Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 179

Episode Date: April 26, 2025

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  Elon Musk and The Martian Revolution feat. Mike Duncan The City Sold Your Water feat. Prop Nihilist Violent Extremism Robert's Guide to The Next Six Months of Danger and Resistance Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #13 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone  Sources/Links: Nihilist Violent Extremism https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%22nihilistic%20violent%20extremists%22&type=r&order_by=dateFiled%20asc https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/fbi-dhs-domestic-terrorism-definitions-terminology-methodology.pdf https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/fbi-kash-patel-antifa-blm-terror-groups https://globalextremism.org/post/trump-abandoning-efforts-to-combat-white-supremacist/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/fbi-kash-patel-investigations-far-right https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi-scales-back-staffing-tracking-domestic-terrorism-probes-sources-say-2025-03-21/ https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/fbi-dhs-domestic-terrorism-strategic-report.pdf/view https://www.dni.gov/files/NCTC/documents/news_documents/2022_10_FBI-DHS_Strategic_Intelligence_Assessment_and_Data_on_Domestic_Terrorism.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-07/23_0724_opa_strategic-intelligence-assessment-data-domestic-terrorism.pdf https://bxwrites.substack.com/p/exclusive-the-satanic-plot-to-assassinate https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/what-are-nihilist-violent-extremists?r=1aiy5i&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #13 https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/04/justices-temporarily-bar-government-from-removing-venezuelan-men-under-alien-enemies-act/ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.98.1_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.100.0_2.pdf https://www.dcnewsnow.com/news/local-news/maryland/prince-georges-county/hyattsville-police-department-details-2019-encounter-with-kilmar-abrego-garcia/  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/us/venezuela-immigrant-disappear-deport-ice.html https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/us-rwanda-relocates-iraqi-refugee-omar-ameen https://news.azpm.org/s/100806-us-citizen-detained-for-10-days-by-immigration-officials-may-not-have-known-what-he-was-signing/ https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1914393644766843386 https://bsky.app/profile/juddlegum.bsky.social/post/3lni7mlxow22c https://www.axios.com/2025/04/23/musk-bessent-trump-white-house-irs  https://news.azpm.org/p/news-articles/2025/4/18/224512-us-citizen-in-arizona-detained-by-immigration-officials-for-10-days/ https://floridaphoenix.com/2025/04/21/feds-blame-u-s-citizen-for-his-arrest-under-suspended-immigration-law/  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/21/doge-musk-trump-federal-employees-emails/  https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-donald-trump-doge-b2736753.html https://insideevs.com/news/753730/tesla-insurance-vandalism-elon-musk/ https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tesla-earnings-show-anti-musk-backlash-damaged-bottom/story?id=121008566&cid=social_twitter_abcn  https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/22/busiest-us-ports-see-big-drop-in-chinese-freight-vessel-traffic.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/21/peter-navarro-the-economist-who-has-outsmarted-elon-musk-and-has-the-ear-of-donald-trump https://archive.ph/v8Vp1 https://www.axios.com/2025/04/23/trump-economy-tariffs-china-powellSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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,

since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, which is, you know, these days normally about the fact that it's happening here.

But today, we're here to talk about a show where it happens somewhere else, a place that people aren't yet, but may one day be in the future. We're talking about the Martian Revolution with the great Mike Duncan of the Revolution's podcast, Mia Wong joining me on this interview. Welcome to the show, Mike. Thank you very much for having me. So let's talk about this because, you know, I've kept up and been listening to revolutions for years. And I started seeing messages earlier this year that like Mike Duncan is doing this fictional revolution podcast on the Martian Revolution.

And it seems to map really, really closely with a lot of stuff that's happening right now in the United States. And I'm wondering kind of to what extent did you anticipate that being an initial reaction to this when you started really at finally. laying down like the text for these episodes. I did not expect that at all. Not at all. What has been happening to me has been one of the most surreal six months of my life in terms of what I am writing and dropping out into the world. And then I turn on the news three weeks later, four weeks later. And I'm just watching exactly what I wrote down in the show come to life. It is horrifying and I hate it. Yeah, welcome to the club.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, you guys have to change the name of your show because there's no good about it, man. We're just here. It's just going, yeah. You know, I've had the notion to do this Martian Revolution series for years. Like, I think I first came up with it back during, like, the French Revolution days is when I was like, you know, it would be a really cool thing to do. It's like, once I've got all of these under my belt, just, like, make up a fictional revolution that kind of follows along, like, many of the plot points of previous revolutions. And so this has been kind of like years in the making. And a lot of the sort of like plot points and ideas that I wanted to do, you know, I wanted it to be like a monopoly corporation because I also wanted to do some like social commentary and like what are the issues that we're kind of dealing with right now.

And, you know, and then I'm like, okay, then there's this thing called the new protocols that is going to, you know, help jumpstart the revolution. And this is somebody coming in and just, you know, implementing whole new software programs and hardware programs without any care for like, what. it does to people. Then there's mass layoffs that are a part of this. And then deportations are, you know, like all a part of the story of how the Martian Revolution gets going. And, you know, this stuff was plotted out in October. And I got to tell you, you know, maybe I was naive. Maybe I had my head in the sand. I thought she was going to win, man. Like, I thought Harris was going to win the election. That's where I, that's where my head was at in September and October going into November. I was like, it'll be close. Of course it will. It's a toss up. But

I think she'll pull it out in the end. It sure feels like it because they were running a terrible campaign and like they didn't have any field operations. And like the whole thing just kind of seemed like she was going to win. So for Trump to win and then start doing all of these things that were just supposed to be fictional plot points. Oh, yeah. Referencing.

Yeah. Like now I'm just like, Jesus Christ, this is terrible. Well, that's what's so, so interesting is because, yeah, so much of so much of the initial, like, as you imagine it, the opening. stages of like the the the the martian revolution in in your series are based on like a guy who is a quote unquote like partly like an autodidact right like a dude who is raised believing that his ideas are good because they're his ideas and that he can kind of jump into any field of human endeavor and make things work better than the people who have been studying and working

in that field for their entire lives and he just starts changing everything based on his whims. Now, you don't have him staying up until 4 in the morning on ketamine benders and then tweeting out his ideas for how to change the government. But, um, and I guess I'd say, like, that's the one, the one thing that doesn't map onto right now. And I think this is, this almost just goes inherently with the act of crafting fiction. Even your bad guys are a lot more sympathetic than our current ones. Yeah. Yeah, which I think is, is to your credit. But like, I've enjoyed the degree to which the decisions that are being made that are kind of making, this Martian Revolution inevitable, are the kind of decisions that you make when you've been raised

in these sorts of bubbles where you are expected to just sort of be able to run things, because, like, that's the strata that you come from. And it maps directly to, like, what we're seeing right now with these Silicon Valley guys who have spent the last few decades getting impossible amounts of money and having that convince them that they know how to do everything. But it also maps back to, like, Versailles. I find that compelling. Yeah. And, you know, The Timothy Werner character, he's like sort of the figure against whom the revolution is going to start after he comes in and starts doing all this stuff. Like the number one, of course, as I'm releasing this, people are just like, this is just a cardboard cut out of Elon Musk, right? And which I would point out, the first thing is like, actually no, because I very specifically wrote it so he was a good husband and father.

Yes, he loves his kids. It's obviously not, it's obviously not Elon Musk because he loves his kids. He's allowed to be in the same room as all of them. Yeah, yeah. And they like, they get along great and everything. Yeah. So obviously it's not. But honest to God, like it wasn't meant to be just much, but it was meant to be those tech guys, right?

Like this is meant to be thinking about the guys who come in and they're like, we're going to move fast and break things. Right. And then what they break is like 120 years of like labor law. Yeah. And that's the only thing that is actually being broken here. Like this is what, you know, what Uber is and all of those kinds of like all of that. stuff that came at us in the last like 10 or 15 years. And they think that, yes, because they can code well or because they had this one ability to like, you know, market something in an effective

way, that that means that they are brilliant and can do everything and everywhere for everybody. And like, we're going to reinvent this and we're going to reinvent that. But they have no idea what they're doing or what they're talking about. And you run into these people on Twitter all the time, this phenomenon of people being good in one area. Yes. And then becoming sort of all-purpose general knowledge experts when it's like you don't have any idea what you're talking about. No. And so there's a line that's in there where it's like, where Werner, the way that he thought is I'm smart, therefore the ideas I have must be smart.

Yes. And that is something that's not about Musk. That's about like just people I run into on Twitter all the time. Oh, constant. That's a phenomenon. That's a generalizable phenomenon. No, I mean, yeah, we talk about that constantly on the show. Like we just did that four-parter on the Zizian.

that who come out of like the rationalist Bay Area tech industry cult, which is both influential with a lot of the people who wound up working at Doge and just to the general tech mindset. And it is, it's the human embodiment of that idea that like, well, I know what a code.

Coding's difficult. That means I'm smart. This must mean I know how to run the schools, right? This must mean I know how to replace Medicare, right? Yep. And it's this kind of like reasoning from first principles without ever actually like having to sit face to face with the consequences of your decisions. And I think you do a great job of showing how that cascades into a calamity.

And in a way that feels very realistic, even though we're talking about Mars. And there's also like gravity generators and the like. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, and what, you know, what Werner does here is so much of what Doge basically started doing when they start going into these systems. They start changing codes. They have no idea what are the key things that are actually underpinning our society. The most recent thing I saw that made me think of this is like they're shutting down all the regional offices of the Social Security Administration and like all communications are now going to be run through Twitter. Right.

And one of Timothy Warner's things is the centralization of all decision making and the centralization of really everything. And in his mind, it would be more efficient if the company just had one brain and that was his brain. and every decision is made by the one brain. And so he's got all this stuff and he's got to make all these decisions, except that is, that's crazy. That is not actually how you can run anything. And it just creates all of this like basically everybody, I forget if I wrote this in, no, I definitely did that like the dreaded like request pending screen that people started

getting. They would submit, they would submit stuff like a fuel requisition order and it would just say request pending. And like request pending would never go away. It would just, that's what it would say. And then you look at what they're doing now. and they are trying to centralize everything. It's a generalized authoritarian power grab,

but, you know, they are doing these things. Yeah. One of the things that it reminds me the most of, like from the other revolutions is I immediately went, wait, this is our Nicholas, where, you know, you have less of the reform package, we're like, yeah, like the way that all of the power gets concentrated and centralized

and there's one guy who's a micromanager and then can't do it because, like, no human could possibly have. done it, but they're not, they're, you know, because of just their, they're sort of affect of power and the way that they think about micro magic anything, they're incapable of, like, letting their subordinates do things. Yeah. Yeah, it also scans with the loves his kids part. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing is like, every, everything that's in the show also is like basically something that comes from history, right? Like, and I am trying to do that.

And it is, it is something that, you know, like Charles I first, uh, Louis the 16th, are Nicholas. These guys are all great family men. Their kids love them and they love their kids, right? Like one of the reasons the French Revolution happened is because Louis's son died, like on the eve of the Estates General and he was just not there because his son had just died. That's a real thing that happened. And the other stuff is like that sort of centralization of power is a lot of, like what I was trying to get at there was actually like the reforms that went in for the European colonial powers after the seven years war in the Anglo colonies, and the Spanish colonies and the French colonies,

all of those governments sort of undertook a reorganization of their colonial structures after the seven years war. It kind of like reshuffled who had what territory. And all of those moves were about sort of an increasing presence of the metropole in colonial life. And this is what triggers, you know, the American Revolution because there was going to be like two more customs officials in Boston Harbor. And so like we went into revolt about this. Yeah.

But this is also true of like the bourbon reforms in Spanish. Spanish America is that kind of like centralization of a community and of colonies that had grown very used to managing their own affairs. And so they're coming in and saying, well, yeah, this is ours. And we here on Earth should be making these decisions for you, Martians. And the Martians were like, well, we've been making these decisions for ourselves for like 70 years now. Yeah. That's where that stuff is coming from. And then history is always the place that I can point to. And then I have to watch it also on the TV. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I've, I've, had that same experience of like, I'm writing out kind of like this possible, you know, this

story about what a future conflict, civil conflict in the U.S. might look like. And I'm just, I'm just taking from stuff that happened in the last like 10 years in a lot of cases that I saw in different countries. And people are like, how, you know, how did you like anticipate this? And my answer is like, I didn't. This is just stuff that happens all the time, right? Because people don't learn from history as a rule. Like no one's ever learned a lesson from history is the thing I've kept repeating to people over the last few years. As I continue to fail to learn lessons from history. Yeah, we all do.

And no, like one of the things that was getting kicked around the other day was like I had, I came to this point where Werner is going to start firing people. He's going to start firing people because he's changed the metrics for how your employment status is being rated. And he's firing just people essentially randomly like you are firing the head of this department and now that department can't run anymore. But he's like, it'll be more efficient. And when I was writing it, it was originally supposed to be like a kind of a more dramatic 10% across the board layoff.

And as I got closer to actually trying to type that up and write it down, I was like, this doesn't actually feel believable to me. Like, people are going to really push back. And I mean this sincerely. Like, people are going to push back that nobody would be so stupid as to just across the board do a 10% layoff of something so critical as, you know, Mars is to Earth. because in the story, Mars is absolutely critical to how Earth is able to function with the resource that they're able to get from there. And so I changed it around and actually looked to like the sullen prescriptions from Roman history to kind of give it a different take where really it was like you woke up every day and there was like 15 more names on the list, 100 more names on the list. And there was something equally sort of dramatic and cool about that without this like unbelievable, you know, 10% across the board cut. And I wrote a paragraph in there being like, I know that people are going to think that this is.

is unrealistic, but you just have to understand that, like, throughout history, we have seen these things. Like, people do stupid stuff, and they stubbornly cling to it all the time. Yeah. Because that is something that happens. And life, as we know it, is actually less, like, if I wrote up what was happening right now, like, if I was just got like a window into an alternate world and we're living in a different world where Trump lost and I brought all this stuff back, they'd be like, this is implausible,

like this is crazy. They would never be allowed to get away with that. They would never be allowed to get away with that. to do that. They would never be so stupid as to blow up the global economy with a bunch of tariffs that make no sense to anybody. Who wouldn't want the dollar as their reserve currency? Yeah.

What would they fuck that up? None of nothing that is happening right now is plausible in the, in a storytelling, in a fictional storytelling setting. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this, this also gets something that I've been saying along this show that I want, I want to get your take on, which is like, you know, one of the things that you wrote about in your sort of like, I guess like recap series of your experience going through the

revolutions was about like how much of the stuff is driven by like the great idiots of history. And my God, do Elon Musk and Trump look to me like two of the great indecis of history? And that doesn't like guarantee that it'll happen. But like, whew. Yeah, they're there. The great idiot theory of revolutions. Yeah. Is a very simple thing, which is just saying that it's revolutions don't happen because

some tyrant is in power and they are. intolerably oppressing their people. Like people have been intolerably oppressed for a long time. And like Trotsky's got this quote that is if peasant discontentment was the cause of revolution, then there would be a revolution happening every single day because the peasants are always discontented. Right. So what it takes to really have a revolution is for somebody in power to be kind of incompetent

and to start doing stupid things that allow the situation to get out of hand. And on top of that really piss off the other elites around them. because it's the mismanagement of the state that allows the elites that are that are kind of necessary for a full-blown revolution. Like you need their resources and you need their money and you need them being close to a position of power to be able to pop whoever is in there at the time. And you've got to be pretty incompetent to like wreck an elite consensus, right? Like that's that is in and of itself catastrophically stupid if you're trying to stay in power. Yeah. And so yes, the great idiot theory is getting quite a work.

out lately. That's actually something else that I wanted to ask you about in terms of, like, you see this in terms of Mabel Dorr, right? Where Mabel Dorr is this kind of example of like the sort of local, I guess like local colonial elite to some extent. Yeah. I almost saw her as like, yeah, a lot of these kind of American revolutionary figures, right, where you have this person who holds a fairly high position in the colonial state as a result

of, you know, their birth and the family they come into, but also is identify as much more as a member of that state of the colony than of the colonizing state. Yep. Yeah, and I think this is something, this is a part of the revolutionary process that I think is really, really badly understood on the left in terms of, in a lot of ways, a necessity of parts of this elite flipping. And like the other example, I think most people kind of are more familiar with is Philippe Egalite, like the Duke de O'Ollone, like funding a bunch of these sort of revolutionary

groups that eventually kind of like get out of his control. but can you talk a bit more about sort of the role of these sort of like elite defections and how they end up sort of funding and enabling these revolutionary movements? Yeah, I mean, it's a mix of things. And I mean, you got it. Like, Mabel Dora is meant to be sort of the colonial elite. Yeah. And she's also meant to be sort of the liberal nobility in lots of different revolutionary settings. And she is doing that.

And when she is like when I talk about her like funding the Society of Martians and like funding all these like philanthropic, you know, enterprises. to help Martians. Like, that's a lot of Philip Agaleigh, like, straight up. Like, that's what the Duke Dorillon was doing in, you know, 1786, 87, and 89. And so that's the role that she's playing. But, you know, if the elites are unified, it is very difficult for any kind of, like, peasant or worker uprising to actually get traction and succeed in overthrowing the state. Yeah. Like, peasant insurrections have happened throughout history without any sort of elite support. They have, often accomplished great things, but when you think about the great revolutions in history, there really have always been people in the inner corridors of power who are ready to get

rid of whoever the sovereign is in that moment. Yeah. And, you know, you can advance all the way to the Russian Revolution. And this is, you know, this is the prototypical, like the workers have risen up and the army is mutining and it is the people who overthrow the czar. and what that story misses is all of the people, even inside the Romanov family itself, who are like so fed up with what Nicholas and Alexander are doing that they're just like, we don't know what to do anymore, but like he's, yeah, I guess he's got to go.

Yeah. You know, like we can't get him to see reason. We can't get him to change course. We can't get him to do anything. Like the situation is completely out of hand. And without those people leaning on Nicholas to force his abdication and also to say, Like, we're not going to back you up if you try to bring the hammer down on all these people, then that's when sovereigns are actually overthrown. Yes, and I love that you bring that up because it gets to the failure to see that.

And this is especially common with people who kind of idolized the 1917 revolution, but it's certainly not limited to that. I mean, in every revolution you have people who are fans of that revolution or who see it as a model for what they want to do and also ignore the realities on the ground that, like, made it. possible. I think one of my favorite examples is the quote that, like, you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. Well, I don't know, in those pictures of the 1917 revolution, I see a lot of Mosens that used to be property of the czar, right? Like, it happens all the time. And I think that we always need to be cautious of, like, seeing just what we want to see in revolutionary history as opposed to seeing what was there. And the thing is, is Lenin understood this, right? Like, Lennon understood what the game was, and he understood what was going on.

And you don't have to, like if you're a revolutionary and you're sympathetic to the communists in 1917, you don't have to say, oh, well, the elites were necessary for this first revolution. And we need, you know, we need a break inside the ruling class. We need divisions inside the ruling class. That doesn't mean you have to say, and what those people want out of overthrowing the czar is what we want and what we're going to accept. Right.

You know, obviously, like the cousins of the, of Tsar Nicholas and the people who are in those inner circles of power, they wanted him out of there just so they could run the empire a little bit better. They were frustrated with how poorly the empire was being run. They didn't want a social revolution. But if you're going to take down that whole system, creating a destabilization event at the very top is necessary. But you don't have to support the ultimate aims of those people. It's just, it's an ingredient. And this is, and you see this in the course of revolutions, and you see this in 19. You see this 1789 and then 1792 where there is that first wave of sort of revolution that overthrows the sovereign.

And then there is a second wave that overthrows the people who did it first. And so, you know, you can hold out hope for, you know, getting the job done without without thinking that elites do play some role in all of that. Right. Yeah. I think that's a great point. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about sort of shifting gears a little bit was about how you were thinking about the deportations when you were writing it and how you were thinking about the way that kind of this generalized anti-deportation organizing turns into that and the sort of mutual aid networks that the Society of Martians are doing directly turns into this thing. And that's also something that, I don't know, it feels very prescient in ways even though it was written out before a lot of this stuff happened. Yeah, the deportation stuff is just because of my own personal political commitments over the course of my adult life, right? Which is that we have an insanely cruel immigration system in this country, you know? And, and, you know, they say like, oh, we've got this like open borders. Like, we do not have open borders.

It is actually really, really hard to, like, navigate your way properly through the American, immigration system. That's true. The system itself is broken. And we did all of this, you know, we did the worst of the horrors with Trump, right? Like obviously that is on my mind with, you know, with family separations and putting people in camps and abusing people and rounding people up. Like all of this stuff, which happened under Trump, yes, but it also happened under Obama for eight years. And it happened for another four years under Biden. It's just that we kind of stopped talking about it because it wasn't Trump who was doing it. And there is, there is a through line of cruelty inside of this system towards immigrants.

So that issue of deportation and like rounding people up and evicting them, especially those who have lived in this place their entire life. Like that's one of the points that I make. Like the people who are being fired are like born and raised on Mars. Like one of the main characters, Alexandra Claire. She is a fourth generation Martian. And she just gets caught up in these like stupid layoffs that, that Timothy Werner is pushing through and now the only choice that she has is to either hide or get deported to

Saturn. And nobody's ever come back from Saturn. We have no idea what happens on Saturn because all they know is that nobody ever comes back from Saturn. And this is a thing. Like taking people who are born and raised in America, this is the only place that they have ever known, right? Even if they came here when they were like one, like, okay, they weren't born here, but like they here since they were one. And then you're like, okay, we're going to send you back to Mexico. They're not from Mexico. They don't know anybody. in Mexico, they don't, probably even speak Spanish half the time, you know? And doing this to people is cruel. It is unconscionable what we do to people. And so, yeah, like, so when I was thinking to

myself, okay, I'm going to write this, like, fictional revolution and it's going to be on Mars, what are some of the things that I want to do that will make the revolution happen? Yeah, some of this does, is like a little bit of like, this is, these are Mike's political interests and the deportation issue and trying to highlight the horror of the deportation issue and laud those who would hide those people and help those people and bring those people food. Like the bravest people going are the ones who like go out and leave, you know, water jugs out in the middle of the desert so people don't die, right? And the cruelest thing is these guys who go out and then break those, like, knowing that people are going to, knowing that people are going to like die of dehydration and

die of starvation, but just not care because they don't care about those people. That's one of the sickest things to me. Like, it's just, there's information coming out now that there's that horrible video of that ICE agent smashing the window of that woman's car to deport her. And then the information's come out that he is a deputized volunteer border guy. And, you know, what's really happened if you look at it is we've kind of recreated in a decentralized form, the Einstein's Grupa, right? Like instead of having a centralized state having to raise these organizations that are going to be

carrying out this kind of violence. Like, it's largely become something that vigilantes have gotten into on their own as part of, like, just their special interest in hurting people at scale. And it's such a uniquely, it's so uniquely tied to, like, this American individualism. It's such a uniquely sick thing about the way things work here, that that's happening. Like, that wouldn't have happened, not that Germany is, you know, not that German culture in the 30s was better, but it just wouldn't have happened because it was a different kind of culture. Yeah, for sure. And then it's really important to remember that this is not just a Trump

problem. Yeah. Like what he's doing right now is like, of court, like we are entering next levels beyond next levels of what he's doing. And even, you know, just this morning, we've got an American citizen who has been held and they are not being released despite the passport and the social security card being shown to the judge. And the judge is like, I don't, I can't actually release this person. Yeah. That's sort of where we're at now. But this has been an ongoing thing for 20 years across both parties and both administrations. And nothing really has like sort of churned my stomach more since Trump got elected than all of the Democrats and people doing like sort of post-mortems on the election and being like, well, you know, we really should be tougher on the border. And we really should sort of like buy into this framing that there is this like invasion.

and we just need to do border enforcement better. Like, and then even moving, positioning themselves to a place where it's like, Trump's not even doing a good job protecting the border. And like there was somebody, I forget even who it was, but somebody, one of them senators like tweeted, you know, this time last year, Biden had deported this many people and Trump isn't even deporting that many people. And he was like trying to make this point that like Trump wasn't following through on his promises or something.

But it's like, do you even hear yourself? Like, do you even hear yourself? Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I can't, you know, stomach the fact that Democrats are going to take away from all this that the American people love cruelty towards immigrants and that we need to lean into that. And then you see the polls before all the tariff stuff and all this stuff is going on. And Trump is still sitting in like 50% approval. And it's like, I don't know, maybe they're right. Maybe the American people really do just love this.

So, I mean, I think the other side of that, though, and this is, you know, part of the reason I brought up specifically like the resistance to it was that like the other. aspect of the kind of individualism of American culture was that it also meant that there a bunch of people went out to the desert like our co-worker James spent a lot of time during the Biden administration like at these just like the open air prisons they built in the middle of the fucking desert like

on the border and you know and like one of the stories that he covered extensively was that like probably most of these people would have died if it wasn't for like literally border volunteers like passing food and water to the bars and that's something that I was thinking about a lot looking

at the mutual aid networks and looking at the kind of mutual aid networks that trans people are building up right now. And like, I mean, I, okay, like, there's always been a million mutual aid networks because it's just impossible to survive if you're trans without like getting stuff from other trans people. We're not supposed to do anything alone, man. We're not supposed to do anything alone. Well, right. Yeah. Nothing. We're not supposed to be doing anything along. Yeah. And that, that's honestly the most optimistic thing about your podcast is that like Martian society develops this very communal because it's, we're living. in like an artificial habitat. And if shit goes really wrong, everyone dies at once. You have to have

this more collaborative, collective attitude towards safety and security that is just so completely absent from American culture. It's the thing that continually sends me into the darkest spirals is because there's no fixing the fundamental underlying problems without fixing that. Yeah. And like on Mars, you know, that sort of communal stuff is like they're also living in close quarters. So you can't really be somebody who needs to be alone, right? That's a thing. And then also, like, in terms of like the early colonization of Mars, like, yeah, you have to do this stuff together. And like there's, there's a, like when I was doing like cultural, like there's cultural background, like works and, you know, like music that was going on that the Martians were creating. And I didn't

quite get into this. But there is a song that I've got like half written called The Ballad of Lonely Joe, which is like a, it's like a Martian folk song. about Lonely Joe, who went off and tried to, like, do it himself. But, I mean, he never comes back, and now Lonely Joe, like, wanders the red sands of Mars because, like, he tried to go out and not do it, like, with the group and not do it with the community because you can't survive alone on Mars. Yeah. But to your other point, like, one of the things that I definitely wrote into the show is that

everybody on Mars has a skin chip in their hand, and the skin chip in their hand is what, like, opens door. It, like, literally opens doors. Yeah. And it gives them access to the commissary and it gives them access to restaurants. It gives them access to food and employment. Like everything goes through that skin chip. And when the people get fired by Werner, their skin chips just get turned off effectively.

And it doesn't, it doesn't open doors anymore. They can't get food anymore. They are living inside of a society that they literally cannot interact with anymore. And so it took other Martians around them. And so there's a thing in the show called the No Doors Movement, which is Martians, jamming open doors so that the people who have, they were called the annulled because their contracts were annulled. Yeah.

But so the, so that the annulled could get from here to there without needing their skin chip. Yeah, those are the kinds of things that, you know, are necessary. And those are the kinds of things that are going to protect people. And I hope that those things are going on out there. And I hope that none of us publicly state right now what we may or may not be doing on that front. Yeah. Let's just go ahead and keep that where it's at.

I'm a big fan of the don't fed post on social media or in your podcast thing. Yeah. Yeah. Just something you touched on there, I think, is interesting about the way that being forced to live together, like, creates this consciousness. It reminds me a lot of, when I was a student, I was an anthropology student. And one of the things that we read was this sort of classic of, I guess you call it like structuralist Marxist, like, anthropology from the 80s. It's this book called We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us, which is about these indigenous Bolivian tin miners.

And one of the things that always struck me about that was, you know, because they're all literally like sleeping next to each other, like in these rooms, you can literally hear like the stomach of like the child next to you like rumbling at night because they don't have enough food. And that like turns them into like one of the most militant sort of like working class. I mean, for like a hundred years,

they are like, like they're syndicalists and then they're communists. and they're one of those militant things. And I don't know, it's interesting to me that that this is like this aspect of this society that you've, you know, you sort of drawn out of these historical revolutions

where a key element of it, again, is this sort of collectivity. And also there's this, like, if you look at like the trajectory of like the modern American state and like the modern, just the modern development of capitalism, it's been specifically trying to make that stuff not happen

by like kicking people into suburbs and like trying to, to physically alienate people. And I was, I don't know, I was wondering how much we were sort of thinking about that kind of stuff when you were like writing the cultural aspects of this. Sure. No, that stuff is all in my mind. And like I said, like, we're not meant to do anything alone.

Like, humans are communal creatures. Like, you don't go anywhere in history. Like, all the way back to the dawn of the species, you do not find individual humans, like living by themselves. We have always done this as a group. This has always been a group project. And like when you go back, this is something that comes out of sort of like, I studied a lot of like political theory in school. And the state of nature sort of works, you know, these thought experiments that like Thomas Payne would do or Rousseau would do. And, you know, it's like, how did we come together? Why did we come together? Well, let's first imagine like an individual human wandering through the forest and like they encounter another one. So they come together for defense and they come together, you know, to share food and do some division of labor. And it's like, no, there's no such thing as a human wandering alone. That's not a thing. Like, Any outgrowth that comes from our description of what human society is like, whether it's defense or the division of labor, begins with the fact that we are already a group.

There is a mother, there is a child, there is a father, there are aunts and uncles and other. Like, whatever the group is, we are always doing this as a group. And hyper individualization and hyper atomization of our society is something that is trying to undo one of the most fundamental parts. of what it means to be human. This is something that I thought about a lot, too, because when I started having kids. And, you know, I have two kids. And the model for, like, having a family at this point is, like,

you have a mother, a father, or whatever, you have kids. But the point being that they are a unit that is unto itself. And they live in their own house. And they have to supply their own food. And they are in charge of getting their own money. And everything that happens is just up to that little nuclear family. Yeah. And the nuclear family.

is not really how we've ever done it before. No. There's always been a broad network, a broad family friend network that has been a part of, you know, raising our kids and having our families. And, you know, if something bad happens, we don't just say, oh, wow, bad luck for them, you know, you support that person. Yeah. And that is something that we've really gotten away from as a society, obviously.

And it's something that we've been pulled away from purposefully, right? Like, the atomization isn't just a byproduct of, incentives, right? Like, it is a directed move. I mean, you just got to look back to some of the shit thatcher was saying, right? There's no such thing as a society. There are men and women and there are families, right? This is a directed change. And I'm not saying this in like the conspiratorial sense. I'm saying this. This is what a lot of people, a lot of the worst people in our society believe because it's convenient for them. And they have pushed to make that belief more common. and done so by funding think tanks

and funding media organizations in part. Right. I was actually about to quote literally that exact thing, but the interesting part to me about the Thatcher line is that everyone, almost everyone who quotes that line

only quotes the part about there are only individuals and then leaves out the part about the family. Yes. Which I think is a really important connection to what you were saying where it's like, their vision of the family

is also still fundamentally this isolated group because they still need some kind of collective because, again, You can't just leave a baby, like, out in the woods. It just dies, right? But, like, they had to, like, create this version to be, like, the political base of their thing.

They had to create this one collective that would be cut off from everything else that had normally made it a collective. Yep. You know, people think these days that that atomized nuclear family is, like, the law of nature, right? That this is, like, this is the way it's always been. And, like, that's not true. It's just not true. There's a great line. I don't have it right in front of me at the moment, but in Tocqueville's Aseon regime in the French Revolution, which is really dynamite book everybody should read.

At the end of it, he lays it out. He's writing this in like the 1840s and 1850s. And he straight up says that like what liberal capitalism is doing, which he was himself, I mean, he's a conservative liberal. Like it's not like he's on the left or anything, but he's watching as the adornment. of families and individuals is happening. And he's like, and that's how, that's what tyranny thrives on. Tyranny thrives when everybody is disconnected from everybody else and everybody is in competition with everybody else because that's the other key part of it is your family is now pitted against every other family in terms of like getting money, getting jobs, like getting that,

getting this other thing. Like we're all scrambling out there in a competition to get a little bit more, a little bit better or just, you know, have enough. Like, I feel this every time I have to sign the kids up for, like, summer camp. You know, like, I'm at war with every other family in the neighborhood because I'm just trying to get my kid into this camp and some people aren't going to make it and other people will and you got to be there and you got to have strategies about when to log on to the thing. Like, because they're pitting us against each other, like, all the time in all those little subtle ways.

Yep. I think that's what's optimistic kind of about the Martian Revolution is like, you know, on the one hand, there is this kind of, like, collective society. But on the other hand, you know, this is a society entirely ruled by corporations, right? And it is, it is literally every single aspect of it is specifically designed to get to do this pitting each other, like being people against each other. And yet, anyway, somehow, they, they, they, you know, even, even if it is by accident, which is, to be fair, how a lot of revolutions start, they, they do it. I think the, the, the key thing is here is that we see. throughout time, like really extreme societies that try to mold people in certain ways with the idea of permanently changing them. And what happens in the past,

at least to every one of those societies, is that the society dies and people go on being people. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's no year zero. Right. Right. There's no, there's no new man. Right. That's not ever going to happen. That's actually, I mean, just, I wouldn't

even have thought that I'm going to tie this back into Tockville, which the reason I would recommend Ancian regime is because that is a book about how much of the revolution was a continuation of what was going on before it and not actually caused by the revolutionary break. And even if you believe in the revolution and believe it was this, I actually believe in the revolution because it accomplished these great things. But there was no year zero thing that happened. A lot of this stuff like is just on a continuum. them. And, you know, like, I don't want to get in a fight with somebody about whether human nature is a thing that exists or doesn't exist. Right. Like, as an abstract thing because, because I'm not sure that it's true. But there sure are a lot of things that keep popping up, right? Like, we're interested in sex and we have to eat food and we live in shelters and we make music. And there does seem to be some very, like, human qualities that exist across all time and across all space. And if you just say to yourself, like,

Well, like, I mean, this is one of the things. I'm very sympathetic to anarchists. But like, there's a point with, with anarchism, like, especially the early stuff, where their idea was that if you smash the state and you destroy the state, then humans will be allowed to flourish in their natural goodness and communalism, which is, you know, a little bit what we are moving towards right now, but I'm not sure even that exists. Because if you, if you crash the state out, it's not the state that's necessarily making us this way.

There is, there is stuff inside of human nature that's. that we created the state to begin with. So the whole thing is like a very, it's a balancing act. Yes. That has gone way too far in a certain direction. Yeah. And I,

I think that's something I always, I always try to keep in mind. Like, it's not that societies can't alter or improve aspects of, of like, how things are, right, by changing the incentives, but by altering like the way things work.

You can reduce the prevalence of certain problems. You can make things better in some ways. But there's certain. stuff that you're just never going to, like when I look at what the white supremacists want to do, right? Well, you're never going to get people to stop mingling with other kinds of people. You simply can't. It's never worked and it never will, right? Like that, that's an impossible dream. So I can just say, like, that's a thing, no matter what, how tightly you grab a hold of the reins of state and how many weapons you deploy, you simply won't succeed in the long term of doing this,

because it's just not something we can do. You can't stop people from mingling. This is actually one of my points about immigration and migration. Yeah. Is that no matter how tightly you try to control it, no matter you could build every wall you want, you can make it as hard as you want, people are still going to move here. People are still going to move away from here. People are still going to go here to there and from there to here. And that is something that is going to happen no matter what. And especially if we're going into the 21st century with all of its various climate disasters that are, you know, facing us. And it is going to make sense. Yeah, it's already making some places less habitable and other places will be more habitable.

And what's going to happen is the people who are living in less habitable areas are going to want to go to where there are areas that are still habitable. And so there is, there's going to be movements of people. And the question before us in the 21st century is not, you know, can we keep people in the places that they are now and, you know, like sort of lock in rigidly to like these xenophobic nation states. and that will actually stop those migrations from happening, or do we open ourselves up to the idea that this is going to happen and simply make it more humane and more rational? That's the question. It's not whether the migrations will happen or not.

It's simply how cruel they will be when they happen. And right now we are choosing maximum cruelty. Yep. Sucks. Yeah. It sucks. It does. Like that's so much of our present society.

is like, well, yeah, this is the cruelest way I can imagine this happening. You know, like, and we are, we are staring down the barrel of the worst case scenario, right? Like, that's the thing everyone's had to make peace with, you know? Even once Trump won, there was still a degree of like, well, I guess we'll see, and we've seen, right? And we do just kind of have to guide off that without pretending it's otherwise. Like the, that's one of the few things that does give me hope is that the people who are insistent upon pretending otherwise seem to be getting increasing. marginally marginalized. I mean, we'll see. Gavin Newson still hasn't been sort of choked off of access to the public, but, you know, the statements he's been making recently about

Abrago Garcia, it's just like, yeah, I just can't, I can't imagine this guy being the future of the Democratic Party if this is just looking at where popular discourse is right now. Right. And there's a lot of them who would like it to be the future of the Democratic Party, because they don't care as much as Republicans don't care about the lives of these people who are living on this earth, who are living, breathing human beings, who are just someplace else, and living in a world where, like, yeah, the United States and Europe, we suck up the world's wealth and resources. Like, that's where the imperial center of the globe.

And people are like, oh, and even when people say, like, well, why do people come here? And, you know, there's kind of a standard American exceptionalist notion. which is like, well, they come here because they want their, because they want freedom. And freedom is what America offers and like the American dream and all that stuff, like the entrepreneurial spirit, et cetera, et cetera. But mostly it's because this is where you can come and get the world's money. Yeah. This is where it all is.

It's sitting in my pocket. It's sitting in your pocket, right? We are the ones who have all of the world's money. And so that is why they are coming here. Yep. So you just have to like fit that in your brain. And what is happening is this, this, this, constant division between like Americans being more important than anybody else. And I understand why

that exists politically. And even these questions of like citizens versus non-citizens, like one of the things that that got me when I was reading Bakunin was like he had, it was a throwaway line. It wasn't even like a point he was making, but he referred to something as mere citizenship, which kind of struck me because I grew up very liberal. Like I come from like the liberal suburbs of Seattle. And, and I had very liberal notions. And citizenship in sort of the liberal imagination is the highest thing that you can be, be a citizen of a polity with rights.

There's a constitution you get to participate in the government. Like citizen and citizenship are these words that had great profound meaning. And really kind of like knock me sideways to have and be like mere citizenship. You've been reduced to simply a part of a polity and your humanity has been taken away from you. You're no longer being recognized as a human being.

You're being recognized it as a citizen. And if you're not a citizen, then you just don't count at all. And it totally wipes out their humanity. So not only do I not have humanity because I'm simply a part of some polity rather than being me, Mike Duncan, a human being. But it's erasing our human obligations to each other to non-citizens. And the idea, like, and you just see this very casually, like right now, like all over the place.

It's just like they're not citizens so they don't deserve due process. They're not citizens. so we can just send them to El Salvadorian torture prisons, and it's fine because they're not citizens, and therefore they don't have rights. It's like, what about, you know, just being a person, thinking about other people? And one of the greatest, one of my very favorite, and I know I'm steamrolling here, I'll let you get a word in edgewise here in a second. But I forget what the court case was, but there was a court case out of Texas, you know, like back in like the 60s when they decided that the Texas school districts had to. open the schools to undocumented children. And they said that because it says in the 14th Amendment persons. It doesn't say citizens. And they were arresting a lot of this on the notion that like

it says person has these rights, not a citizen has these rights. And this is what conservatives and MAGA hate, hate, hate, hate this is why they're going to try to undo the 14th Amendment. But to have the Supreme Court at one point in the past be like, no, you have to do this because you owe an obligation to them as a person, not just as a citizen. That's like mind-blowing. I could not see the Supreme Court today making that same decision. But like, that's the kernel of something really good, I think, for the future of humanity rather than like clinging to this like citizen or non-citizen thing. Yeah. I guess kind of for me, the most important belief I ever came to was the understanding that like I don't care about citizenship and I don't care about who is supposed to be

in a specific place, right? I think one of the most toxic ideas possible is that like your rights as a person are dependent on where you were born. That's just the thing I'll never believe. And it's the fight we've lost the worst as the left. Or I should even say getting beyond left and right because I really think those are not the most useful ways

to look at things. It's like human beings. The fact that that battle, the battle to just see people as humans with inherent value as humans regardless on their place of birth. The fact that that has been botched so badly is maybe the greatest calamity

of the 21st century. Although there's a few, there's a few contenders. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, there's a lot. Well, and it's so deeply ingrained. This is something I'm going to talk about more in a different place,

but like one of the things that's been driving me the most up the walls is like, so I've had to read like every single piece of terrorist cover, tariff coverage that's been written by like fucking all these analysts, all of these media people. Like, and every single thing

one of them only fucking talks about its impact on Americans, right? Yep. And if you look at the, like, the Liberation Day, like, turf tariff package, right? The single country that is the most fuck from this is Sri Lanka. Yep. And if those tariffs go back into effect in like, in like 50 days, whatever, whatever, like 80 days,

like the entire country of Sri Lanka is fucked. They're doomed. They're completely fucked. And all of these countries, you know, all these countries need U.S. dollars in order to, like, literally to buy fucking fuel. And then suddenly, oh, wait, hold on, you can't do exports to the U.S. And like, the entire, this is it affects literally the entire world, right?

You can look at the tariff rates on every single country like in the world and everyone writing about it only writes about its effect upon the U.S. because there's this just like there's this pure sort of AmeriCentrism thing where like people and this,

I see this on the left too which they fundamentally don't see anyone who's not in the U.S. as human and the people in the U.S. who are seen as like people who are seen as like humans who, you know, like think and feel and like act and like hurt in the same ways that we do like that's only a thing that happens if you're a very specific kind of American citizen and if you're not or God help you you were

born in like most of the like the rest of the world which is again it unhidious super majority of everyone on earth you just you don't matter and yeah they don't yeah not not in all this and like I mean to bring it back to the Martian Revolution like that one of the things that is happening right now, like in the series, I'm, you know, it's going to be 30 episodes long and I'm writing episode 23 right now. But like, we've gone through the revolution. There's been, I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but obviously like they win, you know, at certain points. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a very interesting story. And there is a debate right now among the victorious Martian revolutionaries about who should count inside of the Martian constitution and

this thing called the Republic of Mars that they have just declared. They, they're no longer a part of a corporation. They're going to be this thing called the Republic of Mars. And there is a guy who is passionately committed to Mars and to the Martian people, and he hates Earthlings, and he doesn't trust Earthlings. And there's no reason for him to trust Earthlings. They have tried to screw them over a bunch of times and it caused nothing but pain. And so, but there are a bunch of earth-born earthlings on Mars.

And he wants to exclude them from the Republic of Mars. And if you're born on Mars, then you should get to participate. And if you're not, then you shouldn't have rights. You shouldn't be a part of this project. and I would love to just, I would love to deport you. That's what, that's what he's going to be arguing. And then there is another side that has a more universalist take on this. And my character, Alexandra Claire, who is like a D class, she comes out of the Warrens, which you can just, that's basically like the working class.

You know, she's like, when Earthlings come here, yeah, I don't like it when they bungle things because they're new and they don't know what they're doing. Like, I'm as annoyed by the new guy as anybody. but like they've suffered right alongside me, like suffering the same conditions. Like the fact that they were born on Earth doesn't mean that they're not suffering right now that their contracts weren't annulled, that they are not suffering from the new protocols.

Like, and during these revolutions, did they hold neutron guns in their hands and fight and die for Mars? Yeah, they did. And so probably we should say that it's not Martian good, earthling bad, but like let's just open it up to everybody and we will sort out like, you know,

who's, you know, who's in on this and who's actually trying to undermine us because, you know, there is, there are loyalist, fifth columnist that they are going to have to deal with. Yeah. Well, I think we're encroaching on an hour here. So we're, I think we need to probably call this for the day. But, uh, Mike, I really appreciate your time. You've been so generous. And I can't wait to see where you end.

I know that you're also can't wait to see where you land on all of this. Right, right, right. I've got all the plot points, you know, I, I know. I know where it's going, but just getting there is, it's weird because sometimes when you write fiction, characters are like, you weren't supposed to do that, and now I've got to deal with that. And like, what do you, well, she wouldn't do that in this moment. So I guess I was going to have her do it, but I just can't believe that she would ever do that in that situation. So I guess she can't do it.

And I'll have to figure that out. And that's my weekly struggle these days. Yeah, yeah. That's the struggle of releasing fiction before you're entirely done with it. Yeah, well, I write, I mean, I wake up. I wake up every Monday morning with a blank piece of paper and have to have that week's episode done by Sunday night. So I'm writing these in real time. Yeah.

Well, I congratulate you on trapping yourself in such an exquisite hell. I'm enjoying listening to it. I know everyone else is as well. Oh, it's great. I love it. All right. That's the episode, everybody. Thank you.

Bye. So y'all's your favorite cousin. I just came over. You feel me? Y'all, y'all don't have no cousins that just kind of pop up, just be at the house, like a 90s sitcom. where you don't knock on the door, you just be walking in. That wasn't my life, mainly because most of the cousins on my mother's side lived on the other side of the country.

And then my cousins on my father's side, since we lived in gang infested areas, you didn't just pop up. That was just not the safest thing to do. But I'm doing that at your house. And you know what happens when you have cousins come over. Well, now a small percentage of y'all are black, but a lot of percentage of you y'all grew up for, which means that you got whoopens, just like we did. So, you know, usually when your cousin comes over, somebody's getting, we all, somebody getting in trouble. And it's usually

you, because you're supposed to know better. I never got more spankings than when my cousins cousins came over, because we would just get into stuff. And then since I'm the one that lived there and I was cutting up in front of company, I ended up getting into most trouble. Anyway, this isn't where I'm working out trauma. Although it is called It Can Happen Here Podcast, so I feel like we all collectively working out trauma of being Americans. And lastly on the rambling preamble, I got a dog

now. Well, my daughter got a dog. And to all the parents that listen, you know when your child gets a pet whose pet that actually is. So, I find myself doing a lot more chores than I signed up

for, but it's a pug. And it keeps trying to eat the cats food, therefore it's got liquid doo-doo, and I'm not a fan of that. And since I get to work in my pajamas, because I'm just recording podcasts and

rap music back here, seems to fall on me to scoop up this liquid doo-doo. But that's only when she eats the cat's food. Stupid dog. Eat your own food. Anyway, I'm here to talk about something that you can do nothing about. All right, y'all ready? Here we go.

A brother like me, who bleeds Los Angeles, you cut me open and Pacific Ocean salt water comes out. You poke my lungs and smog pours out of me. I could work for the tourist department of Los Angeles. I love this city at an unhealthy level. There are things about this place that is absolute trash. Don't get me wrong. There is a lot wrong with this city. with this place. The ground shakes up under us. We've been such a horrible steward as to how to take care of this land. I'm going to include myself, even though I am not the invasive colonizer. But there are really only nine native trees to California, two of which are not the palm tree or the eucalyptus.

the plants that are here naturally are drought resistant and fire resistant. They don't burn that easy. The ones that burn up real quick are the sycamores and the palm trees. And if you may have noticed, Los Angeles hit a bit of a dry spell recently and had quite the disaster. Now, I'm slowly backing that thing up into what we're going to talk about right now, which you should probably know if you have already read the show title. when you clicked play.

But I'm going to back that thing up into it. California catches fire every year in some location. Now, my mother, you know, mama prop, she worked 30 years for the LA County Fire Department, you know, in the city of West Covina because I'm a 6-26er. And I have vivid memories of the different firemen, fire chiefs. I think I talked about this in the L.A. fire episode. Black is literally hot on the hood politics show, which hopefully you guys are

supporting and listening to also. But even my boy Chris, who's, you know, firefighter, you know, been fighting the fires out here. Everybody knew that one day this day would come and that let's just say all of the bureaucratic failures had not happened. If the water was as full as possible. The fire hydrants were fine. If everything was the budget, if everything was done perfectly, this was going to happen. This day was going to come. That it's a perfect storm. We had a specific type of drought, lack of rain, the Santa Ana winds, and then a fire sparking, and that fire sparking in a densely populated urban area. It was, every fireman I knew was like, Yeah, one day it's going to happen. And like I said in the last episode, yeah, like, you know, we could find ourselves a time machine and practice the indigenous practices. Oh, actually, as a small little beacon alike, there's an area out to Dina that was actually given back to the Tongva tribe many years back. There was a first, like, actual land back given back to the tribe. And they started taking care of the land the way that their elders and ancestors did. And guess what? That area did.

didn't burn. Anyway, in the midst of this disaster that we were having a desperate, desperate man who I completely understand his desperation. On Tuesday night, on January 7th, while the fires were just rumbling through the Palisades, a man named Keith Wasserman, who's the co-founder of a real estate investment firm desperately took to Twitter and said, does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home? Need to act fast here. All neighbor's houses burning will pay any amount. There was another click of Rick Caruso, who almost in a multiverse situation, is our mayor, a billionaire developer who owns the Grove. And on the west side, just that if you ever watch TMZ,

whenever somebody's walking out of a place, it's probably at the Grove. And was a, you know, real estate magnate. Anyway, there were videos of him driving through an area that he had with his, like, private security and private firefighters where there's smoke billowing all around the place. but his situation was fine. Why?

Because he had private firefighters. They shaved his shopping center. But he tried to unsuccessfully save nearby homes as well. Which reminded everybody about the time that Kanye and Kim tweeted about their house being saved by firefighters. And which made people be like, wait a minute. You can buy a fire department? Man, what the hell is this? What type of shit?

Man, what? We over here arguing over fire hydrants and tanks running low. And somebody just paid up where they get the water from? How the hell you can just, oh my God. What the hell water are you using? Nigga, that's not your water. And what you're going to do? Are you going to help out the neighbors?

Okay, so the five by fire department, fire department show up in my house. but the neighbor's house is burning. You just going to lead a neighbor's house? You're going to tell them to call the city's fire department. What the hell is happening? How does this shit work? Is there any other way rich people can be evil?

What is happening right now? Which is basically what happened in how most of the regulars felt. So this episode is not just about private fire departments because that would not be a very interesting full episode. It's about the question that private fire departments bring up, which is like, nigger, whose water is that? Wait a minute. Who owns the water? Is the water private to?

And if the water's private too, what else of my utilities are private? And this is what I mean by there is nothing you can do about it. Now, if there is any of you that are built like Robert and Magpie, then maybe you ain't got to worry about this. Maybe you could dig your own well and find the groundwater. However, there are things called water land rights, which I will talk about into this. So even if you move off the grid to live on a mountain, you find somewhere in the backwoods, you know, four acres away from magpie, wherever the hell magpie live. And you dig to find some water, somebody on that water. It already happened here, y'all.

Let's go. All right, this may or may not be a shock to y'all. I know in the first The Block is literally hot episode I did way, way, way, way back when I first joined. When Cool Zone Media first launch, when I first joined the team, my first episodes, it was one of those things where it's like the thought has probably never crossed your mind. And some of it's like sitting, I'm talking to y'all who pay bills. Some of this stuff is sitting right up under your nose. Like Southern California Edison is one of our power companies. but then there's PG&E.

This isn't the city of Los Angeles providing this. That's a company. In the same way that your internet come from a company, what makes you think your power don't come from a company? And if your power come from a company

and an internet come from a company, why wouldn't your water come from a company? I don't know what would make you think that that's just a city municipality. Well, because, duh, because water fall from the sky. What the shit? So, what,

I'm paying for you to pump it through the doggone pipes. Well, I mean, I understand that. That's the service. But what the hell of my taxes for? Somebody like, I don't know if you notice. You can own the rain. So the water that fill inside the lake, somebody bought the lake. This is the episode that I'm going to tell y'all right now.

So your utilities, most likely your city has sold your water and your sewage processing to a private company. and the bills that you pay in, your water bill, is not going to the city for the service you are receiving. It is paying the company back the money that the company paid your city to get this gig. Let me back up here. First, let me cover the private fire departments. Now, here's the thing. Private fire departments usually are hired by insurance companies.

So what they do a lot of time is like prevention. They're coming here and, you know, clear out shrub, make sure that your house is not like set up for failure. You know, in California, I mean, people always talk about our strict laws and building codes. And it's like, well, nigg, do you see why? Every time you got a bureaucratic law, like there might be a historical evidence as to why we need that. one of which is my nigger California ain't got a lot of water so if you're going to build a house you can't just have dry shrubbery up around your house why because you just basically put a box of matches just around your house so yes fam like that's why you can't do that why you're not

allowed to have a lot of trash in your house nigga what i mean what the hell you think because the shit'll catch on fire so So these private companies, private fire companies usually come through, and again, they hire body insurance companies normally to come and clear shrubbery, make sure that your lint, that your dryer is cleared out, make sure your HVAC is good. And usually they got their own little tank, right? So they come in with their own little tank of water. That's their private water. They basically bring in their bottle water, you know what I'm saying, why the rest of us is using tap, right? But eventually that little tank going to run out.

You feel, me? And then at that point, you got to tap into the fire hydrant. Right. Now, what most of these companies will say is, like, the guys, we're not monsters, dude. Like, if the neighborhood is on fire, of course we're going to help. What are you, like, what are you talking about? Which I truly believe, for this reason,

if I'm paying to protect this house, but the neighbor's house is on fire, that probably means that the neighbor's house is going to cause my house to catch on fire. So, of course, it would be in my best interest. to help put that one out. According to the New York Times, they reported that, yeah,

good 45% of all firefighters working in the United States today are employed privately, right? Now, a lot of those are like wildlife suppression. Now, there's such thing as called the National Wildlife Suppression Association, which represents more than like 300 private firefighting groups. And a lot of them work more as like government contractors,

right, as far as like, again, supplement for like wildfires, right? And like I said, the others are hired by private companies. Yo, and peep this, like a little two-person private firefighting crew with a small vehicle, I mean, it could cost like three grand a day. Like a large crew of like 20 firefighters and four trucks can run $10,000 a day. This is according to Brian Wheelock, the vice president of the grayback forestry. It's a private firefighter. company at Oregon. But most of the time, like I said, these people don't really work directly with homeowners. But that's not what's the interesting part of this story to me. The interesting

part of this story to me is the reality of the utilities that we live in. Now, let me go ahead and run off some statistics to you. I just want to go ahead and add to the dystopia that we live in because we need to say, we need to change the name of this show to, it has happened here. I'm a link all this data to the show notes. Now you're ready for this? Water and wastewater service privatization follows

broader trends. More than 40% of drinking water systems nationwide are private, regulated utility systems. Of the 60% of the systems owned by local governments, privatization by contracting of operations

management has grown rapidly since 2001. Nationwide, the privatization of water wastewater grew by 13% after growing 84% over the decade in the 1990s. So what that means is almost half of y'all are paying a private company for your water. Now, let's make some distinctions here between public utilities and private utilities. And, you know, what are we even talking about? So public utilities are owned and operated by your local state and federal governments on behalf of the citizens and customers in that area.

So a public utility would be your municipal water, sewage sanitation services. Like if you have a public electricity providers, government ran public transit systems, state-owned telecommunication companies, public utilities, right? Now listen, here's where it's interesting. Have to balance serving the public interest while remaining financially sustainable. since they are not profit driven, any revenue earned is invested back into maintaining the infrastructure of the operations, which seems like a big old duh. We're not here to make money. This is not our money-making interest.

This is living, right? It's a utility. Like, it's just, I'm not trying to make money off it. I'm trying to keep the lights on, right? but as we know, it costs to do those things. So the temptation becomes easy to be like, how do I offload this cost, right? And make sure that this service is there

because as you know, oftentimes, public utilities don't be very good. You know what I'm saying? Flint still ain't got fresh water. Right now, Altadena is in a situation where they was like, look, don't even boil the water. Like, whatever coming out of your tax, is just not good.

Boiling's not good enough. Like, do not drink this water, right? Is the situation that they end, and it's like, well, where the money at? Like, how are we going to fix this? Now, that's a public utility. Now, a private utility is utilities obviously owned and operated by private companies.

So that would be an investor-owned electricity company, like a private telecommunication, private-owned oil gas and pipelines, and private-owned waste management companies. Now, their goal, because it's a company, is still to make profit for their shareholders while also delivering reliable service. Now, they argument, their defense would be,

if we don't give you a good product, we won't have customers. So it is in our best interest for our own money to give you a best service. However, are you seeing the trust truck-sized hole in a logic, nigger, we don't have a choice. Do you have a choice as to what

water company provides the water to your house? Who gonna run the sewer? I don't have an option. Anyway, so the key differences are very obvious, right? One is the ownership and motives, like publicly owned utilities serve the public interest rather than pursue profits,

right? Private-owned utilities are there for their investors and the maximize returns. Regulation and pricing. Public utilities are regulated by the government-apported commissions that oversee pricing. Private utilities are also regulated, but usually more flexible in a rate setting, because what the hell you going to do?

Yeah, you're going to call the water company be like, I ain't paying this bill. They're going to be like, cool, no problem. Service areas. Most public utility service customers are within municipal browneries. Investor-owned utilities often are defined by regional monopolies with little overlap or competition with customers. Listen, if you ever moved into an apartment and you was like, y'all, I'm trying to like, you know, install cable.

And they was like, or your internet, it was like, oh, it's AT&T over here. I was like, oh, but I have spectrum. They're like, spectrum don't serve this area. Nigger, it's the internet. It's the air. It's wires. There's poles. I'm not allowed to, you can't come over here because it's a private company.

Now I'm in a situation where AT&T knock on my door every day And being like, yo, we're laying fiber optics You know, we laying new pipes down here up under your up on your street We can move faster than Spectrum I didn't ditch them both And then Spectrum still email me every day Spectrum sent somebody who's like, we heard you left Spectrum We're trying to figure out why I'm like, nigga

Because I don't want to use either of y'all But we're the area you served When I first moved into the house that I'm in now Like, I made a account on Edison, and they were like, oh, niggie, Edison don't serve here. You have SoCal gas. And I was like, who the hell is SoCal gas? They was like, that's who else going to give me the gas? I don't have no options.

Oh, I got to live in L.A. This is who serves L.A. Infrastructure spending. With public utilities, they might find it easier to raise funds for long-term capital projects and maintain infrastructure proactively while privately owned businesses and utilities answer to shareholders seeking returns which impact investment decisions. Meaning if I'm like, yo, somebody got to clean this sewer pipe because this water ain't good in this neighborhood.

It will behoove the city of Los Angeles to fix this and it would be easy for them because I am a Los Angeles resident. This is a public utility. If I have private water, they might be like, how much money that neighborhood give us? You know, if we fix the water up there in Palis Verdes, you know what I'm saying? Like, we got to talk to them because they, you know what I mean,

they kind of give us the bread. So they're not incentivized necessarily to fix my infrastructure, right? And then the customer service focus, right? Public utilities often focus more on customer satisfaction and addressing community complaints while private entities have profit motives. I mean, I don't know what else. I need to explain to y'all, right?

Now, let me show you how this works and what the allure is for a public city council to make this decision. Are y'all hit to More Perfect Union? It's another one of those podcast folks that just got more money than us. They're able to produce things that we had bred, we would produce.

Anyway, they did one about investor-owned water companies and how they lobby to give them the contract to run their sewage and water, right? And it's a super dope study. It's a good, like, focused study to show, like, as sort of an example of how it can happen anywhere. And they focused this one study on this city in Pennsylvania, right? And here's the ill part about all of this, is that how would you know this is happening?

I mean, are you really looking at the logo on your water bill? I mean, no, you just like looking at the cost, right, and hoping that it don't be that much. Now, again, if you rent an apartment, I don't know which utilities you got to cover, right? Let's say you are renting an apartment, you know what I'm saying? Like a lot of times your utilities, it's like, they cover water and gas, you cover electricity and internet. And then whatever it is, I'm not thinking about who the company is. I'm just like paying the bill. But if one day your bill triple, I mean, who do you?

you call. You're like, I haven't used more water. I don't understand why it costs more now. You might call the city, the city like, oh, we don't even run the water no more. And that's exactly what happened. So in 2020, in New Garden, Pennsylvania, they sold their water to get this, Agua, Pennsylvania, jerks, a subsidiary of essential utilities. And they sold their water for $30 million. dollars. And just for you to get a grasp on how much money can be made by doing this if you're a company, that company made $2.05 billion in 2023. And essentially, if you're the city, the city runs up, you are, you have all kind of problems. You got people not paying bills on time. You got all these different, you know, all this stuff. You got to hire the workers. You got to do all this stuff.

And this company runs up and was like, yo, we'll take all this off your hands. Not only when we take it off your hands, we'll pay you for it. So to the city, and they're saying, look, I do a better job than y'all do. Why? Because this is all we do. You got all this other stuff, you got to take care of. We're going to only take care of the water. Look, we'll give you $30 million for it. That's free money.

And you ain't got to worry about it. All you got to do when people call complaining about their water is just say, please hold and transfer it to us. You ain't got nothing to worry about it. And the city say, okay, that sounds good. Now, are you going to change your prices? It's like, why would we change our prices? we don't need to change our price. Matter of fact, we can probably charge less because we ain't got

the same things y'all got. Well, at least for the first few years. Kind of like the phone bill when they like, oh, you sign up for this much money a month for the first three months or your cable for the first two years. And then one day your cable bill come in and it's just psycho. And you like, I don't know why the hell this costs so much more. And they're like, oh, yeah, the contract was for this long. And then after that, it went back to regular price. That's essentially what's happening. That's why I was like, if your water bill go crazy, who are you going to call? Like, what are you going to say? Like, uh, they could just be like, yeah, it just costs more now.

So for the city, the city's like, look, it's free money. We could put this money into other stuff we've been trying to work on and y'all going to get a better situation. And again, no one looks at the logo on their bill. So the utilities industries, right, a few years ago, I think in 2016, got this law passed that made cities want to sell it. It's called the fair market value laws. One example is in Pennsylvania, was Act 12, which was in 2016.

And the concern is cities feel like they can't keep up with environmental laws and keep up with city growth. Cities are growing so fast, so many people are moving in. We're destroying the earth at a particular exponential rate. And the government wants us to not destroy. destroy the planet. Oh, hum. So I got all these laws. I got to, you know, he used to have the money for it.

He just has to have the money for it. Put out of the time. So when you're evaluating how much this utility would be worth, you can include, because of Act 12 in Pennsylvania, the median income, the expected repairs, and future revenue. which means it makes that water worth way much more, right? And a lot of times when you selling this, when you selling this utility,

the price tag, what these people be paying you be six times the city's budget. So think about this. I'm just trying to make this real for you. Let's just say somebody comes in and says, I'll buy your car. you say word for how much and they say

I tell you what I'll pay you your year's salary for this car the fam you're gonna add I add another car in there for that you know I'm saying hey you know

throwing another six months worth of this salary I'll make you some dinner like it's kind of a no brainer you like our entire year's budget just for the water no brainer but who pays the company.

Niggy, you. You paying the company. What do I mean by that? The company cuts the city a check. Now the company got to make their money back. How they make their money back? Nigger, yo bills. What is you, like, what is you saying?

Of course they're going to make their money back. Now, again, they're incentivized to make that money back as fast as possible, which means they're not going to spend more than they. I don't already spend $30 million to get the thing. But then they'll promise. to like fix their systems. They're promised like you, you sold the city saying, I'm gonna be able

to spend some time to upgrade and do all this difference. And they don't ever upgrade nothing. Because it's kind of a no-brainer. This is easy money to them. In Philly, there's this area called the Chester Water Authority that went straight up bankrupt. So like the city's water authority, it just went bankrupt.

So they was like, y'all, we got to sell it. They got offered $410 million. Well, the city did. and the city says, nigger, Chester Water Authority, you ain't got the right to sell because you are not a company. You are part of the city of Philadelphia. Chester Water Authority is like, my gee,

I mean, what the hell you want us to do? How does this stuff become legal? Well, like same way any other stick come legal. They just, you lobby candidates all the time. And the only way to stop this is you got to sign up to some sort of city council newsletter or something to be able to walk up in there and protest the shit. Nigger, good luck.

Now, let's talk about specifically California. All right. I bring up specifically California because of all this stuff about the fire hydrants and water issues that we had recently. Remember that the water that waters Los Angeles comes from the north, right? It comes from right up under Sacramento through the California aquaerals. duck that was put together by this man named Mallholland. So the Mallholland pass, Mallullin Drive, that was all based on this man that made Los Angeles be possible because he just went up there just like any other colonizing was like, I'll buy your water.

And they was like, water ain't for sale. He was like, yeah, it is. And went over their heads and bought the water. Built a hole, basically like when you was a kid at the beach and you dig a little thing in the sand to make the water go a certain way. That's basically what he did through the middle of California to bring water to Los Angeles. Now, Los Angeles did have one river that was the San Gabriel River that starts in the top of the San Gabriel foothills and comes into what we call the L.A. river, which is paved, which there is a movement to unpave that because that would probably help us with a lot of climate issues. But either way, that was an actual river. It was enough to support the native tribes here because it wasn't that many people here. And they had sense enough to not

plant plants that need the water that they ain't got. They wasn't trying to build a city in the area. They ain't supposed to be a city. Nigger, have you ever been to Las Vegas? There should not be a city there. Y'all ever been to the inland empire? There should not be that many humans there, according to the earth, unless you pump water over there.

The natives were fine. The indigenous communities figured out how to live in the shit for thousands of years. But, you know, we had to do our time. thing. Now, some vocabulary. California got a thing called senior water rights, which means whoever got there first gets the water. Like, basically it's my land. I licked it. Right. But they only got them rights when it started from the gold rush. So they was like, well, who was there first? Was this white man? Not the people that already lived there, but these white men. So if you happen to have a farm, you know, up near North Fresno, if your family been there longer than somebody else's

family, then that water is yours. Right? That's. senior water rights. And then there's junior water rights, which is like the second person. So whatever water you don't use, they get to use. Right? Now, why that is specifically important for California, especially the Central Valley,

is because Cali provides everybody's produce. I mean, for the rest of the country. The vast majority of the fruits, vegetables, nuts, and lagoons that you eat come from California. We got to have water. It would be who of rest of America to make

that Cali got water. So those are water rights. Now, the water that gets pumped down into our fire hydrants, here's the situation. Like, that had to do a water pressure. Now, you could refer to the block is literally hot episode where I go into detail as to what happened with that. But there was this whole thing about the water being owned by some billionaires. Now, I would love to run with that one, but the fact is, that's just not true. It's not that simple. Let me go head and fact check that. So the wonderful co, which is who they were talking about, it's Stewart and Linda Resnick. They do have a majority stake in a water bank that can store up to 1.5 million acres, right, which is close to 500 billion gallons of water. But the realness is

that's like a tiny fraction of the water capacity of California. California's groundwater basins combined can hold more than 566 times as much water with a storage capacity of 850 million to 1.3 billion acres of feet across the California Department of Water sources. The state's surface resources hold more than 40 million acres on top of that. So there's two types of water here. There's surface water and there's groundwater. Groundwater, obviously, that's stuff that you would dig in for. Well, that's a whole other thing. Right. Now, it is true. This family owns brands as like wonderful pistachios,

Fiji water, wonderful land halos, wonderful halos, and palm wonderful. And that's a, you know, I don't know if you're in a pomegranate juice, but if that's your thing. But anyway, let me quote from PolitiFact. The water the Resnix use get stored underground initially before the water is delivered to the roots of Resnix, pistachios, almonds, pomegranate, and porches.

Specifically, it's stored in the Kern Water Bank that is the most valuable water resource in the region and critical to America's fresh fluid supplies. The water bank, which is, watch this, the bank itself, a public-private partnership with the Resnick's own 57% of the stake is 32-square-mile recharge basin, which looks like floodlands from the street that essentially stores, again, the 1.5 million acre feet of water, 500 billion. gallons. The Resnix storage arrangement is very controversial, right? They've been banking on the water by using public and private dollars to corral public resource. Because of their water rights and their wealth, they are insulating themselves from this type of drought, which, of course, that's what Rich do, right? This is what Chas Miller says, the director of environmental alices at Pomona College. private capital has no problem with the drought while the rest of us are looking at deep social divides. Somebody bought the water.

But water isn't the only thing, like I said, that somebody else owes. You know, according to publicpower.org, utilities that were sold since 1980 have ranged dramatically in size, although many had a small number of customers at the time of the sale with the median of fewer than 600, customers. Less than 30% of utilities sold had more than 1,000 customers at the time of sale, right? So back then, it was a small amount of people, right? Watch this. Only five public power utilities with 10,000 or more customers have sold, right? And four of those five sales occurred were approved since 2015. Now, the largest sale of such electric department

was the city of Murphysboro, Tennessee, which had about 68,000 customers. And when it sold to the Middle Tennessee Electric Membership Cooperative in 2020, other utilities, substantial size, include those serving the cities of Vero Beach, Anchorage, Alaska, Eagle Mountain, Utah, and altogether we are talking about 800,000 citizens today have their electricity private.

Sales have occurred in 26 states and almost all of Kansas was sold and it was sold in the 1980s. Now, why even make an episode on this? And it's because of this last thing. Corporate cities. Now, of course, Company Towns, is as old as companies are.

You know, you had train things and stuff like that, you know, where like a company moves in. And it just, it just made sense for the company to make sure that they were providing housing and, you know, saloons and stuff like that for the people that, you know, lived in their area. It just made sense. That was just, it was just good business, right? You wanted to attract more people to stay in this area. If you've ever been in northwest Arkansas, city called Benton. It's actually very dope to be in, but it is the headquarters for Walmart. So if you're going to work in corporate Walmart, you've got to live in Bentonville.

Now, the city's dope. Is that a corporate town? It's not in what I'm talking about. It is a company that said we're going to dump a kajillion dollars to make this city as dope as possible. That's one thing. I am talking about a brand making a city. I wish I was making this up. Google got one.

It's working on a community called North Bay Shore in Mountain View, California. That'll have 7,000 housing units. And another called Middlefield Park that'll have 2,000 units. Meta is building Willow Village dubbed Zucktown in Menlo Park, California. And they'll have 1,700 housing units, a hotel and plenty of retail. Disney is developing of 1,400,000 units across 80 acres in Kissimmee, Florida, right near Walt Disney World. Elon Musk is building his city called in Snailbrook outside of Austin, Texas for employees of his constellations of startups, including SpaceX, Tesla, and Boeing. but the most ambitious is California forever.

It's supposed to be Silicon Valley 2.0. It's this group ran by the former Golden Sacks trader, Jane Simark, and is backed by investors like the LinkedIn co-founder Reed Hoffman, Chris Dixon, and this philanthropist name Lorraine Powell, and it plans to create this new city in Solano County, 60 miles north of San Bernardino, with tens of thousands of homes, large solar energy, orchards with a million new trees and a hundred thousand acres of new park

space. And they hope to build this community will generate thousands of jobs in a walkable Paris or West Village in New York. And there was this reporting of this unknown group that was coming up and just like just buying farmland. It was called Flannery Associates. And for years, nobody had any idea who these people were. They purchased 52,000 acres, spent $800 million, paying five times a market rate. And nobody knew who they were. It's a little podunk town, people selling their little farms, and it's because these billionaires is building a city. Now, I am telling you all this, ultimately, to introduce you to Curtis Yarvin, who is probably going to be a future bastard person, or Either way, one of these shows is going to cover this man.

Because this man, in a lot of ways, is the patient zero, the contagion number one of these new Republicans, this new conservatism, this new extremist that's been kind of been trying to tell everybody, here's why it's so poisonous. He's like, because not only is democracy dead, democracy being dead. And whatever you think you have now, there ain't a democracy, to which all of us would be like, nigger, yes. That's why it's so dangerous. Because I'd be like, yeah, he's like, the system's failing you. And I'm like, amen. So his solution is a monarchy.

But he mean a monarchy like a CEO. So this man says, if the country was ran like a tech company, everything would be cool. We would all be better. And his example of that is he would. would say, okay, look at that laptop you're using. Look at that phone you got. Do you think you would have got to that phone, to that laptop, the quality of that laptop you had if it was done by the city of California's tech municipal department? He's like, nigga, no, you got that because of Steve Jobs. That's why you got that phone because that nigga was like, look,

this is what we doing, this, how we doing it. He would argue that Roosevelt over the New Deal. He was a tech, bro. He ran his mug like. like a tech startup. He was like, look, this is what we doing. We building freeways. I don't care what y'all say. We building freeways. He's like, if the country was ran like a tech company, then maybe this country would work better. And he's like, in newsflash, whatever the hell you think you got now ain't working anyway. We might as well just lean into it. All I'm saying is, I don't know what I'm saying. Fam, it could happen here. So this is your favorite cousin. swooping in and signing off, ruining another thing for you.

Don't catch me at the hood, politics pop. This is It Could Happen here, a show about things falling apart. And this episode is about the people who want to make it, being the United States, fall apart even faster, allowing them to install a white supremacist, ethno state, though it kind of feels like that's pretty much already happening. This episode is also about the people in government who categorize and classify want to be terrorists. who want the country to collapse faster, and what these changes in categorization methods

can tell us about the future of the country. I'm Garrison Davis, and today I'm joined by a very special guest, philosopher and comedian Michael Burns of the YouTube channel Michael O'Berns and formerly Weisscrack RIP. How you doing? Pretty good, you know, besides living in the world that you just described, past that everything's going great. Yeah, that's kind of,

been my mood the past three months, maybe longer. There's a tad, a tad like liminality, but I don't know if that's just like living in denial and trying to cope, but hey, you know, what's wrong with a little bit of coping? Especially if it helps one simply survive these times. So, you know, I encourage a healthy dose of coping or sort of a, you know, mental bifurcation, if that's what we need to do to get up in the morning and get through it all. Yay. Now, unfortunately, this episode that I have prepared today is not a super cheery one for you, Michael, which is maybe kind of appropriate because the reason why I have you on this episode today is because the FBI and the Department of Justice have come up with a new terrorism classification acronym, which name

drops the internet's favorite and sometimes least favorite philosophy, nihilism. They're calling these guys nihilistic violent extremists. Oh, boy. We will get into this. Do you want to give like a philosophy 101 definition of nihilism, a super well-known and universally agreed-upon term that always means the same thing to everybody? So, yeah, it's not confusing at all.

And yeah, I mean, I think the root of it, at least in like a modern philosophical sense, is Nietzsche, at least that's a common reference point. And when Nietzsche is talking about nihilism, especially in a book like the genealogy, morality, and a lot of other places, he is making the argument that sort of Christian European culture, and particularly a Christian European culture, influenced by idealist philosophy, creates nihilism. The reason he says it creates nihilism is because people care more about heaven than they do about Earth. They care more about

the life they're going to have an eternity than the life they have in the hearing now. So for him, it's like this devalument of life that happens to be a Christianity. More broadly speaking, nihilism has a, I guess, more positive usage, which is the, you know, disbelief in the inherent or necessary meaning in an overarching system. Like in like the existential sense. Yeah. So you kind of have this distinction in some people use of positive and negative nihilism. And to be really crass and simply here, negative nihilism is nothing means anything.

so I don't give a shit. I'm just going to hang out and do whatever. Positive nihilism is there's no inherent meaning in reality, but cool. Now, me and the homies can construct meaning as we see fit, which is more like the existentialist response. We're going to create meaning where maybe there wasn't natural meaning in this like old school platonic or Christian sense. And I'm not sure how much the FBI agents who are doing these federal court filings have read Nietzsche or the French ex-essentialists and instead are probably using a colloquial definition of nihilism, right? This, this like, oh, nothing matters, you know, this like apathetic postmodernist idea to go a little Jordan Peterson-y, right? Yeah, I mean, I think there's the sense in which

it is the kind of weird Jordan Peterson-y, alt-right philosophy version of nihilism, which just means, like, people that think the dominance of the West is bad. And it also reeks a little bit of like big Lebowski nihilism for totally you know and of course in that movie nihilism is represented by a crew of an Austrian techno producers called Audubon who are also nihilist and they say throughout the film like we are nihilist

we believe in nothing which is a really and obviously Coen brothers made that film at least one of them was a philosophy major so they know what they're doing that's kind of the really basic not good enough version of this thing that it seems like the FBI is operating with like people who don't believe in the the goodness of the Western project?

Correct. And that's what they're really honing in on. I will read an expanded definition of nihilist violent extremism. This is from a federal court filing dated March 18th, 2025. Nialist violent extremists are individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.

Nileless, violent extremists work individually or as a part of a network with these goals of destroying civilized society with the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include minors. Now, this is where it's going to get into some kind of weirder stuff that we will kind of explain later. They have like a second definition here, quote, nihilist, violent extremists both individually and as a network systematically and methodically target vulnerable populations. across the United States and the globe.

They frequently use social media communication platforms to connect with individuals and desensitize them to violence, among other things, breaking down societal norms regarding engaging in violence, normalizing the possession, production, and sharing of gore materials, and otherwise corrupting and grooming those individuals

towards committing future acts of violence, unquote. And that kind of outlines some of the strategy of these groups. The groups that they're kind of going to mention here, I've been doing like freelance research on for about four years now. I've been trying to publish a few articles on these guys over the years, but it's always, it's always tricky. And we will get to kind of the darker corners of that in a sec. But let's let's first kind of talk about what this new term is it, NVEs, nihilist, violent extremists, what this is kind of replacing in the, in the FBI lexicon. Now, it's, it's, it's, seems that this term is being used in place of two previous FBI terrorism categories. This is from a November 2020 FBI bulletin, quote, anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism. This threat encompasses the potentially unlawful use or threat of force or violence

in furtherance of ideological agendas derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment, including opposition to perceived economic social or racial hierarchies or perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy. Can I say something that stood out to me about those definitions? The hatred thing I found really interesting, and like the very first definition you give, that nihilism is defined as like in a motive state. Because again, I think nihilism is classically conceived.

Totally. Is almost more like ontological or metaphysical. And by that, I just mean looking at these structures of belief in the world. So rather than being like motivational, by hatred or love or fear or whatever, a more classically nihilist view is just, again, like, oh, I've been sold a bill of goods on what the meaning of existences or what the underlying, underlying principles of political reality are,

and now I see that they are maybe BS. Not the hatred of society in wanting to collapse it. Yeah, I guess there's just like this negativity associated with all that language. And, of course, I was, having never heard the definitions that you were just bringing up, you know, the way in which it just quickly zigs and zags to, like, some very dark stuff in terms of like radicalization. It seemed like there was a reference towards like a like pedophilia or something there. Child sexual abuse materials.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it just the getting from A to B there is more like getting from A to Z or something. It's just not a connection that I think would be obvious to anyone who is thought about, read about, written about nihilism as more of an intellectual or even like a political and philosophical concept. Totally. Because there is like political nihilists in like the Russian tradition and more recently in like the American anarchist tradition or the or the Greek anarchist tradition where they believe in this like idea of like negation and trying to trying to like negate government institutions.

Yeah. But which is still a far cry from believing in causing active harm psychologically, physically, whatever to human beings. Vulnerable populations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a sense in which it's painted as like if you knew nothing else and you were to read those definitions. and you were just a scared suburban insurance salesman or something, it would sound as if it was like a death cult infecting the minds of children,

like zombie-esque little super soldiers. That's actually what they're going for. And I have a lot of mixed opinions on this term, because I think this term is trying to describe a group that does kind of defy classification. But I think the use of the nihilist term is also not good. So I'm kind of in a rock and a hard place here as someone who does a lot of extremism research. Now, the other term that the FBI is probably seeking to replace, at least in part, with this new nihilism definition, is racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism. This is like your wet termicists, your neo-Nazis, the FBI defines it as, quote, this threat encompasses the potentially unlawful use or threat of force or violence and furtherance of ideological agendas derived from bias, often relating to race or ethnicity.

held by the actor against others or a given population group. Racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists purported to use both political and religious justifications to support their racially or ethnically based ideological objectives and criminal activities. This was the group that saw like a massive explosion and growth the past 10 years, really starting around 2016 to 2017 with, you know, the neo-Nazi mass shooting epidemic, especially around like 2017 to 2019. This is the most lethal group,

and it grew exponentially during that period, and we're kind of seeing some of these groups start to reform now. Now, there's been some reporting that this anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism, which I'm just going to say agave, which is the acronym,

which does make me a little bit hungry for a glucose syrup, but it's fine. Now, there's been some reporting that state, Agave is specifically like a Biden era. term. But it actually predates the Biden presidency and was in use under Trump. In fact, a lot of the internal FBI reforms that are being reported on right now are actually undoing changes and counterterrorism strategies that started under the first Trump presidency. But we'll get more on

that later. We're going to go on an ad break real quick and return to talk about a gruesome act of violence in Wisconsin last month. All right, we are back. I'm going to get more into how the government is using this term and what they are applying it to, what they're applying the nihilist violent extremism labeled to. Earlier this year, a Wisconsin teen male named Nikita Kassup killed his parents in an attempt to gain the financial means and autonomy necessary to carry out a plot to assassinate President Trump and accelerate the collapse of the United States. I'm going to read a quote from a federal criminal complaint filed last month.

Quote, on March 3, 2025, county sheriffs obtained a search warrant for Kasp's cell phone. During the review, they identified material on the phone related to, quote, unquote, the order of nine angles.

The sheriff's review of the phone identified possible usernames for Kassup, including Accelerationist 14 and Awoken, unquote. Now, Michael, are you unfortunate enough to be familiar with the order of nine angles? I am not. So this is a group

that was originally based in the UK and now is primarily active in Eastern Europe, though there are branches or spinoffs called nexions in the United States. This is a group that is kind of hard to define. People often call it a Nazi Satanist group.

I think it's more accurate to call them a white supremacist a cultic group who essentially try to cultivate evil for the sake of evil. They're like a left-hand path, a cult group that is orchestrated, multiple terrorist attacks, especially through radicalizing U.S. soldiers. At this point, they're

pretty mythic, with their writing and tactics, leaving a strong, lingering presence across the left-hand path fascist occult milieu. We also have a reference to quote-unquote accelerationism here, which, kind of similar to nihilism is like this philosophical term, which has kind of been like warped and changed via people's application of it in politics. And specifically kind of the way that we're to be using this word here is this idea of trying to like accelerate the collapse of the country mostly to install like a white supremacist at the state after the country has collapsed this is how most Nazis use the term even though it has a slightly different like cultural background with the work of nickland and mark fisher when i was growing up acceleration just men accelerating the

contradictions of capitalism but kids these days that's right kids these days took in a whole direction and not a good one so this federal criminal complaint and a legend that Kassup was communicating with people on the messaging at a telegram, and these people were possibly in Ukraine and or Russia, and these people helped him plan this attack. The FBI found TikTok messages on his phone, where he discussed the struggle of telling his friends that he, quote, unquote, follows 09A teachings, that's order of nine angles, and he discussed a previous FBI visit to his home in 2023. In other exchanges on TikTok, he shared information with a user named nihilus about how to find Nazi telegram channels.

I'm going to read through some of this chat transcript. Nielas, hey dude, do you know any telegram groups where Niners, that's 09A, and DREX can interact and exchange info. Awoken. That's Kassup. Sorry, no, I'm mostly in NSWP telegram groups, L-O-L. If you do find any, it'd be nice if you tell me. Nylis, what's WP?

awoke Wikipedia.org slash national underscore socialism underscore white power Nylis. Oh, white power. Cool. Awoken.

Do you know any 098 telegram groups? Nylis. Oh, not a group, but a channel. You can find documents there. Awoken. All right. Send.

Awoken. Can you send me the link to the account? Awoken. It says I can't access the message. Nylas, how can I do that? Wait a second. Awoken. Here's my telegram username.

Acceleration. It's 14. Nylas, I sent a message. So there you go. That's a... Man, just... There is some later telegram messages that are archived in this complaint as well, where at Accelerationist says, what country do you think will get the blame for this, meaning his planned attack? An unknown user replied, Russia will be blamed for it. This is the goal. Accelerationist said, quote, when the time comes for me to send my manifesto to you so you can spread it online. Should it be a PDF? Also, sorry. Sorry, I just like that in the context

of all that they're discussing file types. And also, you won't anyhow change or modify the manifesto. The unknown user replies, write it on a piece of paper and take a picture. Wow. The FBI personnel performing the preliminary review saw images of a three-page document titled Accelerate the Collapse. The images are screen grabs. displayed on a phone, and these images were created on February 28, 2025. This document is the manifesto referred to by Act Accelerationist. The manifesto calls for the assassination of the president of the United States in order to ferment a political revolution in the United States to, quote-unquote, save the white

race from, quote-unquote, Jewish-controlled politicians. The third page of the document contains images of Adolf Hitler with text that reads, quote, hail Hitler, hail the white race, hail victory. Now, from what I can read of this manifesto, it's pretty basic. It's heavily plagiarized like most of these kind of white supremacist, accelerationist manifestos are. It talks about how Jews control white countries and are promoting white genocide and degeneracy. It talks about the need to, quote, collapse Jewish occupied governments. The manifest states that his motivation for wanting to kill Trump was to sow chaos and raise public awareness that, quote, assassinations and accelerating the collapse are, possible things to do, unquote. Not that possible since he's arrested and did not accelerate the collapse, but he also advocates that people unable to commit to taking direct action, instead make connections with other white supremacists, and grow a network to take over the country once America collapses. He recommends the writing of Nazi accelerationists, including James Mason, who wrote

the influential Nazi book Siege, and the Terrorgram Collective, a group of white supremacists from around the world who organized on the messaging platform telegram to share guides on how to do terrorism. He also recommends the writings of former Adam Woffin members, an American Accelerationsist Group, writing, quote, there is much to learn from the successes and mistakes of Adam Woffin. I think it's worth noting that Adam Woffon was also either like infiltrated or partially co-opted and inspired by some 09A teachings. This is kind of how the more bizarre and occultic influence of O9A seeped to more. into the kind of general American accelerationist Nazi milieu.

This was like in like 2018. Now, Kassup advises that if the reader of the manifesto is already like pilled, that you should just skip the theory and just read practical how-to guides for terrorism and bomb making since quote unquote, there is no political solution.

Huge amounts of violence will be required. Long past the days where we can vote for a Hitler to save us. White revolution is the only solution, unquote. which I guess I'm kind of desensitized to this sort of stuff. In fact, I just find this slightly funny considering kind of the victory lap that, like, Stephen Miller and like white nationalists they are currently having in the government where many of them do think they can just vote for a Hitler to save us and that Hitler may may already be in office forever.

Well, that isn't so shocking hearing all this. Is someone that doesn't know all these details. I mean, A, I feel like the blinders just got taken off me. And I'm seeing the world anew. But B, shocking that from a more normy perspective. in my mind, I would think all of these types would be pretty excited about how things are going politically, not trying to tear things down further. It's like, you guys won, you know, accept it. Even Trump is not extremely enough for a lot of these guys.

Yeah. They really go places. Now, Kassup was coordinating with multiple telegram users, likely in Ukraine and Russia, on how to build a drone that can drop an explosive and paid some individuals for some of the required materials. And also had a plan to flee to Ukraine after his. attack that he was coordinating with Ukrainian Nazis on telegram. Tough look for telegram. It's always a tough look for telegram. Not great.

Not a great platform. Pretty much only used by these guys. Yeah, no, he was talking about how he probably needs to quote-unquote brush up on my Russian. Oh, yeah, definitely. Before he flees to Ukraine after trying to kill the president. You know, you download duolingo after you do that. That's right. That's right. He had plans to meet up with 10 people with similar beliefs in Ukraine.

My mind is just so blown by all this. I thought I knew things. I know nothing. Now, on March 10th, sheriffs interviewed a classmate of Kassup. And the classmate told them that that Kassup would send quote unquote gore edit videos that includes flashing like gore, like body gore imagery and war images put to Russian music sent via Snapchat. chat. This is a common tactic done by these sort of like teenage extremists. This is a whole like subgenre of video that has like changed and altered inesthetic multiple times. Frankly, if you spend enough time on Twitter now in the comments of blue check neo-Nazis, you can find some of these edits where they have like, you know, like techno, like fast pace,

sometimes like Russian music set to like, you know, glorified images of like, like Rome or Nazi Germany or a large variety of stuff, but the gore genre is specifically unique to kind of the, to the 09A, like, a cultic Nazi branch because they think that, like, viewing these images, like, increases your power level of, like, evil, right? It's a very video game view of, like, of, like, spiritual development. Like, you have to, you have to, like, raise your evil stat by looking at gore. And this will make you more able to commit, like, big acts of violence. Whoa.

So just desensitizing yourself to them, it just makes you a more violent person and capable of doing these things yourself. Correct. Correct. And that's like a big part of their praxis. This is why they send this type of stuff to a lot of kids on the internet because they hope that if they desensitize these kids, they'll be easier to convince them to then do acts of violence themselves. Kassup told his classmate that he intended to kill his parents by shooting them,

but could not because he didn't have access to a gun. He later told his classmate that he would befriend someone with a gun and then steal it and told him that he was in contact with a male in Russia via telegram and that they were both plotting to overthrow the government of the United States and assassinate President Trump. Cassep told the classmate that when he saw 10 consecutive attacks in the news, it would have to be him. I've already transitioned to this sort of person who can now laugh at this

because of the absurdity. Oh, my gosh. And get those laughs in now because the next section is much more dark. Oh, no. Because it's funny to laugh at a guy like this who mostly failed. I mean, he did kill his parents. That is bad. really happened, okay.

Oh, no, he did kill his parents. He did flee to a different state. He wasn't smart enough, though. He police tracked him on him and his parents' cell phone and their car, who he still had with him. So, again, not a very good attacker, I guess. But no, like, this kid, murder of his parents, sat in the house with their decomposing bodies for 12 days before trying to carry out the rest of his attack on the United States.

So yeah, though he did not succeed in his larger goals, like these people still absolutely do get like groomed into doing violence. And this is something that that happens at a pretty frequent basis, honestly, to the point where these types of things don't make giant headlines anymore. They would have maybe in 2017. But now a lot of journalists are desensitized to this. And because it happens so frequently, it is less newsworthy, which is a very unfortunate place to be in for a country. Do you know what else is unfortunate, Michael? I don't know. What? What's that? Having to pivot to ads, actually.

Necessary evil. It's way better than killing your parents. Yes. Yes. I will go on record. I will go on record. Eat me. Gita Board. Sorry. I love ads, actually. As a heads up, the next section will reference online exploitation and child sexual abuse material. All right. We are back. Let's get more depressing. unfortunately, but I think we will find a way to turn this around. Well, not like in an optimistic way, but in a way that it's useful. We'll learn something together.

So at the end of this section of this complaint that attempts to describe Cassipp's collapse-driven political ideology is the appearance of this new term, nihilistic violent extremists, right? Now, this was actually the second time this term has appeared in court documents. The earliest appearance of this term was in a March sentence. METNING memo for a child sexual abuse material case first filed in November of 2024, which was linked to the 764 Child Extortion and Exploitation Network. Ken Klippenstein, who first reported on the use of the nihilism term, missed this first

appearance and attributed the origin to the Kassap case. Michael, are you similarly unfortunate enough to be aware of 764? This is another one where my brain is more pure than yours, I guess, at this point. but it's about to get ruined, so let's do it. Yeah, I mean, it has been for a lot of people. Like, I've been doing, like, extremism research, and I've been aware of these guys for about four years. The FBI, I think, first did their, like, public announcement,

like warning parents about this in 2023. 764 is, like, a network of groups that operate either on Discord, telegram, Instagram, social media apps. They're kind of inspired by some aspects of 09A, but they are much more focused on the production and distribution of child sexual abuse materials and trying to manipulate a groom

and blackmail and extort minors into producing this material. A lot of it's done by other minors too. A lot of this is teens targeting other teens with adults kind of helping this process along. It's a pretty big problem. There's been some good reporting on it in Wired and the Guardian

the past few years if you want to read more. Now this March sentencing memo for the 764 case describes 764 and related groups as, quote, nihilist violent extremists who engage in criminal conduct in the United States and engage with other extremists abroad. The 764 network's accelerationist goals include social unrest and the downfall of the current world order, including the United States government. Members of 764 work in concert with one another towards a common purpose of destroying civilized society through the corruption and

exploitation of vulnerable populations, including minors. Unquote. Now, I think this definition maybe a bit too generalizing, but it's not incorrect. Like, this is correct in what the explicit goals of this group are, maybe not just every individual member of this group.

But I think it would be a mistake to kind of dismiss this definition as outlandishly grandiose, right? It kind of, it calls into, like, mine, you know, like conspiracy theory, like framing, because it sounds very, like, extravagant and complicated.

And it kind of is, but it's also, it's also, like, simple. It's people trying to automate the process of producing and distributing illegal materials. But I do believe it is a mistake to completely dismiss this, both in terms of, like, the government's trying to ascribe political motive for the distribution of these materials, and also the ideological justifications held by some members of these groups. Now, there have been two more 764 cases from April of 2025

that have used the nihilist violent extremism designation in court documents. Now, part of kind of the struggle, with this is like Ken Klippenstein reported, quote, it sounds to me like some demented philosophical justification for just being a pedophile. And like, it is, but that doesn't mean the political motivations shouldn't be discounted. Because those motivations impact how they operate, how these groups spread, which targets they pick, and other political actions members might take, like mass shootings, targeting racial minorities, targeting LGBTQ individuals.

So yeah, this is kind of why I, I push back a little bit on this kind of dismissive tone towards this larger, almost conspiratorial kind of matrix put onto groups like 7-664. Now, part of the tricky thing with use of this new nihilism term is that it's being used to rope in a variety of horrific incidents under a singular nebulous category. Right? So let's take the case of Casp here. Cassup, the guy who killed his parents in a plot to collapse the United States, is a relatively

bogged standard like Need. neo-Nazi accelerationist, with seemingly no direct ties to 764 activity besides an interest in 09A, which was just one of the inspirations that influenced 764 as it evolved into its own complex machine about five years ago. But Casp openly admitted to being radicalized by Nazism and the white power movement online, and yet in his criminal complaint, contains an expanded version of the nihilist violent extremism definition, which is literally copy and pasted from a child sexual abuse material sentencing memo from five days before. So they just use this same thing, despite it not really applying.

It's reading, quote, individuals are targeted online, often through synchronized group chats. Nihilist, violent extremists frequently conduct coordinated extortions of individuals by blackmailing them, so they comply with demands of the network. These demands vary and include, but are not limited to self-mutilation, online or in-person sexual acts, harms to animals, sexual exploitation of siblings and others, acts of violence, threats of violence, suicide, and murder. So very, very dark stuff. The definition goes on to state how vulnerable individuals are targeted, and members of the group attempt to gain notoriety throughout the network and spread fear among those targeted individuals for the purpose of accelerating the downfall of society and otherwise achieving the goal of nihilist-violent extremists. So while that does accurately describe groups like 764, it doesn't really relate to the case of CASA.

It's tricky because a lot of these 764 guys are also Nazis, and a lot of Nazis are also pedophiles. Some of these guys start off as like evil occultic pedophiles who associate with Naziism because it's a pretty universal symbol of evil. And sometimes it's the vice versa where they start off as like an anti-Semitic right winger, a Nazi or a fascists who then associate with this weird pedo-cult stuff for a variety of reasons like spiritual, perverted pleasure or tactical network building. And usually, usually it's a mix. Clippenstein writes, quote, the warrant alleges Cassup was in touch with the order of nine angles,

a satanic neo-Nazi group that espouses accelerationism, a fancy word for the belief that destabilizing the social order allows for radical change. That is pretty heady stuff to ascribe to a 17-year-old and ends up having the feeling

of an episode of altered carbon, unquote. And I kind of like reject this dismissive framing. Like, no, these 17-year-olds are thinking about this. They are getting convinced of this material online. That is the motivation.

for. This isn't like a science fiction thing. This is real and it's pretty common among like extremists this age. There's a lot of young teenage male extremists. That's kind of their main demographic. And this type of stuff is popular. Like this is at least popular within this small group of extremists. So, so yeah, it is a little bit heady, but this is what they are genuinely thinking about. It's it's not incorrect to like ascribe that to them. Cassup openly admitted to this connection. Well, and did you even speak to the flip side of that, you know, over the years making philosophy stuff on YouTube, I've gotten in touch with people who've reached out to be like, oh, I've been watching stuff since high school. And I was like 15. I was watching these like philosophy YouTube videos on heady ideas and reading stuff. So like me, I was one of these people. Yeah. There's like young folks out there who take big ideas very seriously and they have more access than ever to these things. So it doesn't, I mean, it doesn't shock me at all that some teen could go down that rabbit hole or even could start reading like a Curtis Jarvin or Nick Land and going down those rabbit holes and stuff,

especially now that some of these people are put on like the New York Times and stuff like that. Exactly. Yeah, it seems weird to dismiss that. I can understand the impulse to be like, this just seems like a very stupid evil teen kid. Totally. It seems just as plausible like you're pointing out that there could be an actual engagement with ideas. And that's important to recognize that because then you have to get at the root of that. Exactly.

And like, these people aren't necessarily like philosophical nihilists or existential nihilists, but they could be interpreted as reacting to a general, like, passive nihilist culture with this form of, like, pseudo-political nihilism, this attempt at, like, social negation, like, total systems collapse. But, like, even still, they, they aren't total, like, political nihilists, since they have a very clear system of hierarchy that they want the current world order replaced with, though these individuals may be seen as, like, victims of nihilism in, like, in, like, the Nietzschean sense. Now, like, my main problem with the nihilist violent extremism term is that it's so depoliticized and like in a way that's rife for political

abuse. This term can be used to cover what the government deems as violence stemming from like apathy, from frustration with society, as well as like anti-tech or anti-civilization politics. And this is all coming from like top down at the new federal bureau of investigation. For years, Cash Patel has closely associated with QAnon, has helped the legal defense campaigns for January 6th insurrectionists, which included Proud Boys, Oathkeeper, and three-percenters. And now, as head of the FBI, he's investigating FBI agents who worked those January 6th cases. Joe Kent, the new director of the National Counterterrorism Center, has made media appearances with Nick Fuentes and neo-Nazi YouTuber David Carlson.

He hired Proud Boys to consult in his failed congressional campaign and his friends with Patriot Prayer Leader Joey Gibson. Kent has repeatedly called for the FBI to investigate Antifa. The co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, Heidi Baruch, has said that Patel's QAnon-Links and deputy director Dan Bongino's public conspiracyism and bigotry make taking the threat of far-right extremism, quote-unquote, impossible for these two men. She says, quote, I think it makes it very unlikely that the far-right will continue to be seen as the threat it actually is in terms of hate crimes and domestic terrorism. All of this marks a huge departure from the first Trump administration, where the FBI, for the first time, declared why, supremacy, the country's greatest domestic terrorism threat. Facts about violence and its perpetrators probably won't matter this time around, unquote. And these changes are already taking place.

An old counterterrorism strategy guide was removed from the White House website in January. A current FBI agent was quoted in Vanity Fair as saying, quote, the key is the domestic intelligence operations guide. If they change that, Patel will be able to shift domestic terrorism investigations away from the accelerationists and the right-wing street fighters and towards things like BLM and Antifa, unquote. Patel has cut the domestic terrorism office staffing and reassigned agents and intelligence analysts, with new senior FBI officials reportedly considering to disband the entire domestic terrorism operations section. In addition, the FBI has discontinued their previous domestic terrorism tracking tool, where they tag relevant investigations to identify

and track trends for terrorism probes across the country. Sources for outlets like Reuters say that changes to the agency will reduce counterterrorism operations against far-right and racially motivated extremists and militias. Jacob Ware, a domestic terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Reuters,

quote, there is a broader desire, I think, within the administration to, at best, ignore data and put their head in the sand, and at worst, to realign resources away from this battle, unquote. A spokesperson for Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told Reuters that the termination of the domestic terrorism tracking tool is a, quote, great step in the right direction of returning the FBI to its primary crime fighting mission, unquote. Representative Jordan previously in 2023 ran a congressional

panel that alleged the FBI terrorism case tagging tool was being improperly used to target conservatives after January 6th. Three former FBI agents testified at the Republican-led panel and two of those former agents admitted to being paid by Patel, who at the time was not director of the FBI. He was just a right-wing influencer after being kicked out of the government after the first Trump administration. We've also seen the Joint Terrorism Task Force

largely shift their efforts towards immigration enforcement, helping ICE with deportations, and the so-called wave of Tesla terrorism. And like, the other thing is that this new nihilist violent extremism term isn't just replacing agave. It's not just replacing the anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism, because the agave term itself has three subcategories as referenced in an FBI document that outlines domestic terrorism activity from 2015 to

2019. This includes militia violent extremists, anarchist violent extremists, and sovereign citizen violent extremists. And even in addition to those three, there's actually a newer sub-classification from 2023 called Agave Other, which really isn't. a great term at all. This is the problem with trying to use these, like, tracking and tagging tools is that they can get very convoluted, but now they've seemingly collapsed all of these and are just using the term nihilism. So would you say, like, when you bring up the Tesla example, is one of, to be very reductive here, the big risks at play that, like, someone who starts Tesla on fire or causes some damage at a Tesla dealership, largely for the most,

motivation of trying to stick it to Elon Musk or something like that, gets classified in a way by the FBI that is similar to some of the folks you have previously talked about. Exactly. Doing things that most rational humans could agree are deeply more insidious than like set to car on fire. They can frame this as like a rejection of society. Yeah. The same way, like there's been talk that they're going to try to use this label to explain

cases like United Healthcare CEO shooting, the Arsouac at Josh Shapiro's house. They're going to be using this term to apply. to kind of any act that they see is contrary to like society and civilization and anything that's stemming from frustration with society. And that's the huge problem. And in doing so, they're shifting

focus away from like right wing militias who do the majority of like actual lethal violence. When these reports from like the past five years talk about, you know, militia violent extremism, it talks about how there is an increase to lethal threat from these militias to law enforcement and government personnel

due to factors related to grievances from the perceptions of fraud in the 2020 election, government measures related to COVID-19, and legislation to restrict firearms or expand immigration or manage public land. And these are the people that do the vast majority of planned attacks or executed attacks. This report for 2023 outlines two attempted bombings by militia, violent extremists in early 2021, one by an individual targeted against a data center thought to provide services to the FBI and CIA, the other by two people against a state Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, California, as well as the, quote, unquote, dozens of militia violent extremists arrested for their involvement

in January 6th. So even though we're going to take the gas off of groups like those, as well as racially motivated violent extremists, this definition can still include a lot of anarchist violent extremists, which the FBI admits in a 2023 report, are most likely to engage in non-lethal criminal activity and just impact law enforcement. operations. Yeah, it makes me think of like climate activism as well. And, you know, the work of those in the climate community that call for like the destruction of equipment and not the harm of human life. Totally. I mean, and the irony, of course, that you could call someone, you know, disabling an oil pipeline, a nihilist extremist when the act they're doing is precisely for

the purpose of ensuring the continued existence of human civilization on a large scale. That's the big issue here. Like, the Trump government still wants a term that focus on what some people would like colloquially refer to as like accelerationist terrorism. And that does encompass some of the extremist violence from the weirder corners of the far right, like in the case of Kassup, but as well as as like leftist or post-left, like anarchist extremism. But in the administration's mind, the previous terms for this were tainted by crackdowns on right wing or patriot movements after January 6th. And like the nihilist violent extremism term is not replacing the term terrorism necessarily,

like the way Clippenstein suggested in his article. The word terrorism appears frequently in these very documents that we've been discussing, nor does the term terrorism have, quote, unquote, limitations in law, as Clippenstein said, that prevent its use in political prosecution. If anything, it carries kind of special powers of punishment, which can be over-applied to increase sentences,

sway juries, and strip rights. We've seen bills to label Antifa as terrorists introduced to this year. the whole Tesla terrorism thing. And historically, like, the use of terrorism has been used as a repression tool in Atlanta's Stop Cop City movement, which similarly has like a climate focus, like you mentioned. And what this new nihilism term lets them do is it allows the Trump administration to signal to their base that they aren't going to be going after like right-wing malicious-style groups

anymore, not anti-government, anti-authority extremists. Instead, they're just going to target zany weirdos who want to destroy society. It's a looser, more flexible term that can be applied to a much wider swath of people. And the kind of final thing I want to note here is that for groups like 764, we really don't have a good term for them.

Like some people have defended this nihilist term specifically for groups like 764 since that was where it originally appeared. And it is true that these groups kind of defy classic categorization. Some of them are certainly motivated by racial bias in the case of Kassup who's like tied with 09A but not specifically 764.

but a lot of these other 764 guys who are mostly in it for the pedophilia still do have anti-government ideologies that they are roped in with. Now, I have seen a few alternative terms lofted by certain independent researchers that don't really do a good job but are gaining influence under Trump's government. There's this, like, freelance researcher named Becca or Bix Wrights, who mostly operates on Twitter. She's proposed the term satanic accelerationism or ESAC. not good

and this kind of outlines my problems with this person's research now because all of the legitimate extremism researchers have kind of moved away from Twitter and are just on blue sky now people like this have like exploded in influence under Elon's shepherding of Twitter and like this person just spreads like satanic

panics to our writing that appeals to conservative Christian audiences she boasts about how many mutuals she has with these Nazi terrorists she posts on Rumble she went on info wars So that kind of tells you everything you need to know about this person. And a big part of her work is trying to downplay the right wing and a white supremacist to influence in extremism. She excitedly posted, quote, the FBI has coined a new term for this type of individual, nihilist violent extremists. This makes me so happy because it indicates that law enforcement are listening to researchers on the ground and are no longer considering these groups neo-notsis or quote-unquote white supremacist. So yeah, this is a big part of this. push is appealing to these types of people who don't want their weird pedo freaks to be labeled

as right-wing, even though they all are pretty far right-wing terrorists in most cases. This researcher also falsely linked Kassup with a Ukrainian Nazi cult group called MKU. She later retracted this claim on Substack, but left the original viral tweet up online because, hey, engagement. Her substack posts reads, quote, when I first heard the news of Nikita Kassup, my mind immediately darted to another 09A and MQU-linked individual named Nikita. This turned out to be a mere coincidence. I know, because the other Nikita reached out to me personally to clarify.

It's moments like these that cause me to reflect on just how big this movement really is, and just how close to the fire I am, unquote. This is not how you do extremism reporting. This is not how you do journalism. But this does demonstrate kind of the problem with this term is that, yeah, groups like this do need a different term, maybe like accelerationist, violent extremists. That's a term. You could use that if you're going to remove all the other acronyms. But certainly the nihilism label just kind of complicates things and allows for the targeting of just a massive

swath of the population that could become like political prosecutions that then get linked to these child sexual abuse material cases. Okay. That is my, that's my, that's my script, Michael. How do you feel about that info dump? I'm so sorry, truly. I, you know, you've, and I can send it to it, you've extracted a part of my soul and put it into a cosmic toilet today. I know more than I've known before as a human, as an American, as a parent. I'm terrified on every front. And, you know, my simple guy takeaway here is the, yeah, like the idea that this is going to both let some of the worst folks off the hook or at least make it harder to classify them with the groups that should be classified with, while also making it easier to lump in forms of what many of us would consider

more reasonable political activism under that umbrella is quite bad. And I think, of course, for me, due to my pet interest, you know, all of these instances of continuing to, like, pervert and misuse philosophical terms to have meanings developed over hundreds and thousands of years for these political ends is very upsetting. Well, I'm excited to usher in the new wave of Kirk Gardean violent extremists who are going to usher in... Don't get me on a list. Stop it. I am actually sorry that this went on nearly double the length of which I thought it had planned.

After such a depressing episode, I'm going to ask a kind of an odd question. What philosophy books do you think people should read in this political moment? Because a lot of people are approaching me with like, how do I stay sane? How do I stay? how do I like keep going when things feel so bad? And for me, I've always turned to philosophy. I've been recommending different books to different friends. And I'm kind of interested in like what you have to say about kind of what philosophy can like offer us in these times of like existential torment. Yeah. I mean, a really simple one that I talk about way too much is

Kierkegaard's the present age, which you find in this book called two ages that's easy to buy. It's normally really cheap or you can just read it online someplace that kind of describes a society in which people get caught up in media and reflection and the BS they are told rather than developing their subjectivity for themselves. I think that one's really great. In terms of more contemporary stuff, I've been very Frederick Jameson-pilled recently. Right. And I think, I mean, I've read Jameson before on and off, but recently dove in more deeply. And there's one, okay, I have it at arm's reach so I can say the title correctly, that I've really been enjoying. It's called an American Utopia, Dual Power and the Universal Army.

by Frederick Jameson, edited by Slovojijijijijek, and it's this large Jameson essay about what he sees as an alternative for leftist power in America responses from a bunch of other scholars. I have found it very interesting, but for me at least, I find comfort in the fact that others have accurately diagnosed and understood what is happening right now and at least give us the tools to understand the thing so it feels less nebulous and mysterious. We don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. And it's something I feel like some leftists kind of get trapped in.

Or it's kind of a two sides thing. Some people just get fully lost in like the labyrinth of theory. And the other people get lost in trying to constantly reinvent or like make for the first time. Stuff that already exists, right? And I think there's a really careful balance between like reading some stuff so that you can like know what's going on and not feel the need to try to like, cause every, you know, philosophical evolution to come about via your own thought. Yeah, you don't have to be the one to do it. Someone else already did it. You're not alone. Like, other people have done this and you should still, like, think for yourself and still compare.

But people have thought about this type of stuff before. People have been in bad political situations before. And it's, it's useful to know what they've thought. And, like, this is, like, you know, my work is mostly looking at, like, current events and, like, trying to track with, like, extremism and, like, what the government is doing. And, you know, more information always helps me choose how to navigate in the world. That's why I do episodes like this. And I think philosophy is just one other side of that. Unless you have anything else to say,

do you want to talk about where people can find you online and your new YouTube channel? Yeah. I have a recently launched YouTube channel that's just under the name Michael O. Burns. And I think it's literally just YouTube slash Michael O. Burns. I'm quickly, yep. YouTube slash Michael O. Burns where I'm going to be doing more stuff quite regularly. streams and video essays, largely doing some of the stuff we were just talking about, using

philosophy and concepts from theory and from theory to try to understand what's going on in both the political and like the social and interpersonal levels. I'm working on a thing I'm excited about on like depression and capitalism and mental health. So yeah, and I'm on all, most of the social medias, I'm just Michael Burns or Michael O. Burns relatively easy to find on most places. Well, thank you so much, Michael, for joining me in this dive through the darkest depths of the internet and the extremism milieu that is festering in America and abroad. Thanks for having me. Welcome to It Could Happen here.

I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things falling apart, which they always seem to be these days. And in particular, this is an episode about what to expect out of the next six months to a year. If you're not sure what else to do, try and spread calm. I first learned this lesson back in 2016, hanging out with perennial libertarian presidential candidate Vermin Supreme during the protests around that year's Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. If you've never had the pleasure of seeing Vermin at a protest, he's essentially a rodeo clown for riot cops, and his example taught me a lot about how to communicate to a group of angry, scared people in tense situations.

Those lessons came in handy for me back in 2020. But the George Floyd uprising is now almost five years in the past. Trump is once again in power. Very little seems to stand between him and the exercise of a kind of arbitrary dictatorial violence that this nation has seldom seen within its own borders, but has often sponsored elsewhere, including El Salvador, where Trump has sent hundreds of American residents and plans to send thousands, perhaps tens of thousands more. The purpose of this essay is to provide my predictions for the next day.

six months to a year. What I'm writing here is speculative, but it is based on the best data I have available and numerous conversations I've had with activists, current federal employees, former soldiers, and retired law enforcement. There are a million places where I could start, but I feel like the most responsible place to begin is by answering this question. Is now the time to panic? Last year, after Biden's disastrous debate performance, I put out a podcast essay titled, Don't Panic. It was my most shared episode of this podcast that year, and I felt pretty good about the response, until Trump won again, and I found it briefly impossible to take my own advice.

Since January of 2025, the fascist takeover has only accelerated, and I have lost count of the number of people who've asked me, is it time to panic? The answer to that is still no, but not because there's no reason to panic. Panic is a natural reaction to our present moment. If your fight or flight reflexes haven't been triggered, well, they might be broken. Even so, don't panic. Because in combat and disasters and any dangerous situation you might find yourself, panic is what will kill you as surely as anything else.

There's a concept in military theory I bring up often, something introduced to soldiers undergoing training today. It's called the Oda Loop. It describes the process people go through while acting and reacting under fire, and particularly while deciding how to act and react under fire. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. If you can interrupt any part of that loop, you can stop your enemy from fighting back effectively. The basic principle of the Oda Loop functions on the grand strategy scale, as well as it does

in a gunfight. This is the point behind the Flood the Zone strategy, orchestrated. by Stephen Miller and the other intellectual luminaries behind Trump, too. The firehose of outrage is to distract you from observing everything that's happening, to keep you off balance so you can't orient yourself, to stop you from deciding and acting. Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter helped to supercharge the bullshit cannon. AI accelerated the spread of lies on social media beyond all of our worst nightmares. And this has helped blind and divide the people who should have linked

arms to stop this shit before it got to the point that it's at today. I want you to think of how many prominent leftists have fallen repeatedly for right-wing propaganda, like that Russia would never invade Ukraine, or that Trump might actually be somehow better for Gaza. These and a million other things have blinded and hobbled potential resistance. I might also bring up the whole Maga-communist movement, but the less said about those people, the better. Meanwhile, columnists at liberal legacy publications like The Times have fallen for every hyped up story about transgender athletes or woke kids on college campuses and the danger of the liberal left poses to free speech. They've denied genocide and demonized those who protest against it, and too many elected Democrats have taken their

lead as the path of least resistance. Many have pulled right for reasons far more sinister. The fact that Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, is hosting fascists on his new podcast while mailing burner phones to tech CEOs, points towards something dark, immediate, deadly. We live now in the culmination of a successful, decades-long plot to, in the words of Curtis Yarvin, repeal the 20th century and turn this nation into a dictatorship where our lives and our collective national arsenal are the personal property of some dudes who inherited oil money or invested in Facebook back in like 2005. The early stages of the plan, of course, date back well before Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Donald Trump. They began when a coalition

of would-be oligarchs tried to overthrow FDR in what has become known as the business plot and were thwarted by a Marine General named Smedley Butler. These men wanted revenge for the New Deal, but they found seizing power at the top harder than they'd hoped. And so they embarked on a slower, bottom-up approach. Hence the John Birch Society, the creation of countless think tanks and the generation's long effort to stack the Supreme Court. The war on abortion was a concerted step towards this plan, an artificial creation alongside the birth of the religious right as a political coalition. There was initially a small group of men at the center of the web, guys like William Regnery won and William Regnery do, or Paul Wehrich. But the engine of cultural and political change

forged from the late 40s to the 1970s was so successful that at some point it became self-perpetuating. And when a gaggle of tech bros found themselves with more wealth than any humans had ever held, the machine was there to mold them and to be used by them. It's all worked so damn well that many people I know have lost hope entirely. We're fucked, goes the script. They're going to send us to the camps, and they can't be stopped, at least not without apocalyptic bloodshed. Well, that's not necessarily so.

Now, people have already died as a result of this administration, a lot of them, and that will continue to happen. But a collapse into total carnage is not inevitable, nor is a future that offers us nothing but a boot upon our necks. Despite the money that went into building, this is a new house made with cheap materials, and there are already cracks in the foundation. So my first prediction for the coming months is this. The cracks will widen. And we'll talk about that, but first, as we're obligated to do, here's some ads.

Trump and the men who swim in his wake signal only strength. honesty is neither in their interest nor a strong suit, but Curtis Jarvin, chief profit of the neo-reactionaries and Peter Thiel's pet philosopher, is in a different position. He knows people in power listen to some of what he has to say, and over the last few months his profile has risen enormously. I can take credit for at least tiny amount of that. Many normal liberals and elected Democrats now know who he is. This exposes him to a danger that was not present for him during Trump's first term. If the current fascist salient should be pushed back and this movement fails, there could be, and should be, prosecutions. And he rightly fears that if this happens, he might follow in the

footsteps of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi high theoretician who was executed at Nuremberg. That's why, on March 6th, he published a messy, sprawling 7,000-word essay titled Barbarians and Mandarins in his trademark nigh-unreadable style. It comes with the subheading. As soon as it stops accelerating. It stalls and explodes. If you want to spare yourself the headache of reading through one-tenth of a novel of Yarvins, at best, turgid prose, there's a good article by the Nerd Reich that breaks all this down. We'll link it in the show notes. But the gist is that YARVin thanks Musk and Trump have been too slow, have embraced too many half measures, and the whole authoritarian project is careening towards disaster. Quote, unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and

in February are dwarfed in March and April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to wither and eventually dissipate. It cannot stay at its current level of power, which is too high to sustain, but too low to succeed. It has to keep doing things that have never been done before. As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes. Now, the weeks since have seen massive and rising public awareness of Seacot, the terrorism detention facility in El Salvador being used as a concentration camp by the Trump regime. This might rightly be called a new and unprecedented abuse, but there's a couple of issues here, at least as far as Yarvin sees them. For one thing, the people targeted there have been

migrants, people who are in the U.S. either illegally or in the U.S. on visas that have been revoked, people who have been accused being part of Trindagua, but not the people that Yarvan wants to see liquidated because as he writes in this column, the thing that he thinks the Trump administration should be doing right now is quite literally gassing media personalities and politicians who don't align with his viewpoint, basically literally killing the opposition. And since he's shown to be unwilling to do that, the fact that he's shipping people to concentration camps on its own isn't terrifying enough. Now, the other thing that's concerning, Yarbon, is that while the use of this facility in El Salvador, as a foreign concentration camp by the Trump regime, is terrifying and is unprecedented,

it's also been met with a significant response, one that burges on unprecedented itself. I'm not just talking about the protests, or of the recent Supreme Court ruling ordering a temporary halt to such deportations. I'm referring to something else that's happened due to the sheer panic caused by the knowledge that our president has a concentration camp and has been talking about shipping U.S. citizen dissidents there. I'm talking about stuff like the fact that formerly conservative columnist Bill Crystal is now calling for the outright abolition of ICE, and the arch-nealiberal mealymouth, David Brooks, calling for a general strike in the pages of the New York Times while quoting from the Communist Manifesto. This is more than just a vibe shift. It's an open

realization and acceptance by prominent people who are neither radical nor revolutionaries that any action, even the formerly unimaginable, might be necessary and justified to end this regime. Now, make no mistake, first off, this is because a lot of these people are worried about their own privileges going away under a dictatorial regime. But that doesn't change the fact that this is a crack in the very foundation of the authoritarian power structure. Jarvin is scared then because we weren't supposed to be here now. Harvard was supposed to have folded like Columbia, and then have been slowly and quietly liquidated. The tame press was supposed to turn wholly for the regime or be disappeared, not quote Karl Marx and urge people into the streets to do a general strike.

So I don't find all this cheery because I think David Brooks is going to become shithead Che Guevara. I am braced, however, by the failure that this represents for them in above us who seek unchecked dominance. Cracks are also visible in the recent history of Elon Musk, who was watched the value of the stock that underpins his whole empire collapse. He fought desperately to convince Trump not to go through with the tariffs that would punish it further. The result, we see Trump assuring his inner circle that Elon is on the way out, while Musk himself prepares to step back from Doge in the hope that it will somehow protect the remainder of his ambitions. These are all good signs, and the damage will continue to spread. However, and this brings me to my next prediction, the empire's

gonna strike back. We are in for a hot summer, my friends, and there's no way around that. I mean this in the literal sense that it will probably be the hottest summer on record, although that fact will be true of every subsequent summer in our lives. But I also mean this in the sense that things are going to cook off in the streets very soon. This is something the administration has quite openly been waiting to see. Trump has made no secret of his desire to use the Insurrection Act, not only at the border, but to send U.S. troops into U.S. cities to crush riots and punishes and punish leftist demonstrators. This was a desire hatched in reaction to the George Floyd uprising,

and it always seems to be envisioned by the right as targeted against black-clad Antifa types. The reality is that anti-fascists have not been a consistent presence on the ground around the country for some time, at least not organizing in the way that they were back when Antifa was a buzzword. There are numerous reasons for this, but the biggest is that the fascist movement

has moved beyond waving flags in the street and getting into fistfights to try and scare people. people. A lot of them are running federal law enforcement agencies in the military now. Proud boys just ain't a priority. Not for those on the left who want to stop this, or, frankly, for the administration. I expect protests around the country in the coming months for several reasons, but the likeliest event to provoke severe civil disruption is a rise in food prices, and the rise of everything else in price, as well as a collapsing economy, courtesy of the president's tariffs. There were already numerous signs of this, both in

in terms of the volume of shipping coming into the United States and early signs of collapsing crop yields in the United States. And this is where a study of history helps one out, because nothing but nothing brings down regimes like rising bread prices. And any attempt to crack down will be stymied by the fact that a decent chunk of the elites who backed Trump before will be suffering too. Obviously, the people closest to him are making bank off the economic upswings and downswings over the whole tariff issue.

But there's a lot of other people, people who supported him, people who thought he had their back, who aren't quite close enough to power, and they're watching Trump shoot their own fortunes in the kneecap because they built their money on free trade. I won't pretend to know where things are going to pop off or will be the hottest, but the evidence shows the regime at least expects Washington, D.C. to play a central role in what comes next. Republican Congress members recently reintroduced a bill to repeal D.C. self-rule, and Trump appointed Ed Martin to be the city attorney, a man who, in the words of USA Today columnist Chris Brennan, quote, lacks experience but loves revenge. Now, the fact that Elon Musk and his doge cronies left so many in the city and the surrounding area unemployed after their purge of the administrative state means that there's an even higher number of motivated, angry people with free time and experiencing, organizing large complex systems who have nothing to do right now.

A similar set of circumstances brought us to the 2020 uprisings. This was not just a product of the months of isolation or of the brutality of George Floyd's murder, but of the sheer number of people who were out of work and who were finally given a chance to take out their anxiety at an authoritarian president tightening his grip. And today, that grip is even tighter and the danger more real. We have a president openly discussing his desire to put American citizens in a foreign concentration camp. Trump and his inner circle are hoping for protests that stay isolated to D.C. and perhaps a few major blue cities, Portland and the like. This would provide an opportunity to send in the troops to utilize the Insurrection Act, to shoot people in the street, and to send some ringleaders off to El Salvador.

This would be the riskiest option for Trump in some ways. Pete Hegseth has not been a competent or popular Secretary of Defense and asking U.S. troops to fire on protesters, opens up the risk that some junior officer. officer might balk at that order, which could create a cascading chain of disobedience. Such things have sparked rapid collapse in other dictatorships throughout history. There's also the chance that spectacular and comprehensive violence by the military might succeed and thus strangle any protest movement in the cradle. So we might call this the high-risk, high-reward option, and I should note that Donald Trump has, more than a few times in the past, chosen the high-risk, high-reward option. So I don't consider this unlikely.

But it won't be lost on Trump or his cronies that the violence which met the first protest in 2020 provoke the largest domestic uprising and living memory. People have not forgotten this, and some blue state Democrats have even made, let's say, confusing noises to that effect. Case in point, Governor Bob Ferguson of Washington just signed a bill barring other state national guard units

from entering Washington without his approval, unless they were mobilized by the president. Now, as that last part might key went on, this bill doesn't have a lot of legal force or any, really, at all, but it's a sign that even fairly milk-toast-elect Democrats are starting to consider the real possibility of a federal invasion of their states. The president has discussed sending out-of-state troops into blue cities before,

largely in the context of cracking down on immigration and sanctuary cities. This is all dangerous language, but going further than just language, carries risk for the regime, too. I would not be shocked if we were to see the Texas National Guard or whoever, whichever state, occupying, let's say, Chicago, after federal law enforcement makes good on the threats that have been made by members of the Trump administration to arrest governors who aid and abet undocumented migrants like J.B. Pritzker, and an act like that would surely spark mass protests in Chicago and very likely elsewhere. The fact that a move like that would have such a risk of sparking mass resistance, as well as further legal challenges, might keep the Trump

administration focused on smaller fish and less dangerous outrages, at least for the time being. And if that's the route they choose, I think something different might be likely, and I call this potential path forward, the pressure cooker. And we'll talk about that. But first, here's more ads. When public unrest exploded in 2020, it did so after four solid years of buildup. If you'll remember, the earliest fascist-anti-fascist street clashes of that period started before the 2016 election. These were largely focused around speeches and campuses by right-wing provocateurs and dueling demonstrations in a handful of cities. The first wave of such activity crested in Charlottesville, 2017, with tragic results. But the vibe it set and the people it trained continued to take part in street actions,

and many of them formed the infrastructural core of the movement that exploded onto the scene after George Floyd's murder. The last year of serious protests have focused more on the genocide in Gaza than anything, and it's not coincidental that the first wave of deportations have heavily targeted legal residents who took part in those demonstrations. Since Trump took office and Doge started doing its thing, there have been more large-scale demos that focus directly on the regime. Now, these have been quite manageable from the regime's point of view, and they have not yet attracted the same kind of crackdown.

But that won't remain the case as people grow more desperate. any fool can see that the apparatus of repression constructed to punish genocide protesters will be turned on Democrats, former federal employees, and people who are just hungry and pissed about rising food prices. However, this represents another tightrope scenario for the regime. These demonstrations are large, and unlike student protests against Israel, the media has proved less eager to marginalize the participants as extremists. As time goes on and things get worse, folks who last year scoffed at college students occupying campus buildings, may themselves consider if perhaps it might be time to fuck some shit up.

This will be an uneven process, with sudden leaps forward and pulls back, and it will provoke an equally uneven state response. There will be attempts to send so-called instigators and organizers overseas to El Salvador, unless the public reaction to this, which is building as I type, continues to escalate to the extent that it becomes unfeasible. If so, there are ample domestic. locations to detain or even disappear those the regime considers dangerous. First on the chopping block will be the people whose heads are currently closest to the blade,

organizers and demonstrators against genocide whose citizenship is not at all in question. I expect if large, disruptive demonstrations do threaten the administrations hold, they will also start to target Antifa again, which will start with the targeting of longtime activists, many of whom would have been people arrested or at least heavily surveilled in 2020. However, it won't end there, and it will quickly expand to elected Democrats, new people organizing protests, folks who have never had anything to do with any of the kind of anti-fascist actions that so captivated Fox News back in 2020. I will be shocked if we make it more than another year without a serious attempt to brand

Antifa a domestic terror organization, and if that succeeds in a way that has legal force, then the fact that there is no such organization won't matter. Trump's feds will do what we've watched ice do with Trendaagua. They'll break down the door of whoever they wish, argue tattoos or possessions of certain literature or whatever is proof of membership, and then those who survive the raids will find themselves in the most restrictive detention the regime feels secure placing them in. If things follow, what I suspect is the likeliest path,

we will watch this process ebb and flow over the next several months. Each spring and summer protests will grow and peak in the hottest months, with new cities and tactics being attempted regular. by groups constantly reeling from raids that are devastating and terrifying, but due to the incompetence of an FBI whose investigative capacity has been neutered, fail to really disrupt things. As the weather cools off, exhausted activists will lick their wounds and make new plans. Scattered acts of disruption carried out by small groups or individual cells will occur year-round, but I expect large-scale demonstrations and clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement

to follow a pattern not so different from what Afghanistan veterans knew was fighting season. Hot summers of mass activity, winters of raids and experimentation to scout holes for the next year's offensive. And as time goes on, the energy will build, the tension will build, and, of course, we might find ourselves reaching towards something that explodes in the not too distant future, perhaps a year or two down the line. Now, of course, none of this will occur in a vacuum or independent of the next. news churn that we've been drowning in for years. And this brings me to my next prediction, which is the coming of politics as unusual. I apologize for coming back to the David Brooks of it all,

but seeing a man who in 2017 wrote that Trump had changed and we really needed to stop stressing out over him and then wrote a call him attacking millennials for their tribalism, call for a general strike is a sign, and it's not a sign that Brooks has gotten smarter. It's a sign that we've entered radical times and that radicalization spares not even the centrist. If the worst case scenario occurs, and a few weeks from now, U.S. soldiers are gunning down demonstrators while ICE officers cart elected Democrats off to Seacot. Feel free to disregard this passage. But if the somewhat slower path prevails, I expect to see more politicians and news editors chase viewers as they sprint left, or at least away from the dissolving center. We've watched this process occur on the right during the

Biden years, and to a degree it is still occurring out of a fear of reprisals under the Trump regime. I'm finalizing the script on the day's 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens stepped down over interference from Paramount executives into his coverage of Donald Trump. But the polls have started moving against the right. Trump's public approval on immigration policy is underwater for the first time in years, and his approval on everything else is, while not always at record lows, diving with significant speed. The next several months of shipping data, as well as concerning early reporting on farm yields, suggests a near future in which a lot less will be available for everyone. We saw what a rising

price of eggs did to Biden, and we've also seen Senator Chris Van Hollen go almost overnight from a marginal figure in U.S. politics to one of the most famous Democrats in the nation, all because he had the modest courage to fly to El Salvador and call the president's use of a foreign black site what it was. There will be more people like Van Hollen who display courage previously unseen in a moment of trial. But much more than that, there will be opportunists, those who see the wind blowing and chase the approval of crowds, more willing to countenance radical action in the streets than they were a year ago. Most politicians and most thought leaders in the old media are reactive, and I'm not saying that this will change, merely that what they react to will change because of who is in charge now and because of the desperation of the time,

brought on by Republican policies, which is going to paint a target on the backs of conservative leaders as large as the targets they've been painting on the backs of dissidents. And all of this means one thing, which is, we're approaching the age of weird terror. So much has happened in this shitty stupid year that I think we've all forgotten. 2025 opened with a military veteran blowing himself up in a cyber truck in front of the Trump Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. His reasoning was based as much on the numerous head injuries he'd suffered in his service as it was on his exposure to right-wing propaganda, which convinced him that the Democrats needed to be dealt with. But he saw things clearly enough to know that yet another mass shooting or self-immolation

or even a run-of-the-mill bomb wouldn't have garnered him or his manifesto any attention. So instead, he picked a cyber truck and a Trump building, symbols of the two most viral men of our very stupid era, and he blew one of those up in front of the other. And by gummit, We all did pay attention, for a few days at least. Late last year, an anonymous gunman, the government believes to be Luigi Mangione, was even more successful at holding our attention with an even stranger attack, a brazen and nigh perfectly executed assassination carried out by a man with a dazzling smile and the wisdom to pick the most universally hated target that exists today, a health care CEO.

We have all watched so many mass shootings at schools, at grocery stores, nightclubs, everywhere imaginable, that they've lost the ability to shock us. But targeted assassinations of people at the top of the food chain are so rare that they can't help but draw eyeballs. And sheer rollicking strangeness, like we saw in Vegas, has a captivating power all its own. We will see more of both kinds of attacks in the months to come. The arson attempt on Governor Shapiro's home, bizarre at least for the extensive damage done, might be seen as another data point on this list. But as new figures rise to prominence within new protest movements, we will see attempts to kill them. Furious and deranged Trump supporters armed with cars and guns and Trump-branded pocket dives will do as they've been doing.

And this part won't be new. What I do expect will be new is the increased threat felt by the oligarchs at the top of the system, as intelligent and patient young people continue to plot ways to go after them in the places and times where they feel invulnerable. And I also expect that editors and journalists will continue to learn that these actions draw eyeballs more than almost anything else. And while all that's going on, the truly unbalanced among us will find ways to hitchhike off the well-publicized turmoil coming our way and make their own confounding statements. There will be public suicides and attacks utilizing weapons and tools we can't yet imagine, at least not openly on a podcast, without receiving a visit from some friendly alphabet boy or another. I don't know what exactly to expect beyond the unexpected and the very, very silly. And of course, as we talk about weird terrorism, I don't mean to discount the Nazi

accelerationist types here, they'll keep trying. But if they want to raise above the chatter in an even more crowded media ecosystem, even they're going to find ways to get weird with it. After all, an attack no one notices isn't likely to accelerate much of anything. And I guess that's what I've got right now. I've got 10 pages or so on what I see coming. I didn't come up with a smooth, sexy ending for this, like a writer should, because I'm tired. And thinking about this isn't fun.

But I did a lot, and there you are. I suppose the thing you're asking now is, what the fuck do I do about it? And, you know, that's what we talk about a lot on this show. Organize with your friends. Get involved. Find ways to help people. Take a stop the bleed class. And for the love of God, keep your eyes open.

This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder. Our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, The Crumbling World, and What It Means for You. I'm Garrison Davis today. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of April 17 to April 23. J.D. Vance has killed the Pope. A second Pete Hegseth on authorized signal chat has hit the Department of Defense.

the White House announces that the education department will start collecting on defaulted student loans. Beanie-clad Tim Poole joins the White House Press Pool and hippie Facebook moms rejoice with artificial food dyes being banned across America. How are we doing, everybody? Much worse after hearing that. Fine, I guess. I outlive the Pope. I outlive the Pope. You have to live several more decades to like outlive the Pope officially.

I think he was eight. So he was 88. I did it. I still did it. Thank goodness he did not die on Hitler's birthday because that would have been a whole other whole other can of words. I'm still thinking,

I'm thinking back to my catechism classes and trying to remember like Pope dead on Easter, good sign or bad. That's definitely a sign. Like it's some kind of sign. What do we, how do we take that? Shout out to the Pistons for holding off

winning a playoff game just long enough for the Pope to die such that Francis or his entire term in office never saw a Pistons playoff win. Congratulations to the Pistons. Congratulations to the city of Detroit. Congratulations for withholding that from the Pope. We love to see it.

Did Pope Francis have a strong opinion on the Pistons that he expressed at some point? Because I may have missed that. No, he knew they were in a Macklemore song, so therefore he hated them. He was a huge McLaughan. Yeah. A lot of people don't know this,

but the entire time the Pope is lying in state, they'll just going to be looping thrift shop. So, yeah. as as Pope Francis wanted. Yeah, that was his dying wish. Do you know who else probably used to listen to McElmore? Not anymore because he got too woke, but Pete Higgisth seems like a 2012 McElmore guy.

Yeah, might have been. Might have been. He was sharing plans for Yemeni Airstrikes with his wife, his brother, and a personal lawyer in another signal chat. I do the same thing. Yeah, well. Yeah, you've yet to act on your plans as a different. They are not interested.

Looping in the lawyer is the real, like, God-tier move there. That is so funny. I mean, it says so much, both about, like, what's going on in Pete Head Seth's brain, but of the quality of lawyer, because any lawyer worth assault would be like, please remove me. I am not in this chat. Yeah, do not. You need to get me out of this chat. What is wrong with you?

Are you texting me missile package information? That's the thing, though. We've gotten great evidence from, like, this guy. and Giuliani from all of the lawyers, these like random cartoon dipshits the right keeps finding that like they will just hand you a law degree. Like if you hand the state enough money,

they will just hand you a law degree and you can just like bullshit your way through the bar and you'll be fine. They give that shit out to anyone. You can tell a really good lawyer in a room where legal things are being discussed and I've had this happen several times because they just leave. They bounce.

They get the fuck out of the room and that's a smart lawyer. I don't know if you saw, but the state of California was using AI to set its bar exam questions. Oh, wonderful. You don't even have to be someone. I bet the AI would be able to tell you don't text your wife, lawyer, and son classified information about missile strikes. But whatever. Now, hopefully if they start using AI more to get through school, they won't have as many student loans to be collected on.

Yeah, there you go. of practice that has been paused since March of 2020, set to be resumed on May 5th. And then, man, the Tim Poole thing was really wild. Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt gave a glowing introduction to Tim Poole's addition to the press room. And Tim's first question to the administration was asking why news media just lies so much about Trump. Fantastic journalism here from Comrade Tim. Really probing question. Let's pivot towards RFK and the concerning registry that has been discussed, which is a word you never like to hear.

Whenever someone brings up the concept of a registry, it's usually bad. Always bad. So I'm going to talk in general about what RFK, the things that he has said, not just about autistic Americans, but about people who are receiving psychiatric medication, people who are addicted to opiates, people who are utilizing like stimulants. by which I mean ADHD medicine, which if you have ADHD, that's not exactly the way it functions, but that's the way he frames it, because these are all tied together, right? I have some frustrations with kind of how it's been taken on social media that I think are not causing people to worry when they don't need to worry, but look at maybe sort of the wrong area to see the immediate threat coming from.

So first I'm going to start with, like, what has been said. And before we get to the registry, we have to go back to what he's. was talking about on the campaign trail. Because prior, and this is prior to him endorsing Donald Trump, when RFK Jr. was like an individual, like running for president on his own under his independent campaign, he started talking about wellness farms, right? And these were specifically in the language that he used, places that people who were addicted to psychiatric medication, antidepressants.

He named specifically antidepressants and stimulants, as well as people with opiate addictions, right? And he has since talked about other drug addictions as well, could go to spend three or four years working on a farm. He always frames it as also like learning skills. So it's this mix of, I want people to be able to work in this, you know, lovely bucolic, you know, agrarian setting where they'll gain working skills. And then there's also peppered in these very frightening phrases like they need to be reparented, right? Now, in addition to this, he's not just, this is all focused on Americans who are taking medications that he thinks are over-prescribed or purely unnecessary, right? That's always the way, like psychiatric medication, he almost has a

Scientologist attitude towards it, that like this is all essentially unnecessary. And obviously, you know, all of this stuff comes out of their elements of this that were true at one point. For example, back in the 90s, like Ritalin was wildly over-prescribed the kids. but the way in which he's translated this now is that basically everyone on a stimulant, everyone on an antidepressant, is on it unnecessarily. And in a podcast in 2024,

he went further by kind of tying a lot of this to race specifically, stating, quote, every black kid is now just standard, put on Adderall, on SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get reparented.

So that's all deeply concerning. It's like kidnapped, helping children forcibly, like, be medicating. I will say, that's not how he has framed it. So one of the things is people, I've heard it phrase as like, RFK has admitted he wants to imprison millions of Americans in camps. And like, that's not what he said. The direct quotes about this are not framed as a mandatory thing.

It's framed as a replacement for other treatments that people can choose to go into and choose to leave. That's what he's said, right? Okay. Now, perfectly reasonable when a guy in an administration like this, this is talking about putting up camps to be like, well, I don't know if I believe him, but it's not accurate that he said he wants to arrest millions of people and force them onto camps. He just has not said that, right?

Yeah, yeah. And I think it behooves us to be honest about what he said. I think it also behooves us to talk about like where this idea comes from, right? And what he's looking back to. And again, a lot of the issue here is not necessarily what RFK might do, but the fact that he might not be there forever. And if he starts establishing this, this kind of kind of, kind of, program that starts in an attempt to be something that is more, you can choose to be on these

camps or not. There's certainly willingness within the Republican Party to force people into different kinds of quote unquote treatment like this. And one thing I think it particularly is the way in which the right has liked to shift blame for gun violence and mass shootings off of the availability of firearms and onto people who are on psychiatric medication, right? And this is an area in which I could see someone taking over from RFK or pushing past the things he specifically has stated he wants to do, because I think he does come out of a more quack medicine goal here, putting people forcibly in camps and colonies like this. I mean, like, the idea of like reparenting, I guess, is more...

Is deeply problematic. Yeah, yeah. Incredibly scary phrase. But it is worth noting as there's a very good teen vogue article on the matter called RFK wants to send people to wellness farms. The U.S. already tried that. That talks about the actual, like, background that he is. is he is harkening back to because he is not, his vision of wellness farms is not like the Nazi

concentration camp, which doesn't mean that it's not possible that things could wind up in a much darker direction. But this gives you an idea of the history that he is specifically calling back to. Quote, beginning of the 1890s and continuing through the first decades of the 20th century, epileptic and feeble-minded colonies sprung up around the U.S. The initial purpose of these colonies was to remove patients from overcrowded, badly run asylums and poorhouses in favor of farm life where they would have access to the outdoors. Under the colony model, patients generally lived in cottages, designed to be more home-like than institutional.

Patients were also given jobs, and many were expected to work on colony farms where they grew their own food. Dr. William Spratling, the medical superintendent of the Craig Colony for Epileptics in New York, declared that the farm model meant nature, the great restorer, will have an opportunity to do her best. It didn't work. Supporters of the colony model argued that with time, clean air, sunshine, and a restricted diet,

physical labor could heal patients, but that didn't happen. Data from the Craig colony, one of the America's first epileptic colonies, illustrates this point. During the 1940s, thanks to funding and staff limitations because of World War II, conditions in North American institutions were particularly grim. The institutions, 1943 to 1944 annual report to the State Commissioner of Mental Hygiene shows that less than 1% of patients were discharged as cured that year. During that same period, over 200 patients attempted to leave the colony without permission, and 5% of the total patient population died. Jesus. And so that's, I mean, that's reason enough to be deeply worried, right? The fact that without saying, like, RFK wants to do what the Nazis did, RFK wants to do what the America already did, and it killed a huge number of the people who were interned in those camps. And I guess the thing I keep bringing up is that when I think about what the threat model is,

more than fucking Auschwitz for people who want our NSSRIs, it's a Judge Rotenberg center on every corner. It's camps like these where costs are going to be cut and there's not going to be good access for any kind of independent monitors to make sure health and safety are being followed. It's not that people are going to be shoveled into ovens. It's that as a result of this system being incompetently applied to the most vulnerable. And I'm not even talking about my worry at the moment being that everyone on an SSR will be forced in. It's going to be poor kids. And RFK has already talked about that, right?

Like that's why he's focusing on black kids, right? That's who they're going for. We've had some people post up in the subreddit being like, I know I'm going to go to a camp because I have autism or I know I'm going to go to a camp because I have ADHD. And I'm telling you, I'm not saying don't be scared of fascism. I'm saying this is where to fight right now. It's not RFK wants to send every adult on an SSRI into a death camp. It's that they're going to try and be putting these kids instead of. of the different juvenile programs that exist instead of any kind of functional medical program,

they're going to force them into facilities like this. And it's going to become easier for facilities like the Judge Rotenberg Center, which horribly abuses and tortures autistic kids, to spread and to get state and federal funding. Like, and that's the threat, right? It's an extension of what we're doing and what we've done. It's not a carbon copy of what the Nazis are doing. Or did. Speaking of the Nazis, and we're back. So a couple of things happen in quick succession that is responsible in part for why people are so freaked out and rightfully so.

One of them is that RFK gave a speech on the back of new data that showed yet another rise in the rate of autism diagnoses. And as I said on a previous episode, it's because we're looking for it more. But he made a statement about people with profound autism, not being able to pay taxes or write poems, you know, or that sort of thing. And while he was specifically talking about people with quote unquote profound autism,

it's reasonable for people to assume like, yeah, but that's just kind of what he sees is basically everyone, right? And I don't think that that's an unfair assumption. And then coming right up on the heels of that, there was an announcement from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, about RFK Jr.'s new effort to, quote unquote, study autism. And basically what they're going to be doing is collecting comprehensive patient data with broad coverage of the U.S. population and kind of organizing it within the NIH. This is the first time this has been done, but they are going to be grabbing basically everything

they can get their hands on. And we're talking about a mix of medication records from pharmacies, lab testing records, genomic data from people who like go to the, you know, department of the, basically data taken by the VA, data taken by the Indian Health Service, as well as data from private insurers. and they're also going to be buying data from smartwatch, from stuff like Fitbits, right, who does sell their data to anybody with like $20 hanging out the back of their pocket. And as a heads up, if you are looking for a fitness tracker,

you should look more into this. There are a few that have reasonably good data protection histories. Garmin is one of them. This does not mean it's perfect. All of them will hand over your data if given a court order to do so. None of them are going to break the lot to hold on to your data. But Garman doesn't just, like, sell willy-nilly to anybody who wants to, like, advertise based on it, right? That said most of them do.

The last thing I'd write was something like 12 out of 15 different free fitness tracking apps they checked, sold data pretty widely. So. Yeah, about 80%. Yeah, it's the vast majority, right? So the NIH is basically looking at taking the data that exists. They're not talking about really gathering new data, but they're taking, they are talking about collecting everything that exists and putting it under one roof for the first. first time. And this is for a couple of purposes, right? They want to be able to, like, track the spread of different illnesses and different health problems within the population. These are their claims.

But also, they want to create a disease registry specifically to track Americans with autism, right? And this is because Kennedy describes autism as a preventable disease, which is not accurate. And the fact that this database and these other databases are being made should be very worrisome, right? It's both important to talk about the fact that he is specifically signaling out autism while also stating like that's not the only thing they're looking into, right? They want data on people who are on SSRIs, who are on ADHD medication. They probably want data on drug use, right? There are a lot of things they are looking to be gathering. And none of it is shit that they should have access for. Yeah. You could certainly see them expanding this out to like hormone replacement

therapy, transenter health care. Yes. Yes. And also like the apps that track like menstrual cycles, right? People accessing reproductive healthcare. And again, the immediate plan, I'm sorry, I simply don't, I don't think that RFK Jr's master plan is the mass arrest of everybody with autism in the United States and forcing them into a camp. I don't think that's what he wants in part

because, number one, his base of support is a lot of the parents of these kids. And I'm not saying those parents don't want to do things to they, aren't already doing things to their kids that are harmful, but those parents want control over what they see as their kids' health care. They want the freedom to experiment with medications on their kids to, quote, unquote, fix them. And this data is going to be used both to provide, basically to be massage to provide evidence that different treatments that don't do shit do, in fact, work.

And I think I have suspicions of financial interests there. I keep getting question like, well, what do you think is going to happen when the autism cures don't work? well then they're going to put people in camps. No, the autism cures already don't work. This is an industry. They make money off of this. They make money off of drugging and medically torturing these children. And as far, that is the threat is that it is going to get easier to do at a larger scale.

And it is going to be harder to fight even illegal to provide good information on what does and does not work. And that is what's happening right now, as opposed to something we might be worried about, you know, years down the line. And yes, we should fight any time the government is trying to put populations of people into a motherfucking database like this. We should fight all of this tooth and nail. I just think this is what I see is the danger, you know? Yeah, the risk is this to centralize stuff. It's a centralized acceleration for things that have already been happening less so than just like large-scale direct data intervention. Yeah.

I think a lot about like in the context of this of like quote-unquote wilderness therapy programs. which have been... Roberts covered these, but which have been abusing children for years. And that is what I see when we talk about these farms. Again, my worry is not.

RFK wants to forcibly put everybody into fucking Auschwitz. Part two. It's RFK wants a hundred times as many teen treatment facilities where kids who disobey or get in trouble with the law get caught at fucking protests

can be forced to labor and an amount of them will die and all of them will suffer permanent mental and physical damage as a result of being put in these places. Yeah, like behavioral improvement centers that are, you could even be part of, you know, like community service. Yes.

Yeah. It's extensions of what we do. It's extremely American, you know? I just, that's, that's where my head is. Yeah, it's not great. So talking of where, I guess where my head is, is immigration, right? That's what I tend to update us on. So I guess I've seen it characterize just like legal ping pong between the courts and the DOJ.

It would be like if one side was playing ping pong with a regular tennis racket and everyone was just pretending that they weren't, right? Like the DOJ is just continuing to kind of flout these court orders. If we start from the top and go down, the Supreme Court temporarily banned the government from renditioning Venezuelan men in the District of North Texas to El Salvador. I think people maybe sometimes this got a little misinterpreted on social media. Like you have to look at who the class was, and the class was a group of Venezuelan men who were in immigration detention in North Texas, who were going to be sent to El Salvador, and that was who got the relief. The case at the time was pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and the Supreme Court said that once that court acted, the government could appeal to the Supreme Court. However, they added the government should not, and I'm quoting here, remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this. court, i.e. the Supreme Court. To update on the case which we've covered a lot here, the

Abrago-Garcia case, Judge Jeannis ordered expedited discovery. Discovery is when both parties in a lawsuit amass information, right? They're able to find out information. And in this case, the government more or less ignored this, and it did so by sticking to its line that they can't bring him home to the United States, saying that the requests were, and I'm quoting again, here, based on the false premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate Abrago Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador. They're claiming they were ordered to return him and somehow in their minds returning him does not include ensuring his release. Like they're saying that they're only obliged to transport him should he be released anyway.

Genies in a court order called this, quote, a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with the discovery obligations. Jinice also called the government's assertion to executive privilege, quote, equally specious. The city of Hyattsville in this case also clarified through a press release that, quote, at no time did any member of HPD identify or file any reports classifying Abrago Garcia as a member of any gang. Despite this, the executive branch is still going with that he's a violent gang member. they also doxed his wife this week by releasing a protective order

that she had once filed and withdrawn and when that was released it contained her address so she's now hiding in a safe house they photoshopped a MS-13 tattoo onto his knuckles above a weed leaf tattoo a smiley face a cross and a skull yeah

yeah that's what they're going to with, I guess, specious is a good word. Yeah, just hideous nonsense. Yeah, no, absolutely obscenely ridiculous. And then the other wrangler says, is them just saying that you don't have a right to do process, right? Like openly, just, like, Miller has been saying this. J.D. Vance has been saying this on, on X.com.

That, like, these people don't have a right to due process. They've come up with various arguments for that. It also seems like two people sent to El Salvador no longer appear on any official list of detainees. Yeah. Which is concerning one of them, Ricardo Prado Vasquez, he's not among the 238 people

we know on the manifest for those sent to El Salvador. He doesn't appear to be in Venezuela, which is where his passport is from. And the fact that the government claims that they sent him, the government has said they sent him on the March 15th flights, but he's not listed there,

he's not visible in photos, has led to concerns that we might have sent more, people to El Salvador than we currently know about. He entered the country with a CBP one appointment, right, which of all the ways to enter is the one that the US government was trying to force people to use at that time, right? He very like legally entered the country. Yes. Yeah, to be clear, he entered at a port of entry with an appointment to claim asylum. He, it appears, made a mistake when delivering food and ended up driving into Canada and was arrested when he attempted to return to

the United States. He doesn't show up on the ICE detainee locator. And essentially no one knows where he is, right? This concern has been compounded by the fact that it also emerged this week that the US has sent at least one detainee Omar Abdul Sata Amin to Rwanda. And the combination of these two things raises a concern that they are sending third country nationals to detention in other countries that we are not yet aware of, right? Of course, the Rwanda plan was something that the UK government hatched a long time ago. And the Kagame government in Rwanda

seems to see this offer, right, as a way of gaining legitimacy with governments in the global north, especially given the White's support criticism for its actions in the Democratic Republic of Congo recently. From the handbasket,

which is like a kind of substacky outlet, they reviewed memos between the U.S. government and the embassy in Rwanda, and I'm quoting from one of them here, the US provided a one-time payment of $100,000 to support social services, residency documents, and work permits. Rwanda has also, according to the handbasket, agreed to accept 10 more third-country nationals. So the US is paying Rwanda a little bit more than it's paying El Salvador, right? It was paying El Salvador 20,000 per person

per year, but it's a one-time payment. Nonetheless, I struggle to believe that you could concoct a way in which it would cost Rwanda 100 grand to produce a residency document and a work permit for an Iraqi national. But yeah, this has obviously led to the concern that people are being sent to other places that we don't yet know about. Talking of people being sent to other places, a US citizen, Jose Hermosio, was detained by ICE after approaching a border patrol agent to ask for directions. He was detained for 10 days. DHS is claiming that he was arrested near the Nogales

border and that he approached a border patrol agent and upon doing so identified himself as a non-citizen who was not in the country legally. Which is what they claim. Yes. So Hermesio disputes this along with his lawyers. He says he approached the agent looking for directions having had a seizure and been in hospital and when he got out of hospital was trying to work. work out where to go. He is from New Mexico, but he was visiting his girlfriend's family in Tucson. He told the agent he was from New Mexico and the agent accused him of lying. In his account, DHS has to produce a transcript with, I'm not going to call it a signature because it just has the word Jose written underneath it, right? Mr. Hermescio, according to his girlfriend,

has some learning difficulties and by her account he wouldn't have been able to read the English language transcript that he's alleged to have signed. So, like, whether or not he signed this is rather a material, right? He clearly, judging by her account, was not aware that he was in it, judging by this. This is not even a signature with a last name. It's laughable to suggest that he, like, consentingly signed this. But nonetheless, he was detained for 10 days until his family produced his documents in court. Yeah, he was arrested, quote, unquote, without proper immigration documents, which you don't

carry around when you're a U.S. citizen. Yeah, you're not obliged to. Papers, please. Like, you don't need that. His family brought his social security card and birth certificate to court. Eventually, the case against him was dismissed after being held by ICE for 10 days. This reminds me of a similar case from this past week

where a U.S. citizen was detained on Wednesday the 16th. This is a 20-year-old born in Georgia, Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez. He was pulled over while driving to work near the Florida border. He doesn't speak much English. or Spanish. He speaks an indigenous mind language, but he gave his real ID card and social security

card over to a state trooper. He was detained and charged with illegally entering the state as a quote-unquote unauthorized alien. Similarly, the trooper claims that Lopez Gomez said that he was in the country illegally. This is like some kind of communication error

or these like law enforcement officers are just like lying or trying to construct like language traps to make someone agree to a statement that admits that they're in the country illegally, which allows them to be detained. He was put into a 24-hour ice hold. The next day, a federal judge verified his birth certificate,

which was brought by his mother, but claimed to lack the authority to release him, though he was released later Thursday night. And he was arrested under a new Florida law signed by DeSantis last month, which a judge blocked earlier this month on April 4th. This basically allows state troopers to act as their state's own like border patrol,

and it penalizes immigrants who, quote, knowingly enter or attempt to enter the state after entering the United States by eluding or avoiding examination or inspection by immigration officers, unquote. Yeah, and like the common thing here, right, is that they're just, when we've seen this, I mean, there are a bunch of other cases that are like this too, where it's just like, they see someone who's not white and they're just like, fuck it, we can grab this person and then just lie about what they said. It's like, it's not even racial profiling. Yeah, but it's like the thing is, it's like, it's not even like racial profiling anymore. It's like they're just attempting to blackbag like random non-white people that they're just running across. Yes.

And so of course you're like grab a US citizens, right? Because they're just like grabbing random people. But it's like they're just fucking doing this to everyone. This has happened in other states as well. There's been instance like this of like the past few months which have increased in frequency since Trump has taken office. Yeah. Let's go on a break and return to Talk Tariff.

Okay. We are back. How's the economy going? Do not like. Okay, Mia, what can you tell us about tariffs this week? So we got a look inside the White House this week at how the tariff, the turf tariff suspension happened. Now remember, so there was the deliberation day tariffs a few weeks ago, and then they got suspended for 90 days. So we're all still on the 90-day countdown clock on those being unsuspended.

But we got a view of how that happened. from the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary Treasurer Scott Bessett and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik basically waited until Trump advisor Peter Navarro was out of the room, and then

was in a meeting, and then they cornered Trump and were like, you got to roll these tariffs, you got to do this pause on the tariffs? Honestly, iconic. You know, I hate to say it, but iconic. This was also all the first Trump administration ran, and everyone appears to have forgotten that this is how all of the shit works.

Well, because there were all those stories for the first couple of weeks about how smooth and well-run it was and everything. It's a lull. Yeah. And like, this many people assumed that there was like a plan behind this. And like, no, no, I am fucking vindicated. They really are just this fucking stupid. Like, no, there is not a grand strategy behind their sort of like tariff rollout, right? There is a senile old man and his stupid warring advisors and they're both fighting each other for basically for like, they're trying.

They're trying to wait until the other person is out of the room so they can grab control the fucking puppet reigns. But this does actually lay bare something that's sort of important about this, which is that like there is a huge fight inside of the Trump administration between kind of Lutnik who's like the representative of a bunch of different sort of sectors of American capital, right? Like he's a representative of like you're fucking like Walgreens dip shits, right? And like he's also representative of the finance people. And those people are losing their fucking minds over the tariffs because it's again going to do. destroy the economy. But Navarro is, you know, just like a hardline sort of like anti-China ideologue. And Navarro is the person who's been driving the most intense versions of these tariffs. And it's a real issue for everyone else in the administration who doesn't want this to happen because Navarro is like the one guy in the administration that Trump actually likes.

And so they can't directly move against him because they'll lose. Like Elon Musk tried this and like it got nowhere. And so, you know, what we've been seeing is is just like, again, The tariff policy here is just being set by who's the last person in the room with him. Yeah, so we're probably still like about 60 days-ish out from these tariffs coming back into effect. I mean, this basically means, like, they'll be hitting in the summer, which is also just like absolutely the worst conceivable time for these tariffs to take effect in terms of like, if you were just like deliberately trying to cause a massive popular mobilization against you, this is what you would do.

They're not. They're just dumb. But like, you know, so, okay, let's move on to the sort of big news of this week is the press has been carrying stories about Trump backing off of the 145% China tariffs and the fact that there's going to be negotiations and it's all going to get wound down. And like, I'm pretty sure this is just kind of pure Lutnik shit to try to calm the markets down. The issue with this story is that there are no negotiations, right? Everyone keeps talking about how the U.S. is going to do a negotiated settlement with China. There have not been any negotiations. There are not negotiations.

There has not even been a process to start negotiations. Because, you know, the last stories we had about this was that, like, neither side wants to be the person to, like, start going to the table. Because, like, asking the other side for negotiations makes them look weak. Like, Trump has been asking China to ask him to start negotiations. The Chinese are refusing. And the second issue here, and this is the more substantive problem with, with, with, sort of negotiated backout is that the Trump-Novarro position hinges

on the line that the trade deficit inherently with China is proof of Chinese market manipulation. And the thing is, there's no actual way to systematically address that, right? Like, there's nothing that, like, either China or the U.S. could do

that would reverse the trade deficit. So there's no sort of, like, you know, like, yeah, like, the obvious way out here would be for, like, Trump to take some kind of weird, symbolic victory and like China to be like we're doing a fentanyl crackdown or some shit. But the thing is like, ideologically for someone like Navarro

and Navarro is the important figure here like Navarro just wants China destroyed. Right. There's no actual negotiating process that he can do that will actually sort of like make this like negotiation shit happen and have it actually like eliminate the tariffs. The only thing that can happen

basically is a political battle inside of Trump administration where Navarro gets pushed out somehow. But again, Navarro is like Trump. sky. So I just don't buy all of this, all of the fucking stories that are coming out. And this happens constantly. Every single time there's one of these things, there's all these stories being like, well, they're going to get rolled back. It doesn't actually

mean this. And that just happens, right? We have 145% tariffs on China. Now, the last thing I want to talk about is what the actual effect of this has been. And the effect that has been, there's been a massive slowdown and a massive, like, shutdown in exports from China to the U.S., like

in terms of containership traffic. Right? We're talking about, I'm got a quote from CNBC here. So they're talking about optimizer, which is like a tracking system for ships. And they said, quote, year on year, the data shows a 44% drop in vessels scheduled to arrive the week of May 4th

to May 10th. Now, that's not actually necessarily a 40% drop in traffic because there'll be more shit when like other boats get full. But, you know, to put this into perspective, right, during the worst for trade, the worst parts of the COVID lockdowns,

the year-on-year drop was only 20%. and 20% is the number that's been being spread around the media for like what roughly the drop looks like for some companies is larger than others and again the tariff we still haven't even seen the actual shocks of the tariffs yet and we're already seeing a decline in exports from China that is like again around the level of of the lockdowns and if and you know and I think like people remember like the kind of unhinged shit that that caused right and that's something that, you know, is only going to intensify and the other part of this, right, is that the strategies right now for how this is being dealt with is moving through Vietnam,

moving through Cambodia. But if you remember the rates from the original sort of like turf tariffs from Liberation Day, right? Like, the tariff on Vietnam was like 100% or some shit. It was like 80%. I don't remember, I don't have exactly on top of my head, but like, there's no actual viable strategy of just of ways you can route these goods through.

and it's been especially hitting the sort of drop shipping companies, right? Like Tammu and anything that relies on air freight, just getting fucked. And so this is all just, you know, just sort of rolling in the background is just this logistics crisis. And it's also an echoing crisis

and the thing I sort of want to close this section on, is that like, so the big issue with these sort of empty boats, right? And these cancellations of boat orders is that in order for it to be profitable, because all of these shipping companies run on such low margins, right?

They only barely survive the pandemic by taking out a series of just like unhinged sort of like weird collateral-based loans. And in order for these companies to be profitable, they have to continuously keep on completely filling up ships, right? If a ship is not full, it is not profitable for them to run it. So, you know,

and if that's not happening, the entire system literally grinds to a halt until there's enough orders to move things through. So even the shit that there is demand for, right, can't be shipped because these shipping companies cannot afford to unless the entire thing is full. So the supply chain disruptions that we are going to see from this

as this sort of escalates and as this continues, and especially in a few months, if the Liberation Day tariffs go back into effect are catastrophic, and we really like, it's just one of these situations. You can hear the thunder, you can see the lightning, but the storm hasn't hit yet, and it is going to. And when it does, I don't know, I was trying to do a poetic thing about how we're all going to get fucking drenched,

but we're fucked. It's going to be unbelievably bad. And the only process right now inside of the administration that doesn't involve like some kind of mobilization is, like, again, is Lutnik winning this fucking intra-administration political battle with Navarro? So, woo! Well, pre-order your Nintendo Switch 2 right now. Yes. In other news, the Minnesota Attorney General is suing the Trump admin over the executive order about trans women participating in school sports. saying he will, quote, not participate in a shameful bullying, and also says that this order

violates the Minnesota Human Rights Act. So we'll see some more court cases over this in the weeks to come. I'd like to talk a little bit about the student crackdowns for Palestine protests, kind of in a different way. Like we've discussed like ICE going after and detaining and deporting and taking away visas and green cards. So unrelated to this. that side of it. On the morning of Wednesday, April 23rd, the FBI served multiple search warrants in southeast Michigan, presumably related to Palestine protests and encampments from the past year. There's also some reporting of law enforcement activity in other states like Pennsylvania, but I'm still waiting to confirm that. The press secretary for the Michigan Attorney General

confirms investigators executed search warrants for three homes. He said that people were briefly detained during the execution of these warrants, but they were all eventually released. And he noted, quote, there is no immigration enforcement angle to the execution of these search warrants, unquote. So these people aren't being investigated like by ICE to get deported necessarily. This is seemingly for other protest activity. A pro-Palestine student group says that these raids happened at around 8 a.m., quote, early this morning, police and FBI agents rated four residences of University of Michigan pro-Palestine protesters, refusing to show warrants, they seized all electronics, and a number of personal belongings, unquote.

But let's close this episode by returning to my most Stephen Colbert, Skibbitty Biden segment, Stinky Musk, which is still the worst name I've come up with. Last Tuesday, Elon Musk said that, quote, working for the government to get the financial house in order is mostly done, unquote. that Musk is moving closer to stepping back from Doge this May around the time that his special government employee designation is set to expire. Reporting from Washington Post claims that Musk is growing tired of the vicious and unethical attacks from the left, and that is kind of dragging on him. With other reports suggesting that Musk is annoying other cabinet members and administration officials more than Trump himself. In fact, just this Wednesday a few hours before recording, Musk and Bessett,

we're having a pretty intense shouting match in the White House. Going forward, Musk says that he plans to work for the government about one to two days a week for the remainder of the Trump presidency so that he can, quote, make sure that the waste and fraud that we've stopped does not come roaring back, unquote. He keeps referring to his work at Doge is like being already completed essentially. Like we already found all of the fraud and now we just have to make sure more fraud doesn't happen. and we've previously reported on the alleged fraud that he claims to have found and the false numbers up on the Doge site. But it seems like this work really is winding down. The Musk Doge reply to this email with five things you've done this week

or else be fired directive has essentially sputtered out. Senior officials do not comply with the core aspects of the directive. It was never really enforced. And the Trump Office of Personal Management later said that this was voluntary. And that OPM officials may have never actually ever, read those response emails at all, though a small number of agencies are still requiring compliance with this mandate. And in some fun news, Tesla stock just continues to decline, dropping to half its peak from last December, and anti-Tesla vandalism is potentially spiking the cost of Tesla

insurance. Tesla had a just disastrous earnings call this Tuesday, April 22nd, showing that Tesla profits have fell 71% over the $1,000. first three months of the year. The total revenue was decreased 9% compared to 2024, with car sales revenue dropping 20% compared to a year earlier. The Tesla CFO stated that, quote, the negative impact of vandalism and unwarranted hostility towards our brand and our people had an impact in certain markets, unquote. In a company statement before this earnings call, Tesla claimed that, quote, unquote, a changing political sentiment could impact demand for their product. Musk announced that he would be shifting's attention back to Tesla and that his

doge time allocation will quote unquote drop significantly. Musk talked tariffs on this earnings call and tried to carefully like not bash Trump while stating concerns over the high tariffs, saying quote, I've been on the record many times as saying I believe lower tariffs are generally a good idea. But this decision is fundamentally up to the elected representative of the people, being the president of the United States. So, you know, I'll continue to advocate for lower tariffs, but that's all I can do, unquote. Any thoughts on Musk and Tesla here before we close? Yeah, one thing I want to remind everyone that is genuinely good news is that the thing about Tesla sales dropping is that it actually fucks them in two different ways, right? Because, because again,

most of their money is from these carbon credits that they're selling. But the thing is, in order to be able to get the carbon credits, they do need to be able to sell cars. Totally. And so each like subsequent cycle of people not buying cars is also destroying their carbon credit subsidies, which is like this sort of like spiraling like cash crisis thing. So, you know, look, zero Tesla sales is possible. We can keep driving. A better world is possible.

We can destroy these bastards. We can ruin this one guy specifically's life and it's not even that difficult. So, yeah. Well, we reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. 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.

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