It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #11

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

The gang discuss tariff chaos, the IRS handing over data to ICE, student visa cancellations, “lethality” in the military, and the Supreme Court. Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/politics/trump-administration-immigrant-detention-facilities-services.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-E4.PL6V.gJR0OQEOJP8G&smid=url-share  https://ucsdguardian.org/2025/04/07/5-ucsd-students-face-sudden-f-1-visa-terminations-a-6th-deported-at-the-border-no-apparent-pattern-among-students-targeted/  https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/university-california-statement-international-students-visa-status-terminations  https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lmcxoqk2ts24 https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278147/gov.uscourts.dcd.278147.30.1_1.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a931_2c83.pdf https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25881144-24a949/ https://bsky.app/profile/khuddleston.bsky.social/post/3lmaiaxi7f226 https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/immigration/2025/03/18/516185/hpd-says-their-stance-on-immigration-enforcement-hasnt-changed-despite-recent-turnover-to-ice/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/04/cea-chairman-steve-miran-hudson-institute-event-remarks/ https://apnews.com/article/china-response-us-tariffs-104-d40d497f6e07ee4163d88443cb75ab3fSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The championship is back in the Bay for the first time in 40 years. On the new limited podcast series, Dub Dynasty, we hear from head coach Steve Kerr on how Steph Curry almost never even joined the Warriors. In fact, I thought we had a draft date deal to end up getting him to Phoenix. For the entire behind the scenes story of Golden State's incredible 10 year run, listen to Dub Dynasty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey kids it's me Kevin Smith. And it's me Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter man who my wife has always said is just a beardless d***less version of me and that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young

one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless D***less Me on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever. You get your podcast. You Feeling This Too is a horror anthology podcast. It brings different creators to tell 10 vile, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no matters them the most. You're feeling this too. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts,

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Nate Smith. Tickets are on sale now at Ticketmaster.com. Coles own media. Tickets are on sale now at Ticketmaster.com Call Zone Media 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 week, we're covering the week of April 3rd to April 9th. We have we have recovered from the Liberation Day, fully liberated. Yeah. And now the economy is back to normal. Right?

Yes. Everything is really good. Everyone's 401Ks been normal. And stable. And stable, that's what's important. Just line go up. The economy runs from stability. I mean, one of the things the line did was go up. Yeah, the line's gone. Why should anyone complain?

The line's gone in a few different directions this week. Among the different directions the line went up was, you know, a portion of that time. Yes. Yeah. The only direction it hasn't gone is left, I guess, which, you know, we're waiting for that one. In related news, a dead cat can bounce. I don't know why they picked a cat for the dead animal

to bounce to refer to that stock market term. I think this is a term that's new to garrison, just judging by their facial expression. You don't know what that is? No. So basically when when a stock price for a company or whatever collapses, right? There will generally be it will straight a line down and then it will bump back up and it will look like it's rallying. But this isn't generally a rally. What it is is that when people like short a stock there's a point at which they have to buy back the shares, and that artificially inflates it briefly before it then begins to decline

again. So it's not a real... It's the result of how short selling works that there has to be this thing that makes it temporarily look like it's rallying, but that's really not what's happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm familiar with this concept, which is why... And they call it a dead cat bounce.

Yeah, it's referred to as a dead cat bounce, yeah. I don't know why it's referred to as a dead cat bounce, but it is. Because Stonkbrokers are not normal people. They're not wired right. These are Wall Street guys. One of them has probably done it. Like, that's probably why it's called that. Like...

Yeah. Look, I've thrown a lot of corpses at a lot of things and they don't really bounce. Speaking of corpses, Robert, you have some exciting news on the army. It's pronounced call Garrison. Yes, yes. The good news is the army is going to be more lethal and efficient than ever before, which President Trump announced while sitting in the White House next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had to take roughly at twice

the length of trip he normally has to take to go here because so many countries that he would normally fly over or stop in have arrest warrants out for him for all of the war crimes. Oh, we love to see it. But you know, it's not about the journey. It's about the people you journey to. And Netanyahu met with Trump, someone whom he clearly feels very safe and, dare I say, loving with.

And the two of them shared the most intimate bond that two elderly men who have committed war crimes can share, which is announcing a record budget for the United States military of $1 trillion. Well, I should say Trump stated it would be in the vicinity of $1 trillion. Now, does that mean possibly that very little is changing about the military budget? Yes, it does.

And we'll get to that in a second. Peg Seth, our Secretary of Defense, made a post on Twitter right after saying Trump is rebuilding our military and fast. He also really bragged about that trillion dollar amount and said, PS, we intend to spend every taxpayer dollar wisely on lethality and readiness. Now here's the thing, trillion dollars, shitload of money. Current amount of funding allocated to national defense programs, $892 billion.

So trillion dollars, about a 10% bump, right? For national defense programs. But it's actually unclear the way in which he phrased things and the way in which we like talk about the funding for national security. This could mean that basically the military will have pretty much the same, you know, something of an increase, but not a mass, not really a significant difference from what it has now. And there will be more money into other defense related programs. So this is not like as massive a thing as it might necessarily sound like. I think one thing that's sort of significant here is like how this comports with the way a lot of the folks on what we'll call the shit head left had talked about where there was this discussion that Trump's actually going to be, you know, bad for imperialism and the war machine.

And, you know, there was even talk as of the military budget comes down in this, you know Imperial Juggernaut of hell gets finally neutered and these people are stupid. Just all of those people are always wrong They were always going to just make the army bigger. They were always going to put more money in defense They were always always going to put more money into the hands of defense contractors Like anyone who knows anything about these people or about how Republicans have worked knew that was going to happen. There was never any chance that they were going to cut the actual amount of money. Now they're probably going to cut the number of people in the military because despite what Hegseth said, there's a lot of evidence that a shitload of this is going to go towards

modernization and in fact, armed services, each branch is being, armed services are all being asked to cut about 8% of their individual budgets in order to put money into modernization, and in fact, armed services are all being asked to cut about 8% of their individual budgets in order to put money into modernization efforts, which obviously any military needs to regularly modernize different systems. But this is also a thing where if your country is run entirely by grifters and conmen trying to shotgun money to their political supporters who have a lot of money in different defense companies. What this means to me is you are probably going to see them continue to trim numbers of actual troops and put more money into bullshit that gets a lot of money to contractors.

That is my expectation. That is what I see happening more than anything here. We'll see, but I think a lot of this additional money is going to go towards buying shit that may or may not be useful, but the primary purpose of putting the money into that shit is because somebody who is somebody gets a vig. Yeah, I mean, if we look at fascism as a concept too,

it kind of, it has this troubled relationship with modernity, but one of the things it likes to do is flex its new little weapon systems and toys and we're gonna see some guys posing with some weapon systems that probably never get used right like probably some AI targeting shit stuff like that yeah oh yeah oh yeah Israel already does that yeah well we gotta find some way to reallocate the alleged 150 billion dollars in doge Cuts, which is certainly a fake number. Absolutely a fake number.

We may as well send over 200 billion more to the Defense Department. Based on early IRS filings, there's something like half a trillion dollars that we might be losing in tax income this year. So, you know, that I don't think we're doing great. I should also note here a big part of the money that they're going to get for modernization is coming from cutting 50 to 60,000 civilian jobs, many of whom are veterans, but also just in terms of like military readiness, guys like Hague Seth, who's primarily a push up dude, and people who don't know anything about the military

see it as like, well, you know, the military, you just want as many door kickers as you possibly can. And you actually need very few of those guys. What you need a lot of is guys that can move things to different places and fix things when they break, and do a lot of the paperwork that's necessary to make both of those things possible, which is why you need those jobs.

And cutting a shitload of them is not likely to increase readiness. It's also worth noting that the US Army is looking at a force reduction of up to 90,000 active duty soldiers. This is based on an article from April 4th, which is a significant reduction. And again, like we're not real. Yes. Why? Why are they doing a 90% reduction? In part because it's very hard for them to find new active duty soldiers. It is not easy to get people to do this. And it is not the priority of anybody in charge of anything to actually get more soldiers. The priority is to put more money into systems, the AI and all this shit.

Like I don't think they have a vested interest in actually helping with that. How are we going to take Greenland with drones? Like, what are we doing? Yeah, probably. I mean, there's not a lot of people... That's probably how we're going to do it. There's not a lot of people in Greenland, Garrison. Excited for the naval blockade of Greenland to kick off in about two months.

Yeah. It's going to be great. Anyway, they're going to make part of why I think they feel confident trying to make you know, they're calling this making the army smaller and more agile is because Trump is doing his best to make friends with Russia. And we're certainly not going to whatever happens with Taiwan. The U.S. military is not going to be involved. Yeah, we ain't going to go back for them. You know, his attitude is like, what do we need this for?

We need an agile military that we can use to fuck with Greenland and Panama. Like that's, that's what we're going to be doing to two very similar biomes where, uh, like everything is very similar. Yeah. And there's a lot of people like, you know, the folks running Palantir who have an increasing amount of say in what happens to the military and, you know, what Trump does, who are basically advocating for like, we're going to have this whole kill chain automated soon. We barely need people.

You can't trust people. You know how untrustworthy your generals have proved, Donald. Cool. Well, I'm excited for some more Arctic camo surplus to hit the market once the Greenland situation is resolved. I'm excited to be fucking around wondering who a drone is going to kill next. That has been a really life-affirming experience for me and I'm excited to have it again soon. It's going to be great.

Robbie, you mentioned the IRS and the IRS maybe get less money. So I want to talk a little bit about the IRS. I guess let's start with a little summary of this week, Immigration News. This week, Char Raychick, who is the person who runs Libs of TikTok, joined ICE on a raid. She is, shall we say, the Julius Stryker of our modern fascist movement. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, yeah. I guess you're right, damn. Sorry, I'm just- Yeah, no, I mean, like I wasn't joking about that.

That's the most direct comparison to that. Yeah, sorry, I just took a moment to reflect on that and it's not a great thing to reflect on. It's really not, no, it doesn't make me feel good. Yeah, no, other things that don't make me feel good are the 16 Minutes report, 75% of people sent to sickle had no criminal conviction Which seems to leave open the possibility of there being a crime for which it would be okay To be sent to a foreign gulag with no hope of return

Which I don't believe is the case like yeah I'm very disappointed any reporting which focuses on guilt as if one could ever be guilty of anything which would make this justifiable You can't the government is also soliciting for proposals this week to massively increase migrant detention, which again is not surprising. We talked about this last November, but it's also not great. But where I want to focus today is on the IRS and the Abrego Garcia case that we spoke about last week. So, you will have seen some reporting that the IRS has said it will hand over information to people who are subject to criminal investigation to DHS or ICE, right? ICE being under DHS. So, they say, what happened here is that part of court filing is a memorandum of understanding between ICE and the IRS which released. In

the MOU, or in the court filing actually, they cite an offense of failure to depart the United States after being ordered removed. So essentially anyone who they're saying like, you have to go, right, they could then ask for their tax return information. Exactly what the IRS will disclose to ICE is covered by a big black redaction in the court documents. So we don't know that. The entire MOU is submitted, but there's significant redactions in it. One thing that's not redacted is that ICE has to hand over the person's name, address, and the crime for which they're investigating.

And it has to be a non-tax crime, not that that matters hugely. This is more limited than a lot of people have feared and it's more limited than a lot of the reporting I've seen. It's possible that there's something else going on. I saw the acting director at ICE was going to quit over this, I saw that this morning. But the fact that they have to have their address suggests that they couldn't locate them using the tax return form, right? Which is, which is a good thing.

Like it is one last step towards fascism, I guess. I'm also aware of ICE having memorandums of understanding with other agencies to include HUD, Housing and Urban Development. All of this is going to reduce the amount that migrant communities engage with the federal government to any degree. Contrary to what you might have heard, undocumented people do tend to pay their taxes. It's actually relatively rare for them not to do that. And this might change if the IRS starts handing over people's tax return information to ICE, right? Obviously, if HUD starts handing over people's information, that's going to lead to people not being as willing to take housing benefits and will be planning up living on the street, right?

On the other hand, Houston, city in Texas, for those of you who aren't familiar, have I pronounced that right, Robert? Te-House? Yeah. I thought it was, I wasn't sure if it was Houston. Houston. Oh, Houston, understood. It's a place we just don't go. That's how I refer to Houston. Okay, beautiful. So this Texas no-men's land town has turned over information, including

addresses and license paid for people charged with driving without a license, even though some of this under Texas law is supposed to remain confidential. So that's great. They are also now making immigration detentions at regular traffic stops. So I'm aware of one incident where a man was arrested after being stopped for a cracked windscreen and he's now in ICE detention. So that there presumably, an ICE warrant for this person that the Houston police then acted upon. And this can just be racial profiling, right?

Like, if they could just pull someone over and then send them to ICE, like, they're just gonna start pulling over as many people that they don't want to be in Houston. Yeah. Like... We already know that police departments have a tendency to pull over people who aren't white more often, right? And then like, if you give them this, that's just going to exacerbate that further. Again, it's also going to stop migrant communities interacting with the police in any way, right? This obviously has, look, not a big police fan, but like in cases like domestic violence, sometimes people need to go to the police to be safe and they're not going to do so if they think that means they or people

they love will be deported. This will have negative consequences, specifically in cases like domestic violence. We know this, there is plenty of evidence for this nonetheless. This is continuing anyway. What's also continuing is our obligation to pivot to A.T., which we should do now. The Championship is back in the Bay for the first time in 40 years. On the new limited podcast series, Dub Dynasty, we hear from head coach Steve Kerr on how Steph Curry almost never even joined the Warriors. In fact, I thought we had a draft date deal to end up getting him to Phoenix.

For the entire behind the scenes story of Golden State's incredible 10 year run, listen to Dubb Dynasty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, it's me on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

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We're back. And it's time to talk about the Supreme Court. Do we have to? Yes, yes, we do, guys. Because it's the biggest court. It's the big one. And they've been crushing it all week, just sending down decisions. The two big ones, I guess I want to talk about are a five-four ruling that it was vacating Boasberg's TRO. Boesberg being the judge who had initially told the United States government that had to stop sending people to set court, right, and then the US had ignored Boesberg and done it anyway, and then they had this whole court case about how they

hadn't ignored him, and anyway it was a secret, even though we're tweeting it. You can go back a couple of EDs and hear about that. In this decision, the court was unanimous in asserting that people removed under the Alien Enemies Act do have a right to due process, but that they have to bring a habeas petition. So like the reason they vacated the TRO was that the case shouldn't have gone to Boasberg, right? That they should have bought this habeas petition. In practice, that's going to be very hard given the fact that many migrants, even under the current system, even under Biden, most migrants who didn't speak English didn't have access to legal representation. So this this ruling is still pretty bad. The only thing the people in the court case wanted to stop was their rendition to El Salvador, right?

It wasn't even like opposed to other forms of removal. It was specific to this El Salvador situation. The court also sort of cited criminal cases as precedent, which is a very different thing. And it gives us very narrow ruling of the due process available to migrants. And it relies on migrants having access to a legal team, which could be expensive and complicated for them. So this ruling allows Trump administration to send people to El Salvador as as long as they have the quote-unquote Right to due process which is narrowly defined as something that not many people will have access to anyway Yes, yeah well summarize yet

You you would need to have like a lawyer on retainer to file your habeas right leg straight away So if that just doesn't get filed, then you are basically, in their view, forfeiting your due process and they can deport you anyway. Well, they can deport you anyway. Yeah, I guess you have the right to appeal it like by saying like, I'm going to file this habeas petition. But most people aren't going to do that. So in practice, they haven't explicitly ruled on the Secod thing, right? The Abrigo Garcia case, which is the other case, a fourth circuit judge required the US to return Abrigo Garcia to the US and then Chief Justice Roberts on his own issued an

administrative stay. So he is effectively telling them that fourth circuit judge, you can't order them to have him return right now. We need to take a timeout, we need everybody to get their evidence in order, and then bring that to us. So that case, like remains ongoing, right? In the brief for that case, the government referred to Abelgo Garcia as an enemy alien. But I don't think MS-13 is covered by the evocation of the Alien Enemies Act. I think it was specific to Tren de Aragua. And then they also claimed that they removed him under the Immigration Nationality Act, not the Alien Enemies Act. So like, none of

this, I guess, is hugely surprising. We're seeing this like sort of post hoc justification of what they did, right, which is kind of how they operate. But that case still remains ongoing. So we're still we're still going to hear that one, which presumably will reflect on the like constitutionality of sending people to Secot. But like the fact that yeah, they ruled the other case, right, the one that was five to four, it wasn't about whether Secot was legal, it was about whether Boasberg had the right to make a decision on this particular case. But still not great. Like it looks like the Supreme Court is doing everything it can to avoid a face-to-face showdown with the executive branch.

Oh yeah. Because they don't want to deal with the consequences of ignoring them. Nope. And like we said before, like maybe the only court that they will listen to is the Supreme Court. Well, if the Supreme Court doesn't make them, then they won't. So that's where we're at with that. Not great.

Not exactly great at all. Nope. Well, do you know what is doing great? The economy. And for more on that, I think it's time for Tariff Talk with Mia Wong. Wait, wait, wait. Tariff talk? Tariff don't like it. Rockin' the Casbah. Rockin' the Casbah.

Tariff don't like it. Rockin' the Casbah. Rockin' the Casbah. Ah, yeah. Ah, every day, every time we do it. The only band that matters is the only band that matters. It's the only band that matters. The Narcissist Cookbook doing a very brief refrain from Rock the Casbah.

The worst Clash song. By a wide margin. Yeah, the only Clash song to have been played during Operation Desert Storm, which made Jostrum a cry. Ah. A real catastrophe. Mm-hmm. You know what isn't a catastrophe the economy

So I just I just saw a wonderful chart where someone was like Ah, this is this is one of the eight best days the SMP has ever had and every single other one of those days is like 1929 1931 1931 2008. It's one of the best days for Mount St. Helens air quality. So good. So, alright, the tariff situation as of 2.43pm Pacific Time on April 9th is that there is a... Is fine. Going good. It's gonna be cool, guys. Don't worry about it.

Oh, God. Okay, so there is an 125% tariff on all goods from China. Is that bad? Um, I, uh, you know, there's a bit that I cut here where I was gonna say about how, like, at 54%, I was like, we've entered the part of the map where it just says here there be dragons and 125 percent there's not even dragons there that they didn't even think to put that on the map as an unknown region Hi, this is Mia from the future. It is now Thursday one of the problems with attempting to do this episode is That we are learning the tariff rate

from Twitter in real time. So it turns out that the actual tariff rate on China, as clarified by Donald Trump today, is 145%. And also it has become clear that the 25% turf tariffs on both Mexico and Canada are also still in effect so Yay In medical terms it means what happened to the global economy is equivalent to you getting hit directly in the spine By an f-250 going 45 miles an hour. That's that's that's what's happening's happened to the base of the global economy. Yeah. And I mean, it is very funny that a lot of people have been focusing on the bond stuff,

because you can just look at the tariff numbers and it's like, yeah, okay, seeing a 125% tariff on all goods from China and then looking at the bond markets to figure out if that's bad or not is like walking outside into a blizzard and being like, well, I need the weather rather tell me if it's snowing. Like what are we doing here? What are we doing here? The reason I'll explain like briefly, the Treasury bonds are the underpinning of every country, the entire global economy. Every single country has a shitload of money in US Treasury bonds, because they are the

most reliable thing. And what a Treasury bond is, is you give money to the US government and they say in a period of time you can take this out and it will have grown by a set percentage. Because treasury bonds have been for the last basically a century so incredibly stable, this is where you put your money that you don't want to gamble. You have money that is in stocks and stuff that can go up and down, but you also hedge your bets by having a bunch in this. And generally, treasury bonds are hopefully enough

to about keep pace with inflation or beat it by a little bit. But usually the rate is not all that high because there's a shitload of demand. People are always buying treasury bonds. When the treasury bond rate, which is the percentage you get back raises, that may look good, right?

They're like, wow, you get 5% now if you put money into a 30 year T bond. But what that means is that everyone is selling their treasury bonds. So demand is down and the rate is higher and everyone is selling them because entire countries at a time are pulling their money out.

Nations are pulling their money out of the u.s economy. It's great Yeah, and we are going to get more into how the trump administration wants to fuck with that later But first off programming note programming note I am going to be from this episode forward referring to all of these as the turf tariffs because Fuck them and because these tariffs are in a large part also about a bunch of really weird fucking masculinity bullshit. So, excited for that.

Yeah, and when you make most of your election ads being about trans people, and then the economy goes to the toilet. This is what was voted for. Like if you want a transphobia, this is what you wanted. You wanted to lose your job. You wanted everyone to lose their fucking homes. Speaking of T-bonds, am am I right let's skip over that immediately

No one laugh at him I go away Okay, okay, so so the most the most chaotic thing happening here other than Robert randomly saying things is Nobody knows what the tariff situation is going to be just even just on Friday when you're listening to this right now you what time you were listening to this there could be 200% tariffs on Indonesia there could be 4,000% tariffs on Vietnam we don't know no Trump could have dissolved the US dollar and we're all using the fucking weekend. Whatever. Like, I don't know. Yeah. And like, you know, so it's all really unstable. We can talk about the other things

that are still in effect. So there's a general 10% tariff on all countries, except for China, are just supposed to have a general 10% tariff. There's also the sort-Megan-Casella, who's a CNBC reporter. There are 25% tariffs on steel, aluminum, and cars. There's probably going to be more. He keeps talking about more tariffs, and it's like, who knows when they're going to happen, like maybe pharmaceuticals, semiconductors. But the Liberation Day tariffs, turf tariffs, are currently on hold. For 90 days, at least as of right now. Yeah, yeah. And the quote unquote reciprocal tariffs have been lowered to 10%.

For me at least, it's unclear as of recording on Wednesday, Trump said that this is in effect immediately. It's unclear if those 10% tariffs are also on hold for 90 days. No, I think the 10% ones are in effect right now, But it's really hard to tell because he's just saying shit and yes, it's very hard to tell which is he's truthing it Yes, sorry. He is he is true socialing that this information that is how we have to work out the global economic future It's based on posts on true social Yeah, so so okay and one of the things one of the things that's been happening with the turf tariffs is that like the media

is just record is reporting things as true that are just clearly obviously a lie. So one of the ones that's been going around and that the media is reporting that Trump has said is that he said he's going to pause tariffs on countries that don't retaliate, except we know that's a lie because the EU already imposed retaliatory tariffs. But the's tariff tariff rate is like already down to 10% just like everyone else. So we know that Trump is lying about his rationale for the rollback of the tariff tariffs right and every single fucking media outlet is still just reporting it because nobody fucking knows how to do freaking reporting anymore. We should move to what this is going to do the supply chain and To put this in perspective

What I learned about the the 104 percent tariff on China that was before it was 125 percent where it's at now I was writing an episode called the old economy is dead, which will probably be still be coming out on Monday again That was the 54% rate. I was writing a thing called the old economy is dead at 104%. Things are going to break in the supply chain that only seven people on earth have ever heard of before. Entire sectors of the economy are going to be annihilated. We're going to see right now, we're probably going to see everyone attempt to root all shipping from China. There's going to be a massive effort to try to re-root it through like literally any other country.

But again, that's only a solution for like, you know, 90 days. And again, it's not even clear that can work. I mean, I'm already seeing a bunch of reports from all businesses being like, yeah, we're fucked because, and that was at the 54% tariffs and at 125% entire industries are non viable. Now it's maybe possible that if it was just these tariffs and so an all Chinese shipping was able to be routed through some other country, maybe we would only have a regular economic collapse like a like, you know know like an early 2000s tech bubble

collapse and not like a 2008 one but again that's assuming that no more and more tariffs go into effect now the problem is that we went through this with the 90-day pauses on the Mexican tariffs and the Canadian tariffs and then after 90 days everyone assumed that they weren't going to go to effect again they just went to effect yeah so the odds are that the absolutely catastrophic turf tariffs from like liberation day are going to go into effect. Like in about 90 days, right? That's probably what's going to happen. There's probably going to be some attempts to negotiate them down.

But like again, those absolutely catastrophic tariffs, which are going to just fucking annihilate the entire world economy, are probably going to go into effect. And you know, part of what's happening here, right, is that the markets are doing this, they're like dead cat bounds, right? And a lot of this is because they haven't actually stopped to think about, like, how much American manufacturing and contra every argument everyone is making about this. There is actually a lot of manufacturing still in the US, but all of it relies on Chinese imports, and stages of production, and they're fucked. And I haven't even mentioned yet, by the way,

the sort of capstone to all of this is that China is doing an 84% retaliatory tariff on all American goods, which is going to just fuck massive portions of American agriculture. We've talked a lot on this show about soybean exports. It's going to be absolutely catastrophic. We're going to go more into this on Monday. But you know, the thing that's clear from this is that these people don't see the economy as real in the way that you and I do, right? They simply don't. You know, we look at the economy as something where we have to have a fucking job so we can go to work so we can come home and fucking buy food for our families and pay our rent. they think it's a fucking joke right they think

it's a fucking masculinity signifier and they think it's it like they look at tariff rates and they go this is just a number on a fucking page and that's why the tariff rate is now 125% on China because it doesn't none of this shit is real for them at all now do you know what is real? No. I... The products and services that support this podcast. Oh, yeah. Yes. Yep. Yep. Yep.

The championship is back in the Bay for the first time in 40 years. On the new limited podcast series, Dub Dynasty, we hear from head coach Steve Kerr on how Steph Curry almost never even joined the Warriors. In fact, I thought we had a draft date deal to end up getting him to Phoenix. For the entire behind the scenes story of Golden State's incredible 10 year run,

listen to Dub Dynasty on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. States incredible 10 year run? Listen to Dub Dynasty on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one.

And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out.

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whether there was some kind of plan here. Trump has claimed that he was going to roll back the terrorists all along and no, he wasn't just no, he's just lying. He's just going by the seat of his pants. And I can prove that there is no plan here. By moving on to the second thing that I want to talk about here, which is a speech given by Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Steve Mirren at the Hudson Institute. So this is again, the Council of Economic Advisers is a federal agency that is like

their job is to provide economic advice to the president, right? And their chair gave a speech where he argues, and this is something that like I Jesus fucking Christ, we were talking about, OK, the fact that every fucking country on Earth has US Treasury bonds. We were talking about this earlier, right? The status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. This guy is arguing that that is actually a public good that other countries should pay us for. He wants to force countries to fucking pay taxes to the United States for holding US treasury bonds.

And again, if any nation on earth could pay to have their currency be the global reserve currency, there's no amount they wouldn't pay. Like the degree to which this benefits you is ridiculous. Like the fact that you want to charge other people for it is nice. It is like, look, how this actually works, right? Is that every single other country on earth is forced to buy American debt,

which is what a bond is, right? Yeah. And this.s. To carry out even more spending without inflationary effects every single other Everything is based on this yes It's all forced on on like other countries having to stockpile us dollars Like the in literally the entire global economy the u.s. Is advantage in the entire global economy is that every single other fucking country on earth needs US dollars part of this is to Buy oil and part of this is again because the dollar is the fucking reserve currency It's a currency that fucking trade is done in and the asset that you hold Is is like is the fucking US bond the anthropologist David Graeber called this in his book that the first 5,000 years a tribute system

That again every country in the world is forced to buy US bonds. The US government has just like fairly explicitly like did this during the Reagan administration does this other times like has just fairly explicitly leaned on countries have been like you're buying a fucking bunch of US bonds now right like this is this system the status of the dollar of the World Reserve currency is the entire lattice that supports and spreads the American Empire and these fucking clowns want people to pay taxes on the tribute that they are paying to us. This is not Donald Trump or Elon Musk right? This is the guy these people brought in to be their economist to do economic policy. There is no limit to their stupidity. There is no rock of sanity upon which the tide of madness will crash.

Absolutely not. Everything we have seen so far is just a prelude to an infinite abyss of stupidity, so mind-numbingly incomprehensible it will shatter our minds like a snowflake in a hurricane. You can no longer think to yourself, they cannot possibly be this stupid. They are thinking thoughts even gods cannot comprehend. They are attempting to drain the sea by shouting at the moon. They are trying to wipe their ass with pinecones. There is no five-dimensional plan here.

There is not even a man behind the fucking curtain. There was only an infinite sea of cruelty, malice, and stupidity trying to drown us all for the crime of attempting to exist in the world we were born in. The reality of the men who rule the American Empire is this. It is so terrifying that everyone from the most powerful CEOs on the planet to the fucking day traders running the stock markets to broke leftist shit posters, recoil in horror, and try to construct meaning and some kind of like anything, any kind of strategy, any kind of strategic reason why anyone could possibly be doing this. Because the existence of a plan, literally any plan, no matter how evil it is, is preferable to this.

Which is that the largest economy in the world, the most powerful empire the world has ever seen, is being run by the dumbest people who have fucking lived. And they are doing this because they are evil and they are stupid. Yes. Yes. There's absolutely like, yeah, yeah. No, nothing else to say really. I think one of the things that is underpinning this, which you can pick up on if you are cursed enough to listen to enough of these speeches and enough of their talking heads and podcasts is this reoccurring trend in which these people really need to be victims in order to politically succeed, which is an accusation that's usually thrown against woke SJWs.

But before the election, it was this idea that that because because of the damn, corrupt elite establishment, you know, everyday Americans are victims of this of this hidden cabal of Democrats that are ruining everything. But but now that these people are in charge of the United States, the people who are victimizing us is just the entire world, right, the entire world is ripping off the United States by using our dollar, by doing trade with us. They are somehow ripping us off. Like, we are the victims of this global scheme.

And it's hurting you at the average blue collar worker, and it's making women adopt managerial positions. And this is what actually is the core of your oppression. And even when they win, even when they control the country, they can't let go of this victim status. They have to have someone ripping them off in order to justify them doing just incomprehensible stupid power grabs. And it is very much linked to this masculine signifier.

It's very odd. The way that people are trying to justify losing so much money in the stock market is by posting a clip of some Australian women dancing on TikTok in an office building. And they're like, well, you know, tariffs are much better than having to deal with the women in the office. Am I right, fellas? Yeah, women having a job. This is how they justify it.

At least we don't have woke. It's worth it to not be able to afford food if the woke is gone. The global long house. Yeah, that's a deep cut. The fucking long house is burnt down. Sure, because the long house is burnt down, we're now exposed to the elements

and all of our food stores are gone and it's about to snow 18 feet. But at least the long house is gone. Yeah, the long house with your they them nephew in it that you hate and owned you at Thanksgiving is gone. Shout out to your they them nephew. Yeah, I guess what's the nibbling? Nibbling is a correct non-binary appellation.

In other news, last week, President Trump said that he would be quote unquote honored for the president of El Salvador to take US citizens, which he calls American grown and born criminals and put them into CCOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, which is essentially a prison work camp. Yep. That no one gets released from. Yeah. Trump said, quote, Why should it stop just at people that cross the border illegally? Unquote. Mm-hmm. But it shouldn't stop that.

It shouldn't be there at all. And as James already mentioned, 75% of the immigrants sent to CICOT don't have a criminal conviction. These people are not criminals. Now, a few days later, the White House press secretary reiterated that this is something that Trump is seriously discussing both publicly and privately. So the president has discussed this idea quite a few times publicly. He's also discussed it privately. You're referring to the president's idea for American citizens to potentially be deported. These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation's laws repeatedly.

And these are violent repeat offenders in American streets. The president has said, if it's legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that, he's not sure, we are not sure if there is. It's an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly as in the effort of transparency. Now, one of the last things we're going to discuss is an update on DHS and ICE efforts to deport students across the country. Me and James did an episode last week, which is still pretty relevant, but all of the numbers have increased dramatically since that episode. As of Tuesday night, April 8th, 92 student visas had been revoked at California universities,

50 at UC campuses, and 36 at California State University campuses, with six more at Stanford. Also, as of April 8th, 50 student visas had been revoked at Arizona State University, with multiple students now in ICE detention. Lawyers for these students believe that upwards of a thousand visas have been revoked across the country. A map on InsideHigherEd.com shows 419 confirmed instances of student visas, or in some cases green cards, being revoked by Secretary of State Mark Rubio across 34 states. As of Wednesday, April 9th, visas for 18

international students have been revoked at the University of Utah. These students and recent graduates received letters from the Trump administration instructing them to quote-unquote self-deport immediately. At Utah State University, more than 30 students have been impacted according to the university administration. Yeah, I'm aware of at least one UCSD student who was detained at the border and immediately deported and also aware that UCOP, UC Office of the President, right, made a statement about the impact of service terminations across its campuses. But the UCSD Guardian, in a dub for student journalism, reported that UCSD convened an emergency meeting before this of faculty, and it knew about the revocations or the service changes, right, the revocation of their student

status, and it was reluctant to act because it hadn't received guidance from UCOP yet. So we're seeing this from a lot of university administrations, right, they don't know how to respond. I did see that the University of Arizona was helping fund some of the legal fees of their students, which is more than many universities are doing. As of now, there seems to be no pattern of prior rest for the people who have had their statuses changed. But in some cases, it seems that in some university systems, all of the people who have lost their status are either Chinese, Indian or from majority Muslim countries. One other thing I want to close out this episode on, so we have an episode out about this already,

but one of the things ICE has been doing has been targeting migrant farm worker labor organizers. They have basically just kidnapped, like just straight up broke this guy's window in his car and dragged him out. A guy named Alfredo Juarez who's known as Lalo. He's an organizer for Familia Cienitas por la Justicia in Washington. And there is going to be a protest. This will be Saturday the 12th. That will be tomorrow as you're listening to this on Friday. At Portland City Hall at 2pm, organizers are also asking that you call the Washington Attorney

General to demand pressure be put on everyone to release him. Yeah, if you want to hear more about that, there is, I have an interview with an organizer who works with them. And yeah, it's real fucking bad. The scale of the repression has been increasing. It's not undefeatable. And this is a, you know, this is a, this is a tangible thing that you can do

to try to stop them. But yeah, it requires movement now. And yeah, do this now before it gets worse. To update another topic of the episode me and James did last week, we mentioned that DHS was seeking input for for installing a new program to screen the social media activity of people applying for immigration benefits for what would they label as anti-Semitism. Yeah. And this policy is now in effect. This applies to quote unquote aliens applying for lawful permanent residence status, foreign students and aliens affiliated

with educational institutions, possibly also people applying for citizenship. To quote the DHS Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, quote, there's no room in the United States for the rest of the world's terrorist sympathizers and we are under an obligation to admit them or let them stay here. Secretary Noem has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the first amendment

to advocate for antisemitic violence and terrorism, think again, you are not welcome here, unquote. The webpage for this new policy states, Under this guidance, USCIS will consider social media content that indicates an alien endorsing, espousing, promoting, or supporting anti-Semitic terrorism, anti-Semitic terrorist organizations, or other anti-Semitic activity as a negative factor in any discretionary analysis when adjudicating immigration benefit requests. So essentially this means that if you've posted anything that is in support of Palestine or

criticizes the Israeli government, this will be now used against you if you are applying for a visa, if you are applying for a green card, if you're applying for citizenship and already live in this country as a permanent resident, lawfully so. Just a wider net of social media surveillance. 404 Media put out a good article on Wednesday about a Palantir system that ICE is using to look for immigrants and people in this country, which allows them to select for specific attributes

with a pretty intense filtering system. So yeah, this is ongoing, and we will continue to report as such. Yeah. All right, everybody. Well, until next week, please don't go to an El Salvadoran prison camp if you can avoid it. We reported the news. Great. We reported the news. be reported than this. or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

The championship is back in the Bay for the first time in 40 years. On the new limited podcast series, Dub Dynasty, we hear from head coach Steve Kerr on how Steph Curry almost never even joined the Warriors. In fact, I thought we had a draft date deal to end up getting him to Phoenix. For the entire behind the scenes story of Golden State's incredible 10 year run, listen to Dub Dynasty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard.

Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. It could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress.

Listen to Beardless, S***less Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. You Feeling This Too is a horror anthology podcast. It brings different creators to tell 10 vile, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, grotesque, horrific stories on what scares them the most. You're feeling this too. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tickets are on sale now, y'all,

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