It Could Happen Here Weekly 169

Wasn't that delicious?

So good.

Your bill, ladies?

I got it.

No, I got it.

Seriously, I insist.

I insisted first.

Oh, don't be silly.

You don't be silly.

People with the Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited

2% cash back on purchases.

Okay, rock, paper, scissors for it.

Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

No!

The Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card. Visit wellsfargo.com slash activecash.
Terms apply. Oh, hi.
This is Chelsea Handler from the Dear Chelsea podcast. This episode is brought to you by Opill, the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the U.S.
I love shedding light on what's important for women's health care. And one thing that makes health care easier is making birth control more convenient to access.
Well, let me introduce Opil. Opil is a daily birth control pill that is FDA-approved, full prescription strength, and estrogen-free.
Plus, there's no prescription needed. Finally, the days of needing a prescription for birth control are over, a sentence I very much enjoy saying.
This is our moment to take control of our health and reproductive journeys because Opill is birth control in your control. Opill is available online and at most major retailers.
Use code OPILLOTC, OPILLOTC for 25% off your first month of O pill at opill.com. Amazon one medical presents painful thoughts.
Do they ever actually clean the ball pit at these kids play gyms? Or is my kid just swimming in a vat of bacteria, catching whatever cootie of the day is breeding in there. A cootie that'll probably take down our whole family.
Luckily, with Amazon One Medical 24-7 virtual care, you can get checked out for whatever bald-pit-itis you've contracted. Amazon One Medical.
Healthcare just got less painful. Get this.
Adults with financial literacy skills have 82% more wealth than those who don't. From swimming lessons to piano classes, us parents invest in so many things to enrich our kids' lives.
But are we in Thank you. Start prioritizing their financial education and future today with a risk-free trial at greenlight.com slash iHeart.
Greenlight.com slash iHeart. Call Zone Media.
Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.
So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Welcome to It Could Happen 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.
Glad to hear about whatever's going to shoot today. Yeah, so before we start talking about imperialism, we're starting every episode with this until you people stop, until you stop doing this.
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 they did it in 2018 during the occupy ice protest the people did it in 2020 people did it last year during the during the palestine encampments 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, we would also include a tunnel.
Yes, don't do the tunnel either. Yeah, if there's no side exits, just don't.
Yes. Here's the thing.
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.
If you must do it, you need to make 1,000% sure you can hold both sides of the bridge. Yeah.
Both of them. You need to them yeah and almost certainly you can't so only you only you dear listener can prevent four thousand more people from getting kettled on bridges and i'm going to keep starting episodes talking about getting don't get kettled on bridges until this stops all right this is this is this has been me as public service announcement about bridgeettling.
Let's get into the nature of imperialism and why Trump's is different. 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.
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. And I think it's worth actually taking a second to unpack this because things are probably going to get worse.
There is a non-zero chance that we effectively start a war with Mexico in the next few months. Yeah, it's great.
It's banging. Everything's going swell.
Yeah, but I want to start with talking about the way that Trump has been using tariffs as a sort of political weapon and not as an economic tool, but very, very specifically as a political weapon 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. 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.
Now, when an economist talks about trade, they go, oh, yeah, obviously trade is when two countries exchange a thing right yep 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 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 not most but you know what a huge portion of u.s mexico trade is? It is the same company, the same company moving an auto part from one side of the border to the other side. Back and forth across the border.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Yes, back and forth.
Right. So it's a lot of different people being paid different wages to make the same thing.
Yeah. Or if someone paid lower wages can make it and then someone paid more can QC it and, and then they can send it back.
Very, very common. Yeah, and this is actually a real substantive problem with the way that everyone thinks about trade.
Because what is happening here, and this is an argument that the anti-globalization movement used to make. You know, David Graeber makes this argument a lot.
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 yeah and exploit labor at the maximum possible exploitation rate yeah 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 there there are some things we're thinking about specifically nation-state trade like trade is important because you know even even the same corporation moving goods around right that does contribute to how much foreign currency a country has right so okay there's things like balance of payments where if you run out if you're a country and you run out of american dollars suddenly you can't input like fuel anymore and your country like explodes that's a very common way that like this like happens in sri lanka for example pretty recently this is a way here for your economy to blow up but that's kind of an edge case in terms of how global trade actually operates 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 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 it's gerber okay

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 and those are the countries

the Thanks Gerber. Okay.
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. And those are the countries with the highest tariffs that Trump is attempting to apply.
Yeah. And it's worth actually understanding what this does by looking at what actually is traded between, for example, the U.S.
and Mexico. So, and the place i want to start is that one of the largest kinds of goods that is moved from from mexico to the u.s is computer equipment and nobody fucking talks about this ever yeah no one like zero fucking people talk about this i am convinced this is because of racism 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 yeah and there's also you know the the the thing the thing that we we started this episode on that's i think the thing i guess talked about the most now is transportation equipment right and this is a combination of consumer vehicles and also like heavy duty cargo trucks yeah which are unbelievably important for the maintenance of the American economy, right, of the entire global economy.
Having these trucks is a sort of vital infrastructure thing for the United States. You can move stuff around.
A lot of that comes in Mexico. And then also like a lot of it is like whole cars that are like Finnish assembly like in Mexico and they get shipped across the border, right? there's a lot of things there and and these are also like all the same international car companies that work in the u.s so it's like toyota it's like honda yeah i mean these are your american trucks often right or like yeah yeah yeah ford does this too yeah what's gm now stolorus yeah yeah like chevy gm like these as well as like.
Toyota, I think, has a big planet. 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, this is multinational capitalist companies who are moving their products across the border. Yeah.
And this gets counted as Mexico doing trade 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 from the amount of industrial production if you look at like the east asian tigers right right 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 economies they're talking like say your south koreas etc etc 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 like mexico is not yeah like a place where you you offshore your supplying your supplies to because you need to move stuff to you know fight the war in vietnam but you know 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 are the people who actually reap all of the benefits yeah to a degree like post nafta right post 94 it has created a class of people in mexico who have benefited from it but it has not lifted up the average income. It's created a greater disparity of income than at any point previous to that.
You'll hear people, I was talking to a friend about this yesterday in Tijuana, how NAFTA did, 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? But we didn't open it up to people. At the same time, we had Operation Gatekeeper, right? Like, enforced a much harsher border enforcement, 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, Graeber talks about this, it's like, yeah, free trade is about the free trade is going for yeah yeah and you know and this is another old anti-globalization thing like revert talks about this is like yeah free like free trade is about the free movement of capital and the unfree movement of people right yeah so 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 we're going to get into this more in a second, but I want to talk about

some of the other things

that are exported from Mexico.

Fruits, vegetables, alcohol

are like huge exports.

Yeah.

And then also,

and this is something

that I don't think is,

people don't understand

what's happening very well,

is there's a lot of oil

from Mexico

that's shipped to the US,

but the thing that's happening there, and this is the thing that's very weird about the oil industry is that the refinery facilities are not in the same country as the extraction facilities a lot of the time so this oil is getting shipped around because they don't have the refinery facilities to like yeah refine the specific kind of like crude oil or whatever that they're extracting so like yeah it's 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 ones but largely what's happening is that like again like it's an oil company moving stuff to to you know moving stuff around to to do refinement of it so they can sell it.

Now, there's been some other stuff happening with Mexico.

That's a kind of reaction to Trump's previous thing.

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.

This is one of my media things on this show, is that this has been happening for a while because labor prices have been rising in China.

And one of the places that these things went to is Mexico. so there's been a lot of like direct investment from china etc etc and and all of these things you know like these these kind of movements i'm talking about them because these kind of like seismic global economic shifts right of the kind that we're going to be seeing are driven by a lot of things you know i mean there's stuff like like currency valuations like local tax laws, like state and corporate planning policies, like demand surges, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But one of the single most important things is the state of class struggle in a country and what effect it has on wages or like, you know, like straight up uprisings, right? The geographer David Harvey, he gets credit for popularizing the term the spatial fix, although other people were already using it and I don't like his work much but he did he is the guy who gets credited with this he describes you know the sort of free trade regime that the persisted roughly through like now i mean it was it was it was taking shape in sort of the 80s like the 80s through like roughly now as the spatial fix for declining profitability right you know You know what else has declining profitability? Well, I don't know. The worse things get, the more people listen to our podcast.
I don't know if you could say that. We are back.
Okay, so let's talk about this of declining profitability and and the fix that capitalism sort of finds for this right you know through the 70s there's sort of spiraling unemployment and inflation and the economy is sort of going to shit and it's happening everywhere because there's sort of like structural overcapacity in manufacturing and the solution to this is a spatial right? Which is destroying some manufacturing capacity and just moving it to other places.

Yeah.

And, you know, and this is sort of

what James was talking about earlier, right?

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

with weaker labor protections

and also a weaker level of sort of, like,

workers' organization, right?

Yeah.

And then it leaves, like, the previously well-organized workers. Like, if you look at the industries and the places where my grandparents come from, like dock workers and minors, right? Those are not really jobs that are employing large numbers of people in the UK anymore.
And like, as a result, those working class towns are just destitute, you know? So that that previously thriving and well-organized working class that we had in Northern England, it has to relocate or reorganize, right? And it destroys those nexuses of working-class power that existed in Britain up until the 80s with a minor strike, right? Yeah, and this was done deliberately, right? I mean, there's always a debate in the literature about to what extent neoliberalism was planned or to what extent it was a sort of reaction to a bunch of crises. But specifically, this kind of offshoring, and the container ship's a big part of this, but this specific kind of thing, and even the transition from coal to oil was a very deliberate thing done by American and British politicians in order to sort of thing.
And even the transition from coal to oil was like, was a very deliberate thing done by,

like,

done by sort of

American and British politicians

in order to sort of

break the power

of like miners' unions.

And,

you know,

one of the major places

that this,

when obviously like

a lot of these things

go to Mexico,

the sort of first round

of these go to

like the original

like Asian tiger economies

that I was talking about.

But 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.
But, you know, one of the largest, most important ones was China. And, you know, it's important to sort of remember, I've talked about this on the show before, 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? Most people who were executed afterwards were workers. They were like, students died, but it was mostly workers who were killed.
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 like that's that's how fucked it is and the last time that that Chinese trade unions took a political stand was in favor of the Tiananmen protests and then the army shows up and just like slaughters their base. And what this does is it breaks the old Chinese working class, right? It breaks the alliance with the students that they'd had.
That was, you know, and that was a durable political force dating back to like the 1920s, right? And it breaks this extremely militant, well-organized Chinese urban working class and replaces them with a more exploitable and less organized migrant working class. And that is the class that to this day, right now, is the engine of global capital.
Those 300 million migrant workers. And they can be in different parts of the world, right? 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 yeah but yeah china's migrant worker population is like almost the size of the u.s it's like it's like the fourth largest country in the world just by like itself it's yeah that's mad yeah i was just thinking of today like the um the scam compounds which exist on the border between uh miyanmar and thailand like they actually thailand just cut power off to them today.
I mean, I can see the strategy there, but it's just going to end up hurting the people who are in those compounds more. Of course it is.
Of course, those people who are in those compounds used to be able to escape and go to places where they could like get back to their lives, right? Like be re-taken 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 these people these migrant workers who come from all over the world hoping for a chance at the things that capitalism had promised them are the people who have to be exploited so that people in wealthy countries can have their treats.
Yeah and those workers are the basis of modern global capitalism right like you know like those chinese workers for example like it is it is illegal for them to form an independent union if you try to form an independent union you will go to prison so fast that like there'll be dust clouds like yeah like wily coyote will take you to prison yeah like even trying to get your to like do something, like trying to have your own independent people elected to that union, like can and will get you arrested. And even like sort of Chinese labor oppression is pretty intense, but it's like, you know, we're also talking about countries like Colombia.
It's like, well, yeah, okay, so what happens to union organizers in Colombia? It's like they get being shot by paramilitaries with machine guns, right? And that's what the sort of spatial fix spatial fix was right was moving jobs to places where the the ruling classes sort of control was more firm and their ability to use violence was higher yeah 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 we've literally been talking about like japanese corporations right doing like the same shit right 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 like that that's what free trade is yeah and it's also you know secondarily right it is a debt system it on forcing countries to, like, pay back loans that were taken out by dictators. Go read Draper's debt last 5,000 years.
Yeah. It's very good.
But, yeah, it's based on, like, turning entire countries into just debt servicing engines where, like, all of the wealth that is produced by the entire nation is just going to, like, pay debts to Bank of yeah 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 it works extremely well it makes the u.s an unbelievable amount of money it protects global capitalism 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

i can guess it's the products and services that support this i'm excited to hear which one we get

you know it could be it could be anything really at this point who knows 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 war human face and it did it for good reason right 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 for like ages and ages and ages right you know that like they prop up right-wing military dictatorship constantly but the thing is democracy and human rights are things that like people like yeah and so you know it was it's it's a weapon that he and and his sort of brand of conservatives like anti-communist conservatives like wielded against communism and it was a very very powerful ideological weapon because if if your choice ceases to be between like communism and capitalism and your choice is now between like do you want to live in a dictatorship or do you want to live in a democracy like that's a very different question 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 because there's there's always been an illusion that there's an international community and that countries are like working together and and this is this is a very very powerful ideological thing you know i mean and this is something like you lived through this like probably listeners who didn't live through this now dear god but like like the iraq war right the u.s didn't unilaterally invade iraq now it was called the quote-unquote coalition of the wielding and included like like 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 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 outsized 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 we're still done under the auspices of like multinational like coalitions yep and the thing about different about trump is trump doesn't give a fuck about any of that right absolutely not he has turned on rob ford a man who is like who boldly answers the question what if trump smoke crack like that is rob ford like he's he's turning on his allies like people like right-wingers who should be his allies in Canada, right? Who are exactly the kind of people who you would expect to do sort of like right wing multilateral interventions in countries. Right.
Yeah. And, you know, he is caused with with his like threat to put tariffs on like he's causing people to become anti-American.
And this is the same thing with Mexico. Right.
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.
He wants to run everything just very purely and very openly as an American empire. Yeah, like America's always bullied Mexico, right? 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. But now Donald Trump is just doing it on true social.
It's kind of different. Or Panama, fuck.
I was in Panama September of 24 and I went to the Canal Museum and Panama is very proud of its history of independence. 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.
Now they're burning American flags in Panama City. Yeah, yeah, because Trump is trying to take the Panama Canal back.
And before we get into, like, you know, 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.
Like, he's trying to conquer Canada, right? That's so fucking silly. Yeah, 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. 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.
There is, again, him saying the U.S. 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. The last US tried to take Canada was 1812.
Right? It's been like 200 years. This is how Britain returns to the world stage.
Right? And the thing is the last time the US tried to take Canada, they burned the capital down. So like, you know, this is something that even under people like Bush, right, who is like that? Bush is like a very, very overt American imperialist, right? Yeah.
Bush would never try to invade Canada. Like, yeah, no, absolutely not.
Yeah, that's that's completely unhinged, right? And this is just a very, very different kind of imperialism than than what's existed before. And I wanted to go into, I think, why this is the case.
Yeah. And I think the reason the reason why this is the case okay so the reason that there's been such a defensive free trade is like people being like oh my god if he puts tariffs in place it'll raise prices and like yeah that's true right 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 it's it's working exactly how trump wants it to work if the U.S.
wants to rebuild a manufacturing economy, that is technically possible, right? Reagan was able to do this. 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.
And the Plaza Accords was this thing he did in the 80s where he forced Japan, Japan was the important one, but like Japan, West Germany, I think there are a couple other countries. He forced them to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar because if you have a currency and it's worth a bunch of another person's currency, so you have the dollar and it's worth a million yen or whatever the fuck, the currency that's worth less has a more has a more competitive manufacturing economy and reagan 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 so there's a very very good essay written right after 2008 called what's good for goldman sacks is good for america by the economist robert brenner and what what the strategy became and this is a strategy that was originally pioneered by japan that we took was instead of having like a manufacturing economy, like an actual production based economy, you have an economy based on the value of assets, right? So assets are things that you own, right? 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? And so what you do is you speculate on, you take out loans, you speculate on the prices of stocks going up, the prices of houses going up. And you make it very easy to borrow money.
Now, obviously, this produced a series of staggering economic collapses, including the dot-com collapse. 2008 was, 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. but the thing is in the wake of the financial collapse the u.s mostly figured out how to sort of stabilize the system but the thing is you know they they were sort of able to stabilize the system economically right yeah what they couldn't stabilize was 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 and the other one is donald trump who is the human manifestation of the real estate class right who's who's wealth like 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 like just like the people who designed the tree system they don't think the same way trump does trump is real estate guy, right? And this is how he sees the world, right? He thinks in terms of land and borders and territorial control, and he thinks in terms of what physical thing can I steal from someone in order to make money? This is why he's trying to steal the Panama Canal.
And he thinks this way instead of things that are more abstract, like debt servicing and the sort of lines of power in the coalition building right he looks at a map of greenland and goes this looks really big i want it and so and now he's going to try to use the american empire to just seize this yeah he sees things in terms of like raw power it's a very uh undeveloped notion of like power right like yeah yeah 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 he was uh he wrote books about soft power right the idea of the u.s power to persuade rather than power to kind of yeah rather there are than like hard power which comes in tanks or tariffs, I guess, Joseph Nye is no longer relevant.

Yes, yes.

No, we're... Rather than hard power, which comes from tanks or tariffs, I guess, Joseph Nye is no longer relevant.
Yes, yes. 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 the US media just wants to do propaganda for it. I'm going to read a quote from a CNN article.
Again, this is CNN. The subject heading is the US has been expanding for its entire history this is an article the title of which is Trump Trump wants to redraw the map of the western hemisphere for fuck's sake 2025 Monroe Doctrine posting on CNN.com literally you are so far ahead of this thing because next then i'm gonna read the the one i was going to read first uplift civilizing christianize what's the next paragraph the next section heading is and i quote what is trump's doctrine and explains the monroe doctrine for fuck's sake this is 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.
And even the conservative students are like, yeah, hard agree. Look at these racist as fuck cartoons about Filipino people that we're using here to justify this.
And now we are back. Like, it is.
And, like, yeah, CNN is just out there, like, fucking cranking the manufacturing consent manufacturing consent 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 expansion is built into the american dna since retired ambassador gordon gray now a professor of practice at george washington university and former foreign service career officer okay yeah like an angel sweeping across the plains fucking manifest destiny yeah yeah it's you know and this is this is 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 yeah right yeah yeah 18th century land empires you know got money by conquering people and like extracting tribute from them directly. And then also they were mercantilist empires, right know, got money by conquering people and, like, extracting tribute from them directly.

And then also, you know,

they were mercantilist empires, right? So they got a bunch of their money. And this is something that Trump

explicitly talks about. He thinks he can raise

revenue from, like, tariffs. Which, like, no, he can't.

But, like, what he 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. It is a definite

substantive break from what we've seen in the U. for a century, more than a century.
Yeah. And I think, I think it's important for people to understand exactly how this functions.
Yeah. And yeah, it's sick.
We're going into new opium wars. It's going to be so fun.
Uh, yeah, it's great. Well, this is, this has been a kid happen here.
Do not get kettled on bridges. Go out into the world and make trouble.
If people want to read more about the early, like, 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...
Yeah, yeah. I would also recommend David Graeberver's uh direct action and ethnography which is him

writing about the original like anti like ultra globalization protests and his like time in them

yeah so you know if you need direct action ideas they did some fun stuff yeah dressing guys up

like marshmallows so police batons would bounce off of them great things yeah bring back clown

block that'll get us through it. Yeah.
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Let's talk numbers.
Traditional in-person therapy isn't exactly cheap. It can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 a session, which adds up fast, especially in a challenging economic climate.
BetterHelp's online therapy is more affordable. You can save on average up to 50% per session.
With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, which can save you a lot on cost and on time. Therapy needs to be accessible, and with online therapy, you can get care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety and trauma to just everyday stress, relationship issues.
Your mental health is worth it, and now the price is within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally.
It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life, plus you can switch therapists at any time.
Your well-being is worth it. Visit BetterHelp.com slash ItCould to get 10% off your first month.
That's better help. H-E-L-P dot com slash it could.

Wasn't that delicious?

So good.

Your bill, ladies.

I got it.

No, I got it.

Seriously, I insist.

I insisted first.

Oh, don't be silly.

You don't be silly.

People with the Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card prefer to pay because they earn unlimited

2% cash back on purchases.

Okay. Rock, paper, scissors for it.
Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. No! The Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card.
Visit wellsfargo.com slash active cash. Terms apply.
Oh, hi. This is Chelsea Handler from the Dear Chelsea podcast.
This episode is brought to you by Opill, the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the U.S. I love shedding light on what's important for women's health care, and one thing that makes health care easier is making birth control more convenient to access.
Well, let me introduce Opil. Opil is a daily birth control pill that is FDA-approved, full prescription strength, and estrogen-free.
Plus, there's no prescription needed.

Finally, the days of needing a prescription for birth control are over, a sentence I very much enjoy saying. This is our moment to take control of our health and reproductive journeys because Opill is birth control in your control.
Opill is available online and at most major retailers. Use code OPILLOTC.

OPILLOTC for 25% off your first month of Opill at opill.com. Give your kids a summer full of fun and learning.
Give them ID Tech. ID Tech camps are all about high energy fun, meeting new friends, and our top elite instructors.
Located at 75 prestigious college campuses all across the country,

ID Tech features over 50 epic courses

like BattleBots, AI, and machine learning,

coding, game design, and more.

There's something for every kid

ages 7 to 17 at ID Tech.

Sign up at IDTech.com

and use code IDTech

to save $150 on a week of a lifetime. The government of two weeks ago no longer exists.
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.
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. 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, Thiel Fellowship researchers, Palantir employees, eugenics enthusiasts, and literal Nick Fuentes-pilled groipers.
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. 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. 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. On a whim, the unelected Elon Musk

decided to carry out the closure of an entire government agency. And he is far from finished.
Doge has hijacked the Treasury to withhold authorized payments to multiple agencies, resulting in an ongoing battle of lawsuits and court orders. This is It Could Happen Here.
I'm Garrison Davis, and this episode is an audio companion to an article I published on the ShatterZone Substack, linked below in the description. You can follow along online at shatterzone.substack.com and click the hyperlinks for more information and sources.
Elon Musk has personally directed the General Services Administration to terminate leases on, quote-unquote, mostly empty federal buildings. 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.
The legality of the letter is still uncertain as it promises to pay out

currently unappropriated funds. IRS workers who accepted the resignation offer have already been asked to return to work until May.
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 to 50%, unquote, according

to a GSA employee who requested to remain anonymous. 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%, with talk of consolidating GSA offices into a few major cities using a quote-unquote hub model.
Wired reports that Doge staff may be trying to use White House IT credentials to access GSA computers remotely. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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. We grasp at analogies to help contextualize current events that escape understanding.
There are similarities, but what's happening is new. It's very American, very 21st century.
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.
Now, rhetoric of cutting red tape and breaking federal bureaucracy has been common political claptrap for decades. And previous efforts have been largely all bark and no bite.
But now there's been a huge chomp. So why now? What happened? Trump has blamed entrenched federal bureaucracy, or the quote-unquote deep state, for preventing him from enacting sweeping change during his first term.
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. Last month, the far-right America First Policy Institute published a report titled Tales from the Swamp, How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump.
The author, James Schreck, a former Heritage Fellow, credits, quote-unquote, hostile career employees for, quote-unquote, refusing to implement policies. 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.
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. This allowed Trump to treat large swaths of government employees as political appointments.
In his article for the America First Policy Institute, Shrek refers to career removal protections as a, quote, modern invention that protects entrenched bureaucracy, unquote. Though Biden repealed Schedule F, Trump effectively reinstated the order on the first day of his second term.
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. When Trump first ran on Drain the Swamp in 2015, he was referring to corporate lobbyists, special interests, and Washington corruption.
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. 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.

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. 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.
Rather, the executive branch controls the flow of federal spending and Congress merely sets a ceiling on spending that the executive must not exceed. Under this interpretation of the Constitution, the president has sole and complete control of the executive branch, including all of its agencies and departments.
But people in Trump's circle, like J.D. 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.
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.
And I'll outline two of those examples, pulling from the aspirations of the modern conservative movement after this ad break. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and get ready to say bye-bye to the FBI.
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. The far-right militia movement has long clashed with federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ATF.
In the aftermath of January 6th, many mega supporters found themselves at odds with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Republican politicians began to feed into right-wing uproar surrounding the FBI as Trump himself became a target for investigations.
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. We must save America.
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. The new right publication, Compact Magazine, featured a slightly better written article by the same title, Abolish the FBI.
At CPAC in March of 2023, Matt Gaetz, noted pedophile, advocated to get rid of the FBI among other federal agencies. Either get this government back on our side, or we defund and get rid of, abolish the FBI, CDC, ATF, DOJ, every last one of them, if they do not come to heel.
In April of 2023, Trump joined in in calls to defund the FBI after being charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. 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.
The same two former FBI employees, who had their security clearance revoked after espousing J-6 conspiracy theories, later called to, quote, abolish the FBI at a Heritage Foundation symposium on the, quote, weaponization of the U.S. government in April of 2024.
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. What? Now, some people are going to say, okay, yeah, we're going to have to, do you just abolish a vote? Is there a replacement? I mean, you can't just not have federal law enforcement, right? I think in large part, you could just not have federal law enforcement.
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. The Trump administration has already begun the process to dismantle large swaths of the FBI before Kash Patel has even been confirmed by the Senate.
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. A questionnaire was distributed to FBI supervisors requesting agents provide information pertaining to their own involvement in the January 6th investigations.
This was believed to be used for the targeted removal of agency personnel. Last week, the FBI handed over a list containing the information of 5,000 employees and agents who worked on the January 6th investigations.
FBI leadership initially chose to withhold employee names. In response, Bove accused the FBI leadership of insubordination.
This was ultimately a fruitless effort, as data seized by Elon Musk's Doge team could easily match employee IDs to names. 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.
But individual agents are still worried. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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. Alternative agencies perceived as being more loyal to Trump, like

Homeland Security investigations, could start picking up the FBI slack. According to a senior

government source, on day two of Trump's second term, HSI was instructed to reopen investigations

in the world. picking up the FBI slack.
According to a senior government source, on day 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. 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.
Conservatives have advocated for dismantling the Department of Education ever since Jimmy Carter signed its modern incarnation into law in 1979. Most notably, Ronald Reagan tried and failed to abolish the department in 1981.
But Reagan's commission, ironically, strengthened support for the department. Once Reagan ran into roadblocks, he instead sought to limit the department's power and influence.
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.
Trump previously fiddled around with merging the departments of education and labor during his first term, but that plan went nowhere. 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.
Later, at the National Religious Broadcaster's 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. 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.
Opposition to the Department of Education was a frequent topic at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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.

It's unlikely that Trump would get the 60 Senate votes needed

to pass the quote-unquote necessary legislation.

But even if they can't manage to technically abolish the department,

he could still try to rip its guts out, slash spending, and forcibly resign or fire employees. 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. Federal education employees have already received the fork-in-the-road resignation

buyout offer, while others have been fired for alleged links to DEI. 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.
Only Elon Musk could do this. 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.
So how did Musk get here? 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. 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.
Initially, Musk threw his support behind the doomed presidential bid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But as it 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. The two met in Florida in March of 2024, among other wealthy Republican donors, as Trump was lobbying for campaign funding.
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. endorsement.
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. But all that changed on July 13th.
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.
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. 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. On the final day of the convention, rumors circulated that Musk himself would make a surprise appearance on stage.
Though said rumors did not come to fruition, Musk's specter haunted the entirety of the RNC. Come August, Musk just finished overhauling leadership at his America Super PAC and was rigorously pushing pro-Trump messaging on X, the everything app.
On August 12th, Musk hosted Trump in a two-hour live-streamed phone call dubbed in X space. This conversation marked the first time Trump casually spoke at length about the assassination attempt.
The pair also discussed quote-unquote migrant crime and the need to eliminate federal bureaucracy. Trump gave a rare compliment to Musk, calling him the greatest cutter, followed up by saying, I need an Elon Musk.
I need someone that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts. I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the states.
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.

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. Musk himself agreed to be appointed head of the commission, aiming to cut trillions of dollars.
This announcement was not taken very seriously. The New York Times called commissions such as this, quote, a favorite Washington solution for delaying dealing with hard problems, unquote.
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. Trump or funding approval by Congress, unquote.
Even I can admit that both myself and some of my co-workers

underestimated Doge's ability to physically carry out Musk's suggestions with no congressional oversight or authority. 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.
Throughout 2024, Musk spent over $290 million in contributions in support of the mega campaign, mostly via his own super PAC. On October 5th, Musk made his first appearance at an official campaign event, joining Trump for his return to Butler, Pennsylvania.
Musk continued to appear at Trump rallies

in the month leading up to the election.

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.

After this ad break,

we will return to discuss

how Elon Musk is now trying to become

the CEO of the United States of America. Okay, we are back.
And now, a few months after the election, Elon Musk is doing to the United States exactly what he did to Twitter. By the end, it still might technically function on some level, just worse in every way, prone to glitches and full of Nazis.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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. A current GSA employee was quoted in Wired as saying, quote, they are acting like this is a takeover of a tech company, unquote.
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.
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.

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. Having everything be done via executive order and Doge helps to speedrun a full reboot of the administrative state.
The motto of the old government may as well have been move slow and build things. Progress is slow, but detonation is fast.
The breakage of government isn't a mere side effect or a bug of this expedited form of rule. It's a feature.
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.
They're doing so much so fast, knowing that they will only get away with some of it.

But with new Supreme Court-approved presidential immunity and unlimited pardon power,

they can try as much as they want with zero consequence.

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

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.
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.

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

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.

But those inefficiencies and pesky regulations really irritate the Silicon Valley tech bros

who think they are the smartest people on the planet.

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

Musk has a personal interest in slashing the regulatory state as it interferes with

his own businesses and dreams of space colonization.

Last year, Musk claimed that Doge, quote,

was the only path to extending life beyond Earth, unquote.

The White House press secretary has said that Musk himself will determine

when there is a conflict of interest involving his businesses and Doge.

SpaceX alone has received $15.4 billion in government contracts, according to the New York Times. The large reduction in the federal workforce through the combined efforts of Doge and Schedule F, there's an irrefutable similarity to a plan outlined by New Right blogger Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel's favorite philosopher.
Last year, Robert Evans did a behind the bastards on Curtis Yarvin, and you should absolutely check that out for more information. In 2022, Yarvin outlined how a second Trump term could quote-unquote reboot the United States government.
This plan amounts to a corporate takeover of government, which subsequently reshapes the structure of government akin to a corporation. Though in Yarvin's mind, it is not President Trump who assumes the role of CEO.
Instead, the president acts as chairman of the board and, before inauguration, should select a CEO who is an experienced executive. 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.
Yarvin writes, quote, most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems. Trump will be monitoring this CEO's performance on TV and can fire him if need be, unquote.
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. 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. The first step in Yarvin's plan has the Trump campaign running on centralizing executive power to eliminate government inefficiency.
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.
Retire all government employees. 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.
Senior-level officials have been replaced by a batch of loyal tech oligarchs, with links to Musk and Peter Thiel. The stupidity of Doge was almost a secret weapon.
The cryptocurrency memeness made everyone in respectable society not take the idea seriously. What's the worst an advisory commission could do with no power to enforce its suggestions? Oops.
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.
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. 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.
Under direction from Doge, the White House has ordered government agencies to cancel subscriptions to policy news services from multiple news outlets. A White House advisor told Axios, The eye of Sauron is on more than just Politico.
It's all the media. In terms of attacks on academia, the federal grant freeze has had devastating effects on university research.
Another step in Yarvin's plan is to co-opt Congress and ignore the courts. This is where we are at right now.
The goal is to reduce both the judicial and legislative branches to being purely ceremonial and advisory, as advocated by Yarvin. 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. Furthermore, this Congress seems to have willfully given up on their power over the federal budget.
To quote a senior government official, quote, the real challenge is that Congress is on board for now in losing their own budgetary authority. So far, a lone security guard standing outside USAID and the Department of Education has been enough to deter resistance from the Democratic Party.
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.
When Congress is willing to hand the keys over to the president, then we no longer really have a democracy, or at least the constitutional democracy that was created 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.
So if Congress were to pass new legislation giving the president more centralized power, well, that would be a concerning thing to me. Right now, the real roadblock is the courts.

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.
The Justice Department has argued that the order to resume funding

contains several ambiguous terms and provisions that could be read to constitute

significant intrusions on the executive branches, lawful authorities, and the separation of powers, unquote. This past weekend, Musk raged against a federal judge who ordered to temporarily restrict Doge's access to Treasury Department data.
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. On X, the Everything app, Musk boosted claims calling this a judicial coup and shared an announcement from California Representative Daryl Issa to introduce legislation to, quote unquote, stop these rogue judges.
But even without added legislation, Musk and the Trump administration are gearing up to directly defy judicial authority. 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? And on Sunday, Vice President J.D.
Vance posted a statement undermining judicial power. If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.
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." 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? That leads us to another step in Yarvin's plan. Centralize the police.
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.
Marshals to kill Michael Reinald 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. Yorvin 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. If you have all of the guys with guns, who can physically stop you? Support from the public doesn't hurt, though.
And if things get tricky, Trump could employ the next step in Yarvin's plan, mobilize populist support. But crucially, don't wait until you're at your weakest, at the end of your term after losing an election.
Under popular mandate, deploy your empowered supporters at the height of your powers to oppose any obstruction from government agencies or the courts. 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.
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.
Vance laid out a very similar vision for a second Trump term, using what the Peter Thiel protege described as a de-wokification program to purge bureaucracy. I think Trump is going to run again in 2024.
I think he'll probably win again in 2024. 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.
And when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and 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. Yorvin 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.
What the administration can do once they fully seize this power is so incredibly vast. 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. But that's a whole separate topic.
The current fight determines the degree to which this power is seized. And Yarvin notes the importance of going all the way.
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% of power, the only way he can do it is to take 100%.
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. 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. It was retribution.
As extremism analyst Jared Holt notes, quote, the right got its base so hooked on the idea of revenge, it doesn't even need to pretend that any of this benefits their base in any tangible way. 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. But the past 10 years have shown us you can't really return to normal.
There probably is no going back. 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.

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.

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

wasn't that delicious so good We'll be right back. Oh, hi.
This is Chelsea Handler from the Dear Chelsea podcast. This episode is brought to you by Opill, the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the US.
I love shedding light on what's important for women's healthcare, and one thing that makes healthcare easier is making birth control more convenient to access. Well, let me introduce Opill.
Opill is a daily birth control pill that is FDA-approved, full prescription strength, and estrogen-free. Plus, there's no prescription needed.
Finally, the days of needing a prescription for birth control are over, a sentence I very much enjoy saying. This is our moment to take control of our health and reproductive journeys because Opill is birth control in your control.
Opill is available online and at most major retailers. Use code O-P-I-LOTC for 25% off your first month of Opill at opill.com.
Give your kids a summer full of fun and learning. Give them ID Tech.
ID Tech camps are all about high energy fun, meeting new friends, and are taught by elite instructors. Located at 75 prestigious college campuses all across the country, ID Tech features over 50 epic courses like BattleBots, AI, and machine learning, coding, game design, and more.
There's something for every kid ages 7 to 17 at ID Tech. Sign up at IDTech.com and use code IDTech to save $150 on a week of a lifetime.
Catch the new Hulu original comedy, Mid-Century Modern, from the creators of Will & Grace, executive producer Ryan Murphy, and director James Burroughs. When three best friends move in together, Palm Springs will never be the same.
Bunny, Jerry, and Arthur are already close friends, but when they decide to live together, it's a new chapter with a new family. And speaking of family, don't forget Bunny's mom, Sybil, who's along for the ride.
Whether it's a trip to Fire Island or a local congresswoman with a wild side, these roomies know how to do it with style. They're fun, they're fabulous, and they're turning life's lemons into spiked lemonade.
So shake up a batch of cocktails, relax by the pool, and get ready for some serious shade. A new comedy with heart, soul, and sass.
Mid-Century Modern stars Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, Nathan Lee Graham, and Linda Lavin. All episodes of Mid-Century Modern are now streaming on Hulu.
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. 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.
That article is now published on chatterzone.substack.com and is also the previous episode of this podcast. 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.
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. But I decided to publish the full interview because I believe his perspective is still helpful, 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. 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.
But I teach constitutional law and courses like that. Author of a couple books, Schoolhouse Burning, Public Education, and the Assault on American Democracy.
And then more recently, Dangerous Learning, the South's Long War on Black Literacy. Let's start by discussing what's going on at the Department of Education right now.
And maybe let's actually start a little bit further back. Attacks on the Department of Education are not new.
Reagan famously 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. Could you talk about the history of conservative attacks against the department? Yeah, I mean, there's always been this states' rights issue that's been with America since its founding.
It obviously was a big part of the Civil War, a big part of the Civil Rights Movement, a big part of the Affordable Health Care Act debate. So you always have this states' rights argument going on, 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? 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. But it's often been not that serious of a critique, but obviously it's gotten very serious here in the last couple of weeks.
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. Calls to abolish the Department of Education, even this rallying call from the new right the past few years to abolish the FBI, general claims of draining the swamp, these types

of old, almost stereotypical claims that now, through Musk, they've been able to weasel their

way into actually dismantling large systems that make the everyday functionality of the government

possible. What should people know right now about the current attacks on the Department of Education

Thank you. large systems that make the everyday functionality of the government possible.
What should people know right now about the current attacks on the Department of Education? Trump is still allegedly drafting an executive order. 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 the current attacks on the DOE? 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.
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 without Congress and those things and those things that would need Congress. And I mean, it's a weird silver lining, but that gives me like some like 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? It sort of was claiming authority to do everything.
And so there is this at least recognition that there's not unbounded power. 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.
Like most of the department is established by statute and he can't just dissolve things or move things around that are created by statute. He can't take money that's for poor kids and spend them on vouchers, right? These things, you know, the law dictates.
And the fact that he's implicitly acknowledging, or rather his advisors are implicitly acknowledging they need Congress's help gives me a little bit of comfort because I think that getting rid of the department is, 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.
But I think there's something far more disturbing to me, and it's the long term, 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.
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. You know, probably no one, not many listeners probably familiar or ever heard of the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787.
But before we even had a United States Constitution, this foundational document laid out how our territory is going to become states. 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.
And so that's very important is where we start. 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 you create a public education system and you never take those rights away, right? 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. 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.
So this isn't some wild new sort of fantasy of liberals or unions that we need a department so that we can 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 enshrined in law that may not be legally abolished now, but they've been effectively abolished. Like all the employees are on leave.
It's been hollowed out. It essentially no longer exists.
I feel like they're trying to, at the very least, test the bare limits of executive power and bypass Congress when they can. Part of my fear is Congress is not willing to fight them on that, seemingly.
They're not willing to call them on that. They're almost willing to acquiesce their appropriations ability, as well as the ability to actually have to remove departments from existence or create new ones.
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 a democracy, or at least the constitutional democracy that was created a couple centuries ago here, in which the president executes the law, the president doesn't make the law, right? Congress funds programs, not the executive.
But if ultimately Congress is going to shift all that authority over, that's a dangerous place for democracy to be. There are no checks anymore.
So I think what you're raising up is the fear that there aren't any checks in place. 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, and hopefully the courts 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, Congress cedes more and more power to the president with a new legislation. So if Congress were to pass new legislation giving the president more centralized power, well, that would be a concerning thing to me.
Let me just stop and we'll get to your next question to go. But we have a larger phenomenon that'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. 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 a No Child Left Behind waivers.
And, you know, I told the current administration as much as I hate it, right? You know, I wish we could just wipe away student debt. I feel bad for my students who have huge debt.
But I said, it is beyond the president's power to just wipe away all this debt. And they did it anyway.
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. And their presidents are doing it anyway, right? And it's because our Congress is broken.
Our Congress isn't doing its job. So citizens are demanding that our presidents do things that they really don't have the power to do.
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. And 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 break the government temporarily to 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 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.
And it's really frightening when it comes down to the basic level of, is there people, military, police, who will enforce this if things get really bad? That's something I don't have complete confidence in anymore. Well, I deal with this every year at the beginning of my constitutional law class.
This is not 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? 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?

So for when Brown v. 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. 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? So our entire system really rests on good faith.
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. Marshals to take President Trump into custody.
So that order goes out, the Marshals receive it, they march over to the White House, 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.
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, it's not a function of police power.
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? Yeah. That's where it's at, right? And so, you know, it really is a good faith litmus test.
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. 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. J.D.
Vance was interviewed on a Far Right podcast about like two or three years ago. And he expressed desire for what he called a quote-unquote de-wokeification program.
Which again, sounds silly, but this is basically happening now. He extrapolated and said, I think Trump is going to run again in 2024.
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.

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

Unquote.

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

I'm sorry, where did J.D. Vance make this statement at?

What context?

On Jack Murphy's podcast.

Jack Murphy is like a far-right commentator. Wow.
Vance is invoking the political philosophy of Curtis Yarvin, who is becoming increasingly popular in the new right. 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.
And I feel like we're getting closer and closer to this. 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. Doge is basically installing loyalty tests and running through communications to see what the loyalty to Trump is for different levels of administrative employees.

The FBI are negotiations to stay on, but only if they can prove their loyalty to the president. And it's all of these scenarios that, again, originally would be kind of far-fetched when you're hearing someone like J.D.
Vance talk about this a few years ago on some right-wing podcast. That's one thing.
watch this like happen in real time for people like me who study like this type of like more like esoteric far right political theory. It's kind of surreal to watch the type of thing that you've been like writing about and thinking about like on background for years now happen.
I just kind of rambled there. But do you have any like, I guess thoughts on like idea that Vance is talking about in terms of creating this constitutional crisis? Well, I mean, look, I tend to be the guy in the room that says, let's not overreact.
Let's see what happens. 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? This is my predisposition. But a week or so ago, I had a huge crisis of confidence, shall we say.
There were just a few events in the news that I was just like, 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. I never thought a president would do that.
I just never thought, you know, never thought, never thought. And so I said to myself, you know, are any of my opinions or projections, you know, valid anymore? Because I'm the guy who never thought.
And so that That was a tough 24 hours for me, I'll have to say. So I don't know if I just rebooted for self-sanity and moved forward or whether there is still some truth and reason to believe in certain stability.
And I mean, I will say this, 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. If you read the five executive orders 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. And of course the president can appoint them to think about stuff.
If they do the stuff they're thinking about, that becomes a problem. But again, it is this sort of like, can I grab a headline about what would sound like an awful reality, but really all I've done is tell people to think about that reality.
You know, that gives me some faith, right? 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.
It's just, it's unpredictable to some extent which opinions those are going to be. 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, I have my really bad days. I think like,

you know, I think a lot of people have a bad day every day right now. It's,

you know, I just feel thankful mine are, mine are fewer and further between than others. And maybe that's just psychological coping.
I don't know. Let's, I guess, close by talking about

Dis- Let's close by 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. Yes, I spent a pretty good deal of time on this disunion question in my new book, Dangerous Learning, because most of that book is focused on the three decades leading up to the Civil War.
So that the Civil War doesn't just happen overnight. It happens over the course of late 1820s to 1860 with the South just saber rattling over and over again, openly talking about disunion.
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 they were a bunch of 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 anti-slavery advocates in North Carolina in the 1820s is shocking to a lot of people.
But 10 years later, only 12 people show up to the final meeting. So you had something that changed there.
And so you have this sort of period of escalating disunion and censorship and propaganda and sort of policing what is publicly acceptable commentary in the South. All this stuff is happening.
Sort of going in and editing there, sort of censoring textbooks, 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 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? 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.
And one of those that I talk about is our public school voucher. I say private school vouchers.
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 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.
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.
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? This is a step towards disunion from a fundamental institution of American democracy.
What happens to us if they actually execute on that plan? 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. We're talking about people on the public dollar retreating into their religious silos, into their racial silos, into their culture silos.
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. And if what we have is education that becomes the equivalent of MSNBC and Fox News and Newsmax and whatever else, that is a dangerous place.
I don't know how we build democracy on such a system. What's the solution here? I mean, beyond people diversifying where they get their media from, and for vast parts of the country, I think that that line's been crossed a long time ago.
If you look at the way Twitter functions, the way that people just exist in their bubbles and are happy to. People don't want to hear anything else with the most hostility coming from both extreme ends.
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.
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.
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, 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? 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? 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. I mean, I do think that in the push for more justice in our public schools, and I think we do need more.
I mean, that's what I've devoted my career to. I do think that—well, I don't think our schools did any of the awful stuff that 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. 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.
And so one of the things I'm working on my new book is that I really think we have to rethink how we teach history, how we teach literature, maybe not so much literature. 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.
What we're committed to is our children engaging in free and open thought amongst themselves, right, with hopefully an adult in the room that can establish some guidelines.

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

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? Not just bullet points, not just bullet points. What would cross the Rubicon for you? People throw around the term constitutional crisis.
What would actually happen that would make that something that you would be like this is like it like it is happening what is that like make or break moment you wanted me to imagine a realistic one or just sort of give you some sort of example that makes no like what would that be like for you because like I think everyone has their own personal rubric for like what is too far in my mind like what is something something that's like, this is, this is completely unacceptable. And for some people, this, this may have already happened, but like in terms of like legitimate, like constitutional crisis, what is that for you? Well, let's just rewind.
And this is, I guess, an example of why, you know, someone still got their finger in the dam holding back, holding it together. 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.
Federal district court enjoined it. He then backed down from that.
Right. But let's say he didn't back down.
It's like, well, okay, 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. So just the budget, that's it, just the budget.
Just the belief that the president can spend our money however he wants with no constraint. And that would be crossing the Rubicon.
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. It's like, you know, I have been alarmed.
And this goes back, this isn't just a Trump problem. Like, I was alarmed with the NCLB waivers.
Probably nobody in this even knows what I'm talking about, right? Like, you know, a decade ago. 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? Executive power has been steadily expanding, certainly. Yeah.
And so, but I was like, you know, you can kind of get it. There was some gray area.
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. But when Biden, I mean, think back.
And again, I don't begrudge people needing their debts relief. 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, I can I can commit this nation to a 50 percent increase in its fiscal outlays tomorrow? That's not constitutional democracy.

But now, right, we have a president going even further than that.

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.

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. I mean, I guess the main difference there for me relates back to what you said about acting in good faith.
Something that people on the left, I think, get mad about sometimes is Democrats seeming a complete commitment to acting in good faith sometimes. And it certainly appears that Trump is willing to push a little bit farther, especially in terms of tests for loyalty.
And at a certain point, if he does something really bad, at least for these next two years, I don't see a way that he'll get impeached or removed from office. Certainly not with this Senate, not with this Congress.
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 a little bit further, play a little bit more fast and loose with some of these checks and balances than what we've previously seen.
But this is certainly still developing. Well, the thing that really sort of jumps out at me, and I was telling several reporters, is that you're right.
He's pushing it further. It looks scarier.
But part of why it's scarier, to be quite honest, well, I think it's scary, I don't know, is that he's doing it out in the open. 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 it, Nixon was paranoid.
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 rationalization for what you're doing, and, you know, you minimize it, act like it's no big deal. 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, and it does show that what's acceptable from public officials is much different now. Because had Nixon shared his designs with the American public, he wouldn't have made it as long as he did.
And probably true of a lot of other presidents. They would have been gone.
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. He's putting his dirty laundry out there and people are like, oh, this is normal.
Unless you have anything else to add, do you want to talk about where people can find you and your writing? Yeah. I mean, I'm on Blue Sky more recently.
I'm still on Twitter. I sort of have just lots of friends on there, so I'm still there.
Me too. Me too.
Yeah. I'm not on there as often as I used to be.
I gave up blogging a long time ago. So as we drink out of a fire hydrant, I spend a lot of time just trying to explain basic things about public education to reporters.
But you can find me there. I'm a professor of law at the University of South Carolina.
And like I said, 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. We've had those wars before and we scarily are having them again.

All right. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Wasn't that delicious?

So good. Your billfargo.com slash active cash.
Terms apply. Oh, hi.
This is Chelsea Handler from the Dear Chelsea podcast. This episode is brought to you by Opill, the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the U.S.
I love shedding light on what's important

for women's healthcare,

and one thing that makes healthcare easier

is making birth control more convenient to access.

Well, let me introduce O-Pill.

O-Pill is a daily birth control pill

that is FDA-approved, full prescription strength,

and estrogen-free.

Plus, there's no prescription needed.

Finally, the days of needing a prescription

for birth control are over, a sentence I very

much enjoy saying.

This is our moment to take control of our health and reproductive journeys because Opill is birth control in your control. Opill is available online and at most major retailers.
Use code OPILLOTC for 25% off your first month of OPILL at OPILL.com. ID Tech, the first and most trusted tech camp, is where kids ages 7 to 17 find their people.
The coding and creating people. The fire-breathing, shell-spinning BattleBots people.
The just-as-happy building games as they are playing them people people at 75 prestigious college campuses all across the country id tech features over 50 epic courses like battle bots ai and machine learning game design and more visit idtech.com and use code idtech to save 150 on a week that's guaranteed to be a highlight of summer catch the new hulu original original comedy, Mid-Century Modern, from the creators of Will & Grace, executive producer Ryan Murphy, and director James Burroughs. When three best friends move in together, Palm Springs will never be the same.
Bunny, Jerry, and Arthur are already close friends, but when they decide to live together, it's a new chapter with a new family. And speaking of family, don't forget Bunny's mom, Sybil, who's along for the ride.
Whether it's a trip to Fire Island or a local congresswoman with a wild side, these roomies know how to do it with style. They're fun, they're fabulous, and they're turning life's lemons into spiked lemonade.
So shake up a batch of cocktails, relax by the pool, and get ready for some serious shade. A new comedy with heart, soul, and sass.
Mid-Century Modern stars Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, Nathan Lee Graham, and Linda Lavin. All episodes of Mid-Century Modern are now streaming on Hulu.
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.
And today we are going back to talk about Gaza, particularly what has happened and changed in sort of U.S. 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. satellite.
And with me today is Dana Elkurd,

an assistant professor of political science, guest on our episodes about Bibi Netanyahu over

at Behind the Bastards. 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.

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

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, like I said, a dumb question.
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? 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.
But yeah, how would you characterize kind of the initial reaction to that announcement? Yeah. So a couple of different audiences for that announcement to begin with.
For the Israeli side, I mean, what I'm hearing from analysts and people who follow Israeli politics is that this has really changed the permission structure for them. Yeah.
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. And so I don't think a lot of people are thinking like, for real, there's going to be a Gaza Riviera.

But what this does is it just expands the scope of what they think is possible for Gaza, whether it's preventing reconstruction 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. That could be a possibility moving forward.
It could cover up for more aggressive action, ending the ceasefire. I mean, it's really upended the things in terms of the Israeli perspective

and how much they've accepted it, I think.

Yeah, because 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. 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.
The plan is for ethnic cleansing, right? That's the only way to describe that. Yeah, no, it's very explicit.
And I think that the way in which American allies, allied regimes in the region have reacted to this shows a great deal of alarm. 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.
The Saudi government, you know, put out, I would say, like a pretty strong statement. I mean, I was I was surprised how strong it was about how much they do not endorse such a plan.
So, yeah. 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.
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. And so far, Egypt and Jordan have both said, no, this is not something we're interested.
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. It's nonsense that you have to take it very seriously.
I mean, the man has the nukes, as we've discussed. So, yeah, I mean, 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 the end of the ceasefire, essentially.

Yeah.

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

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's staying, is effectively a combatant. 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 noncombatants to begin with.
Yeah. That really didn't stop them from targeting civilians, targeting children.
So you can imagine now that even, 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.
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 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 there's no international actor that's really empowering those efforts. And so it's really bleak.
Yeah, I mean, it's bleak in so many comprehensive ways like one thing and not to i don't mean to like kind of take the focus off of of gaza but this is used to term permission structure on an international level the u.s saying we are backing a forced expulsion and genocide of an entire population does change the permission structure for every international actor in in terms of like a massive variety of conflicts around the world like this is like a sea change in in international norms that so many millions of people outside of gaza will eventually and and very probably immediately be affected by i mean yeah i think that there has always been gaps in what is acceptable and what is permissible under international law. Obviously, that has never been applied evenly.
And then if you were a particular group that didn't have American backings, for example, the Armenians in Artsakh, it didn't matter if you were ethnically cleansed. 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. 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, that was a huge obstacle to this kind of precedent.
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 you said, this is now going to become how states operate. 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.

Yeah. Well, and I think that this is, 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, 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? 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. Right.
No, absolutely. There was a Syrian activist and political writer,

Yasin al-Hash Saleh, who said the Syrianization of the world.

Yeah.

And we're seeing the gossification of the world.

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

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. Then we're going to come back and we're going

to talk about demining. We're back.
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. 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. 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 70 days, I think.
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.
And for an idea of how long it takes to demine and render an area safe for munitions like this, there are still people who die in France from old World War I munitions up to the present day in 2025. So this is a massive problem.
In the best case scenario, something has to be done with these munitions. This is something that Trump has been bringing up when talking about his desire to clear people out of there, demine, and then rebuild effectively, what sounds almost like a vacation colony, right, for the United States.
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. We've spent billions of dollars, put billions of dollars into demining around the world through USAID.
The US military is actually not allowed by our laws to do demining operations. There's a complicated history there.
But like, so we both got this situation where the proposed justification for pushing the population out is, well, it's not safe to be there. We have to demine it.
And also, we have created a situation in which the organizations that do demining can't do it anymore. Yeah.
And I think those same organizations asked for like an exception to the stop work order and were denied by the State Department and no explanations were given. And I mean, it's obviously a fig leaf.
Yeah. It's obviously an excuse.
Like this has nothing to do with bettering conditions in Gaza. 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.
Well, all right, what are you demining? You really think you're going to build hotels? Yeah. My understanding is people in the administration were also surprised by this tack of reasoning.

So I wonder who's fed him this idea,

like who's given him this idea that he's going to be able to build hotels

here.

My understanding based on reading,

I obviously don't have any ins in the Trump administration,

but I,

the reporting I've seen suggested came from Kushner that like a year or so

ago,

he was talking about this. Like, this is great, you you know a great place to build a condo it's beautiful

you know wonderful weather 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 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 it's just like the grift can really stick in his mind he's really good at

Thank you. 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.
It's just like the grift can really stick in his mind. He's really good at holding on to possibilities for grifting.
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.
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? 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? So to that extent, this is like a natural expression of U.S. policy for decades in the area.
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? Yeah, I mean, the thing is, they can achieve and have already been able to maintain American hegemony with all sorts of bases across the Middle East.

Some secrets, some not.

Turkey. Qatar.

Like, it's, this is, I think this is another level where it's like, American hegemony is tangential to Jared Kushner making money.

Yeah.

Which is an interesting little, I've never seen a hegemon kind of shoot itself in the foot in this direction to this degree. Yeah.
I don't want the focus to be on the danger to Americans from this, but this is extremely dangerous for Americans too, right? 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 build, like take this land and profit off of it is such a, it's, it's so comprehensively escalates everything on an international scale. 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, by American politicians other than the Iraq war.
Right. And that was, I think, maybe the first nail in the

coffin. And we're reaching the last nails in the coffin.
Yeah. Yeah.
The coffin's almost done. It's almost done.
We're dismantling the whatever remnants of the international order used to exist. And it's really going to be a free fall.
Yeah. I don't know what more to say on that.
I guess kind of the

one thing we should get into is

what we're seeing in terms of the

Trump administration and pro-Palestine protests in the United States.

Obviously, last night at the Super Bowl, we had a moment where a member of Kendrick Lamar's

performance crew on the ground, I think it was one of his dancers, as far as I can tell.

I don't believe the individual has been named yet. Maybe I missed that.
I think that somebody has released his name. I think the Intercept.
Okay. Well, I don't feel specifically a need to do that.
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. It was a fairly small, a a couple of feet wide, couple of feet deep.
So like, not like a mass, 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, 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? I mean, it's not like he even invaded the pitch, right? Like he's no, he was supposed to be there. Actor.
Yeah. He did a thing that wasn't part of the script, I assume.
But like, I don't know how you even...

Charged him.

Yeah, I don't think charges are out yet, right?

But they're going to find something to do,

which is also going to set a precedent, right?

Because this person was not in a place they weren't allowed to be.

This person didn't damage any property.

They held a thing.

Like, that's the definition of protected speech.

If you're their employer, you can fire them for that. But you can't charge them criminally for that.
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. And it like like you said, it's it's really in line with.
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.

And so it's these executive orders around deporting international students.

It's executive orders around like expanded understandings of anti-Semitism.

And the idea is, even if you don't go after everybody you're making an example enough that like you're chilling yeah people's abilities to engage whether it's on campuses or you know off campuses um and so it's it's definitely i can tell you from like the academic perspective like a number of disciplinary organizations and and and, and like Middle East Studies Association and things like this, like they're, they're very concerned. Like, this is a

very concerning moment. 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.
We're back. Dan, yeah, we're just talking about kind of the chilling effects this has had.
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? I mean, not even in favor, that's the wrong way to put it. Discussing the reality of the genocide.
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is like they have not, they've conflated any attempt to give information with advocacy.
So there's that inflationlation but then of course advocacy in and of itself is protected yes 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 and i 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 in private institutions that have paid lip service to things like free speech and are now ignoring that commitment in the past. And so we've seen even tenured professors, like what happened in Muhlenberg College, like tenured professors being targeted, losing their jobs.
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, 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.

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% of professors

who teach on the Middle East are self-censoring.

Jesus.

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. It's like they're literally just self-censoring the content.
Yeah. 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 of those kinds of things is now completely under the microscope.
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? 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. 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.
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.
They 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. 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. Yeah, there has to be institutions and leadership at these institutions holding a line because this kind of preemptive obedience hasn't served them.
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.
Vance says it like professors are the enemy. Yeah.
So what are you doing trying to placate? You know, it's like you're just giving them an easier time. No.
And through the use of funding and their ability to kind of gin up outrage in media, groups like AIPAC 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, 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 most people in traditional organizations, particularly professors, which is always where it starts. And yeah, that salient is just going to get whiter and whiter and whiter, right? Like that's the way this stuff works.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, this is not a new argument, but it's like the ways in which the United States has engaged abroad, it's very much boomeranging home, you know? 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.
It's so much broader than that, the precedent that is being set. 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.
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 in your syllabi or um chilling your speech on other issues whether it's trans rights whether it's you know uh reproductive rights whatever issue if you don't toe the line they're going to come for you too right yeah and so i think that at least i've seen folks who are not who I have never been, you know, activated on the issue of Israel-Palestine, whether in their advocacy or in their research, they are making that connection at least.
And maybe that's a silver lining that I'm trying to be less bleak here. Yeah, yeah.
I think that's helpful. You know, 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.
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 and the former president of the United States, Joe Biden made pro pro ira statements right like one thing is okay and the other is not i don't know 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 like it's it's just this hideous hypocrisy that i i don't even understand how like people can keep that consistent in their own heads but they don't need to right that's that's always the thing with fascists no there's no need for consistency yeah yeah i mean that's the thing is like first of, the conflation that like the entire movement made

such a statement or, you know, I mean, obviously that, that in and of itself is dishonest. 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, of particular, you know, particular students or particular groups to shut down any speech around it. And I was featured in this like Vox video and it was just like an explainer.
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, you know, what had happened on October 7th. And I was like, is the red line now just even discussing anything? Like with any kind of expertise or information? Like it's, yeah, it's mind boggling.
I mean, I guess I think that is what they want to make the red line yeah yeah what you went through there too makes me so angry when i read shit like um and this is not on on gillibrand but kristin gillibrand was on uh 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 and she's like they're scared of like, isn't everyone who says anything? And like, you got death threats for a Vox video. Like, why are these Congress people who have so many more resources to protect themselves? Why do they get to be scared? Oh, well, that's, yeah, Congress and its inability to do anything.
Like, that's a whole nother level of demoralization. Yeah.
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we hit on during this conversation before we sort of close things out? 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. And some analysts have claimed that this has to do with 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.

Yeah.

And like Saudi is going to make peace with Israel and claim that we convinced Trump not

to do this kind of thing.

And so that's been something I've read in some analysis.

And I don't think it's actually correct.

I don't think that Trump is making these kinds of statements or possibly these kinds of plans just as kind of like, I don't know, multi-level chess with Saudi Arabia to get them to sign a peace deal with Israel. And the conditions in the region, I think, have really shifted.
And I don't think Saudi Arabia, as I mentioned at the beginning, because they put out statements to this effect, I don't I don't think they're at all interested in this kind of move right at this point. So I just 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. Yeah, no, I know because Biden was playing a long game, a dumb long game, but a long game trying to brokers a deal with Saudi Arabia and Israel that, I mean, again, I think deranged.
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 don't think that Trump is, I don't think Trump cares about that. Yeah, and the region has changed so much.
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.
Saudi Arabia, I mean, has a huge influence on the new Syrian government. Like, they don't need this.
They don't need this, 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.
People are just doing shit and trying to grab onto whatever they can, right? And like, let's see what sticks, essentially. 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. 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? Check out, I guess the fire these times podcast.
I sometimes do episode for them. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
And if you're looking for organizations to help support Gazans right now, heal Palestine or or Anera, A-N-E-R-A,

are both doing really crucial work.

Excellent, excellent.

We'll 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.

And yeah, I hope you, I don't know.

I hope.

I hope.

I hope.

That's all hope.

Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Robert.
Wasn't that delicious? So good. Your bill, ladies? I got it.
No, I got it. Ha ha ha.
We'll be right back. 2% cash back on purchases.
Okay. Rock, paper, scissors for it.
Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. No! The Wells Fargo Active Cash credit card.
Visit wellsfargo.com slash active cash. Terms apply.
Oh, hi. This is Chelsea Handler from the Dear Chelsea podcast.
This episode is brought to you by Opill, the first over-the-counter daily birth control pill available in the U.S. I love shedding light on what's important for women's health care, and one thing that makes health care easier is making birth control more convenient to access.
Well, let me introduce Opil. Opil is a daily birth control pill that is FDA-approved, full prescription strength, and estrogen-free.
Plus, there's no prescription needed. Finally, the days of needing a prescription for birth control are over, a sentence I very much enjoy saying.
This is our moment to take control of our health and reproductive journeys because Opill is birth control in your control. Opill is available online and at most major retailers.
Use code OPILLOTC. OPILLOTC for 25% off your first month of OPILL at OPILL.com.
ID Tech, the first and most trusted tech camp, is where kids ages 7 to 17 find their people. The coding and creating people.
The fire-breathing, shell-spinning BattleBots people. The just as happy-happy-building games as they are playing them people.
At 75 prestigious college campuses all across the country, ID Tech features over 50 epic courses like BattleBots, AI, and machine learning, game design, and more. Visit IDTech.com and use code IDTech to save $150 on a week that's guaranteed to be a batch of cocktails relax by the pool and get ready for some serious shade.

A new comedy with heart, soul, and sass.

Mid-Century Modern stars Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, Nathan Lee Graham, and Linda Lavin.

All episodes of Mid-Century Modern are now streaming on Hulu. 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.
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.
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.

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.
Drake has been executed live on stage. It's a great week.
That would have been kinder than what actually happened to Drake. Look, as someone in my Blue Sky mention 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. Oh, my God.
They lost so bad. They lost so badly.
I can't even say that they were beaten up and down the field because I didn't even fucking get down the field. Obliterated.
Generational beatdown. And, yeah.
When I arrived here in New Orleans on Monday, 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 oh that's great no one. And all of the Eagles merch were gone.
I will see that Chiefs merch again somewhere in like a resource poor setting in a market three years from now. Yes.
Yes, that's going to be the uniform of a future Civil War. It's Kansas City Chiefs jersey.
I love it when I see that shirt. Literally Taylor Swift themed Kansas City Chiefs merch.
Oh, yeah. Huge L for capitalism.
So funny. Oh, man.
Well, I guess, yeah, the big losers this week, Drake and unfortunately the nation of Ukraine and most of the rest of Western Europe. Yeah.
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.

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.

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.

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.
He's made a couple of statements like, yep, we're hoping that this is what pushes everything towards peace. 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, so it hopefully will not be a situation where Putin gets entirely his own way, but that is kind of what's happening, 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. Specifically, he stated that we're not going to tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency, 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 SACDF. Yeah, it's sick.
It's really cool. And it's going to be great.
It's going to be great if you're in the German arms industry. It's going to be a banger year for you.
You're going to be making some leffertines. I think we can all agree the future is bright for German weaponry.
Once again, Germany will rise to its former glory. 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.
Yeah. When Aftey 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.

Well, and what you bring up there, Mia, is probably worth

discussing in concert with all of this,

which is that AFD, Aufde,

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. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, every Western European nation basically came to a tacit agreement referred to as the Corden Sanitaire, which is when a right-wing party starts to gain power, you do not coalition with them under any circumstances.
Germany is actually like the last of the European countries to give up this idea, but the fact that the Corden Sanitaire has fallen in Germany is real bad news. Yeah, and the ADF, like, it's worth mentioning, right, like, theF is so right wing and so Nazi that like the,

the,

the Italian fascists who are in power right now will not work with them.

Like,

yeah.

Yeah.

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.

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, great stuff. It is dark.
I mean, and again, when we say the Italian fascist, this is literally Mussolini's party, as in his granddaughter hits a member. 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 multi-polar world that like russia has wanted for some time like coming to fruition right and i didn't want to talk about so there was 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 wouldn't necessarily have enforced 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. 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. He called the ICC's actions against Israel illegitimate and baseless.
That's a quote. He specifically called the warrants against Yves Gallant and Benjamin Netanyahu baseless.
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.
His order then goes on to outline what it calls protected persons. For people who aren't familiar, a United States person is distinguished from a United States citizen.
It also includes only permanent residents. It also includes U.S.
armed forces, government officials, and contractors working on behalf of US Armed Forces.

Contractors?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

The people who can do no wrong.

It then goes on to include US allies, including all of NATO, and sometimes contractors working on their behalf.

It says that if the International Criminal Court investigates any of these people, Trump

will declare a national emergency.

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 it this is an unprecedented American politics and sometimes it gets reported like it is I want to like throw back to uh what they called the Hague Invasion Act that wasn't its real name uh but that was George Bush's like uh 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.
Trump did also sanction ICC prosecutors and their families in 2020 for looking into U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan.
done i think that happened in june of 2020 so you can be forgiven uh for having this set because

some stuff was happening at that time. Oh, was it? Yeah, things were going down.
I'm sure the Philadelphia Eagles were, you know, beginning their rise to glory again. That was a big thing.
Kansas City Chiefs were doing some racist shit, shockingly. Shockingly.
I'm sure Taylor Swift was doing something too. too but yeah this is like israel has for nearly a decade been trying to hack smear surveil and threaten the court 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 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 So if you've heard, you know, you will stand trial at The Hague.
That's what they're talking about. It has its most immediate roots in the tribunal's investigative perpetrators of genocides in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
The US and Israel are not members of the court. They never signed the Rome statute.
Russia withdrew in 2016. Curious time to withdraw.
Interesting. Fascinating yeah.
They just decided that it wasn't for them and off they went to do some war crimes. 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? 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.
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. Okay, so Trump, just like everything else he does, was condemned internationally for this, right? Including by several NATO allies, in so much as they really are NATO allies anymore,

given everything we've just talked about.

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 Netanyahu, to transit their airspace.

So, like, their full commitment to the ICC,

perhaps, can be questioned. This is a problem with the I the ICC right it doesn't have an integral enforcement mechanism yeah yeah I mean like Canada previously promised quote-unquote promised to arrest Netanyahu if they were ever like able to 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 at least than we previously had we we already like you know quote-unquote like condemned canada but like i'm interested to see trump like be more interested in actually pushing this further than it has been yeah i guess we'll see how it goes for people who are unfamiliar i do want to like really quickly mention that like palestine is a signatory uh and therefore war crimes that happen within palestine are covered by the court even if states such as israel are not signatories right and therefore they're still under the court's jurisdiction so that 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 the tech back end of everything the icc does trying to remove that from any united states involvement would be very hard well let's go on a quick ad break and return to talk about i don't know the treasury or something yeah let's talk about the treasury all right cool All right, we are back.

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.

It was a life-changing experience. It really warmed my heart.
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 Blueland. God.
Let's get some quick reactions from the panel sorry as a person born in Europe the idea of Buddy Carter authorizing the formation of Red White and Blueland is simply just like the fact that this is not a parody it's just fucking too much for me yeah yeah I mean well what it is is purposefully ridiculous it's a it's a flex It's a statement of the power that they have over their own party and the country. 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.
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. Honestly, I'm kind of

surprised because I would assume

maybe this is still in the works.

If Elon Musk can find a way to call this

thing X-Land is really

my concern. Yeah.

Yeah.

But no, I'm really interested in hearing from Greenlanders

genuinely. You can contact us at

coolzontips at proton.me

which is an encrypted email address that you can send emails to. Yeah, all right.
Let's talk about Trump potentially crashing the entire world economy. 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 fucking 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 treasury bonds um we will get to what those are in a second second, but I need to read the rest of this. It could be that a lot of those things don't count.
In other words, that some of the stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent. Therefore, maybe we have less debt than we thought.
Now, that's a very scary thing to say. Yeah, treasury bills are the primary underpinning of economic stability in this country.
T-bills are what large corporate institutions, when they have a lot of cash, what very wealthy people, it's where you park your money. And it's where foreign governments park a lot of their money.
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.

Yeah, for the global economy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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,

people simply do not believe that he means to do the thing he says he's going to do, right? Quote, this is from Reuters again. It could be treasury payments, which is not linked to treasury bonds, said Prashat Bahani, investment chief for Asia BMP Parabas Wealth Management.
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.
Now, this is something where these institutional investors, 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. He thinks that American debt works the same way as his own personal debt.
and no it doesn't i mean it's worth saying some bit so i mean just a very very basic shit about how national debt works right 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 that's what money is right these treasury bonds are, as we were talking about earlier, right? This is like the investment asset for literally the entire world. And there's trillions of dollars of these.
Actually, Japan is the largest holder of treasury bonds. China's sort of been selling some of theirs, but they have a lot of them.
Yeah. Probably good to be doing that.
Yeah, and it's also, you know, like, the fact that he's saying he's not going to pay these, yeah, like, 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. debt, which is a real problem for U.S.
trying to, like, get money from people. 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 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 and it's also another example of trump not understanding how the empire of his inherited works because like one of the one of the ways the u.s funds his 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's who buys u.s assets like it's china and u.s tributary states like japan for example which is just purely an american military protectorate right it's it's an it's sort of incredible system for the U S right.
You get a bunch of people and you, you know, you just, you just sort of perpetually keep borrowing money from them. And it's this thing where they don't understand who actually holds the power in the relationship, which is that the U S 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.
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 we'll we'll see if he moves on it he may simply forget about it or we're going to wake up one day and like the u.s's credit's going to be downgraded to like junk bond status and yeah everything's going to be chaos. So speaking of Trump trying to sort of like take shots at pillars of the

global... downgraded to like junk bond status and yeah everything's gonna be chaos so speaking of uh 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 most of that's actually from canada and mexico i think in their minds is the thing about chinese steel but it's mostly from can Canada and Mexico.
This is also a fucking shitshow because the US manufacturing capacity that we still have, and we still actually do have a decent amount of very high-tech manufacturing capacity, relies on this stuff, and this is going to make it more expensive. It's bad.
It will do nothing to deal with the fact that it doesn't produce steel anymore which is the product of that one day i'll do my structural chinese steel over capacity episode but you know it's it's the product of like half a century of of the global manufacturing economy you know becoming zero-sum and they're simply not being a large enough consumer market for all of industrial goods which means the production becomes increasingly 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 is he just straight up stole 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 they're like so they've been paid to the government in new york right this happened earlier today right this is yeah literally literally this is breaking news breaking news on wednesday this is coming out friday this episode is being recorded on wednesday everything that you hear if shit has happened in the last few days uh that's from the future we didn't know but yeah yeah he literally like they have taken 80 million dollars just from this bank account they just stole it the u.s federal government is just straight up robbing banks it's okay that came out today and said that don't worry your bank accounts are still safe everybody yeah and this is like

appropriated funds like for fema being safely secured in banks that have like literally been stolen funds that were approved by congress for a specific purpose right yeah and what's actually going to happen with this right because you would expect a even like a normal shitty mayor of new York to like go sicko mode.

However, comma.

Well, man.

However, comma.

Here's some Yahoo News. even like a normal shitty mayor of new york to like go sicko mode 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 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, it could risk federal funding.
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. Great.
Cool. This is the most, like, quid pro quo thing I've ever seen.
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 yeah we're gonna see it that's what we're gonna we've hit a singularity of corruption yes yeah istanbul is always the first stop yeah the only way they can go further than this is that eric adams is going to appoint rob lagoyevich his head of like bank robbery or something one can dream Mia one can dream there are a few other Ways they can go further than this is that Eric Adams is going to appoint Rob Lagojevich's head of, like, bank robbery or something.

One can dream, Mia.

One can dream.

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.

Speaking of corruption, let's pivot to ads. Alright, 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.
There was a transports ban that trump did an executive order about using a whole bunch of children as a prop uh very clearly trying to steal steal the charisma from uh whatever that governor who lost the election did with his uh free school lunch there anyway instead now it's you just you know hurt other children in the school by not making them be allowed to play sports.

So that happened.

And then a few other things have happened the past few weeks. I'm kind of just like catching up on because I've been really focused on like reporting on like Musk specifically.
And there's been a lot of other stuff the past few weeks. So I'm going to kind of get to that now.
the state department's travel website changed the acronym lgbt to lgb on a web page like warning

about like how dangerous it might be to like travel to like other countries with like worse legal protections say 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.

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.

So they've only changed the title part.

They haven't even bothered to edit the text.

No, because they also have another info page where they have just like control F LGBT to LGB as well. So this is like one of like many changes we're seeing across a whole bunch of 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 webpages for the FDA, Health and Human Services, and the CDC were allegedly brought back online, restoring their January 30th status.
They did this right before a court-mandated deadline to restore these pages.

I can now go back on to 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. This is something that we're still working on because this literally happened yesterday.

This is a small part of their current war on wokeness another aspect of this is there's been

a whole bunch of orders from federal agencies to ban specific woke keywords across like their

databases their like websites training information including from agencies like noah so just like the

weather and the national oceanic and atmospheric administration they released a memo banning specific words across the agency including words like ability acceptance access affirmation aggression allyship androgyne uh asexual belonging bias binary bisexual black culture dei discrimination diversity empathy empowerment equity, ethnicity, 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. The word white has been banned.
Safe space, social justice, underserved communities, race, privilege, power dynamics, Native American, multiculturalism. So just all of these, like, again, this is like, the party of free speech has banned all of these words.
And it's not, it's not just NOAA. Also, the National Science Foundation has released memos saying that They cannot have these words and it's not it's it's it's it's not just noah also the national science foundation has has released memos saying that they cannot have these words included in their documents because it could cause them to lose grant funding well it's the end for race science then because they can't do race science anymore there's a lot of similar words flagged in the national science foundation list of banned words like activism activists, activists, advocacy, barrier, bias, Black, Latinx, community, diversity, equity, cultural differences, cultural heritage, culturally responsive, diverse, you know, diverse community, diverse groups, diversified, diversifying, all this kind of stuff.
Ethnicity, equality, inclusion, marginalized trauma underappreciated stereotypes systemic underrepresentation uh undervalued victim i i love that you can no longer do scientific papers about systemic infections of your internal organs. Like, yeah, no, there's a lot of issues.
Anything that has a barrier.

Yeah. could no longer do scientific papers about systemic infections of your internal organs like yeah no there's anything that has a barrier 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 gonna lose their funding like yeah 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 this very basic stuff it may just result in like the tick-tock-ification of this like trying to spell these words with like a different letter talking about cute little boots or whatever it is 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 well but like like hold on there's something else there's something else we need to talk about too which is like like you are required by law as part of your grant proposal like have things that talk about like how this is going to affect different communities etc etc is 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 and this is this is one of these things where it's like like they'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 so like yeah who knows it's a really weird situation 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 they're like they're ethical boundaries and like what you're doing is okay but i i can't see it being possible to do an irb and not say these words yeah no and like we have to do scientific studies on like how how various disabilities affect people's lives like like very basic stuff like this all of these types of things it's really bad and these things like are going into effect i know like this this stuff is still happening columnist dr lucky tran uh 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 the move aims to ensure that quote unquote terms appear in the work.
Banned terms must be scrubbed. Great.
It's all really bad. Yep.
And we're seeing 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. Christ.
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. When the website was first discovered, the employee profiles were labeled under targets.
This has since been changed to dossiers. Like very, very frightening, like very bad stuff, like very obvious intimidation.
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. Columnist Jamal Bowie says, quote, They are are mostly targeting black employees so this is quite literally just a repeat of ridgiro wilson's segregationist purge of the federal government and and like yes like all of this all of this like push against quote-unquote dei is like very clearly just like white supremacist segregation in action 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.
And to avoid doing that, you can only hire white people. And Trump's transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, sent out a memo directing staff on where to direct like grant funds.
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. This is like very, very obviously what they're doing.

Yeah. And there I mean, this is extending to the military now under Hegseth.
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. 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 a recruit.

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 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 military and probably to an extent law enforcement. We look at agencies like the FBI.
There's a book called The Dictator's Army that heavily focuses on how changes like this impact operational efficiency. 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? 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? 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? So you have an understanding, which is very common when regimes like this take over in democratic societies.
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 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 and that 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 and 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 like banning, is these things are not DEI. These things are very old.
These are pretty standard things that have been roped into what it means to be in America. And we're now just seeing this crusade against DEI being used to just reverse affirmative action and specifically select for white Christian applicants.
yeah and like that's the entirety of this point here like they're they're using dei as like as 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 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 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 to the 60s where the u.s is part this giant anti-communist purge, it was on, basically went through and found every gay government official and fucking ran them out. That's another aspect of this whole thing, right? The way these people understand the world in order to purify their white state, right? 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 this sort of transformational project of changing this sort of like just changing the composition of what the u.s is into like and how how its state functions and how they can to what like what level of violence they can bring about on.
And they've roped these things together so closely now, like the anti-trans school executive order. Only the first half of that executive order was actually about the gender ideology stuff.
The second half was aimed at curbing what they called discriminatory equity ideology, which is D-E-I. 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 like noble historical project it's like it's stuff that they've tried to do before with that like uh with that like 1776 project that the new york times reported on part of trump's, quote, an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America's founding and foundational principles.
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.
The concept that celebration of America's greatness and history is proper. And then the order goes on to try to ban the concept of white guilt, saying that teachers can get in trouble if any of their students feel guilty about things that people of that same race have done in the past, and making sure that teachers do not teach things in a way that could possibly make a student feel quote-unquote guilt yeah they use the word children actually not students which like is fundamentally something we don't do in education right we refer to our students as students because we respect them as people 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 totally we you know we certainly do discuss these things in university and like it's fundamentally shows a complete lack of understanding of how education works to call them children 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 if you look at when trump like comes down the fucking elevator for the first time so i think people may remember like after ferguson in 2015 there was baltimore where there was you know huge riots uh massive confrontations with the police like massive anti-racist actions 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 it, 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 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.
history is taught to reflect that this country was like, again a settler colonial empire built by slave labor that expanded its territory through genocide, which is just objectively true about how the U.S. started.
But the thing is, that's not good for these people's projects, right? Saying that out loud is a fucking issue for them. And so their attempt to roll back was gained from sort of the black uprisings is culminating all of this shit with, like, the purge of black workers from the federal government, with all of these things ordering you to, like, that's why they're talking about all of these weird, 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 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 like earlier today we we learned that the nih has finally uh has finally acknowledged that the grant funding freeze is illegal. And this is probably due to pressure from news coverage about all of the temporary restraining order violations through the continued freezing of funds.
And now the NIH is saying, because of these orders, we will resume funding. The first TRO was like ago on february 1st so it's not like like they just learned about this 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 do do not do not become automatically enforced so this is this is like one one step now uh you can go to a popular.info who has been breaking the news on on this specifically and then some some breaking news uh that i have here on drop site quote-unquote armored tesla forecast estimated to win 400 million dollars of state department contract funds what so this could go one of two ways this could either go a really funny way yeah it's gonna say or it could go a really sad way 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 yep yeah it was this is very funny because trump went off on a on like a tangent about uh electric tanks horrible idea campaign trail a couple of times horrible idea yeah 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 sure 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 themselves just because batteries do that sometimes yes yeah you never know what you're gonna get i'm excited this is gonna make everything a lot safer for our uh our men and women in greenland i'm guessing yeah yeah, batteries thrive in the cold.
Red, white, and blue. Yeah, I do love the new M1A whatever, seven Abrams that gets four miles on a charge.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then again, detonates.
Wait six months to use a solar panel to field recharge in a place where it doesn't get light for six months. Yeah, magnificent.
Upwards of 10 miles a year, yes. All right, well, that is it for us today on It Could Happen Here.
James, do you want to talk about the tip line again? Yeah, yeah. 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 ProtonMail. That doesn't mean that it's super secure.
It simply means it's end-to-end encrypted if you send from a Proton address. The email address is coolzontips at proton.me.
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. 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. We reported the news.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.
Thanks for listening. Amazon Pharmacy presents Painful Thoughts.
20 more minutes to kill in the pharmacy before my prescription is ready.

Maybe I'll grab some deeply discounted out-of-season Halloween candy.

Hmm, I never had a chocolate pumpkin with raisins before.

Those were raisins, right?

Next time, use Amazon Pharmacy.

We deliver.

And no, those were not raisins. Amazon Pharmacy.
Healthcare just got less painful. This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.
Have you ever felt that uneasy anxiety when the 4 p.m. hour strikes? The creeping meal-related distress that happens when you don't quite feel prepared? You know, dinner dread? Let's get rid of that unpleasant feeling forever with one word, Stouffers.
No matter what happens, you'll have a dinner plan that everyone loves with Stouffers. Some chicken enchiladas or a cheesy chicken and broccoli pasta bake is always welcome, whether it is plan A or plan D-licious.
Not gonna lie, I eat the lasagna once a week. And that's a fact.
When the clock strikes dinner, think Stouffer's. Shop now for family favorites.
ID Tech, the first and most trusted tech camp, is where kids ages 7 to 17 find their people. The coding and creating people.
The fire-breathing, shell-spinning BattleBots people. The just-as-happy-building games as they are playing them people.
At 75 prestigious college campuses all across across the country, ID Tech features over 50 epic courses like BattleBots, AI, and machine learning, game design, and more. Visit IDTech.com and use code IDTech to save $150 on a week that's guaranteed to be a highlight of summer.
This podcast is supported by BetterHelp, offering licensed therapists you can connect with via video, phone, or chat. Here's BetterHelp Head of Clinical Operations, Hess Hugh Jo, discussing who can benefit from therapy.
I think a lot of people think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day. But before you get to that point, I think once you start even noticing that you feel a little bit off and you can't maintain this harmony that you once had in relationships, that could be a sign that maybe you want to go talk to somebody.
There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from improved insight about ourselves and who we are and how we behave with other people. So if you're human,

that's like a good indicator that you could benefit from talking to somebody.

Find out if therapy is right for you. Visit BetterHelp.com today.
That's BetterHelp.com.