Fourth Reich Archaeology - Fourth Reich Geopolitik 2

Episode Date: April 5, 2025

This week we bring you another current events episode because, frankly, there is just too much insanity going on right now to stay silent.  As with the last episode on current events, we take a good hard look at the sad state of affairs at home and abroad under the Trump administration, while reserving plenty of ire and disgust for the Democrats as well. You’ll recall that we primarily focused on the European Theater in our previous episode. This time, we look at the developments happening in the Americas.And while the developments are new, the story's contours are familiar.  First, you have the goons at ICE targeting individuals based on their political views. Over the last few days and weeks, we’ve witnessed activists like Mahmoud Khalil, Ranjani Srinivasan, and Radha Alawieh being targeted by the Fourth Reich Gestapo simply because they decided to exercise their constitutional right to free speech and speak up against genocide. As our listeners know full well, silencing dissent literally by disappearing dissenters is a tried and true tactic of fascism. We then turn to the Trump administration’s plan to deport hundreds, if not thousands, of Venezuelan nationals (for now) to El Salvador, where they will languish in concentration camps, out of reach from lawyers, journalists, and human rights defenders, as they await removal proceedings by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. And, as far as we can tell, the strategy of deporting the undesirables is not going to end with the Venezuelans.  Trump’s lap dog “lil” Marco Rubio has even been in talks with El Salvador’s President Bukele to work out a plan to send undesirable U.S. citizens to serve their criminal sentences in Salvadoran black site jails. The rotten cherry on top of this putrid cake is that, in the past few weeks, the Trump administration has also targeted several prominent law firms in retaliation for their political involvement in the 2016 election and beyond.  Through executive orders, Trump has barred federal agencies from working with these law firms, revoked any security clearances that the firms' lawyers might have had, and even restricted their access to certain federal buildings.  If that sounds familiar, it should, as it is precisely the kind of thing that Adolf Hitler did back in the day. It’s the purge and intimidation of the nonconforming elements of the bourgeois elite to unify the ruling class behind the criminal state, in preparation to crush into submission the working classes when crisis inevitably hits.We give a brief preview of the economy and the ingredients for a crash stewing on the boiler, and draw just a couple of the seemingly innumerable parallels to previous fascist apex moments before bringing it all back home to what this podcast is all about: calling out both parties in the sorry spectacle that passes for a democracy, exposing the historical roots of their mutual fecklessness and self-interested cruelty, and urging our listeners to join us in building - albeit from a whisper - the foundations for a new political formation built on truth, justice, and love. In sum, the Fourth Reich alarm bells are ringing. These are scary times. So sit back, try to relax (we know that is a tall order these days), and be sure to put on that PPE—this dig is another one that qualifies for hazard pay.

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America.

America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. Now, he has a mile. He knows so long this is to die, afraid of we never be secure.

It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is a day. I have a national globe.

This is coming. This is Fourth Reich. And I'm done. Welcome back. This week we are stepping away again from the Warren Commission Decided, and we're revisiting the modern day to cover current events because, boy, has it been a wild ride. There's just so much to cover. And we received your feedback. It seems like you enjoy listening to these episodes.

as much as we enjoy making them. So we figured, why not? Let's do another one. That's right. But first, I want to just say once again, on behalf of Dawn and myself, thank you very much, deeply, sincerely. We appreciate every one of you. We love every one of you. We are sending our thoughts, our good vibes, our positive outlook to all of you.

through the radio waves, through the home Wi-Fi, through the internet, whatever. We are with you, and in solidarity, you can always write to us via email at forthrighteckpod at gmail.com. We love hearing from you. And you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Fourth Reichpod.

And we're also on Patreon. If you're feeling generous, if you have the means to do so, we would be so grateful if you join the ranks of our patrons. One note about that. Our Patreon is exclusively for, as of now, exclusively for just support. We just need your support. We try and do put some exclusive content. I think Don this week put up a new track of music.

That's right. And we certainly endeavor to put on little treats on Patreon. But for now at least, the purpose of the Patreon is just to fund this little project. To keep the wheels turning on this train, keep us running on time, and add a little more fuel to our engines. I think Don, last time you may have said coal to the engines. but here on Fourth Reich Archaeology, our engines are, they run on love. So we put, throw a little love in the engines. Not lithium.

Yeah, no rare earth metals. But, right, so yeah, with all of the initial threshold sort of housekeeping done, I think we should just get right into it because, God damn, there's been a lot going on in this. world of ours. Why don't you start us off? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, I think this week, we are continuing what we're broadly calling our Fourth Reich Geopolitics series, and what this series really is, you know, we did our sort of find, choose your Hitler series with respect to the presidential election. And this kind of picks up where some of that left off now that I think more of the American public would agree with our broad thesis that we are living in something of a fascist

reality under a regime that bears all the hallmarks. that we recognize as fascist. We want to provide an analysis that it's not a delivery of the news type of a thing, but it's really fitting the headlines or some of what we see going on in the world into the broader analytical framework that we've been developing all along. And so while we focus our discussion on a lot of current goings on, I think we are endeavoring at the same time to stay rooted in the same historical context that we've developed, whether it's through the Warren Commission series, through Jerry World, etc., we will try to refer. back to connect the dots and to root and to base our vantage point on the present in our understanding of the past. And with that said, you know, the last one of these that we did a few

weeks ago was really focused in large part on the European theater, so to speak, the geographic pivot of history of Sir Halford McKinder, passing through your Kalhaushofa to the American Cold War geopoliticians, all with respect to the situation in Ukraine. developments there this time around we're staying in the western hemisphere by and large and we are going to focus on the current fascist American maneuvering to one wrench something approximating total control over the politics of the Western Hemisphere. Two, to use the geopolitical ferment in the Western hemisphere to engage in fascist conduct on the domestic level, talking about deportations

and the like. And then finally, you know, once we've kind of covered the ground, work covering things like immigration, things like tariffs and the economy, we will bring it all back to that drum that we've really been beating, I think, since episode one. And that drum beat is essentially the need for a political formation to be organized outside of the two-party duopoly that has operated for so many decades now as the left hand of the Democrat party and the right hand of the Republican Party strangling the life out of the people. And I mean the working class people not only within the confines of the United States of America, but also throughout.

its sphere of influence and even beyond. We're talking about a global empire with designs geared towards total control on a global scale, the elimination of rivals, the slaughter of innocence in the name of expanding markets. This is the very same empire that picked up the torch from the Nazi project of the Third Reich and sprinted like hell

through the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st to achieve that same objective. Total control. Right, and just to boil it all down, we are living in the Fourth Reich and that is a very bad think you got your shovel dick

I got my shovel I got my hard hat and I'm putting on extra PPE for this one because it's going to be a stinky stinky dick yep let's break ground let's do it well this is a time of the empty jails other nations emptied their jails into the United States that's an invasion

This is not about free speech. This is about people that don't have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card, by the way. Politics needs your mind. Politics needs human beings. Politics need lies. That's why, my friend, it's an evidence.

Politics is violence. What, my friend, it's an evidence. He is violence. MS-13, Tren darago, whatever it may be, he has offered his jails so we can send to me and he will put him in his jail. And he's also offered to do the same for dangerous criminals currently in custody of serving their sentences in the United States, even if their U.S. citizens are legal residence. It's just one more sign of what an incredible friend we have here in President Buchello.

That's why my friend, it's an evidence. A district court judge has no authority to direct the national security operations of the executive branch. The president is operating at the apex of his authority when you are dealing with questions of invasion and questions of alien enemy infiltration, as well as the expulsion of terrorist illegal aliens from the country. That's the president operated at the absolute apex of his constitutional authority. And in the coming days, you will see the full suite of presidential authority. suite of presidential authorities used to extirpate this gang, this terrorist organization from our soil.

Well, I find it remarkable that any district judge has the authority to overrule president's executive orders. This is a good one. Is everybody listening? Politics need force, force. Politics need cries. Politics need ignorance. The weaponization.

of our system by law firms. Even pro bono work they're doing just in order to plug up government, stop government. And nobody knows about it more than me. And hopefully that'll never happen again. Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal. By definition.

Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. Okay. So the first agenda item to discuss is broadly writ deportations. Everybody's favorite topic. And Dick, maybe I'll pass it off to you. I know that in our last episode, we were just reacting to the early reports about the abduction. and the extraordinary rendition, albeit domestically, of Mahmoud Khalil. So maybe you could start out by giving us the update on this type of politically driven deportation, exclusion, and general clampdown using the immigration control powers of the executive to restrict and police free speech. No problem.

Okay, so for those of you that aren't aware, Mahmoud Khalil was a Columbia University student, graduate student, and he was arrested by federal agents at Columbia University for his protest. He was a, you know, an activist who was, had the audacity to speak up. against the genocide. And for doing that, what happened was he was taken in. He was detained. He was

detained in New York. And then if you recall, we actually didn't know where he was at the time of our last recording or what, you know, what the federal government had done with him. We've since discovered that what had happened was they had detained Khalil in New York, but then promptly extradited him took him to Louisiana where he is now awaiting processing and you know for what it's worth there's a federal court order that says he should not be removed until he has his due process whatever that's worth in today's world but as of now Mahmoud Khalil is being held in Louisiana where he's pending his, you know, appearance in front of an immigration judge later this month. This conduct by the federal government, I mean, there should be alarm bells ringing in

everyone's head. Here is a student who was engaging in his right to free speech, to speak up about a beyond a political issue, a human rights issue. And because he had, I guess, what the federal government would view,

the temerity to do that, the audacity to do that, he had got to go, you know? And so the Trump administration here, and we'll see elsewhere,

is using the immigration and customs enforcement agency to do violence upon protesters, upon people who are doing nothing more than speaking their mind about a human rights issue. Shame on ice, but even more so, shame on Columbia University. Yeah, absolutely. And they've said a horrifically dangerous precedent too, right? Absolutely. And because Khalil isn't the only Columbia University student that has gone through this, right? It's embarrassing at this point.

Right. You might be referring to Ranjani Sri Navasan, who was another Columbia University student. She was of Indian nationality. and as I understand it, the ICE agents actually were roving around Columbia's campus looking for her even before they rounded up Mahmoud Khalil and she fortunately had the wherewithal not to open her door to these agents in the first instance. listener please access know your rights materials so that you know what to do in the event that you may be targeted for any reason whether by police by ice or whatever because at least on paper for now we all do enjoy certain rights that our forebearers have fought and died for and that this country purports to stand for which are being drastically curtailed but nevertheless act as if you had those rights because if you give them away willingly nobody is going to reclaim them on your behalf.

But anyways, Srinavasan was put into fearing for her life. by these ice raids in her house until the point where she got herself a ticket to Canada and left the country and the Trump administration has since gloated on social media about scaring her into self-deporting something that is just, such a slap in the face. I mean, the rank hypocrisy, I mean, to sound like a broken record once again, but an administration that promises America first and that promises to embody American values and then shreds the Constitution in this way is something that I think nobody who voted for Trump or who supported Trump for whatever reason.

You know, I know that for sure many people supported him for bad reasons. But probably some people did find their way into the Maga sphere on the simple ground that Maga and Trump were the only political formation out there. there that at least rhetorically promised a rejection of the dead-end unaccountable politics of yesteryear whereby this two-party duopoly screws everybody over and enriches a narrow political class largely consisting of wealthy people who are unconnected to the mess. well if that is if you or anyone you know came to trump through that path you have been led astray

and screwed over because the degree to which these people are just playing games with the constitution is astounding but just quickly to put on the lawyer hat to our non-lawyer listeners out there, right? Because I've seen on social media a lot of the right wingers that are defending the administration's action are citing certain provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act that give the Secretary of State or that give whatever agency, whether, you know, it used to be the INS that was under the Department of Justice until the Department of Homeland Security was created after 2001, after 9-11. But regardless, the First Amendment of the United States Constitution says in no uncertain terms,

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. And, listener, it says what it says. Right. And I think at this point, we should just clarify for the non-lawyers and the folks who don't read the Constitution all the time like we do. It says Congress shall pass no law. It's not leaving room open for the president to pass those law because elsewhere in the

Constitution, it says that. Congress is the body that is entitled to pass laws, not the president. So the only body in the government that is entitled to pass laws shall not pass any law that abridges the right to First Amendment, you know, free speech. That's right. And there's another part of the Constitution that's called the Supremacy Clause, which states that the Constitution shall be the supreme law of the land. In other words, if any law of Congress, like, for example, the Immigration and Nationality Act that so many of our favorite fascists are citing as a reason for why Marco Rubio, or Little Marco, as we call him here, why he was in his rights to declare Mahmoud Khalil, persona non grata,

and have him deported from the country, the INA is subordinate to the Constitution. It's subordinate to the First Amendment. Congress shall make no law, abridging the freedom of speech. Now, another question is if the Supreme Court does its little tricks and will find some way for this administration, to weasel out from under the Constitution the same than the Supreme Court in the Cold War did in the McCarthy era or in the era of the Palmer raids before that when our boy Jay Edgar Hoover

was first making his bones and deporting the likes of Emma Goldman and the others who were rounded up as communists and anarchists in the first Red Scare on you know Trump up national security grounds, well, listener, you can have, it's not legal advice that we're giving you, but it is a lawyerly assessment of the state of the law. That the, whether you're an originalist reading the Constitution or not, that it's pretty plain and simple that the Bottom line is that this shit is ab so fucking lootly illegal. Do not give an inch, do not give a centimeter or a millimeter. Do not Chuck Schumer this shit.

It doesn't matter what he said. Freedom of speech, the administration itself has conceded that Khalil did nothing except what they called something like Hamas related activity or some bullshit nonsense that they make up out of thin air and it's the same thing that they're doing for all of these other people. Sorry for going off on a tangent, but I think part of what we are trying to provide part of the value proposition for Fourth Reich archaeology

is a legal perspective that is not within this kind of bullshit legalese lib discursive framework where we have to pretend that a bunch of fake things are actually true before we start talking real shit. So sorry about it. Sorry to take up all that oxygen. No, no. I think one more point on that is like the way they do it, right?

and this is the really disgusting thing, the mental gymnastics, right? You take Khalil or Shrinivasa, and what they're doing is they're speaking up about human rights violations. They're saying, look, there's a genocide that happened, right? There's a genocide going on. People are dying, right?

And what the administration is doing now, what the federal government's doing now, is they're saying, okay, if you support Palestine, that means you are supporting Hamas, right? And they equate that together to say, okay, if you are against Israel, if you are for the Palestinian people, that means you are for Hamas. And if you're for Hamas, you're a Hamas supporter, that makes you a terrorist. And one more name to add to the list that might not be the extent of it.

I'm sure this is a list that's growing every day, but one more person. that was targeted for the same reason is the medical doctor at Brown University School of Medicine, Radha Alawiyah, who was a Lebanese woman attempting to reenter the country from a trip to Lebanon, and her phone was seized. It was discovered that she attended the funeral of, Hassan Nasrallah and she was deported to Lebanon and her status was stripped and I think we'll bring her back up this is just to lay a foundation but later on I want to bring her back up when we get to talking about the Trump administration's targeting of law firms but I think Dick why don't

you keep on that track that you were starting to pull and maybe bring us to another sort of story about mass deportations right friends look it's a lot of hard work putting together these episodes i got to say the silver lining for episodes like this one is it's really low-hanging fruit. The things these these jerks are doing, it's like right out of the fascism playbook. So another thing that's been going on

as of late is this mass deportation of Venezuelans. And the president, what he's done is he's relied on an archaic law from 200 years ago, the Alien Enemies Act. And what he's saying is that if you're Venezuelan and you're in this country illegally, you are connected to a Venezuelan gang. Don, you're going to help me

out here. And because you're Venezuelan and they're Venezuelan and you may have ties to them, that means that you are a supporter of that organization. We are going to designate that organization as a terrorist organization, an enemy of the state, and by association, you too are an enemy of the state. And we're going to give you your process, but we're going to do it this way. We're going to deport you to a third. country where we've set up a prison camp and you will languish in that prison camp until we're

ready to put you through the process what the Trump administration has done is they've developed again I think again through with Mini Mark Rubio I think Minnie Mark has his dirty hands all over this one but through cooperation with El Salvador and the Buckele regime, they've come to agreement to deport thousands of Venezuelans here in this country to El Salvador to wait until they have their hearing dates, until they have their day in court. This one is quite familiar. Maybe you want to talk about the precedent for using camps. like this to hold people without any process on the promise of one day maybe you will have your court day.

Yeah, Bouthernerner Can't O'Connor Mucca, with a mutton with 20 kilos of pura anti-sapo, anti-yuta, the drug, they're in Colombia, butta opera

cocinando fuchsia and the bala of the armeros are brought from a trearrawa, coinando lika with the water, the t'emua, me trahola, but I mean, I think you kind of,

Yeah, I mean, I think you kind of hinted at it. These are, in fact, camps where you could say that people are being concentrated, perhaps. Yikes. And, you know, you said thousands. I want to be clear, like, the first flight, just to unpack the facts a little bit more, the first flight, I think it was like 240. or something like that alleged gang members but no evidence whatsoever was provided to corroborate the

fact that they were gang members and not only that but the the the i think some people that have been accused of pertaining to this gang in the past have been found to just simply be Venezuelans who have tattoos. That's their crime. Right. I was going to say that we are, you know, I think we're both pretty familiar with this process and I think at this point what they're doing is they're saying, okay, men of a particular age group, men who have tattoos, men who maybe live and come from certain areas in Venezuela, they are going to get the presumption that they're associated with the game. Exactly. Exactly.

And in terms of precedent, you have to kind of span the globe because there are many different historical precedents for this type of state conduct. one that's probably the most obvious well let's start right here in the united states of america was the last time that this alien enemies act was invoked in the united states when was that why it was during world war two oh and you've got this epic quote you got to lay down this epic quote you got here don yeah i mean look i think it's the third time that we've read out this quote on the podcast and it's our very close friend john j mccloy who as our

loyal listeners will know was the deputy to the secretary of war henry l stymson and part of his gambit in his role was to arrange for the internment of Japanese Americans, including American citizens, during World War II, under the pretext that they somehow posed a national security threat, not only the internment of Japanese Americans, but also the confiscation and expropriation of their property, which was in many ways redistributed or sold at fire sale basement bargain prices, another theme that we'll revisit later in this episode, listener, to the rapacious capitalist class in this country, right? So the interment was not only a fascist mechanism for enacting racial revenge on a population, but it was also a means for capital to extract value

from, you know, everywhere from working class to middle class to even some Japanese Americans of moderate wealth. But what John J. McCloy said, when he was warned that the mass internment of Japanese on the basis of race could, violate the Constitution, what he said was, if it is a question of the safety of the country and the Constitution of the United States, why? The Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me. So it is. So it is. And the bedfellow that the United States is making with El Salvador. it's I mean it's hilarious right it's you have this country El Salvador which surely the US the Trump administration is looking as a at as a law and order administration because

if you look on paper the numbers suggest El Salvador is a country that went from being a country that had the highest death highest murder rate I think of any country right there were more deaths per capita in El Salvador than there were in the Coringal Valley and war zones, right, in 2014, 2015, 2016. But then what happened around 2022 is you had Buckele come in and clean up the place. And I think this administration really likes that. But what they don't tell you is that the way Buckele did that is by essentially rounding up nearly a hundred 100,000 people and just putting them in jail. Many of these people never got any due process

and are still just languishing in prisons to this day. And of course you're going to get a reduction of crime when you're indiscriminately just corraling people and putting them in jail and locking them away, right? Maybe 10%, maybe 1% of those people were actual criminals What about the rest? This is where the alarm bell should be ringing. If the Trump administration is looking at a country like El Salvador and saying,

oh, yeah, they're doing things right? That's a cause for major concern. And, you know, just to zoom it out on the trajectory of El Salvador that you just described, I think it bears mentioning because the Trump people and disturbingly, I've even eavesdropped in my outings around town, you know, whether I'm out to dinner. And in fact, this is where I eavesdropped on this particular conversation. But you hear people that are speaking so highly of the Buckele crackdown, which essentially performs a complete exchange of least.

liberty for quote-unquote safety, right? And, you know, how did El Salvador get violent? Well, the gangs in El Salvador are largely gangs that were started in U.S. prisons of people who were later deported back to El Salvador after experiencing incarceration, largely in the state of California. And developing criminal networks while in prison. Along drug routes that were themselves developed protected and expanded by the CIA in order to fund its Cold War guerrilla warfare throughout Central and South America

and to enrich the very many people who have sucked at the teat of CIA cocaine over the many decades, right? Like, we're not going to get deep into that now. Suffice it to say, check out Gary Webb's Dark Alliance, right? Check out the cocaine politics at Peter Dale Scott, the politics of heroin by Al McCoy. and lots of resources document in painstaking detail the ways in which the traditional forms of life have just been eviscerated throughout Latin America in favor of these drug economies, these criminal networks, oftentimes which are indistinguishable from the client states that the U.S. has propped up throughout the region.

And so when the Trump people look at something like the Buckele phenomenon, what they see is almost an evidence of white supremacy, to put it in kind of a stark term. But that's what they think, right? They think these are savages. They kill each other senselessly. They're criminals. They are inherently undisciplined and uncivilized.

And thank God that this strong man came around to crack the whip on them. It's really no different than what you might have heard about Pinocet in the 70s and 80s. And why is that important now? Well, because, I mean, to put it in a Fourth Reich terminology, El Salvador is auditioning for the role of occupied Poland. It's true. They've invited and welcomed our prisoners, not just immigrants, right? Puekele, I think at one point said,

we were willing to be your prison contractors for anything. It's chilling. I mean, it's truly chilling. I don't know if any journalist, or any human rights organizations or whatever have even been able to access these sites in El Salvador. I mean, they certainly can't get into them the same way that they could if it were in the territorial United States.

That's a good point. So to kind of take stock of where we're at with the Nazi parallels, we have one group of people being mass categorized as enemies of the state for their support of Palestinian rights and their opposition to genocide. Right. I think we can even say even broadly, more broadly, right? Because I don't think it's even about Palestinians. I think it's virtually a human rights issue, right? It would be anyone in that same position.

It's like there's a group of people who are saying, these people are being targeted because of their ethnicity, because of who they are, because of their immutable characteristics, and that's bad, and those are the people being targeted. Right, unless they're talking about, like, I don't know, the Uyghurs. For the most part, it will be Palestinians, at least for the foreseeable future, just given what's going on. But yes, I agree that it could be turned against any political group and chances are that immutable characteristics could be used as a shorthand to identify people with those political sympathies. but the other group is definitely you know ethno-national and that is anybody Latin American and is unassimilated broadly speaking whether that means simply speaking Spanish or an indigenous language or whether that means the way that you dress or whether that means

tattoos, whatever it is, those characteristics can be used and these AI tools and other very gross mechanisms that are being employed to identify the targets of these dragnets. It's going to be a broad group, and the minute you step out of line, you're going to be subject to mass deportation. And if it's anything like the deportation of these Venezuelans, you know, even if a United States Article III federal court intervenes to stop your deportation, this administration has proven its willingness to directly violate the law, to ignore the separation and balance of powers, and to ride roughshod over any semblance of constitutional rights. And I think that transitions us to the next topic that we were going to get into,

which is really this kind of the frontal nature of the attack on the rule. of law itself The crops are all in And the peaches are rotting The oranges are piled in their Creosote dumps You're flying them back To the Mexico border

To pay all their money To wait back again Goodbye to my one Goodbye Rosalita Adios my amigos Jesus and Maria you won't have a name when you ride the big airplane and all they will call you will be deportee I think you just laid it out nicely and I just want to reiterate it right what has the

state been doing it's been targeting people who speak up against violations human rights violations it has been using its allies its sort of strong men allies in other countries relying on them to do the harm that it wants done right and what we're going to talk about now is how the state is targeting the lawyers law firms that are speaking out or in some cases not even doing much to criticize the state the president the people in power I think that's what you're getting into, right? Like the Perkins Coosys, the Paul Weiss, the Covington. Yeah, I'd call it a preemptive strike against any well-resourced means of a legal response

against the administration's attack on constitutional rights and civil liberties. And we were talking before we went on air how it's sort of funny. It's like true to form the Trump administration is just hilarious about the way it goes about doing this, right? So for example, it targets Perkins Cooey because of the work that the firm did in 2016 during that campaign, the famous dossier. Right, yeah, maybe, Dick, do you want to just, in case listeners don't know what Perkins Kui is or what that background is? Right.

Well, I was, it's going to bring it back. So you had, it's Mark Elias. Is that the lawyer? Yeah, Mark with the sea. So you have a lawyer, Mark with a C, Mark Elias, he's on Twitter. I mean, I'm not particularly a fan of the guy. No, no, he's a big, you know, a big. Fat Democrat lib guy.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And he was a prominent lawyer in the Hillary 2016 campaign. One of the main guys who was sort of doing this investigation into Russia's involvement with the Trump campaign and sort of developed this report about the sort of the Russian backers behind the Trump campaign, right? which Trump will never forget, never forgive. And because of Elias' work at Perkins Cooey, what Trump did this turnaround, right, this administration, what he's done,

is he signed an executive order. And I think it's like the executive order calls out Perkins Cooey, right? It's like an executive order targeting Perkins Cooey. Oh, yeah, yeah, it specifically does. Specifically, like the only thing governed in that executive order is Perkins Cooey. I think the first part of it is talking about the Russia stuff that they did. But then also it goes even crazier. It's like also Perkins Cooey's responsible for violating Title VII and employment discrimination

and their DEI initiatives and like sort of just like word vomit about how Perkins Cooey is discriminating against people. Yeah, against white men in particular. And so what the executive order is calling. for is like a full on audit and investigation into like any government contracts that are being doled out to Perkins Cooey. All of the credentials, the government security clearances that Perkins Cooley lawyers have have been removed, right? Doing this crazy shit to sort of essentially retaliate against what basically Elias was doing in 2016, right? Well, yeah, although to be be fair, I don't want to paint too broad a brush on Perkins Cui or their quote unquote

political practice because as I understand it, you know, part of it was direct representation of the DNC and some of what we might say nastier work doing things like the steel dossier, working with Fusion GPS, but they also did do much more legitimate work or, you know, what we would consider to be laudatory work. I mean, admirable work, right, enforcing the Voting Rights Act, for example. And it goes both ways, right? Like the DNC's team of well-paid lawyers, it's kind of the same people that are going after, like ballot access for third parties and attacking Bernie campaign in the primaries and all that

stuff and then they do some good stuff when it comes to protecting voters that are getting thrown off the rolls because of Republican voter purges or you know it right like the Georgia stuff yeah it's like it's nuanced it's not it's not something that you could say everything that they did is great and it's not something that you could say everything that they did is bad because just like the institutional democrat party right some of the stuff is broadly cognizable under the label of harm reduction and I don't think that we want people to be thrown off the voter rolls even if that is ultimately the expression of the political system that both parties have allowed to take form in this

country. But anyways, I mean, to get back to the executive order, it's both a retaliation for the kind of specific anti-Trump stuff, but it sweeps in all this other stuff, including the voting rights litigation, including whatever other actions they were taking that may have a very legitimate basis in the law. And it's not only retaliating against them for past conduct, but it's also like one of the provisions, for example, I'm looking at Section 5B, agency officials shall, to the extent permitted by law, refrain from hiring employees of Perkins Cooey, absent a waiver from the head of the agency. So they're saying, like, anybody that works for this law firm is ineligible for government

service under this executive order. That's... Right. Wow. It's bonkers. The reason I was focusing on Elias, it was basically the conversation we were having before we went on air. it's like Mark Elyse doesn't work for Perkins Cooey anymore.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, and I don't think there's an executive order targeting his new firm. Yeah, exactly. But just to move on from this point, I think this is another sort of, we're going to just mark this, you know, flag this one too. It's like this executive order was temporarily blocked by a federal judge, day. after it was issued, okay? The administration can't do this, right? And they did it.

The judge had no problem doing it, right? They ruled from the bench. They were like, this violates the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment. It's all there. Right. And to be clear, with a rational basis in the law, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Another kind of lawyer to non-lawyer audience word of advice, you know, not everything that judges do whether you like it or whether you dislike it is just arbitrary reflecting that judge's whims right right and I mean this one has particular foundations in the fact that our society in our society lawyers have a particular standing to sort of serve as these zealous advocates for people for parties who can't otherwise represent themselves they're they're the lawyers are the people in society that sort of speak up on issues and this is exactly one of the things

the judge pointed to was like you can't stop lawyers from being lawyers anyway my point being what did Trump do after getting that sort of ruling

where his executive order was temporarily blocked well let's just say Trump views court orders, much like our boy McCloy viewed the Constitution, right? It's no more than a shred of paper. And he just turns around and he issues another executive order, this time targeting a different law firm. And that executive order basically says the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah, he's wielding a hammer because in his first administration, and this is something that, you know, in our professional lives, Dick and I see and are very disturbed by. But in the first Trump administration, there was not only a verbal outpouring against things like the Muslim ban and the racist rhetoric and what have you, remember during the first, first Trump administration is really when a lot of this, what is now being denigrated as DEI, but we might call attention, you know, increased attention to historical racial discrimination. If we're being charitable and, you know, viewing it in the most favorable light, got off of the ground.

Historical to ameliorate historical sort of harms and also to remove sort of headwinds that are very much in existence today, right? And it was, you know, not saying that the big law firms were by any means the tip of the spear. But there was a general mobilization within the legal profession against the excesses of the first Trump administration's agenda that has not at all materialized this time around and the collective effect of these types of executive orders, whether it's the one specifically targeting particular law firms that have been a thorn in Trump's side. I mean, just to mention another one, right? There was one targeting, I don't know if it was an executive order

or just like a memorandum or something, but some kind of a presidential decree targeting Covington law firm, which is another, you know, massive law firm. You know who actually worked for Covington, Dick, was our friend John Sherman Cooper. Word. I was about to say the AG, what's his name?

Obama's guy. Oh, Eric Holder, yeah. Yeah. He's no John Sherman Cooper, but... No, he's not. You know, he's not. But, but, yeah, I mean, it's a huge... Did you imagine Eric Holder on the...

Oh, Eric Holder on the Warren Commission? Go ahead, I'm sorry. Oh, man. Just to say, you know, Covington, massive law firm was targeted just for the fact that they represented the former DOJ official Jack Smith, who led the prosecution. against Trump, one of the federal prosecutions against Trump, when it became clear that Trump won the election and was going to come after Jack Smith in his individual capacity, he retained Covington, who represented him apparently for

free, and as a result of their pro bono representation of Trump, Trump's political enemy, he stripped all of their lawyers of security clearances if they had any and had similar issues with hiring anybody from that firm and basically steering, you know, prospective employees away from the firm, prospective clients away from the firm, just real down and dirty mob shit. and this, please, by no means, is to carry a brief for Covington, Perkins, or any other big law firm. It is simply to really hammer home the big game targets that the elephant gun of the Trump administration is aimed at. because these are pretty powerful institutions, these law firms,

and by eliminating them from the headwinds, as you said, Dick, against the Trump agenda is greasing the skids much more than I think the lay person might otherwise think. And here's where I'll take it back to. She was initially represented in federal court by a lawyer, another one of these big law firms. In fact, it's one that's come up repeatedly in the Warren Commission series because one of the original named partners was Abe Fortis. It used to be Arnold Parenthood. Porter and Fortis, before Abe Fortis was nominated to the Supreme Court, and the firm was

required to remove his name as a matter of ethics. Well, what happened to Arnold and Porter's representation of that First Amendment deportee? They withdrew after it became clear to them that she had attended the funeral of the Hezbollah leader. In other words, the intimidation is working. Just like the intimidation is working with Columbia University, which was threatened with the removal of hundreds of millions in federal funds and has bent over backwards to throw its students

and their free speech rights under the bus in exchange for that sweet mula. And that's really what it's all about. And to his credit, I mean, to their credit, the administration is acutely aware of how tied all of these organizations, these institutions, are to that sweet, sweet federal cash. Yeah.

Speaking of a Speaking of the Speaking of that sweet Speaking of that sweet cash I think now we come to the segment of our episode where we just talk about the economy economic imperialism that's right yeah so i think everybody knows at this point the tariffs that's a huge point in this administration the trump administration's idea to ramp up tariffs to

with the hopes i guess the stated hope of promoting the u.s economy america first means we're not important anything don't forget that the tariffs are something that we pay but put that aside I mean it doesn't make any sense and we know it doesn't make any sense because the stock market is going every which way any which day all over the place and especially down especially down

and I think our running theory here on fourth Reich archaeology is that this is all a part of a larger ploy to tank the stock market, at least for a short term, but who knows what's going to happen. Yeah, and all these police state fascist control tactics will really come in handy once the economy tanks, and not to mention, keep your eye out for a false flag to inspire Americans to get out their wallets and take out more credit to spend the country out of depression for patriotic purposes. But needless to say, we can expect this administration to pull out the old disaster capitalism playbook.

With the hopes of doing a couple things, right? The stock market is largely tied to the U.S. economy, and so what I think is going to happen what I think the Trump administration wants to happen is you get the market to crash you have all these companies that all of a sudden need cheap money you have the at the same time that you have interest rates coming down so that they will have access to this money you also have private equity come in and swoop in and gobble up companies on the cheap public companies on the cheap in a lot of ways you'll see this reverse effect of what we saw in 2019 2020 when a lot of companies were using that free money as an opportunity to get them you know make

themselves public right through these s packs or whatever i think we'll see sort of the reverse of that and at the same time what we'll see is what we've been sort of an acceleration of what we've been seeing in the last decade or so and certainly the last five years which is private equity, private companies coming in and buying public companies and taking them off the public market. I don't know. I mean, I'm an educated lawyer, but I really didn't get this stuff before well into my legal career.

What we're really talking about here is, right, any public company that sells its shares on a stock exchange, like the New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, whatever, the control of that company belongs to the person or persons or group that controls 50% plus 1 or whatever the corporate bylaws dictate is the control percentage. And so you hear a lot about IPOs, which is an initial. public offering whereby a startup company goes public, invites the members of the investing public to take ownership of the company by injecting their capital in the form of share ownership. And the opposite of that, which you're just describing, Dick, is a go-private

type of transaction where a private equity firm, a hedge fund, a consortium of investors, whatever buys up a controlling stake or even the whole kit and caboodle of outstanding shares of a company and takes it off the market. This is what Elon Musk did, if I'm not mistaken, with Twitter. Exactly. And the pattern we are likely to see repeat itself with these very cash heavy tech companies, tech hedge funds, tech private equity firms or even just generic private equity firms. Right. The government of Saudi Arabia.

Yeah. Yep, exactly. And I think just the point, one little point here is we've covered this before just really quickly, though. It's like the reason this is bad is that public companies, they're subject to disclosure laws. They're subject to regulations. They're subject to a whole list of oversight and reporting and disclosure requirements that private companies don't have. I think Twitter is an exceptional example of this. Right? No longer does Twitter have to report every three months what it's doing. It just sort of does what it wants to do. So, but in any way, anyway, the stock market is crashing. And I think I just want to talk about one stock that came up last time we were doing one of these present day episodes. Remember we were talking about Tesla and how, boy, what, we were wondering. What was Musk going to do because all these Democrats were essentially boycotting the company and they were going to be declining sales?

And I think we sort of talked our way out of it in that episode. We're like, oh, he's just going to become an even bigger government contractor. I don't think that either of us expected it to take the turn that it did. The solution was not to be an even bigger contractor. the solution was to contract the president to be an advertiser of its product. And frankly, I'm a little embarrassed that neither of us saw this coming because this is firmly in the fascism playbook. Is it not? Totally.

Yeah, you dug up some great stuff on this. It's like, you know, when you're seeing the rise of Hitler, what you're seeing is the rise of Hitler's support for the German auto. industry, right? The birth and development of Volkswagen. Same thing with Mussolini, right? During Mussolini's range, he was investing heavily into the automotive industry, into auto racing, into companies like fiat. You want to know a really funny anecdote about Fourth Reich automotive publicity that is etched in my memory? When the United States came around to recognizing and at least tacitly supporting the fascist Franco dictatorship in Spain and Dwight D. Eisenhower made his maiden voyage to Madrid, he was paraded around the city in the city in the very same

Volkswagen that Hitler had gifted to Franco and that Franco paraded Hitler around in. Oh my God. And I'm sure at that time

right, Ike is thinking, man, this is a nice trophy. I'm riding around in the car the guy I killed. Yeah, exactly. Like, what winners we are. But boy, does history really have another take on that? It's really come to light. So I think this actually brings us to our last point for this episode, right?

Why is it so important? Why is the work we're doing so important? Why do we think it's so important to insist that fascism in America? Fascism generally, it didn't start with Trump. Right. Just in this episode alone, we've already pointed to, many precedents not just in the officially designated fascist dictatorships of the past but i mean the the expulsion of immigrants to whether it be guantanamo which is something we didn't mention but i think

the listener will probably be aware that trump is also trying to send people to guantanamo but maybe it's just easier to send them to El Salvador instead, but it not only has precedent in the fascist, officially recognized fascist world, but also in practices like extraordinary rendition. This whole concept of surveilling foreign students is something that got its legs in the N-C-R-S-E-E-R-S-E-E-R-S. under the George W. Bush administration and the war on terror, all these databases and, you know, associations of identity characteristics with deportable felonies or deportable offenses or perceived offenses, something that dates back to the 1920s and then again in the 1950s and then again in the early 2000s.

like none of this stuff is new none of it and none of it is exclusively republican either totally the sort of corporatism in government the you know targeting of immigrants all of that stuff that's squarely in the dem's sort of purview as well right it's it sort of reminds me of this thing you mentioned, I can't remember who it was that you accredited to, you're going to help me out on it, but it's like the game as of, I don't know, the last 20, 30 years has been

the right wing just sort of ratchets it up and then when it comes into the left's hand, all they're doing is sort of dialing back a little bit but nonetheless sort of keeping the same course. And all the while, painting over

everything with this whitewash, veneer of democratic legitimacy that says well they went too far and that's why you voted us in and now we're just going to do the same thing but slower and four years later they're going to do the same thing ratchet it up again and there's never any sort of reversal of the past And Dick, I don't know for you personally. For me, it was the Obama effective pardon. I mean, it wasn't a formal pardon that he issued, but he essentially pardoned the absolute murderer's row of war criminals in the Bush administration against whom he had campaigned vigorously

in his purportedly anti-war 2008 campaign, and by the time he gets into office, he simply, with a wave of his hand, says, we're going to look forward and not back. Will you appoint a special prosecutor, ideally Patrick Fitzgerald, to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush administration,

including torture and warrantless wiretapping? We're still evaluating how we, we are going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices. And I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the CIA, you've got extraordinarily

talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyer. So no 9-11 commission with independent subpoena power? We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward, we are doing the right thing. And before you know it, Michelle is giving candy to George. and it just becomes this disgusting spectacle as you know the way that you've yeah yeah yeah W becomes this late night personality that goes around on all these talk shows as America's

sort of lovable uncle or something that does oil paintings and you just totally forget about the fact that this is the man who is responsible for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people's deaths yeah and i've even seen once again the same thing that happened in 2016 2017 another attempt at george w bush rehabilitation in the name of like oh well the normal republicans were this guy and the dems called him hitler it's like yeah motherfucker he killed a million people for fuck's sake but you know if it wasn't for the whitewashing of dubia we'd never have the whitewashing of cheney right and it's a serious indictment of the democrats and their whole political identity as a whatever you want to call it controlled opposition a you know professional managerial class

jobs program, a bourgeois arm of capital, whatever you want to call it, those are all accurate descriptions. There's really nothing that is too derogatory to describe the Democrats because they have enabled all of this. And to expect now that the Democrats are who we, the disgusted, must turn to, to shelter us from Trump or to provide an alternative to Trump. It's like going to, I don't know, an abusive parent to protect you from an abusive uncle. Because you know what's going to happen, right, under the Kamala. administration or the noose and or whatever fucking freak show administration that comes next that's a democratic administration they're going to just whitewash the trump administration right

Donald Trump is going to turn back into some weird craze celebrity profile right like it's it's sickening because you can see it and it's even worse because they say well the republicans go after their political opponents and they take the hacksaw to the administrative state aspects that they don't like and they fire people on mass for no reason just because they have a political bone to pick with the agency that that person works for but we don't do that we are institutionalists and we put the institution above all else. And in fact, our whole identity is to simply not be the bad thing that you think the other guy is. And therefore, we're going to just wind the clock back. And instead of

nostalgia for an apartheid 1950s state where men were psychotic alcoholic abusers, women were submissive pill-popping, you know, repressed housewives. Second-class, yeah, second-class citizens. And, you know, blacks and Latinos were denied the basic civil liberties that whites enjoyed, which is kind of the type of mega nostalgia that Trump has on sale. The Democrats are just going to sell a different type of fake-ass nostalgia. for a time like the Obama administration when, you know, Obama and John McCain could be opponents in the election

and then be good personal friends and agree that, yes, we do need to, you know, bomb Yemen. Well, that's one thing that everybody can agree on. Yeah. So this is, I mean, when you think about like these, the idea of a purity test or, you know, whatever sort of finger-pointing that the serious political analysts and people that are talking about these things from a very sophisticated perspective have to say, you know, I challenge them and I challenge you, listener, like, why should we

engage in a political discourse that is premised on a stack of lies you know it's totally totally that's first principles that's the first principles right there like throw away and this is what Trump pretended to do this is why he got sort of popular or at least a good reason a one of the reasons why he became popular that the lib sort of professional class would never want to admit that it's not just racism and bigotry why he's popular it's also because everybody is rightfully fed up with the political class and he's the only one that is sniping these snakes for what they are but he's exactly the same as they are and it doesn't offer any alternative and so it's like now is the time like

it's too late to keep on that train and so I think there's a besides you know the demographic group that we've talked about before the largest voting block in the country those who didn't vote in the presidential election, as we were discussing, you know, earlier off Mike, there's like a large chunk of people who are quote unquote Democrat voters who hate the Democrats, rightfully so. I mean, their approval ratings are in the absolute shitter, especially after Chuck Schumer's atrocious spectacle of obsequiousness to Trump with the budget and there's also a large and a growing demographic of Trump voters that are not getting the quote unquote America first agenda that they were promised I mean for fuck's sake

Trump has suspended ICE investigations into human trafficking and drug trafficking that he said was going to like purge the nation of all of the evils of cross-border traffic and he's investing those resources to scrolling the social media profiles of fucking college students exercising their constitutional rights like who could get behind that who the fuck could get behind that only a fucking liar an idiot or you know

maybe the well-intentioned person who was fed up with everything and kind of found a last resort in Trump and hopefully for God's sakes is I mean come on we're seven years into the shit already but I mean he's he's he's the king of crime he is the king of crime he's a fucking sleaze ball mob boss TV reality TV star

piece of shit not a guy who used to be a piece of shit a current and an eternal piece of human shit. Okay, I think that's good for this episode. Wait, but before we log off, I want to say one thing that it's not all bad, right? There are some things that Trump is doing that we're excited about, and this has nothing to do with this episode. But I do want to point out, so we're recording this on Monday, March 17th, and Trump announced, I think, today, that he is going to release the JFK files tomorrow.

Yes. Oh, wait, no, no. Actually, I have it down here, so I'm just going to, I want to say it exactly like how he said it because it's great. He says, we are tomorrow announcing and giving all the Kennedy files. I've instructed my people. I got lots of people. I've instructed my people who are responsible

Tulsi Gabbard They're going to be released We have tremendous amounts of paper Tremendous paper There's going to be lots of reading And I said Just don't redact Just don't redact

That was like to sum up then The announcement We're going to see what he does, but I have something to look forward to for tomorrow. Yeah, and look, it's just in proof of concept. We are fair here on Fourth Reich Archaeology. We appreciate if it happens the JFK disclosure. We appreciate the willingness to actually do politics, to actually do politics, to exercise power. It's something that anybody with an imagination and a inkling of fealty to any sort of a

left or a revolutionary political program must embrace and must observe as the only real example in our living history, like maybe since FDR, of a president actually exceeding the bounds of the bourgeois liberal capitalist system set up by the founding fathers to protect their property interests and prevent any sort of upraising by the people they enslaved or the people they subjected to servitude and poverty. 100%. You can't ignore it, and you can't reject it just because it's done by the guy you hate. Okie-dokey, I think this is a good place to stop.

Thank you so much for tuning in. Be sure to tune in next week. We will pick up where we left off with the Warren Commission decided. For now, I'm Dick. And I'm done, saying farewell, and keep digging. Looking counter-clockwise, knowing what could happen any moment, maybe you, maybe even you. Step past all-lapse, always certain any moment, maybe you, maybe you, maybe even you. dream too sweet i can't do it not with you not even with you maybe never with you

and i'd tell my soul for total control yeah i'd tell my soul for total control yeah i'd tell my soul for total control Oh, I just held my soul for total control Over you Over you control of you.