Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 169

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York,

Starting point is 00:00:25 since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio, Apple Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone 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

Starting point is 00:00:56 new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to Dick. It happened here, a podcast about things falling apart and them continuing to fall apart. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. Hi, Mia. Glad to hear about whatever's going to shit today. Yeah, so before we start talking about imperialism, we're starting every fucking 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 cettled by cops on bridges. They did this in Occupy in 2011.

Starting point is 00:01:36 They did it in 2018 during the Occupy ICE protest. The people did it in 2020. People did it last year during the power sign and came and people are doing it again this year. Simply do not lead a march onto a bridge. Yep. Or a tunnel for DDI reasons. We would also include a tunnel. Yes.

Starting point is 00:01:51 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, like, make 1,000% sure you can hold both sides of the bridge. Yeah. Both of them. You need to hold both

Starting point is 00:02:10 of them. Yeah. And almost certainly you can't. So only you, only you, dear listener, can prevent 4,000 more people from getting kettled on fucking 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 has been me as public service announcement of a bridge kettle. 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 started war with Mexico in the next, like,

Starting point is 00:03:04 few months. Yeah, it's great. It's banging. Everything's going as well. 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 terrorist threat of tariffs go up in the market. it's sort of tank and fear of them. There's been a lot of sort of defense of like free trade in ways where I don't think

Starting point is 00:03:36 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?

Starting point is 00:04:00 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 do you know what a huge portion of U.S.-Mexico trade is? It is the same company,

Starting point is 00:04:12 the same company moving an auto part from one side of the border to the other side. Back and forth across the border. Yeah, yeah, so I was going to say. Yes, back and forth. Right. So there's a lot of different people being paid different wages

Starting point is 00:04:22 to make the same thing. Yeah. Or if someone paid lower wages can make it and then someone paid more can QC it and then they can send it back. Yep, yeah, yep. 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

Starting point is 00:04:42 movement used to make. You know, David Graber 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. 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 are some things we're thinking about specifically nation state trade, like trade is important because, you know, even the same

Starting point is 00:05:16 corporation moving goods around, right, that does contribute to how much foreign currency a country has, right? And so, okay, there's things like balance. of payments where if you run out of, 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. And that's a very common way that like this like happens in Sri Lanka, for example, pretty recently. This is a way for your economy to blow up. But that's kind of an edge case in terms of how global trade actually operates.

Starting point is 00:05:42 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 Economy, Cities Bridging the U.S.-Mexico Divide

Starting point is 00:06:03 by James Greber. 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 trouble's attempting to apply. Yeah. And

Starting point is 00:06:19 it's worth actually actually understanding what this does by looking at what actually is traded between, for example, the U.S. and Mexico. And the place I want to start is that one of the largest kinds of goods that is moved from Mexico to the U.S. is computer equipment. And nobody fucking talks about this ever. 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 monitor, screens, like computer equipment in general. And a lot of that stuff comes into the U.S.

Starting point is 00:06:55 Yeah. And there's also, you know, the thing that we started this episode on, that's I think the thing I got 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.

Starting point is 00:07:20 You can move stuff around. A lot of that comes to Mexico. And then also, like, a lot of it is, like, whole cars that are like a finish assembly, like in Mexico and they get shipped across the border. Right. There's a lot of things there. And these are also, like, all the same international car companies that work in the U.S. So it's like Toyota.

Starting point is 00:07:37 It's like Honda. Yeah. I mean, these are your American trucks often, right? Or like... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ford does this too. what's GM now, Staloris. Yeah, like Chevy GM,

Starting point is 00:07:50 as well as like Toyota, Toyota I think has a big plan I forget exactly where, but along the border somewhere, if I recall correctly. Yeah, this is extremely common. Yeah, and what this is, right, like this is multinational capitalist companies who are moving their products across the border. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:07 And this gets counted as Mexico doing trade. You know, one of the things in, one of the questions in this book is about why Mexico, economy never had the kind of economic bump that China did from the amount of industrial production, if you look at the East Asian Tigers, 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 that developed their economies and you're talking like, say, your South Korea's, etc., etc. Like a lot of those countries,

Starting point is 00:08:32 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 like a place where 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 trade going? It's like, well, it's going to a bunch of American and Japanese car companies. Yeah. Because it's those multinationals are the people who actually reap all of the benefits.

Starting point is 00:09:01 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 like the average income, right? It's created a greater disparity of income than at any point. Yeah, yeah. Previous to that. You'll hear people, too, I was talking to a friend about this yesterday in Tijuana,

Starting point is 00:09:23 like how, like, what NAFTA did, like, if you look at 1994, I think it's a really good example of what you're talking about, of like, yeah, we opened up that border to international companies to do tariff-free back and forth, right? But we didn't open it up to people. Yeah. At the same time, we had Operation Gatekeeper, right? like enforced much harsher border enforcement.

Starting point is 00:09:42 And the two things in parallel really kind of indicate what the free trade is going for. Yeah, yeah. And this is another old anti-globalization thing. Like Graver talks about this. It's like, yeah, 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 dictate wages to

Starting point is 00:10:03 them and then moving capital around the world to avoid them. Exactly. Yeah. And we're going to get into this more in a second. I want to talk about some, you know, some of the other things that are that are exported from Mexico, fruits, vegetables, alcohol, or 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 U.S., 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.

Starting point is 00:10:42 So this oil is getting shipped around because they don't have the refinery facilities to refine the specific kind of crude oil or whatever that they're extracting. So, like, yeah, it's, again, one of these situations where it's not really like Mexico is sending its oil to the U.S. It's like, I mean, kind of, right? That's like one of the more direct-ish ones.

Starting point is 00:11:02 But largely what's happening is that, like, again, like it's an oil company moving stuff to, you know, moving stuff around to do refinement of it so they can sell it. 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

Starting point is 00:11:27 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 direct investment from China, et cetera, et cetera. And all of these things, you know, like 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, are driven by a lot of things, you know, I mean,

Starting point is 00:11:47 stuff like like currency valuations, like local tax laws, like state and corporate planning policies, like demands you're just 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 that has on wages or like, you know,

Starting point is 00:12:01 like straight up uprisings, right? The geographer, David Harvey, he gets credit for popularizing the term the spatial fix though other people were already using it, and I don't like his work much, but he did. He is the guy who gets credited with this. He describes, you know, the sort of free trade regime that persisted roughly through like, I mean, it was taking shape in sort of the 80s, like the 80s through like roughly now

Starting point is 00:12:24 as the spatial fix for declining profitability, right? 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 can say that. we are back. Okay, so let's talk about this, this sort of declining profitability and the fix that capitalism sort of finds for this, right? You know, through the 70s, there's this sort of spiraling unemployment and inflation and the economy is sort of going to shit. And it's happening everywhere because of sort of like structural overcapacity in manufacturing. And the solution to this is a spatial fix, right, which is destroying some manufacturing capacity and just moving it to other places. 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

Starting point is 00:13:21 and then moving capital to poorer countries, the 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, dock workers and minors, right? Those are not really jobs that are employing large numbers of people

Starting point is 00:13:43 in the UK anymore. And like, as a result, those working class towns are just destitute. So, like, that previously thriving and well-organized working class that we had in Northern England, it's left kind of like, it has to relocate or reorganize, right? And it destroys

Starting point is 00:13:59 those, like, 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, like, neoliberalism was, like, planned, or to what extent it was,

Starting point is 00:14:16 a sort of reaction to a bunch of crises, but specifically this kind of like off-shoring and the container ship's a big part of this, but like this specific kind of thing

Starting point is 00:14:25 and even the transition from cold 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

Starting point is 00:14:34 the power like miners unions. And you know, one of the major places that this went obviously like a lot of these things go to Mexico. The sort of first round of these go to like

Starting point is 00:14:45 the original like Asian tiger economies that I was talking about, but I mean, places like Indonesia to a lot of those economies sort of Thailand. Those economies kind of blew up in the 90s. But, you know, one of the largest, the 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

Starting point is 00:15:17 at Tiananmen were workers, right? Most of the 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,

Starting point is 00:15:32 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 how fuck 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

Starting point is 00:15:52 slaughteres 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

Starting point is 00:16:10 Chinese urban working class and replaces them with a more exploitable and less organized like migrant working class. Yeah. And that is the class that like to this day right now is like the engine of global capital or like those like 300 million migrant workers. Yeah. And they can be in different parts of the world, right?

Starting point is 00:16:25 Like, uh... Well, 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 China's migrant worker population is like almost the size of the US. It's like the fourth largest country in the world just by like itself. It's...

Starting point is 00:16:40 Yeah, that's mad. Yeah. I was just thinking of today like the, um, the, um, the sky. jam compounds which exists on the border between Myanmar and Thailand. Like they actually, Thailand just cut power off to them today. I mean,

Starting point is 00:16:53 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, 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?

Starting point is 00:17:05 Like be re-taking care of and of course those were funded by USA so they don't exist as of this week, which is pretty brutal. But like, yeah, these people, These migrant workers who come from all over the world, hoping for a chance at the things that capitalism have promised them, are the people who have to be exploited so that people in wealthy countries can have their treats. Yeah, and those workers are the basis of modern global capitalism, right?

Starting point is 00:17:30 Like those Chinese workers, for example, like 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, those dust clouds. like, whiley coyote will take you to prison. Yeah, like even trying to get your union to like do something, like trying to have your own

Starting point is 00:17:50 independent people elected to that union, like can and will get you arrested. And like, and even like sort of Chinese labor oppression like is pretty intense, but it's like, you know, we're also talking about countries

Starting point is 00:18:00 like Columbia. It's like, well, yeah, okay, so what happens the union organizes in Colombia? It's like they get being shot by paramilitaries with machine guns, right? And that's, that's what the sort of spatial fix was,

Starting point is 00:18:09 right? Was moving jobs to places where the ruling class to 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

Starting point is 00:18:23 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

Starting point is 00:18:39 from other countries and accumulating it in American corporations. Like that's what free trade is. Yeah. And it's also, you know, secondarily, right, it is a debt system. It's based on forcing countries to like payback 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 an entire nation is just going to like pay debts to Bank of America. Yeah. And you know, the thing about this is that this is actually a very, very efficient

Starting point is 00:19:15 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 US 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

Starting point is 00:19:31 the current system to work like it does because they can make more money? I can guess. It's the products and services. I'm excited to hear which one we get. You know, it can be It can be anything at really at this point, who knows. We are back.

Starting point is 00:19:57 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, you know, and this has been true of the U.S. for like ages and ages, right? you know, they prop up right-wing military dictatorships constantly. But the thing is, democracy and human rights are things that, like, people like. And so, you know, it's a weapon that he and his sort of brand of conservatives, like,

Starting point is 00:20:32 anti-communist conservatives, like, wielded it against communism. And it was a very, very powerful ideological weapon, because 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. There's an international community in that countries are like working together. And this is a very, very powerful ideological thing. You know, I mean, this is something like, you lived through

Starting point is 00:21:08 this. Yeah. Like, God, there's probably listening to you didn't live through this now. Dear God. But like, like the Iraq war, right? The U.S. didn't unilaterally invade Iraq. Now, now it was called the quote unquote coalition of the welding and included like, like they dragged Australia in the war by threatening to like destroy their like milk shipping contracts with the Iraqi government.

Starting point is 00:21:29 Like so, you know. Yeah, you had all kinds of people running around in Iraq for a while that like, yeah. Probably the United Kingdom played a big role in it, like an outside role given it being a relatively small country. Yeah. And you know, and this is the way that you do, you know, even just overtly straight up imperialist stuff.

Starting point is 00:21:45 Like invading Iraq, right? was still done under the auspices of like multinational like coalitions. Yep. And the thing about it's 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.

Starting point is 00:22:06 Like he's turning on his allies 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 has caused with his, like, threat to put tariffs on. Like, he's caused these people to become anti-American. And this is the same thing with Mexico, right? Even the sort of, like, the nominally center left

Starting point is 00:22:28 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,

Starting point is 00:22:44 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. Yeah. Like it's kind of different. Or Panama, fuck. Like, you know, I was in Panama September of 24. And I went to the Canal Museum. And Panama, like, it's very proud of its history of independence, right?

Starting point is 00:23:07 It's relatively short and hard earned and paid for him blood. But, like, yeah, I traveled. I'm a U.S. citizen. 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.

Starting point is 00:23:20 Yeah, because Trump is trying to tape the Panama Canal back. And before we get into, like, you know, I mean, I guess we can get into here some of the stuff that he's doing, right? He's pulled out of the international criminal court and is putting sanctions on it. He has been trying to use the sanctions that he's been threatening to apply to Canada to get Canada to join the U.S. Like, he's trying to conquer Canada. It's so fucking silly. Yeah, he's been trying to, he's been trying to force the government of Denmark to buy Greenland. Sell Greenland, right?

Starting point is 00:23:45 Like, he wants to purchase Greenland from him. Yeah, he wants to buy Greenland. Yeah. There was the whole sort of showdown with Columbia over Columbia'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?

Starting point is 00:24:09 Yeah. The last time the U.S. 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 U.S. tried to take Canada, they burn the capital down. So, like, you know. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:25 But this is something that even under like 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. What? Absolutely not. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:38 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 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.

Starting point is 00:24:57 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 working exactly how Trump wants it to work. Now, if the U.S. wants to rebuild a manufacturing economy, that is technically possible, right? Reagan was able to do this, but what Reagan did,

Starting point is 00:25:16 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.

Starting point is 00:25:23 And the Plaza Accords was this, this thing he did in the 80s where he forced Japan, Japan was the important one, but like Japan, West Germany,

Starting point is 00:25:31 I think there are a couple other countries. Like, he forced them to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar because, like,

Starting point is 00:25:38 if, you have a currency and it's worth a bunch of like another person's currency. So, like, you know, you have like the dollar and it's worth like a million like yen or whatever the fuck, right?

Starting point is 00:25:47 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 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 a few minutes. So there's a very, very good essay written right after 2008 called What's Good for Goldman Sachs is good for America by the economist Robert Brenner. And what the strategy became, and this is a strategy

Starting point is 00:26:25 that was originally pioneered by Japan that we took, was instead of having like a manufacturing economy, like a production based economy, you have an economy based on the value of assets, right? So assets are things that you own, right? This is stocks, bonds, like real estate, which is important for 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, right?

Starting point is 00:26:53 And, you know, you make it very easy to borrow money. Yeah. Now, obviously, this produced a series of, like, staggering economic collapses, including, like, the dot-com collapse, 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, you know, they were sort of able to stabilize the system economically, right?

Starting point is 00:27:17 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 wealth 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 don't think, like, the people, people who built like American financial capitalists, right? Like the people who designed the trade system. They don't think the same way Trump does. Trump is a fucking real estate guy, right? And this is how he sees the world, right?

Starting point is 00:27:52 He thinks in terms of land and borders and territorial control. And he thinks in terms of like what physical thing can I steal from someone in order to make money, right? And that, you know, this is why you're trying to like steal the Panama Canal. And he thinks this way instead of like things that are more abstract, like debt servicing and like, you know, the sort of lines of power and the coalition building. Right. He looks at a map of Greenland and goes, this looks really big, I want it.

Starting point is 00:28:16 And now he's going to try to use the American Empire to just cease this. Yeah, he sees things in terms of like raw power. It's a very undeveloped notion of like power, right? 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 wrote books about soft power, right? The idea of the U.S. power to persuade rather than power to kind of, rather than like hard power, which comes in tanks or tariffs, I guess.

Starting point is 00:28:50 Joseph Nye is no longer relevant. Yes, yes. No, we're back in pure hard power. And something I think is, you know, very alarming that I want to close on, is the extent to which, like, the U.S. media is just sort of, just wants to do propaganda for it. I'm going to read a quote from a, CNN article. Again, this is CNN.

Starting point is 00:29:09 Quote, the subject heading is the U.S. has been expanding for its entire history. This is an article, the title of which is Trump, is Trump wants to redraw the map of the Western Hemisphere? For fuck sake, like 2025 Monroe Doctrine posting on CNN.com.

Starting point is 00:29:25 Literally, literally. Okay, okay. You are so far ahead of this thing because the next, I'm going to read the one I was going to read first. Uplift, civilizing Christian eyes. 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 sake, this is, I cannot explain how, like, I have taught this as a thing in history

Starting point is 00:29:50 classes for more than a decade from the perspective of, like, that was fucked up, it's 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 machine. 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.

Starting point is 00:30:19 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. Yeah, like an angel sweeping across the planes, fucking manifest destiny. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, and 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, yeah, yeah, yeah. 18th century land empires, you know, got money by conquering people and, like, extracting tribute from them directly.

Starting point is 00:30:51 And then also, you know, they were mercantilist empires, right? So they got, they got a bunch of their money. And this is something that Trump explicitly talks about is, like, he wants, he thinks he can raise revenue from, like, terrorists, which, like, no, he can't. But, like, what it can do is use the threat of tariffs to, like, force countries to do. whatever the fuck he wants. And this is the kind of imperialism that we're in now. It is a definite,

Starting point is 00:31:08 substantive break from what we've seen in the US for a century, more than a century. Yeah. And I think it's important for people to understand exactly how this functions.

Starting point is 00:31:18 Yeah. And yeah. It's sick. We're going into new opium wars. It's going to be so fun. Yeah. It's great.

Starting point is 00:31:26 Bob, this is the spitting app in here. Do not get cettled on bridges and go out into the world and make trouble. If people want to read more about the

Starting point is 00:31:34 early, like globalized, the previous year of neoliberal globalization, like Naomi Klein has some good stuff, and I think Joe Stiglitz does as well. We can, uh, yeah, yeah, I would also recommend David Graber's direct action in ethnography,

Starting point is 00:31:50 which is him writing about the original, like anti, like, alter globalization protests and his, like, time in them. Yeah. So,

Starting point is 00:31:56 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 the, great thing. Yeah, bring back clown block. That'll get us through it.

Starting point is 00:32:07 Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 00:33:04 Using the justification of removing government bureaucracy, Musk and the Trump administration have installed their own batch of bureaucratic tech oligarchs, made up of former Tesla and SpaceX interns and engineers, Teal Fellowship researchers, Palantir employees, eugenics enthusiasts, and literal Nick Fuentes pilled groipers. 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,

Starting point is 00:33:44 and more federal employees have been put on leave, including the entirety of use aid. 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.

Starting point is 00:34:31 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,

Starting point is 00:35:18 a private equity executive that specializes in downsizing corporate real estate, has decided that, quote, non-D-FED federal building space should be reduced 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.

Starting point is 00:36:10 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.

Starting point is 00:36:44 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, unquote. 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

Starting point is 00:37:27 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 clap trap 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? 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

Starting point is 00:38:15 titled Tales from the Swamp, how federal bureaucrats resisted President Trump. The author, James Shrek, a former Heritage Fellow, credits, quote unquote, hostile career employees for, quote, unquote,

Starting point is 00:38:29 refusing to implement policies. Shrek says, quote, many career employees refused or defied directives. Withheld information, slow-walked projects that they opposed, performed unacceptably,

Starting point is 00:38:42 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.

Starting point is 00:39:02 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

Starting point is 00:39:31 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

Starting point is 00:39:58 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,

Starting point is 00:40:19 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.

Starting point is 00:40:57 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 Jarvin. 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

Starting point is 00:41:32 after this ad break. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and get ready to say, 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,

Starting point is 00:42:17 as Trump himself became a target for investigations. After the Mar-Lago raid in August of 2022, Marjorie Taylor Green tweeted, defund the FBI. Arizona Representative Paul Gosar joined in attacks on the bureau, posting, We must destroy the FBI, we must save America.

Starting point is 00:42:39 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 Wright Publication, Compact Magazine, featured a slightly better written article by the same title, Abolish the FBI.

Starting point is 00:43:00 At CPAC in March of 2023, Matt Gates, 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 heal. 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

Starting point is 00:43:48 clearance revoked after espousing J6 conspiracy theories, later called to, quote, abolish the FBI at a Heritage Foundation Symposium on the, quote, weaponization of the U.S. 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. 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

Starting point is 00:44:37 several federal agencies, starting with the FBI, as well as the CIA and the IRS. abolish the DEA, you know, I imagine of all the places to abolish, I don't know if that's the best one. I'd start with the FBI. I'd start with the CIA. I'd start with the IRS. There's a lot of, you know, the DEA. Now, maybe I know agent-level guys, so if they're going after narcos and stuff like that, I'm perhaps a little bit more forgiving. They don't seem to be setting up or entrapping people like the FBI. The Trump administration has already begun the process to dismantle large, waths of the FBI before Cash Patel has even been confirmed by the Senate. Eight top FBI officials have been fired or forced to resign by order of acting deputy

Starting point is 00:45:23 attorney general, Emile Boeve, 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, Boeve 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.

Starting point is 00:46:08 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

Starting point is 00:46:48 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

Starting point is 00:47:32 conservative workforce. Alternative agencies perceived as being more loyal to Trump, like Homeland and 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 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

Starting point is 00:48:14 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.

Starting point is 00:48:54 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 Broadcasters' 24, 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

Starting point is 00:49:32 the DOJ. Opposition to the Department of Education was a frequent topic at the 24 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 R&C 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-Dodge chopping block. The administration is drafting a sweeping executive order while Trump says he wants his education nominee,

Starting point is 00:50:18 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

Starting point is 00:51:04 Fork in the Road resignation buyout offer, while others have been fired for alleged links to DEI. Without someone like Elon Musk and 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 Yarvins' 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

Starting point is 00:51:53 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

Starting point is 00:52:41 anti-Biden 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.

Starting point is 00:53:13 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 named-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,

Starting point is 00:53:40 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 Superpack 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

Starting point is 00:54:21 federal bureaucracy. Trump gave a rare compliment to Musk, calling him the greatest cutter, followed up by saying, quote, I need an Elon Musk. I need someone that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts. I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the states, unquote. 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.

Starting point is 00:54:53 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.

Starting point is 00:55:29 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 coworkers underestimated Doge's ability to physically carry out Musk's suggestions with no congressional oversight or authority. As the election ramped up, Musk's SuperPack mobilized thousands of canvassers across key swing states and collected data

Starting point is 00:56:01 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 SuperPack. 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 Mara Lago.

Starting point is 00:56:38 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.

Starting point is 00:57:35 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 Stoge 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

Starting point is 00:58:22 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 and 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.

Starting point is 00:59:05 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, 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 speed run a full reboot of the administrative state.

Starting point is 00:59:38 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.

Starting point is 01:00:00 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

Starting point is 01:00:19 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.

Starting point is 01:00:40 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

Starting point is 01:00:58 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.

Starting point is 01:01:25 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,

Starting point is 01:01:56 there is 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 Yarvan, 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,

Starting point is 01:02:23 which subsequently reshapes the structure of government akin to a corporation. Though in Yarvon'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,

Starting point is 01:02:45 and, quote, run the executive branch without any interference from Congress or the courts, to quote, Yervin, while President Trump reviews the CEO's performance in the background. Yervin 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 a 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,

Starting point is 01:03:34 Musk is the easiest guy to blame and push out of the administration's inner circle. The first step in Yarvon's plan has the Trump campaign running on centralizing executive 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

Starting point is 01:04:24 Musk and Peter Thiel. The stupidity of Doge was almost a secret weapon. The cryptocurrency, meamness 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 Yarvon'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

Starting point is 01:05:14 from their in-house press offices, and replaced them with one American news, the New York Post, Breitbart, and Huff Post. 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, quote, the eye of Sauron is on more than just politico. It's all the media, unquote. In terms of attacks on academia,

Starting point is 01:05:44 the federal grant freeze has had devastating effects on university research. Another step in Yarvan'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 you.

Starting point is 01:06:05 Yarvin. So far, the Trump administration has effectively sidesteped 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 loan. security guard standing outside USAID and the Department of Education has been enough to deter resistance

Starting point is 01:06:40 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

Starting point is 01:06:57 over to the president, then we no longer really have a democracy, or at least the constitutional democracy that was created. you know, 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,

Starting point is 01:07:18 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, quote, contains several ambiguous terms and provisions

Starting point is 01:07:43 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 a 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

Starting point is 01:08:18 from California Representative Darrell 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, unquote. And on Sunday, Vice President J.D. Vance posted a statement undermining judicial power. Quote, if a judge tried to tell a general

Starting point is 01:08:59 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, unquote. 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 Yervin's plan.

Starting point is 01:09:30 Centralize the police, nationalize local law enforcement to place them under federal control. Trump has flirted with his tactic in the past when he deputized Washington police as U.S. Marshals to kill Michael Reinal in 2020. Doge staff threatened to call U.S. Marshals when U.S. officials, who have since been fired, denied them access to classified systems.

Starting point is 01:09:53 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 Yarvon's plan, mobilize populist support. But crucially, don't wait until you're at your weakest.

Starting point is 01:10:23 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

Starting point is 01:10:38 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 Yarvon'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,

Starting point is 01:11:01 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

Starting point is 01:11:30 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.

Starting point is 01:11:51 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

Starting point is 01:12:47 think of doing this. And he's just too old. quote. 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.

Starting point is 01:13:38 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. 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 shatterzone.substack.com, and it's also the previous episode of this podcast.

Starting point is 01:15:01 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 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.

Starting point is 01:15:56 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

Starting point is 01:16:14 of Education are not new. Reagan famously kind of pioneered the rights focus on this, but it's been something they've like struggled to deal sizable blows against, especially in terms of wanting to abolish the organization. Could you talk about like the history

Starting point is 01:16:30 of conservative attacks against the department. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's always been this state rights issue that's been with America since its founding. Obviously, it was a big part of the Civil War, big part of the Civil Rights Movement, you know, big part of the Affordable Health Care Act debate. So you always have this state's rights argument going on, and at least amongst the folks that are worried about that, public education comes up as being a target,

Starting point is 01:16:55 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 a abolish the Department of Education, even this rallying call from the new right in the past few years to abolish the FBI, general claims of, you know, like draining the swamp. These types of like old,

Starting point is 01:17:40 almost like stereotypical claims that now, through Musk, they've been able to like weasel their way into actually dismantling like large, large systems that make the like everyday functionality of the government possible. What should people know right now about the current attacks on the Department of Education? Trump is still allegedly. drafting in executive order. He'll probably have to work through Congress, but we'll see the decree to which he even needs to do that.

Starting point is 01:18:08 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 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

Starting point is 01:18:24 that we've seen, it is interesting that the White House seems to distinguish between the things that it can do unilaterally, right, without Congress and those things that would need Congress. 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's 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

Starting point is 01:19:02 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 or implicitly acknowledging that need Congress's help, because 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

Starting point is 01:19:42 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 and Slate that that says, look, you know, the federal role in public education predates the Constitution itself. You know, probably no one, and not many listeners are familiar ever heard of the Northwest ordinances of 1785 and 1787. But before we even had the 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 and the very fabric of what it means to be

Starting point is 01:20:25 a state before we even have a constitution. And so that's very important as 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 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,

Starting point is 01:21:02 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, you know, hand over the spoils to teachers. This is an idea about what it means. to have democracy in America. And public education is a centerpiece of that and the federal government has been pushing it for 250 years. And that's a good thing. It's a good thing. How do you think that relates to the administration's attempts to centralize executive power though? Like if you look at what happened with you say it, right? This agency that has been

Starting point is 01:21:36 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. exist. 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 like,

Starting point is 01:21:59 Congress is not willing to fight them on that seemingly. They're not willing to call them on that. They're almost willing to acquies their like appropriations ability as well as, you know, the ability to have actually have to like remove departments from existence or create new ones.

Starting point is 01:22:15 Yeah. So you're picking up on a threat 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, you know, a democracy, or at least the constitutional democracy that was created, you know, 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, like that, 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

Starting point is 01:22:52 place. You know, fortunately, there still is a legal apparatus. I mean, even if Congress isn't standing up, shouting and complaining, it's still the case. The president can't just do whatever he wants, and hopefully the courts, you know, 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 just, it's not just about Trump.

Starting point is 01:23:35 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 Arnie Duncan in a case or against the United States Department of Education in 2012 or 14 or something like that because the department was taking power that it clearly did not have in regard to no child left behind waivers. And, you know, I told the current administration, as much as I hate it, right? I wish we could just wipe away student debt. I feel bad for my students who have huge debt.

Starting point is 01:24:10 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.

Starting point is 01:24:34 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 like break the government temporarily to like their goals be enacted. And at a certain point, it's really tricky when the thing that you always hear is, you know, like, hopefully the courts will step in. Hopefully they'll do something.

Starting point is 01:25:07 If things get really bad, who will, like, literally stop them? In terms of, like, the courts told them to halt the funding freeze. And there's still grants that they are refusing to issue that were already approved legally need to be followed through on that they are still withholding. And it's really frightening when it comes down to, like, basic level of, like, is there people, military police who will enforce this if things get really bad? that's something I don't have like a complete confidence in anymore.

Starting point is 01:25:34 Well, you know, I deal with this every year at the beginning of my constitutional law class, right? 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.

Starting point is 01:26:05 So for when Brown versus Board of Education was decided, it was reportedly the case that the president said, you know, if the court wants to desegregate schools, let it do it itself. 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 a 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.

Starting point is 01:26:47 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 something. 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.

Starting point is 01:27:09 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 in 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 or three,

Starting point is 01:28:07 three years ago. And he expressed desire for what he called a quote unquote de-wokification program. Which again, like, sounds silly, but this is basically happening now. He extrapolated and said, quote, 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.

Starting point is 01:28:37 and say, the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it. And I feel like we're getting closer and closer to like this scenario. I'm sorry, where did J.D. Vance make this statement? What context? On Jack Murphy's podcast, Jack Murphy is like a far-up commentator. Vance is invoking the political philosophy of Curtis Yarvan, who is becoming increasingly popular in the new right. Lots of what, what Musk and Trump, by extension, have been doing the past few weeks is taken

Starting point is 01:29:06 pretty directly out of Curtis Yarvon'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 like 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

Starting point is 01:29:43 that, again, like, 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, like, right-wing podcast, that's one thing. To 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

Starting point is 01:30:02 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, this idea that, like, Vance is talking about in terms of, like, creating this constitutional crisis? Well, I mean, look, I tend to be, I tend to be the guy in the room that says, let's not, let's not overreact.

Starting point is 01:30:26 Let's see what happens. Sure. There's a lot of, you know, 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

Starting point is 01:31:01 that. I just never thought, you know, never thought, never thought. And so I said to my 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 was, you know, that was a tough 24 hours for me, I'll have to say. So, you know, I don't know if like I just rebooted and for self-sanity and move forward or, you know, whether there is still some truth and reason to believe in certain stability. And I mean, I will say this, you know, as we started this conversation. The fact that the White House is conceding that it can't do everything to the Department of Education that it wants to do without Congress is a good thing. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:31:43 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, you know, reality. But really all I've done is 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,

Starting point is 01:32:40 it's unpredictable to some extent, which opinions those are going to be. So I have this faith, these sort of pieces of the puzzle that still suggest we're still a democracy and are going to remain one. But, you know, I have my really bad days. I think like, you know, I think a lot of people have a bad day every day right now. I just feel thankful. Mine are fewer and further between than others. And maybe that's just psychological coping. I don't know. Let's, I guess, close to me 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, you know, linking back again to the attacks on the Department of Education.

Starting point is 01:33:28 Yeah, so I spend 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, like, the Civil War doesn't just happen overnight. It happens over the course of late 1820s to 1860 with the South this saber rattling over and over again, openly talking about disunion, right? So that you had a South that actually was diverse in lots of ways and its opinions about various things. I'm not going to say that there 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 1600, you know, anti-slavery advocates in North Carolina in the 1820s is shocking to a lot of people, right? But 10 years later, only 12 people show up to the final meeting.

Starting point is 01:34:20 So you had something that changed there, right? And so you have this sort of period of escalating disunion and censorship and propaganda and sort of policing what is publicly, you know, acceptable commentary in the South. All this stuff is happening. sort of going in and, you know, editing their sort of censoring textbooks, you know, demanding that books only be written by Southerners, like, oh, I make it go on and on and on, we don't have time for it. What I point out, though, in my analysis of what's going on, you know, right now over the last few years in education is that there are a lot of policies that are attacking public education in the way that they previously had. And a lot of them are symbolic of disunion instincts, right? 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.

Starting point is 01:35:16 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.

Starting point is 01:35:54 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

Starting point is 01:36:34 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, like that is a dangerous place. I don't know how we build democracy on such a system.

Starting point is 01:36:58 What's the solution here? I mean, like beyond people diversifying where they get their media from. And like for vast walls of the country, I think that that line's been crossed a long time ago. If you look at the way like Twitter functions, the way that people just exist in their bubbles and are happy to. Like people don't want to hear anything else with the most hostility coming from like both extreme ends. I don't know how to get around this problem. This is something that, you know, we've thought about a lot the past eight years. but certainly longer.

Starting point is 01:37:32 Well, I'll say this. Public schools can't solve all of democracy's problem, you know, 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.

Starting point is 01:37:54 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 I think sort of really stepping back and appreciating how dangerous this is to our democracy is step one. That's hard, right? I'm talking about teaching adults to see things differently than what they currently see them.

Starting point is 01:38:12 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, you know, 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

Starting point is 01:38:40 mean is, and 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, like, I really think we have to rethink how we teach history, you know, 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, you know, establish some guidelines.

Starting point is 01:39:20 But I think, you know, 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.

Starting point is 01:39:42 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 eat like eat is happening what is that like make or break moment are you wanting me to imagine a realistic one or just sort of give you some sort of example that makes no like like what what would that be like for you because like i think everyone has their own personal rubric for like like what is

Starting point is 01:40:10 too far in my mind like what is 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 yeah 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 it together. You know, the president of the United States asserted unilateral authority over the entire federal budget when he came into office, right?

Starting point is 01:40:44 He does not have that power. Federal District Court and joined it, he then backed down from that, right? But let's say he didn't back down. Well, okay, you know, maybe as a district court, but if the United States Supreme Court or a court of appeals told the president you lack the authority to sequester those funds and he still did it. So just the budget. That's it, just the budget. You know, just the belief that the president can spend our money however he wants with no constraint. And that would be crossing the Rubicon. Now, I'll tell you, and this is why, you know, you had 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've been alarmed, and this goes back,

Starting point is 01:41:33 this isn't just a Trump problem. Like, I was alarmed with the NCLB waivers, probably long about it, and 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 and other, he thinks he can do this. Like, why is he even testing the boundaries this way? Executive power has been steadily expanding, certainly. Yeah. But I was like, you know, you can kind of get it. There were some gray area.

Starting point is 01:41:59 This area 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, I can commit this nation to a 50% increase in its fiscal outlays tomorrow.

Starting point is 01:42:32 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.

Starting point is 01:42:50 He's pushed him 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 like tests for loyalty. And at a certain point, like, if he does something really bad, at least for these next two years, like, I don't see a way that he'll get, like, impeached or removed from office. Like,

Starting point is 01:43:32 certainly, not with this Senate, not with this Congress. Like, that check imbalance 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, you know, a little bit further play a play a little bit further, play a a little bit more fast and loose 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

Starting point is 01:44:03 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. Is that he's doing it out in the open. I mean, on some level, some of this stuff like telling people

Starting point is 01:44:20 to cook up crazy plans to do this, that, like, presidents have been doing that, like, you know, Nixon was, Nixon was paranoid. He was, like, this is what presidents do, but it's not appropriate to do it in public, right? You do it behind closed doors, you know, offer some plausible 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, you know, and probably true of a lot of other presidents, they would have been gone.

Starting point is 01:45:05 So what's actually acceptable as public behavior has clearly changed? What's acceptable as a policy agenda has clearly had 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.

Starting point is 01:45:29 Still on Twitter. I sort of have, you know, just lots of friends on there, so I'm still there. Me too, me too. Yeah, you know, I'm not on there as often as I used to be. You know, I gave up blogging a long time ago. So, you know, as we drink out of fire hydrant, you know, I spent a lot of time just trying to explain basic things about public education to reporters. But you can find me there.

Starting point is 01:45:50 I'm a professor of law at the University of South Carolina. And like I said, dangerous learning just came out, you know, 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. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here.

Starting point is 01:46:36 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 Donna El-Kurd, an assistant professor of political science, guest on our episodes about BB Nanyahu over at Behind the Bastards. Dana, thank you so much for being here with us.

Starting point is 01:47:23 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.

Starting point is 01:47:51 And it would be turned into effectively American condos, right? Like, that's, 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 needs. 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

Starting point is 01:48:38 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 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

Starting point is 01:49:29 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. Right. The plan is for ethnic cleansing, right? Like, 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, like shows a great deal of alarm. Obviously, Jordan and Egypt, already

Starting point is 01:50:15 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 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.

Starting point is 01:50:48 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, 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 real saying, well, now that we've announced this plan and people have to get out, everyone's staying,

Starting point is 01:51:40 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 non-combatants to begin with. Yeah. That really didn't stop them from targeting civilians, targeting children.

Starting point is 01:51:59 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.

Starting point is 01:52:41 Like one thing, and not to, I don't mean to like kind of take the focus off of Gaza, but this is. used to term permission structure. On an international level, the U.S. saying we are backing a forced expulsion in genocide of an entire population does change the permission structure for every international actor in terms of like a massive variety of conflicts around the world. Like this is like a sea change in international norms that so many millions of people outside of Gaza will eventually and very probably immediately be affected by. I mean, 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.

Starting point is 01:53:30 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.

Starting point is 01:54:14 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? Right. These things metastasize. You have to view those kind of actions in the international stage like a cancer. Right.

Starting point is 01:54:57 No, absolutely. There was a Syrian activist and political writer, Yassin al-Hash Saleh, who said the Syrianization of the world. Yeah. And we're saying 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.

Starting point is 01:55:13 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

Starting point is 01:55:59 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 saying 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, you know,

Starting point is 01:56:45 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 World War I munitions, you know, up to the present day in 2025. So this is a massive problem. And the best case scenario, something has to be done with these munitions. This is something that Trump has been bringing up when talking about, like, his desire to clear people out of their demine and then rebuild effectively, what sounds almost like a vacation colony, right, to the United States.

Starting point is 01:57:17 And one of the issues just with any sort of practical sort of effect with demining is that U.S.Aid 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 U.S. aid. The U.S. 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 just. justification for pushing the population out is, well, it's not safe to be there. We have to

Starting point is 01:57:49 de-mine 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 ask for like an exception to the stop work order and were denied by the State Department and no, you know, no explanations were given. And I mean, it's, it's obviously a fig leaf. It's obviously an excuse. Like, this has nothing to do with the 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.

Starting point is 01:58:26 Yeah. Well, all right, what are you demining? You really think you're going to build hotels. Yeah. My understanding is, like, people in the administration were also surprised by this tack of reasoning. So I wonder who's fed him this idea, like, who's given him? 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 in the Trump administration,

Starting point is 01:58:54 but the reporting I've seen suggested came from Kushner that like a year or so ago he was talking about. Yeah, he's been talking about this. Like, this is great, 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

Starting point is 01:59:16 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

Starting point is 01:59:32 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

Starting point is 01:59:52 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 condo. Yeah, I mean, the thing is they can 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, Qatar, like it's, it's, this is, I think this is another level where it's like, American hegemony is tangential to Jared Kushner making money. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:00:34 Which is an interesting little, I've never seen a hegemon kind of shoot itself in the foot in this direction to this direction. to this degree. Yeah. I don't want to the focus to be on like the danger to Americans from this but this is extremely dangerous for Americans too, right?

Starting point is 02:00:51 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, like take this land and profit off of it

Starting point is 02:01:02 is such a, it's so comprehensively escalates everything on an international scale. Like I don't even, I can't even, I can't think of a single decision that's this reckless that's been made in my lifetime by American politicians other than the Iraq war. Right. And that was, I think, maybe the first nail in the conference and we're reaching the last

Starting point is 02:01:23 nails of 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 The 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.

Starting point is 02:02:08 But an individual who was a part of that was standing on, like, 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, like 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? No, he was supposed to be there.

Starting point is 02:02:53 Yeah, he did a thing that wasn't part of the script, I assume, but like, I don't know how you even charge 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 is nothing, 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. You know, if you were their employer, you can fire them for that, but you can't charge them criminally for that. I mean, they wanted to make an example.

Starting point is 02:03:27 Yeah. 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

Starting point is 02:03:46 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

Starting point is 02:04:02 go after everybody, you're making an example enough that, like, you're chilling people's abilities to engage, whether it's on campuses or, you know, off campuses. And so it's definitely, I can tell you from, like, the academic perspective, like, a number of disciplinary organizations 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.

Starting point is 02:04:46 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

Starting point is 02:05:00 any kind of protected speech in favor of Palestine? I mean, not even in favor. That's the wrong way to put it. It's not even a bit, yeah. Discussing the reality of the genocide. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is like they have not, they've conflated any, any attempt to give

Starting point is 02:05:17 information. Right. With advocacy. Yes. So there's that conflation. 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 will say that like, we're seeing attacks on academic freedom and we're seeing attacks on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly on academic campuses, both in public institutions that have to uphold public laws and also on private institutions that have paid lip service to things like free speech and are now ignoring that commitment in the past. And so we've seen even tenured professors,

Starting point is 02:05:55 like what happened in Milenberg 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.

Starting point is 02:06:37 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.

Starting point is 02:06:57 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

Starting point is 02:07:27 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 transcan. 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 take your ability to talk about or to act in one way away, and then they take it away

Starting point is 02:07:52 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. Venn 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

Starting point is 02:08:33 easier time. No, and through the use of funding and their ability to kind of gin up outrage in media, groups like APAC have effectively blasted a salient in free speech in this country, where you really, you almost can't talk about Palestine and you certainly can't acknowledge what Israel is doing, right? You can't say, 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,

Starting point is 02:09:05 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 studies Palestine or teach about Israel, Palestine.

Starting point is 02:09:35 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. Yeah. But 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 chilling your speech on other issues,

Starting point is 02:10:05 whether it's trans rights, whether it's, you know, reproductive rights, whatever issue, if you don't tow 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 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 hopeful.

Starting point is 02:10:34 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 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. States, Joe Biden made pro-IRA statements, right? Like, one thing is okay and the other is not.

Starting point is 02:11:04 I don't know. 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 just this hideous hypocrisy that I don't even understand how, like, people can keep that consistent in their own heads, but they don't need to, right? 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 all, 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. And, and like you said, it's not that they care

Starting point is 02:11:47 about consistency and they don't have to maintain an honest approach to this. They're just using these isolated incidents of 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. Yeah. 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?

Starting point is 02:12:32 Yeah. 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. What you went through there, too, makes me so angry when I read shit. Like, and this is not on Gillibrand, but Kristen Gillibrand was on someone's podcast. recently talking about why some of her Republican colleagues who had expressed opposition to some

Starting point is 02:12:54 of Trump's picks ultimately voted for them. And she's like, they're scared of getting murdered. And like, isn't everyone who says anything? And like, you got death threats for a Vox video. 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, that's, yeah, Congress and it's inability to do anything. Like, that's a whole other level of demoralization. Yeah. Is there any, else you wanted to make sure we hit on during this conversation before we sort of close things

Starting point is 02:13:24 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 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

Starting point is 02:14:09 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 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 like Biden was playing a long game, a dumb long game, but a long game trying to brokers a deal with like Saudi Arabia and Israel. That, I mean, again, 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

Starting point is 02:14:54 Trump cares about that. Yeah. And the region has changed so much. Yeah. You know, for whether we like it or not, like Iran is not the threat it used to be. Iran has closer ties with Saudi Arabia. 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, 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.

Starting point is 02:15:38 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 of These Times podcast. I sometimes do episode for them. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And if you're looking for organizations to help support Ghazans right now, Heal Palestine or Anera, A-N-E-R-A, are both doing really crucial work. Excellent, excellent. Well, check that out. Definitely check out the Fire These Times, and that's a great place to send some aid. Donna, thank you so much for being on the show again. And, yeah, I hope you, I don't know. I hope. I hope. I hope. I hope. That's what I got.

Starting point is 02:16:19 Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Robert. 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.

Starting point is 02:17:05 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 Super Bowl.

Starting point is 02:17:27 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 invention says, Capitalism currently, the rule of capitalism seems inescapable, but the divine rule of the chiefs once seemed undefeatable to, and they were fucking humiliated. Oh my God, they lost so bad.

Starting point is 02:17:53 They lost so bad. I can't even say that they were beaten up and down the field because I'd even fucking get down the field. Obliterated. Generational beat down. And, yeah. When I arrived here in New Orleans on Monday, this is the Monday after the Super Bowl.

Starting point is 02:18:09 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. And no one boxed. And all of the Eagles merch were gone. I will see that Chief's merch again somewhere in like a resource poor setting in a market three years from now.

Starting point is 02:18:35 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 alpha capitalism. So funny.

Starting point is 02:18:51 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

Starting point is 02:19:19 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. Zalinski was not really consulted on this. He's, you know, made a couple of statements like, yep, we're hoping that this is what pushes everything towards peace. But it's very clear that's 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 the, what's happening

Starting point is 02:20:01 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.

Starting point is 02:20:36 It's going to be great. If you're in the German arms industry, it's going to be a bang a year for you. You're going to be making some leper times. I think we can all agree. The future is bright for German weaponry. Once again, Germany will rise to its former glory. Hussar. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:20:50 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, the moment when the German fascist parties are like about to take power. Yeah, when AFDA 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,

Starting point is 02:21:14 which is that AFD, Offday, the alternative for Deutscheeland, 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 Cordon 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 cordon sanitaire has fallen in Germany is real bad news.

Starting point is 02:22:00 Yeah, and the ADF, like, it's worth mentioning, right? Like, the ADF is so right-wing and so Nazi that, like, 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 no. Nazis. And yeah, so now we're fucking handing them the fucking justification to fucking rebuild their

Starting point is 02:22:32 entire arms industry. So, yep. 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, it's 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, it's not good. It doesn't point to a great future. This is the multipolar world that Russia has wanted for some time, like coming to fruition, right? And I didn't want to talk about, so there was a time when Vladimir Putin, some of you remember, was sanctioned by the international criminal court for his war crimes in Ukraine. The United States, however, the United States

Starting point is 02:23:18 has not been a signatory to the Rome Statute, so it wouldn't necessarily have enforced that arrest war in 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 U.S. Gallant and Benjamin Net and Yahoo baseless. He then went on to claim, quote,

Starting point is 02:24:02 both nations are thriving democracies with militaries, 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 any permanent residence. It also includes U.S. Armed Forces, government officials, and contractors working on behalf of U.S. armed forces. Contractors. Yeah. Yeah, the people who can do no wrong. It then goes on to include U.S. allies, including all of NATO, and sometimes contractors

Starting point is 02:24:35 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 of the families of those. those people. Interesting. Yeah, this is an unprecedented American politics. Sometimes it gets reported like it is. I want to like throw back to what they called the Hague invasion act. That wasn't its real name. But that was George Bush's like it authorized the president to use any means

Starting point is 02:25:09 necessary to release United States people held by the ICC or at its request. So people started calling it a Hague invasion act, right? Trump did also sanction ICC prosecutors and their families in 2020 for looking into U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan. I think that happened in June of 2020, so you can be forgiven for having this up because some stuff was happening at that time. Oh, was it?

Starting point is 02:25:34 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 cheese were doing some racist shit, shockingly. Shockingly. I'm sure Taylor Swift was doing something too.

Starting point is 02:25:46 But yeah, this is like, Israel has for nearly a decade been trying to acts mere 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 Hague. 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 tribunals investigated perpetrators of genocides in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

Starting point is 02:26:17 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. Look, the ICC has been criticized probably recently

Starting point is 02:26:36 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,

Starting point is 02:27:04 right, including by several NATO allies, and 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 Netton Yahoo, to transit their airspace. So, like, their full commitment to the ICC perhaps can be questioned. This is a problem with the ICC, right? It doesn't have an integral enforcement mechanism. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, Canada previously promised, quote, quote, promised to arrest Netanyahu if they were ever, like, able to. And, like, yeah, I'm very curious to see how

Starting point is 02:27:42 this is going to shake down with the US taking like an extremely firmer stance at least than we previously had. 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 and therefore war crimes that happen within Palestine and covered by the court, even if states such as Israel are not signatories, and therefore they're still under the court's jurisdiction. That's how, in this case, this is happening.

Starting point is 02:28:18 Yep. It could also make the ICC's life very difficult in terms of using technology, right, the tech back end of everything that ICC does, trying to remove that from any United States involvement would be very hard. Well, let's go on a quick out of break and return to talk about, I don't know, the Treasury or something. Yeah, let's talk about the Treasury. All right.

Starting point is 02:28:39 Cool. All right, we are back. Before we talk with 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.

Starting point is 02:29:07 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 blue land. God.

Starting point is 02:29:28 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 blue land 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 flex. It's a statement of the power that they have over their own party and the country.

Starting point is 02:29:51 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,

Starting point is 02:30:15 if Elon Musk can find a way to call this thing X-Land is really my concern. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now I'm really interested in hearing from Greenlanders, genuinely. You can contact us at Coolzone Tips at Proton.me, which is an encrypted email address 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 bond. Okay, so let me read some quotes from Reuters. So this is Trump. We're even looking at treasuries, Trump said.

Starting point is 02:30:56 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. We will get to what those are in a second, but I need to read the rest of this. Quote, it could be that a lot of those things don't count. 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.

Starting point is 02:31:21 Yeah. Treasury bills are the primary underpinning of like economic stability in this country. T-bills are what large corporate institutions, when they have a lot of cash, what like very wealthy people, it's where you park your money. 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.

Starting point is 02:31:56 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 Croshap Bahani, investment chief for Asia BMP, Powerboss 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.

Starting point is 02:32:30 Now, this is something where these institutional investors, like, they still have not quite wrapped their head around the fact that no, he really will do this ship because he doesn't understand at all, he thinks that American debt works the same way as like his own personal debt? And no, it doesn't. I mean, it's worth saying some bits. 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 what money is. Right. And these treasury bonds are, as we were talking about earlier, right? This is like the investment asset for literally the entire world.

Starting point is 02:33:16 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 that, 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

Starting point is 02:33:52 to other things, which is, like, unbelievably unhinged, would also, in and of itself, 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 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 buys u.s assets like it's china and u.s tributary states like japan for example which is just purely in american military protectorate right it's it's it's sort of incredible system for the u.s right you get a bunch of people and you you know you just

Starting point is 02:34:30 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 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 economy, starting on 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, this is the thing about Chinese steel, but it's mostly from Canada and Mexico. This is also a fucking shit show because the U.S. manufacturing capacity that we still have and we still actually do have a decent amount of like very

Starting point is 02:35:34 very high-tech manufacturing capacity, right, 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,

Starting point is 02:35:53 it's the product of like half a century 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 that production becomes increasingly, you know, it becomes impossible to expand production in one place without, you know,

Starting point is 02:36:10 getting ready to production in 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 in FEMA funding

Starting point is 02:36:30 that they had already paid out, like just straight up stole it from, like, New York. a New York City bank account? So we've been paid to the government in New York, right? This happened earlier today, right? This is... Yeah, literally, literally today. This is breaking news on Wednesday.

Starting point is 02:36:41 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, that's from the future. We didn't know. But yeah, yeah, he literally, like, they have taken $80 million just from this bank account. They just stole it. The U.S. federal government is just straight up robbing banks.

Starting point is 02:36:59 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 for FEMA being safely secured in banks that have like literally been stolen. Funds that were approved by Congress for the specific purpose, right?

Starting point is 02:37:18 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 sick a mode. However, comma, however, here's from Yahoo News. Quote, Eric Adams has said he will not

Starting point is 02:37:33 publicly criticized Trump or his administration. Instead, he'll take his concerns to Trump and private. On Monday, Adams convened a meeting with his own top officials to urge them not to speak badly by the president and public, saying if they were to do so, it could risk federal funding. Later that day, at 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.

Starting point is 02:38:09 Yeah. Like blatantly. It's staggering. I mean, it would come from Trump plus Adams, right? Like, if we're going to see it, that's where we're going to see it. We've hit a singularity of corruption, yes. Yeah. Istanbul is always the first stop.

Starting point is 02:38:21 Yeah. The only way they can go further than this is that Eric Adams is going to appoint Rob Blagojevich'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.

Starting point is 02:38:38 Okay. Speaking of corruption, let's pivot to ads. All right, we are back, and I'm going to close by talking about the War on Woke, my new favorite news beat that I'm forced to pay attention to every week. There was a transports ban that Trump did an executive order about using a whole bunch of children as a prop. very clearly trying to steal the charisma from whatever that governor who lost the election

Starting point is 02:39:18 did with his preschool 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 that I'm kind of just like catching up on

Starting point is 02:39:33 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 LGBT to LGBT on a web page, like warning about like how dangerous it might be to like travel to like other countries with like worst legal protections. Say, LGBT travelers can face special challenges abroad. Laws and attitudes in some countries may affect safety and ease of travel.

Starting point is 02:40:07 Many countries do not recognize the same-sex marriage. Many countries don't recognize the ex-gender market. 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 Ft LGBT to LGBT as well.

Starting point is 02:40:33 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. radiology. Previously, the CDC removed HIV and trans-related health info pages from their website. And as of yesterday, February 11th, the web pages for the FDA, health and human services, and the CDC, 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

Starting point is 02:41:21 because this literally happened, like, yesterday. This is, this is like a small, 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 NOAA. 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, androgen, a sexual, belonging, bias, binary, bisexual, black, culture, DEI, discrimination, diversity, empathy, empowerment, equity, ethnicity, fairness, gay, gender, gender dysphoria, handicap, homosexual, LGBTQ, intersex, pansexual, queer, transgender, transvestite, as well as words like impartial, inclusion, indigenous intersectionality, justice. The word white has been banned. Safe space, social justice,

Starting point is 02:42:31 underserved communities, race, privilege, power dynamics, Native American, multiculturalism. So just all of these, like, again, this. This is like the party of free speech has banned all of these words. And it's not, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, has, has, has released my most, has, has, has, has, has, has, has, has, it's, has, it's, it's, it's, a lot of, it's, it's, a lot of, it's, a lot of similar words flagged in the National Science Foundation list of banned words, like activism, activists, advocacy, a barrier, a 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, inequality, LGBT, institutional, marginalize, trauma, underappreciated, stereotypes, systemic, underrepresentation,

Starting point is 02:43:37 undervalued victim. 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. Exactly. There's so many words that are just, like, used in, like, how, like, studies function that they cannot use because the word is too woke and then they're going to lose their funding. Like, you can't, like, you can't, like, look at, like, things being equal.

Starting point is 02:44:04 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 TikTokification 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. There's something else.

Starting point is 02:44:28 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 how this is going to affect different communities, etc., etc. It's a legal requirement for you to put that in your thing. So, like,

Starting point is 02:44:41 if you were to, like, strictly enforce this, this kills every fucking grant. And this is one of these things where it's like, like, they're literally just running straight into the federal law tells you

Starting point is 02:44:51 you must do this thing and the Trump administration says these words are banned. So like, who knows? It's a really weird situation. Yeah, you can't do IRB right now. Like,

Starting point is 02:45:00 most grants will go through an institutional review board that will determine, like, if there are human subjects, they're, like, their ethical boundaries and, like, what you're doing is okay. But I can't see it being possible to do an IRB and not say these words. Yeah. No, and, like, we have to do scientific studies on, like,

Starting point is 02:45:18 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 stuff is still happening. columnist Dr. Lucky Tran reported, quote, the CDC has instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal.

Starting point is 02:45:42 The move aims to ensure that, quote unquote, no forbidden 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, conservative oppositional research group called the American Accountability Foundation,

Starting point is 02:46:06 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, the social media posts, having pronouns in their bio, or previous work on, since deleted,

Starting point is 02:46:42 diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Columnist Jamal Bowie says, quote, they are mostly targeting black employees, so this is quite literally just a repeat of Ridgerow Wilson's segregationist purge of the federal government. 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

Starting point is 02:47:21 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 very. very clear dog whistle to just like only hire like white Christians, higher Christians with big families, you know, parenthesis, like white people. This is like very, very obviously what they're doing. Yeah. And they're, I mean, this is extending to the military now under Heggseth. West Point has just announced effectively the banning of a number of clubs,

Starting point is 02:47:49 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 to 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 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

Starting point is 02:48:30 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 Hegset'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 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 Millie 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

Starting point is 02:49:18 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 right came to power wouldn't let him do. And that was one of the first things. And 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 Higgs is doing here specifically with like the West Point,

Starting point is 02:49:46 like club banning is like like these things are not like DEI. These things are like very old. these are like pretty standard things that have been like roped into like what it means to like be in America and we're now just seeing this crusade against DEI being used to just reverse affirmative action

Starting point is 02:50:03 and specifically select for white Christian applicants. And like that's the entirety of this point here like they're they're using DEI as like a as this like magical wand to frame things that are like pretty standard and like accepted parts of like how you do like hiring

Starting point is 02:50:20 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 US as part of this like giant anti-communist purge it was on, basically went through and found every gay government official and fucking ran them out. That's like another aspect of this whole thing, right? The way these people understand

Starting point is 02:50:58 the world in order to sort of like purify their like white state, right? Like you have to get rid of the non-white people and you have to get rid of the queers and, you know, 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 it state functions and how they can, you know, to what, like, what level of violence they can bring about on people. And they've roped these things together so closely now, like, the anti-trans, like, school executive order, only the first half that executive order was actually about the gender

Starting point is 02:51:36 ideology stuff. The second half was, was aimed at curbing what they called discriminatory equity ideology, which is DEI. 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 stuff that they've tried to do before with that like 1776 project that the New York Times reported on. Part of Trump's order called for quote, inaccurate, honest, unifying, inspiring and ennobling characterization

Starting point is 02:52:12 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 like that same race have done in the past. And like making sure that teachers do not teach things in a way that could possibly make a student

Starting point is 02:52:46 feel quote-unquote guilt. Yeah. They use the word children, actually, not students, which is fundamentally something we don't do in education. 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?

Starting point is 02:53:06 Totally. We certainly do discuss these things in university. And it 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, massive conversations with the police,

Starting point is 02:53:35 like massive anti-racious 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 this sort of Trumpism. It was, you know, it was a reaction to that. And then this entire campaign, right? Like, all of the stuff

Starting point is 02:53:51 that he's talking about here, you know, this is about 2020, right? This is about reversing the gains that had 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

Starting point is 02:54:04 the U.S. history is taught to reflect that this country was like, again, a settler colonial empire built by slave labor. And, you know, that expanded its territory through genocide. Which is just, this is just objectively true

Starting point is 02:54:14 about how the, the U.S. started. But the thing is, like, that's not good for, you know, these people's projects, right? Like, saying that out loud is a fucking issue for them. And so, you know, their attempt to roll back everything that was gained from sort of the black uprisings is culminating all of this shit with, like, the purge of black workers for the federal government with all of these things ordering you to, like, that's why they're talking about all of these weird, all they keep banning all these weird, like, terms that don't make any sense. Like, I was talking about, like, empathy, right? So, okay, so why the fuck are they talking about banning empathy? Yeah, because

Starting point is 02:54:45 specifically these things come from the purges they've been trying to do in the education system where they have a bunch of very specific grievances about kinds of education stuff that teachers were implementing, particularly in sort of middle and high schools. Well, I'm going to close here with two pieces

Starting point is 02:55:01 of breaking news. One, like earlier today, we learned that the NIH has finally acknowledged that the grant funding freeze is illegal. And this is probably due to pressure from like news coverage, about all of the temporary restraining order violations through the continued freezing of funds.

Starting point is 02:55:20 And now the NIH is saying, because of these orders, we will resume funding. The first TRO was like two weeks ago on February 1st. So it's not like they just learned about this. 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 not become automatically enforced. So this is like one step now.

Starting point is 02:55:48 You can go to a popular. info who has been breaking the news on this specifically. And then some breaking news that I have here on DropSight, quote unquote, armored Tesla forecast estimated to win $400 million 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 going to say. Or it could go a really sad way. Yeah, I do like the idea of a lot of Trump appointees being in Teslas that are armored when the batteries catch.

Starting point is 02:56:22 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 a contingent about electric tanks. Horrible idea. On the 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 beast, as they call it.

Starting point is 02:56:44 What everyone always says the problem with tanks is, is that they don't explode enough when hit by munitions. Or by themselves, when not hit by munitions. Or by themselves, just because batteries do that sometimes. Yes. You never know what you're going to get. I'm excited. This is going to make everything a lot safer for our men and women in Greenland, I'm guessing. Yeah, batteries thrive in the cold.

Starting point is 02:57:08 Red, white, and blue, blue. Yeah, I do love the new M1A, whatever. Evan Abrams that gets four miles on a charge. Yeah, yeah. And then again, detonates. Wait six months to use a solar panel to field recharge. It doesn't get light for six months. Yeah, magnificent.

Starting point is 02:57:26 Upwards of 10 miles a year, yes. Yep. 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,

Starting point is 02:57:42 it is a proton mail that doesn't mean. that it's super secure. It simply means it's sent to end encrypted if you send from a proton address. The email address is CoolZone Tips 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 a person. Maybe we don't get back to you, but we do appreciate you all reaching out. We reported the news.

Starting point is 02:58:18 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

Starting point is 02:58:34 you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 23 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now.

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