It Could Happen Here Weekly 169

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Speaker 8 Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 8 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 8 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 8 Welcome to It Happened Here, a podcast about things falling apart and them continuing to fall apart. I'm your host, Mia Wong.
With me is James Stout. Hi, Mia.

Speaker 8 Glad to hear about whatever's going to shit today. Yeah, so before we start talking about imperialism, we're starting every fing episode with this until you people stop, until you stop doing this.

Speaker 8 It is the year 2025. We are a quarter of a century into this millennia and people are still getting kettled by cops on bridges.
They did this in Occupy in 2011.

Speaker 8 They did it in 2018 during the Occupy ICE protest. The people did it in 2020.
People did it

Speaker 8 last year during the dream of the Palestinian campus. People are doing it again this year.
Simply do not lead a march onto a bridge. Yep.
Or a tunnel for DEI reasons. We would also include a tunnel.

Speaker 8 Yes, don't do the tunnel either. Yeah.
If there's no side exits, just don't. Yes.
Here's the thing.

Speaker 8 The moment you walk onto a bridge, all the cops have to do is take both exits and everyone on the bridge gets arrested. You can simply not do this.

Speaker 8 If you must do it, you need to like make 1,000% sure you can hold both sides of the bridge. Yeah.
Both of them. You need to hold both of them.
Yeah. And almost certainly you can't.

Speaker 8 So only you, only you, dear listener, can prevent 4,000 more people from getting kettled on bridges.

Speaker 8 And I am going to keep starting episodes talking about getting, don't get kettled on bridges until this stops. All right,

Speaker 8 this has been Mia's public service announcement about bridge kettling. Let's get into the nature of imperialism and why Trump's is different.

Speaker 8 So we've been covering a lot of Trump's sort of, I don't know, the trade wars, his call for the U.S.

Speaker 8 to seize the Gaza Strip, a whole bunch of stories about the way that Trump is using the power of the American state to do imperialism.

Speaker 8 And I think it's worth actually taking a second to unpack this because things are probably going to get worse.

Speaker 8 There is a non-zero chance that we effectively start a war with Mexico in the next like few months. Yeah, it's great.
It's spanging. Everything's going swell.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 But I want to start with talking about the way that Trump has been using tariffs

Speaker 8 as a sort of political weapon and not as an economic tool, but very, very specifically as a political weapon.

Speaker 8 And how this differs from the previous economic regime, because I think there's been a lot of, you know, as the tariffs, the threat of tariffs go up and the markets sort of tank in fear of them, there's been a lot of sort of defense of like free trade in ways where I don't think people actually understand what's happening.

Speaker 8 And to understand how what Trump is doing is different from the stuff that's come before, we need to actually understand what trade is.

Speaker 8 Now, when an economist talks about trade, they go, oh, yeah, obviously trade is when two countries exchange a thing. Right.
Yep.

Speaker 8 But that's not actually what most of the stuff on earth that is labeled as global trade, that's not what it is, right?

Speaker 8 Look at like U.S.-Mexico trade. We're going to go a bit more into detail about what that stuff is.
But do you know what most,

Speaker 8 not most, but do you know what a huge portion of U.S.-Mexico trade is? It is the same company.

Speaker 8 the same company moving an auto part from one side of the border to the other back and forth across the border yeah that's what i was going to say yes back and forth. Right.

Speaker 8 So it's a lot of different people being paid different wages can make the same thing.

Speaker 28 Yep.

Speaker 8 Or if someone paid lower wages can make it, and someone paid more can QC it, and then they can send it back. Yep, yep, yep.
Very, very common. Yeah.

Speaker 8 And this is actually a real substantive problem with the way that everyone thinks about trade.

Speaker 8 Because what is happening here, and this is an argument that the anti-globalization movement used to make. You know, David Graeber like makes this argument a lot.

Speaker 8 And they're right, which is that most things that we think of as quote-unquote global trade are just a single corporation moving a resource around the world so that they can produce something and exploit labor at the maximum possible exploitation rate.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 You know, and this means that using nation states as a way to understand trade is an absolutely terrible way to think about the global economy, right?

Speaker 8 There, there are some things we're thinking about specifically nation-state trade, like trade is important because, you know, even the same corporation moving goods around, right, that does contribute to how much foreign currency a country has, right?

Speaker 8 And so, okay, there's things like balance of payments where

Speaker 8 if you're a country and you run out of American dollars, suddenly you can't import fuel anymore and your country like explodes.

Speaker 8 And that's a very common way that this happens in Sri Lanka, for example, pretty recently. This is a way for your economy to blow up.

Speaker 8 But that's kind of an edge case in terms of how global trade actually operates.

Speaker 8 But the problem is that it is to the advantage of the ruling class for you and everyone else to think about trade as something that's like a war between you and the country next to you instead of a corporation like fucking over everyone involved in this entire thing.

Speaker 8 Now, there's a pretty interesting book that I read recently called Border Economies, Cities Bridging the U.S.-Mexico Divide by James Greber. Gerber? Nick's Gerber.
Okay.

Speaker 8 And one of the things he points out is that the two largest trade relations between any country, any two countries on earth are the U.S. and Mexico and the U.S.
and Canada.

Speaker 8 And those are the countries with the highest tariffs that Trump is attempting to apply.

Speaker 8 And And

Speaker 8 it's worth actually understanding

Speaker 8 what this does by looking at what actually is traded between, for example, the U.S. and Mexico.

Speaker 8 And the place I want to start is that one of the largest kinds of goods that is moved from Mexico to the U.S. is computer equipment.
And nobody fucking talks about this ever.

Speaker 8 No one. Like zero fucking people talk about this.
I am convinced this is because of racism.

Speaker 8 But Mexico is a huge sort of like assembly place for a whole bunch of things like monitors, screens, like computer equipment in general. And a lot of that stuff comes into the U.S.
Yep.

Speaker 8 And there's also, you know,

Speaker 8 the thing that we started this episode on, that's, I think, the thing that gets talked about the most now is transportation equipment, right?

Speaker 8 And this is a combination of consumer vehicles and also like heavy-duty cargo trucks, which are. unbelievably important for the maintenance of the American economy, right?

Speaker 8 Of the entire global economy. It's like having these trucks is a sort of vital infrastructure thing for the United States.
You can move stuff around. A lot of that comes to Mexico.

Speaker 8 And then also, a lot of it is whole cars that are like Finnish assembly in Mexico and they get shipped across the border, right? And that there's a lot of things there.

Speaker 8 And these are also like all the same international car companies that work in the US. So it's like Toyota, it's like Honda.
Yeah, I mean, these are your American trucks often, right? Or like.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ford does this too.
Yeah. What's GM now, Stellaris? Yeah, yeah, like Chevy, GM, like these, as well as like Toyota.
Toyota, I think, has a big plant.

Speaker 8 I forget exactly where, but along the border somewhere, if I recall correctly. Yeah.
Yeah, this is extremely common. Yeah.
And what this is, right?

Speaker 8 Like this is multinational capitalist companies who are moving their products across the border. Yeah.
And this gets counted as Mexico doing trade.

Speaker 8 You know, one of the things in one of the questions in this book is about why Mexico's economy never had the kind of economic bump that China did from the amount of industrial production.

Speaker 8 If you look at like the East Asian tigers, right? Right.

Speaker 8 And I think part of that is actually something that is not mentioned in the book, which is if you look at the East Asian economies that developed their economies, and you're talking like your South Korea's, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 8 Like a lot of those countries, like Japan, there was a lot of U.S. military investment there in a way that's just not true of Mexico.

Speaker 8 Like Mexico is not like a place where you offshore your supply supplies to because you need to move stuff to fight the war in Vietnam.

Speaker 8 But one of the other reasons is that yeah okay so like where is all the profit from the international uh trade going it's like well it's going to a bunch of american and japanese car companies yeah because it's it's those those multinationals who are the people who actually reap all of the benefits yeah to a degree like post nafta right post 94

Speaker 8 it has created a class of people in mexico who have benefited from it but it has it has not lifted up like like the the average income right it's created a greater disparity of income than at any point yeah yeah previous to that.

Speaker 8 You'll hear people, too. I was talking to a friend about this yesterday in Tijuana, like how like

Speaker 8 what NAFTA did, like if you look at 1994, I think it's a really good example of what you're talking about of like, yeah, we opened up that border to international companies to do tariff-free back and forth, right?

Speaker 8 But we didn't open it up to people. Yeah.
At the same time, we had Operation Gatekeeper, right? Like enforced much harsher border enforcement.

Speaker 8 And the two things in parallel really kind of indicate what the free trade is going for. Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, this is another old anti-globalization thing. Like Graber talks about this.

Speaker 8 It's like, yeah, free, like free trade is about the free movement of capital and the unfree movement of people, right? Yep.

Speaker 8 It's about locking people down in place so you can like, you can, you can dictate wages to them and then moving capital around the world to avoid them. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 8 And we're going to get into this more in a second, but I want to talk about some, you know, some of the other things that are that are exported from Mexico.

Speaker 8 Fruits, vegetables, alcohol are like huge exports. Yeah.

Speaker 8 And then also, and this is something that I don't think is,

Speaker 8 people don't understand what's happening very well, is there's a lot of oil from Mexico that's shipped to the U.S.

Speaker 8 But the thing that's happening there, and this is the thing that's very weird about the oil industry, is that

Speaker 8 the refinery facilities are not in the same country as the extraction facilities. a lot of the time.

Speaker 8 So this oil is getting shipped around because they don't have the refinery facilities to like refine the specific kind of like crude oil oil or whatever that they're extracting.

Speaker 8 So like, yeah, it's again, one of these situations where it's not really like Mexico is sending its oil to the U.S. It's like, I mean, kind of, right? That's like one of the more direct-ish

Speaker 8 ones. But largely what's happening is that like, again, like it's an oil company moving stuff to, you know, moving stuff around to do refinement of it so they can sell it.

Speaker 8 Now, there's been some other stuff happening with Mexico that's a kind of reaction to Trump's previous thing.

Speaker 8 And I think the extent of this has been overblown to some extent, but a lot of very low-end manufacturing stuff has been leaving China for a long time.

Speaker 8 This is one of my media things on this show is that this has been happening for a while because the labor prices have been rising in China. And one of the places that these things went to is Mexico.

Speaker 8 So there's been a lot of like direct investment from China, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 8 And all of these things, you know, like these, these, these kind of movements, I'm talking about them because these kind of like seismic global economic shifts, right?

Speaker 8 of the kind that we're going to be seeing are driven by a lot of things you know i mean the stuff like like currency valuations like local local tax laws, like state and corporate planning policies, like demand surgeries, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 8 But one of the single most important things is the state of class struggle in a country and what effect that has on wages or like, you know, like trade-up uprisings, right?

Speaker 8 The geographer David Harvey, he gets credit for popularizing the term the spatial fix, though other people were already using it and I don't like his work much, but he did.

Speaker 8 He is the guy who gets credited with this. He describes, you know, the sort of free trade regime that persisted roughly through, like, now, I mean,

Speaker 8 it was taking shape in sort of the 80s, but like the 80s through like roughly now as the spatial fix for declining profitability, right?

Speaker 8 You know what else has declining profitability?

Speaker 8 Well, I don't know. The worse things get, the more people listen to our podcast.
I don't know if you can say that.

Speaker 8 We are back. Okay, so let's talk about this, this sort of declining profitability and the fix that capitalism sort of finds for this, right?

Speaker 8 You know, through the 70s, there's this sort of spiraling unemployment and inflation and the economy is sort of going to shit.

Speaker 8 And it's happening everywhere because there's sort of like structural overcapacity in manufacturing. And the solution to this is a spatial fix, right?

Speaker 8 Which is destroying some manufacturing capacity and just moving it to other places.

Speaker 8 And, you know, and this is, this is sort of what James was talking about earlier, right?

Speaker 8 The goal is to sort of weaken the power of the working class by locking people down into their countries and then moving capital to poorer countries, the weaker labor protections, and also a weaker level of sort of like workers' organization, right?

Speaker 8 Yeah. And then it leaves like the previously well-organized workers.
Like, if you look at the industries in the places where my grandparents come from, dog workers and miners, right?

Speaker 8 Those are not really jobs that are employing large numbers of people in the UK anymore. And like,

Speaker 8 as a result, those working class towns are just destitute, you know. So, like that, that previously thriving and well-organized working class that we had in Northern England

Speaker 8 is left kind of like it has to relocate or reorganize, right? And it destroys those like

Speaker 8 nexuses of working class power that existed in Britain up until the 80s with the miner strike, right? Yeah, and this was this was done deliberately, right?

Speaker 8 I mean, there's always a debate in the literature about to what extent like neoliberalism was like planned or to what extent it was,

Speaker 8 you know, a sort of reaction to a bunch of crises, but specifically this kind of like offshoring and the container ships, a big part of this, but like this specific kind of thing and even the transition from coal to oil was like, was a very deliberate thing done by, like, done, done by sort of American and British politicians in order to sort of break the power of like miners unions.

Speaker 8 And, you know, one of the major places that this went, obviously, like a lot of these things go to Mexico.

Speaker 8 The sort of first round of these go to like the original like Asian tiger economies that I was talking about.

Speaker 8 I mean, places like Indonesia too, with a lot of those economies sort of like Thailand, those economies kind of blew up in the 90s. Yeah.

Speaker 8 But, you know, one of the largest and most important ones was China. And, you know, it's important to sort of remember, I've talked about this on the show before.

Speaker 8 A lot of this is also the product of Tiananmen Square because the thing that's important to remember about Tiananmen is that contra both sort of liberal histories of Tiananmen and also the sort of CCP line, most of the people who died at Tiananmen were workers, right?

Speaker 8 Most of the people who were executed afterwards were workers. They were like students died, but it was mostly workers who were killed.

Speaker 8 And a lot of what happened there was that, you know, Tiananmen was like the last time that China's like trade union federation, which is like now such a joke that it's like, it's genuinely a subject of academic debate and discussion as to whether you can even literally consider it a trade union.

Speaker 8 Like that's, that's how fucked it is. And the last time that Chinese trade unions took a political stand was in favor of the Tiananmen protests.

Speaker 8 And then the army shows up and just like slaughters their base.

Speaker 8 And what this does is it breaks the old Chinese working class, right? It breaks the alliance with the students that they'd had.

Speaker 8 And that was a durable political force dating back to like the 1920s, right?

Speaker 8 And it breaks this extremely militant, well-organized Chinese urban working class and replaces them with a more exploitable and less organized like migrant working class.

Speaker 8 And that is the class that like to this day right now is like the engine of global capital, or like those, like, 300 million migrant workers. Yeah.

Speaker 8 And they can be in different parts of the world, right? Like, uh, well,

Speaker 8 by the way, the 300 million number, that's just the migrant workers in China. Jesus.
To be clear, there are a lot more internationally.

Speaker 8 Yeah, but China's migrant worker population is like almost the size of the US. It's like, it's like the fourth largest country in the world just by like itself.
It's

Speaker 8 yeah, that's mad. I was just thinking of today, like the

Speaker 8 scam compounds which exist on the border between Myanmar and Thailand. like they actually thailand just cut cut power off to them today

Speaker 8 i mean i can see that the strategy there but it's just going to end up hurting the people who are in those compounds more of course it is yeah of course those people who are in those compounds used to be able to escape and go to places uh where they could like get back to their lives right like like be retaken care of and of course those were funded by usaid so they don't exist as of this week which is pretty brutal but like yeah these people right these these migrant workers who come from all over the world hoping for a chance at the things that capitalism have promised them, are the people who have to be exploited so that people in wealthy countries can have their treats.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and those workers are the basis of modern global capitalism, right? Like, you know, like those Chinese workers, for example, like it is illegal for them to form an independent union.

Speaker 8 If you try to form an independent union, you will go to prison so fast that like there'll be dust clouds. Like

Speaker 8 yeah, like Wiley Coyote will take you to prison.

Speaker 8 Yeah, like even trying to get your union to like do something, like trying to have your own independent people elected to your, to that union, like can and will get you arrested.

Speaker 8 And like, and even like sort of Chinese labor oppression, like is pretty intense, but it's like, you know, we're also talking about countries like Colombia.

Speaker 8 It's like, well, yeah, okay, so what happens to union organizes in Colombia? It's like they get being shot by paramilitaries with machine guns, right?

Speaker 8 And that's, that's, that's what the sort of spatial fix was, right? Was moving jobs to places where the ruling class's sort of control was more firm and their ability to use violence was higher.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And so this is what the American imperial system sort of had been, right? It's based on American capital flowing around the world. And this is also like international capital too, right? Like

Speaker 8 we've literally been talking about like Japanese corporations, right? Doing like the same shit, right?

Speaker 8 But, you know, it's like international capital flowing around the world, extracting resources and labor from other countries and accumulating it in American corporations.

Speaker 8 Like that, that's what free trade is. Yeah.

Speaker 8 And it's also, you know, secondarily, right, it is a debt system.

Speaker 8 It's based on forcing countries to like pay back loans that were taken out by dictators. Go read Graeber's debt last 5,000 years.

Speaker 8 It's very good. But yeah,

Speaker 8 it's based on turning entire countries into just debt servicing engines where all of the wealth that is produced by the entire nation is just going to like pay debts to Bank of America. Yeah.

Speaker 8 And you know, the thing about this is that this is actually a very, very efficient model of empire. It's one of the most sophisticated imperial systems that the world has ever seen, right?

Speaker 8 It works extremely well. It makes the U.S.
an unbelievable amount of money. It protects global capitalism.

Speaker 8 And the people currently running it don't want it to work like that. Now, do you know who else doesn't want the current system to work like it does because they can make more money?

Speaker 8 I can guess.

Speaker 8 It's the products and services that support this file. I'm excited to hear which one we get.
You know, it could be

Speaker 8 anything really at this point. Who knows?

Speaker 8 We are back. So, we've entered, I guess, what you could call the phase of mask off imperialism.
U.S. imperialism usually at least sort of like wore a human face, and it did it for good reason, right?

Speaker 8 You know, Ronald Reagan did not give a single shit about democracy and human rights, right? Like, right, like, you know, and this is this has been true of the U.S.

Speaker 8 for like ages and ages and ages, right? You know, know, that like they, they prop up right-wing military dictatorships constantly.

Speaker 8 But the thing is, democracy and human rights are things that, like, people like. Yeah.

Speaker 8 And so, you know, it was, it's, it's, it's a weapon that he and his sort of brand of conservatives, like anti-communist conservatives, like wielded against communism.

Speaker 8 And it was a very, very powerful ideological weapon because if your choice

Speaker 8 ceases to be between like communism and capitalism and your choice is now between like, do you want to live a dictatorship or do you want to live a democracy? Like, that's a very different question.

Speaker 8 And it's a very, very important question for sort of how, how the Cold War was won and how international power is wielded, right?

Speaker 8 Because there's always been an illusion that there's an international community and that countries are like working together. And this is a very, very powerful

Speaker 8 ideological thing. You know, I mean, and this is something like you lived through this.
Like, God, there's probably listeners who didn't live through this now. Dear God.
But like.

Speaker 8 like the Iraq war, right? The U.S. didn't unilaterally invade Iraq.

Speaker 8 Now, it was called the quote-unquote coalition of the the wielding and included like like they they they dragged australia in the war by threatening to like destroy their like milk shipping contracts with the iraqi government like so you know

Speaker 8 yeah you had all kinds of people running around in iraq for a while there like yeah obviously the united kingdom played a big role in it like an outside role given it being a relatively small country yeah and you know and this this is the way that you do you know even just overtly straight up imperialist stuff like like invading iraq right was still done under the auspices of like multinational coalitions.

Speaker 8 Yep.

Speaker 8 And the thing that's different about Trump is Trump doesn't give a fuck about any of that, right? Absolutely not.

Speaker 8 He has turned on Rob Ford, a man who is like, who boldly answers the question, what if Trump smoked crack? Like, that is Rob Ford.

Speaker 8 Like, he's, he's turning on his allies, like people, people, like right-wingers who should be his allies in Canada, right?

Speaker 8 Who are exactly the kind of people who you would expect to do sort of like right-wing multilateral interventions in countries, right? Yeah.

Speaker 8 And, you know, he has caused with his like threat to put tariffs on, like, he's caused these people to become anti-American. And this is the same thing with Mexico, right?

Speaker 8 Even the sort of like the nominally center-left governments in Mexico like have cooperated with American imperialism, but Trump doesn't want to fucking do that anymore.

Speaker 8 He wants to run everything just very purely and very openly as an American empire. Yeah, like America's always bullied Mexico, right?

Speaker 8 When we talk about the deployment of troops to the border, Biden absolutely bullied Amlo into bringing those troops to the border because they came before Donald Trump even came into office.

Speaker 8 But now Donald Trump is just doing it on true social.

Speaker 8 Like

Speaker 8 it's kind of different. Or Panama.
Fuck. Like, you know, I was in Panama September of 24 and I went to the Canal Museum and Panama is very proud of its history of independence, right?

Speaker 8 It's relatively short and hard-earned and paid for in blood. But like, yeah, I traveled.
I'm a U.S. citizen.
I traveled and no one gave me any shit. It was fine.
Everyone was very nice to me.

Speaker 8 Now they're burning American flags in Panama city like yeah yeah because trump is trying to take the panama canal back and before we get into like you know i mean i guess we can get into here some of the stuff that he's doing right he's pulled out of the international criminal court and is putting sanctions on it he has been trying to use the sanctions that he's been threatening to apply to canada to get canada to join the us

Speaker 8 like he's trying to conquer canada right

Speaker 8 silly yeah he's he's been trying to he's been trying to force the government of denmark to buy greenland sell greenland right like he wants to purchase greenland from them yeah he wants to buy greenland Yeah.

Speaker 8 There was the whole sort of showdown with Colombia over Colombia's like being pissed off about the treatment of deportees to Colombia and he used sanctions there.

Speaker 8 There is again him saying the US is going to take over Gaza. And this is a very, very substantively different thing than the kind of American empire that we've had before, right? Yeah.

Speaker 8 The last time the U.S. tried to take Canada was 1812.

Speaker 8 Right? It's been like 200 years. This is how Britain returns to the world stage.

Speaker 8 Right. And the thing is,

Speaker 8 last time the U.S. tried to take Canada, they burned the capital down.
So like, you know.

Speaker 8 But like, like, this is something that even under like, like, people like Bush, right? Who is like a Bush is like a very, very avert American imperialist, right? Yeah.

Speaker 8 Bush would never try to invade Canada. Like,

Speaker 8 absolutely not. Yeah, that's completely unhinged, right? And

Speaker 8 this is just a very, very different kind of imperialism than what's existed before. And I wanted to go into, I think, why this is the case.
Yeah.

Speaker 8 And I think the reason why this is the case, okay, so the reason that there's been such a defense of free trade is like people being like, oh my God, if he puts tariffs in place, it'll raise prices.

Speaker 8 And like, yeah, that's true, right?

Speaker 8 It'll crash the global economy because the global economy has been turned into a very, very efficient engine of extracting profit from countries and putting them in the hands of corporations, right?

Speaker 8 It's working exactly how Trump wants it to work. Now, if the U.S.
wants to rebuild a manufacturing economy, that is technically possible. right? Reagan was able to do this.

Speaker 8 But what Reagan did, instead of doing tariffs, is that, well, I mean, kind of, but like, the main thing that he did was this thing called the Plaza Accords.

Speaker 8 And the Plaza Accords was this, this thing he did in the 80s where he forced Japan,

Speaker 8 Japan was the important one, but like Japan, West Germany, I think there are a couple of other countries. Like he forced them to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar.

Speaker 8 Because like, if, you know, so if you have a currency and it's worth a bunch of like another person's currency, So like, you know, you have like the dollar and it's worth like a million like yen or whatever the fuck, right?

Speaker 8 The currency that's worth less less has a more has a more competitive manufacturing economy and reagen was able to like restart the american like manufacturing economy for a while by doing this but the problem is that it it blew up the entire world economy and so to save the world economy clinton rolled back the accords and it you know and that was the thing that actually finally sort of like eviscerated american manufacturing and the exchange here was, you know, and all the stuff that I've been, I've been talking about for the last like few minutes.

Speaker 8 There's a very, very good essay written right after 2008 called What's Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America by the economist Robert Brenner.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 what the strategy became, and this is a strategy that was originally pioneered by Japan that we took,

Speaker 8 was instead of having like a manufacturing economy, like a production-based economy, you have an economy based on the value of assets, right? So assets are things that you own, right?

Speaker 8 This is stocks, bonds, like real estate, which is important for our purposes. And the goal is to make the value of those things go up, right?

Speaker 8 And so what you do is you speculate on you, you take out loans, you speculate on the prices of of stocks going up the prices of houses going up right and and you know you make it very easy to borrow money yeah now obviously this produced a series of like staggering economic collapses including like the dot-com collapse uh 2008

Speaker 8 was

Speaker 8 you know remember that one but the thing is in the wake of the financial collapse the u.s mostly figured out how to sort of stabilize the system

Speaker 8 But the thing is, you know, they were sort of able to stabilize the system economically, right?

Speaker 8 What they couldn't stabilize was the the political sector where if you look at the two people who are currently running the united states it is elon musk who is the human personification of the stock price goes up bubble economy right

Speaker 8 and the other one is donald trump who is the human manifestation of the real estate class right who's whose wealth like balloon enormously and the thing is right but because elon musk is like a tech bubble go up guy right those people don't think like the people who built like American financial capitalists, right?

Speaker 8 Like the people who designed the treat system. They don't think the same way Trump does.
Trump is a fucking real estate guy, right? And this is how he sees the world, right?

Speaker 8 He thinks in terms of land and borders and territorial control. And he thinks in terms of like, what physical thing can I steal from someone in order to make money? Right.

Speaker 8 And that, you know, this is why you're trying to like steal the Panama Canal.

Speaker 8 And, and he thinks this way instead of like things that are more abstract, like debt servicing and like, you know, the sort of alliance of power and the coalition building. Right.

Speaker 8 He looks at a map of Greenland and goes, this looks really big. I want it.
And so now he's going to try to use the American Empire to to just seize this. Yeah, he sees things in terms of like

Speaker 8 raw power. It's a very

Speaker 8 undeveloped notion of like power, right? Like

Speaker 8 I was thinking the other day, like whoever is in the same room as Joseph Nye must be having a fucking field day right now, right? The guy who

Speaker 8 he was, he wrote. books about soft power, right? The idea of the U.S.

Speaker 8 power to persuade rather than power to kind of, rather than rather than like hard power, which comes from tanks or tariffs, I guess.

Speaker 8 Joseph Nai is no longer relevant.

Speaker 8 Yes, yes. No,

Speaker 8 we're back in pure hard power. And something I think is very alarming that I want to close on is the extent to which

Speaker 8 the U.S. media is just sort of just wants to do propaganda for it.

Speaker 8 I'm going to read a quote from a CNN article. Again, this is CNN.
Quote, the subject heading is the U.S. has been expanding for its entire history.
This is an article,

Speaker 8 the title of which is Trump. Is Trump wants to redraw the map of of the Western Hemisphere?

Speaker 8 For fuck's sake, like 2025 Monroe Doctrine posting on CNN. Literally, literally, literally.
Okay, okay. You are so far ahead of this thing because the next that

Speaker 8 I'm going to read the one I was going to read first: uplift, civilize, and Christianize.

Speaker 8 What's the next paragraph? The next section heading is, and I quote, what is Trump's doctrine and explains the Monroe Doctrine?

Speaker 8 For fuck's sake, this is a, I cannot explain how, like, I have taught this as a thing in history classes for more than a decade from the perspective of like, that was fucked up and shameful.

Speaker 8 And even the conservative students are like, yeah, hard agree. Look at these racist as fuck cartoons about Filipino people that

Speaker 8 we're using here to justify this. And now we are back.
Like it is.

Speaker 8 And like, yeah, CNN is just out there like. fucking cranking the manufacturing consent.

Speaker 8 That's not even the worst part about it. Like, I'm going to read the section.
So one of the other section headings is the U.S. has been expanding for its entire history.
Sick. Quote, expansion.

Speaker 8 Expansion is built into the American DNA, says retired ambassador Gordon Gray, now a professor of practice at George Washington University and former Foreign Service career officer.

Speaker 8 Yeah, like an angel sweeping across the plains, fucking manifest destinies. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 8 It's we're, you know, and this, this, this is coming, all sort of coming into like the way that Trump thinks about, which Trump thinks about the U.S. like, like an 18th century land empire.
Right.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 18th century land empires, you know, got money by conquering people and like extracting tribute from them directly.
And then also, you know, they were mercantilist empires, right?

Speaker 8 So they got, they got a bunch of their money. And this is something that Trump explicitly talks about.

Speaker 8 It's like he wants, he thinks he can raise revenue from like tariffs, which is like, no, he can't.

Speaker 8 But like what it can do is use the threat of tariffs to like force countries to do whatever the fuck he wants. And this is the kind of imperialism that we're in now.

Speaker 8 It is a definite substantive break from what we've seen in the U.S. for a century.
more than a century. Yeah.
And I think, I think it's important for people to understand exactly how this functions.

Speaker 8 Yeah. And yeah.
It's sick. We're going into the new opium wars.
It's going to be so fun.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 That's great. Bob, this is what it could happen here.
Do not get kettled on bridges. Go out into the world and make trouble.

Speaker 8 If people want to read more about the early globalization, the previous year of neoliberal globalization, like Naomi Klein has some good stuff. And I think Joe Stiglitz does as well.
So we can.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah. I would also recommend David Graeber's Direct Action action in ethnography, which is him writing about the original like anti-like alter globalization protests and his like time in them.

Speaker 8 Yep. So, you know, if you need direct action ideas, they did some fun stuff.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Dressing guys up like marshmallows so police batons would bounce off of them. Great thing.

Speaker 8 Yeah, bring back clown block. That'll get us through it.
Yeah.

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Speaker 2 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 4 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 5 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 7 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 9 We got clear facts.

Speaker 11 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 13 NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts.
Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 12 NBC News, reporting for America.

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Speaker 14 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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Speaker 28 the government of two weeks ago no longer exists

Speaker 28 We are now in a fundamentally different country. Under the authority of President Trump, Elon Musk is leading a de facto cyber coup of the United States.

Speaker 28 Using the intentionally vague and unaccountable Department of Government Efficiency, Musk is seizing control of the United States' critical digital infrastructure, literally rewriting the code that runs our country and culling the federal workforce.

Speaker 28 Using the justification of removing government bureaucracy, Musk and the Trump administration have installed their own batch of bureaucratic tech oligarchs, made up of former Tesla and SpaceX interns and engineers, teal fellowship researchers, palantir employees, eugenics enthusiasts, and literal Nick Fuentes pilled groipers.

Speaker 28 Career employees have been locked out of their respective agencies, both digitally and physically, as the Doge team ransacks various departments and accesses wide swaths of sensitive government data.

Speaker 28 Agency officials who have tried to resist Musk's seizure of classified materials have been fired, and more federal employees have been put on leave, including the entirety of USAID.

Speaker 28 This effectively amounts to Musk abolishing the whole department, all without congressional authorization or oversight, not even an executive order from Trump that extends presidential authority.

Speaker 28 On a whim, the unelected Elon Musk decided to carry out the closure of an entire government agency. And he is far from finished.

Speaker 28 Doge has hijacked the treasury to withhold authorized payments to multiple agencies, resulting in an ongoing battle of lawsuits and court orders.

Speaker 28 This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, and this episode is an audio companion to an article I published on the Shatter Zone Substack, linked below in the description.

Speaker 28 You can follow along online at shatterzone.substack.com and click the hyperlinks for more information and sources.

Speaker 28 Elon Musk has personally directed the General Services Administration to terminate leases on quote-unquote mostly empty federal buildings.

Speaker 28 The GSA, essentially the landlord of the federal government, was one of the first agencies to receive Musk's quote-unquote fork in the road deferred resignation letter, offering to buy out the entire workforce.

Speaker 28 The legality of the letter is still uncertain as it promises to pay out currently unappropriated funds.

Speaker 28 IRS workers who accepted the resignation offer have already been asked to return to work until May.

Speaker 28 The newly appointed GSA commissioner, Michael Peters, a private equity executive that specializes in downsizing corporate real estate, has decided that, quote, non-DOD federal building space should be reduced 50%, unquote, according to a GSA employee who requested to remain anonymous.

Speaker 28 On top of planning to cut the entire federal portfolio by half, Doge is seeking to cut GSA's own budget by as much as 50%,

Speaker 28 with talk of consolidating GSA offices into a few major cities using a quote-unquote hub model.

Speaker 28 Wired reports that Doge staff may be trying to use White House IT credentials to access GSA computers remotely.

Speaker 28 An anonymous GSA employee claims that few people at the agency have elected to take up the voluntary paid resignation offer, with those who have mostly being of retirement age.

Speaker 28 High-level Trump appointees used quote-unquote scare tactics in agency emails pressuring career employees to accept the deferred resignation offer, warning that cost-cutting measures will eventually lead to a further reduction in force.

Speaker 28 Employees are concerned that a reduced federal workforce would result in federal buildings losing their operations and maintenance contracts, with disastrous consequences for the functionality of government buildings.

Speaker 28 Quote, The brain drain is going to cripple our ability to maintain the buildings even more than it already was. We aren't overstaffed, unquote, per a GSA employee.

Speaker 28 They continued, quote, I think this process is already too far along to stop. I'm hoping we just need to get to the midterms, unquote.

Speaker 28 What is happening across the federal government right now is unprecedented, but this is not Germany in the 1930s. It's not the fall of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 28 We grasp at analogies to help contextualize current events that escape understanding. There are similarities, but what's happening is new, very American, very 21st century.

Speaker 28 Think of the growth of the internet, social media, tech startups. In 50 years, what's happening right now could be talked about in the vein of what happened to the United States in the mid-2020s.

Speaker 28 Now, rhetoric of cutting red tape and breaking federal bureaucracy has been a common political claptrap for decades. And previous efforts have been largely all bark and no bite.

Speaker 28 But now there's been a huge chomp. So, why now? What happened?

Speaker 28 Trump has blamed entrenched federal bureaucracy, or the quote-unquote deep state, for preventing him from enacting sweeping change during his first term.

Speaker 28 The obstacles Trump encountered didn't just come from Congress and the courts, but rank-and-file government workers who run day-to-day operations.

Speaker 28 Last month, the far-right America First Policy Institute published a report titled, Tales from the Swamp, How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump.

Speaker 28 The author, James Schreck, a former Heritage Fellow, credits quote-unquote hostile career employees for quote-unquote refusing to implement policies.

Speaker 28 Schreck says, quote, many career employees refused or defied directives, withheld information, slow-walked projects they opposed, performed unacceptably, and used strategic leaking to undermine the president's agenda, unquote.

Speaker 28 Trump himself realized this late into his first term and sought to remedy the situation by revoking civil protections for tens of thousands of federal career employees, reclassifying them as at-will employees under an executive order called Schedule F.

Speaker 28 This allowed Trump to treat large swaths of government employees as political appointments.

Speaker 28 In his article for the America First Policy Institute, Schreck refers to career removal protections as a, quote, modern invention that protects entrenched bureaucracy, unquote.

Speaker 28 Though Biden repealed Schedule F, Trump effectively reinstated the order on the first day of his second term.

Speaker 28 Trump promised to restore his authority to, quote, remove rogue bureaucrats back in early 2023 under his Agenda 47 plan, vowing to, quote, wield that power very aggressively, unquote.

Speaker 28 When Trump first ran on Drain the Swamp in 2015, he was referring to corporate lobbyists, special interests, and Washington corruption.

Speaker 28 But now, the term is used to deride the so-called administrative state, federal agencies, regulatory boards, and bureaucratic career employees that maintain the basic functionality of our government.

Speaker 28 Both Schedule F and Doge are part of a two-pronged assault on the administrative state, all in service of consolidating then amplifying executive power.

Speaker 28 Trump has fully embraced the unitary executive theory proposed by the likes of Russell Vought, Project 2025 co-author, and the newly confirmed director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Speaker 28 Although it's understood that Congress has quote-unquote power of the purse, under unitary executive theory, Trump now believes that funding appropriated by Congress does not need to be spent.

Speaker 28 Rather, the executive branch controls the flow of federal spending, and Congress merely sets a ceiling on spending that the executive must not exceed.

Speaker 28 Under this interpretation of the Constitution, the president has sole and complete control of the executive branch, including all of its agencies and departments.

Speaker 28 But people in Trump's circle, like J.D.

Speaker 28 Vance and Elon Musk, could be pushing Trump to go even further, to where the president considers both the judicial and legislative branches as purely ceremonial and advisory, in the words of new right philosopher Curtis Yarvin.

Speaker 28 And And arguably, we are already well on our way to that point. This centralized executive power allows the executive branch to achieve goals I would have previously considered to be quite lofty.

Speaker 28 And I'll outline two of those examples, pulling from the aspirations of the modern conservative movement, after this ad break.

Speaker 28 Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and get ready to say bye-bye to the FBI.

Speaker 28 Though the right has typically been thought to be firmly in the back the blue camp, this isn't always the case, especially on the more extreme end.

Speaker 28 The far-right militia movement has long clashed with federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ATF.

Speaker 28 In the aftermath of January 6th, many mega supporters found themselves at odds with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Speaker 28 Republican politicians began to feed into right-wing uproar surrounding the FBI as Trump himself became a target for investigations.

Speaker 28 After the Mar-a-Lago raid in August of 2022, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, defund the FBI. Arizona Representative Paul Gosar joined in attacks on the Bureau, posting, We must destroy the FBI.

Speaker 28 We must save America.

Speaker 28 That same month, right-wing columnist and podcaster Liz Wheeler published an op-ed titled Abolish the FBI, which called to, quote, farm out the vital functions of the FBI and raise the rest, unquote.

Speaker 28 The new right publication, Compact Magazine, featured a slightly better written article by the same title, Abolish the FBI.

Speaker 28 At CPAC in March of 2023, Matt Gates, noted pedophile, advocated to get rid of the FBI among other federal agencies.

Speaker 40 Either get this government back on our side or we defund and get rid of abolish the FBI, CDC, ATF,

Speaker 40 DOJ, every last one of them if they do not come to heal.

Speaker 28 In April of 2023, Trump joined in in calls to defund the FBI after being charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Speaker 28 Next month, two former FBI employees testified in a congressional hearing accusing the Bureau of weaponization against conservatives in regards to the January 6th investigations.

Speaker 28 The same two former FBI employees who had their security clearance revoked after espousing J6 conspiracy theories later called to, quote, abolish the FBI at a Heritage Foundation symposium on the quote weaponization of the U.S.

Speaker 28 government in April of 2024.

Speaker 8 You're given that magic wand, that ability to be Jim Jordan. What would you do? I think you have to abolish the FBI.
That's where I'm at at this point.

Speaker 8 What?

Speaker 8 Now, some people are going to look at and say, okay, yeah, we're going to have to, do you just abolish it?

Speaker 8 Is there a replacement? I mean, you can't just not have federal law enforcement, right?

Speaker 8 I think in large part, you could just not have federal law enforcement.

Speaker 28 During a live episode of Donald Trump Jr.'s podcast on July 8th, 2024, he called to abolish several federal agencies, starting with the FBI, as well as the CIA and the IRS.

Speaker 42 Abolish the DEA.

Speaker 8 you know

Speaker 42 i imagine of all the places to abolish i don't know if that's the best one they i'd start with the fbi uh i'd start with uh the cia i'd start with uh the irs there's a lot of you know the dea now maybe i know agent level guys so if they're going after narcos and stuff like that i'm perhaps a little bit more forgiving they don't seem to be setting up or entrapping people like the fbi The Trump administration has already begun the process to dismantle large swaths of the FBI before Cache Patel has even been confirmed by the Senate.

Speaker 28 Eight top FBI officials have been fired or forced to resign by order of Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, despite resistance from Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll.

Speaker 28 A questionnaire was distributed to FBI supervisors requesting agents provide information pertaining to their own involvement in the January 6th investigations.

Speaker 28 This was believed to be used for the targeted removal of agency personnel.

Speaker 28 Last week, the FBI handed over a list containing the information information of 5,000 employees and agents who worked on the January 6th investigations.

Speaker 28 FBI leadership initially chose to withhold employee names. In response, Bove accused the FBI leadership of insubordination.

Speaker 28 This was ultimately a fruitless effort, as data seized by Elon Musk's Doge team could easily match employee IDs to names.

Speaker 28 Trump has since agreed to not publicly release the names of agents until at least late March, as lawsuits continue, and is required to give two days' notice if the administration chooses to publicly disclose names.

Speaker 28 But individual agents are still worried.

Speaker 28 An anonymous letter from an FBI agent warns, quote, currently there is an effort to call a significant number of career special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, unquote.

Speaker 28 Around one-third of FBI agents were told they would be placed on leave, according to a government source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Speaker 28 FBI employees have lost access to systems only to later regain access, while others were told to wait to find out about their employee status.

Speaker 28 Agents are now trying to negotiate back into their jobs, with sources saying FBI employees may be able to stay on if they can prove their loyalty to Trump and disown the January 6th prosecutions.

Speaker 28 I write all of this not in defense of the FBI, but to demonstrate how far Trump is willing to go to expand his executive power and transfer law enforcement duties to agencies seen as more loyal to the president.

Speaker 28 Though I doubt the FBI will be completely abolished in the next few years, the agency could become unrecognizable, a shell of its former self, with hardline Trump loyalists replacing the existing and already largely conservative workforce.

Speaker 28 Alternative agencies perceived as being more loyal to Trump, like Homeland Security Investigations, could start picking up the FBI slack.

Speaker 28 According to a senior government source, on day two two of Trump's second term, HSI was instructed to reopen investigations into the 2020 George Floyd protests to, quote, identify protesters, BLM rioters, like they did to us after January 6th, unquote.

Speaker 28 For another once considered far-fetched goal of the conservative movement that now seems oddly within grasp, let's talk about the Department of Education.

Speaker 28 Conservatives have advocated for dismantling the Department of Education ever since Jimmy Carter signed its modern incarnation into law in 1979.

Speaker 28 Most notably, Ronald Reagan tried and failed to abolish the department in 1981. But Reagan's commission ironically strengthened support for the department.

Speaker 28 Once Reagan ran into roadblocks, he instead sought to limit the department's power and influence.

Speaker 28 Since then, calls to abolish the Department of Education have been a recurring Republican talking point among certain think tanks and politicians, but they have struggled to land sizable blows against the department.

Speaker 28 Trump previously fiddled around with merging the departments of education and labor during his first term, but that plan went nowhere.

Speaker 28 In Trump's own Agenda 47 plan released in 2023, he expressed his goal of quote, closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., unquote.

Speaker 28 Later at the National Religious Broadcasters 2024 Christian Media Convention in February of 2024, Donald Trump repeated this promise, quote, I will close the federal Department of Education and we will move everything back to the states where it belongs, where they can individualize education, unquote.

Speaker 28 Project 2025 outlined how to achieve the effective dismantling of the department by transferring funding and duties to other departments such as Health and Human Services and the DOJ.

Speaker 28 Opposition to the Department of Education was a frequent topic at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Speaker 28 Robert, Sophie, and I attended multiple panels and events taking aim at the department, hosted by groups like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation.

Speaker 28 On the first day of the convention, the party ratified their official 2024 RNC platform, which called to quote, close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 28 and send it back to the states where it belongs and let the states run our educational system as it should be run, unquote. And now the department seems to be next on the Trump Doge chopping block.

Speaker 28 The administration is drafting a sweeping executive order while Trump says he wants his education nominee, Linda McMahon, to quote unquote, put herself out of a job.

Speaker 28 The planned executive order would not just direct the Secretary of Education to begin dismantling the department, but also ask Congress for assistance in formally abolishing the agency.

Speaker 28 It's unlikely that Trump would get the 60 Senate votes needed to pass the quote unquote necessary legislation.

Speaker 28 But even if they can't manage to technically abolish the department, he could still try try to rip its guts out, slash spending, and forcibly resign or fire employees.

Speaker 28 Basically, make the department simply non-functioning, much like what Doge did to Usaid. Upwards of 16 Doge staffers are currently listed in the Education Department directory.

Speaker 28 Federal education employees have already received the Fork in the Road resignation buyout offer, while others have been fired for alleged links to DEI.

Speaker 28 Without someone like Elon Musk in Trump's administration, there was no clear path towards implementing some of the more lofty plans proposed by conservative thought leaders, whether they be Trump's own Agenda 47, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, or Curtis Yarvin's dream of a national CEO king.

Speaker 28 Only Elon Musk could do this.

Speaker 28 You need someone with his influence, connections, money, experience, and knowledge of fringe neo-reactionary Silicon Valley political theory to propose and carry out something like Doge.

Speaker 28 So, how did Musk get here?

Speaker 28 Though it's common knowledge that Musk has drifted pretty severely rightward the past five years, leading into the 2024 presidential campaign, he was not an out-and-proud Trump supporter.

Speaker 28 As recently as 2022, Musk deemed Trump too old to serve as president again, tweeting that it was time for Trump to, quote, hang up his hat and sail into the sunset, unquote.

Speaker 28 Initially, Musk threw his support behind the doomed presidential bid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 28 But as it became became clear Trump would be the Republican nominee, Musk fell in behind his new party line. But his implicit support of Trump was kept on the down low.

Speaker 28 The two met in Florida in March of 2024, among other wealthy Republican donors, as Trump was lobbying for campaign funding.

Speaker 28 The New York Times reported that Musk did not want to publicly endorse Trump as of early 2024. telling friends the most he would do was an anti-Biden endorsement.

Speaker 28 Instead of public support, Musk would create his own super PAC to secretly help get Trump elected, timing payments so his fiscal backing of Trump's campaign could only go public after the election.

Speaker 28 But all that changed on July 13th.

Speaker 28 After Trump's brush with death in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk seemingly took Trump's call of fight, fight, fight to heart, tweeting less than an hour later, quote, I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery, unquote.

Speaker 28 This opened more frequent communication between Musk and Trump. Later that weekend, both Musk and Peter Thiel called Trump to recommend J.D.
Vance as vice president.

Speaker 28 Next week was the Republican National Convention, during which Elon Musk was frequently name-dropped, both by official speakers and regular attendees, talked about as almost some kind of mythic right-wing superhero.

Speaker 28 On the final day of the convention, rumors circulated that Musk himself would make a surprise appearance on stage.

Speaker 28 Though said rumors did not come to fruition, Musk's specter haunted the entirety of the RNC.

Speaker 28 Come August, Musk just finished overhauling leadership at his America Super PAC and was rigorously pushing pro-Trump messaging on X the Everything app.

Speaker 28 On August 12th, Musk hosted Trump in a two-hour live-streamed phone call dubbed in XSpace. This conversation marked the first time Trump casually spoke at length about the assassination attempt.

Speaker 28 The pair also discussed quote-unquote migrant crime and the need to eliminate federal bureaucracy.

Speaker 28 Trump gave a rare compliment to Musk, calling him the greatest cutter, followed up by saying, quote, I need an Elon Musk. I need someone that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts.

Speaker 28 I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the States, unquote.

Speaker 28 News outlets were more interested in reporting on the stream's technical glitches rather than Musk's idea for a government efficiency commission, to which Trump responded very positively.

Speaker 28 Next month, on September 4th, Trump announced that, at the suggestion of Elon Musk, if elected, he would quote, create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms, unquote.

Speaker 28 Musk himself agreed to be appointed head of the commission, aiming to to cut trillions of dollars. This announcement was not taken very seriously.

Speaker 28 The New York Times called commissions such as this, quote, a favorite Washington solution for delaying dealing with hard problems, unquote.

Speaker 28 And the Times later reported that the commission, quote, can issue recommendations around federal funding and regulations, but will be powerless to enact them without executive actions by Mr.

Speaker 28 Trump or funding approval by Congress, unquote.

Speaker 28 Even I can admit that both myself and some of my coworkers underestimated Doge's ability to physically carry out Musk's suggestions with no congressional oversight or authority.

Speaker 28 As the election ramped up, Musk's super PAC mobilized thousands of canvassers across key swing states and collected data to target both enthusiastic and unlikely voters.

Speaker 28 Throughout 2024, Musk spent over $290 million in contributions in support of the mega campaign, mostly via his own super PAC.

Speaker 28 On October 5th, Musk made his first appearance at an official campaign event, joining Trump for his return to Butler, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 28 Musk continued to appear at Trump rallies in the month leading up to the election, and by election day, Musk was firmly in Trump's inner circle, spending election night and most of the next week with President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 28 After the sad break, we will return to discuss how Elon Musk is now trying to become the CEO of the United States of America.

Speaker 28 Okay, we are back.

Speaker 28 And now, a few months after the election, Elon Musk is doing to the United States exactly what he did to Twitter.

Speaker 28 By the end, it still might technically function on some level, just worse in every way. prone to glitches and full of Nazis.

Speaker 28 The previous version was already bad and harmful, but the new one somehow sucks even more and no longer has the aspects that made it semi-worthwhile.

Speaker 28 The fork in the road deferred resignation letter sent to government employees used the exact same title as a similar email sent to Twitter employees after Musk bought the company.

Speaker 28 The Doge team has installed sofa beds on the fifth floor of the headquarters of the Office of Personnel Management to enable working around the clock, mirroring Musk's previous actions during his takeover of Twitter.

Speaker 28 Musk has brought on some of the same exact people who helped him take over Twitter, all of whom are now special government employees with odd job titles but immense power.

Speaker 28 It was reported in Wired that a Musk Stooge told General Services Administration workers that the agency will now pursue, quote, an AI-first strategy, unquote, and that the GSA should operate like a quote-unquote startup software company.

Speaker 28 Musk has ordered the General Services Administration to terminate leases for all roughly 7,500 federal offices amidst a national call to return to in-person work.

Speaker 28 This, again, is a classic Musk move taken from his takeover of Twitter, in which to cut costs, he refused to pay rent for Twitter offices in London, New York City, and San Francisco while the buildings were still in use.

Speaker 28 A current GSA employee was quoted and wired as saying, quote, they are acting like this is a takeover of a tech company, unquote.

Speaker 28 Musk's own personal success hasn't been from his skill as an inventor or a software engineer. What he's proficient at is taking over corporations and molding them in his image.

Speaker 28 This is what happened to Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter. In 2020, Musk called the federal government, quote, the ultimate corporation, unquote.
And now he seeks to become CEO.

Speaker 28 In doing this, Musk is following the tech industry motto of move fast and break things. So far, all his actions bypass Congress, the slow controller of stable government.

Speaker 28 Having everything be done via executive order and doge helps to speed run a full reboot of the administrative state. The motto of the old government may as well have been move slow and build things.

Speaker 28 Progress is slow, but detonation is fast. The breakage of government isn't a mere side effect or a bug of this expediated form of rule.
It's a feature.

Speaker 28 To reshape the government into their ideal technocracy, first breaking things is a requirement. They might not get away with all of it, and they don't need to.

Speaker 28 They are doing so much, so fast, knowing that they will only get away with some of it.

Speaker 28 But with new Supreme Court-approved presidential immunity and unlimited pardon power, they can try as much as they want with with zero consequence.

Speaker 28 These are not the moves you would make if you wanted a stable government.

Speaker 28 It's the moves you would make as a new tech company, which is why Musk's operation is masked with the Silicon Valley language of efficiency. The inefficiencies of government are part of the point.

Speaker 28 That's what creates stability, makes the country a trusted ally, and gives the dollar value. Quote, Regulations can be bothersome sometimes and downright problematic, but that's kind of the point.

Speaker 28 They act as a control on imprecise and rushed decision-making.

Speaker 28 If the cost of doing business is slowing down the process, that's the cost that has to be made, to quote a government employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Speaker 28 But those inefficiencies and pesky regulations really irritate the Silicon Valley tech bros who think they are the smartest people on the planet.

Speaker 28 It's their view that since they're so smart, shouldn't they run the country?

Speaker 28 Musk has a personal interest in slashing the regulatory state as it interferes with his own businesses and dreams of space colonization.

Speaker 28 Last year, Musk claimed that Doge, quote, was the only path to extending life beyond Earth, unquote.

Speaker 28 The White House press secretary has said that Musk himself will determine when there is a conflict of interest involving his businesses and Doge.

Speaker 28 SpaceX alone has received $15.4 billion in government contracts, according to the New York Times.

Speaker 28 The large reduction in the federal workforce through the combined efforts of Doge and Schedule F, bears an irrefutable similarity to a plan outlined by New Right blogger Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel's favorite philosopher.

Speaker 28 Last year, Robert Evans did a behind the bastards on Curtis Yarvin, and you should absolutely check that out for more information.

Speaker 28 In 2022, Yarvin outlined how a second Trump term could could quote unquote reboot the United States government.

Speaker 28 This plan amounts to a corporate takeover of government, which subsequently reshapes the structure of government akin to a corporation.

Speaker 28 Though, in Yarvin's mind, it is not President Trump who assumes the role of CEO.

Speaker 28 Instead, the president acts as chairman of the board and before inauguration, should select a CEO who is an experienced executive.

Speaker 28 This appointed CEO could then, quote, run the executive branch without any interference from Congress or the courts, to quote Yarvin, while President Trump reviews the CEO's performance in the background.

Speaker 28 Yarvin writes, quote, most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.

Speaker 28 Trump will be monitoring this CEO's performance on TV and can fire him if need be, unquote.

Speaker 28 Musk may believe that he has successfully maneuvered Trump into appointing him CEO, but Trump could be well aware of Musk's ambitions, but is keeping him around as an emergency patsy, ready to fire when needed.

Speaker 28 The Trump admin is currently testing the limits of presidential authority, and once those limits get surpassed by the standards of Senate Republicans, Musk is the easiest guy to blame and push out of the administration's inner circle.

Speaker 28 The first step in Yarvin's plan has the Trump campaign running on centralizing executive power to eliminate government inefficiency.

Speaker 28 This was both in line with Project 2025 and Musk's suggestion of an efficiency commission. Once Trump gets into office, the plan is as follows.
Purge bureaucracy. What Yarvin calls rage.

Speaker 28 Retire all government employees.

Speaker 28 This is essentially being carried out by Doge, Schedule F, and by just pressuring career employees to accept deferred resignation offers by threatening future mass layoffs.

Speaker 28 Senior-level officials have been replaced by a batch of loyal tech oligarchs with links to Musk and Peter Thiel.

Speaker 28 The stupidity of Doge was almost a secret weapon. The cryptocurrency meme-ness made everyone in respectable society not take the idea seriously.

Speaker 28 What's the worst an advisory commission could do with no power to enforce its suggestions?

Speaker 8 Oops.

Speaker 28 Another step in Yarvin's plan is to nullify elite institutions of power like the media and academia. Musk's takeover of Twitter has gone a long way in altering the country's information ecosystem.

Speaker 28 The Trump admin seems to be utilizing Steve Bannon's flood the zone strategy to distract and exhaust the media, as well as more directed attacks.

Speaker 28 On January 31st, The Department of Defense kicked out NBC News, The New York Times, NPR, and Politico from their in-house press offices and replaced them with One American News, The New York Post, Breitbart, and HuffPost.

Speaker 28 Under direction from Doge, the White House has ordered government agencies to cancel subscriptions to policy news services from multiple news outlets.

Speaker 28 A White House advisor told Axios, quote, the eye of Sauron is on more than just Politico. It's all the media, unquote.

Speaker 28 In terms of attacks on academia, the federal grant freeze has had devastating effects on university research.

Speaker 28 Another step in Yarvin's plan is to co-opt Congress and ignore the courts. And this is where we are at right now.

Speaker 28 The goal is to reduce both the judicial and legislative branches to being purely ceremonial and advisory, as advocated by Yarvin.

Speaker 28 So far, the Trump administration has effectively sidestepped the legislative bodies via Elon Musk and Doge. It's highly unlikely Trump would ever be impeached or removed by this Congress.

Speaker 28 Furthermore, this Congress seems to have willfully given up on their power over the federal budget.

Speaker 28 To quote a senior government official, quote, the real challenge is that Congress is on board for now in losing their own budgetary authority.

Speaker 28 So far, a lone security guard standing outside UsAID and the Department of Education has been enough to deter resistance from the Democratic Party.

Speaker 28 Last week, I interviewed Derek Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina. The full interview will air tomorrow, but here's his short take on the current situation.

Speaker 41 When Congress is willing to hand the keys over to the president, then we

Speaker 41 no longer really have

Speaker 41 a democracy, or at least the constitutional democracy that was created

Speaker 41 a couple centuries ago. So the bigger danger, I think, is that through law itself, Congress cedes more and more power to the president with a new legislation.

Speaker 41 So if Congress were to pass new legislation giving the president more centralized power, well, that would be a concerning thing to me.

Speaker 28 Right now, the real roadblock is the courts.

Speaker 28 The Trump administration has already displayed a willingness to ignore the courts based on the continued halting of federal spending and grants, despite an order from a U.S. district judge.

Speaker 28 The Justice Department has argued that the order to resume funding, quote, contains several ambiguous terms and provisions that could be read to constitute significant intrusions on the executive branch's lawful authorities and the separation of powers, unquote.

Speaker 28 This past weekend, Musk raged against a federal judge who ordered to temporarily restrict Doge's access to Treasury Department data.

Speaker 28 Both Musk and the White House have labeled the judge an activist, with White House spokesperson Harrison Fields calling the order, quote, absurd and judicial overreach, unquote.

Speaker 28 On X, the Everything app, Musk boosted claims calling this a a judicial coup, and shared an announcement from California Representative Daryl Issa to introduce legislation to quote unquote stop these rogue judges.

Speaker 28 But even without added legislation, Musk and the Trump administration are gearing up to directly defy judicial authority.

Speaker 28 On Saturday, Musk shared a tweet reading, I don't like the precedent it sets when you defy a judicial ruling, but I'm just wondering what other options are these judges leaving us if they're going to blatantly disregard the Constitution for their own partisan political goals?

Speaker 28 Unquote. And on Sunday, Vice President J.D.
Vance posted a statement undermining judicial power. Quote: If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.

Speaker 28 If a judge tried to command the Attorney General in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal. Judges aren't allowed to control executives' legitimate power, unquote.

Speaker 28 So now it all comes down to force. If the executive branch not just ignores judicial authority, but blatantly defies it, who would be left to enforce the power of the court?

Speaker 28 That leads us to another step in Yarvin's plan, centralize the police.

Speaker 28 Nationalize local law enforcement to place them under federal control. Trump has flirted with this tactic in the past when he deputized Washington police as U.S.

Speaker 28 Marshals to kill Michael Reinhall in 2020. Doge staff threatened to call U.S.
Marshals when USAID security officials, who have since been fired, denied them access to classified systems.

Speaker 28 Yarvin believes this step is paramount. Quote, support of the democratic public is a cipher.
I think that actually all you need is command of the police, unquote.

Speaker 28 If you have all of the guys with guns, who can physically stop you?

Speaker 28 Support from the public doesn't hurt, though. And if things get tricky, Trump could employ the next step step in Yarvin's plan, mobilize populist support.

Speaker 28 But crucially, don't wait until you're at your weakest, at the end of your term after losing an election.

Speaker 28 Under popular mandate, deploy your empowered supporters at the height of your powers to oppose any obstruction from government agencies or the courts.

Speaker 28 Trump may weaponize Supreme Court-ordained presidential immunity and his unrestricted pardon power to make any willing actor carry out his bidding with zero risk of legal consequence.

Speaker 28 Now, even if Trump himself isn't aware of Yarvin's plan, his vice president certainly is. On a far-right podcast in 2021, J.D.

Speaker 28 Vance laid out a very similar vision for a second Trump term, using what the Peter Thiel protégé described as a de-wokification program to purge bureaucracy.

Speaker 43 I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. I think he'll probably win again in 2024.

Speaker 43 I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.

Speaker 43 And when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.

Speaker 28 Yarvin writes that the initial goal of this new administration should not be simply to govern, but to, quote, figure out what the Trump administration can actually do when it assumes the full constitutional powers given to the chief executive of the executive branch, unquote.

Speaker 28 What the administration can do once they fully seize this power is so incredibly vast.

Speaker 28 Without checks and balances, all those crazy things Trump tried to do during his first term would be a lot easier to enact, let alone whatever Musk and the tech oligarchs want out of the United States Incorporated.

Speaker 28 But that's a whole separate topic. The current fight determines the degree degree to which this power is seized.
And Yarvin notes the importance of going all the way.

Speaker 28 Quote, when Trump in 2017 took office, he took about 0.01% of power. If Trump in 2021 wants to have more than 0.001%

Speaker 28 of power, the only way he can do it is to take 100%.

Speaker 28 Take it all at once, completely legally. The real Donald J.
Trump would never have the guts to even think of doing this, and he's just too old, unquote. Funny pessimism from Yarvin there.

Speaker 28 All of this doesn't even need to benefit average Trump supporters, because Trump's main campaign promise wasn't mass deportations, fixing the economy, or abolishing the Department of Education.

Speaker 28 It was retribution.

Speaker 28 As extremism analyst Jared Holt notes, quote, the right got its base so hooked on the idea of of revenge, it doesn't even need to pretend that any of this benefits their base in any tangible way.

Speaker 28 They just have to say it hurts the wrong people, and that satisfies them, unquote. If Trump and Musk continue to get their way, it could take years to fix.

Speaker 28 But the past 10 years have shown us you can't really return to normal. There probably is no going back.

Speaker 28 The options are to hunker down and play it slow and try to survive whatever happens in the next two to four years while offering passive resistance.

Speaker 28 Or we accelerate to whatever comes next, put cards on the table, trigger a kinetic confrontation, and fully manifest the results of this constitutional crisis.

Speaker 28 We are dealing with managing crumbles versus a full systems collapse. Sad face emoji.

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Speaker 9 We got clear facts.

Speaker 11 Maybe we could calm down a little.

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Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 12 NBC News, reporting for America.

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Speaker 28 This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.
Last week, I was working on an essay about how the Trump administration is trying to shut down the Department of Education.

Speaker 28 Now, very quickly, that project expanded to being about how Elon Musk is actually trying to internally coup the federal government and become the CEO of the United States.

Speaker 28 That article is now published on shatterzone.substack.com and is also the previous episode of this podcast.

Speaker 28 But during my research, I talked with law professor Derek Black about the Department of Education, the state of disunion in the country, and if we still have a democracy.

Speaker 28 Already, some of the things we talked about have begun to happen, like Republicans introducing legislation to expand executive power, while Trump and Musk flirt with denying the authority of the courts.

Speaker 28 But I decided to publish the full interview because I believe his perspective is still helpful.

Speaker 28 And the conversational format alters the way we process information compared to me just reading a kind of depressing essay for 40 minutes. So, without further ado, here is the interview.

Speaker 41 I'm Derek Black. I'm a professor of law at the University of South Carolina.
My area focuses on education, law, and policy, and really sort of how that relates to democracy.

Speaker 41 But I teach constitutional law and courses like that. I'm author of a couple of books, Schoolhouse Burning, Public Education, and the Assault on American Democracy.

Speaker 41 And then more recently, Dangerous Learning, the South's long war on black literacy.

Speaker 28 Let's start by discussing what's going on at the Department of Education right now. And maybe let's actually start a a little bit further back.

Speaker 28 Attacks on the Department of Education are not new.

Speaker 28 Reagan famously kind of pioneered the rights focus on this, but it's been something they've struggled to deal sizable blows against, especially in terms of wanting to abolish the organization.

Speaker 28 Could you talk about the history of conservative attacks against the department?

Speaker 41 Yeah, I mean, you know, there's always been this states' rights issue that's been with America since its founding.

Speaker 41 It obviously was a big part of the Civil War, big part of the Civil Rights Movement, big part of the Affordable Health Care Act debate. So, you always have this state's rights argument going on.

Speaker 41 And at least amongst the folks that are worried about that, public education comes up as being a target because there's this argument always that, well, education is not in the federal constitution, so what business does the federal government have to be involved?

Speaker 41 And so, it's really more of a talking point as opposed to any particular substantive reason why they want to get rid of it. But that's really where it's come from.

Speaker 41 But, you know, it's often been not that serious of a critique, but obviously it's gotten very serious here in the last couple of weeks.

Speaker 28 Yeah, that's the general overall feeling I'm having is that there's a lot of things going on that I would have previously thought are kind of like pipe dreams.

Speaker 28 Calls to abolish the Department of Education, even this rallying call from the new right the past few years to like abolish the FBI, general claims of, you know, like draining the swamp, these types of like old, it's almost like stereotypical claims that now, through Musk, they've been able to like weasel their way into actually dismantling like large, large systems that make the like everyday functionality of the government possible.

Speaker 28 What should people know right now about the current attacks on the Department of Education? Trump is still allegedly drafting an executive order.

Speaker 28 He'll probably have to work through Congress, but we'll see the degree to which he even needs to do that. What are you worried about right now? And what do you think people should know about

Speaker 28 the current attacks on the DOE?

Speaker 41 Well, there's the sort of immediate worries, and then there's the larger worries. The immediate worries, I'll have to say, I'm not terribly worried about.

Speaker 41 I mean, if you look at the reporting that we've seen, it is interesting that the White House seems to distinguish between the things that it can do unilaterally, right, without Congress, and those things that would need Congress.

Speaker 41 And I mean, it's a weird silver lining, but that gives me like some measure of comfortability in this weird, bizarre world, only because, you know, two weeks ago, the administration was willing to do things that it had no authority to do, right?

Speaker 41 It just sort of was claiming authority to do everything. And so there is this at least recognition that there's not unbounded power.

Speaker 41 So that's sort of the immediate threat is not that huge because the White House, Trump's power over the department or to close it up is relatively narrow.

Speaker 41 Like most of the department is established by statute and he can't just dissolve things or move move things around that are created by statute.

Speaker 41 He can't take money that's for poor kids and spend them on vouchers, right? These things, you know, the law dictates.

Speaker 41 And the fact that he's implicitly acknowledging or rather his advisors are, you know, implicitly acknowledging they need Congress's help gives me a little bit of comfort because I think that getting rid of the department is...

Speaker 41 I'm not sure there's a majority in the House for that, but there's certainly not a filibuster, you know, 60-vote majority for that in the Senate. So that's short term.

Speaker 41 But I think there's something far more disturbing to me, and it's the long term.

Speaker 41 This sort of idea that there's something illegitimate about the federal role in education, that there's something illegitimate about public education itself. Those are very dangerous ideas.

Speaker 41 I have a piece that just came out yesterday in Slate that says, look, you know, the federal role in public education predates the Constitution itself.

Speaker 41 You know, probably no one, not many listeners, probably familiar or ever heard of the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787.

Speaker 41 But before we even had a United States Constitution, this foundational document laid out how our territory is going to become states.

Speaker 41 And without going through all the details, Congress embeds public education in the very fabric of what it means to be a state before we even have a Constitution.

Speaker 41 And so that's very important is where we start.

Speaker 41 At the end of the Civil War, right, where we almost lost our democracy, Congress, as a condition of readmitting southern states into the Union, says that one of the terms of readmission is that that you create a public education system and you never take those rights away, right?

Speaker 41 Forcing public education into the South in places where it never had been before. You know, people are more familiar with the civil rights movement, so I won't go through all that.

Speaker 41 But just to take one more pause, I mean, Congress created a Department of Education in 1867. right to get this public education project off the ground.

Speaker 41 So this isn't some wild new sort of fantasy of liberals or unions that we need a department so that we can you know hand over the spoils to teachers this is an idea about what it means to have democracy in america and public education is a centerpiece of that and the federal government has been pushing it for 250 years and that's a good thing it's a good thing how do you think that relates to the administration's attempts to centralize executive power though like if you look at like what happened with usaid right this agency that has been has been in charge in law that may not be legally abolished now but they've been effectively abolished.

Speaker 28 Like all the employees are on leave. It's been hollowed out.
It essentially no longer exists.

Speaker 28 I feel like they're trying to, at the very least, test the bare limits of executive power and bypass Congress when they can.

Speaker 28 Part of my fear is like Congress is not willing to fight them on that, seemingly. Like they're not, they're not willing to call them on that.

Speaker 28 They're almost willing to to acquiesce their like appropriations ability as well as you know the ability to have actually have to like remove departments from existence or create new ones.

Speaker 41 Yeah. So you're picking up on a thread that's much bigger than a department, right? So when Congress is willing to hand the keys over to the president, then we no longer really have

Speaker 41 a democracy, or at least the constitutional democracy that was created, you know, a couple of centuries ago here, in which the president executes the law, the president doesn't make the law, right?

Speaker 41 Congress funds programs, not the executive. But if ultimately Congress is going going to shift all that authority over, like that, that's a dangerous place for democracy to be.

Speaker 41 There are no checks anymore. So I think what you're raising up is the fear that there aren't any checks in place.

Speaker 41 You know, fortunately, there still is a legal apparatus. I mean, even if Congress isn't standing up, shouting and complaining, it's still the case.
The president can't just do whatever he wants.

Speaker 41 And hopefully the courts

Speaker 41 would step in. I use the word hopefully.
I think courts will step in to limit his ability to do things that go beyond his statutory power. So the bigger danger, I think, is that through law itself,

Speaker 41 Congress cedes more and more power to the president with a new legislation.

Speaker 41 So if Congress were to pass new legislation giving the president more centralized power, well, that would be a concerning thing to me. And let me just stop and we'll get to your next question to go.

Speaker 41 But we have a larger phenomenon.

Speaker 41 It's not just about Trump and people don't necessarily realize this. I mean, look, I don't think that President Obama was a dictator or had authoritarian tendencies.

Speaker 41 I was part of the Obama-Biden transition team, but I testified against Arne Duncan in a case or against the United States Department of Education in 2012 or 14 or something like that, because the department was taking power that it clearly did not have in regard to no child left behind waivers.

Speaker 41 And, you know, I told the current administration, as much as I hate it, right? I wish we could just wipe away student debt. I feel bad for my students who have huge debt.

Speaker 41 But I said, it is beyond the president's power to just wipe away all this debt. And they did it anyway.

Speaker 41 The real point here is that both Democrats and Republicans have been asking things of their presidents that their presidents don't have the power to do.

Speaker 41 And their presidents are doing it anyway, right? And it's because our Congress is broken. Our Congress isn't doing its job.

Speaker 41 So citizens are demanding that our presidents do things that they really don't have the power to do.

Speaker 28 And that's like the big thing that I'm concerned about is we talk about these things that presidents are not quote unquote like allowed to do.

Speaker 28 and i i feel like like both trump and musk right now are speed running like the limits of executive power and they are willing to test the boundaries a little bit a little bit more than previous presidents and they're willing to like break the government temporarily to like their goals be enacted and at a certain point it's really tricky when the thing that you always hear is you know like hopefully the courts will step in hopefully they'll do something if things get really bad who will like literally stop them in terms of like the courts told them to halt the funding freeze and there's still grants that they are refusing to issue that were already approved legally need to be followed through on that they are still withholding.

Speaker 28 And it's really frightening when it comes down to like basic level of like, is there people,

Speaker 28 military, police, who will enforce this if things get really bad? That's something I don't have like a complete confidence in anymore.

Speaker 41 Well, you know, I deal with this every year at the beginning of my constitutional law class, right? This is not

Speaker 41 a new problem. It seems more real and frightening, but it's not a new problem.
And so what I tell my constitutional law students is that the rule of law doesn't exist because of courts, right?

Speaker 41 It doesn't exist because of police officers, right? That the rule of law, when push comes to shove, exists in the hearts and minds of Americans. And if they don't believe in it, all is lost, right?

Speaker 41 So for when Brown versus Board of Education was decided, it was reportedly the case that the president said, you know, if the court wants to desegregate schools, let it do it itself.

Speaker 41 Because guess what? What's the Supreme Court? It's nine old people in one building with a handful of Capitol police. Like they can't do anything.
They don't have the power to do anything, right?

Speaker 41 So our entire system really rests on good faith.

Speaker 41 Or as I tell my students, like, what if due to something, you know, President Trump or Biden or whoever had done, the federal district court issued an order directing U.S.

Speaker 41 Marshals to take President Trump into custody. So that order goes out.
The marshals receive it. They march over to the White House.

Speaker 41 They come in the door and they say, we are here to take the president. Signed.
And it's already been fast-tracked by the Supreme Court. Signed by the Supreme Court.

Speaker 41 The answer to whether, we'll just use Biden, the answer to whether President Biden is escorted out of the White House by U.S. Marshals is not a function of military.

Speaker 41 It's not a function of police power.

Speaker 41 It's a function of when that piece of paper is held up, does the Secret Service member believe that the rule of law exceeds his loyalty to the man standing behind him? That's where it's at, right?

Speaker 41 And so, you know, it really is a good faith litmus test.

Speaker 41 And I think we used to live in an era when I think we all had maybe more faith in the idea that people put fidelity and commitment to the Constitution and the law above personal loyalty.

Speaker 41 But we increasingly live in a Congress and in a world and a situation when it seems that people put personal loyalty above the Constitution at times.

Speaker 28 J.D. Vance was interviewed on a

Speaker 28 Far Right podcast about like two or three years ago, and he expressed desire for what he called a quote-unquote de-wokification program, which again, like sounds silly, but this is basically happening now.

Speaker 28 He extrapolated and said, quote, I think Trump is going to run again in 2024.

Speaker 28 I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.

Speaker 28 And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.

Speaker 8 Unquote.

Speaker 28 And I feel like we're getting closer and closer to like this scenario.

Speaker 41 I'm sorry, where did J.D. Vance make this statement? At what context?

Speaker 28 On Jack Murphy's podcast. Jack Murphy is like a far a commentator.
Wow. Vance is invoking the political philosophy of Curtis Yarvin, who's becoming increasingly popular in the new right.

Speaker 28 Well, lots of what Musk and Trump, by extension, have been doing the past few weeks is taken pretty directly out of Curtis Yarvin's playbook for seizing executive power.

Speaker 28 And I feel like we're getting closer and closer to this.

Speaker 28 And so much of what's happening in various agencies is about proving loyalty to Trump so that if there is some kind of constitutional confrontation, people side with him.

Speaker 28 Doge is basically installing loyalty tests and running through communications to like see what the loyalty to Trump is for different levels of administrative employees.

Speaker 28 the FBI are negotiations to stay on, but only if they can prove their loyalty to the president.

Speaker 28 And like, it's all of these scenarios that, again, like originally would be kind of far-fetched when you're hearing someone like J.D.

Speaker 28 Vance talk about this a few years ago on some like right-wing podcast. That's one thing.

Speaker 28 To watch this happen in real time, for people like me who study like this type of more esoteric far-right political theory, it's kind of surreal to watch the type of thing that you've been writing about and thinking about on background for years now happen.

Speaker 28 I just kind of rambled there, but do you have any, I guess, thoughts on like this this idea that like Vance is talking about in terms of like creating this constitutional crisis?

Speaker 41 Well,

Speaker 41 I mean, look,

Speaker 41 I tend to be the guy in the room that says,

Speaker 41 let's not overreact. Let's see what happens.

Speaker 41 You know, there's a lot of institutional history and there's a lot of Americans who I think the majority are good and decent people and they don't want authoritarianism. So this is me, right?

Speaker 41 This is my predisposition. But a week or so ago, I had a

Speaker 41 huge crisis of confidence, shall we say? There were just a few events in the news that I was just like,

Speaker 41 I just never thought that this would happen in America. I never thought a governor would, I mean, some of this was what governors were doing.
I never thought a governor would do that.

Speaker 41 I never thought a president would do that. I just never thought, you know, never thought, never thought.

Speaker 41 And so I said to myself, you know, are any of my opinions or projections, you know, valid anymore? Because I'm the guy guy who never thought.

Speaker 41 And so that would, that was, you know, that was a tough 24 hours for me, I'll have to say.

Speaker 41 So, you know, I don't know if like I just rebooted and for self-sanity and moved forward or, you know, whether there is still some truth and reason to believe in certain stability.

Speaker 41 And I mean, I will say this, you know, as we started this conversation, the fact that the White House is conceding that it can't do everything to the Department of Education that it wants to do without Congress is a good thing.

Speaker 41 If you read the five executive orders or for however many that they've already issued there, it's a good thing that actually, if you read them carefully, it's mostly directing appointees to think about stuff, not actually do stuff, but to think about stuff.

Speaker 41 And of course the president can appoint them to think about stuff. If they do the stuff they're thinking about, well, that becomes a problem.

Speaker 41 But again, it is this sort of like, can I grab a headline about what would sound like an awful, you know, reality, but really all I've done is tell people to think about that reality.

Speaker 41 You know, that gives me some faith, right?

Speaker 41 And notwithstanding the fact that this United States Supreme Court, you know, granted an immunity to all presidents that I never could have imagined, you know, this court does, you know, issue opinions that surprise us every single term and they line up with the rule of law.

Speaker 41 It's just, it's unpredictable to some extent which opinions those are going to be.

Speaker 41 So, I have this faith, you know, these sort of pieces of the puzzle that still suggest we're still a democracy and are going to remain one. But, you know, I have my really bad days.

Speaker 41 I think, like, you know, I think a lot of people have a bad day every day right now. It's that, you know, I just feel thankful mine are fewer and further between than others.

Speaker 41 And maybe that's just psychological coping. I don't know.

Speaker 28 I guess closely talking about disunion and how that relates to the general feeling I think a lot of people are experiencing around the country, as well as linking back again to the attacks on the Department of Education.

Speaker 41 Yeah, so I spend a pretty good deal of time on this disunion question in my new book, Dangerous Learning, because

Speaker 41 most of that book is focused on the three decades leading up to the Civil War. So that like the Civil War doesn't just happen overnight.

Speaker 41 It happens over the course of late 1820s to the 1860s with the South just saber-rattling over and over again, openly talking about disunion, right?

Speaker 41 So that you had a South that actually was diverse in lots of ways in its opinions about various things. I'm not going to say that

Speaker 41 they were your bunch of all abolitionists, but there was a manumission society in North Carolina in 1829 that had, I think, 1,600 members, right? The very idea of 1,600

Speaker 41 anti-slavery advocates in North Carolina in the 1820s is shocking to a lot of people, right? But 10 years later, only 12 people show up to the final meeting, right?

Speaker 41 So you had something that changed there, right?

Speaker 41 And so you have this sort of period of escalating disunion and censorship and propaganda and sort of policing what is publicly, you know, acceptable commentary in the South.

Speaker 41 All this stuff is happening, sort of going in and, you know, editing their sort of censoring textbooks, you know demanding that books only be written by southerners like oh i make it go on and on and on we don't have time for it what i point out though in my analysis of what's going on you know right now over the last few years in education is that there are a lot of policies that are attacking public education in the way that they previously had and a lot of them are symbolic of disunion instincts, right?

Speaker 41 Sort of just sort of anti-government, right? Anti-sort of whatever the current culture is. And then there's actually policies that I argue are facilitating disunion.

Speaker 41 And one of those that I talk about is our public school voucher. I say private school vouchers.

Speaker 41 You are so upset with, you're so raging at the public school system that we need private school vouchers, right? And we are effectively paying, we're going to pay individuals.

Speaker 41 to leave the public school system. And I call this a coded call for disunion, even if people don't think that's what they're doing.

Speaker 41 If we look back at where we started this conversation, which is institution of public education as something upon which American democracy has been built, of course, it had lots of flaws and it wasn't perfect, but it's been part of how we build a democracy.

Speaker 41 It's always been a bipartisan project. Now becoming the thing that we rage against, now becoming the thing in which we are going to finance exit from, right?

Speaker 41 This is a step towards disunion from a fundamental institution of American democracy. What happens to us if they actually execute on that plan?

Speaker 41 I shudder to think about where we might be because it's not just some private school that's the equivalent of the public school.

Speaker 41 We're talking about people on the public dollar retreating into their religious silos, into their racial silos, into their culture silos.

Speaker 41 And if there's anything I think that we could all agree on is listening to only the people that you like on Twitter or listening only to the people that you like for the evening news is what got us here.

Speaker 41 And if what we have is education that becomes the equivalent of MSNBC and Fox News and Newsmax and whatever else, like that is a dangerous place. I don't know how we build democracy on such a system.

Speaker 28 What's the solution here? I mean, like beyond, beyond people diversifying where they get their media from. And like for vast boss of the country, I think that that line's been crossed a long time ago.

Speaker 28 If you look at the way like Twitter functions, the way that people just exist in their bubbles and are happy to, like people don't want to hear anything else with the most hostility coming from like both extreme ends.

Speaker 28 I don't know how to get around this problem. This is something that we've thought about a lot the past eight years, but certainly longer.

Speaker 41 Well, I'll say this, you know, public schools can't solve all of democracy's problem. You know, I'd be a fool to say otherwise.

Speaker 41 But if what we're doing is talking about education itself, I think number one is that I think our leaders need to understand, better understand the dangers of, you know, vouchers, for instance.

Speaker 41 Like right now, and I'm writing about this, like they think it's just a policy dispute. And like, if you just look at the surface level, it's like, well, who cares if we give some more vouchers?

Speaker 41 And that makes the most far-reaches of our party happy. But like, I think sort of really stepping back and appreciating.
how dangerous this is to our democracy is step one. And that's hard, right?

Speaker 41 I'm talking about teaching adults to see things differently than what they currently see them. But as to our schools, I mean, I've got a little bit of stiff medicine for both sides.

Speaker 41 I mean, I do think that in the push for more justice in our public schools, and I think we do need, I mean, that's what I've devoted my career to. I do think that Well, I don't think our schools did

Speaker 41 any of the awful stuff that

Speaker 41 the right has said, but I do think that they maybe were not as open to people disagreeing with them as they should have been.

Speaker 41 And what I really mean is in the push for justice, I think there was a bit of shutting down conversation, not teaching children to reach their own conclusions, but giving them conclusions and expecting them to reach them.

Speaker 41 And so one of the things I'm working on my new book is that like, I really think we have to rethink how we teach history, you know, how we teach literature, maybe not so much literature.

Speaker 41 I think our literature teachers are pretty good, but rethink how we teach those things such that we are not committed to our children reaching particular conclusions.

Speaker 41 What we are committed to is our children engaging in free and open thought amongst themselves, right? With hopefully an adult in the room that can, you know, establish some guidelines.

Speaker 41 But I think public education didn't do that very well five years ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago when I was there.

Speaker 41 But I think in this moment of cultural fracture, we do really have to commit to free speech, open debate, inquiry, listening harder, thinking harder, right?

Speaker 41 Not just bullet points, not just bullet points.

Speaker 28 What would cross the Rubicon for you? People throw around the term constitutional crisis.

Speaker 28 What would actually happen that would make that something that you, that you would be like, this is like it, like it is happening. What is that like make or break moment?

Speaker 41 Are you wanting me to imagine a realistic one or just sort of give you some sort of example that makes sense?

Speaker 28 No, like like, what would that be like for you? Because like, I think everyone has their own personal rubric for like, like, what is too far in my mind?

Speaker 28 Like, what is something that's like, this is, this is completely unacceptable.

Speaker 28 And for some people, this, this may have already happened, but like, in terms of like legitimate, like, constitutional crisis,

Speaker 28 what is that for you?

Speaker 41 Well, let's just rewind. And this is, I guess, an example of why, you know, someone still got their finger in the dam.
I'm holding back, holding it together.

Speaker 41 You know, the president of the United States asserted unilateral authority over the entire federal budget when he came into office, right? He does not have that power.

Speaker 41 Federal District Court enjoined it. He

Speaker 41 then backed down from that.

Speaker 41 But let's say he didn't back down.

Speaker 41 It's like, well, okay, you know, maybe as a district court, but if the United States Supreme Court or a Court of Appeals told the president you lack the authority to sequester those funds and he still did it.

Speaker 41 So just the budget. That's it.
Just the budget. You know, just the belief that the president can spend our money however he wants with no, with no constraint.
And that would be crossing the Rubicon.

Speaker 41 Now, I'll tell you, and this is why, you know, you have to kind of be like a constitutional law professor or, well, you don't have to be a constitutional law professor, but you've been following it.

Speaker 41 It's like, you know, I've been alarmed. And this goes back, this isn't just a Trump problem.

Speaker 41 Like I was alarmed with the NCLB waivers. Probably nobody in this even knows what I'm talking talking about, right? Like, you know, a decade ago.

Speaker 41 Not that like President Obama was like going to take over the country, but alarmed that somehow or another he thinks he can do this. Like, why is he even testing the boundaries this way?

Speaker 28 Executive power has been steadily expanding, certainly.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 41 And so, but I was like, you know, you can kind of get it. There was some gray area.

Speaker 41 This is where you kind of need to be a constitutional law professor to kind of figure out why that was such a big deal.

Speaker 41 But when Biden, I mean, think back. And again, I don't begrudge people needing their debts relief.

Speaker 41 But when President Biden effectively asserted the power to allocate federal dollars to pay off debts that was like, you know, half of the discretionary funds of the entire federal government, like that's a big move to just say, yeah,

Speaker 41 I can commit this nation to a 50% increase in its fiscal outlays tomorrow. That's not constitutional democracy.
But now, right, we have a president going even further than that.

Speaker 41 But he, like Biden, at least thus far, stepped back, at least from the district court, right, when the court said can't. So it's really that sort of defying of the court at that point.

Speaker 41 Yeah, they've all been pushing the boundaries. He's pushed them further.
Thus far, they've all complied with judicial orders, but it would be the refusal to comply with judicial order.

Speaker 28 I mean, I guess the main difference there for me relates back to what you said about acting in good faith.

Speaker 28 Something that people on the left, I think, get mad about sometimes is Democrats seeming complete commitment to acting in good faith sometimes.

Speaker 28 And it certainly appears that Trump is willing to push a little bit farther, especially in terms of like tests for loyalty.

Speaker 28 And at a certain point, like if he does something really bad, at least for these next two years, like

Speaker 28 I don't see a way that he'll get like impeached or removed from office. Like certainly not with this Senate, not with this Congress.

Speaker 28 Like that check and balance just no longer is viable due to the last election. And acting with that popular mandate has, I think, given them a bit more courage on their side to go

Speaker 28 a little bit further, play a little bit more fast and loose some of these like checks and balances than what we've previously seen. But this is certainly still developing.

Speaker 41 Well, the thing that really sort of jumps out at me, and I was telling some, you know, several reporters is that you're right. He's pushing it further.
It looks scarier.

Speaker 41 But part of why it's scarier, to be quite honest,

Speaker 41 well, I think it's scary. I don't know, is that he's doing it out in the open.

Speaker 41 I mean, on some level, some of this stuff, like telling people to cook up crazy plans to do this, that, like presidents have been doing that, like, you know, Nixon was

Speaker 41 Nixon was paranoid. He was like, like, this is what.
presidents do, but it's not appropriate to do it in public, right? You do it behind closed doors, you know, offer some plausible,

Speaker 41 rationalization for what you're doing, and, you know, you minimize it, act like it's no big deal.

Speaker 41 What's startling here is that he is out in the open expressing his designs to us, giving us the sort of thoughts. And that's very unusual.

Speaker 41 And it does show that what's acceptable from public officials is much different now. Because had

Speaker 41 Nixon shared his designs with the American public, he wouldn't have made it as long as he did, you know, and probably true of a lot of other presidents. They would have been gone.

Speaker 41 So what's actually acceptable as public behavior has clearly changed. What's acceptable as a policy agenda has clearly changed.
And so he's just putting it out there.

Speaker 41 He's putting his dirty laundry out there. And people are like, oh, this is normal.

Speaker 28 Unless you have anything else to add. Do you want to talk about where people can find you and your writing?

Speaker 41 Yeah, I mean, I'm on Blue Sky more recently.

Speaker 41 Still on Twitter. I sort of have...
you know, just lots of friends on there. So I'm still there.

Speaker 41 Me too. Me too.
Yeah. You know, I'm not on there as often as I used to be.
You know, I gave up blogging a long time ago.

Speaker 41 So, you know, as we drink out of a fire hydrant, you know, I spent a lot of time just trying to explain basic things about public education to reporters. But you can find me there.

Speaker 41 I'm a professor of law at the University of South Carolina. And like I said,

Speaker 41 Dangerous Learning just came out a week or so ago, really helping us, I think, helping us to see this current moment through a long lens of war on black equality, black freedom, and to be quite honest, just free and open debate.

Speaker 41 We've had those wars before and we scarily are having them them again.

Speaker 8 All right.

Speaker 28 Thank you so much. Thank you.

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Speaker 13 NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts.
Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 12 NBC News, reporting for America.

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Speaker 8 Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. This is a daily news podcast about all of the things happening here, which is wherever you happen to be, and also the world in general.

Speaker 8 And today we are going back to talk about Gaza, particularly what has happened and changed in sort of U.S.

Speaker 8 policy relating to Gaza, to what's going to happen as the actual combat operations wind down, to the Trump administration's so far promises to effectively, ethnically cleanse the entire area and turn it into some sort of weird U.S.

Speaker 8 satellite. And with me today is Dana L.
Kurd, an assistant professor of political science, guest on our episodes about Bibi Nanyahu over at Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 8 Dana, thank you so much for being here with us. How are you doing today? I know that's a dumb question.
I just asked you that at the start of this too.

Speaker 1 No, thank you for having me. I think every Palestinian in the world is not doing great.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, like I said, a dumb question.

Speaker 8 The short story of what is happening is that Trump made an unprecedented announcement about a week ago on stage with Netanyahu that Gaza would be, that like the Palestinian population would be forced out and not allowed to return, and it would be turned into effectively American condos, right?

Speaker 8 Like that's that's essentially, I think that's essentially the gist of the initial meeting, which was met with a degree of chaos even from Israel, because I don't think anyone entirely knew exactly what Trump was going to say when he got up on that stage, which is pretty normal Trump fashion.

Speaker 8 But yeah, how would you characterize kind of the initial reaction to that announcement? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So a couple different audiences for that announcement to begin with.

Speaker 1 For the Israeli side, I mean, what I'm hearing from analysts and people who follow Israeli politics is that

Speaker 1 This has really changed the permission structure for them. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think you're right that they didn't expect something to this degree, but now that it's been said, it's like that is the full extent of what we can expect to do. Right.

Speaker 1 And so I don't think a lot of people are thinking like, for real, there's going to be a Gaza Riviera.

Speaker 1 But what this does is it just expands the scope of what they think is possible for Gaza, whether it's preventing reconstruction.

Speaker 1 and, you know, basically keeping them in this kind of stagnant condition and allowing people to start trickling out and leaving and anybody left is considered combatant.

Speaker 1 That could be a possibility moving forward. It could cover up for more aggressive action, ending the ceasefire.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's, it's, it's really upended things in terms of the Israeli perspective and how much they've they've accepted it, I think.

Speaker 8 Yeah, because I, I, I mean, My interpretation would be that what Trump's literal words leave the door open to everything from, like you said, sort of slowly waiting for people to trickle out and not letting them back in, kind of like what you saw in the Chagos Islands, or outright mass killing.

Speaker 8 You know, like there's no closed doors in Trump's plan, other than about three hours before we recorded this on Monday, the 10th, a series of articles went out based on some of Trump's comments confirming Palestinians wouldn't be allowed back into Gaza under his plan.

Speaker 8 Like the plan is for ethnic cleansing, right? Like that's the only way to describe that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, it's very explicit. And I think that the way in which American allies, allied regimes in the region have

Speaker 1 reacted to this like shows a great deal of alarm.

Speaker 1 Obviously, Jordan and Egypt, already struggling as it is with a variety of issues, don't want a bunch of Palestinians who are very politically active to be absorbed into their population.

Speaker 1 The Saudi government, you know, put out, I would say, like a pretty strong statement. I mean, I was surprised how strong it was about how much they do not endorse such a plan.
So, yeah.

Speaker 8 And it's interesting because Trump, in the way that he often just like says shit, has I'm going to read the exact quote.

Speaker 8 I'm talking about starting to build and I think I could make a deal with Jordan. I think I could make a deal with Egypt.
You know, we give them billions and billions of dollars a year.

Speaker 8 And so far, Egypt and Jordan have both said, no, this is not something we're interested.

Speaker 8 UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese said Trump's proposal was nonsense, but has to be taken very seriously, which I actually think is a reasonably good summary of how to handle everything that he says.

Speaker 8 It's nonsense that you have to take it very seriously.

Speaker 1 I mean, the man has the nukes, as we've discussed.

Speaker 1 So, so, yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 the way that people have reacted is obviously a great deal of alarm. And on the Palestinian side, it's like Palestinian, different Palestinian political actors are bracing for

Speaker 1 the end of the ceasefire, essentially.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty stark term to put it.

Speaker 8 And I don't know, I guess, because, yeah, one thing that the door is open on is Israel saying, well, now that we've announced this plan and people have to get out, everyone staying is effectively a combatant.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah.
I think that that's, yeah. It's not, you know, what we've seen over the past 470 days up to ceasefire is not that they have much respect for non-combatants to begin with.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That really didn't stop them from targeting civilians, targeting children. So you can imagine now that even,

Speaker 1 I mean, it's hard to even talk about it in these terms. It's not like the Biden administration was really holding them accountable either.

Speaker 1 But now, again, because the permission structure has just been expanded to such a degree that we don't know what kinds of things we're going to see for people who remain in Gaza

Speaker 1 in the coming future. And obviously, this derails any possibility for Palestinian and Israeli civil society actors who are trying to move beyond this particular status quo.
And

Speaker 1 there's no international actor that's really empowering those efforts. And so

Speaker 1 it's really bleak.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I mean, it's bleak in so many comprehensive ways.

Speaker 8 Like, one thing, and not to, I don't mean to like kind of take the focus off of Gaza, but this is you used the term permission structure on an international level. The U.S.

Speaker 8 saying we are backing a forced expulsion and genocide of an entire population does change the permission structure for every international actor in terms of like

Speaker 8 a massive variety of conflicts around the world.

Speaker 8 Like this is like a sea change in international norms that so many millions of people outside of Gaza will eventually and very probably immediately be affected by.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think that there has always been gaps in

Speaker 1 what is acceptable and what is permissible under international law. Obviously, that has never been applied evenly.

Speaker 1 And then if you were a particular group that didn't have American backings, for example, the Armenians in Artsach, it didn't matter if you were ethnically cleansed.

Speaker 1 But like you said, this just expands it to such a scope. Like now this is an acceptable policy solution to remove wholesale huge populations.

Speaker 1 And when the ceasefire happened, there was an argument, and I think that this is a valid one, that Palestinians, the fact that they were able to, in the ceasefire agreement, secure their right to return even to the rubble.

Speaker 1 That was a huge obstacle to this kind of precedent.

Speaker 1 And I think Trump is now trying to upend that victory, even if it's, you know, in terms of a precedent set or in symbolic terms, like, like you said, this is now going to become how states operate.

Speaker 1 I mean, the Syrian dictator during the Syrian civil war, I think, pushed the bounds of how states can operate. And this is another level.

Speaker 8 Yeah. Well, and I think that.
This is, and I, and I want to kind of zero back in on Gaza in a second, but I really do, I think that that broader point that you just make can't be made enough.

Speaker 8 Not just the centrality of Syria, but the idea that when on the international stage, the leader of a country is allowed to do forced displacements through massive aerial bombing, like there's this idea that you can just be like, well, that's just Syria, right?

Speaker 8 It's never just Syria, just like it's never just Gaza, you know, these things metastasize. You have to view those kind of actions in the international stage like a cancer.

Speaker 1 Right. No, absolutely.
There was a Syrian activist and political writer, Yassin al Harsale, who said the Syrianization of the world. Yeah.
And we're seeing the Gazification of the world.

Speaker 1 We will see the gossification of the world. And that's very, very dangerous for everybody involved.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that can't be overstated. A chill kind of goes down my spine thinking about that and thinking about that quote, which makes this a very bad time to throw to ads, but that's what I'm going to do.

Speaker 8 Then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about demining.

Speaker 8 We're back. back.

Speaker 8 So to zero back in on Gaza, obviously one thing that comes up when Trump talks about this plan that is an actual thing that would have to be dealt with one way or the other is that huge chunks of Gaza are uninhabitable right now and will be for the foreseeable future because of the sheer quantity of munitions dispensed.

Speaker 8 A number of munitions that have been used in Gaza are cluster munitions, but even munitions that are not cluster munitions, when you're dropping bombs on particularly dense urban targets, there's a wide variety of things that can happen to those munitions on their way to their target, including them getting deflected by debris, them getting deflected by pieces of metal and rebar and the like, that damages the device and stops it from detonating, but leaves it still in an active state.

Speaker 8 And the estimate I'm seeing for munitions used in Gaza is about 10% of the munitions. And there's no way of knowing how many have been dropped, but estimates are at least 30,000 in the first

Speaker 8 70 days, I think.

Speaker 8 Yeah, seven weeks, sorry, much less than 70 days. Nearly 30,000 munitions in the first seven weeks of the war.
So a huge number, about 10% at least, are still active and live.

Speaker 8 And, you know, for an idea of how long it takes to demine and render an area safe from munitions like this, there are still people who die in France from old World War I munitions, you know, up to the present day in 2025.

Speaker 8 So this is a massive problem. In the best case scenario, something has to be done with these munitions.

Speaker 8 This is something that Trump has been bringing up when talking about like his desire to clear people out of there, demine, and then rebuild effectively what sounds almost like a vacation colony, right?

Speaker 8 For the United States.

Speaker 8 And one of the issues just with any sort of practical sort of effect with demining is that USAID has been gutted as an agency, and that's the agency through which demining was done.

Speaker 8 We've spent billions of dollars, put billions of dollars into demining around the world through USAID. The U.S.
military is actually not allowed by our laws to do demining operations.

Speaker 8 There's a complicated history there. But like, so we've both got this situation where the proposed justification for pushing the population out is, well, it's not safe to be there.

Speaker 8 We have to de-demine it. And also we have created a situation in which the organizations that do demining can't do it anymore.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And

Speaker 1 I think those same organizations asked for like an exception to the stop work order and were denied by the State Department. And

Speaker 1 no explanations were given. And so, I mean, it's obviously a fig leaf.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's obviously an excuse. Like, this has nothing to do with bettering conditions in Gaza.

Speaker 1 And the fact that he's gone back and clarified and has been asked a number of times, including last night after the Super Bowl or something. And he said, no, no, they won't be allowed to return.

Speaker 1 Well, all right, what are you demining? You really think you're going to build hotels.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 1 My understanding is like people in the administration were also surprised by this tack of reasoning. So I wonder who's fed him this idea?

Speaker 1 Like who's given him this idea that he's going to be able to build hotels here?

Speaker 8 My understanding, based on reading, I obviously don't have any ins in the Trump administration, but the reporting I've seen suggests it came from Kushner that like a year or so ago, he was talking

Speaker 8 about this. Like, this is great, you know, a great place to build a condo.
It's beautiful, you know, wonderful weather.

Speaker 8 I mean, we know just from the past, that is kind of how Trump works is somebody, people tell him a lot of shit, but something sticks in his brain.

Speaker 8 And that, like with the Greenland shit, can become U.S. policy.
And that appears to be, I mean, as best as I can tell, that's the origin of this.

Speaker 1 It's just like the grift can really stick in his mind. He's really good at holding on to possibilities for grifting.

Speaker 8 Yeah. The fact that you are doing a genocide in order to clear land for condos doesn't make it less of a genocide, but it is like a justification for genocide.

Speaker 8 I don't think I've heard a country's leader make before. Right.
I mean, parts of this are familiar and go back, you know, even to the Iraq war in terms of U.S. policy and further back, right?

Speaker 8 Like what is kind of the core of U.S. support of Israel is our desire to have a stable territory within the Middle East from where we can project power, right?

Speaker 8 So to that extent, this is like a natural... expression of U.S.
policy for decades in the area.

Speaker 8 Like, well, what if we just take this for ourselves and then we have this stable platform from where we can airstrike whoever the hell we want? And also Jared Kushner can have his condos.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, the thing is,

Speaker 1 they can achieve and have already been able to maintain American hegemony with all sorts of bases across the Middle East. Some secret, some not.

Speaker 1 Qatar, like it's, it's, this is, I think this is another level where it's like, American hegemony is tangential to Jared Kushner making money, which is an interesting little,

Speaker 1 I've never seen a hegemon kind of shoot itself in the foot in this direction to this degree.

Speaker 8 Yeah. I don't want the focus to be on like the danger to Americans from this, but this is extremely dangerous for Americans too, right?

Speaker 8 Like having your country openly back a genocide to this extent, like not just even arming it, but saying like, we are specifically going to build.

Speaker 8 like take this land and profit off of it is such a it's it's so comprehensively escalates everything on an international scale.

Speaker 8 Like, I, I don't even, I can't even, I can't think of a single decision that's this reckless that's been made in my lifetime by American politicians other than the Iraq war.

Speaker 1 Right. And that was, I think, maybe the first nail in the coffin.
And we're, we're, we're reaching the last nails in the coffin.

Speaker 8 Um, yeah, yeah, the coffin's almost done.

Speaker 1 It's almost done. Uh, we're dismantling the, the, whatever remnants of the international order used to exist, and it's really going to to be a free fall.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I don't know what more to say on that. I guess kind of the one thing we should get into is

Speaker 8 what we're seeing in terms of the Trump administration and pro-Palestine protests in the United States.

Speaker 8 Obviously, last night at the Super Bowl, we had a moment where a member of Kendrick Lamar's, the performance crew on the ground, I think it was one of his dancers, as far as I can tell, although I don't believe the individual has been named yet.

Speaker 8 Maybe I missed that.

Speaker 1 I think somebody has released his name. I think the intercept.

Speaker 8 Okay. Well,

Speaker 8 I don't feel specifically a need to do that.

Speaker 8 But an individual who was a part of that was standing on one of the cars that was on stage that Kendrick had been dancing on, unfurled a Palestine and Sudan flag.

Speaker 8 It was a fairly small, like a couple of feet wide, couple of feet deep.

Speaker 8 So like not like a massive, certainly not a destructive act, but like not only did that person get like banned for life from all sort of NFL events and performing or attending them, which I suppose was not super shocking.

Speaker 8 But there were immediate announcements by New Orleans police that they are trying to figure out what to charge this person under, which, like, I tell me what kind of crime that is, you know?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's not like he even invaded the pitch, right? Like he's

Speaker 1 supposed to be there. He was an actor.

Speaker 8 Yeah. Like he did a thing

Speaker 8 that wasn't part of the script, I assume, but like, right. I don't know how you even charged him.
Yeah, I don't think charges are out yet, right?

Speaker 8 But they're going to find something to do, which which is also going to set a precedent, right? Because this is nothing. This person was not at a place they weren't allowed to be.

Speaker 8 This person didn't damage any property. They held a thing.
Like that's the definition of protected speech.

Speaker 8 You know, if you are their employer, you can fire them for that, but you can't charge them criminally for that.

Speaker 1 I mean, they want to make an example. Yeah.
And they, and we'll see what kind of example that they try to make out of this person.

Speaker 1 And it, like, like you said, it's, it's really in line with Trump, Trump, the Trump administration taking aggressive action against any forms of dissent around American foreign policy that is obviously, as we've mentioned, like very tied up with the genocide that unfolded.

Speaker 1 And so it's these executive orders around deporting international students. It's executive orders around like expanded understandings of anti-Semitism.

Speaker 1 And the idea is even if you don't go after everybody, you're making an example enough that like you're chilling people's abilities to engage, whether it's on campuses or out, you know, off campuses.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 it's definitely, I can tell you from like the academic perspective, like a number of disciplinary organizations and

Speaker 1 like Middle East Studies Association and things like this, like

Speaker 1 they're, they're very concerned. Like this is a very concerning moment.

Speaker 8 Yeah. I want to kind of dig into that a little bit more and we'll continue our conversation.
I've got to throw to ads one last time and then we'll be back.

Speaker 8 We're back. Dana, yeah, we're just talking about kind of the chilling effects this has had.

Speaker 8 As an academic, do you want to talk a little bit about what you've experienced so far and what you think kind of needs to be the response to this attempt to chill any kind of protected speech in favor of Palestine?

Speaker 8 Or not even in favor, that's the wrong way to put it. It's not even if it's discussing the reality of the genocide.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's the thing is like they have not, they've conflated

Speaker 8 any

Speaker 1 attempt to give information with advocacy. Yes.
So there's that conflation. But then, of course, advocacy in and of itself is protected.
Yes.

Speaker 1 You're certainly allowed to advocate if you're a student or things or, you know, a citizen in the world. Like, of course.
So there is that conflation.

Speaker 1 And I will say that like we're seeing attacks on academic freedom and we're seeing attacks on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly on academic campuses, both in public institutions that have to uphold public laws and also on private institutions that have paid lip service to things like free speech and are now ignoring that commitment in the past.

Speaker 1 And so we've seen even tenured professors like what happened in Muhlenberg College, like tenured professors being targeted, losing their jobs.

Speaker 1 And I can say that this has really activated organizations like the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP, the Middle East Studies Association, as well as their Committee on Academic Freedom has been working to collect data on how this has impacted people's abilities to engage on the issue of Israel-Palestine, even in their research or teaching.

Speaker 1 And then there was a study by two professors, Mark Lynch and Shibri Tilhami. George Washington and University of Maryland, respectively, that found something like over 90%

Speaker 1 of professors who teach on the Middle East are self-censoring.

Speaker 8 Jesus.

Speaker 1 And it's not because they're out in front of the classroom giving a crap about giving their opinion. Yeah.
I can tell you, none of us want to change anybody's minds about this.

Speaker 1 It's like they're literally just self-censoring the content.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like we're just afraid to even address what happened, what's happening in a historical context or, you know, teaching a course on Israel-Palestine or any, any, any of those kinds of things is now completely under the microscope.

Speaker 8 And this is all part of the whole kind of authoritarian chilling effect of any ability to express anything outside of like what the regimes that you live under considers acceptable, you know?

Speaker 8 And it always starts with these, well, you know, if we talk about Palestine and what's happening there, then maybe this department will get, you know, its funding cut and we won't be able to talk about anything.

Speaker 8 So really, this is, you know, it's the same decision a lot of hospitals are making around like the treatment for trans kids as well.

Speaker 8 We'll lose our funding if we do this and we do all these other good things, but they never stop, right? Like you never actually are safe. There's no point at which these people say it's enough.

Speaker 8 They take your ability to talk about or to act in one way away, and then they take it in a way in another and they keep taking, you know, until you make a stand.

Speaker 8 And you might as well make a stand the first time they start trying to take shit from you. Otherwise, you're going to get backed even further into a fucking corner.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there has to be institutions and leadership at these institutions holding a line because this kind of preemptive obedience hasn't served them.

Speaker 1 And it's not going to change fundamentally the fact that this administration sees academic knowledge production as a political landscape they need to control. And see, I mean, J.D.

Speaker 1 Venn says it, like professors are the enemy. Yeah.
So what are you doing trying to placate? You know, it's like you're, you're just giving them an easier time.

Speaker 8 No, and yeah.

Speaker 8 Through the use of funding and their ability to kind of gin up outrage in media, groups like APAC have effectively blasted a salient in free speech in this country, where you really, you almost can't talk about Palestine and you certainly can't acknowledge what Israel is doing.

Speaker 8 right you can't say it state in plain terms like we are watching a genocide be at least attempted here right and if you do that there are huge consequences to to most people in traditional organizations particularly professors which is always where it starts and yeah that salient is just going to get wider and wider and wider right like that's that's the way this stuff works yeah yeah i mean um the arg this is not a new argument but it's like

Speaker 1 the ways in which the united states has engaged abroad it's very much boomeranging home you know um and so it's not about like you said it's not just about palestine it's not about people who study palestine or teach about israel palestine

Speaker 1 It's so much broader than that, the precedent that is being set.

Speaker 1 And what is like kind of a silver lining is that the last year of the Biden administration, the last year plus of the Biden administration, and then even now, I think at least it has helped people connect the dots a little bit.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, this is not an issue in isolation.
And just because you don't happen to work on it doesn't mean that you're safe from people meddling in your syllabi or

Speaker 1 chilling your speech on other issues, whether it's trans rights, whether it's

Speaker 1 reproductive rights,

Speaker 1 whatever issue, if you don't toe the line, they're going to come for you too, right?

Speaker 1 And so I think that at least I've seen folks who are not, who have never been activated on the issue of Israel-Palestine, whether in their advocacy or in their research, they are making that connection at least.

Speaker 1 And maybe that's a silver lining that I'm trying to be less bleak here.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah, I think that's hopeful. You know,

Speaker 8 when I think about the hypocrisy of this moment, I think about how much of the clamping down on speech, particularly the attempt to punish like student protesters in the United States, is predicated on accusing them of backing Hamas.

Speaker 8 Right. And it's so interesting to me because like, you know, obviously I don't think Hamas is a good organization, but neither is the IRA.

Speaker 8 And the former president of the United States, Joe Biden, made pro-IRA statements, right? Like one thing is okay and the other is not. I don't know.

Speaker 8 It's, it's, I find it incredibly frustrating that like, there's this pretended act that like, because you've got some people on one side who have made statements in favor of this group that sucks, that that is a reason for cracking down on the ability of people to talk about a genocide.

Speaker 8 Like it's, it's. just this hideous hypocrisy that I don't even understand how like people can keep that consistent in their own heads, but they don't need to, right?

Speaker 8 That's, that's always the thing with fascists.

Speaker 1 No, there's no need for consistency. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's the thing is like, first of all, the conflation that, like, the entire movement made such a statement, or you know, I mean, obviously, that in and of itself is dishonest.

Speaker 1 Uh, and and like you said, it's not that they care about consistency and they don't have to maintain an honest uh approach to this, they're just using these isolated incidents of particular, you know, particular students or particular groups to

Speaker 1 shut down any speech around it. And I was featured in this like Vox video, and it was just like an explainer.

Speaker 1 And I received some harassment and like accusations that because I was providing context in a Vox video, which is what I was asked to do based on my expertise, that I was making excuses for

Speaker 1 what had happened on October 7th. And I was like, is the red line now just even discussing anything

Speaker 1 with any kind of expertise or information? Like

Speaker 1 It's mind-boggling.

Speaker 8 I mean, I guess I think that is what they want to make the red line.

Speaker 8 What you went through there, too, makes me so angry when I read shit.

Speaker 8 Like, and this is not on Gillibrand, but Kristen Gillibrand was on someone's podcast recently talking about why some of her Republican colleagues who had expressed opposition to some of Trump's picks ultimately voted for them.

Speaker 8 And she's like, they're scared of getting murdered. And like, isn't everyone who says anything? And like, you got death threats for a Vox video.

Speaker 8 Like, why are these Congress people who have so many more resources to protect themselves, why do they get to be scared?

Speaker 1 Oh, well, that's, that's, yeah, Congress and its, and its inability to do anything. Like, that's, that's a whole nother level of demoralization.

Speaker 8 Yeah. Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we hit on during this conversation before we sort of close things out?

Speaker 1 I'm not sure if maybe this is too in the weeds, but I think there's been a lot discussed around Trump and the statements around Gaza and his and his supposed plans for Gaza.

Speaker 1 And some analysts have claimed that this has to do with like like taking an extreme position so that then Arab-Israeli normalization deals could make the claim that like we talked him down from this brink and like Saudi is going to make peace with Israel and claim that we convinced Trump not to do this kind of thing.

Speaker 1 And so that's been something I've read in some analysis. And I don't think it's actually correct.

Speaker 1 I don't think that Trump is making these kinds of statements or possibly these kinds of plans just as as kind of like, I don't know, multi-level chess with Saudi Arabia to get them to sign a peace deal with Israel.

Speaker 1 And the conditions in the region, I think, have really shifted.

Speaker 1 And I don't think Saudi Arabia, as I mentioned at the beginning, because they put out statements to this effect, I don't think they're at all interested in this kind of move at this point.

Speaker 1 So I just...

Speaker 1 Maybe I would only add that Trump is not playing this long game that we think he is. Maybe we can take him at his word.

Speaker 8 Yeah, no, I know, because like Biden was playing a long game a dumb long game but a long game trying to brokers a deal with like saudi arabia and israel that i mean again a i think deranged if if there's clear evidence that the fact that he was not compass mentis it's that right but it was a long game and i i don't think that trump is i don't think trump cares about that Yeah, and the region has changed so much.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, for whether we like it or not, like Iran is not the threat it used to be.
Iran has closer ties with Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 1 Saudi Arabia, I mean, has a huge influence on the new Syrian government. Like, they don't need this.
They don't need this.

Speaker 1 And, like, this is not this kind of long game, multi-level chess, you know, mastermind over here that Trump is doing. So, yeah, I just wanted to add that.

Speaker 8 People are just doing shit and trying to grab onto whatever they can, right?

Speaker 1 And like, let's see what sticks, essentially.

Speaker 8 Exactly. I mean, and that is so much of, that is the entirety.
of the current plan of the new regime in the United States is throw everything you can out there and see what sticks. You know? Yeah.

Speaker 8 They're doing that in Gaza just like they're doing it everywhere else. Well, Donna, thank you so much.
Do you want to plug anything at the end of this? Your own stuff or something else?

Speaker 1 Check out, I guess, the Fire of These Times podcast. I sometimes do episode for them.

Speaker 8 Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 And if you're looking for organizations to help support Gazans right now, Heal Palestine or Anera, A-N-E-R-A, are both doing really crucial work.

Speaker 8 Excellent, excellent. Well, check that out.
Definitely check out the Fire These Times, and that's a great place to send some aid. Donna, thank you so much for being on the show again.

Speaker 8 And yeah, I hope you, I don't know,

Speaker 8 I hope,

Speaker 8 I hope.

Speaker 8 I hope. That's what I said.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, thanks, Robin.

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Speaker 2 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 4 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 5 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 7 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 9 We got clear facts.

Speaker 11 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 13 NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts.
Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 12 NBC News, reporting for America.

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Speaker 14 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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Speaker 8 Welcome to the Birds and the Bees, a podcast where James Stout makes animal noises. And also, we talk about what's going on in the White House this week.

Speaker 28 That's right. This is It Could Happen Here.
Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world, and what this means for you.

Speaker 28 That is Robert talking previously. James Stout is also here.
I'm Garrison Davis. I'm also joined by Mia Wong.
This episode, we're covering the week of February 6th to February 12th.

Speaker 28 Currently, me and Mia are inside New Orleans, Louisiana, and I am proud to report that fascism has been defeated. The Philadelphia Eagles have beat the KK Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl.

Speaker 28 Drake has been executed live on stage.

Speaker 8 It's a great week.

Speaker 8 That would have been kinder than what actually happened to Drake.

Speaker 8 Look,

Speaker 8 as someone in my blue sky mentioned says, capitalism currently, the rule of capitalism seems inescapable, but the divine rule of the Chiefs once seemed undefeatable too, and they were fucking humiliated.

Speaker 8 Oh, my God. They lost so bad.

Speaker 8 I can't even say that they were beaten up and down the field because they didn't even fucking get down the field. Obliterated.

Speaker 28 Generational beatdown and yeah when i arrived here in new orleans um on monday this is the monday after the super bowl so a complete nightmare but there was just an ocean of an ocean of out and proud eagles fans and the funniest thing i saw is when i was waiting for mia to fly in there was this like half a full clothing rack of leftover chiefs merch

Speaker 8 and no one bought and all of the eagles merch were gone i will see that chiefs merch again somewhere in like a resource poor setting in a book three years from now. Yes.
Yes.

Speaker 8 That's going to be the uniform of a future civil war.

Speaker 8 Kansas City Chiefs merch. I love it when I see that chief.
Literally, literally.

Speaker 28 Taylor Swift-themed Kansas City Chiefs merch.

Speaker 8 Oh, yeah. Huge L for capitalism.
So funny. Oh, man.

Speaker 8 Well. I guess, yeah, the big losers this week, Drake and unfortunately, the nation of Ukraine and most of the rest of Western Europe.

Speaker 8 I guess we'll start with the big news today, which is that Trump just had a really great call with Vladimir Putin. Went super well.
They're going to be meeting maybe in Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 8 There's been some floating of the fact that they might meet at the White House, which I don't think it ends well for Putin if he visits the United States.

Speaker 8 I don't think it ends well for anybody if he visits the United States. This country is too heavily armed and crazy right now.

Speaker 8 But they're doing this because Putin and Trump have evidently reached some sort of agreement about the end of the war in Ukraine. Zelensky was not really consulted on this.

Speaker 8 He's made a couple of statements like, yep, we're hoping that this is what pushes everything towards peace.

Speaker 8 But it's very clear that what's happening is Ukraine is going to be made to give up a decent chunk of their territory. Now, they do have Russian territory still to bargain with somewhat.

Speaker 8 So it hopefully will not be a situation where Putin gets his... entirely his own way, but that is kind of the what's happening.

Speaker 8 And the sea change that will accompany this is that new Secretary of Defense and alcoholic Pete Hegseth made a statement at a meeting in Brussels that the United States will no longer be the guarantor of peace in Europe.

Speaker 8 Specifically, he stated that we're not going to tolerate an imbalanced relationship, which encourages dependency.

Speaker 8 But this was an announcement that the post-war sort of status quo is no longer something that we can rely on going forward. And that is a really significant admission from the SECDAF.

Speaker 8 Yeah, Yeah, it's sick. It's uh, it's really cool, uh, and it's gonna be great.
Uh, it's gonna be great if you're in the German arms industry, it's gonna be a banger year for you.

Speaker 8 You can making some, I think we could all agree the future is bright for German weaponry. Yeah, once again, Germany will rise to its former glory.

Speaker 8 Huzzah, yeah, you say that as kind of a joke, but like genuinely, the fact that we are doing a bunch of stuff that is leading to the full rearmament of the German army at the moment when the German fascist parties are like about to take power.

Speaker 8 When AFDE is getting into power. Yeah, it's great.
And the Luftwaffe hasn't even bothered to change its logo since the last time. So that's cool.

Speaker 8 Well, and what you bring up there, Mia, is probably worth discussing in concert with all of this, which is that AFD AFDE, the alternative for Deutschland, which is the new Nazi party in Germany, is not the majoritarian party, but is taking enough seats that it is going to be included in the next governing coalition, which is something that has not happened in the post-World War II era.

Speaker 8 In the immediate aftermath of World War II, every Western European nation basically came to a tacit agreement, referred to as the Cordon Sanitaire, which is when a right-wing party starts to gain power, you do not coalition with them under any circumstances.

Speaker 8 Germany is actually like the last of the European countries to give up this idea. But the fact that the Cordon Sanitaire has fallen in Germany is real bad news.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and the ADF, like, it's worth mentioning, right? Like the ADF is so right-wing and so Nazi that like the

Speaker 8 Italian fascists who are in power right now will not work with them. Like, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 A bunch of stuff leaked a little while ago about these people at meetings openly talking about deporting every single Jew and every single immigrant from the country.

Speaker 8 Like these people are, you know, I mean, they're just Nazis. And yeah, so now we're fucking handing them the fucking justification to fucking rebuild their entire arms industry so yep

Speaker 8 great stuff it is dark i mean and again when we say the italian fascists these this is literally mussolini's party as in his granddaughter it's a member yeah yeah so yeah that's bad i think that's probably most of what we can say about what's going on in europe and with ukraine right now but it's not good yeah yeah it's not good it doesn't point to to a great future this is the multipolar world that like russia has wanted for some time like like coming to uh fruition right and i didn't want to talk about so there was a time when vladimir putin some of you remember was sanctioned by the international criminal court for his war crimes in ukraine the united states however the united states has not been a signatory to the rome statute so it it wouldn't necessarily have enforced that that arrest warrant anyway But this week, Trump signed a little executive order titled, in block capitals, as we've come to expect, imposing sanctions on the international criminal court.

Speaker 8 And in doing so, he followed the example of Putin, who in 2023 put out arrest warrants for ICC prosecutors after they put out a warrant for his arrest. Trump didn't cite the Putin example.

Speaker 8 He called the ICC's actions against Israel illegitimate and baseless. That's a quote.
He specifically called the warrants against UF Gallant and Benjamin Netanyahu baseless.

Speaker 8 He then went on to claim, quote, both nations are thriving democracies with militaries that strictly adhere to the laws of war. This is a thing that is not true.

Speaker 8 His order then goes on to outline what it calls protected persons. For people who aren't familiar, a United States person

Speaker 8 is distinguished from a United States citizen. It also includes any permanent residents.
It also includes U.S. armed forces, government officials, and contractors working on behalf of U.S.

Speaker 8 armed forces.

Speaker 28 Contractors.

Speaker 8 Yeah. Yeah,

Speaker 8 the people who can do no wrong. It then goes on to include U.S.
allies, including all of NATO, and sometimes contractors working on their behalf.

Speaker 8 It says that if the International Criminal Court investigates any of these people, Trump will declare a national emergency.

Speaker 8 It also imposes material sanctions and travel bans on both ICC prosecutors and people acting on their warrants, as well as the families of those people. Interesting.
Yeah,

Speaker 8 this is an unprecedented American politics. And sometimes it gets reported like it is.
I want to

Speaker 8 throw back to what they called the Hague Invasion Act. That wasn't its real name, but that was George Bush's, like

Speaker 8 it authorized the president to use any means necessary to release United States people held by the ICC or at its request. So people started calling it the Hague Invasion Act, right?

Speaker 8 Trump did also sanction ICC prosecutors and their families in 2020 for looking into U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan.

Speaker 28 I think that happened in June of 2020.

Speaker 8 So you can be forgiven for having missed that because some stuff was happening at that time. Oh, was it?

Speaker 8 Yeah, things were going down. I'm sure the Philadelphia Eagles were beginning their rise to glory again.
That was a big thing. Kansas City Chiefs were doing some racist shit, shockingly.
Shockingly.

Speaker 8 I'm sure Taylor Swift was doing something too. But yeah, this is like...
Israel has for nearly a decade been trying to hack, smear, surveil, and threaten the court.

Speaker 8 In the show notes, I'll include a link to a Guardian article that came out last year about Israel's attacks and attempts to undermine the International Criminal Court.

Speaker 8 And just if I've been talking about something and you're like, what is the International Criminal Court? Very briefly, it's based at The Hague.

Speaker 8 So if you've heard, you know, you will stand trial at The Hague. That's what they're talking about.

Speaker 8 It has its most immediate roots in the tribunals investigated perpetrators of genocides in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. The US and Israel are not members of the court.
They never signed the Rome Statute.

Speaker 8 Russia withdrew in 2016.

Speaker 28 Curious time to withdraw.

Speaker 8 Interesting, fascinating. Yeah, they just decided that it wasn't for them

Speaker 8 and off they went to do some war crimes.

Speaker 8 Look, the ICC has been criticized probably reasonably for the vast majority of the people who have actually been prosecuted for the ICC being outside of the core neoliberal states, right?

Speaker 8 It's prosecuted a lot of people in Africa. That doesn't mean that African people can't do war crimes in Africa.
Of course, they can.

Speaker 8 But it means that they're held accountable more often than when countries in the global north do war crimes, which they can do too.

Speaker 8 Okay, so Trump, just like everything else he does, was condemned internationally for this, right?

Speaker 8 Including by several NATO allies, inso much as they really are NATO allies anymore, given everything we've just talked about.

Speaker 8 However, it's also worth noting that some of the countries, like France, who condemned Trump's sanctioning of ICC prosecutors, also allowed someone with an ICC warrant, i.e., Benjamin Detonyahu, to transit their airspace.

Speaker 8 So, like, their full commitment to the ICC perhaps can be questioned. Like, this is a problem with the ICC, right? It doesn't have an integral enforcement mechanism.
Yeah.

Speaker 28 Yeah. I mean, like, Canada previously promised, quote-unquote, promised to arrest Net Yahoo if they were ever like able to.

Speaker 28 And like, yeah, I'm very curious to see how this is going to shake down with the U.S. taking like an extremely firmer stance, at least, than we previously had.

Speaker 28 We already quote unquote, like, condemn Canada, but like I'm interested to see Trump be more interested in actually pushing this further than it has been.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I guess we'll see how it goes.

Speaker 8 For people who are unfamiliar, I do want to really quickly mention that like Palestine is a signatory and therefore war crimes that happen within Palestine are covered by the court, even if states such as Israel are not signatories, right?

Speaker 8 And therefore they're still under the court's jurisdiction. So that's how in this case this is happening.
Yep. It could also make the ICC's life very difficult in terms of using technology, right?

Speaker 8 The tech back end of everything the ICC does. Trying to remove that from any United States involvement would be very hard.

Speaker 28 Well, let's go on a quick ad break and return to talk about, I don't know, the Treasury or something.

Speaker 8 Yeah, let's talk about the Treasury. All right.

Speaker 8 Cool.

Speaker 28 All right, we are back.

Speaker 28 But before we talk about the Treasury, I first want to do some breaking news. Well, kind of breaking.
So when I was flying to New Orleans, I was able to fly past the brand new Gulf of America.

Speaker 28 It was a life-changing experience. It really warmed my heart.

Speaker 28 And then luckily, a few days ago, Georgia Representative Buddy Carter announced legislation to empower Trump to enter into negotiations to quote unquote purchase or otherwise acquire Greenland and importantly to rename it Red, White, and Blue Land.

Speaker 8 God.

Speaker 28 Let's get some quick reactions from the panel.

Speaker 8 Sorry, as a person born born in Europe, the idea of Buddy Carter authorizing the formation of Red, White, and Blue Land is simply just like the fact that this is not a parody is just fucking too much for me.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah, I mean, well, what it is, is purposefully ridiculous.

Speaker 8 It's a flex. It's a statement of the power that they have over their own party and the country.

Speaker 8 It is purposefully absurd, and everyone is going to go along with it because the chief, the king, supports it, right? Like, that's the point, in my opinion.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it's the Emperor's new clothes of invading places. Like, it doesn't matter.
We can be as silly as we want. Genuinely interested in hearing from people in Greenland.
Yes.

Speaker 28 Honestly, I'm kind of surprised because I would assume, and maybe, maybe this is still in the works, if Elon Musk can find a way to call this thing XLEND is really my concern.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 8 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
But no, I'm really interested in hearing from Greenlanders genuinely. You can contact us at coolzone tips at proton.me, which is an encrypted email address

Speaker 8 that you can send emails to yeah all right let's let's let's talk about uh trump potentially crashing the entire world economy uh he's taking more shots to just literally blow this all up yeah okay so let's talk about the treasuries thing and him potentially talking about not paying out our treasury bonds okay so let me read some quotes from reuters so this is trump we're even looking at treasuries trump said there could be a problem you've been reading about that with treasuries and that could be an interesting problem now treasuries again, are of course U.S.

Speaker 8 treasury bonds. We will get to what those are in a second, but I need to read the rest of this.
Quote, it could be that a lot of those things don't count.

Speaker 8 In other words, that some of the stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent. Therefore, maybe we have less debt than we thought.

Speaker 8 Now,

Speaker 28 that's a very scary thing to say.

Speaker 8 Yeah, treasury bills are the primary underpinning of like economic stability in this country.

Speaker 8 T-bills are what large corporate institutions, when they have a lot of cash, what like very wealthy people, it's where you park your money.

Speaker 8 And it's where foreign governments park a lot of their money.

Speaker 8 And it's how our government gets a lot of its money because it's a good, reliable investment. So saying maybe we're going to declare some of these T-bill investments bullshit is very dangerous.

Speaker 8 Yeah, for the global economy. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 8 And I want to read this next line because one of the things that's happening here, right, is that people just simply, and this has been a real problem for this entire administration, is people simply do not believe that he means to do the thing he says he's going to do, right?

Speaker 8 Quote, this is from Reuters again.

Speaker 8 It could be treasury payments, which is not linked to treasury bonds, said Prashak Bahani, investment chief for Asia at BMP Powerboss Wealth Management.

Speaker 8 I would be very surprised if they ever stopped a payment of treasury bonds to a holder. It would be like shooting yourself in the foot, he said.

Speaker 8 Now, this is something where these institutional investors, like, they still have not quite wrapped their head around the fact that no, he really will do this shit because he doesn't understand at all.

Speaker 8 He thinks that American debt works the same way as like his own personal debt. And no, it doesn't.
I mean, it's worth saying some bits.

Speaker 8 So I mean, just a very, very basic shit about how national debt works, right?

Speaker 8 Like all of our money, literally every single dollar that is in circulation, every dollar that is in a bank account, that is literally government debt, right? Like that's what money is, right?

Speaker 8 And these treasury bonds are, as we were talking about earlier, right? This is like the investment asset for literally the entire world. There's trillions of dollars of these.

Speaker 8 Actually, Japan is the largest holder of treasury bonds.

Speaker 8 China's sort of been selling some of theirs, but they have a lot of them. Yeah, probably good to be doing that.
Yeah.

Speaker 8 And it's also, you know, like the fact that he's saying he's not going to pay these.

Speaker 8 Yeah, like this this can start a massive crisis in which I've been talking for a bit about, you know, every day we sort of get closer to credit rating agencies like downgrading the quality of U.S.

Speaker 8 debt, which is a real problem for U.S. trying to like get money from people.

Speaker 8 And, you know, even if you listen to what the sort of bond analyst is saying, right, he's like, well, it's fine. They'll just stop paying like U.S.
debt to other things, which is like...

Speaker 8 unbelievably unhinged would also in and of itself like like destroying the full faith and credit of the united states would absolutely just fucking annihilate the world economy.

Speaker 8 And it's also another example of Trump not understanding how the empire that he's inherited works because like one of the one of the ways the U.S.

Speaker 8 funds its government is by getting its client states to buy like trillions of dollars of assets. Like that's partially why if you look at who buys U.S.
assets, like it's China and U.S.

Speaker 8 tributary states, like Japan, for example, which is just purely an American military protectorate.

Speaker 8 It's a sort of incredible system for the U.S., right? You get a bunch of people and

Speaker 8 you just sort of perpetually keep borrowing money from them.

Speaker 8 And it's this thing where they don't understand who actually holds the power in the relationship, which is that the US having all this debt is the one with the power and is the one that's getting everyone else's money for this sort of secure asset.

Speaker 8 So, you know, who knows what's going to happen with this? If this actually starts happening, like, yeah, this is world-rending economic crisis levels of stuff. Well, we'll see if he moves on it.

Speaker 8 He may simply forget about it, or we're going to wake up one day and like the US's credit's going to be downgraded to like junk bond status and everything's going to be chaos.

Speaker 8 So speaking of Trump trying to sort of like take shots at pillars of the global economy, starting in March, he's trying to implement a 25% tariff on all imported steel and aluminum.

Speaker 8 Most of that's actually from Canada and Mexico. I think in their minds is the thing about Chinese steel, but

Speaker 8 it's mostly from Canada and Mexico.

Speaker 8 This is also a fucking shit show because the U.S.

Speaker 8 manufacturing capacity that we still have, and we still actually do have a decent amount of like a very high-tech manufacturing capacity, right, relies on this stuff.

Speaker 8 And this is going to make it more expensive. It's bad.
It will do nothing to deal with the fact that the U.S.

Speaker 8 doesn't produce steel anymore, which is the product of that one day I'll do my structural Chinese steel over capacity episode.

Speaker 8 But, you know, it's the product of like half a century of of the global manufacturing economy, you know, becoming zero-sum.

Speaker 8 And there simply not being a large enough consumer market for all of industrial goods which means the production becomes increasingly

Speaker 8 you know it becomes impossible to expand production in one place without you know getting rid of production another place and trump thinks you can solve those with tariffs you can't mostly it's just another like throw things at the economy shit now you know trump is sort of throwing bombs at the economic system one of the largest ones that he's thrown

Speaker 8 is

Speaker 8 he just straight up stole

Speaker 8 80 million dollars in fema funding that they had already paid out like just straight up stole it from like New York, a New York City bank account.

Speaker 8 They're like, so we've been paid to the government in New York, right? This happened earlier today, right? This is

Speaker 8 breaking news, breaking news on Wednesday. This is coming out Friday.
This episode is being recorded on Wednesday.

Speaker 8 Everything that you hear, if shit has happened in the last few days, that's from the future. We didn't know.

Speaker 8 But yeah, yeah, he literally, like, they have taken $80 million just from this bank account. They just stole it.
The U.S. federal government is just straight up robbing banks.

Speaker 8 It's okay that came out today and said that, don't worry, your bank accounts are still safe, everybody.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 28 And this is like appropriated funds like for FEMA being safely secured in banks that have like literally been stolen.

Speaker 8 Funds that were approved by Congress for this specific purpose, right? Yeah. And what's actually going to happen with this, right? Because you would expect even like a normal shitty.

Speaker 8 mayor of New York to like go sicka mode. However,

Speaker 8 however, comma, here's from Yahoo News. Quote, Eric Adams has said he will not publicly criticize Trump or his administration.
Instead, he'll take his concerns to Trump in private.

Speaker 8 On Monday, Adams convened a meeting with his own top officials to urge them not to speak badly about the president in public, saying if they were to do so, it could risk federal funding.

Speaker 8 Later that day, that same day, Trump's Justice Department ordered the prosecutors in Adams' criminal case to drop the charges against him, in part arguing Adams must be free of the burden of his corruption indictment to help carry out Trump's immigration agenda in the city.

Speaker 8 Great.

Speaker 28 Cool. This is the most like Quiddro quo thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 8 It is the single most corrupt thing I've seen out of U.S. politics.
Yeah. Like blatantly.
It's staggering. I mean, it would come from Trump plus Adams, right? Like, we're going to see it.

Speaker 8 That's what we're going to see. We've hit a singularity of corruption.
Yes. Yeah.
Istanbul is always the first stop. Yeah.

Speaker 8 The only way they can go further than this is that Eric Adams is going to appoint Rob Ligojevich as head of like bank robbery or something.

Speaker 28 One can dream, Mia. One can dream.

Speaker 8 There are a few other ways they can go further with this. I'm afraid to inform you, Mia, but we'll be hoping those don't happen.
Well, on the corruption index, on the corruption index. Okay.

Speaker 28 Speaking of corruption, let's pivot to ads.

Speaker 28 All right, we are back and I'm going to close by talking about the war on woke, my new favorite news beat that I'm forced to pay attention to every week.

Speaker 28 There was a trans sports ban that Trump did an executive order about using a whole bunch of children as a prop, very clearly trying to

Speaker 28 steal the charisma from whatever that governor who lost the election did with his free school lunch there.

Speaker 28 Anyway, instead, now you just hurt other children in the school by not making them be allowed to play sports. So that happened.

Speaker 28 And then a few other things have happened the past few weeks weeks that I'm kind of just like catching up on because I've been really focused on like reporting on like Musk specifically.

Speaker 28 And there's been a lot of other stuff the past few weeks. So I'm going to kind of get to that now.

Speaker 28 The State Department's travel website changed the acronym LGBT to LGB on a webpage like warning about like how dangerous it might be to like travel to like other countries with like worse legal protections.

Speaker 28 Saying LGB travelers can face special challenges abroad. Laws and attitudes in some countries may affect safety and ease of travel.
Many countries do not recognize same-sex marriage.

Speaker 28 Many countries don't recognize the X gender marker in passports and do not have IT systems at ports of entry that can accept sex markers other than female and male.

Speaker 8 So they've only changed the title parts.

Speaker 8 They haven't even bothered to edit the text.

Speaker 28 No, because...

Speaker 28 Because they also have another info page where they have just like control F'd LGBT to LGB as well so this is this is like one of like many changes we're seeing across a whole bunch of uh federal websites in relation to trump's order to like remove wokeness and gender ideology previously the cdc removed like hiv and trans related like health info pages from their website and as of yesterday february 11th the web pages for the fda health and human services and the cdc uh were allegedly brought back online uh restoring their january 30th status.

Speaker 28 They did this like right before a court mandated deadline to restore these pages.

Speaker 28 I can now go back onto the CDC's HIV page. Verge first reported on this and they said that they've been unable to verify that all of the pages have been restored exactly to how they were before.

Speaker 28 This is something that we're still working on because this literally happened like you know yesterday.

Speaker 28 This is like a small

Speaker 28 part of

Speaker 28 their current war on wokeness.

Speaker 28 Another aspect of this is there's been a whole bunch of orders from federal agencies to ban specific woke keywords across their databases, their websites, training information, including from agencies like NOAA, so just like the weather and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Speaker 28 They released a memo banning specific words across the agency, including words like ability, acceptance, access, affirmation, aggression, allyship, androgyne,

Speaker 28 asexual, belonging, bias, binary, bisexual, black, culture, DEI, discrimination, diversity, empathy, empowerment, equity, ethnicity, fairness, gay, gender, gender dysphoria, handicap, homosexual, LGBTQ, intersex, pansexual, queer, transgender, transvestite, as well as words like impartial, inclusion, indigenous, intersectionality, justice.

Speaker 8 The word white has been banned.

Speaker 28 Safe space, social justice, underserved communities, race, privilege, power dynamics, Native American, multiculturalism.

Speaker 28 So just all of these have like, again, this is like the party of free speech has banned all of these words. And

Speaker 28 it's not just NOAA. Also, the National Science Foundation.

Speaker 28 has has released memos saying that they cannot have these words included in their documents because it could cause them to lose grant funding.

Speaker 8 Well, it's the end for race science then. They can't do race science anymore.

Speaker 28 There's a lot of similar words flagged in the National Science Foundation list of banned words like activism, activists, advocacy, barrier, bias,

Speaker 28 black, Latinx, community,

Speaker 28 diversity, equity, cultural differences, cultural heritage, culturally responsive, diverse, you know, diverse community, diverse groups, diversified, diversifying, all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 28 Ethnicity, equality, inclusion,

Speaker 28 inequality, LGBT, institutional, marginalized, trauma, underappreciated,

Speaker 28 stereotypes, systemic, underrepresentation, undervalued, victim.

Speaker 8 I love that you can no longer do scientific papers about systemic infections. Yeah,

Speaker 8 yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, no, there's not anything that has a barrier.

Speaker 28 Yeah, exactly. There's so many words that are just like used in like how like studies function that they cannot use because the word is too woke and then they're going to lose their funding.

Speaker 28 Like, you can't like, you can't like look at like things being equal. You can't look at any kind of like scientific bias.
Like you can't like

Speaker 28 this very basic stuff. It may just result in like the TikTokification of this, like trying to spell these words with like a different letter.

Speaker 8 Talking about cute little boots or whatever it is.

Speaker 28 And like I'm laughing because it's all like absurd and that's kind of like kind of like a coping mechanism, but like this is all like very bad.

Speaker 8 Well, but like like, hold on, there's something else.

Speaker 8 There's something else we need to talk about too, which is like, like, you are required by law, as as part of your grant proposal, like, have things that talk about, like, how this is going to affect different communities, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 8 It's a legal requirement for you to put that in your thing. So, like, if you were to, like, strictly enforce this, this kills every fucking grant.

Speaker 8 And this is one of these things where it's like, like, you're literally just running straight into the federal law tells you you must do this thing and the Trump administration says these words are banned.

Speaker 8 So, like, who knows?

Speaker 28 It's a really weird situation.

Speaker 8 Yeah, you can't do IRB right now. Like, most grants will go through an institutional review board that will determine like if there are human subjects,

Speaker 8 the

Speaker 8 ethical boundaries and like what you're doing is okay. But I can't see it being possible to do an IRB and not say these words.
Yeah.

Speaker 28 No, and like we have to do scientific studies on like how various disabilities affect people's lives. Like very basic stuff like this, all of these types of things.
It's really bad.

Speaker 28 And these things like are going into effect. I know like this is this stuff is still happening.
Columnist Dr.

Speaker 28 Lucky Tran reported, quote, the CDC has instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal.

Speaker 28 The move aims to ensure that, quote, unquote, no forbidden terms appear in the work. Banned terms must be scrubbed.

Speaker 8 Great.

Speaker 28 It's all really bad.

Speaker 8 Yep.

Speaker 28 And we're seeing this, this sort of like lists being formed increasingly, including this DEI watch list put together by a conservative oppositional research group called the American Accountability Foundation,

Speaker 28 who released a DEI watch list, which publishes the names, photos, occupation, and personal information of mostly black employees who work under the Department of Health and Human Services.

Speaker 28 When the website was first discovered, the employee profiles were labeled under targets. This has since been changed to dossiers.

Speaker 28 Like very, very frightening, like very bad stuff, like very obvious intimidation.

Speaker 28 For each target, the website lists a collection of alleged DEI offenses, which includes donations to Democrats, social media posts, having pronouns in their bio, or previous work on since deleted, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Speaker 28 Columnist Jamal Bowie says, quote, they are mostly targeting black employees. So this is quite literally just a repeat of Ridgerow Wilson's segregationist purge of the federal government.

Speaker 28 And like, yes, like all of this, all of this like push against quote-unquote DEI is like very clearly just like white supremacists segregation in action.

Speaker 28 Like this is the whole point is that if any employee is a person of color, that means that they, that they must be unqualified because they were hired only due to DEI.

Speaker 28 And to avoid doing that, you could only hire white people. And Trump's transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, sent out a memo directing staff on where to direct like grant funds.

Speaker 28 And he said, quote, give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average, unquote, which is a very clear dog whistle to just like only hire like white Christians, hire Christians with big families, you know, parenthesis, like white people.

Speaker 28 This is like very, very obviously what they're doing.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and they're, I mean, this, this is extending to the military now under Heg Seth.

Speaker 8 West Point has just announced effectively the banning of a number of clubs, including the Society of Black Engineers, which is like three quarters of a century old, something like that.

Speaker 8 Also, ending programs that are focused on like recruiting into the military black soldiers, but have like pivoted to recruiting from NRA gatherings, even though there's internal agreement that this brings in a lower quality type of

Speaker 8 recruiting. I've seen some NRA members.
Yeah, yeah, I've seen a few NRA members, right? And I, yeah, it's just one of these things.

Speaker 8 Like there's a very good book that I think people need to read if you want to know. kind of the operational impact this is going to have, both on the U.S.

Speaker 8 military and probably to an extent law enforcement. We look at agencies like the FBI.

Speaker 8 There's a book called The Dictator's Army that that heavily focuses on how changes like this impact operational efficiency.

Speaker 8 And the gist of it is that the goal and clearly what Hegseth's job is, is to make the military into something that can't pose opposition to the new regime, right?

Speaker 8 That's the goal here, because there's a very realistic understanding that the military was one of the things that stopped him from maintaining power in 2020, right?

Speaker 8 Both because the military was not willing to be used to crack down directly on protests and because General Milley acted as a barrier to Trump's attempt to do a coup the last time, right?

Speaker 8 So you have an understanding, which is very common when regimes like this take over in democratic societies.

Speaker 8 In the early days of the Third Reich, the military was the primary concern Hitler had because they were not. Nazis, right? They were conservative, but they were not in the tank for the Nazi Party.

Speaker 8 And there was a lot that he wanted to do that the military establishment at the time the Third Reich came to power wouldn't let him do.

Speaker 28 And was so one that was one of the first things and this this took several years but that was one of the first goals of the nazi regime in power was reforming the military as much as possible in their own image and like so much of like what heggs is doing here specifically with like the west point club banning is like like these things are not like dei these things are like very old these are like pretty it's like standard standard things that have been like roped into like what it means to like be in america and we're now just seeing this like crusade against dei being used to just reverse affirmative action and specifically select for white Christian applicants.

Speaker 28 And like, that's the entirety of this point here.

Speaker 28 Like, they're, they're using DEI as like a, like, as this like magical wand to frame things that are like pretty standard and like accepted parts of like how you do like hiring practices, how you don't do discrimination to just specifically only, only like uplift white Christians.

Speaker 28 And that's part of this like very basic like Christian nationalist project that people like Heritage have been trying to do for a long time.

Speaker 8 I think it's also worth noting too that like the other thing that this mirrors, you know, and like specifically in the way that this targets queer people is the lavender scare, which is a thing from like the sort of late 40s through the 60s where the U.S.

Speaker 8 as part of this like giant anti-communist purge it was on, basically went through and found every gay government official and fucking ran them out.

Speaker 8 That's like another aspect of this whole thing, right?

Speaker 8 Like the way these people understand the world in order to sort of like purify their like white state right like you have to get rid of the non-white people and you have to get rid of the queers and you know and people especially people who are fucking both and so this is a sort of transformational project of

Speaker 8 changing this this sort of like just changing the composition of what the us is into

Speaker 8 like and how how its state functions and how they can to what like what level of violence they can bring about on people

Speaker 28 And they've roped these things together so closely now, like the anti-trans like school executive order. Only the first half of that executive order was actually about the gender ideology stuff.

Speaker 28 The second half was aimed at curbing what they called discriminatory equity ideology,

Speaker 8 D-E-I.

Speaker 28 Basically, it was proposing a program for quote-unquote patriotic education across the country. Basically, trying to rewrite history to make like the United States like this noble historical project.

Speaker 28 It's like stuff that they've tried to do before with

Speaker 28 with that like 1776 project that the New York Times reported on.

Speaker 28 Part of Trump's order called for quote an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America's founding and foundational principles.

Speaker 28 A clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout history. The concept that commitment to America's aspirations is beneficial and justified.

Speaker 28 The concept that celebration of America's greatness and history is proper.

Speaker 28 And then the order goes on to try to ban the concept of white guilt, saying that like teachers can get in trouble if any of their students feel guilty about things that people of like that same race have done in the past.

Speaker 28 And like making sure that teachers do not teach things in a way that could possibly make a student feel quote-unquote guilt. Yeah.

Speaker 8 They use the word children, actually, not students, which like is fundamentally something we don't do in education.

Speaker 8 We refer to our students as students because we respect them as people.

Speaker 8 We don't think of them as like lesser than, especially when we're getting to the points where we're discussing things like race and equity. Like these are high school students, right? Maybe

Speaker 8 we certainly do discuss these things in university. And like it fundamentally shows a complete lack of understanding of how education works to call them children.

Speaker 8 Yeah, and I think it gets to what this is actually about. And this is something that I would argue both Trump administrations were about, right?

Speaker 8 If you look at when Trump like comes down the fucking elevator for the first time.

Speaker 8 So I think people may remember like after Ferguson in 2015, there was Baltimore, where there was, you know, huge riots, massive confrontations with the police, like massive anti-racist actions.

Speaker 8 And that's the, that's like the thing that really, truly tipped like a bunch of the Republican Party even further right from where they'd been with the Tea Party into, into this, into sort of Trumpism.

Speaker 8 It was, you know, it was a reaction to that. And then this entire campaign, right? Like all of the stuff that he's talking about here, you know, this is about 2020, right? This is about reversing.

Speaker 8 the gains that have been, you know, and like obviously there were incomplete gains. One of the things that did happen was that a bunch of teachers were trying to change the way the U.S.

Speaker 8 history is taught to reflect that this country was like, again, a settler colonial empire built by slave labor and, you know,

Speaker 8 that expanded its territory through genocide, which is just, this is just objectively true about how the U.S. started.

Speaker 8 But the thing is, like, that's not good for, you know, these people's projects, right? Like saying that out loud. is a fucking issue for them.

Speaker 8 And so, you know, their attempt to roll back everything that was gained from sort of the black uprisings is culminating all of this shit with like the purge of black workers for the federal government with all of these things ordering you to like that's why they're talking about all of these weird all they keep banning all of these weird like terms that don't make any sense like we're talking about like empathy right it's like okay so why the fuck are they talking about banning empathy yeah because specifically these things come from the purges they've been trying to do in the education system where they're there they have a bunch of very specific grievances about like kinds of education stuff that teachers that teachers were implementing like particularly in sort of like middle and high schools well i'm going to close here with two pieces of breaking news one One, like earlier today, we learned that the NIH has finally,

Speaker 28 has finally acknowledged that the grant funding freeze is illegal.

Speaker 28 And this is probably like due to pressure from like news coverage about all of the temporary restraining order violations through the continued freezing of funds.

Speaker 28 And now the NIH is saying, because of these orders, we will resume funding. The first TRO was like two weeks ago on February 1st.
So it's not like they just learned about this.

Speaker 28 It's that they have in some ways like perhaps caved to pressure. Again, like these executive orders do not enforce themselves.
These are enforced by people at agencies. These things

Speaker 28 do not become automatically enforced. So this is this is like one step now.
You can go to a popular.info who has been breaking the news on this specifically. And then some breaking news

Speaker 28 that I have here on drop site. Quote unquote, armored Tesla forecast estimated to win $400 million of State Department contract funds.

Speaker 28 What?

Speaker 28 So this could go one of two ways.

Speaker 28 This could either go a really funny way. Yeah, it's going to sad, or it could go a really sad way.

Speaker 8 Yeah, I do, I do like the idea of a lot of Trump appointees being in Teslas that are armored when the batteries catch and maybe the jaws of life can't cut through those, you know? Yep.

Speaker 8 Yep. Yeah.
It was, this is very funny because Trump went off on a, on a tangent about electric tanks. Horrible idea.
Campaign trail a couple of times. Horrible idea.
Yeah.

Speaker 8 Well, he's had a, he's had a come to Jesus moment and he has changed his mind and he wants a more sustainable

Speaker 8 beast, as they call it. What everyone always says the problem with tanks is, is that they don't explode enough when hit by munitions.
Or by themselves when not hit by munitions. Or by themselves.

Speaker 8 Just because batteries do that sometimes. Yes.

Speaker 8 You never know what you're going to get. I'm excited.
This is going to make everything a lot safer for our

Speaker 8 men and women in greenland i'm guessing

Speaker 8 yeah yeah batteries batteries thrive in the cold red white and blue

Speaker 8 i yeah i do love the new m1a whatever seven abrams that gets four miles on a charge

Speaker 8 and then again detonates wait six months to use a solar panel to field reach on a chamber place where it doesn't get light for six months yeah magnificent upwards of 10 miles a year yes yep all right well that does it for us today on uh it could happen Here.

Speaker 28 James, thanks. Did you want to talk about the tip line again? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 So everybody, we have an email where you can reach out to us if you have things that you think we should be reporting on. It is a proton mail.
That doesn't mean that it's super secure.

Speaker 8 It simply means it's end-to-end encrypted if you send from a proton address. The email address is coolzone tips at proton.me.me.

Speaker 8 You can send story ideas, things that you think we should be reporting on, things that you've seen that you think you'd like to draw to our attention to that email address.

Speaker 8 We will try our best to get through all of those. We've been getting a lot of tips.
Please don't take it personally. We don't get back to you, but we do appreciate you all reaching out.

Speaker 8 We reported the news.

Speaker 8 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 45 It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 45 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 45 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 14 Hey guys, it's Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 18 So as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

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Speaker 27 Let's take a minute to unpack the myths behind GLP-1 drugs. Myth number one, GLP-1 is a long-term solution for weight loss.

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False.

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Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.