Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 173

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, app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone 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 and after here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. Hi, Mayor. Happy to be here again. Yeah, I am, I don't know. I have mixed emotions about this one.

Starting point is 00:01:16 So today we are talking about how the American state, particularly the sort of neoliberal American state of the last about 50 years created Elon Musk and how it is destroying itself. And we'll start with the fun part of this, which is that Tesla, stock is down 25% in the last month. Yay. It's extremely funny. The protests are working. People are lighting them on cars on fire, literally all over the world. Like there was just a big rash in France the day we're recording this. The pressure is working. He's having a bad time. 25% is just the start. We can get the other 75%. Yeah. And like for people who like, I guess don't know, the value of Tesla stock is directly tied to Elon Musk's net worth.

Starting point is 00:01:59 obviously he's diversified. He doesn't have all of his wealth in net stocks. But when Tesla stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer. Yep, it's great. It's great. We love making Elon Musk poorer. Yeah, it's the one line we like to see. However, comma. So we've talked a lot on this show about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the American state and about all of the people who he is harming and the lives is destroying the people who are dead because of his actions. And I think it's worth actually getting into how he was produced and how it came into be. that at the beginning of the communist manifesto, Marx famously wrote to the bourgeoisie

Starting point is 00:02:34 produced their own grave diggers. And his promised inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and like this specific state seems to have produced their own grave diggers partially in the form of Trump, partially in the form of Elon Bosque. And it's worth actually going into the story

Starting point is 00:02:55 of how specifically this happens. And also I think, what neoliberalism is because this is an important aspect of, I think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines of the story of the extent to which, you know, Tesla and SpaceX were built by American subsidies, but it's worth going into some of the, some of the more structural elements of how this happened and why. So one of the problems that we have here, and I say we have here because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates?

Starting point is 00:03:31 Yeah, he says a lot of things he doesn't understand, but yeah. And unfortunately, he has inherited the greatest of all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism, whatever you call his sort of ideology,

Starting point is 00:03:49 you know, is supposed to be. And, you know, like, he is just sort of a fascist, but on the other hand, he's a product of this wing of that movement that was created out of the neoliberal thing about like, you must like decrease the size of the state. You got to eliminate all regulations. You have to, you know, keep decreasing the size of the state.

Starting point is 00:04:06 Keep fire, like, you know, fire all government employees, etc., etc. Yeah. And again, this is, I think largely what a lot of people think neoliberalism is, right? They think it's like, okay, neoliberalism is when the state gets smaller. And this has always been a fucking joke. Like, through this entire neoliberal period, the size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing. And this has always allowed a kind of like controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to,

Starting point is 00:04:27 to, you know, when 2008 happens, right? Yeah. The entire economy collapses. And then out of the woodwork come all of these like Rand Paul sort of like, quote unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and like all of these sort of fascist paramilitaries. But, you know, they can come out of the woodwork and say, oh, the reason that the 2008 collapse happened was because there is too much government regulation.

Starting point is 00:04:48 And this is like sort of what Bitcoin is, right? It's like, ah, the evils of capitalism are happening because like... Not enough capitalism. Yeah, well, it's because like, but like specifically like the evil entrench interests have taken over the state and you don't have the power to access the things that they do, which is obviously, you know, like it is obviously true that these people have control of the state and you don't, but this sort of controlled opposition of if you put us in power, we'll eliminate parts of the state, we'll get rid of all this regulation that you can suddenly be in power.

Starting point is 00:05:13 This has always been a controlled opposition thing, you know, and this disappears into form of sort of libertarianism or like on the most extreme mangenarchal capitalism. Yeah. And this is something that the Montpelier society, which is like the people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all like their academics come from they still have conferences they've always had a problem with this where there's always been a branch

Starting point is 00:05:33 of an anarcho-capitalist there who think the only thing that the state should do is enforce contracts or just that it shouldn't exist and everything should just do. Yeah. And the neoliberals are like, okay, you guys are fucking ridiculous.

Starting point is 00:05:46 And the reason they think this is that the actual thing that these people believe and this is something that if you read more Hayek than just like the road to surfed him, right? That's like the stuff for public consumption. If you read the stuff that you write for public consumption, And if you read sort of like rope key and you read all of the, all of the sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF and, you know, you go through all the different schools, what they actually believe, contrary the things that they say were like, oh, markets naturally emerge and the state just like exists to control them.

Starting point is 00:06:14 What they believe is that you have to use the state specifically to create markets. Yeah. And you have to use the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until they become sort of like good neoliberal market subjects. You go to work, go home, buy things and do nothing else. And the product of this is the 1980s, right? It's the replacement of the welfare state, you know, which is the sort of carrots of this system with just the pure stick of the police baton and the prison system. Yeah, it's the end of like the post-second World War welfare state order, right, that we saw.

Starting point is 00:06:46 Certainly in the U.S., but mostly in Europe, right? Yeah, yeah, but this is very important. This never actually decreased the size of the state, Because what the state, you know, what it was, was a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from, like, the state giving you things towards the state, you know, like beating you over the head with a hammer. And also, insofar as it gives you things, making you go through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort of like scant welfare policies still exist. Yeah, the state's surveilling you, both for violence reasons and for withdrawing your benefits reasons. Yeah, and this is always something that all of these people have supported, right? Now, the other important part for our purposes is the thing I said earlier about the state creating markets.

Starting point is 00:07:35 And that's kind of like an abstract thing, right? There are sort of historical examples you can go through to look at what this looks like in a place where there aren't markets. But this is something that's very important because a huge amount of what Tesla is a direct result of, you know, pure neoliberalism in action, which is the state's step. stepping in to create a market as its way of doing regulation and the way it interacts with the world. And so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now, selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits. In 2024, the selling of carbon credits was 43% of Tesla's net income. 43%.

Starting point is 00:08:14 Yeah. So we should explain what a carbon credit is if people aren't familiar. Yeah. Well, actually, it has numbers on this. their numbers are that since 2014, 34% of the total profits of Tesla are from selling these carbon credits. So the way the system works is that the EPA sets standards

Starting point is 00:08:33 for how much, this is like, you know, I can read the Axios thing too, but like the EPA set standards for how much like CO2 per mile all of the cars and trucks combined that a car company makes can admit. And, you know, instead of doing the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just going to be like a firm cap on these emissions. They're like, no, no, no, this is what I say when I say they create a market. So what happens if you go over the

Starting point is 00:08:57 cap isn't that like, you know, like people get hauled off the jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to buy someone else's carbon credits. And if you're below the cap, it gives you credits you can sell to other companies. So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right? Their cars produced like zero basically like they don't have any fossil fuel use at all within their line. Yeah, yeah. Now, obviously, like, where is, you know, you can ask the question, where is that electricity coming from? But, you know, like, but that's what doesn't get factored into it, which is part of the sort of problem with trying to use the state like this to solve. This sort of problem with trying to use the state like this, you know, this is the problem with climate change by creating a market. And so Tesla makes, and again, this was this last year, this was 43% of its net income came not from selling cars. but from selling these carbon credits. So what they're doing is making it so that other companies can produce more cars that are less fuel efficiency,

Starting point is 00:09:57 can produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids. Yeah. It's why you couldn't get a plug-in hybrid EV pickup truck. Like, I think there may be plug-in hybrid mavericks now. But like the reason that no US manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck, like the F-150 lightning, that they have now, It's because they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead. Yeah, and this is a fucking disaster for climate policy

Starting point is 00:10:25 because instead of having all of the car companies just dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one car company that makes electric cars, and then all the rest of the car companies increasing the amount of CO2 per miles, etc., etc. And the secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now, is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort of, in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of what a market is. is right when they explain it.

Starting point is 00:10:48 She was like, ah, this is going to be all this competition in the market. The competition is going to create the best product. And what actually happens, and the near liberals in their private doctrine understand this, is that when the state creates a market like this, what he's doing is handing like a person, like a single individual, a giant monopoly. And that's what happens. And that monopoly is one Elon Musk, who has now been handed the title of the richest man in human history by the state's regulatory apparatus.

Starting point is 00:11:16 Because they've given him basically complete control over it. I mean, there are other EV-only companies, but they're minute, right, Rivian or something like that. And he's got this scarce resource that the entire automotive industry now needs. Yeah, and again, this is, you know, going back to the market creation part of this, none of this shit existed, right? Like, carbon caps are not something the market would ever produce by itself or whatever. Like, this is a direct neoliberal intervention into the market, which is what neoliberalism is, right? It's the neoliberal state coming into create markets, and the product of it is Elon Musk.

Starting point is 00:11:51 Yeah, it's a monopoly. Yeah, and when we come back from ads, we'll go into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon Musk and not all of these other companies that became the sort of single guy and how else he's benefited from the state. We are back. So the other aspect, you know, so we've gone into how Tesla is built on this carbon credit trading. the other aspect of it is that Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts. The Washington Post in probably the last, like, expose they're ever going to do like this now that Bezos has been like we are free market capitalists. Yeah. Like tried to go through and find all of the money in government contracts that they've gotten.

Starting point is 00:12:47 They totaled it. Well, I think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that. But they totaled it at $38 billion. and that's just the ones that are unclassified, which is very important because a bunch of what SpaceX does, SpaceX's, you know, most other company, is a bunch of contracts for classified, like the deployment of spy satellites.

Starting point is 00:13:06 So it's definitely way more than that, right? Yeah. But this comes to the other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies, like, in general, do not make money, right? They hemorrhage money for basically the entire existence until they can find a bunch of government contracts

Starting point is 00:13:22 that can make them money. And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating shit after 2008. And, you know, WAPO talks about this. They got a $465 million low interest loan for the Department of Energy in 2010 that basically saved the company from the brink of collapse. Good thing. There's nothing else to spend the money on in 2010. No one else needed low interest loans or anything. It was fine.

Starting point is 00:13:46 No, no. There was no attempt to build like a giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed. Yep. You know, nothing else was happening. I wasn't living in my car at that time. It was fine. Yeah. Thank you, Obama.

Starting point is 00:13:58 And so as this goes on, right, the goal of you as a tech company, there's two things you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire on your pile of money. Or if you were a larger tech company, you are trying to amass enough U.S. contracts, like U.S. government contracts to, like, get you to sort of stability. Yeah. And this is what happens with SpaceX.

Starting point is 00:14:19 SpaceX now has gotten $18 billion of contracts with, NASA. And this is sort of a part of like, I mean, NASA has always used government contractors, but like this is different. Like this is just straight up there using Tesla's rockets to do things. And this is also part of why like Tesla and Boeing fucking fucking fucking fucking stranded on the space station right now. Because these things do not work. But there's been an enormous amount of money here. And the other thing, you know, this is one of the other sort of like great neoliberal things is that a lot of the, a lot of the factories that Elon Musk sort of builds, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:57 the ones that are in the U.S. are there because they get unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from local states themselves. All of this brings us to, you know, one of the other really core aspects of sort of the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling cars. By the way, we should also mention,

Starting point is 00:15:16 this is something Axios talks about, that like, if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, his company would literally never make money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this has been the case. I wrote about this like, I think, two years ago. Yeah. I remember writing about this before Elon Musk had gone full fucking evil villain, I guess. But that's what they are.

Starting point is 00:15:33 They're a carbon credit company that makes cars. Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by a $7,500 tax credit for electric cars. Oh, yeah. I got some tax credit information on electric cars. It's now the time. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to talk about the other one that's driving these unhinged sales? Yes, I do, because I have been driving around San Diego, and I have seen an obscene number of cyber trucks wrapped in people's business livery.

Starting point is 00:16:02 And it occurs to me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck, nor do people who need a pickup truck for work by cyber trucks, because they suck are being trucks. And so I did some digging, and I discovered that the IRS has a special tax deduction for vehicles, which are rated over £6,000 gross vehicle weight. The gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not like the mass of the vehicle if you drove it off the dealer lot onto a scale. That's the maximum operating weight of the vehicle as specified by the manufacturer. So, like, it's your Tesla with,

Starting point is 00:16:36 I mean, they're very funny videos of guys like loading one bag of compost into the back of a Tesla and being, it's a great truck for truck stuff. The other really funny one is when they try to attach like a winch to it and try to use it to pull, to pull heavy things, the back of the truck comes off because it's just like made of like it's like secured by like glue

Starting point is 00:16:54 like it a unit body yeah it might not be a body on frame like it might not be a proper truck i actually don't know now i'll look into that afterwards i bet it's i bet most of the electric or like high mileage pickup trucks are not so yeah not a good truck actually under it's called section 179 under section 179 a vehicle with the gross vehicle weight rating over 6,000 pounds you can deduct up to 31,000 in the first year, rather than deducting the appreciation of the capital good over time, right? So instead of deducting the depreciation of your vehicle that you purchase your business over time and not paying tax on that amount, you can not pay tax on 31,000 in the first year of your vehicle if it's over £6,000, right? There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've

Starting point is 00:17:43 got a Maybach or something really fucking heavy. So that would even cover the Model X, right? Tesla Model X have the GVWR above that, with a truck, there are exemptions for work vehicles, and they have to have a separate cargo compartment that is not the driver's compartment that is six feet or more in length. So the cyber truck just happened to have a six-foot bed. Yeah, so you can deduct 100% of value in the first year, for what I understand, for these vehicles, which have a six-foot bed. At least this was the case when I was looking. I became aware of the exact nature of this when I went on the Cyber Truck Owners Club Forum and looked what tax deducted people were doing, right? And then I worked back from there. And it does

Starting point is 00:18:24 seem that people are doing this. I think it might be changing, so you can only deduct a certain percentage soon. It will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you tax advice, nor am I qualified to do so. I'm not accountant. This is not accounting advice. On top of that, Mia mentioned the IRS commercial clean vehicle credit, right? That's a credit, not a deduction. So the deduction would discount the amount of your income that you pay tax on versus the credit, which is just rate credit. So potentially the person could deduct the cost of the cyber truck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking cyber truck right to prove it's a business vehicle.

Starting point is 00:19:00 And then if you're wrapping it, from what I understand, like these deductions somewhat depend on the percentage of the vehicle's use to their business. I guess this could be like the equivalent of a fringes on the flag tax theory, people claiming that when they're driving their cyber truck to go to Whole Foods, but it's wrapped, they're advertising a business so it's a business use. I don't understand how, how it look viable that is to claim. But part of this is like it's very easy.

Starting point is 00:19:30 Like, especially right now when the IRS is being gutted, like it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit. People are not getting audited. Yeah. Yeah. So they can take a 7,500 commercial vehicle. clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much. And like, you would struggle to persuade me that that is not why a lot of people are buying cyber trucks, right? Like, it's got the weight rating,

Starting point is 00:19:53 it's got the bed size, like, it's a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily, like, not all trucks have six foot beds now. I will never buy a new truck because I can't find a truck that has like a decent seating arrangement and larger than six foot bed and four by four and doesn't cost more than I earn in a year. But like, it's quite a like niche overlap of trucks that apply. And like for a truck with a six foot bed and a six thousand pound gross vehicle weight rating, the cybertruck's pretty small and it fits kind of with people who don't actually need a work truck, but can nonetheless take advantage of the work truck tax deduction. So once again, thank you government for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the roads today. Yeah. And it's worth noting. So like Tesla,

Starting point is 00:20:37 you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is like one of the like best selling like car manufacturers, right? And part of it is from this. But also, you know, and this is this is the other aspect of this. It's worth noting there's a very good Bloomberg article out today by Amanda Mole that talks about how 50% of all American consumer spending is now by people in the top 10% of the income bracket. So people make $250,000 a year or more. And that means increasingly that everything in the United States reflects. the you know the sort of like cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes who all also want to buy this for their sort of like like cultural grudges and you know to like to own the libs and like show how like much of a fucking man they are yeah and you know and so you already you have that initial incentive and then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that like definitely this is like designed with a shit in mind yeah without a doubt and it becomes like you say it becomes like a status good and it becomes like a culture war signifier. Yeah. In addition to all those things. I guess people also like, I've noticed that there's been a lot of backlash against people who own Teslers. If you go on the front, the day we're recording, the top article on the front page of

Starting point is 00:21:53 Reddit on the third article, Reddit, the top post is someone who's been putting pictures that say, sell your car and it's got a picture of Musk, Zeke Highling on people's Tesla's in Boston. Yep, yep, yep. Shout out to that person. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to sort of finish this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going.

Starting point is 00:22:25 We are back. Now, I think this all, I think if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard of most of this. I actually, okay, you've heard of most of what I've said to some extent. I don't think you've heard what James has said before because I've seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here is that Elon Musk, on a fundamental level, is also a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all been living in for decades now. It's a product of an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Keynesianism. So regular Keynesianism, right, is about, you know, having the government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation.

Starting point is 00:23:04 Also, you know, also like the military too, right? Like, let's not sort of like sugarcoat it. But it's about using a bunch of state money to like make there be jobs. using this to sort of, I don't know, the way they call it is like countercyclical spending, but it's like they want to use the state to spend money to make there be jobs and to put money into the economy and to put goods into the economy to counteract economic downturns. Asset Keynesianism is still the state expending a bunch of resources, right? But it's the state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms of incentives

Starting point is 00:23:34 and in terms of sort of tax structures and specifically also very much in terms of the Federal Reserve's interest rates. specifically to increase the price of stocks. And also, you know, and the reason he calls it assets, right, because it's not just stocks, right? It's also things like real estate. It's to increase the value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you think it's going to be worth more later. I have talked about this a lot on this show. This has been the fundamental global economic strategy of most of the world's economies

Starting point is 00:24:03 ever since sort of Japan kind of pioneered it in the 80s as after the U.S. sort of knee-capped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy to the Plaza Accords. By the end of this fucking administration, everyone who listened to the show will be able to explain what the Plaza Accords and the reverse Plaza Accords are. That's when we stop. It won't happen here after that because you'll all understand and you'll stop it. Yeah. It can no longer happen here. You'll know. You'll know the origin of the economy. Yes. So again, again, the Plaza Accords, the U.S. forces all of these countries to increase the value of their currencies relative to the dollar. This makes American manufacturing

Starting point is 00:24:37 more competitive. It nukes all of their manufacturing. These countries need to find another place to, you know, develop their economy, right? And the thing that the solution in Japan comes to is real estate speculation. This blows up. This blows up in the 90s. This is a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse stuff is from this. And then the U.S. is forced to do the reverse plaza cords in the 90s. This is Bill Clinton and, you know, sort of annihilate American manufacturing in order to sort

Starting point is 00:25:02 prop up the rest, like, proper Japanese manufacturing to keep their economy from completely imploding. Japan was a number two economy in the world at that point. But again, this means that the U.S. has now been doing this. There's the famous things called the Greenspan puts where, like, to try to stop a market collapse, that was obviously coming with a tech bubble blew up. Greenspan kept cutting the interest rates over and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing, just making it bigger and then eventually it blew up. This is what 2008 is, was, you know, we did a whole bubble.

Starting point is 00:25:28 I mean, there's another bubble and collapse in between there. But, like, you know, and this is what we've been doing for the last two decades, like, since 2008, we've been creating this giant tech bubble. And this tech bubble shit, this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part of the value of Tesla stock. It's just, you know, people who've been given a whole bunch of access to cheap credit. And by people, I mean, like not really you and me, like a bunch of unbelievably rich people have access to, like, incredibly cheap loans. And they use that money to buy Tesla stock. This is a sort of cyclical thing that just continuously increases the value of the company.

Starting point is 00:25:58 And it's not just sort of like banks and investors. A lot of money that goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension fund. from a bunch of bunch of different countries and also like a huge number of American states like your teacher's pensions are all tied up in this because pension reform the way that we sort of like lost the pension as a normal thing was that it was

Starting point is 00:26:19 conformed to 401ks and the people who still have like regular state pensions all of that money is now sort of invested in the stock market and it puts billions of dollars into Tesla every year and so this is also another aspect this is the broader structural level on which U.S. macroeconomic policy

Starting point is 00:26:38 was designed to create a bunch of companies like Tesla. And then U.S. sort of like micro policy, the microcreation of markets through tax credits and all of these government contracts they've been given to do like everything from like fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit, right? And like the U.S. is like contracting out starting like now. I mean, like all of this stuff, right,

Starting point is 00:26:59 is literally how Elon Musk was created. Yeah. But there is a third. even deeper level in which, you know, we can look at how how these cars are actually produced and how these rockets are actually produced. And they're produced by just incredible, the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers. And I think people tend to think about, you know, Tesla workers in the U.S. But there's Tesla workers all over the world. There's a huge gigafactory in Xinjiang. You know, there's factories all over China. And, you know,

Starting point is 00:27:32 these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit. They work. in unbelievably dangerous conditions. And at the end of the day, they get a very small amount of money so that the richest man in the world can get fucking richer every day. Yeah. And that's before we consider like ingredient parts to Teslas, right? Like the lithium, you know, that we just addressed, for instance, in our episode on Congo. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:54 There are parts for your Tesla that come out of this country where there has been a war for as long as most of us has been alive. Really very little effort has gone into improving conditions. for people. They're certainly for workers. They're doing jobs that are essential to like our economy and to like Mia and my 4401K line going up comes from exploiting workers in Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world. Yeah. And, you know, this is something our standard of living is based off of. But at the end of the day, right, Elon Musk's, all of Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the state's monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these people

Starting point is 00:28:37 from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in order to stop these people from taking back the fucking value that they create. Now, unfortunately, all of this sort of neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last 50 years, right, this attempt to sort of like depoliticize everything and have everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this sort of like non-politics where you're voting for two parties. like literally even more the same than they are now. This attempt to do things like solve climate change through these promotion of carbon markets

Starting point is 00:29:08 and create this sort of like stable like capitalist hegemony forever has ultimately been self-defeating. It's why all attempts to regulate capital inevitably fail because the functioning of the capitalist system and particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism has worked has concentrated like the most wealth ever held by a single human being into the hands of one guy who was a Nazi.

Starting point is 00:29:33 And then these people use their wealth to accumulate political power and seize control of the state, dismantling the systems that were met to regulate them. And you can't solve this problem with regulation. Because again, eventually they will simply accumulate enough power, retake power, and eliminate the regulations.

Starting point is 00:29:49 You can't even solve this problem just by killing them. I see people talk about the killing of billionaires in China. It's like an example of this. And like, A, that's all political factual and fighting stuff. And B, they'll execute people specifically to sort of appease like the Chinese worker so that they never have to fucking

Starting point is 00:30:04 watch the PLA get ran out of Shanghai again. But the thing is, even if somehow you use the state to just kill them, right, it doesn't work because capitalism will just produce more of these people. If you actually want to stop this, if you want to stop this Elon Musk from destroying

Starting point is 00:30:20 the entire country and quite possibly ending all life on Earth by fucking with America's nuclear weapons until there's simply not enough safety mechanisms, to stop someone from accidentally sending one off, you were going to have to destroy them completely. The permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch, the power of the billionaire,

Starting point is 00:30:39 the power of the dictator must be broken. This tiny group of men cannot, as a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals, supply chains, to produce everything we need to survive. It must belong to us. We create their wealth. The only way to save this world is to take it back.

Starting point is 00:30:57 If we want to save democracy, the only way to do it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon Musk rules as a tyrant. Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast that is lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too. They must cease to rule. They must cease to exist, not as individuals, but as a class. And the only way to do that is by giving control of their power and their property and their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of it in the first place. that is the tax that we have in front of us. The challenge that we face is that we face effectively the entire might of the American state,

Starting point is 00:31:34 which is one of the most powerful apparatus of repression that has ever been built. Our advantage is that that apparatus of repression is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are, and I cannot emphasize this enough, maybe the two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan's, after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the revolution's podcast, concluded to be the great idiots of history who by their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision at every single moment

Starting point is 00:32:04 are what makes revolutions possible. And if these people are not the great idiots of history that allow us to bring them down and stop them from destroying everything that has ever been in this world that is good, then nothing else is. Yeah, we have the one great stroke of good, portion we have, right, is that all power has been concentrated in their hands of complete idiots

Starting point is 00:32:29 who are addicted to diet coke and being mad at their children. Yep, and they, you know, we have already seen, they don't, they don't understand how this apparatus works, right? They fired the nuke police by accident. Yeah. So, like, it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of the means of coercive violence. Yeah. When we started, you spoke about controlled opposition, right? And the idea that, like, the great debate, fate of our time is how much state regulation we should have and how much unfettered anarcho-capitalism we should have. They are drinking the Kool-Aid that got them in power. That is the one thing going in our favor right now, that they are dismantling the means of coercive violence because

Starting point is 00:33:12 they genuinely believe the myth that if the state didn't exist, they could be even more wealthy and even more tyrannical. Yeah. And the second advantage that we have is that they have been, they have set about systematically alienating every single group of people who they would need as their political base. They are pissing off the military. They are pissing off the intelligence services.

Starting point is 00:33:30 They are going through and they are like systematically pissing off the farm states. And you know, like the farmers obviously do not have that like don't fucking matter. But they're pissing off the agro businesses. They are individually going through and pissing off a whole bunch of the of the country's scientific resources. They are going through.

Starting point is 00:33:45 They're like fucking with the Social Security Administration. They're individually going through and pissing off every single group of people on earth who matter and people who like us under this system aren't supposed to matter until we fucking do something about it. And, you know, the other big thing that we have right now is that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do. And by pulling apart his base of support and by putting together coalitions of some of these people and not all of them, some of them, some of them you just need to divide

Starting point is 00:34:15 and conquer by getting them out from backing him, right? Like the whole thing with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was that people just mostly stayed home. Yeah. And that was how they won. Like that is largely what we need. We need these people to stay home. But these people can and will, if we have anything to say about it, be fucking driven home. And hopefully we can bury both the grave diggers and the people whose graves they were digging in the same spot in the dust bit of history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again.

Starting point is 00:35:05 Welcome to What Could Happen here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis and I'm joined today by a special guest host, Bridget Todd. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I am completely excited to be here. I'm a listener of the show, so it feels like getting to be on a show that I actually freak out too often. And I'm very excited for you to be here because you have a special report on one of the people who I've been cyber stalking for years. And I'm very excited to hear the details of what she's been up to these past few weeks.

Starting point is 00:35:42 I kind of know the rough overview, because, again, because of my cyberstalking. But I've not done a deep dive the way you have. So I'm very excited to hear an update on this character. So it sounds like we are in a similar place when it comes to this person, and this person is none other than Candace Owens. First of all, what are your thoughts on her? because I am low-key fascinated with her. I follow her on social media. I watch her videos.

Starting point is 00:36:07 I am like weirdly captivated by her. I mean, I've covered her mostly through her involvement with Daily Wire. I've talked a little bit about kind of how that all fell apart, you know, like a year and a half ago or so. I've talked a little bit about her involvement in Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk. And she's just kind of been one of these like randomly, you know, like, like orbitors of like the online. like right wing content sphere for like, I don't know, the past six years at least. And I typically

Starting point is 00:36:37 focus more on like the, you know, like the Ben Shapiro's, the Matt Walsh's, you know, back in the day, the Stephen Crowders and stuff. But Candace was always just like a round. And like she definitely like went after a different demographic than what like my usual focuses, right? Like I'm, I'm focused on like what's going on with straight white men? Like why, why are they like this? And who, who is targeting them? And you know, and that's, you know, that's, you know, that's, like the Matt Walsh, like Stephen Crowder kind of angle. Like Candice Owens has like a kind of a broader net that she

Starting point is 00:37:07 targets with her content. So like she's always kind of come up as like a side character. I don't think I've ever done like a distinct focus on her before besides just you know whatever kind of crazy post or like you know anti-trans or like very like weird like racist rant that she goes on like every once in a while.

Starting point is 00:37:23 Yes. So there is so much to talk about when it comes to Candice Owens. I'm sort of like you like I sort of saw her as a side character but only recently have I realized, like, oh, people in my life are listening to Candace Owens and citing Candice Owens, and they have no idea any about her, anything about her backstory. Yeah. All the stuff that you were just talking about. She's like reinvented herself like multiple times.

Starting point is 00:37:46 And, you know, some people who mainly come at this from like the anti-fascist research perspective might not be aware of her like latest rebrand, which is what I'm excited to hear about today. Yes. I just remembered how she had that whole event with Kanye when she did her, like, be a bit of her like, L.M documentary. That was a whole other Candace era. Yeah, so much. Oh my god. I have to say, I was like, low-key embarrassed for her. Because like, during her Kanye West era, she was like, Kanye West designed the couture outfits for my Blegzit movement. And Kanye West was like, no, I fucking didn't. And like, I was like, oh, that's so embarrassing that you like, that you like publicly aligned yourself with Kanye West only for him to basically like, dis you,

Starting point is 00:38:30 publicly right after. Yeah. And then come out as like an explicit neo-Nazi like two weeks later. Yes. Yes. Oh. Candice. Girl. So I want to talk about her. Like I don't want to spend too much time on her background, but there are some pieces that I think like are good for understanding kind of who she is,

Starting point is 00:38:48 this chameleon figure that she's been. Totally. If there is not like a behind the bastards on her, do you know if there is? There should be if there's not. Not yet. Similarly on bastards, she's been one of these like recurring characters. Oh my God. But she has not had a distinct focus. Robert Evans, get on it because we need the Candace Owens behind the bastard.

Starting point is 00:39:06 So Candace grew up in Stanford, Connecticut. While she was a student there, she went through this horrible-sounding racial harassment. A classmate left her, like, this racist death threat on her voicemail that turned into, like, a pretty serious local scandal because it turned out the student who made that threat via voicemail did so in a car with a group of students that included the son. of the then mayor and then future Democratic governor of Connecticut, Danelle Malloy. So she got tons of support from the local chapter of the NAACP, and her family ended up suing the Stanford Board of Education and Federal Court for failing to protect her rights resulting in a $37,500 settlement. She went on to study journalism at University of Rhode Island before dropping out.

Starting point is 00:39:51 And this is like the early 2000s? Yes. This was like young, like baby Candace, high school Candace, before she was, The Candace Owen that we know today. Yeah. So I sort of like almost see a little bit of myself and where she got her start. Sure. Like me, she was an early adopter of using the internet to talk about things like race and politics.

Starting point is 00:40:13 Like me, that also seemed to sort of manifest in a lot of like low hanging fruit shit posts on the early days of blogging. Like in 2015, she was writing blogs, making fun of Trump's penis size. Sure. Many such cases. Yes, many such cases. So in 2015, Owens is running a blog called Degree 180, where she wrote pieces criticizing conservative Republicans, writing about the quote, that shit crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party. The good news is they will eventually die off, peacefully and in their sleep, we hope. And then we can get right on with the obvious social change that needs to happen immediately, she wrote on her blog. So back then, she was really someone who had like a progressive point of view and was doing a lot of public writing about,

Starting point is 00:40:59 what she was seeing and experiencing in politics at the time. Yeah, no, this is something that I guess some people might not know if they've only, like, become aware of her through Daily Wires. Yeah, like in the pre-2016 like BuzzFeed Internet kind of sphere, she was just, like,

Starting point is 00:41:15 one of like these people who would, yeah, have like, like, you know, progressive, like, ish takes, criticize, embarrassing, like, politicians and like overtly racist stuff happening. And then the degree to which this, this like, he'll turn happens is like one of the most stark examples I've seen in like a I don't know I'm trying to think of it if there's like any like exact parallel I don't

Starting point is 00:41:37 like there's like certainly some like detransition like grifters there used to be like ex-gay influencers or you know this like proto influencers kind of before influences were a thing like ex-gay speakers but yeah the switch around on on candace from these blog posts is so concentrated so in her own words she describes is happening overnight. There you go. Yeah. How it happened is like fascinating to me. So in 2016, when Gamergate was in full swing, Owens launched a Kickstarter for a project called Social Autopsy, which she described as a way to catalog the abuses of trolls and cyber bullies. Fun fact, that Kickstarter is still up today. It is such a weird time capsule of a different time. There's like a video

Starting point is 00:42:23 of her speaking earnestly about the need to like have the internet be a like safer, more equitable landscape. It is nuts. Like, people should go listen to her speaking about this project. So the plan for this project was essentially that she would create a way to de-anonymize online commentators and then connect

Starting point is 00:42:42 them with, like, their real names and their real-life employers. And what's so funny is that, like, that is the very same argument that a lot of people use, people who, like, want to restrict the open internet still use today, that, like, problems on the internet, online harassment,

Starting point is 00:42:58 and abuse would all be improved if only everybody had to use their government ID and government names to access the internet. And so, like, it's very funny that that idea, it was bad then, and it didn't really die. It was just recycled into today. Yeah, I mean, like, there's a version of this that happens, or at least it kind of used to happen more in regards to, like, anti-pascist research where, like, you're, like, you know, identify specific, like, extremely racist accounts or, like, explicit neo-Nazis and contact their employer in an attempt to get, to get them fired. so they can focus on getting a new job and supporting themselves rather than doing racism online and in person,

Starting point is 00:43:36 especially if he's like, you know, a member of like a group, whether that be, you know, the proud boys back in the day or many, many other groups, Patriot Prayer, now Patriot Front, that sort of thing. It's funny how hated this tactic is soon to be by people like Candace and the Daily Wire people, but he or she's advocating it herself. Exactly. And they just like post Anita Sarkeesian kind of content. world. Yeah. So pretty much everybody thought this was a bad idea, including video game developer

Starting point is 00:44:05 Zoe Quinn, who folks might remember was kind of at the center of GamerGate and was like viciously attacked. Owens was subsequently harassed and doxed, and she blamed Zoe Quinn and other feminists for this and said so publicly. As you can probably guess, like people like Milo Yanopolis loved this. People who were promoters of Gamergate really hyped up Owens. as claims that, like, yes, feminists were actually the ones dooming all the online harassing. Okay. They can see where this is going. So this event is what Owens credits with her turn from Progressive

Starting point is 00:44:40 to, quote, becoming a red-pilled radical. She says, I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls. She starts promoting right-wing viewpoints on her YouTube channel calling herself, quote, red-pilled black, which I got to say is like pretty good. branding. Like, I'm not mad at the branding there. I was like, okay, black woman talking about

Starting point is 00:45:03 like right wing stuff. Red pill black. I get it. I get it. Yeah, I'm interested to see how much how much the checkbook was a consideration here. Oh, yes. How much her Kickstarter got versus how much she realized she could get if she jumped on the other side of the content churn. Well, she almost instantly gets noticed by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Points USA, right? And he hires her almost immediately. She starts cranking out these videos. that really perform quite well, like her videos really go viral, videos where she's doing things like dismissing the 2017 white supremacist unite the right rally in Charlottesville.

Starting point is 00:45:40 Alex Jones gets her to co-host some of his Info War show. She's doing stints on Fox News as a paid commentator. Like, business is booming for Candace Owens from this turn. Yeah, this is around when I became aware of her. Yes. In 2021, she joins up with the Daily Wire. There was so much fanfare around them hiring Candace. Like, it was a big deal.

Starting point is 00:46:02 She moved to Nashville. Yeah. Fun fact, there was even a House Joint Resolution, House Joint Resolution 350, a resolution in the Tennessee government to congratulate Candace Owens on relocating to Tennessee and for her work at Daily Wired that reads, whereas Ms. Owens has earned the admiration in respect of millions of Americans through her activism in support of President Trump as a black woman and her perceptive criticism of creeping socialism and leftist political tyranny. Very cool stuff. Yeah. Imagine it being like a joint

Starting point is 00:46:35 resolution in your local government when you move someplace. Yeah. The governor of Tennessee was like super excited when the Daily Wire relocated their headquarters to Tennessee and brought in all these people. Like there was there was like so many like private dinners, meetings. There was like a number of resolutions welcoming the Daily Wire to Tennessee in this like 20, 21 period as they were just starting to launch their own like streaming service website, which is why they recruited Candace is because they were looking for content creators to fill out their slate. So you would think that this should be like a match made in heaven, right?

Starting point is 00:47:10 Smooth sailing. They need incidiary content creators. She's an incendiary content creator should be a match made in heaven. Perfect. Not quite because things end in like this really messy public fallout just a few years later. So I know that you've done episodes on this. From my perspective, and I would love to know what you think, it's not 100% clear what went down, but the public friction between Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, one of the founders of Daily Wire,

Starting point is 00:47:39 it seemed to be, like, related to reactions around the situation in Gaza. Yeah, totally. So Ben Shapiro is Jewish, and Owens, as we said, has said and done, like, a lot of anti-Semitic stuff, like a lot. And like actual anti-Semitic stuff. Like, people use that as a way to, like, shut down, like, very, very admirable, like, pro-Palestinian, like, activism. No, like, Candace Owens just is anti-Semitic.

Starting point is 00:48:09 And it's the same thing with, like, Jackson Hinkle. And she made it, like, an escalating series of anti-Semitic claims after October 7th, which slowly kind of, like, broke with the company and Ben, like, more and more and more of over series. of a few months. Yes. And it's funny because, like, it also kind of mirrors

Starting point is 00:48:28 this, like, online fight she had with Stephen Crowder like a year or so prior when Daily Wire was trying to recruit him. And then she got informed about, like, how, like, abusive he was to his wife.

Starting point is 00:48:40 And then she went on, like, a media blitz, like, against him as, like, as he was in negotiations, like, with the Daily Wire. She's, like, very willing to, like, stir shit up.

Starting point is 00:48:49 Like, even if it, like, goes against her own interests or the interests of, like, whatever company she works for, Like she is absolutely willing to like make like some kind of like chaotic spectacle regardless of her own like, you know, financial security, I guess. Yes. Like she, I'm so glad that you mentioned that. She is not afraid to get down and dirty in public. And I do think like, you know, as a black woman who works with a lot of white men, I would imagine that she's probably thinking like, I have to have some kind of decorum. I don't want anyone to say that I'm being a crazy black woman or whatever. She, it seems like she's, it seems like she's. It seems like she's. has no such qualms. Like she is like, I will, I will make this a public messy fight and I am not

Starting point is 00:49:30 afraid to make a genuine spectacle of myself. Yeah. And so it is really important to note that like, as you said, she wasn't just like criticizing the Israeli state. She was like getting into like blood liable and like deep conspiracy theories. Yeah. No, it was there was some really nasty posts. Yeah. Like one of the things that she said, she's claimed that Judaism was quote, a pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons and child sacrifice and that she was waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power, like stuff like that. Not great. Not good. Not good. So as you said, like this starts to become like a public feud toward her employer. She wrote on Twitter, no one can serve two masters and ended her post writing, you cannot serve both God and money

Starting point is 00:50:16 to which Ben Shapiro, her boss tweets, like quote tweeted. Oh my God. Like Candice, if you feel that taking money from the daily wire somehow becomes between you and God. By all means, quit. Like, messy as hell. It's crazy that instead of having, like, a company meeting, they were just doing this on Twitter.com. Oh, my God. And my messy ass was eating it up.

Starting point is 00:50:37 I was like, keep fighting. Let him fight. Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. I'm totally willing to, like, watch this go down. I do not want to get involved. Right, right, right. Owens, like, went on Tucker Carlson's show and said that Ben Jepiro was, quote,

Starting point is 00:50:50 acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged for weeks now. She said that Shapiro, quote, crossed a certain line when you come for scripture and read yourself into it. I will not tolerate it. Very cool. Yeah. So at one point, Owens tweets that she wants Ben Shapiro to have a public, like, debate with her, moderated by podcaster Patrick Bette David. Ben Shapiro was having none of this. He tweets, Candice, I can see why you'd want to hide behind a moderator, particularly one who said we should rename our company, quote, daily Jewish wire just yesterday. No. One on one Monday at five,

Starting point is 00:51:25 we can sit down and have a healthy debate like adults and we'll live stream it on X and YouTube, take it or leave it. As to the true reason why you didn't respond to my offer to sit down with you and discuss these issues publicly or privately back in February, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Like, this is employer employee going at it on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:51:43 I can't believe I'm taking Ben Shapiro's side here, not just because he's Ben Shapiro, but also because he's an employer. but it's a really tough situation here. Yeah, I feel the same way because, like, it's just not a great look to have somebody that you just hired to all this fanfare coming at you like this on Twitter. And I think, I mean, this is just my opinion.

Starting point is 00:52:04 So, like, take that for what it's worth. Just as somebody who has worked in media and been around the block, the reason why I'm not comfortable saying, like, their feud was entirely based on Owens' anti-Semitic comments and behavior is that she just went so hard. and so public, that something to me, I almost wonder if there was like a contract dispute here. Sure.

Starting point is 00:52:23 Like she was like, oh, I can make more money on my own. Totally. Got to get out of this contract or something. Because like, it just doesn't smell right. I mean, yeah. If she had like an inclination that she could afford to lose his job because she might make more money on her own, then yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:52:37 That would allow her to push this further than what she might otherwise might. Like there's been a lot of discussion in the right way in content sphere about like the daily wires fairly restrictive contracts, despite still getting paid. like tens of millions of dollars. There is like restrictions on like what happens when you lose monetization because the daily wire is like a company trying to make a profit. So totally.

Starting point is 00:52:58 There could absolutely be other financial stuff going on here. I think it's more like an interlocking series of issues rather than just one thing or another. Yes. So after Rabbi Shmuli Boutich criticized Owens for her defenses of Kanye West, Owens liked a tweet asking Botech if he was, quote, drunk on Christian blood again. And I guess that was the final straw. A few days later, Daily Wire and Candace Owens ended their relationship with Owens tweeting,

Starting point is 00:53:26 The rumors are true. I am finally free. Okay, so that's what happened with her and Daily Wire. So where is she now? Well, this is where the story gets interesting because I had not heard from Candice Owens in a minute. And my reintroduction to her happened recently when I was trying to make sense of the dispute

Starting point is 00:53:57 between two Hollywood A-listers, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. So the issue between Blake and Justin, it's a little bit complicated and ongoing, but it's actually a pretty interesting story that includes a lot of things that I enjoy, like how celebrities use media and how social media platforms can be weaponized for or against specific people. Email correspondence where people make themselves look terrible in writing because they do not expect those emails to be in a deposition later. Like, that's my favorite thing in the world. Like, please continue to put your wrongdoing in.

Starting point is 00:54:27 writing so that my nosey ass can read it later and be like, oh, messy. So I do encourage, like, folks to read up on it because it does go beyond just, like, two celebrities having a feud. But you don't really need to know the specifics for our purposes. The quick and dirty version is that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were in a movie adaptation of the very popular novel by Colleen Hoover called It Starts with Us. In December, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and starting a smear campaign against her. Baldoni strongly denies that and has sued her in response. Both camps have released information like emails, text messages, and video attempting to make the other look bad. So it has

Starting point is 00:55:08 kind of turned into one of those inkblot tests that changes depending on whose version you buy. Version one is that Blake Lively was being sexually harassed on set by a fake feminist ally who is actually an abusive man or version two that Blake Lively is an egomaniac who was using her star power and A-list celebrity network like her husband, Ryan Reynolds from Deadpool, to control the narrative around her being a nightmare on set and steamrolling everybody on this project. Cool. Yes. And so what's interesting about this to me is that it's one of those stories where algorithmically, it depends on what silo or what pocket of the internet you're at. Sure. To determine what version of this story you're getting, much like Johnny Depp's defamation

Starting point is 00:55:54 lawsuit. This sounds too much like the Johnny Depp's thing. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. And so, like, for whatever reason, TikTok thinks I hate Blake Lively and want to pour over every nuance of how she is a fraud, right? But someone else's TikTok might be like, no, Blake Lively, we should be supporting her. Like, it's one of those situations where, just depending on where you are on the internet, you might get a very different impression of the public sentiment leaning one way or another. Yeah, yeah, this is all the types of things I try to avoid learning about at almost all costs. So, thanks. Yes, I do not blame you. So I was trying to get to the bottom of it because I kept hearing about it. Like everyone was talking about it. So I'm talking to my cousins who I would lovingly describe as normies and that they are not super online.

Starting point is 00:56:41 It's like they're not like you and me. They're not like deep into the depths of extremism or anything like that. No, they're not watching like the Daily Wire for fun slash for work. Yes. And my cousins are like, oh my God, there is this black girl journalist who has been following everything. and breaking it down, she has all the tea, we'll tag you. That journalist was Candace Owens. Okay.

Starting point is 00:57:04 So, all right. You know, Candice has been making so many videos off of this. And, like, her coverage, coverage and quotes, has really taken off online. As the cut put it in a piece called Candice Owens has gone mainstream. They write, the right-wing commentator's coverage of the Blake lively Justin Bodoni case has reached millions of viewers. Owens' podcast was hours and hours of analysis of the case, deep dives into court filings, tabloid news stories, even Ryan Reynolds' recent SNL-50-th anniversary special appearance. One listener said, she's really been able to go in and pinpoint discrepancies in some of the things Blake Lively has said,

Starting point is 00:57:41 rather than us having to go through it on our own. Ah, of course. It's the woman who's lying about being sexually harassed, of course. One listener of her podcast says she recognizes that Owen seems to have a pro-Baldani bias, but she doesn't care because, quote, she's urging us to look past the fact that this is not a feminist issue at all, that it's about getting justice

Starting point is 00:58:00 for whoever is being wronged here. She's uniting the left and the right. The right-wing women's magazine also published a headline about this, saying how Candace Owens is uniting conservatives and liberal with her, it ends with us coverage. So her coverage of this dispute

Starting point is 00:58:16 has really allowed her to attract a lot more viewers beyond her like normal right-wing extremist base, which has generally been like a lot of white men, like that who was really listening to her content before when she was with Daily Wire. Now she has really branched out. So like Normies, like my cousins,

Starting point is 00:58:35 who have no idea who Owens is, have no idea her background, her past, the work that she has done, and just think like, oh, she's a normal entertainment journalist like digging and getting the dirt. I know she's doing this like on her podcast, I assume YouTube as well.

Starting point is 00:58:48 She also just like trying to like flood TikTok, trying to flood like Instagram reels. Is this kind of part of how she's trying to expand her reach? It is. Like, she's everywhere. And then she has her longer-form podcast than YouTube, but then clips of her, like, you know, breaking down the top lies or top inaccuracies

Starting point is 00:59:06 and things that Blake lively has said, those go super viral on social media, the short clips. Yeah. Okay. And all of this has been just gangbusters for her growth and engagement. Here's how the cut put it. Since Owen started covering the live live.

Starting point is 00:59:22 Baldani case, her YouTube channel has exploded in popularity, allowing her to attract a much larger fan base than the audience of hardcore conservatives she is amassed over the years. Each episode about lively racks up at least 1.5 million views. In the past month alone, Owens has amassed more than 450,000 new subscribers on YouTube, and her total video views have quadrupled since this time last year. This is according to data from the platform Social Blade. Oh, no. Over the past three months, her audience on YouTube has almost started skewing 65% female, according to data provided by a spokesperson, a marked shift from her past fan base. So, yeah, she's exploding in popularity. She's everywhere.

Starting point is 01:00:02 And now she's attracting, like, normie women who are just coming in for this celebrity dispute. Yeah, that's probably not going to end well, huh? Well, I don't think it will end well. You know, I was, like, racking my brain trying to figure out, like, why has this story taken off so much for Owens? And there are a couple of reasons I think this is, like, working for her. One, I hate to say it, but she is actually genuinely interesting to listen to. You know, when she was a progressive voice online, she definitely was somebody who had a point of view and a clear voice and a perspective. And that really comes through when she's breaking down Blake lively in these videos. She has a way of speaking that really makes you pay attention and signals to the listener like, this person is really breaking it down.

Starting point is 01:00:48 It's the same reason why on TikTok or social media when someone is like, like story time or like, I'm about to tell you all the details of something. Those videos always perform very well on social media. And I think that Owens is just very good at knowing how to hold somebody's attention online. Like, I have to say it. Sure. I mean, she's been doing the content churn for almost a decade now. Like, yeah, you do get good at it on like a technical proficiency level.

Starting point is 01:01:16 Yes. Also, you know, we just love good old-fashioned misogyny. and if that misogyny can be laced with like a conspiracy theory I think that it's even better so like I think that part of this is just like social media platforms are always going to amplify misogyny I would argue that things like massagony transphobia misogy noir or racism all of that is like

Starting point is 01:01:39 baked into the experience of showing up online as a feature not a bug and I think that Owens takes it even further because she is breaking it down like she's uncovering some conspiracy like it's not just let's talk about Blake lively it's I'm uncovering the web of lies and I'm gonna I'm gonna expose Blake lively's dark truth right and so like of course that's gonna take off and she does gain this element of authority because she's a woman talking about this it makes men feel better about being misogynistic because a woman's telling them it's okay to I mean this is this is the same thing that she was able to weaponize for all of her like like you know anti black clavs matter stuff for all of her like like like racism isn't real things. She tries to use that to her advantage, mostly to make like white members of her audience feel good about their own racism because a black woman told them it's actually okay. And like that's been like a big part of her career the past few years.

Starting point is 01:02:37 Exactly that. And I think like she really understands that the inviting power of taking what you might think of as like a contrarian stance on something. Like yeah, totally. Like after the Me Too movement, how many women got involved? engagement by taking a contrarian stance, right? Like, I think going against the conventional attitude that says, like, oh, we have to automatically support the woman in this dispute probably makes people tuning into Owens' breakdowns feel like they're like free thinkers who are going against the grain, you know, by taking an unpopular opinion, which I do think connects to her more odious stances on things like trans people

Starting point is 01:03:13 and women and Jewish people. Yeah, no, I mean, like, you see the same thing with like, you know, like the gays against groomers thing, right-wing trans. D-trans-influencers. It's the same like Gambit. And certainly I think like your identification of her as like a professional contrarian is like very, very key to her success. Exactly. I also think like part of the reason why people are attracted to conspiracy theories is that it allows for like fantasy world building. And I think I really see the ways that she injects that into her coverage. Even the word coverage, I put that in quotes because like she is like a wild person. And so her coverage is, like, also wild.

Starting point is 01:03:52 She does not adhere to, as she puts it, quote, a traditional style of reporting. You know, I'll take her word for that one. You know what? I'll believe her on that single point. Yeah, I believe her. I believe that. You know, she amplifies rumors. And even once she read a letter that she said that she got from Blake Lively's husband,

Starting point is 01:04:12 Ryan Reynolds, his acting coach when he was 12. And according to Candace Owens, his acting coach said that Ryan Reynolds was an obnoxious. kid. You know what? I also believe it. Oh, I have no trouble believing that. But like her coverage, it includes like side characters. Yeah, things that have no bearing on this whatsoever. I mean, this, this focus on like, this, like, conspiratorial Ben is like the same, she's using the same tactics she did for her Black Lives Matter documentary for like most of her political work. Like it's, she's using the same tactics over and over again. And eventually she like reaches this like stress point or this like threshold. where she cannot see a path forward or she can't see a way to surpass it, and then she does a pivot. This happened with her progressive blog.

Starting point is 01:04:56 This happened even at the Daily Wire. She doesn't work with Turning Point USA anymore. And like this new pivot is learning, hey, it's super lucrative to be like a tabloid entertainment, quote unquote, journalist. Very easy, super lucrative. And all of the tactics you learned on the right wing media sphere work great here. Like all of this like conspiratorial thinking, really a disregard for like facts. and evidence works perfect for this sort of like rumor-based reporting. And it spreads like crazy.

Starting point is 01:05:26 And yeah, it spreads across political lines. You don't, you aren't just targeting the mega people or like the far right. This can be so much more broad to like the giant audience of like, quote unquote, like apolitical people go to these platforms for a form of like escapeism and entertainment rather than you're just hearing about politics yet again because that's, you know, very tiring. Yeah, and I think in my mind, all of it is sort of connected. Like, Ben Shapiro,

Starting point is 01:05:56 nobody cared more about celebrities or talked more about celebrities than Ben Shapiro. He would love to be like, I don't care what Hollywood is doing, but he was obsessed with, like, Beyonce and Meg the Stallion. Like, it was just like a negative obsession.

Starting point is 01:06:09 Like, you know, anti-fandom is still fandom. When you make video after video about how much you don't like Meg the Stallion, in a kind of way, you are a fan just in the opposite direction. And so I think that Candace Owens really took that and learned how to perfect it. Because she is much, I think that she is much better at this than Ben Shapiro is like, the evidence being that like her YouTube channel is exploding with people who probably

Starting point is 01:06:32 would never watch any of Ben Shapiro's content. The big bummer for me is that the DailyWire's first film, Lady Ballers, left us on a cliffhanger with Candace Owens and Matt Walsh sitting in a car talking about how Matt Walsh planned this entire, like, plot of, of the film as, like, some kind of scheme or, like, social experiment. And, you know, it was implied there would be more, you know, it was like a, you know, like, Avengers Nick Fury type post-credit scene. And, and now we're never going to learn what Candace Owens and Matt Walsh get up to now, because she's left the company, she's now doing her own thing. So now we just had this dangling plot thread that's just going to bug me

Starting point is 01:07:12 forever. Like, what does the Candice Owens character at the end of Lady Ballers do next? I'm going to be thinking about this for like years. America deserves closure. We deserve to know. Just putting that out there. I think we do deserve closure. I just think my closure is going to be a little bit different. I am very fine having all of these plot threads wrapped up quite quickly.

Starting point is 01:07:33 But I do not see that in the cards immediately. So in terms of where she's at now, like, you know, my question is like, has Owens, has this kind of like mainstream audience that she's been able to amass? has she changed her views? Is she trying to do a rebrand or a pivot? In an interview, she said, in terms of my perspective, I haven't changed anything. I've been anti-Me-too

Starting point is 01:08:06 since long before it was cool. Sure. I mean, that can be true. It's also true that she's getting better at propaganda and widening her footprint, which, yeah, then once her audience gets bigger, she may be able to slip in more things that I would find unsavory

Starting point is 01:08:21 to a larger audience over time. But she also might be content to keep growing that and be slightly less off-putting in the meantime. But no, I mean, like, there's also just a huge audience for like the anti-woke backlash, anti-Me2 stuff right now. Like, that's kind of, that's kind of like the new mainstream, frankly. So I am certain that she's going to try to continue to like flex that and grow that in the next few like months, years. Yeah. So I agree with you. I believe Owens when she says that like her stances have not changed much. Yeah, no. It's easy to be like, oh, well, she's pivoting to go mainstream

Starting point is 01:08:56 now that she has these like women in her audience who are interested in celebrity. And you can honestly, you can sort of see some of this in changes to her physical appearance. Like she was sort of known for having very severe hair. The joke being that she had alienated herself so much from her fellow black people

Starting point is 01:09:12 that like no black person was going to do her hair and that's why it looked that way. But lately, you've really seen this like softening. She's kind of going for like a softer public look. She is pivoting to different kinds of programming. She's branched out into doing a book club for paying subscribers and some kind of a fitness program. That makes sense. Yeah, totally.

Starting point is 01:09:32 Like the health guru fitness entertainment bubble. Yeah, that's huge. That's such a good grift. She's going to make so much money. Yeah. Yeah, she is. But I really agree with you, Gair, that like, I think that these new followers are certainly going to be walked out a pipeline that includes her extremist attitude. just using celebrity scandal as a hook because, like, as you said,

Starting point is 01:09:56 celebrity scandals and celebrity stories are just considered fluff for a lot of people. So, like, people who care about extremist content and ideology are maybe not seeing that as a space that they need to pay too close of attention to about these stories that you might see on the cover of an Us Weekly. But these stories actually can be used to tap into extremist ideologies and unleash them on a whole new audience. And, like you were saying, if you are just, like, watching a podcast because you're, want to be entertained about a story about two celebrities,

Starting point is 01:10:25 you might not have your like bullshit detector up to be like, wait, is this extremist content? Because it's seen and treated as a less charged space. And so, you know, that line of thinking that says that, you know, this is just fluff. It doesn't really matter what happens in celebrity news. It's incorrect. It is dangerous because it lends itself to people being more susceptible to it

Starting point is 01:10:46 when extremist content is slipped in without even really realizing it. I mean, and like that relates even to like the originator of this Gamergate stuff and the whole like anti-woke like media fandom content sphere, right? Where so much of like the anti-book backlash has been built on people complaining that Star Wars is too woke now. There's too many women in in movies. There's too many black people in commercials. Where'd all the white people go? There's too many gay people in TV. There's too many trans people in TV. And like that is his, it is definitely focused on by the rest of the Daily Wire goons. And you can very easily pivot back to that sort of cultural commentary after you're done talking about Blake lively.

Starting point is 01:11:27 Like this is a very small jump where you're still talking about the entertainment industry, but with this like anti-woke framing of like, you know, why is all these minorities here? Why are they pushing transgenderism on kids? You know, whether that'd be talking about, you know, trans actors in the business, whether you'd be talking about, you know, like female led or like diversity casting, like all, all that kind of stuff. that especially Candace can use her contrary in position to speak on authority about talking about why are you recasting these legacy characters

Starting point is 01:11:57 to be people of color or why is a woman the lead of this thing when it should be actually a man just like very very basic stuff that's been a part of like the YouTube slop for a decade now but it's still like

Starting point is 01:12:11 it still takes in a lot of a lot of clicks and it is a lot of the daily wire and like right wing content still still does. It's all this weird, like culture war stuff. It's very, very tight in with Hollywood.

Starting point is 01:12:26 Like you were saying about how like Ben Shapiro claims to, you know, like, hate Hollywood. He's trying to build his own alternative to it. But he can't stop talking about it. Like, he can't stop complaining about Disney's Snow White. And I can see Candice doing like the exact same thing. But now with like honestly like a bigger, a bigger

Starting point is 01:12:41 more like a political audience that's much more malleable and can be shaped around these like larger cultural trends when you think about this like perception of backlash against wokeness. I absolutely think that's what we're going to see. And I can tell you, we can finish by, I can tell you about her next big pet issue, which is going to be championing Harvey Weinstein, who she is.

Starting point is 01:13:04 No, no, no, no. She's been interviewing him since 2022. According to the Hollywood reporter, she explains, while he is, quote, an immoral man, he is also a victim of the justice system. A victim, sure. A victim. And she says, always had faith in our court system and now it's beginning to change. Now I'm beginning to wonder

Starting point is 01:13:24 if our courtrooms have been politicized. And the thing that's made her think this is Harvey Weinstein. It's wild. I mean, like, Ben Shapiro is starting his own campaign to free Derek Chauvin. I think there's going to be a lot of pressure on the courts right now. I mean, you're seeing that from like Elon and Trump as well. I think undermining the authority of the court, I think is actually kind of part of this larger concerted issue amongst the entirety of the right right now. Because this is like their biggest remaining roadblock to. achieving their right-wing utopia is the court system. And this may not be intentional on every person's part.

Starting point is 01:13:59 Like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens aren't intentionally collaborating on this, but they may be copying each other's trends. And if they're seeing this wider push across a large amount of the right-wing content people to put pressure on various aspects of the courts, including by using high-profile cases like Harvey Weinstein or Derek Chauvin, that's not a great sign and I can definitely see them trying to do that

Starting point is 01:14:24 in conjunction I guess. Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot more of it. Candice has a series coming out called Harvey Speaks that apparently tells his side of the story, so look out for that. And I think that's the thing like I think with her content, like when asked why it was

Starting point is 01:14:40 she thought that her Blake lively stuff was really taking off, she says that she believes her new fans on the left, quote, have just kind of gotten wise to the fact that maybe women lie just like men. And so I just implore folks that like, even if you think that you're just like taking in this content because you're following fluffy celebrity news or whatever,

Starting point is 01:15:01 it is so easy to go from maybe women lie to maybe women can't be trusted or maybe women shouldn't work and have jobs. A stance that Candace herself has actually advocated for, despite very obviously being a working woman. And so I don't think we should trust Candace Owens, even if she does this rebrand. And like, don't let her rebrand herself as like just a celebrity investigative journalist. Like, she put all of these odious views out into the world.

Starting point is 01:15:26 And I don't want her to be able to like soften it or, you know, soften what it is that she advocates for and what it is that she believes in. If that is truly what she's trying to do to just sort of like amass a more mainstream audience. So don't fall for it. If you're getting tagged in Candace Owens videos, just know what she actually is about. I mean, yeah, I think for our audience, it's more likely that you'll have, like, family members who are going to be finding this stuff. And you should find a list of sources, maybe this episode included, but probably, you know, you can find some articles as well. That they give some background on Candace's history and previous beliefs. You can pick and choose some of her most, like, outrageous claims. So when your aunt sends you a video about how Ryan Reynolds and Blake lively are kidnapping children or something, you can pick and choose. You can pick and choose some of her most, like, outrageous claims. So when your aunt sends you know, You can maybe inform Aunt Judy that maybe you shouldn't listen to everything this Candace Owens character is saying. Yeah, this Candace Owens might not be on the money. Might not be on the level.

Starting point is 01:16:27 No. Yeah, inform an auntie today. Yes, that's right. And that's all I got. That's it. I don't know how you usually end these episodes. Usually by getting sad. But I don't know.

Starting point is 01:16:40 This has been an interesting dive into the life of. a woman with many, many careers, many, a chameleon, many personalities, a chameleon, a, a, a chameleon of contrarianism. Ooh, I like that. If I ever write a book about her, that'll be the title. Jesus Christ. Oh, what a nightmare that would be. Man, scary.

Starting point is 01:17:04 Bridget, where can people find you online? You can find me on my podcast. There aren't our girls on the internet on this network. I heart radio, I mean. you can find me on Instagram at Bridgett, Marine, D.C. or on Blue Sky at Bridgett Todd. Well, thank you so much. Good luck in D.C. Thanks for holding the line out there as Elon puts a killdozer through your entire city. We're doing our best.

Starting point is 01:17:27 I would love to talk again about a DC update. Maybe next time you come on the show. Oh, my God. Yes, please. There we go. Well, we will talk then. Goodbye, everybody. This is It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Still banned from one of the top 15 highest endowment universities in the country. But I am not banned from this podcast. Today I'm joined by Robert Evans and James Stout to discuss the very troubling news of students having their visas and or green cards revoked by U.S. customs.

Starting point is 01:18:26 in relation to anti-genocide protests. James, this is something that you've been putting together a piece on for a while. Yeah. Repeatedly trying to warn people of Cassandra-like to no avail, yes. Yes, I do feel like we kind of saw this one coming a little bit, but that doesn't mean it's not bad. And specifically, the case we're talking about today, I think is particularly egregious,

Starting point is 01:18:52 because it doesn't actually involve someone to student visa, right? So I've been working for a while on people who actually under the Biden administration were potentially facing deportation, right? But the material difference between that and now is that those people were facing deportation because the university removed their visas or the university removed them from the university and therefore their visa was no longer valid. In this case, it seems that the order came directly from the state department to. deport a guy whose name is Mahmood Khalil. So Kalil was a prominent activist in the encampment at Columbia, right? But what's notable is that and the events here, as best we can tell, went down like this. I'm referencing an AP article here that we'll link in the show notes. ICE agents came to his front door, which is on university property, and told him that they were

Starting point is 01:19:53 revoking his student visa and therefore he was being deported. He then informed them that he didn't have a student visa, that he was a legal permanent resident, right, colloquially referred to as a green card holder. They then told him, or his lawyer, at some point he got his lawyer on the phone and was communicating with them through his lawyer. They then told the lawyer that they were revoking the green card. And at some point, it's reported that they attempted to detain his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, which of course is not a thing that ice can do. So the difference between a legal permanent resident and a student visa is like the place I want to start this because they are materially very different, right?

Starting point is 01:20:33 Student visas are pretty fragile. People lose their student visas for lots of things all the time. A green card is a much higher barrier. And the revocation of his green card, we spoke a lot before this episode about like exactly kind of where this comes from in Trump's mishmash of executive orders and speeches, right? Because after he was detained, we saw Trump trothing about specifically using the word green card. We also saw Marco Rubio tweeting about removing green cards, right? Rubio being a Secretary of State.

Starting point is 01:21:09 Normally the green card wouldn't be a State Department thing. No. It seems the most likely course of events, as far as we can tell from what we know right now, and today is the 10th of March, is that, ICE came thinking he had a student visa. It's not particularly uncommon for ICE raids to not have all the information on someone, from what I understand.

Starting point is 01:21:29 I mean, this is just a police thing. Yes, yes. It's not just like cops who are doing raids very often don't have all or accurate information. Yeah, ICE in particular very often don't have a judicial warrant. They have a warrant that they may sign themselves, which is a different thing.

Starting point is 01:21:43 They're supposed to require a warrant to get onto Columbia University campus, but as of now, I don't believe Columbia have clarified that they did have. the apology also allows for them to allow ice onto campus in like exigent circumstances. So we'll have to see what exactly that warrant was for and why exactly Columbia allowed them onto campus. So it seems like they came attempting to evoke this guy's student visa, realized you didn't have a student visa, detained him anyway, and then kind of ex post facto

Starting point is 01:22:12 these tweets and statements came out. But Garrison, you found some stuff in, I mean, Trump has made previous statements that are kind of uncons. clear, right? He uses the word aliens a lot. Yeah, so we've been trying to kind of figure out the exact details of like what is going on what justification they have for doing this and how we can like extrapolate

Starting point is 01:22:33 this out to larger trends because deporting like legal residence for a college protest is pretty insane. And also the rhetoric coming out of the White House and like the White House like social media accounts around this incident is like extremely worrying.

Starting point is 01:22:49 Yeah. Like the way they're basically putting up like wanted posters for protesters. And in general, the way that the White House account has been doing this like, own the libs, like, memetic nationalism the past few weeks has been, has been really upsetting. And this has continued around this issue. And I think it is worth focusing on this as like a specific escalation. Because you have people like Mamadu Tal who I think Cornell tried to revoke their student visa. And then he's in some way negotiated back.

Starting point is 01:23:21 back into that to stay on the interim provost John Siciliano eventually ruled in Tal's favor, so he did not end up getting deported last year. And now this new development in relation to the Columbia protests is a significant escalation. Yeah. Because not only is this, not just like the university revoking in F1, which they do have the, you know, authority to, this is like coming directly from the Trump administration where they are going after specific students without the involvement of the university and students who may be legal permanent residents. Yeah. Garrison found a fact sheet on Whitehouse.gov where Trump is quoted as saying, quote, to all resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protest, we put you on notice.

Starting point is 01:24:06 Come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you. And that would seem to include the legal permanent residents. Yes. Right. Like resident alien is a tax status. But again, like, I think it's quite possible that the vagueness in the language is deliberate, not necessarily from Trump, but there are other people within the Trump cabinet who might seek to use that vagueness for things like this, right? Like, who might see that as a benefit. Yeah. Well, and you see that with other things, like with, like, with Rubio's State Department directives on trans people right now, where they keep the language intentionally vague. They leave the enforcement up to, like, individual actors, and then they can eventually, like, figure out the logistics, like, in court.

Starting point is 01:24:48 once people be like, oh, no, this is illegal. Yeah. So, like, yeah, it is vague because they want to test the actual, like, full authority of their power. But I think the specific, like, fact sheet, which is, like, a sister article towards this executive order, says, like James was saying, to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice. Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses. which have been infested with radicalism like never before, unquote. So there you have him saying both resident aliens,

Starting point is 01:25:25 which we can infer, probably refers to green cardholders, as well as student visas. So these are two separate things that he has specifically named as going after. And now you see more direction from Rubio, after this arrest that happened on Monday, you see more direction from Rubio and the State Department in specifically naming legal permanent residence as targets for removal and targets for ice actions,

Starting point is 01:25:50 which is not something that is extremely common? Yeah. Where I've seen it before is like in cases of material support for terrorism. But that has quite a high bar of proof, right? That's like a listed organization of proving a material, i.e., financial or physical support, right? Like in kind donations. Like I've written about a guy who was providing material aid to the Islamic State

Starting point is 01:26:14 called Siki Remy's Hodzik, sending stuff from back. fast pro, actually, like thermal scopes and hunting scopes and things like that. But that has a much higher bar than this, which we will see, you know, because we have a legal permanent resident here and they're seeking to revoke that, I imagine we will see a court case and we will see exactly the justification for revoking his green card in that court case. That will be some time in the future. Let's go in a quick break and we will come back to discuss some more of the details on what Mark Rubio is actually saying and where this could all end up. Okay, we are back.

Starting point is 01:26:59 I would like to talk about specifically some of the rhetoric that Rubio has been using since this arrest and a little bit of what he was saying before. Like we were saying before the break, some of this kind of vague language can kind of be used to their advantage. And this is certainly like riffing off of very vague language that Trump would use on the campaign trail, right, where he would talk about wanting to jail or deport protesters, like in general, regardless if they're student visa holders, green card holders, or just U.S. citizens, right? Like, Trump has made statements about wanting to do all of that.

Starting point is 01:27:31 And campaigns, like, off-the-cuff statements and actual, like, government policy are two different things. And right now, like, they're trying to figure out where the line between that is, like, how much of this rhetoric can be turned into government policy. And we mentioned, like, the fact sheet from the executive order that I believe was signed in January, which is, you know, to quote unquote, combat anti-Semitism. And then, like, last week, so before this arrest happened, we had a post from the secretary

Starting point is 01:27:58 Mark Rubio Twitter account official, quote, those who support designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, threaten our national security. The United States has zero tolerance for foreign visitors who support terrorists, violators of U.S. law, including international students, face visa denial or revocation and deportation, unquote. So that one specifically focuses, I would say, pretty, pretty firmly on people who have student visas, right? He names like visitors. Yeah. And then after the arrest happened, he posted a different statement on his own personal account, quote, we will be revoking the visas and or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so that they can be deported. Unquote. I'm sharing an AP article. And then the Homeland Security DHS Gov account. posted on March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmood Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student.

Starting point is 01:29:05 Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump's executive orders and protecting U.S. national security, unquote. And there has now been a flurry of... of posts from both the White House account and DHS accounts, basically posting like a picture of this person saying that he's aligned with Hamas in celebration, almost like styled after a wanted poster, but instead I just reads, like, arrested.

Starting point is 01:29:34 And that is like the, that's the rhetoric that like they're using right now on their official accounts. Something that like James, I think noted, it's important to like think about if ICE was just freestyling this action or if there was a directive beforehand to go after green cards specifically, right? And it seems like, at least for the people like doing the raid, they did not care.

Starting point is 01:29:56 Nor did they like, no, they weren't like informed. They just were told to go after this person from someone higher up, right? And that very well could be Rubio. I mean, a lot of DHS is being ran by Stephen Miller right now. A lot of this feels very Miller-esque. Yeah. We got an update.

Starting point is 01:30:14 As of the time of recording, I've just discovered that Mahmoud Khaled, Khalil's lawyers filed a lawsuit challenging his detention, and a judge in New York City, a federal judge, obviously, ordered that Khalil shouldn't be deported while that court then considered his case. Yes, I was going to bring that up. So that also, like his case would be considered in New York City, which is probably good for him as opposed to a more conservative jurisdiction elsewhere, right? Totally. Like this happening in Texas, like in all of those districts where Elon Musk is trying to set up his corporations because there's friendly judges, this would be handled quite differently. right? Yeah, this is something migrants I speak to are at least aware of sometimes that they don't want to enter into Texas because the Fifth Circuit is seen as less favorable to them than say the Ninth Circuit where they would be if they entered in California. I'm sort of surprised if it is a Miller joint that it isn't someone like UT Austin or somewhere like that.

Starting point is 01:31:05 No, they're going directly after this individual in part because he's somebody that a lot of folks who might otherwise be like up in arms about a move like this, would say because of some of his connections and some of the things he said in the past, well, he's, you know, supported groups that are really bad. Like, I think they're really trying to find the first case is they want someone that they can carve a lot of, like, liberals off from being too scared to support because he said some things that, like, they don't want to have attached to them. Like, that's how they're, and they're going to keep pushing that further and further each time.

Starting point is 01:31:40 You find some folks who you can scare off a lot of maybe what you might call, like, their otherwise natural support base because you can. point out this thing or that thing they did that was that was not great. Yeah, the ACLU types. Like when I'm not, I'm not insulting or trying to say bad things about this guy. I'm just saying like, that's the tactic here, right? To try to paint this guy as like, well, this guy did this, are you do really want to support that? Which is why you have to take an incredibly firm stance that, no, the government doesn't get to do this. The State Department doesn't get to do this. Yeah, regardless of any things that this person may have said. Yeah, the First Amendment is for

Starting point is 01:32:12 everyone. I don't care what he said, you know? So, like, it's also worth noting that Columbia, specifically, the intercept has reported on this, that there is a WhatsApp group called Columbia alumni for Israel. And they have been explicitly trying to identify the students and to call for like prosecution and I guess persecution of these students. And I think the Columbia encampment was particularly objectionable to a lot of people. That was kind of the one that got a lot of the national focus and the reporting, right? So it's understandable that that's where they went for this.

Starting point is 01:32:47 Yeah, it's high visibility, and I think it's also very likely that they are just looking to have a test case for this to see if they can create legal precedent for removing people's green cards for, you know, anti-genocide protests, right? Yeah. And the specific details of that will become more and more less important based on like the results of the case. Yeah, as long as they can create that precedent, right? And specifically, like the precedent for revoking a green card, something that's pretty substantial. They want something that's like, you know, in their mind, like the most favorable towards their outcome. So, I mean, that's part of what they're trying to do with this specific case. And, like, it is, it is very much in line with Trump's campaign rhetoric and versions of what Trump has said before. And now you're seeing someone like Rubio, someone who's, you know, a little bit more policy-minded, taking, taking steps towards this outcome.

Starting point is 01:33:40 Yeah, which I think is, you know, like, the other thing they didn't get to do, I guess, is that they weren't able to deport the guy at hyper speed, which they have been doing with some people. He was detained in New York and then moved to Louisiana. People were very upset about this, rightly, because it's removing him from easy access to his lawyer and to his family and to his eight-month pregnant wife, right? That's all things that shouldn't be done.

Starting point is 01:34:02 It's also something that the Biden administration did routinely. We have other episodes on this, actually. Especially in San Diego, where we have some funding that allows people who are detained access to legal assistance, it has been very common for those migrants to be then moved to Texas. I've seen it with migrants. I've met at the border and I've looked for them in the ICE immigrant detention locator and they've been moved to Texas.

Starting point is 01:34:26 It's not uncommon at all. So it's bad that it happened. It was bad that it happened under Biden. It's still bad that it's happening now. We shouldn't have let it happen then. We shouldn't support it when it happens now. And I think before we go and break again, I do want to kind of close this section by talking about how, like,

Starting point is 01:34:41 they don't necessarily need an executive order. specifically allowing Trump to do this, or like Trump doesn't need to make an executive order, like, explicitly for this, based on, like, immigration deportation law. Like, there will be an argument made in, like, in court that they have justification for this action already. This is something that, like, I've already been through when I immigrated to the country and, like, did, like, my citizenship interview, right? Like, if you, if you have discussed in the past, you know, something that can be construed as support for a terrorist organization, that does disqualify you from U.S. citizenship, right?

Starting point is 01:35:16 So there's going to be a lot of arguments, like, around, like, specifically these terrorism statutes that will make someone like this a subject for removal. Yeah. And, like, that's going to be, like, the angle in which they go about this. And I think that's, like, worth keeping in mind. I also think it's worth, because I, and I don't want to make this, because a lot of people online have, this shouldn't be our immediate primary concern. Our immediately primary concern should be Mahmood and the other.

Starting point is 01:35:42 people like him who are in situations like him are going to be targeted. Yeah. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that like if they get away with this at some point that we'll start saying like, look, if you support for Palestine, the government describes, like, or any support for any group that the government considers a terrorist. It doesn't matter if you were born here as a citizen, you know, we can start. Like that is a potential in state of this, which is, again, not should not be on your front burner. It should be the people being targeted right now, but also an awareness of like this is part

Starting point is 01:36:12 of why you have to draw such a heartline. Like if the situation was reversed, and this were a Democratic administration coming after an anti-vaccine student activist who is a permanent legal resident, it would be wrong for them to disappear. Right? Like, that has to be like where the line is drawn. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:36:28 Yeah, the state should not have this, like, ability. Like, we should not let them get away with this and we should put as much support and legal support into preventing this from happening. I really can't say which way this will go. immigration law is one of the most headache-inducing things I've ever had to go through in my entire life.

Starting point is 01:36:48 He will be spending a lot of money on immigration lawyers now. Also, be really clear, I'm not equating support for Palestine to being anti-vax. I'm just saying, like, if this was like a shitty guy, right, it would still be wrong. It was something that we like to laugh at for getting measles in Texas. Disappearing people bad.

Starting point is 01:37:06 If he thought Russia was doing anti-fascism in Ukraine, it would still be important. Right, right. You know, to do this. And should we take a break and come back and discuss some more? Yes. Yes. I wanted to give a little bit of background here, some other stuff that I've been looking into.

Starting point is 01:37:33 So on the 5th of February, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a series of memos. One of these was establishing a, quote, October 7th Task Force. I'm going to quote from it here, to prioritize seeking justice for victims of October 7th, 23 terrorist attack in Israel, addressing the ongoing threat posed by Hamas and its affiliates and combating anti-Semitic acts of terrorism and civil rights violations in the homeland. It then lifts several action items for the FBI, among them is investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, anti-Semitic civil rights violations and other federal crimes committed by Hamas supporters in the United States, including on college campuses.

Starting point is 01:38:13 The final point is, quote, supporting efforts by the Israeli government, Department of Defense and Department of Treasury to pursue non-criminal responses to the October 7th attack and other terrorist activities by Hamas. There's a couple of things that are considered. Obviously, like non-criminal responses could include deportation, right? Like if the person is not being accused of a crime, but nonetheless having their visa revoked. Also, the idea of cooperating with a foreign government, a government which is currently committing a genocide, potentially against US citizens or US residents, is quite concerning.

Starting point is 01:38:47 It's especially concerning when we talk about that Trump executive order that we've already discussed, right? One of the parts of that Trump executive order that I noticed that I haven't seen any reporting on was the, quote, infantry and analysis of all the Title VI complaints of administrative actions, including in K through 12 education related to anti-Semitism, pending or resolved after October the 7th, 2023. Can you explain what Title VI is? Yeah, I can garrison, and I would love to. So Title VI is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, right? It prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. DEI. Yes. It applies to federally funded programs, activities, or institutions which receive federal funding, right, which recover almost every institution of education in this country, apart from some religious private schools, I guess. Maybe they still get some federal funding. There have been a number of Title VI cases filed for, frankly. anti-Semitic discrimination and anti-Palestinia, anti-Arab or Islamophobic discrimination since October 27, 2023.

Starting point is 01:39:52 The ones filed for Islamophobic discrimination don't seem to be covered by this, but the other ones do. The Biden administration kind of rushed to finish up and resolve some of these in the last few weeks of his tenure. And normally the results were pretty ineffectual. It was like some more trainings, a review of policies. is anyone who's been an educator at one of these institutions will have already been very familiar with the sort of anti-discrimination training video that you have to watch. And they were suggesting that you watch more of those videos.

Starting point is 01:40:23 I'm not really convinced that that is the way we deal with hatred, but that's what they recommended. The Emory one, I thought was interesting because they told Emery that it had to commit to a, quote, equitable handling of protest after its campus police were so violent towards anti-genocide protesters. A lot of the other cases are still pending, but it seems like, the Trump administration is going to go back and review all of them anyway. It does seem like whether it spread organically or whether it was some kind of campaign to file Title VI complaints, a lot of Title VI complaints were filed after October 7th. And during this time when we saw

Starting point is 01:40:59 like campus protests and we saw support by some faculty for those campus protests, right? And we saw some faculty who may or may not have supported the protest, but felt very strongly about the right of students to have freedom of speech on campus. And I'm sure they will have been kind of wrapped up in this big dragnet too. This potentially raises a specter of like at least career threatening. And again, lots of faculty are not U.S. citizens, right? They might be permanent residence. It might be married to citizens.

Starting point is 01:41:26 They might be here on a visa. There are a number of different immigration statuses that they could have that are not U.S. citizen that they could potentially lose. So what is Trump trying to do about these cases which could be pending or have already been resolved? Yeah, well, what they said is they want to familiarize institutions with the grounds for inadmissibility. So that's not allowing someone to enter the United States, right? And read out the section of the United States Code, but a section of the United States Code.

Starting point is 01:41:55 Quote, so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds, and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead as appropriate and consistent with applicable law to investigations and, if warranted, comma, actions to remove such aliens. So it's in there, right? This is in Trump's late January executive order. This is the legal argument that they're making there, and they're asking universities to do some of that legwork for them, it seems. I imagine that this is the same section of the United States Code that we'll see

Starting point is 01:42:33 use with reference to Khalil, but it refers to like excludable or inadmissible aliens, which is people coming into the country. But I guess they could make an argument that, like, he disguised his inadmissible status or became inadmissible. Sure. I mean, there's these two sections, right? There's this one that revolves around who can be, like, admitted, who can be accepted. And there's that one section, which is, I believe, section 1-227 subsection A4A-Dash-C, which is the section specifically on deportation as relating to, like, supporting, quote-unquote, terrorist activities.

Starting point is 01:43:07 So I think they will try to use these both, like, in conjunction. and I think it's also important to note out here the use of the word like aliens as opposed to the word that like Rubio was using previously which is like visitors right like visitors I would say probably applies more to like student visa holders non-residents versus aliens

Starting point is 01:43:27 aliens can be anyone right like aliens can be any non-citizens can be visa holders can be green card holders right and so at least in like the official wording here the use of the word I think aliens is important as opposed to like Rubio's like, you know, posts on X.com, which now become official policy because we're in the hell world. Yep.

Starting point is 01:43:49 That refers to like, just like, you know, visitors to this country. Yeah. The right has used aliens for a long time, right? Because it differentiates them from people. Yeah, it's like, it's very basic, like dehumanization language. Yeah. In this case, I think it's important. It's pivotal.

Starting point is 01:44:03 So, like, we have a sense of what will happen there. Maybe I could just finish up by saying if you are faculty or a student, if you're encountering this, you can reach out to us using our encrypted email. So if you'd like to reach out to us, it is Coolzone Tips at Proton.me. It's only encrypted if it's encrypted from the sender as well as a recipient. So that would mean using a proton or other encrypted email to reach out rather than using an unencrypted email. If you'd like to reach out again, Coolzone Tips at Proton.me. obviously this is something we're going to continue taking an interest in. And obviously it's something that we can't report the entirety of now because we're still waiting on the court case, but we are

Starting point is 01:44:44 very interested in learning more about it. So please feel free to reach out. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, and it's something that Trump is also saying, they will be taking a continued interest in. He is promising that this is the first arrest of, quote unquote, many to come. So as they continue to focus on this, we will as well. James, did you have anything else you wanted to say, like, read lawyers? Yes. So as I mentioned before, right, people under the Biden administration have been moved away from their lawyers. This is very common. It seems that now people are being moved away from their lawyers and having teleconference requests denied, i.e., let's say, Garrison, you're a lawyer and you have a client detained to San Diego, they're moved to Texas, and now you can't teleconference in for a 10-minute

Starting point is 01:45:30 hearing, so you would have to fly, right, for that 10-minute hearing. Yeah, which is going to make it impossible, both in time terms and financial terms. What I'm understanding, I'm still digging into this a little bit more, but that's what I'm hearing. So this is going to be an ongoing thing. I guess if you're an immigration lawyer and one of the places people are being sent to, like Texas, you can help, but you probably already know that. And you're probably already already very, very overworked if you work asylum cases. So, yeah, I think now is the time for groups like the ACLU to step up or shut up and we'll see. Well, the ACLU has come out against Mahmood's arrest.

Starting point is 01:46:05 Okay, good. The ADL, obviously, totally for it. Shocked. The ADL, an organization formed to help avoid another Holocaust, does not see any potential danger in a state redefining citizenship in order to disappear its political enemy. So we love the ADL here, folks. But the ACLU did, I mean, we'll see if they do anything,

Starting point is 01:46:25 but they did, like, make a statement. Yeah, and they've been very good. I should say the ACLU has been pursuing a lot of litigation against Trump administration. This is the sort of thing they're pretty consistently anti, yes. Yeah, especially at a national level. They've been very good at this. Yes.

Starting point is 01:46:38 So, yeah, you know, shout out to them, I guess. I don't know. We don't need to shout it out. It's their job. Yeah, they get millions of dollars to do this. Like, this is literally why you're there. Do a good job or else. You'd better do something else, too.

Starting point is 01:46:52 Yeah, yeah. You better show up, yeah. I don't know, don't donate to the ADL, I guess, if you were thinking of doing that after listening to this podcast. Don't furs. Oh my God, you guys, it could happen here, meaning our podcast. It could. It is.

Starting point is 01:47:29 It's happened. Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast, it is happening here? Yeah, uh-huh. That's a fun joke that I only hear 47 times a day. And the whole point of the podcast was, well, initially, I was a crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen. And now it's a bunch of that stuff happened. And even more of it looks very likely. And so now I just feel bad all the time.

Starting point is 01:47:59 It's going to be called. I fucking called it. I fucking told you, bro, I said this was going to happen. Why don't you rename the podcast? I just feel bad all the time. Yeah. Why don't you rename the podcast? Robert should have bought more stock and ammunition companies than he did.

Starting point is 01:48:14 And DGI. Jesus, should I have bought stock and DGI. Yeah. I'm going to buy a little DGI drone here. Yeah, there we go. A lot of people are going to be buying little DGI drones here very soon, James. I should point out that I'm buying one that's not capable of carrying a payload. It's definitely a safer investment to pull out your 401K now when the market's crashing, use that money, buy drones.

Starting point is 01:48:40 Those drones will be worth a lot more in five years. Or, what is that? That is a sound of a sound of a sound. Sound investment, a box of bullets. It's like how boomers used to invest in like silver or gold as like a stable currency. No, we're investing in DPI, like physical DGI drones. We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder. Yeah, you got to get it in a bottle rub it in a box that can get light struck or get moist.

Starting point is 01:49:11 You want to get it in a special black bottle. James, I keep all of my gunpowder in, you know how like people used to take cocaine? cane by wrapping it in toilet paper and swallowing it? No. Sure. Okay. If you say so, buddy. Speaking of toilet paper, Nate Silver has a newsletter.

Starting point is 01:49:31 And it would be useful as toilet paper, more so than it is as a newsletter. Sorry, I just got like PTSD flashbacks from 2024 when you said that. It's okay. Normally, my rule of thumb is every election, usually starting in like December the year before election year, I begrudgingly fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or four times in a bucket, and then head over to Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls. And I do this. I hate that I keep having, I have regularly on election years. People will be like, but he was always wrong. He's like, no, he's, he's reasonably good on polls. He's usually, if you read what he's saying

Starting point is 01:50:10 about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close to that. So I read him during elections. And I hate it because he's never been right about anything else. But he's a gambler. He's a degenerate, filthy gambler. And so when we're talking about degenerate filthy gambler stuff, and by God, election polls are the most degenerate type of gambling that exist. He's worth reading. And then after the election, no matter how well or badly it goes,

Starting point is 01:50:39 I ignore him again for four years. And I didn't get to do that this year because on February 25th, 2025, Nate wrote a column called Elon Musk and spiky intelligence. Spiky intelligence. Am I hearing that right? Spiky intelligence, yes. And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm sure he used some AI. Like he must have used some AI like video software to do that just like shows you a kind of

Starting point is 01:51:06 spiky star looking thing and then like a blob with rounded edges. I can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver thought that like we need. needed this illustrated. I have to see this. Yeah, yeah. I would like it to be shared. Look at this. Why did you like,

Starting point is 01:51:21 oh wow. The promise of AI, we couldn't have envisioned a spiky thing. Yes. Wow. Yeah. It looks like maybe an amoeba if you were forced to. He looks like an amoeba and then like a poorly drawn star. It's Boba and Kiki.

Starting point is 01:51:34 This is an actual thing. When Batman biffs you, wait, this is a thing. This is, this is Boba and Kiki with a weird, like digital fuzz over it. Who the fucker, Boba and Kiki? Yeah. Okay, Garrison, yeah. It's like a social experiment to, like, ask people what, like, the emotional correspondence of each of these shapes are.

Starting point is 01:51:53 Like, which, like... It's a Rorschach test. Oh, it's like a Rorschach thing. Sure. Or, like, like, which one looks nicer, which one looks meaner, you know, that sort of thing. I'm a Kiki type. Like, like, I am a Kiki in terms of my behavior. I am...

Starting point is 01:52:08 Garrison, now that you bring up Rorschach, all I can think of is how cool it would be if Rorschach from the Watchman showed up in Nate Silver's house. and did his thing. Unfortunately, I think Rorschach and Knight Silver might actually get along. They would become fast friends. Actually, yeah. No, no, Nate would, but after them getting along for like 45 minutes, Nate would take him to an illegal card game,

Starting point is 01:52:31 and Rorschach would murder everybody in the room, because they were gambling without a license. So I'm assuming Nate's going to try to argue that Musk's intelligence is akin to the kiki drawing here as opposed to like the empathetic boba right now there actually yes there is a little bit of that in there he does not mention this kiki and boba thing i don't know if that's because i'm supposed to just infer it from the image or if he's okay we'll get your opinion on it is he ripping these people off because this doesn't count as enough for him to be crediting them if this is the underpinning of his stupid idea which he credits to his stupid book that he came up with later

Starting point is 01:53:10 but i'm just going to start reading the stupid column well hit us with the second paragraph because that We haven't gotten paragraph one, James. Okay, that radicalized me immediately. There's been a debate raging on Twitter. Noah Smith can run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the platform's owner. Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest,

Starting point is 01:53:29 and then there's a little eye in parentheses, because we need that. Elon is obviously pretty bright, and then there's two eyes in parentheses. This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment. Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things. Okay. You'd think this wouldn't be especially controversial,

Starting point is 01:53:44 but since it involves Elon and intelligence, well, it was. Elon has run founded or co-foundeds, Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, Neerlink, XAI, PayPal, and more recently, Twitter. He's also managed to steer himself into a position where he's now the de facto chief of staff to the president of the United States. I do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects. Some of these were long-shot bets. And Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk documents,

Starting point is 01:54:08 he thought he'd be ruined if there had been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success of some of these enterprises might also be, debated. Yes. Twitter was a canny play for cultural and political influence, but it probably, and he doesn't bring up in this whole thing where he's talking about like all his successful companies. Not a word about the boring company. Not a word about hyperloop, right?

Starting point is 01:54:27 Well. Yeah, any of the failed ones. His record does seem better if you ignore the two massively publicized and invested absolute failures. Yes. Well, and last week, I know there was a SpaceX launch. I'm sure it went well. I'm sure it didn't fling debris all over.

Starting point is 01:54:42 Lower atmosphere. I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft. Also, crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co-founded Open AI, but not in a way that mattered. He just shot gun money in there and then got kind of edged out. Yeah. Sure. Yes.

Starting point is 01:54:58 And is actively in a conflict with everybody who did make Open AI as prominent as it is. Again, Nate La has to leave a lot out in order to start making this case. But he's going to argue that, you know, we're going to see how well this co-presidency goes, but he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all of this stuff done, right? Yeah, and he's also saying, well, like, maybe Twitter won't be profitable, but we'll see how, you know, he could probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff. Not a word from Nate about, like, yeah, but he's just, like, that's just breaking the law. So why are we, why aren't we including in our canny businessmen, guys that get rich selling,

Starting point is 01:55:32 like, shitloads of heroin for the cartels, because, yes, if you are breaking the law, sometimes that goes well for you financially. Walter White may have done some bad things, but... But you can't deny he was a brilliant meth cook, you know? But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is. 1400, according to Isaacson. He's clearly some sort of outlier in many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably even a genius.

Starting point is 01:56:01 And yet, first off, it becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider a 1400 to be an impressive SAT score and would normally be. be judgmental of someone who had an SAT score of 1400 if it weren't for all of Elon's other genius accomplishments. And yet, when my partner and I were heading to dinner the other day, and we saw some tweet that Elon sent, I forget which one, because he tweets so much, we were both like, man, he's such a dumbass. Yes, someone can be both a genius and a dumbass. Welcome to what I call spiky intelligence. Here we go. This gets to, like, the core of what's annoying about Nate is his need to, he's one of these guys. You know what, you know what it is?

Starting point is 01:56:40 he's an intellectual enclosureorist, right, where he's not confident to be like, everyone is very aware of the fact that no one is good at everything and that people have holes in their competence and that there are like brilliant surgeons who are bad fathers or whatever because there are different kinds of intelligence. This is like a broadly common understanding. Nate has to give it a name so that he can sell his book. So he gives it the names. It's like an intellectual.

Starting point is 01:57:06 Now it's my idea. I'm the one who came up with the concept that smart people can be dumb. Stop it, Nate. It's annoying. Capital S, capital I, registered trademarks by Keying Intelligent. Yeah. Now, he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original and then links to somebody without really like crediting them. Interestingly, many of the instances online refer to people on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he has Asperger syndrome, but the concept is simple. While intelligence is a multidimensional phenomenon, the scientific consensus is that there's also

Starting point is 01:57:39 something known as a G factor, sometimes also called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and verbal skills in the GRE are correlated. The correlations are loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's just going into, like, he talks about like the absent-minded professor. Like, it's all just these, these very common ideas that, like, yeah, people are usually bad at more things than they're good at, Right? Like, it's, yeah.

Starting point is 01:58:09 There's, there's no need to explain, like, how Elon Musk has been successful at certain things. But, but Nate does. And he has to keep going back to, like, he makes a comment later in here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that, like, well, if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves, which ignores the fact that, like, he's not

Starting point is 01:58:32 making any of these decisions. Like, he bought a company that already had good automotive tech. He hired a bunch of rocket engineers to design rockets. Elon is arguably good at hiring in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man, right? Like, that's the actual brilliance that Elon has, is he was very, very good at hyping people up and getting people to believe in him until he was too big to fail. Like, that's the one thing he actually did. But Nate can't accept that, because I think it kind of, among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is. who is a guy who was really good at one narrow thing

Starting point is 01:59:11 and now has a career writing about everything. And he can't, that's like a dangerous thing for Nate to think too hard about. Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very soft and soothing ads. Yeah, we're back. I want to talk a little bit about the danger of being a guy who gets famous for being really good at one thing and then gets a job talking about.

Starting point is 01:59:47 about everything, because I've had a version of that experience. And let me tell you, you're not ever going to be competent to discuss all of the things that you can make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No one ever has been and no one ever will be, which is why what you ought to do is the thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on a bunch of people to, like, run a website with you, right? Where you cover more things than one. unfortunately, it turns out 538 was a bad business venture. It got massively overvalued. A company spent a shitload more money on it that it was capable of making. And now everyone's gotten laid off. And Nate left years ago to do his substack. You know, it's a tragic case in the problem of, like,

Starting point is 02:00:33 hubris and the fact that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't run an entire media enterprise. But Nate doesn't like thinking about that. It isn't like thinking about the fact that maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at was being the guy from the music man. Because I think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period of time. A lot of people did. He still clearly does. Yes. Yeah. And there's been this thing lately where a lot of folks on the left have been like, the, oh, you couldn't always tell that he was a con man. You couldn't always tell that he was this bad. Like he was always the worst. And I was like, no. Like, back in 2014-15, what I was writing about the billionaires and rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie Diamond because he had helped

Starting point is 02:01:16 create the 2008 financial collapse. And he just seemed obviously much worse than this guy who up to that point was pretty much just making cars and rockets, you know? He had two companies doing that. Musk was not top of most people's radars for a very good reason, which gets to like, there's this thing that's been created because of some of like the sinister beliefs that his grandfather had and his family background, which has a lot of white supremacy in it, to that this has been Elon's sort of like grand plan from the beginning and that it's all come together for him, like, as if he's, you know, a Marvel or a James Bond villain who's been executing this like 30-year plan to get where he is.

Starting point is 02:01:57 Yeah, yeah. I think when you look at his cognition, like, he's not the same man he was 10 years ago. He's not the same guy he was when he started dating Grimes. And I'm saying he was a good man before then. I don't think he particularly ever was. But he's clearly his brain has degraded, in part due to contact through Twitter. Well, yeah, and you can measure this through his posting as well. Like, the types of posts he would make in 2017 are, like, completely opposite to the way that he would talk about certain social issues now.

Starting point is 02:02:30 Oh, yeah. He's not, like, meming about, like, anarcho-syndicalism. Yeah. We get to a few of those things. But I want to read another quote from Nate's article. because he's going to talk about his book, On the Edge, which, quote, describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call the river.

Starting point is 02:02:44 These people who occupy a range of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital are bright but in spiky ways. In Baron Cohen's dichotomy, they lean heavily towards the systematic side of the equation. They're good at abstract, analytic reasoning, but they may lack other forms of intelligence, like empathy, judgment, and self-awareness.

Starting point is 02:03:05 They also have some distinctive characteristics, largely unrelated to intelligence. For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrarian. And again, what you are talking about all of these people. Number one, when he says AI research, he's not talking about people who are doing like the gut level coding. He's talking about Sam Altman, right? Poker, venture capital.

Starting point is 02:03:25 This is all gambling. You're all talking about gamblers. The river is just gamblers, Nate. It's people like you who put money on bets. And they are contrarian and competitive because that's how gamblers are. That's the intelligent, that's the river. Like, he's thinking about it as like this specific chunk of intellectuals who have, you know, there's some dangers, but they have great potential to make the world brilliant.

Starting point is 02:03:53 I'm like, no, no, no, no. These are just people who, like, wind up shooting themselves outside of a sports betting facility. Like, that's the river, Nate. I have been turning into a monster during our friend poker nights recently. It's tough. Garrison, by the way, I've been meaning to talk to you about wearing the full data makeup because you know your skin can't breathe if you coat your whole body. You're only supposed to put that on your face.

Starting point is 02:04:16 I don't do that every time I play. You get a gold finger yourself, Garrison. I don't put on the data makeup every time I play poker. Just that one time. Actually, no, I've done that twice now, never mind. I have done that two times. Okay. It's becoming a habit.

Starting point is 02:04:33 I also have the little hats. I ordered a 12-pack of like, of like the little like poker visors to complete the outfit. Of course you did. Wonderful. Of course you did. Yeah. It would be rude not to.

Starting point is 02:04:43 For better or worse, this typology, the river, is associated with high achievement in certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is also associated with high variance. Sam Bankman Free built FTX into a company that investors valued at 32 billion before the House of Cards collapsed. Again, because he was a gambler. Yeah. Because he was a con man.

Starting point is 02:05:03 Yeah. And again, Nate can't just accept. Oh, he was never out. actually very smart. He just got really lucky for a while and then gave it and then gambled it all away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought. Nate says, I interviewed SBF several times for the book and I can tell you that he very much falls into the genius but dumbass category. How about just dumbass? Lucky dumbass. It's not hard. What's the genius? Where did he prove that? I mean, he proved that by fooling Nate Silver, a man who probably values his own intelligence, like a great

Starting point is 02:05:36 deal. I mean, that's the whole thing, right? Nate Silver can't, like, it would be ego death to admit that there are just some lucky, dumb white dudes. Yeah. If a guy had won, like, one of the lotteries where it was like a billion and a half dollars, right, got crazy rich, and then lost it all in two weeks because he just kept putting half a million dollars at a time on 21 black at a roulette table in Vegas. And I would be like, well, obviously he's a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How else could he have made the money in the first place? No, it's like, no, he, he, He got lucky, and then he gambled it all the way because he doesn't have good judgment. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:12 So it's important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence. Namely, neither their worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story. And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless statement because that's true of every human being ever born. Yeah. But clearly Nate doesn't feel that way because only, I think the undercurrent here is that only people like this in Nate's mind are worth talking about, because only gamblers bring the world forward, right? Yeah, no one else who serves empathy.

Starting point is 02:06:41 Yeah, yes. Like, you're just addicted to putting money on sports games and elections, Nate, Silver. Anyway, so here's the two things he wants to warn us up, or wants people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent in several ways, but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't. brilliant in many respects just because he isn't in others.

Starting point is 02:07:09 And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does. It's not high school. Nobody cares about us SAT skills. Elon's what, like 50, like 55 or something? Like, what do we do? Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:07:22 You are a middle-aged man. I don't even know what my SAT score was. I was going to say, like, look, I never took an SAT, but I spent more than a decade in full-time education. And anyone who ever told me their SAT scores, I immediately hated and never took the I've spent almost 20 years asking people questions for a living, and I've never asked anyone there at safety school. Sorry, Garrison. Although SAT might not be like a stable metric for evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method. Absolutely not, Garrison. Just how much,

Starting point is 02:07:52 well, he does. He does have an alternative method. I'm seeing what you might call it infographic. Because the next section of the article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence. So, first he admits he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to talk to it. I have to say, Elon does have better shit to do than talk to Nate Silver, because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree. And that is a better use of his time than talking to Nate Silver. So since he can't actually talk to Musk, he's going to model and extrapolate from, quote, many other Silicon Valley bigwigs I have met. Okay.

Starting point is 02:08:33 Helping him in this is the fact that, quote, Musk maintains an extremely public profile. He's turned X into a running diary of his innermost thoughts. And in addition to that, the biographies of the guy. One more caveat here. I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory of Elon's career, not just his recent antics. So we go down here and the next segment is dimensions where Musk has exceptionally high

Starting point is 02:08:55 or genius level intelligence. So finally, Nate's going to prove it. And I'm going to show you guys how he chooses to do that. What the evidence he gives us here is. And I think this is something that we should reveal to the audience after these ads. Good point, Gare. All right, we're back. So let's look at what Nate shows is the chief dimension where Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence.

Starting point is 02:09:30 I'm just reading that first line, man. So the first words under this are cognitive load capacity and overall horsepower slash RAM. always on. I mean, literally, look at how often he's tweeting. And then a huge graph that shows the density of tweets posted and when, which has been used by other people to prove that since sometime in late 2022, he's almost never gone more than about three hours without posting a tweet. Like, it's just a solid red after he buys the site. This graph of like when he makes his posts, he's never offline now. He's not sleeping. So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from 24. 14 to 2024 showing the time of day and when a post is posted represented by small red dots.

Starting point is 02:10:16 And yes, at around 2022, the thickness of the red increases dramatically. It's almost just a straight red line. And like the period of where he must be sleeping in this graph is very concerning. No, he sometimes sleeps from about 6 to 9 a.m. as far as we can tell. but not regularly or often. That's like a streak of 2023, where he just isn't sleeping. He's not sleep. And again, he's on drugs, people.

Starting point is 02:10:46 I think they're probably prescript. I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed. When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you want to do recreationally prescribed, right? But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that to judge drug users. I say that as someone who had a drug problem. Like, this is drug user behavior. And specifically Silver is using this.

Starting point is 02:11:09 And Elon's sobriety is possible. Sorry. And specifically Silver is using this as evidence of Musk's intelligence. Yeah. It's not. He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he must be like a special type of person. Yeah. He's railing adderol and eating ketamine lozenges all day every day.

Starting point is 02:11:29 That's what this is a sign of and no one is allowed to take his phone away. Anyway, here's how. Nate explains why this is smart. In NBA terms, we'd say this is a player with an exceptionally high motor, and this is undoubtedly a valuable trade as the world becomes more complex. Lax fall, I was simultaneously doing an extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to build up silver bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work. Even if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would only have been sustainable for a short burst. But Elon is taking on, I don't know, approximately

Starting point is 02:12:03 a thousand times more stressed than that and has done so for years. No, he's not. That's the thing. He just tweets. He has a massive, number one, all of the businesses are being run by people who are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to sit in meetings and say yes or no to stuff and occasionally tells him to do something crazy that causes issues, right? And they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now than it gained after the election. and SpaceX just had a giant rocket explode. Again, the boring company has not done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas, and the hyperloop is nothing, right?

Starting point is 02:12:42 Like, this is just full of shit, Nate? Like, what you have just described running an election model that's functional, going on a book tour, and consulting and writing a newsletter, is more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing. Oh, yeah. More actual effort work, right? No, Lask's mostly, like, sitting in an occasional meeting, doing drugs and injecting random women with his sperm. Yes.

Starting point is 02:13:07 And sending tweets. He doesn't do the injecting, I think. Oh, God. Garrison, that comes up, too. No. No. Oh, and it's crazy how it does. Right before he posts the graph of how much Elon tweets.

Starting point is 02:13:21 Okay. Okay, good, there it is. Okay. Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains. Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicated. especially if Musk ostracizes people who might keep him grounded. More sympathetically, he's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities, doing several really hard jobs at once,

Starting point is 02:13:38 each of which would be stressful on their own, while still managing to father 13 children and tweeting hundreds of times per week. Again, equivalent efforts, tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering 13 children. He's not a father to them. No, he just... He contributed by all...

Starting point is 02:13:56 He didn't even have sex. No. Yeah, it is literally the lowest possible effort way to have a child. We, like, I'm going to guess most of the people with penises listening to this, come. Like, that's not a big effort. You wouldn't include that it's like, what did I get done this week? Well, in addition to working 40 hours, I jacked off. That's a little transphobic.

Starting point is 02:14:19 This is a, this is an HRT joke. Anyway, continue. I said, I'm just saying it doesn't count as work. No, no. Yeah, certainly not from us. Unless you're a sex worker, then it does, okay? Like, especially, I know a lot of male porn stars. That is a difficult part of the job.

Starting point is 02:14:37 That's why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that kill their hearts. I would like to get into more of Silver's, like, justification for why he associates this high tweet load with, like, intelligence. Well, because it shows rapid cognition and thin slicing ability. Okay. All right. Yeah. Sure, man. Indeed, in a capitalist system with a significant premium I'm being first to market,

Starting point is 02:15:05 making decent judgments fast is often more important than making better judgment slowly. Canonically, VCs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders as though on Shark Tank, relying on well-owned gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble, as it has for Elon, what is Shark Tank's success rate? Yeah. I bet there's a quick answer to that. Yeah. And it's, considering that it has built-in free television advertising for any product made. Less than 50% of deals are successfully closed.

Starting point is 02:15:37 My God. Yeah. So, I don't know. All this tweeting also shows abstract problem-solving capability. This is related to the idea of creativity. Though in Musk's case, it seemingly doesn't manifest itself in artistic prowess. Seemingly. You know what? I'll give it to Nate there.

Starting point is 02:15:55 I'll give it to Nate there. I don't disagree with you there. And then, of course, instrumental rationality. Philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types of rationality. Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ends, basically figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want. For this category, I think you have to point towards the scoreboard. Musk has some unparalleled accomplishments and isn't about to let anybody stand in his

Starting point is 02:16:17 way. It's also a category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole, not one for nice guys. Now, and again, if Musk's actual goal is a stated goal, getting to Mars, then backing the political party that is actively doing as much damage to the biosphere as possible, ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind of off-world civilization likely, I would argue, is a stupid decision. But he doesn't actually want us to get to Mars, right? He just wants to be in charge of everything. No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference. That's really it. It is. Yes.

Starting point is 02:16:54 Yes. Yes. And he has been very successful at that. But again, it's the success of brute force. It's the same way as like, if you hire a thousand people who are willing to, like, break the kneecaps of a guy who annoys you, like, you could say, like, I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who annoy me. But really, you just have a lot of dudes who can beat people up for you. Like, is that intelligence, or did you just have enough money to hire thugs? Or are you just a mob boss?

Starting point is 02:17:19 Right. Are you just a mob boss? And a mob boss, no one is allowed to attack because it's going to be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon, you know? Anyway, we need ghost dog. It's pretty upsetting because, you know, a few weeks ago, I was having a little bit of a resist live moment and I actually ashed my clove cigarette on a parked Tesla. Felt pretty cool about it. But now I guess I can't even do that. It's too dangerous.

Starting point is 02:17:46 No, no, you can't. I could face substantial charges. You might want to text resist to it. a certain five-digit number or something that's probably the best way to solve this garrison I just text resist to every single person my phone book every day it takes about seven hours

Starting point is 02:18:01 I have fallen behind on work you know but it's the only thing we can do to fight fascism the quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep deprivation and drug problem apparently or at least that is how you show for it it's funny because I saw

Starting point is 02:18:17 Brian Johnson the billionaire who who's eating his son's blood or now plasma. Oh, yeah, the dead guy. Posted his own, like, self-study on, like, the damaging effects of sleep deprivation. And I'm pretty sure Musk, like, retweeted it with, like, an emoji or something. I'm like, yeah. Dude, dude, your brain is completely sooth.

Starting point is 02:18:37 No, you are, you are fried. You are the most cooked a man has ever been. It's an interesting study. Like, there is legitimately interesting things to look at Neil Musk's brain. Well, yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data put together, like, exhaustively by researchers studying how not just sleep deprivation, but like wealth and power impact the brain. And like all of it makes a strong case that Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to his brain than like a career, one of those career WWE wrestlers who like

Starting point is 02:19:08 kills their whole family and then shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their brain later. Yeah, I mean, well, before we close, I do want to say before any psychologists or sociologists or like linguists get mad at me. Yes, I know Boba and Kiki is, is a, is a, is a shape language like correlation test. I myself, as well as Nate here, have kind of expanded its usage to like projecting even more like human or like emotional qualities onto these shapes or onto these specific words. So please sociologists, leave me alone. Do not do not, do not message me about Boba and Kiki. Garrison, your favorite French sociologist

Starting point is 02:19:53 by direct message on X.com. I'm afraid it's already too late. I think I already hear like 12 different Redditors typing. But yes, I think Nate's just using that image there as like a metaphor to like show how, you know, aggressive or manipulative Musk's own intelligence is as symbolized by a Kiki as opposed to, you know, maybe like a Bill Gates, which might be more of like a boba.

Starting point is 02:20:20 intelligence type. Okay. A little softer, a little bit more philanthropy, you know. I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist and Zizian literature for two straight weeks. About a quarter of a million words by my last count, Garrison. I don't have it in me to do this. Again, I'm going to get back to my Hitler books, you know, where things make sense, where the world is comforting and safe. Yeah, I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War, which is my comparative happy place. Ah, the Syrian Civil War. Yeah, it's a really great world.

Starting point is 02:20:59 I do wonder if he's trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing by using that little filter that he used over to Buber and Ki-Kee- No, because it would be, it's actually not fair use now as opposed to if he just mentioned that thing as that... He doesn't, yeah, because he doesn't talk about them. Then it is fair use, right?

Starting point is 02:21:15 And he could use, like, a little clip of it to illustrate the point. Yeah, like I did with Manu Chow. Anyway, this is all I want to say again about Nate Silver until 2028. And if, you know what, the upside, if democracy really does die is we'll never have to talk about him again. If Trump and Musk really take over fully and do a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silver. Cut in nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Jarvin t-shirt. No, man, they'll be doing Assad numbers and he will still be analyzing that data.

Starting point is 02:21:47 straight regime capture of Nate Silver. Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten 104% of the vote, but... Those are spiky percentages. Those are spiky percentages. Why can't Nate Silver just, like, run like Trump's casino or something, right? This is just like, just like, put him away. I understand if Nate, because Nate's rich, he doesn't need to do the other stuff. And if he was like just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well, yeah, that's what he loves, right?

Starting point is 02:22:16 If I had Nate Silver money, I'd probably just write novels for the rest of my life because that's what I like to do. I don't understand why he keeps writing about politics. He's not good at it and he can't like it. He needs to feel special. He wants to feel like a special boy who knows the answers that no one else does. All right. Well, anyway, this is us making fun of Nate Silver so you don't, well, you can still make fun of him. You don't have to read him. We did that for you. Good night. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder. our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of the world, and what it means for you.

Starting point is 02:23:15 I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of March 5 to March 12. Trump films a Tesla commercial. RFK Jr. eats beef tallow French fries at steak and shake. And Sam Cedar commits a mass casualty event on YouTube. How's everyone doing today? Very happy to join you for ED this week.

Starting point is 02:23:37 Huge fan of ED, just like just big, big ED guy. So, you know, psych to be here. I feel like we should mention up top. There's also a bunch of unhinged tariff news and the most like electing fucking Caligula's horse to the Senate thing I've seen in a long time. So stay tuned for that. Lots of good stuff. Yes, we will get to it.

Starting point is 02:23:57 First, I would like to give a little bit of an update on a story that we talked about a few days ago. The detention and the revocation of a green card of. for a Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. As of Wednesday, his lawyers have still been unable to even contact their client. There was a large rally outside the first court conference in New York this Wednesday.

Starting point is 02:24:22 So we talked about this a few days ago for some background, an episode with James, Robert, and myself. Robert, do you want to, like, briefly summarize the situation? And then I'll play a clip from one of his lawyers. The situation is that this guy, I got taken into custody. My understanding is it was at an apartment that he lived in with his wife. He was a U.S. citizen.

Starting point is 02:24:46 He became aware, it looks like, at least about 24 hours before, probably became aware that he was being, it's a little clear if he was just like being surveilled or there was something else that tipped them off. But he contacted the school asking for help, convinced that ICE was coming for him about a day before they did. when they entered the house my understanding is based on the claims being made by his wife that they did not like they didn't like produce a warrant or anything he's still not charged with any crime no he's not

Starting point is 02:25:13 been charged with any crime they just took him and like turned off the phone when they were on the phone to their lawyers if I'm if I'm remembering correctly correct so it's like none of this is the way this should have gone like if this was an arrest no he was just like black bagged from campus yeah but it's

Starting point is 02:25:30 not an arrest again and they've been very clear about this that like they have specifically stated we're not accusing him of like breaking the law right like that's that's not what's going on here correct and we will get to some of that later i'm going to play a clip from a press conference outside court that happened on wednesday march 12th this is one of his lawyers mr calil's detention has nothing to do with security it is only about repression the united states government has taken the position that it can errone detained and seek to deport a lawful permanent resident exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism.

Starting point is 02:26:13 In this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and an end to the genocide in Gaza. The government takes the position that because the Secretary of State finds his dissent, unacceptable or contrary to U.S. foreign policy, he can be deported. As Romsey suggested, it's largely unprecedented, save for ugly historical precedents, including in the Red Scare and McCarthyism. That's what we're talking about. We're also talking about a period of repression that the Center for Constitutional Rights knows well following 9-11 when we were in the courts trying to get people out of secret detention.

Starting point is 02:27:04 One thing that's different now is the legal infrastructure is so much stronger and everyone out here on the streets knows that we cannot hide in the face of this amount of repression. We will be fighting in the courts and fighting in the streets to bring Mahmoud home and prevent this level of repression from spreading to many others as the administration has threatened to do. So that was on Wednesday. For now, Khalil will be remaining in ICE detention in Louisiana. And ICE director Tom Homan said Wednesday that, quote, free speech has its limitations, unquote.

Starting point is 02:27:49 Yeah. I have found some stuff today of people on the right at times. attacking the judge who put out a, I guess called a stay on this, in part because the judge is Jewish. So it's nice to see the anti-Semitism being used in that way as well in this instance. Just fascinating. We're really breaking new ground in all of this. A White House official did tell Friend of the Pod, the free press, not necessarily our favorite publication, but they do have an exclusive quote here, that the basis for targeting Cleoel is being used as a blueprint for investigations against other students, saying Kalil is, quote, a threat to the

Starting point is 02:28:28 foreign policy and national security interests of the United States, unquote, said the official, noting that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest, saying, quote, the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law. So we have this official, like, openly saying, like, he's not charged with a crime, we're just wanting to see if we can do this. Can we deport a legal permanent resident for saying something that we don't like? Yeah, and I, and I I think that there's been a lot of comparisons to this to direct McCarthyism. I think that's accurate to some extent. I think the most direct comparison to this is not McCarthyism.

Starting point is 02:28:59 It's the Palmer raids. Yep. Which I think people tend to be way less familiar with. That was the first Red Scare, which was largely targeted at the industrial workers of the world for their opposition to World War I. And they did basically the same shit. A lot of people would give anti-war speeches and then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort of like leftists would get fucking deported for it.

Starting point is 02:29:19 So, yeah, that was a absolutely terrifying period of repression. If the line is not drawn here, and it should have been drawn like 200 miles back from here, but if it isn't drawn here, this is going to continue, this is going to continue to get worse. And, I mean, all this is, all of this is in relation to Trump's executive order, you know, about quote unquote anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, today in the Oval Office, he said something incredibly anti-Semitic and also anti-Arab somehow in like in the same statement saying, quote, Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I'm concerned. he's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian, unquote.

Starting point is 02:29:58 Which is just an unbelievably anti-Semitic and anti-Arab statement all at once, like removing someone's Jewishness because of how they act or things they've said or things they believe in. Yeah. And it's one of those things, again, like, it's worth like covering this as it develops. There's not much to say other than like,

Starting point is 02:30:16 this is incredibly illegal and has to be opposed immediately. and vigorously. Like, yeah, yeah. No, it's really bad, and of course you're not going to have the ADL coming out against Trump here. The ACLU did,

Starting point is 02:30:28 which I should note, because I heard some people saying they did not expect the ACLU to. They have, but yeah, the ADL is fully in the camp of lock anyone up who's ever protested Israel.

Starting point is 02:30:39 And they're not going to call Trump anti-Semitic for making a statement like this. No. Because their interests are fairly aligned at this point, re what's happening in Gaza.

Starting point is 02:30:48 So, I think now we're going to play a special report from James, who can't be on the recording here today, but he does have a report on deportations in Panama. So, James, take it away. So something that we've seen in the last week is that the people who the U.S. government has deported to Panama, who it can't deport to their home countries, have in some cases been released by a Panamanian government and given a 30-day visa or 30 days to essentially exit Panama.

Starting point is 02:31:17 And they're not really been given any support. They're in some cases like just sleeping on the streets in Panama City, right? Just wandering around trying to work out how to get home and trying to work out like what they should do next. Obviously, these people who have fled places like Afghanistan, Iran, places where they can't go back to. They would face persecution just for the act of having tried to leave, even if they weren't already facing persecution before, which many of them were, that that's why they fled. So they've just kind of kicked it down the road a little bit and we'll see where this leads. But it's another piece of evidence that this wasn't hugely well planned that the Trump administration just wanted to get these deportation numbers up at almost any cost.

Starting point is 02:31:59 All right. We're going to go on a break and come back to talk about the Department of Education and tariff talk with Mia Wong. Wow. Well, we are back. And, you know, it's everyone's favorite time of the podcast talking about tariffs. And before we get to Mia, I want to bring on a musical game. to set this section of the program up.

Starting point is 02:32:34 Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. That was worth the rest of our year's budget. Now, everyone will be getting paid for the rest of the year in Denny's coupons. That's all we have left after paying for this, but I think we can all agree worth it. Do you want to explain what that is? Because I still don't really have a clue

Starting point is 02:33:09 what exactly that opening theme song is for Tariff Talk. Well, there was a great band called The Clash once, and they wrote one song that wasn't very good. And in it, somebody says something that didn't sound very much like the word tariff. But if you mispronounce the word tariff, it fit in. And that's where $42,000 of our operating budget this year went.

Starting point is 02:33:31 Anyway, Mia, let's talk about tariffs. Yeah, now that I've gotten one of the two things I've ever wanted in life, play on music. So since last week, this has been an entire roller coaster because right after we finished recording in like the next two days, everyone went, oh, the tariffs aren't going to be that bad,

Starting point is 02:33:49 because a lot of the tariffs that were hit with Trump's sort of general 25% Canada, Mexico tariff got waived after Trump agreed not to apply them to goods covered by the USMCA free trade agreements. But then everyone remembered that the 25% steal and aluminum tariff was still going into effect. And so that went into effect this week. Now, there was also a brief, incredible moment of panic where Trump was talking about doubling them to 50%. he backs off of this in exchange for Ontario's Doug Ford stopping a like 25% increase in electricity prices. However, comma, the trade war is 100% still on. Canada is doing a whole like sort of slate of reciprocal tariffs specifically on steel and also tariffs and taxes on a whole suite

Starting point is 02:34:34 of other US goods. I'm just going to read this from the Associated Press because this is no longer the trade war here is no longer limited to the US, Canada, China and to some extent Mexico. really hasn't been responding in the same way as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs, or at least the sort of main focuses of these tariffs. But this week, the EU officially joined the phrase. So here's from the AP, quote, across the Atlantic, the European Union will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon and motorcycles. Bourbon again? Yeah, yeah, bourbon twice. It's twice as important as the other thing.

Starting point is 02:35:11 Yes, peanut butter and jeans. Actually, you say this. There was a whole, like, part of the whole speech. That was not a joke, Mia. People of the EU, like, this was part of the thing was, yeah, like, we're hoping to restore the profitability of the American spirits markets with the U.S. backs down. It was also the only American product that Trudeau could name during his big speech. Very funny.

Starting point is 02:35:32 Let's be honest, outside of music, this nation has produced one thing of value to the world, and it's bourbon. Pretty reasonable. It's also very funny that it was like, bourbon was like our, what attempt number was it, making whiskey before we finally got one that was like exportable terrible uh oh i mean yeah it took it took generations look you know you know you the rome wasn't built in today and bourbon is the rome of liquors produced in kentucky yeah well and speaking of it being produced in kentucky this is actually deliberately okay well all right so the u in theory the the the line that they're

Starting point is 02:36:05 saying is that these these are deliberately designed to like target things that are made in red states, they also did do soybean tariffs too, though, which is, you know, like, you're dropping a newfound Illinois here. Okay, so the EU has imposed reciprocal tariffs on $28 billion of U.S. goods. Also, on Tuesday, China's tariffs went into effect, which means the agricultural tariffs we talked about last week, and notably, I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such a critical part of the system of American agriculture as the crop that you rotate out with corn to sort of, like, preserve soil integrity. The Chinese tariffs are now in effect. It's mostly on agricultural goods. Yeah, and this has, I think,

Starting point is 02:36:48 in ways that are pretty predictable, at least to me, this has caused a lot of panic in the markets. There's been some sort of rallying as, like, more information comes in. But there's stuff that I did not predict, which is, so, okay, Goldman Sachs has downgraded its projection for US GDP growth. Their chief economist is talking about how he thinks we're going to get stagnation again, which is sort of while Sactflation was the thing in the 70s that was, you know,

Starting point is 02:37:14 like you have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time. This is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state and allowed to write to take power in the first place.

Starting point is 02:37:23 That's funny because when I Google stagflation, I get very different results. That could just be my own... No, that's that stagflation garrison. Two very different things. Oh, sorry.

Starting point is 02:37:33 Yeah, I think I'm just... Sorry. Anyway, I continue. The things I have to do. deal with on this job. They didn't warn me. You got your music now. It's true.

Starting point is 02:37:45 It's true. It's true. This makes up for a lot. If you ever get to fight The Undertaker, you have a song to go on to. It's true. So, okay. Now, sort of more surprisingly, and this is something I have literally never seen before with the U.S.

Starting point is 02:38:00 Both Citibank, while City, which is the over, the Citibank, like, changed his name to City or something. But Citibank and UBS, the Giants Swiss Bank, downgraded the status of all U.S. equities. I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. They are also boosting the status of Chinese and EU equity. So this is basically like, this doesn't have like a technical official effect, but this is like this is basically their evaluation of what countries like stocks basically

Starting point is 02:38:30 you should purchase, right? And this is also sort of applies to bonds. So is that bad? This is like, I assumed that the U.S. would get its actual credit rating devalued before this happens. I've never, this is, this is unreal. Like, the argument that they are making here is that it is because of the instability in the U.S., like, because of the tariffs and because of everything that's going on,

Starting point is 02:38:52 that like you should just fucking pull your money out of the, out of the U.S. and American companies and put it somewhere else. And they're specifically boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities, which is astonishing. Because, again, one of the countries, again, whose equity status that they are boosting is China. China's economy is a fucking disaster right now. They're dealing with their fucking housing bubble going under. They've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer-based economy for years and years and years and years. And it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough to actually fuel an economy by consumer spending.

Starting point is 02:39:22 Like, they're about to take giant damage from the trade war. And also that, like, you know, like it was only like three years ago. The CCP faced their first like nationwide mass protests like since Tiananmen. Right. And these guys like, and again, these are these are the financial analysts of Citibank. and UBS have looked at that and went, you are better off putting your money there than you are putting it in the U.S.?

Starting point is 02:39:45 I mean, at this point, I think Trump's tariffs have wiped out, I'm reading, $4 trillion from the U.S. stock market just in this past month. Now, trillion, is that, okay, so for example, I have $32 right now in my pocket. Is it more than that? I think it's a little bit more.

Starting point is 02:40:04 Okay, okay, okay. So it is enough to buy two different servers. of pizza. Okay. This is, I'm trying to put this into terms I can understand. Thank you.

Starting point is 02:40:14 It is, imagine, imagine one burger, right? And a burger in Portland does cost $32. So yes. Yes.

Starting point is 02:40:21 Now, imagine, I thought you were going to say a burger in Portland does cost $4 trillion dollars. I mean, probably tomorrow,

Starting point is 02:40:28 right? Like, who knows? I don't know. If, eggs, man. The fucking plagues that we're doing. We're adding levity

Starting point is 02:40:33 because this is legitimately kind of frightening. No, like, this is, I have never seen the financial press. Like, yes. Like, the only times I've ever seen the financial press

Starting point is 02:40:42 react to something like this is like, they were kind of acting like this about the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn like taking power in the UK. Like, they are, like, I watched a guy on CNBC, right? This is not like,

Starting point is 02:40:58 like, this is not MSNBC. This is not even like CNN. This is CNBC. Literally go on air and call what Trump is doing, quote, insane. And start talking about how this. And this is, I think, what these people are worried about, is there, you know, the thing that they're seeing, that's starting right now and it's starting with these sort of, with these

Starting point is 02:41:13 downgrades of U.S. equities, is capital flight, which is straight up, a butt like international capital, taking their money from the U.S. and fucking literally moving out of the country, moving it somewhere else because the U.S. is so unstable. This is, I don't know if anyone knows what mass capital flight from the U.S. would do, because I've never seen anything like this. So part of what's going on, right, part of the reason the markets have kind of recovered in the last few days after the tanking they did Monday, is that like the inflation data came out,

Starting point is 02:41:42 and it wasn't that bad. But the thing is, all of the inflation data we're getting right now and all of the economic indicators we're getting right now, it's going to take a little bit of time for the actual effects of these tariffs to set in, right? Like, these are things that, like, you know, it's going to take, it's going to take, like, six months, maybe a year before we fully see the impacts of that.

Starting point is 02:41:59 And when we do, it is going to fucking blow his smoking crater into the economy. And the worst part about this is this isn't even the most unhinged part of this. The most unhinged part of this is how the Republicans have been reacting to all of this in Congress. So one of the few things the Democrats have been trying to do, and I say one of the few, because their response has been downright collaborationist, but they've been trying to force Republicans to take a vote on the tariffs because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular, and they're particularly unbelievably unpopular among, like, the capital-owning class who, you know,

Starting point is 02:42:33 actually matter. So what they've been trying to do is that Trump did tariffs by declaring a state of emergency. And the Democrats wanted to use the National Emergencies Act to force to vote on the tariffs. I'm just going to read this from the New York Times. The national emergency law lays out a fast-track process for Congress to consider a resolution ending a presidential emergency

Starting point is 02:42:51 requiring committee consideration within 15 calendar days after one is introduced and a floor vote within three days after that. But the language the House Republicans inserted into their measure on Tuesday declare that, quote, each day for the remainder of the

Starting point is 02:43:07 The 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that Trump declared on February 1st. So the point we are at right now is in order to preserve a bunch of tariffs, which are effectively about to fucking obliterate the entire world economy. Congress has declared that days don't pass. This is fucking, this is completely unhinged. This is fucking like Caligula's horse in the Senate shit. Like, again, they are literally, they have literally declared. that calendar days passing are not actually calendar days so that Trump can just keep doing tariff shit and rule by fiat?

Starting point is 02:43:44 Like the Israelites, they have stopped time in order to win the battle. It's genuinely astonishing. And the extent to which this has kind of just been swept under the rug, the Republicans have been, you know, doing this kind of quietly, right? And the fact that, like, the fact that Democrats are not literally on TV every single second of every day going, the Republicans are voting to stop times. so that Trump can destroy the economy is astonishing. It's this real, like, sort of admission by the Republican Congress that, like,

Starting point is 02:44:15 they're ceding authority over policy, like, to Trump completely, right? Like, the government now is Trump ruling by sort of fiat and people attempting to sort of, like, run circles around him in courts, which is not, you know, working enormously well. Yeah, we'll see. And, you know, and this is starting to have effects on, like, investor confidence, like, in the, in, like, the U.S. as a political entity and the, U.S. as an economic entity, which is unprecedented. The other thing I think it's worth noting is that these people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the people around them have been saying for a long time

Starting point is 02:44:46 that the plan is to cause a recession and then after the recession, things are going to get better. And the financial pressures hasn't believed them. And this right now is the period in which they're starting to realize that they were serious about this. And I don't know what the political ramifications of that are going to be because these are people who actually matter in the political system. And I think we'll see the ramifications of this play out in the sort of coming weeks and months, but this is a fucking cliff that we've hit.

Starting point is 02:45:14 And we're now like wily coyote running off the side and trying not to look down. But on the upside, we have a great new song for everybody. So who's to say if any of this has been bad? All right, we are back. Speaking of running circles around the courts, we do have a small update re-usaid.

Starting point is 02:45:46 Usai. last week in a 5-24 vote, the Supreme Court denied an appeal from the Trump administration in a case regarding Trump's attempted federal funds freeze and the shuttering of use aid. This was a case filed by the AIDS vaccine advocacy coalition

Starting point is 02:46:03 and the Global Health Council. The White House is now required to pay foreign aid contractors for work that has already been completed and further details will be worked out back in the district court. And it's still unclear, you know, if the Trump administration is going to abide by the court's ruling and resume all required payments.

Starting point is 02:46:20 But this is the first move from the Supreme Court regarding Trump's actions the past few months. This is also not stopped Trump from trying to slowly close other entire government agencies. This very week, the Education Department laid off nearly half of its workforce over 1,300 employees. Late Tuesday night, Education Secretary Linda McMahon went on to Fox News to say that this reduction force is only the first step towards abolishing the entire education department, saying, quote, this was the president's mandate, his directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat, unquote. Yeah, and I mean, like, you know,

Starting point is 02:47:12 we've talked about on this show for a long time, how eliminating the Department of Education, and eventually destroying public education has been a long-running goal of the most absolutely unhinged of these people who are the people now in charge and yeah, they've decided to just like individually fuck every child in the U.S. It's incredible.

Starting point is 02:47:30 Well, and so far, the way that they're trying to close up the Department of Education is kind of in a more selective manner because they're still keeping certain parts of the department active. Yeah. On March 10th,

Starting point is 02:47:42 the Education Department announced that they were launching investigations into 60 universities for, quote, Title VI violations relating to anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination, unquote. And this is in relation to anti-genocide protests on campus.

Starting point is 02:47:56 And this comes after Trump announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University. The Education Department is threatening that these other 59 universities may lose their funding if they do not, quote,

Starting point is 02:48:12 enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin. National origin includes shared Jewish ancestry, unquote. I don't know what to say here. You get to see all the threads of this admin coming together, right? Which is that, you know, these people are also attempting to effectively destroy, like,

Starting point is 02:48:35 the secondary education system in this country, too. For reasons that are sort of unclear to me, I don't know. But what we're seeing here, right, is the ways that the Democrats sort of like falling into locks up with the Republicans on back of the genocide and Israel has sort of led to this thing where the Republicans are using this to just straight up obliterate like all of the U.S.'s like political economic and social institutions. Well, and specifically with this like investigation, they are trying to get all these universities to cooperate in efforts to selectively remove students who have protested against. the genocide in Gaza, right? This is the same attack on free speech and free expression that they're doing against Khalil. This is the same exact purpose.

Starting point is 02:49:22 And now they're trying to get more and more universities to be complicit in like the selective removal of people in this country who choose to express their First Amendment rights, regardless of whether they're a citizen or green card holder or on a student visa. So this is, this is all deeply, deeply worrying. Robert, you have a small segment you want to discuss before we start to close out. Yeah, just a little bit at the end here. So in the subreddit for the 50-501 protest campaign, which is an attempt to do protests in all 50 states simultaneously, right?

Starting point is 02:50:00 I think their next day of actions coming up in April. I'm not giving an opinion on the overall thing, but in the subreddit, somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard soldier, given kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would respond to orders to carry out violence against U.S. citizens. And I just wanted to chat about this because it's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly. My opinion is that one of the likely ways things come to a head probably as early as this summer is that there is mass protests in D.C. And the Insurrection Act gets used and, you know, the Guard at least are brought in to attempt to crack down. I mean, obviously Trump has done a version of this before, and Trump and his state attorney have both discussed using the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests. I think they see D.C. is the place they want to do that.

Starting point is 02:50:51 So it's interesting to me to see a post like this. This is not a thing where, like, I've been able to verify this guy yet. There's a couple of points that make me. They probably is a national guardsman. For one thing, there's a lot of them, right? Like, this is not like a national guardsman. Where'd you find one? There's a ton of fucking dudes in the National Guard.

Starting point is 02:51:07 For the other thing, everything he says is consistent with things that I have seen and talk to other people who are in and were in the guard about. There's one little bit where he advises people on like stop the bleed gear and he gives good advice. He says only by from NAR and North American Rescue. It's the same advice we would have given. He cites DoD Directive 134410, which is why he believes he's well within his rights to make a post like this. And in essence, what he's saying is that it is his belief that most of the military, chain of command from NCOs up to officers would not be down with following illegal orders to fire on U.S. citizens. But the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon, would get over

Starting point is 02:51:51 whatever issues they have with that very quickly, right? That's the gist of it, is that I think, you know, within sort of the officer class and the NCO class, there are a lot of resistance to the idea of the military being used for domestic policing that is less clear with kind of the enlisted class who are, you know, a significant chunk of them are very much down for Trump. But whatever sort of divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon. And I think this is probably like a, assuming this is accurate. And I don't really see a reason to doubt it. There's nothing he's saying here that's crazy. I think this is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind that like when you're

Starting point is 02:52:34 looking at the military, it's not the police. Like if I have to have a Agents of armed agents of the state cracking down on a protest. I'm less worried about people being killed if it's the National Guard in general. But that situation can change very, very rapidly if like the situation becomes an active firefight. And I do think like that's a thing we have to consider right now is the possibility that we have U.S. soldiers, whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in shooting at American protesters. like that's that's in the cards as early as this summer and it's not a fun thing to think about but I'm seeing more and more not just posts like this but I'm having more and more conversations

Starting point is 02:53:19 with people who are in the military or who are in the National Guard about their concerns about what they might be called upon to do some of this has to do with the border but like it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military to worry about how they are going to be used in the immediate future we're not talking about years, we're talking about this summer, right, is when there's a very good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head. So these are things you should be thinking about if you're listening and you are in the military. These are things that you should be thinking about because the people who are in charge of our government right now have made a lot of statements about how they want to use the military

Starting point is 02:53:56 to deal with protests. And the idea that that's going to happen very soon is not fringe or crazy. Well, and although these people might have, you know, slightly more discipline when it comes to actual firearms, there is also incidents like in 2020 where the Kentucky Army National Guard killed someone via the misuse of crowd control. Absolutely. Munitions. I think that this is also worth stating, even if, you know, like a Kent state situation maybe is not not as likely in like the modern day. There's certainly other ways to cause grievous harm. Yes.

Starting point is 02:54:30 In these sorts of like protest environments. And when we've seen, I mean, even in Portland, when we have seen, which you witnessed personally, unfortunately, Garrison, the worst injuries to crowd control devices are usually people, in our case, it was federal agents, but who are utilizing crowd control weapons and have not trained on them. Because they're not, there's certain ways you're supposed to and not supposed to use them. And these guys are just, you know how to use a gun, you must know how to use the rubber bullet thing, you know? No, if you use, like, less lethal, the way you would use, you know, a regular firearm. that actually leads to like much more like possible lethal consequences or like life-changing consequences. Which, you know, police are more familiar with the regular use of crowd control munitions than necessarily, you know, like Bortak or like state national guards. Something that's also, you know, worth keeping in mind.

Starting point is 02:55:21 Let's close by my least favorite segment, Stinky Musk, which still has a really bad name. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Musk's doge. should be subject to comply with FOIA requests and public disclosures of information required of government agencies, with the judge ordering the release of email correspondence between Musk's team and the Office of Management and Budget, and was ordered to, quote, begin producing documents on a rolling basis as soon as practicable, unquote. Now, despite Musk's claims of, quote, unquote, maximum transparency, last month, the Trump administration tried to shield Doge from public records requests by labeling the agency's documents as, quote, unquote, presidential records. which carries special protections.

Starting point is 02:56:05 This specific case is super interesting. The judge, a federal judge by the name of Cooper, also critiqued the way that the Trump admin tried to litigate this case. Quoting from Politico, quote, the lawyers offered virtually nothing in the way of evidence about Doge's operations or management. Indeed, the court wonders whether this decision was strategic, Cooper said, noting that the Trump administration lawyers had taken competing positions,

Starting point is 02:56:28 including that Doge qualifies as an agency under some sections of law, but not others when it suits it. Thus, Doge becomes, on the defendant's view, a Goldilocks entity, Cooper wrote. Not an agency when it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient, unquote. And I do like Cooper's analysis here of how Doge is very selectively an agency

Starting point is 02:56:51 only when it causes benefit to Trump or Musk. And finally, we have one other Musk's story to close out this episode. admits Tesla's plummeting stock price, protests outside Tesla dealerships, and reports of vandalism of dealerships across the country. Trump has essentially started doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway. Upon climbing in a red car that he's not allowed to operate, Trump remarked, wow, everything is computer.

Starting point is 02:57:22 So this was a very odd and kind of embarrassing show of favoritism, where, Musk brought out a number of different Tesla models, and Trump got to, quote, unquote, you know, pick the one that he wanted to buy as he just, like, sat in on this, like, televised advertisement for Tesla as his, you know, company is losing a shocking amount of money in the stock market. Yeah, and there's, I mean, there's literally, there's literally a picture of him with, like, the notes that he has. There's, like, in a, like, really, really giant launch. Like a Tesla sales note, like, bullet point of, like, how much certain models. are, what their different features are, which ones have self-driving features included, which ones you have to pay extra for? Yeah, no, he's literally carrying like a Tesla sales pitch as he does this televised appearance boosting his new best friends and co-presidents company.

Starting point is 02:58:15 Trump said on True Social, the radical F lunatics are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers and Elon's baby in order to attack and do harm to Elon and everything he stands for, unquote. So now, not only has Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, which is, you know, its own form of unhinged, but on Tuesday, Trump announced that vandalism of Tesla's will be labeled as domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will, quote, unquote, go through hell. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote, ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Tesla's by radical leftist activists are nothing short of domestic terror, unquote.

Starting point is 02:59:06 So that will be fun to see how that plays out. I feel like we're genuinely are not that far off from just like Trump trying to hand down legal mandate saying you must buy a Tesla. Like this is, this is the kind of shit that we're in now. No, this is one of the most like bizarre things I've ever seen. If Biden or any Democratic president did anything similar to this, you would have thralls of people screaming for his impeachment. Similar to the Eric Adams thing,

Starting point is 02:59:34 it's like one of the most blatant open displays of corruption I've ever seen, where a president is using his office to boost, like, the personal financial interests of one of his top advisors, who's also, like, running government agencies essentially and doing massive cuts to prohibit their ability to, like, investigate his own businesses, while also taking massive amounts of government money to keep businesses like Tesla and SpaceX operable.

Starting point is 02:59:58 So this has been a pretty silly thing to watch unfold the past few days. And now Tesla shares have risen 4% after Trump's support for Musk and Tesla. Great. Well, I think that's going to do it here at us with the ED. To play us out, we're going to refer back to our friend, The Narcissist Cookbook, who put together our lovely new tariff theme song that you're going to hear every week until tariffs aren't a thing anymore. We reported the news.

Starting point is 03:00:32 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Starting point is 03:01:05 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 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,

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Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 173

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