It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #12

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

The gang talks about concentration camps in El Salvador, an ICE arrest of another green card holder, and RFK Jr.’s autism eugenics. Plus updates on tariffs and DOGE. Sources: https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/investing/us-stock-market/index.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/live/trump-tariffs-live-updates-china-signals-readiness-for-talks-if-us-shows-respect-amid-numbers-game-191201017.html https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-ensures-national-security-and-economic-resilience-through-section-232-actions-on-processed-critical-minerals-and-derivative-products/ https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/16/temu-cuts-us-ad-spend-drops-in-app-store-rank-after-trump-tariffs-.html https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-issues-export-licensing-requirements-nvidia-amd-chips-china-2025-04-16/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts. This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope, about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Sam Mullins, and I've got a new podcast coming out called Go Boy, the gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. Has spent 24 of those years in jail. But when Roger Caron picked up a pen and paper, he went from an ex-con to a literary darling.

From Campside Media and iHeart podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Israel Gutierrez, and I'm hosting a new podcast, Dub Dynasty, the story of how the Golden State Warriors have dominated the NBA for over a decade. The Golden State Warriors once again are NBA champions. Today, the Warriors dynasty remains alive in large part because of a scrawny 6'2 hooper who everyone seems to love. For what Steph has done for the game, he's certainly on that Mount Rushmore.

Come revisit this magical warrior's ride. Listen to Dub Dynasty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. From the producers who brought you Princess of South Beach comes a new podcast, The Setup. The Setup follows a lonely museum curator, but when the perfect man walks into his life, Well, I guess I'm saying I like you. You like me? he actually is too good to be true. This is a con.

I'm conning you to get the Delama painting. We could do this together. Listen to The Set Up on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Dr. James Stout

and Reverend Dr. The Honorable Robert Evans. That's right. That's right. Reverend Dr. The Honorable Evans, who is currently hacking up a fucking lung. No idea why. I feel otherwise fine. Well, I'm sure you feel otherwise fine

due to this great week in American history we've all been through together. Yeah. Which started with a meeting between President Donald Trump and El Salvador President Bukele on Monday morning in the Oval Office where they discussed the possibility of the United States helping to build more CICOT style facilities.S. citizens and immigrants that the Trump administration deems criminals or terrorists? Yes.

I mean, I keep getting asked, is this the panic moment? And I don't think panic is particularly productive. But like, yeah, this is the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is happening. The president's talking about sending citizens overseas to a concentration camp. Honestly, I'm on the verge of thinking it's OK to call it a death camp, but we just don't have the data yet. There's some very concerning satellite shots that appear to show piles of bodies. Yeah, that's from March of 2024. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, but it won't have gotten better. No, no. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't I don't know. This is this is about as bad as it could be, folks. We're in it. During that meeting, both President Bukele and the Trump cabinet argued that there is simply no way for people sent to see God to ever return to the United States, coming up with a whole bunch of absurd, absurd reasons for why that is that is impossible due to due to foreign policy

and safety of both El Salvador and the United States. Me and James did a whole episode on this earlier this week that you can check out on the it could happen here feed. I'm going to move on to an update on the student crackdowns. So ICE has targeted a third green card holder for deportation based on pro-Palestinian activism. Mahozin Maroui is a Palestinian from the West Bank who has lived in the U.S. with a green card for a decade. While studying philosophy at Columbia, he co-founded the Columbia Palestinian Student Union in 2023 with Mahmoud Khalil. Maroui was arrested by ICE last Monday, April 14th, at his citizenship interview in Vermont. After Khalil was arrested last month, Maroui went into hiding.

He suspected that this citizenship interview could be a honeypot, but decided to go anyway after waiting a long time for this appointment. His lawyers quickly filed a habeas corpus petition arguing his detentions unlawful and violates the First Amendment. A U.S. District Judge issued an order hours later that he was quote not to be removed from the United States or moved out of the territory of the District of Vermont pending further order of this court. Zionist doxing accounts targeted Maroui in recent weeks. I'm gonna play actually this two minute clip

of Maroui talking. This is from December of 2023 on the program 60 Minutes. What was your initial reaction when you heard about the Hamas attack on October 7th? I could not believe what my eyes were seeing, where I see Hamas members getting into settlements and so on. But also the first moment I saw that, I put my hand on my heart and I started praying knowing that there will be a huge level of revenge from the Israelis and I was praying that this

will not be the result because it would be disastrous. The night of the rally I believe someone in the crowd said something very anti-Jewish, not just anti-Israeli, but anti-Jewish. Yes. This was a walkout on November 9th. And a person who's not affiliated with Colombia, we've never seen him, we don't know who is this guy, comes down the stairs yelling, death to Jews. I was shocked and I walked directly to the person and they told him, you don't represent

us because this is not something that we agree with and directly what I've done I talked to the megaphone and they gave a speech and they said we here are conscious educated students and we know how to separate right from wrong and what this guy has said is wrong what this guy has said is wrong. What this guy has said is clearly anti-Semitic against Jews. Anti-Semitic? To be anti-Semitic is unjust. Is unjust.

And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against anti-Semitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Yeah, I mean, he said everything that would make him a respectable protester, at least based on like what the fucking dims were saying last year. Like there's nothing in there that's pro-Hamas. There's nothing in any I can tell this guy has done that is advocacy towards terrorism. Like, but obviously that's not what matters. What matters is they have the ability to get him out and they're doing that because of his speech.

Yeah. He took a step back from protests in March of 2024 during the second wave of student protests at Columbia. Yeah, and I believe he didn't, isn't he like a member of the University Buddhist Club? Yes, part of why he took a step back was to focus on his role in the Buddhist Club as a, for I think in the past two years,

he has been participating in that on campus. He told CBS News the day before he was detained. Quote, if my story will become another story for the struggle to have justice and democracy in this country, let it be. Unquote. Like other students who've been targeted and arrested, he's not been charged or accused of any crime, but the State Department has deemed him a threat to foreign policy. Yeah, hard to see how, but I think as we're seeing it, that doesn't really matter.

Yeah. Now, last Friday, a Louisiana judge ruled in favor of the Trump administration to allow the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, upholding the government's argument that the rarely used Cold War era statute of the Immigration and Nationality Act allows for the Secretary of State to deport aliens that pose quote, adverse foreign policy consequences.

The only quote unquote evidence presented in court was a two page memo written by Mark Rubio that alleges that Khalil's presence in the country threatens quote, U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States based on information provided by the DHS, ICE, and Homeland Security investigations regarding the perspiration and roles of Khalil in anti-Semitic protests and disruptive actions which foster a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States." So there's no real evidence in this document. It is just Mark Rubio's opinion for two pages, and this is the only evidence that ever has

been held in court that resulted in the judge ruling in the government's favor. A lot of what we're seeing here is the natural conclusion to what was happening with like Vance last year talking about Haitian immigrants and admitting like, yeah, it's not literally true, but like, it's true to how we feel. So it's like fine for us to spread this lie. Like they're just declaring these people terrorists and even attempting to get evidence for that claim. Like they certainly have no need to. And the media that like I'm seeing coverage on Fox particularly, that's just repeatedly framing this as like the left is angry that like a terrorist got deported. Right. Yeah.

The left is angry that like a terrorist got deported. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the same stuff that we saw at the RNC where they referred to students as terrorists, like just completely, completely flat. Yeah. Like every single person at a college campus who is upset about a genocide or criticizes the state of Israel. That person is a terrorist. Lawyers for Khalil have until April 23rd to file an appeal to halt the deportation, and they plan to file an asylum case on his behalf. A separate habeas petition case is

playing out in a New Jersey court. This week, NBC News reviewed over 100 pages of documents from the federal government and Khalil's legal team containing information about his immigration process, work experience, and activism. These documents showed that the government used unverified tabloid reporting against Khalil and contained contradicting information. Yep. So essentially using New York Post style publications as a pretext for ICE to execute arrests against people who are green card holders, legal permanent residents

of the United States. We're going to go on break and come back to talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Finally, finally, something fun. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly

like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.

This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast.

Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are your ears bored? Yeah. Are you looking for a new podcast that will make you laugh, learn and say, que? Yeah. Then tune in to Locatora Radio, season 10 today.

Okay. I'm Dioza. I'm Mala. The host of Locatora Radio, a radiophonic novella. Which is just a very extra way of saying a podcast. We're launching this season with a mini series, Totally Nostalgic, a four part series about the Latinos who shaped pop culture in the early 2000s. It's Lala checking in with all things Y2K 2000s. My favorite memory, honestly, was us

having our own media platforms like Mundos and MTV3. You could turn on the TV, you see Thalia, you see JLo, Nina Sky, Evie Queen, all the girlies doing their things, all of the beauty reflected right back at us. It was everything. Tune in to Locatora Radio Season 10. Now that's what I call a podcast. Listen to Locatora Radio Season 10 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Are we ready to fight? I'm ready to fight. I thought it was, oh, this is fighting words. Okay. I'll put the hammer back. Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a bestselling author with the second most banned book in America. Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back.

And that's what we're doing on Fighting Words. We're not going to let anyone silence us. That's the reason why they're banning books like yours, George. That's the reason why they're trying to stop the teaching of Black history or queer history, any history that challenges the whitewash norm. Or put us in a box. Black people have never, ever, depended on the so-called mainstream to support us.

That's why we are great. We are the greatest culture makers in world history. Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Camila Ramon, Peloton's first Spanish-speaking cycling and tread instructor. I'm an athlete, entrepreneur, and almost most importantly, a perreo enthusiast. And I'm Liz Ortiz, former pro soccer player and Olympian and like Kami, a perreo enthusiast.

Come on, who is it? Our podcast, Hasta Abajo, is where sports, music, and fitness collide. And we cover it all, de arriba hasta abajo. Sit down with real game changers in the sports world, like Miami Dolphins CMO Priscilla Shumate, who is redefining what it means to be a Latina leader. It all changed when I had this guy come to me.

He said to me, you know, you're not Latina. First of all, what does that mean? I'm not this wide open. Yeah. History makers like the Sukar family, who became the first Peruvians to win a Grammy. It was a very special moment for us. It's been 15 years for me in this career.

Finally things are starting to shift into a different level. Listen to Asta Waho on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. All right, we're back. I'm going to throw to Robert Evans for an update on everyone's favorite roadkill consumer. Yes, yes. RFK Jr. He's not just strapping the carcass of a dead whale to the head of his truck and driving down the highway. Now he is, well, kind of launching a genocidal campaign against people with autism.

Kind of doing a national eugenics program. Yeah. Kind of calling a large group of people in this country useless eaters. Jesus Christ. Yeah, fuck it. And the gist of what's happening is they just had a new quote unquote study come out that looked at like apparently rising autism rates. And again, I've covered this a lot. The reason why rates of autism are increasing every credible scientist degrees is because we're, we're looking for it more.

And so we're finding more of it and we have a broader understanding of what it is. RFK Jr. Is obsessed with the idea, the image of autism as a disease that is spreading due to an environmental contagion. And he is trying to make the case that this is a calamity. The most recent promise he made is that by September, the government will release exhaustive studies that will identify the environmental causes of autism. He made a statement, autism destroys families.

More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this. He has called autism a preventable disease, which it is not. While there is evidence that some of the factors that can be relevant in autism expressing are environmental, the vast majority of it seems to be genetic. There is no evidence and there have been repeated studies. There's anything to do with vaccines. He's posited a couple of other theories as to what causes it, including mold and diet. And these are largely based on what are already kind of quack

both autism treatments and quack autism causes that are popular within the biomedical movement, the experimental biomedical movement, which is the fake autism medical industrial complex that we covered recently on the Behind the Bastards. One of the things I think is really worrying about the language that Kennedy is using is how similar it sounds to a lot of what you were seeing in the early 1930s out of the Nazi state.

What we know of as the Holocaust, which is generally a term generally primarily when people use that term, they are talking about the mass killing of Jews and other ethnic minorities in central Europe by the Nazi state. That got a lot of it start. And there's a couple of different places got it started. Obviously the wild concentration camps and the political concentration camps are in that heritage. But when it comes to the actual mass killing of people, the very origin of that was in

getting rid of the disabled. The term that was used in Nazi propaganda for these people was useless eaters. And this is the first time that the Nazis tested out gassing in large numbers. And he hasn't used literally the term useless eaters, but he talks a lot about one of the terms he uses is severe autism, right, which is not the term that is popularly used now for people who have kind of profound autism, I think is the preferred term for people who do have a significantly higher degree of like disability as a result of their autism or that correlates with their autism, right?

As opposed to the vast majority of people who can be diagnosed as somewhere on the spectrum who are able to like live independently, right? And Kennedy sort of does the thing that is very common within this community of sort of number one, correlating that to everybody with autism and talking about it as if it is a disaster that justifies any kind of response. Because the people who have profound autism aren't real people in his eyes. He made a statement, quote, these are kids who will never pay taxes.

They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children. And first off, having taught a lot of kids with profound autism, yes, they could play baseball. A number of them held jobs. Now, do a lot of them need assisted living? Sure. But number one, that's always been the case. There's no evidence

that people with this kind of autism, that there's any sort of raise in this, right? What's raised is the number of people who are being diagnosed, right? And he's using this kind of scare term, right? This idea that like, parents, you need to be frightened that something is going to steal your children from you. Yeah. In order to justify the dehumanization of everyone with autism, as well as like radical biomedical experimental procedures that are going to do harm at scale to lots of kids. One of his favorite new terms is epidemic denial, which is the term that he's using for people who say that like, this is not an epidemic.

This is something that we're now screening for more. He's kind of, kind of repurposing the language of like, uh, vaccine denial and whatnot as like a denial that this is sort of a, an immediate crisis that needs to be hit, which I find interesting. Also like co-opting like COVID conscious language. Yeah, yeah. Like the way he and his, his group were referred during COVID, he's now using in the same fashion. Yeah. And it's interesting.

His initial promise was that like by September we'll know why autism rates are on the rise. That's not really a thing. You can't make science work that way. Like you can't guarantee that. Like you said, we already know because people are seeking out diagnoses, like because we have better awareness of it now. But he's kind of altered that recently being like,

no, we'll have some answers by September. And we're going to get those answers by removing the taboo so that doctors won't get gas-lit by blaming autism on vaccines or mold exposure or the like. So that's what we can look forward to in the near future from our good friend, RFK Jr., who definitely doesn't pay taxes or write poems. I just want to make that clear. I don't think either of those are particularly good bars

for whether or not you're a human being, but he for sure doesn't do either. Also, frankly, I know way too many autistic people who write poems. Oh, tons of them. Yeah, it's good to say. Yeah. The the rain poem things was a really fucking poet. Laureate of Washington State since 2023 is a is a woman with autism.

So, yeah, like I writing poems, nonsense, extremely common activity for for my fellow. Yeah. My fellow autism people out there. OK, OK. R.F.K. Jr. again, but he was talking about, you know, people with what he calls severe autism. But he also doesn't ever care to like specify his language because there's no there's no benefit. That's not a real medical. And there's no benefit to his ideology in acknowledging that, like, well,

most people who get diagnosed with autism may need some accommodations. It's a difference, right? It's a difference in the way your mind works, but they're fine. Like they're living healthy, happy lives. Yeah. I talk slightly differently in the Cool Zone work chat, which is kind of the extent of it for me. Yeah, that's the extent of it. Yeah. That is an aspect. Speaking of the Department of Health and Human Services, they released a report page on their website for you, the Vigilant Citizen, to report trans minors receiving health care. Finally.

So another one of these snitchinging hotlines this time on a federal government website that I'm sure will only get real real complaints sent to it and not the B movies script. Repeatedly the B movie script. Yeah. Speaking of trans people, I do have a few updates on on some some of the transgender stuff during that meeting between President Bukele and Trump, they went on a small tangent about trans people, where Trump said that he actually doesn't like talking

about quote unquote men in women's sports, because he wants to wait and save that issue to use for the next election. Amazing. Yeah. I'm going to play the clip. And I don't like talking about it because I want to save it for just before the next election I said my people don't even talk about it Because they'll change Then well, but I watched this morning

It was a congressman fighting to the death for men to play against women in sports that's like super interesting like women in sports. That's like super interesting, like very clear insight into how like Trump sees, like the trans sports issue and treats it as this like election winning superpower. And like certainly he is directing like the DOJ and with his executive orders. Like he still is targeting trans people, especially trans people in school. So it's not it's not that he's treating this as like a hands off issue to like ensure that it can remain a hot button thing for the next election.

But I think I think in his mind, like he doesn't want to stop Democrats from. Caring about this issue in a way, like like the more that that they that they fight for it in his mind is like what gives him ammunition for the next election, whether he's going to run for a third term or just like Republicans, like mega stuff in general. But I think that it is an interesting look into like his personal insight on this issue. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice just announced on Wednesday, April 16th, that they

are suing Maine's Department of Education for not complying with Trump's anti-trans executive order by continuing to allow trans people to compete in sports, claiming that they are quote, failing to protect women in women's sports, unquote, which they say violates Title IX. The suit aims to get an injunction to force Maine to strip away rights from trans people in schools, to take away two winning titles from trans school athletes, and are considering to quote-unquote retroactively pull all funding that Maine has received. Maine's Attorney General Aaron Frey said on Wednesday, quote,

Our position is further bolstered by the complete lack of any legal citation supporting the administration's position in its own complaint. While the president issued an executive order that reflects his own interpretations of the law, anyone with the most basic understanding of American civics understands that the president does not create law nor interpret law." So Maine and specifically the Maine governor are adamant that this is going to be an issue that's only going to be settled in the courts and in fact challenged Trump at a recent meeting to see you in court over this issue. We are going to go and break and then return to close out this episode of Executive Disorder. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in

an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.

This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Are your ears bored? Yeah. Are you looking for a new podcast that will make you laugh, learn, and say, Que? Yeah. Then tune in to Locatora Radio, season 10 today.

Okay. I'm Diosa. I'm Mala. The host of Locatora Radio radio a radio phonic novella Which is just a very extra way of saying a podcast We're launching this season with a mini series Totally nostalgic a four-part series about the Latinos who shaped pop culture in the early 2000s It's Lala checking in with all things Y2K, 2000s.

My favorite memory honestly was us having our own media platforms like Mundos and MTV 3. You could turn on the TV, you see Talia, you see JLo, Nina Sky, Evie Queen, all the girlies doing their things, all of the beauty reflected right back at us. It was everything. Tune in to Locatora Radio Season 10. Now that's what I call a podcast. Listen to Locatora Radio Season 10

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are we ready to fight? I'm ready to fight. As you were to fight. Is that what I thought it was? Oh, this is fighting words. Okay. I'll put the hammer back. Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a best-selling author with the second most banned book in America.

Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back. And that's what we're doing on Fighting Words. We're not going to let anyone silence us. That's the reason why they're banning books like yours, George. That's the reason why they're trying to stop the teaching of black history or queer history, any history that challenges the whitewash norm. Or put us in a box. Black people never, ever depended on the so-called mainstream to support us.

That's why we are great. We are the greatest culture makers in world history. Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Camila Ramon, Peloton's first Spanish-speaking cycling and tread instructor. I'm an athlete, entrepreneur, and almost most importantly, a Perreo enthusiast. And I'm Liz Ortiz, former pro soccer player and Olympian and like Kami, a perreo enthusiast. Come on, who is it? Our podcast, Hasta Bajo, is where sports,

music, and fitness collide. And we cover it all. De Arriba, Hasta Bajo. Sit down with real game changers in the sports world, like Miami Dolphins CMO Priscilla Shoemate, who is redefining what it means to be a Latina leader. It all changed when I had this guy come to me. He said to me, you know, you're not Latina. First of all, what is that move? I'm not that wide open. Yeah.

History makers like the Sukar family, who became the first Peruvians to win a Grammy. It was a very special moment for us. It's been 15 years for me in this career. Finally things are starting to shift into a different level. Listen to Hasta Bajo on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Okay, we are back. I'm now going to throw to myself to you about the tariff tariffs. So alright, the big thing that happened last week in tariffs was that Trump exempted Smartphones and electronics is a whole suite of electronics that are exempted from the

145 percent Turf tariffs from Liberation Day now there was still a 20 percent tariff on On all these electronic goods from the earlier round of tariffs And in one of the initial rounds that there was a whole thing where he put a bunch of tariffs on. I'm so confused though, because I thought it's 10% tariffs for non-Chinese companies. Yeah, but okay, so here's the thing, right? China?

Is it like additional or? No, okay, so what's happening with these is that in the very very first round of tariffs that went out there was a 20% tariff on all Chinese goods and so the Liberation Day tariffs, which and then the subsequent retaliatory tariffs Pushed it. Pushed all goods to... Yeah, now like what? 250%? No, okay. We're gonna get the 250% that number's bullshit.

Okay, but we're at a hundred and forty5% like tariff from the Liberation Day stuff. But that also had included an earlier 20% tariff. You see why we're reporting about this is so fucking hard, right? So that was stacked on top of that other tariff. So he's removed the Liberation Day tariffs, but there still are 20% tariffs on all like iPhones and all the electronic goods that are still in effect So the tariff rate for those goods is now 20 instead of 145 But this is where things get even more murky So even before the exemptions for the semiconductor stuff had been released

Trump had been talking about imposing a bunch of tariffs specifically on semiconductors from all countries which is going to like, again, if this is just also if you want to just kneecap your entire economy, you put in a tariff on all semiconductors from other countries, which was what this is looking like, it's possible the levels are going to be that high anyways, it's again, worth pointing out that like, there's a bunch of the parts of this production process that basically can only be done in Taiwan, which will presumably have these new tariffs on them. We don't know what they're going to be yet. They're coming in who fucking knows. But so it seems like they're these tariffs are being withdrawn for now due to market sort of backlash, but probably they will come back at some point in the future. We're not 100% sure. There's also another thing I want to mention where, so the number that you said, the 250% tariff thing, so Trump tweeted that out,

but that's fake. What that is, is that there are a couple of items. And I mean, when I say a couple, I mean, like we're talking like single digit items, like things like medical syringes that already had like 100% tariffs on them, the 145% tariffs stack on top of all tariffs that were already in effect. So there's like like three or four items already had 100% tariffs on them. So when you stack the 145 on top of them, they're 250%. But again, it's like it's like three things, right? So like that's fake. On the other hand, like substantively, and this is something that a lot of people have been talking about, the difference between 145% and 245% like isn't that relevant because

at 145% you stop doing trading? So it's, you know, the numbers at this point are just sort of in comedy levels. But yeah, so that's what's going on with the 250 number people have been going around from, it's not real, it's still 145 for all non-electronics goods, 24 electronics. There's also been a bunch of sort of China's been doing retaliatory stuff for a little bit, and they've been ramping up this program to restrict US access to rare earth elements that are necessary for a whole bunch of advanced engineering and particularly sort of defense projects. Now this is something that could genuinely devastate the American defense sector.

Trump's plan for this is that he's threatening to use the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to impose even more devastating tariffs. Now it is genuinely unclear to me. Like what is he going to do? Impose a thousand percent tariff? Like you need to buy these goods. Like- You say that Mia, and yes. He probably will.

He probably will. Like, like two weeks ago a thousand percent tariffs would have been a joke, but no, they might, they might legitimately do a thousand percent tariffs. Why not? There's also been the beginnings of, of, on the US and sort of export restrictions from chip exports to China and countries like Nvidia and AMD and this is a fucking big rip to the Big rip to the fucking AI people eat shit get fucked Yeah, so like so that that that's roughly the state of the tariffs right now

More more bullshit will happen. We'll be back on Tariff Talk next week with another round of unbelievably hideous turf tariff shit. But I want to I want to move on to one more thing, which is things that have been happening at the at the NLRB. So the NLRB for people who are not regular listeners to the show is the National Labor Relations Board. They were in charge of a whole bunch of things related to negotiations between like employers and unions or the people who certify union elections. They handle unfair labor practices, disputes, and Doge effectively broke into the NLRB and has seized a whole bunch of information that they shouldn't have.

NPR broke the story and has been doing a lot of good coverage of it. So it came in, right? They technically had some kind of like order saying that they're supposed to be able to come in and do this stuff. And they set up and they disable all of the security stuff and all of the sort of like logs and all of the sort of stuff that's supposed to like verify what someone's doing on a computer system. They go in and disable all of them. like verify what someone's doing on a computer system. They go in and disable all of them. They delete all traces of what they do. And this is a big deal because the NLRB has a lot of extremely sensitive data. It has extremely sensitive data on unions.

It has a lot of extremely sensitive trade data on private companies. Now the NLRB person who blew the whistle on this to NPR described how, so he complains about to his superiors about Doge again, just like sort of breaking into this fucking like office and just like stealing all of this data because, I mean, so he notices this program that they're building that's literally just called like backdoor which is like again, what you would do if you were literally running a hack, right? And we'll come back to that in a second. So the NLB person complains to his superiors like, hey, these Doge people are just like stealing all of the data from this and

Then like the next day someone from doge tapes to his door Pictures of him and his dogs with like a threatening thing on it like drone footage of him and his dog like walking which is So fucking weird. I I don't even know. I don't even. So, yeah, that's that's extremely alarming. This is this is their they're just blatantly threatening a whistleblower. Yeah, so the other reason that this is really concerning is that so a lot of the corporate

media is focused on the fact that there's a lot of trade information in there. There's also a lot of very personal information about unions, about union strength, about size, about tactics, about the history of negotiating things, about just where unions are and who's in them, and it's deeply unclear what Doge is going to do this information, but it's not good. And again, and I need to emphasize this, so I talked to friend of the show Maya Arson CrimeW about this, who is someone who knows a lot about hacking. And I said to it, okay, so this is what you would do if you were just straight up hacking the NLRB, right? Like these are the things you would do. And they went, yeah, pretty much. So, it's great, it's great. Yeah, the Doja just stole a bunch of information.

Who knows what's going to happen to it? Who knows what's going to happen with their escalation of attacks on whistleblowers? But things bad. Things continue to go bad. Well, thank you for that uplifting story, Mia, about Doge breaking into and stealing data from the NLRB and posting overhead drone photos of people's houses who threatened the Doge supremacy. We're back. Thank you, Future Garrison and Future Mere. So it's my role here to update you on the Board of Fascism, right? And that's what I'm here to do.

Where I want to start this week is in the Roosevelt Reservation. This is something that's been reported on a little bit. It's read largely by people who maybe only found out about it this week and looked at a Wikipedia page and then wrote a story. The Roosevelt Reservation is a 60-foot easement that runs along the southwestern border of the United States from the coast of San Diego all the way to New Mexico. It doesn't cover the Texas border. I've written about it before for the Sierra Club and for Drilled News four or five years ago, and I'm going to include a link to the Sierra Club piece in the show notes. The Drill piece is down now. They don't have that print site anymore. It was

established in 1907 by Teddy Roosevelt and it was transferred for three years from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Defense by the Trump administration in 2019 using an executive order. This year in 2025, all of the Roosevelt reservation that is not part of federal reservation land was placed on the Department of Defense jurisdiction. A lot of reporting seems to have missed this exemption for federal reservation land, which makes up a significant part of the border, especially in Arizona, in the Tornautum Reservation. I'm going to quote from the language of the Executive Order here, quote,

To provide for the use and jurisdiction by the Department of Defense over such Federal lands, including the Roosevelt Reservation, and excluding Federal Indian Reservations that are reasonably necessary to enable military activities directed in this memorandum, including border barrier construction and emplacement of detection and monitoring equipment. The way I read this, it also doesn't limit to the Roosevelt reservation. It seems to include other federal land, right, which could include national monuments, national parks, BLM and the national forests, all of which exist along the border.

The Trump administration this week also obtained waivers. The waivers waive dozens of laws that have been limiting construction in the San Diego sector. I'd like to quote a little bit from that Sierra Club piece that I wrote, because I think the aspect of the damage done to the sacred space of indigenous people is being completely overlooked by the legacy media in this. Not, perhaps, surprisingly. So one of the laws waived was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation

Act was enacted by Congress in 1990 to protect and safely relocate native burial sites when construction takes place on sensitive sites. The tribe in question should be consulted and in the event remains or other archaeological objects are found, construction should be altered so as not to disturb the site. In the areas of San Diego where they are digging, what's called midden soil has been found. Midden soil is soil that contains evidence of cremated human remains, right, in this case of Kumeyaay people. With this waiver, they don't have to comply with NAGPRA, Native American Graves Protection and Relocation Act, which means that they can continue digging through what are literally people's ancestors' graveyards. Here's another quote from that 2020 story. If this were another country's government destroying

a region's holy land, the US would go to war and the people would feel it justified, activist Thomas Barber told Sierra. But it happens here at home in front of us and we just turn away. We sure do turn away. It seems to be most of what we do these days. It's not even what bugs me, it's like not so much of folks not doing anything. I get that it's overwhelmingly horrible at the moment. It's that this doesn't even get reported.

Yeah. Big outlets with a massive budget who are supposed to have a border reporter who's never fucking set foot on the border, doesn't take the time to talk to the indigenous people who's land the border crossed, right? Like, doesn't take the time to hear their concerns. Doesn't take the time to think about when you dig 30 feet into this ground to build your border wall, that's 12,000 years of someone's history. How do they feel about that? And like that is a failing of the legacy media has been a failing for a long time and it will continue to be on for a long time and pisses me off.

Yep. I guess to talk more broadly than about this militarization of the Roosevelt reservation and other public land, there's been some speculation about what this might mean. I don't think that you're going to see soldiers pointing their guns at the southern border and shooting anyone who comes across. I do think it's likely a lot of the people who have been deployed to southern border so far are MPs, military police, right? And it's possible that those MPs will be able to detain people and potentially charge them with trespassing on a military installation. That would just

be another string to the bow of their attempt to rapidly deport people because they already have many other options through executive order of doing that, which they're already implying. It might also make it easier for them to waive some of these other laws and to construct more surveillance equipment. In the Ebrigo Garcia case, which we've covered for several weeks now, the Supreme Court has unanimously asked the United States government to quote, facilitate his return. The US government has embarked upon a unique definition of the word facilitate, which it feels like means allowing him to enter the country and providing transport if El Salvador releases him.

Bukele refused to release him, saying that doing so would be to quote, smuggle a terrorist into the United States. Garryson and I did a whole episode about this yesterday that you can listen to. Today Senator Chris Van Hollen went to San Salvador, right? Capital of El Salvador, if you're not aware. He met with the vice president because Bukele is still out of the country. Van Hollen held a press conference right afterwards that I watched right before we recorded this. In the press conference, Van Hollen basically said that he'd asserted to the vice president, Earl Salvador, there was no

evidence nor any conviction of being a member of MS 13. And he asked the VP why he was holding Mr. Abrego Garcia and the VP said because the US is paying us to hold him. Yeah. Which yeah, they won't even lie. Yeah, no, he's not lying. That's that's why they're doing it. I hold him. Yeah. Which... Yeah, they won't even lie. Yeah, no, he's not lying. That's why they're doing it. I believe that. Yeah. I mean, credit to this Maryland senator being the only one to do something. And it's not enough, and it's just one person.

There are 300 people there, right? They're not even going for the hundreds of other innocent people who are there. It's one guy. But at least he's doing something. The rest of the Democrats are collectively, I the Democrats are collectively voting for Trump's nominees. He asked to meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia and was told that they needed more time. He said, I'll come back next week.

They said they don't know if they can organize it in a week. He asked if he could call him. They said they didn't know if they could facilitate a call. They said maybe the US embassy would have to be the one that requests that. So he has now requested that the embassy request that he be allowed to call Mr. Obrego Garcia and Mr. Obrego Garcia be allowed to speak to his wife. Garrison and I spoke about how like it's not in the interest of the government at

El Salvador to have people leave this prison and testify to the conditions that are in it. No one has ever left this prison. That we're aware of. Yeah. That no one who's been detained has ever left this prison. That we're aware of, yeah, that no one who's been detained there has left. Yeah. The government wouldn't give him a date when he could meet Mr. Abrego Garcia or when he would be likely able to make a call. In a separate case, Judge Boasberg, who we've spoken about before as well, right, Judge Boasberg was the judge

who issued the tentative restraining order on the rendition of people to El Salvador, which the government then ignored, has found probable cause that the administration is in contempt of court. What does this mean? It doesn't mean, despite what you've seen on your timeline, that this will mean these people will be brought home. When they're found in contempt, they have two options, right? They can purge themselves of the contempt and the way they would do that would be by providing habeas Not by bringing all these people home, at least not yet, right? Yeah, or they could present the people who are responsible and then either an attorney could be appointed by the DOJ to prosecute them

I guess I don't quite know how that work insisted so the judge himself can appoint an attorney to prosecute them for criminal contempt instance, or the judge himself can appoint an attorney to prosecute them for criminal contempt. Again, like at least the guy's trying, I guess. No, I mean, like I got nothing to say against him right now. Like this is what they all should be doing. He went there. He's doing something and he's not mincing his words. He's saying that this man was disappeared.

No, yeah. And he's asserting that like they need to listen to the court. They are supposed to listen to the court. Judge Gines, who is a judge on the district court that had its case sent to the Supreme Court for review in the Abrego Garcia incident also, quoted the Merriam-Webster dictionary and said that the government's understanding of the word facilitate flew in the face of the common understanding of the word. Again, like I've seen it asserted like, oh, legal experts can disagree. Meanwhile, you've got the actual judge in the actual case being like, no, this is what the

dictionary says. Your definition is ludicrous. I would caution people to be very careful looking at blue check legal experts on x.com or people on blue sky. There has been so much misleading stuff about immigration law and the laws in these particular two cases and about the resort reservation actually. Just be really careful where you're getting your information, especially on immigration law from. Maybe go back and check what that person was doing in 2023 when thousands of migrants were detained in outdoor detention camps because I've seen so much misinformation and people understandably

who aren't expert in this because it's extremely complicated are likely to be taken advantage of by people who are grifting off what is a moment when a lot of us are afraid and a lot of us are uncertain so to be very careful what you're reading out there. All right. I think that's all for us today on It Could Happen Here. Yeah I think that's our new Erectile is executive dysfunction episode. Erectile order. Alright, well, we're fucking done. Go away. We reported the news. We reported the news.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts.

This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Sam Mullins, and I've got a new podcast coming out called Go Boy. The gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted.

I spent 24 of those years in jail. But when Roger Caron picked up a pen and paper, he went from an ex-con to a literary darling. From Campside Media and iHeart podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Israel Gutierrez, and I'm hosting a new podcast, Dub Dynasty, the story of how the Golden State Warriors have dominated the NBA for over a decade. The Golden State Warriors once again are NBA champions.

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