It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #2

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

The gang discuss Elon Musk's cyber coup of the federal government, trade wars with Mexico and Canada over immigration, and we follow up on Trump's order to require misgendering and detransition in schools. Sources: https://apnews.com/article/trump-netanyahu-washington-ceasefire-1c8deec4dd46177e08e07d669d595ed3https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-lackeys-general-services-administration/ https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-lieutenant-gsa-ai-agency/http://wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-payment-system/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-workers-out-computer-systems-us-agency-sources-say-2025-01-31/https://x.com/USAO_DC/status/1886537850390483276https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3lhfjn7ires2h https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/02/politics/usaid-officials-leave-musk-doge/index.htmlhttps://bsky.app/profile/chadloder.bsky.social/post/3lhc52j6kns2d https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-gsa-terminate-office-leases-f8faac5e2038722f705587c8dd21ab26?user_email=dabc81d5ec766cfb0c88230c077bd88afdc57894c6b8dcdfcf8102146e6c https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/pr/2024/dojpr-041224-former-border-patrol-agent-sentenced-18-years-prison-drug-smuggling-and-bribery.pdf https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/san-diego-border-agent-nicknamed-goalie-took-bribes-to-let-drugs-into-u-s-prosecutors/3259608/ https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/quick-facts/Fentanyl_FY23.pdf https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/frontline-against-fentanyl https://x.com/nayibbukele/status/1886606794614587573?mx=2 https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/el-salvador/ https://apnews.com/article/eu-us-ukraine-defense-trump-greenland-tariffs-c3e454c8f0959d273c2b6dd5941395e3 https://www.theverge.com/news/605483/shein-temu-amazon-trump-tariffs-de-minimis-exemption https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/03/americas/mexico-military-migrants-killed-int-latam/index.html https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-indoctrination-in-k-12-schooling/ https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/local-politics/denver-health-pauses-gender-affirming-surgeries-minors-federal-funding/73-e61f598b-e32d-474e-94b4-4b11d4c5c8afhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/nyregion/nyu-langone-hospital-trans-care-youth.html  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2025/02/04/transgender-hospitals-gender-affirming-care/78204417007/  https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/school-systems-across-us-declarehttps://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/02/04/nyc-parents-push-for-statement-from-schools-chancellor-opposing-trump-executive-order-on-race-gender/https://www.seattleschools.org/news/commitment-to-sps-students-staff-and-families/  https://bsky.app/profile/erininthemorning.com/post/3lhh7qpjygk27 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of our 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 are covering the week of January 29th to February 5th, and oh boy, has this week felt like a month. I am absolutely exhausted. And let's start, I guess, by talking about what Trump did Tuesday night. He had a press conference with both himself and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to announce that the United States would quote-unquote,

take over the Gaza Strip, resulting in quote-un long term ownership. Previously on that day, Trump also signed an order pulling out of the United Nations Human Rights Council and cutting off aid to UNRWA. Let's start with this topic. Hopefully we will have a later episode, maybe next week, covering what's happening in Palestine. But you know, this is as of right now, the current most development. This is one of the more like Crazy things that he's like like you could see Netanyahu even like in the room clearly finding out about this for the first time Yeah, there was a real. Oh shit. Really vibe I'm not sure how long Trump and Netanyahu have actually had this like entire thing planned

That that is a distinct possibility that like this has been Netanyahu's goal for a while, and this was like impacted his negotiations with Biden, like knowing that he wanted this to be like the outcome, where the US basically just takes and holds the territory of Gaza as a US territory like indefinitely. I think Bibi knew that Trump would give him a positive outcome in any number of ways, right? Like to include just saying saying, bomb it off the map. I think it's reasonable to assume that. Well, I mean, something like this was, I think, the obvious outcome as soon as Trump, I mean, from before Trump won, right?

Yeah. Netanyahu never had any intention of letting things go back to the way they were before October 7th. And Trump has a vested interest in giving Netanyahu whatever he wants the most. Like, it's, I don't know, I'm not surprised by it. I guess I'm a little bit like. OK, at least now we know what what they're going to do next. It's in line with the manifest destiny territorial expansion

Trump has been talking about the past few weeks. Yeah, I mean, Joe Biden laid the groundwork for this by giving giving Israel the actual bombs and materials to do the demolition side of this project. And now Trump continues to discuss relocating Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan, while promising to turn Gaza into quote unquote, the Riviera of the Middle East. Level it out, create an economic development. He has also said that he's going to again said he's going to withdraw US troops from Syria which would leave 2000 people in CENTCOM to deploy to Gaza, I guess, if that's what

they want to do. Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's no possible way this can go quote unquote well, this is going to be a fucking catastrophe. The basic plan here is to do a genocide and then- Well, this is part of a genocidal operation. Yeah, it's like, this is like, we're doing a second larger genocide. This is like the finishing touch. Yeah, but you know, on a sort of practical level, it's like, okay, the US couldn't hold Afghanistan, right?

Like, obviously this is a quote unquote easier occupation, but it's like, this is going to be a quote-unquote easier occupation But it's like this is gonna be a fucking shit like a nightmare Like and it I don't know I mean my my assumption is that this is gonna be just like if he actually like You know does a deployment of US troops This is going to be hideously unpopular people are going to be coming back in body bags, and it's gonna fucking I don't know. It's going to be a nightmare for everyone involved and Yeah, it's a Absolutely terrible idea. I'm more scared that they're going to get away with it. I think I'm more

scared that things will go fine for them. And this just becomes like an actually stable US territory in the Middle East. There will be significant pushbacks, not the word, right? Like, there will be guerrilla warfare, right? Like, it's very hard to take and hold significantly large urban areas as the US has found out for 20 years. Whether or not people will accept that, I think they might. I think Trump kind of needs an enemy, you know, and a war and like a quote unquote, you know, he can paint almost anything as a win.

And I think people might be more willing than we'd like to think to accept people coming home in body bags from that. I'm not really sure I think we're actually going to see the kind of troop deployment that people think based on what Trump has said as opposed to expanded support for what the Israelis have already been doing, which has done a significant job to depopulate the area as it stands. I think we have to be hesitant to draw too strong a line between the rhetoric and what Trump is actually going to do, which doesn't mean I don't think that it's not very likely that you're going to continue to see mass depopulation in Gaza. I think it's just that like, I don't know that I think the only way that happens is something that looks like most of the occupations of the last century

have looked like from a US point of view. Yeah. And the new model is this Syria model, right? Like a relatively small footprint and then in the local partner force that the IDF pulling security for US contracts and in US money like that. Right. The IDF and a lot of third party corporate PMCs. Yeah, PMCs, you know, like that's what we've got guys championing at the bit to do that. And like that looks a lot likelier to me than the 10th Mountain Division, you know, occupying large chunks of Gaza.

Agreed. Yeah. Eric Prince is ready to get in there, sadly. Alright, let's transition to our new segment titled Stinky Musk, which I came up with last night, Delirious, and yes, it's bad, no, I'm not going to fix it. South African gang does a hostile takeover of the United States. Yeah, you're hidden today, Garrison. Elon Musk and a gang of overly online Gen Z interns are doing an oligarchic cyber coup of the federal government, starting with the Office of Management and Budget, then moving

on to USAID, General Services Administration, the Treasury, and as of recording, NOAA, as well as many other agencies, smaller agencies, bigger agencies, that they are infiltrating both physically and digitally. Employees of these agencies have been locked out both physically and digitally as the Doge team ransacks various departments and accesses sensitive data with no oversight. And that's like government data about you, possibly in the hands of a literal Nick Fuentes-pilled GROIPER intern. Security officials who tried to resist Musk's seizure of classified materials have been fired,

and Doge personnel threatened to call the U.S. Marshals to be let into buildings. I have some more info on this as we will go on, but I guess this is an okay time just to discuss. Yeah, I think the response to this is one of the more hopeful things going on right now and kind of what led me to think that is looking at 2020, looking at the fallout from 2020 and what worked and what didn happening, what does that look like? And it doesn't look like the same crews of people doing the same thing that they did four or five years ago, which is why I've got some hope in the fact that you've got a different crowd of people

who are radicalizing and taking to the streets and, you know, we, we Federal employees, Federal employees, right? And you've got a lot of like, or former. Yeah. Most of them are still current, but you know,'ve got a lot of like- Or former. Yeah, most of them are still current, but it's a mix of former and current federal employees. And these are the people who do a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff at the office of personnel management,

office management budget. These are the people who keep things functioning at a ground level. And a lot of them are pissed off in a way that I don't think we have really seen before. And I think there's a potential, and who's to say, like right now we just had a big protest in front of treasury, about a full city block or so of people, many if not the vast majority of whom were federal employees rallying alongside a lot of democratic members of Congress. And that doesn't accomplish anything on its own, but it's a potential start to accomplishing

something. If you get those people out in the street, it provides, among other things, a lot of cover for everyone else. And it also is the start of what you might call a reverse January 6th. You know, if January 6th was a bunch of random people taking and occupying government buildings without any knowledge of like what they are or how things actually function inside of them,

the kind of thing that we might be looking at in the near future is the opposite of that. Where a bunch of people who absolutely do know how those organizations and buildings function trying to take and occupy them. And that's the feeling I got because I talked to some folks who are at the Treasury protest. One person that I talked to most extensively is a federal contractor who was present in 2017 at the travel ban protests, if you remember those, which is back when Trump announced his first Muslim ban and a bunch of people started occupying airports and stuff.

I was at LAX for that. This person was at some of those protests and it was out in front of Treasury. And the quote that I've got from there was, I was expecting it, it being this protest, the Treasury protest, to feel like the travel ban protests. It didn't. It was a lot angrier than the travel ban protests.

The travel ban protests were kind of an in defense of another person sort of anger. And this was narrowly focused anger at a very specific group of people. There were a lot of people yelling and screaming outside of their congressman's offices and the like. And like there hasn't been that much disruption compared to what we're going to see, right?

Social security payments haven't stopped going out in mass. So if we're seeing something like this at this early stage, I think there's a lot of potential there. And the thing this person brought up repeatedly is like, when we start seeing congressmen kicking indoors is when things are going to get interesting. If that happens, like that's kind of the stage at which there's a lot of

potential for this to turn into something that could actually like cause change. Yeah. Like if you actually start getting government employees who are willing to do more than stand outside of their offices, like who are willing to take direct action to occupy those buildings or stop other people from, and you've seen little bits of that, right? One of the things we did see is as these Doge kids came along, federal employees refusing them entry, keeping doors locked. Now that was not illegal because these were literally, as it's been described to me by

multiple people, just kids showing up demanding entry without any kind of a badge or evidence of who they are, right? Right. When you, when you get people who are willing to escalate from that and refuse entry, that's when we might actually see some things start to seriously shift here. I mean, based on how much of what Musk is doing is just bypassing Congress and doing a very kind of

typical oligarchic coup. He's doing all those steps. And if you look at what happened in South Korea a few months ago, we are not at the point where congressmen are literally climbing over fences, barricading doors. We're not in South Korea territory yet, but yeah. But their lawmakers were willing to do that.

And there is, I think, waiting from people to wait and see if our lawmakers are gonna be willing to do the same to protect the actual functional aspects of our government. And things are already happening. We are in some ways kind of already at this point. The USAID website is now completely removed, leaving only a note that claims that all personnel

have been put on administrative leave, including overseas personnel. But this essentially leaves a whole agency shut down, but all done without an act of Congress, or even an overstepping executive order from Trump. It was just the unelected Elon Musk who decided to and carried out the closure of a government agency, which should actually be criminal. There is statutes that are designed to stop this from happening,

just no one's enforcing them because they control almost every aspect of government. Musk has also closed the IRS direct file tax system, which has now forced taxpayers to use third party paid services. It's like he's doing this like one by one. I think the weakness that they have right now is that because you're causing so much chaos because they're you're talking about the FBI purge they're trying to do. Like, you know, the thing that they're relying on is everyone is just going to let them in and Just let them get walked over but it's like okay The thing about acting this much outside the law is what guys with guns do you have who you can use to enforce this?

Yeah, that's the thing where it's it's legitimately like if there's serious resistance to them. They might start to crumple because the the reason you work inside of the legal order or you have your own paramilitaries is so that you can have the guy with the gun to make you open the door. And the more people who are willing to just be like, no, fuck you, and force them to actually find guys with guns who are willing to do this. The odds are lower that you get a positive shift because people engage directly and aggressively with the cops than you have when some sort of like mid-level military functionary is

asked to drive a tank over a school teacher, right? Like historically, if you look at when regimes fall, that happens more often than the waving a flag on top of like a pile of corpses. Yeah. Right? Demands are ordered, illegal orders are given to people with guns and they're like, no, I'm not going to shoot at a bunch of teachers today. That's not the only way this kind of thing happens, but at least for my money, that's

the likeliest positive outcome right now. Yeah. And if you look at the last world historical empire run by incredibly unpopular genitocracy, it was the Soviets and look at how they fell apart. That's more or less what happened, yeah. Yeah, and like, it's interesting that if we use a barbarian definition of the state, like that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, right, that they've dismantled the apparatus for state violence as well.

This could just be like the blunt instrument of apparently offering every federal employee time. I know I've heard that they've tried to un-retire wildland firefighters who accepted their offer of retirement. It's extremely funny. But like it's very, yeah, if you're going to what? You're going to retire a bunch of FBI agents or fire them because like Mia said, they are going to need hitters.

They're going to need to use coercive force at some point, possibly very soon to get what they want to do done. And I think when it comes to that, the question is like which hitters? Yeah. Because the FBI and the CIA, I mean, are getting gutted at the moment right now. So you're looking at like... And the NSA. And the NSA, you're looking at local police, federal protective services,

Department of Homeland Security, you know? And the marshals, right? Like, these are kind of like the shooters Trump has to play with and the military will remain an open question until the critical moment, right? Yeah, I mean, FPS is infinitely expandable and is mostly contracted through Robin.

I've spoken about it before, but like that's the one that has a lot of potential to grow. And I think within local, especially sheriff's departments, you've got some people who weren't bat an eyelid in some of those. Oh, no, no, no, absolutely not. And I do think that like sheriff's departments are kind of what haunt me the most,

but that's also, it's not purely a matter of like which agencies and organizations are going to back Trump in this. It's also a matter of like geographic location and DC, in DC at least, he can count on a lot less of those guys because like the Capitol police aren't thrilled right now, you know? Essentially, what Elon is doing right now is exactly what he did to Twitter Except to the entire United States of America. Yeah, and like yeah by the end of this process It still might function on some level right like Twitter still kind of functions, but it's just worse in every way It's worse. It doesn't have the quote-unquote good features it used to, it's buggy, it's full of Nazis, it's just, it sucks more.

Like the previous version was already bad and harmful, but the new one is just worse without the aspects that made it semi-worthwhile. And like, I'm gonna do an episode like next week, like kind of about this like specifically, and how Musk is Twitter Twitterifying the entire government using like all of the same tactics, like refusing to pay leases on buildings, installing beds in agency headquarters to make employees sleep there overnight, having teenagers review code of like long standing employees. It's the exact same process. And if you didn't like

what happened to Twitter, that process is now happening to the government itself. I can't wait for the IRS to send me a letter saying my pussy in bio. Like that will be... Hey. Now you've gotten me back on the Trump train. You know what? I'm piecing out for the day. I'm on board now. Before we close this segment and pivot to ads, I do want to shout out the work that Wired is doing right now. Oh man, yeah. Wired magazine is doing some fantastic reporting on this.

The DC attorney is currently promising to go after individuals who post about Doge employees. They might end up going after some of these Wired journalists who identified this Gen-Z Doge team that is wreaking havoc throughout the government with no oversight. Wired provided what should be legally required and necessary identification of public workers who Musk is trying to keep secret. The DC attorney and Trump's DOJ is very mad about that. They might end up going after these people. But fantastic work coming out of Wired right now. If you want to keep up to date on Musk's takeover, I strongly recommend checking out their work.

I'll post some of those in the sources below. Let's go on a quick ad break and then come back to talk about the continuing kind of fake trade wars and immigration. Sick. I'm Dr. Lorie Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab, is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy-to-digest actionable tips. It's about never feeling good enough. I feel like I'm always failing. You'll

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or wherever you get your podcasts. We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness, and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy model.

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Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back. I'm gonna pivot towards James and Mia to discuss tariffs and immigration. Take it away. Yeah. So on Monday, Trump sort of averted the market collapse that he had set off with his declaration that there are going to be 25% tariffs on all goods from Canada and Mexico

and also 10% tariff on China. So let's let's go into like what actually happened. So the tariffs on Mexico and Canada are on hold for a month. However, the 10% tariff on all Chinese goods did go into effect. And we'll get some more about what that's going to do in a second. But much more importantly, Trump eliminated the de minimis exception, which allowed like people and companies to ship goods the de minimis exception, which allowed people and companies to ship goods from China that were worth under $800 and not have to go through the formal customs process and pay tariffs on it and also have to spend all of that time paperwork and shit.

And before we get into the sort of devastating effect this is going to have on businesses, I wanna make it clear that regular people in China use this to send things to people in the US. Like that's a that's a very normal thing. Yeah, that is now really, really difficult. And about a third of YouTube ads are supported by people who run companies that make use of this loophole. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So on the business side, this is actually really interesting, because I think it's one of the I mean, not the But I think it's going to be a very very early example of Trump completely fucking a base

That's been very very supportive of him because this is going to liquidate Huge portions of the dropshipping economy right like all of all of the stupid YouTube shirts Like all of that stuff is just going to be annihilated Can you explain dropshipping if people aren't familiar, Mia? Just like 10 second version. Yeah. So dropshipping is, is, is a thing where you, you do an order and instead of having like an inventory, normally, you'd have a warehouse that has shirts in it. Dropshipping, you don't do that. You are now the intermediary and you have these manufacturers like print to

consumption basically. And you can, you can do this very cheaply and then you can run the entire markup, but it works because of how cheap it is to get these like, sort of small scale Chinese firms to like make stuff for you. Those people are screwed companies like Temu and Shien are either going to have to just completely eat shit, or they're going to have to figure out a way to move their entire supply line through countries like Vietnam Which is going to be very difficult I mean because Temu even getting stuff to the US has been kind of hard for them because of how the logistics network works Yeah, and so obviously like I don't I don't think most people listen to this show are that sad about she and and Temu eating shit

but no it is like a mixed bag because a whole lot of the MLM industry is going to take a header as a result of this. Yeah. Yeah. There's some stuff to like fuck them but on the other hand there are a lot of people who are going to eat shit who are not those people and this is there is a huge like range of industries that are run by very very small businesses like it was even just like an individual person who like makes crafts and sells and those people are also screwed because they rely on getting the resources in from China and there's a

lot of sort of you know in things like like people who build like hand like retro handheld consoles area and like data like custom airsoft rifles I know you talked about like there's a whole bunch of industries like that that are these like small-scale production things That are I just screwed That rely on this stuff So the ripples of this specific part of it are going to keep playing out basically no matter What else happens in this trade war yeah? It's also worth noting that Trump's tariffs on Mexico and Canada aren't gone. They've just been postponed for a month

So there is a real chance that we end up in exactly the same place that we were going into the weekend where no one knows where these tariffs are going to take effect and basically blow a smoking crater in the world economy. And we get another round of the negotiations that James is going to talk about. It's already setting off a really sort of staggering right-wing, I mean not even necessarily right-wing, but just like a nationalist backlash in Canada that's kind of been like tearing up this sort of international right-wing alliance and nationalist because suddenly Trump's coming after them and now they're really mad about it. Well, and because Trudeau announced that he would be targeting, you know, like retaliatory tariffs, specifically at red states, we now have people calling him dark woke or dark Trudeau,

you know, for very different reasons than they used to call him the actor Alright you're gonna get canceled if you're not careful Outstanding speaking of getting canceled what hasn't gotten canceled is is the 10% tariff on all Chinese goods, which is just now in effect. It's just happening. That's bad. It's going to increase inflation. It's also, it's, you know, it's sort of the opening round of this escalation to a trade war.

China has retaliated with tariffs that are not a very big deal on US goods and some product control stuff on export control stuff on some rare earth minerals. Actually, I don't know if they're rare earth minerals, but like, minerals you need for production stuff that isn't a big deal yet, but could be. And we were all expecting Chinese tariffs. Having 25% tariffs to Canada was not something I thought was like a looming port. No. Yeah, I mean, I thought they'd do Mexico. I didn't know about that.

I'm very worried about the offshoring of Chinese labor and the impact that we're having places like Myanmar where China has these special economic zones. And it's something we will cover. We obviously have a lot of sources. Yeah, we have Monday. On Monday, we're gonna cover this more. So I think something that's important to understand

about these tariffs is that these tariffs are not economic policy. This is the mistake that all of the capitalists who back Trump made is that they assumed that just like every. This is the mistake that all of the capitalists who back Trump made, is that they assumed that just like every other president who's made promises like this, like Obama's promise to renegotiate NAFTA, they all assumed that because of this economic policy, they'd be able to just like get Trump to be pro-business and he wouldn't do it.

The miscalculation they made is that these are not economic tariffs. These are directly foreign policy geopolitical tariffs, right? Their international relations are to the deal bullshit. And the the goal of it and he's been deploying this against like I mean Columbia, Denmark He's threatening the EU now He's going to keep doing this with China The goal of this is to directly use American consumer power as as a weapon of imperialism to make these countries fall into line Yeah, and now now we'll pass it to James to talk about what he was specifically trying to get out of Mexico and Canada in this round.

Yeah, so like we had to speak about falling into line there, I think it's probably a good place to start. Like this kind of Trump brinksmanship is very typical of his style, right? Nearly every media outlet, I think, fell for it this time, just like it did in his first term, like we got this, like this is going to cause a crisis. Trump was very nebulous in his goals for these tariffs. And as almost always, like he talked a lot about like America being treated unfairly, right? He talked about the border and he talked specifically about fentanyl. So let's begin by talking about fentanyl. Just to be clear, it is true that some fentanyl comes into the USA from Mexico and to a lesser degree

also from Canada. The vast majority of the fentanyl that enters the USA from Mexico, about 80% of the convictions made as a result of that fentanyl entering the USA are made on US citizens, right? And 90% of the fentanyl that is seized is seized at ports of entry. So this idea that there are like Mexican nationals backpacking fentanyl through the desert that exists but it is not what is bringing the bulk of the fentanyl that is killing the people in this country into this country. There are multiple cases of CBP agents taking bribes to allow the drug into the country. I will link to two of them in the show notes, but know that there are more of them.

And given the relatively high bar for CBP agent, anyone in DHS to be investigated, right, we can assume that this is something that happens on at least a semi-regular basis. So what did Trump do to stop this fentanyl coming into the country? What did he get? He got this promise that Mexico would deploy

10,000 troops to its border. In reality, this isn't much of a concession at all. The Mexican National Guard has been deployed to the border for years. Specifically, it's been deployed at gaps in the US border wall for more than a year. So people will remember our coverage of the open air detention sites in Hacumba and East County San Diego. All of those open air detention sites correspond to gaps in the border wall where migrants would enter, surrender to border patrol and then be detained in open air. Each of those open-air detention sites correspond to gaps in the border wall where migrants would enter, surrender to border patrol, and then be detained in open air. Each of those gaps now has a Mexican National Guard checkpoint in front of it.

They're there in conjunction with the INM, the National Institute of Migration in English. The INM has camps for the migrants who do come there. This is something that Biden obtained in I think late 23, early 24, and that's why we aren't seeing open-air detention. One of the reasons being Biden's asylum ban, we aren't seeing as many people crossing the border. Mexican border towns also tend to be areas where the Mexican military deploys its troops because often they're places where organized crime occurs due to their proximity to the border and the market for drugs and the fact that weapons from the US tend to flow into Mexico and that that's where large numbers

of weapons for organized crime come from. For more than a year, I've received press releases from Tijuana constantly talking about new unit arrives, special forces arrives, army arrive, and then they'll have pictures of a parade. Now, they never tell us when those units are leaving. They just keep telling us they're coming. So it's very hard to get a sense of actually how many troops are there. But the idea that Mexico is suddenly militarizing its border is kind of farcical. Yeah, I want to there's been a lot of sort of cheerleading of shine bombs sort of like standing up to the US and I don't think people in the US really understands the securitization

on the Mexican border. And so something that I'm realizing that I don't think I just assume people knew about this, but I don't think I ever made it into the Western press much is that so like a few months ago in October, the Mexican army just like open fire on a convoy of like on a convoy of immigrants. And this was this was on the border of Guatemala, and just like killed six of them shot 12 other people. so like and that like there are massacres like that like not infrequently right like this is not a This is not a Mexico is pro-immigrant like the u.s. Is anti-immigrant thing like part of the part of the reason why Trump can Like you know sort of declare victory without getting any concessions or whatever is because of how murderous the Mexican Army's Like border policy is already. Yeah, and the Mexican leaders have successfully been able to paint themselves as leftists, exclusively being two inches to the left of a further and further right regime in

Washington DC. People can listen to the last episode of my Dali and Gap series for an idea of how Mexico is constantly deporting migrants to its own southern states. I want to talk a little bit about the Canadian concessions very briefly. Again, 10,000 agents and a border spending that really doesn't change much in terms of what was already becoming a more militarized border. There has actually been a significant flow of migrants from the US to Canada in the last couple of years, specifically of Francophone African people who would take that route. I'm aware of several TikTok influencers. There's one guy I follow in Chad who, he's in Canada now, but he's from Chad. And he makes these videos explaining to Chadian people how to go from

Mexico into the U S and then move up to Canada, obviously where they can speak French and that makes their lives much easier, right? It makes it much easier to not have to learn a language. Trudeau did agree to list cartels as terrorist organizations. Yeah, that seems to be from what I can tell the big move that he made. Yeah, yeah. So it does allow for some economic sanctions, right? If they attempt to use that Canadian border and sort of get around the United States. It's much less significant than a US listing, which we believe is coming. Canada's not going to use it to do covert operations inside Mexico, I don't think.

Canada's not going to be drone striking anyone. But when Trump listed the Kurz force, he then struck its leader with a drone. I don't think Canada's going to be doing that. But nonetheless, that is a concession and perhaps there is some plan for that. Right. It certainly allows for, and I've said this before, the economic sanctioning of people who provide material benefit to those organizations or potentially the arrest of people who provide material benefit to those organizations, which is a large number of businesses in Mexico, which end up being extorted or paying protection money. Right? So we don't know what is going to happen with

that but it's one of the tools that Trump now has to use as another cudgel against it, against Mexico. The last and perhaps most sinister of all development is this deal that Marco Rubio struck with Bukele in El Salvador, right? El Salvador has said it will host US citizen criminals and deportees from any nation in its jail system. So I'll just read Bukele's tweet, it's very short. We are willing to take in only convicted criminals, parentheses including convicted US citizens, into our mega prison, Secod, in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for

the US, but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable. If you're not familiar, it means a counterterrorism confinement center in Spanish. For people who haven't heard about this, it's the largest prison in the world that Bukele opened in 2023. And it's a terrible place. There are cells of a hundred people. In that cell, there are 80 bunks, two toilets and two basins. They are extremely confined. I think they get 6.5 feet of space per person. They get 30 minutes outside a day.

They're forced to shave their heads. Their ankles and wrists are chained. People are arbitrarily detained there. Sometimes for things like looking like they might be in a gang. Multiple human rights organizations, including that, well, the State Department is not a human rights organization, sometimes it's the opposite of that. The State Department itself has raised concerns about human rights abuse due to the quote unquote state of exception, which exists in El Salvador, which allows the government to do these things without really any human rights oversight.

The U.S. has already seemingly moved some migrants to Guantanamo Bay, to the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Satellite imagery has shown tents going up there. Very few at the current time. And they seem to come from Fort Lewis McCord, which I couldn't work out. But there are tents, I guess, I think it was Washington Post had these satellite images of tents being constructed there. I'm trying to keep an eye on that satellite imagery. Of course, Biden opened the door to outdoor detention. It's not impossible that we will see that again.

But this Bokehli plan, this plan to send people to El Salvador, especially US citizens, evidently this is unconstitutional. The courts get to decide how much that matters, right? We don't. But this is deeply concerning. We're all waiting on the courts and we're all deeply concerned. Yeah, well, there you go. One final break and then we'll come back to end and discuss Trump's targeting of teachers

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Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast. Welcome back. So last week, Trump signed an executive order titled Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 schooling, and part of its focus was to prevent teachers from calling trans students by their names and preferred pronouns, even promising to inflict legal punishment for doing so, basically mandating deadnaming, misgendering, and forcibly detransitioning students. This order specifically took aim at quote-unquote social transition. This is like the non-medical social aspects of transitioning,

like changing gendered names, pronouns, what facilities you use, socialization. And this stuff has historically been the most common form of transition for minors. It's the easiest to do. You don't even need your parents' help. But this order blames schools for indoctrinating children in quote, radical anti-American ideologies, unquote, which they include gender ideology as a part of. The order tries to mandate a national school bathroom ban, restrict participation in school sports, and states that within 90 days, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the Attorney General, shall provide Trump with a quote-unquote ending indoctrination strategy

to protect parental rights and eliminate all federal funding that directly or indirectly supports gender ideology indoctrination in K-12 schools, including curriculums, teacher education, certification, licensing, employment, and training. To quote from the order, quote, the attorney general shall coordinate with state attorneys general and local district attorneys in their efforts to enforce the law and file appropriate actions against K-12 teachers who violate the law by one. sexually exploiting minors, 2. unlawfully practicing medicine by offering diagnoses and treatment without the requisite license, and 3. otherwise unlawfully facilitating in the social transition of a minor."

So basically the goal is to try to make calling a student by their name and pronouns illegal and wrapping this in either with some form of sexual exploitation, practicing medicine without a license, and using those as justifications for making this practice illegal. Now, in response, school districts in Columbus, Ohio, Harrisburg, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland announced that they would not comply with the order and continue to defend their trans students, according to journalist Aaron Reed. Seattle Public Schools published a statement reaffirming their commitment to protecting

LGBTQ students and staff, and later the California Department of Education pushed back on the legality of Trump's order. Other blue cities and states have stayed quiet in the week since the order, with teachers and parents calling on places like the New York City Public School System to take a stance on if they will stand up for their trans students. So this is one side of the coin right now. The other side is healthcare, which we will close on. Now in relation to Trump's executive order from his first week entitled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the federal

government, some hospitals have begun complying in advance by cancelling patient appointments for gender-affirming care. Denver Health and University of Colorado Health sacrificed the care of their patients for Trump's promise of continued funding by announcing that they would no longer be offering care, including blockers and hormone replacement therapy, for patients 18 and under. The Virginia Commonwealth University and Children's Hospital of Richmond have also ceased providing gender-affirming care to those under 19.

This past Monday, thousands of people gathered outside at the NYU Langdon Hospital in protest of the hospital's choice to proactively comply with Trump's order to restrict health care after the cancellation of two appointments for trans patients under the age of 19. Now, after these protests, which saw thousands of people protesting out in the streets, after this, the New York attorney general sent a letter to the state health care systems saying that the state law requires that hospitals provide gender affirming care and claimed that the federal funding would not be impacted by an executive order. And like this really hammers down the point that like none of these executive orders are

self-enforcing. These all require proactive implementation by local actors. Dr. Jeremy Birnbaum was quoted in the New York Times. He's a pediatrician at the state-run University Hospital of Brooklyn. He was quoted as saying, quote, I am willing to go to jail to continue to provide your care, unquote. And you really can't, like protest hospitals that comply in advance. Same thing with schools. These are targets that can provide actual pressure. And there's probably people on staff who are very sympathetic and they just might be too scared to take a stance right now.

And we have some breaking news as of this morning. State Attorney General from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Nevada, Vermont, and Wisconsin released a statement saying that Trump's executive order banning trans health care is unlawful and that the hospitals have a duty to provide care. So this is like the the most optimistic thing that we've seen so far. Now, obviously, these are blue states. This is not going to impact red states who already have these types of bans either in process or, you know, are going to have them down the line. Georgia just put out a trans health care ban this morning for, you know, a bill

that'll reach our Senate in the next few weeks. But this is the current situation. Protests seem to have applied a degree of pressure that has gotten states, attorney general to actually make a statement on this issue. Yeah. I will say, like, so I still teach, right? I teach at a community college and sometimes through that we also teach high school students. If you are an educator or someone in healthcare, now is the time to be talking to your union about like how you meet this because like the stronger we are, the better we can confront

this and the only way to confront this is we all need to do it together. And like you, these are conversations that we need to be having right now. Like we do not have time and, and our unions are a very valuable tool for preserving our rights. Yeah, that's actually part of what I was going to say. I've talked to a few union teachers Like we do not have time and unions are a very valuable tool for preserving our rights. Yeah, that's actually part of what I was going to say. I've talked to a few union teachers who are like, yeah, we're going to go do this. We're going to go fight. So I expect in the next couple of weeks, we're going to see more movement from the teachers' unions.

And I think there's, you know, there's an under... I mean, there's on the one hand, there is the threat that, you know, these people do want to privatize the education system, right? So there is a chance that this is, you know, trying to draw a backlash out of this is something that they're going to about this whole time, right? Is that this this whole coup is being carried out by a bunch of people with laptops and pieces of paper walking up to bureaucrats and the bureaucrats doing what they're being told, right? this is this is not a coup that's working with like an army that is showing up on your street and You can go like find the local Bureaucrats who are the people who are supposed to enforce this stuff and you can protest them and you can put some steel on their spine and make the administration actually try to do this.

It's not that hard and they'll fucking cave. Yes. Yes. That's entirely what I was trying to get at earlier. It ties into what James was saying. This is the time to be making connections across as wide a swath of the country as you can including like everyone you can get in touch with who is not someone you would normally organize with like this is a moment of potential and it's it's during moments of potential

that you should be widening the swath of people that you connect to because otherwise there's just no getting through this sort of shit Yeah, we will be covering all these topics more in depth in our regular like daily episodes I have a mind-boggling very frustrating episode on Musk and the the Trump campaigns promises of abolishing different departments of government As well as a deep dive on like affirmative action DEI-awokeness in the coming weeks. And I'm sure we will all be focusing on different parts of this in our continuing episodes. But that does it for us today. See you on the other side.

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