It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #43

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

The gang discuss X’s new account location feature, a Russian peace hoax published by Axios, Border Patrol’s use of license plate readers, the shuttering of the Education Department and DOGE, and Zohran’s White House meeting. Sources: https://archive.is/LRnmy https://www.axios.com/2025/11/19/ukraine-peace-plan-trump-russia-witkoff  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqZO0VRlp7E  https://x.com/SenMcConnell/status/1992719172292214824?s=20  https://x.com/BarakRavid/status/1990948698508185760  https://apnews.com/article/immigration-chicago-arrests-police-federal-5c21bcb2cd890fcb086480469c1a3a96  https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/border-patrol-monitoring-us-drivers-detaining-suspicious-travel-127699704  https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-sues-el-cajon-illegally-sharing-license-plate-data-out https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhscbppia-049-cbp-license-plate-reader-technology  https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-doesnt-exist-with-eight-months-left-its-charter-2025-11-23/ https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-announces-six-new-agency-partnerships-break-federal-bureaucracy https://www.ed.gov/media/document/fact-sheet-department-of-education-and-department-of-state-international-education-and-foreign-language-studies-partnership-112461.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDanzN1EUeE  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/nyregion/mamdani-osse-dsa-endorsement.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc. And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you.

Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. check out the second season of my podcast shell game on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts i'm stephen curry and this is gentleman's cut i think what makes gentlemen's cut different is

me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product with every sip you get a little something different visit gentlemen's cut bourbon dot com or your nearest total wines or bevmo this message is intended for audiences 21 and older gentlemen's cut bourbon Boone County, Kentucky. For more on gentlemen's cut bourbon, please visit gentlemen's cuthuburn.com. Please enjoy responsibly. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years, until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small.

all towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another. It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other. I'm Elia Kani, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope.

I've always wanted us to have therapy, so this is such a beautiful opportunity. Listen to Season 2 of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CoreZone Media This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yes.

This episode we're covering the week of November 19 to November 24th. Boy, this year's just blown by. Yeah. Fast year. Yeah, they sped up the time stream. You know what else sped up the time stream? Watching something on Twitter blow up again. We can't seem to stop talking about this fucking website.

and I'm tired of it, but the big news this week from Elon Musk's fucking vanity propaganda app is that they introduced a new feature to let you know the location of the account and also the number of like name changes, like how many username changes it's had since the account has started. I would say within sort of progressive and liberal circles, the common interpretation of what's happened is best summarized by this Daily Beast headline, top MAGA influencers accidentally. unmasked as foreign trolls. No shit. Now, as is often the case, this isn't entirely accurate. It's not to say that there's not a shitload of foreign trolls who are making money by pretending to be American MAGA influencers. There definitely are. We've known about this since well before this Twitter change. One of the most prominent people on Musk's Twitter, Ian Miles Chong, is a Malaysian man who has never been to the United States and publishes nothing but MAGA content. Now, what's happened here, you can find going through, there's a bunch of three,

There's threads on blue sky, threads on Twitter, threads in various articles that are basically all copies of each other that are collecting a bunch of these accounts that have been busted, right? One good example would be the Maga Nation verified account, which has almost 400,000 followers, started in 2024. It's had five name changes since October 2025, and it is based in Eastern Europe, non-EU. Yeah, that's Megination, yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people have taken to mean, like, it's Russian, right? Yeah. Another account is the Ivanka News Trump, which displays as Ivanka Trump, even though it has nothing to do with her, which it does note in its Twitter bio.

The account was started in 2010. It has had 11 user changes since August of 2024, and it is apparently based in Nigeria. You love to say it. You're seeing like a shitload of stuff like this, right? And it's being taken. Unfortunately, I think this is a mistake. And I hate to be like the, hey, guys, stop being happy about this, but you should because you're wrong about what's happening here.

people are. Like the Daily Beast account posts some liberal Twitter account being like, this is total Armageddon for the online right. It's looking like half of their large accounts were foreigners posting as Americans all along. Now let me clarify a couple things. For one thing, nothing that Elon has done here, nothing that Twitter has revealed, has proven that these accounts exist in any particular country. I'm going to explain why. A lot of people use something called a VPN. And a VPN masks the location that you're browsing and law. in from, right? And you can use a VPN to look like you're posting from almost any country on the planet. And there is no evidence whatsoever that Twitter has done anything at all to,

like, deal with this, right? To like make sure that they're getting someone's actual location. A bunch of accounts, a bunch of like people have pointed out like, hey, look, this is saying I'm from a country that I have literally never been to. Like, here's my information. I'm very transparent. And there have also been organizations, including liberal, you know, coded organizations that have been mistakenly identified as coming from a country that they are not set up. And for example,

the Planned Parenthood account was showing us from Germany, which has ignited this conspiracy theory on the right that Planned Parenthood is some European fucking influence op in the United States. No, they used a VPN because they're in danger

because it's Planned Parenthood, right? No, I mean, I ran into a very similar situation because I mostly use Twitter to look at Yowie now. And when I was in Germany last month, it wouldn't let me look at the Yowie without putting in my government ID for like age verification. Sure, of course. Then the nanny state hits garrison.

So obviously a non-starter. I'm not, I'm not giving X the everything app my government ID to allow me to look at Yawi in Germany. So instead, I had to put on the VPN, so I'm back into states, and then I can look at the yowie. So this is basically the same situation between me and Planned Parenthood here. Yes. I've said often that you in Planned Parenthood are basically identical beings.

What's happening here is it is worth. talking about, but it's worth talking about not because we suddenly know the truth that it's been revealed about. We don't really know anything more than we did before this change came in, right? Well, except, Robert, I mean, the biggest, the biggest news is that the DHS has been a Mossad operation this whole time. Yes, that's right. Like we've always suspected. Yeah, so the Department of Homeland Security account, I think it was, got listed as having been based in Israel. This is not real. Like, this isn't even X fucking up. Somebody just edited a screenshot. And there's so many of these going around, hundreds and hundreds of them, right,

that this just kind of got shuffled in to the flood. And a lot of people didn't catch it, right? And it just gets integrated into people's beliefs about the world, right? This is a standard story with how Twitter works now. And this is, by the way, is overall, I think, beneficial to Musk and his kind of people, which is that we know less every day about the world. There's more disinformation about what's happening, people are less keyed in on reality and more just getting locked into different delusions. Like, that's what the story is here, which is that this app and the way that social media in general works, particularly in this age, each of these changes, even the ones that get celebrated as having revealed something, are just fogging up

reality. And they're doing it in such a way as to make it so that, like, no one knows anything about what's going on, right? This is like this is the standard playbook that you've been getting out of like authoritarian regimes from forever, right? What's important is not that just their propaganda be out. It's that there's not really any, any way for there to be a consensus reality. Because if there isn't consensus reality, then you can't put together a large enough block of people who all believe basically the same things about reality to stop what's going on, right? That's what's happening here. And you're wrong if you're looking at this as good.

if you believe that this has blown up the right and that this has done damage to them. They're saying the same things about you and about the left because a shitload of people use VPNs and you can always cherry pick a bunch of, and I'm not, again, nothing I'm saying is not saying that they're in a shitload. Like Elon has specifically incentivized foreign accounts in different countries to make money by getting into the U.S. culture war, right? That is absolutely a big part of how Twitter works today. No one's denying that.

What I'm saying is that you don't know any more than you did before this came out because you have no way of knowing if any of these accounts are based where X is saying they're based because of how VPNs work. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's what I've got to say. It's incredibly annoying. It's incredibly annoying that we have to continue writing about X. It's even more annoying. The half of blue sky is people just virtue signaling that they're not using Twitter and being mad at Twitter. You know, it's the same, honestly, this will get me flack, but it's the same thing about like whether people are angry about substack or, fucking Instagram or Twitter or whatever, like if you're using social media, you're not doing

yourself any favors. And they're all pretty supportive of bad things and bad people. And we use them anyway, because that's the world. Like, we spend dollars anyway. And let me tell you, dollars support some bad things. We pay taxes and boy howdy, I don't like where a lot of those taxes go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But don't pretend that because you pick the right social media app that you're not fucking your brain up and introducing yourself to a bunch of things that aren't true we all do it like that's the problem yes that not good for humans yeah broadly uh do you want to talk about something else it's not good for humans yeah let's not talk about fucking x the every goddamn thing app anymore no unfortunately i have i have something robert which

which does relate to x great the everything app so let's talk about axios oh yeah are you guys familiar with Axios. It's the news outlet for people who hate paragraphs. People who love cocaine. Yeah. Yeah. For people reading the news while they're having a dump, that is what Axios is for. They shit out news for you to read while you're having a shit. Again, which makes cocaine even a bigger part of the picture here. No, it's like the ADHD brain's like ideal news source. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You do a line, you have to go take a shit and you catch up on your news. Yeah, it is.

That's what they call productivity. It's the Robert Evans grind set, the morning routine that everyone's been asking for. It's really genius of fucking Axios to hit that demographic, exactly. Because those people also have a lot of money because they're all day traders. Truk, truke.

Yeah, yeah, they smashed. I have Polymarked on one tab, Caliishi on the other, and Axios always pulled up. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. That's split screening. It's one of those Apple, like, flat glass touchscreen panels, but it's just for doing Coke off of.

You've just got lines cut off on it. Yeah. It's because the meta glasses are constantly looping Axios and you don't need your screen. Right. Right. Yeah, Axios and use that left for people who are taking cocaine has seemingly been duped into running a Russian wish list as a proposed U.S. Act peace plan in Ukraine. Yeah, great.

what happens when you do journalism at the speed of paranoia. But this has come at the same time as Trump has proclaimed via truth, by the medium of a truth on truth social, that Ukraine was not showing sufficient gratitude for what were at, like 11 months of him failing to end the war. Yeah. So this 28-point plan was first published by Axios. And it was pretty much immediately rejected by a number of senators, led by Senator Angus King, who were at a security conference in Halifax, Halifax, Canada, not O.G., Halifax. Shout out. Yeah, Halifax Jr. The senators pretty much immediately said that the U.S. was not the author of the document. Rubio, quote, made it very clear to us that we are recipients of a proposal that was delivered

to one of our representatives, said Senator Mike Rounds. So what they are saying is that the U.S. didn't write this document and it was delivered to them. One can safely assume by Russia, right? Rubio, using X, the Everything app, then attempted to deny this. So what it appears has happened is that this plan was drafted by Russian special envoy, Dmitriev, probably was Steve Whitkoff. Sure, that sounds right. Wittkoff is Trump's what is. I think he's a special envoy to Russia at this point. Yeah, I believe he's an envoy to Russia. Yeah. Warren Zevon wrote a song about guys like him. Yes. Yeah. He has not covered himself in glory in his time doing this. He's kind of a useful fool. He's formerly like a real estate guy. Yeah, that'll prepare you to deal

with Vladimir Putin. Having sold houses during the subprime mortgage crisis. Yeah. Yeah. And it's pretty much what he's doing here, right? Like, he's consistently been duped and pretty much has become an advocate for the Russian point of view a lot of the times. In this case, it seems that it was then strategically leaked to Axios, right? When Barack Ravid, who authored the Axios article, posted it on X, the Everything website, Steve Whitkoff responded saying, quote, he must have got this from K. This is very funny, because we have Steve Whitkoff, right, negotiating a peace process, which affects millions of people and he also doesn't know

how to use the DM button on X, the Everything website. To be fair, X, the Everything app just changed their DMs and the whole user interface for the DMs is completely different now. You have to put in like a passcode and they claim to be encrypted

and it's much uglier to look at. So in defense... In defense of Steve, you can instead leak the source of the article. The safer, more secure option It might just be to do it all in public at this point. To do it in public, yeah. So Steve, of course, using a codename there, K.

We'll never know. Yeah, because we can possibly tell that Kereel Dmitriev might be using K as a code name, also the first letter of his first name. So it seems very likely that either Dimitriov or someone else in Russia decided to leak this plan to Barack Ravid or Dave Lola, knowing it would be raised at a press conference to betting that Trump who, according to Washington Post, seems to have very little detailed knowledge

as negotiations would probably see this as a quote-unquote deal that then he could claim for himself, right? And it worked. I want to talk about how Axios' model makes that possible, right? I'm very well aware that Barack Ravid was a member of the 8200 unit in Israel.

If people aren't familiar, that's like a SIG-Intyreli intelligence unit. This is widely known. I've seen this being discussed in sort of religious. to this. The thing is he doesn't need to be nefarious for this to happen. And I think the most likely option here is that the Axios model is to do insider journalism and then rush to be the first to post it on social media and then get a bazillion clicks for your 78 word article. Right. That is

how, that is their entire business model. Speed is the name of their whole game. Yeah, that's why they don't use paragraphs. It's news for people who are like waiting for their coffee at Starbucks or whatever. The problem is in this case, states or non-state actors, right, can effectively place a leak and they know that Axios will rush it to press, probably in minutes, if not hours. And with the way that the United States executive branches right now, it seems very clear that if they can get it in front of Trump, then they're going to get a reaction one way or another. So it seems that Rubio was effectively cut out. The United States Secretary of State was effectively cut out of this whole process. And there's a lot of reporting about, like, I don't want to do Kremlinology for the

Trump White House particularly. But it shows how these news outlets, these news outlets are sort of don't fact check the Russia price to do everything for social media, can effectively be used, right, in a way that the benefits, in this case, Russia, but any number of organizations could do the same thing. Yeah. Robert mentioned some kind of like war times, wartime song. I was wondering, where is the country of Zevon? You said there's like a song about war in Zivol? Jesus, Garrison.

Garrison. Get out of here. Get out of here. About discrimination in the workplace. I'm going to do a Woody Guthrie thing in my next series, and Gary is just going to sail straight past Garrison. You have to listen to Johnny Cash, Garrison? I like Johnny Cash.

Okay. James Cash. that's what they say they call me here's the man's Hi Kyle Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan Just one page as a Google Doc And send me the link, thanks

Hey just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you Here's the link But there was no link There was no business plan It's not his fault I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet My name is Evan Ratliff

I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses.

Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer. the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved. Until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer.

And I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her. Or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up.

Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Jingle bells, jingle, jingle all the way. Yo, yo, can we get Thanksgiving first? I'm hungry. Hey, y'all. It's Kadeen. And DeVal. The hosts of Ellis Ever After podcast.

This holiday season, whether you're cooking for the family, out buying gifts for the kids, or crowded in holiday traffic, tune out the noise and tune in to Ellis Ever After. On Ellis Ever After, we get real with our crew about family. If you feeling like you're feeling, that's probably because you're good parents. Friendship. Be careful what you put in your body. Move your body and love it the way you love them cars that house them, them clothes, them shoes, love yourself, them brunches, love marriage. You know what's become attractive to me? And it's because I've self-corrected and I guess I detoxified myself, accountability. Oh yeah. That is bad attractive. So attractive to me

and everything else in between. I've told my most embarrassing moment on this podcast before, which was me taking a shit in a Ziploc bag. So listen to Ellis Ever After on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. New Doge news for the first time in who knows how long. The news being there's no more Doge, according to a report in Reuters. has dispended eight months before its scheduled expiration

in July of 2007. When I asked about the status of Doge earlier this month, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kapoor told Reuters quote, that doesn't exist adding that Doge is no longer

a quote unquote centralized entity. Yeah. Caporo has also said that the Doge mandated hiring freeze is over and that there's, quote, no target around reductions, unquote, meaning that the Doge era rule of having to fire a certain number of people in order to be allowed to hire people is no longer in use as well. And this isn't

really surprising. You haven't really heard about many Doge-related stuff in a while. They haven't been doing anything in a while. Musk has basically been out of the center loop of things. But also, they did the things that they were needed to do, right? They, like, did a massive triggered large portions of government employees and did permanent damage to the administrative state and cost several hundred thousand people around the world their lives through cuts in USAID. Yeah. Yeah, and like two former Doge employees, including Big Balls, now just work on web design for U.S. government websites, and other Doge officials have moved to agencies which they administered

cuts to. A former Doge team member, Zachary Terrell, is now the chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services. And Jeremy Lewin, who assisted the slashing of USAID now oversees foreign assistance at the State Department. Yeah. So those guys got jobs out of this. All of the people who got fired or got negatively impacted by the government shutdown are probably not going to be coming out as well as Mr. Big Balls here. Well, and there's some evidence that a number of folks who worked with Doge are now feeling left in the wind and potentially in danger because there are a lot of people who want these folks to be properly.

prosecuted for what they did. There's definitely talk about that if there's another Democratic administration. We'll see if they would ever have the big balls to do it. But there was an article in Politico recently, and I'm going to read a quote from that. Musk had not just been their visionary leader. For them, he was their protector. The man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came.

Without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed. A senior doge figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still brothers in arms, and that Musk would continue to protect them. That led to another protesting and advising, guys, seriously, get your own lawyer if you need it. He lunts great, but you need to watch your own back. Watch your backs, guys. Yeah. These guys would be some of the more, like, presumably very easy to prosecute and, like, obvious targets if we get another democratic administration. It's some really obvious crimes in terms of, like, protection of information, you know, like some pretty obvious rule breaking that went on. That's not being

prosecuted now, but yeah, they're right. It could be prosecuted in the future. Those first three, four months of the Trump admin, what it really was just full steam ahead on the Silicon Valley version of things, right, like they move fast and break things. Yeah. That's such a wild time to look back on, not only just in terms of how much damage they did, but the idea that if they were going to continue at that pace for the rest of the term, the government already is fundamentally different in some ways but like how much worse that would have been yeah yeah and if musk's ego is in part what's sabotaged that from being complete and really kind of doing that more like yarvin inspired project yeah hubris uh kills kills a man once again but there is aspects of like the

doge idea and this like government efficiency thing which aren't fully going away like this this still is an aspect of the trump administration there still is like some of those guys at the Office of Budget and Management and the Heritage 2025 guys who have a lot of this government efficiency, quote unquote, government efficiency type stuff that they're still working on, including at the Education Department, which last week, the Trump administration took another step towards closing the Department of Education by shifting some of its duties to other federal agencies, which the admin claims will quote, streamlined federal education activities on the legally required programs

and reduce administrative burden, unquote. That is going to be done by these six new inter-agency agreements which have been signed with the departments of labor, interior, health and human services, and state. The Education Department writing in an announcement that this will, quote, break up the federal bureaucracy,

ensure efficient delivery of funded programs, activities, and move closer to fulfilling the president's promise to return education, to the states. So by splitting up Education Department duties among four different agencies in three different interagency agreements, this

is supposed to cut red tape and lighten federal bureaucracy. You have seven entities now doing what one entity did before. The elementary high school and post-secondary programs will now be administered by the Department of Labor. That's great.

We'll now oversee over $30 billion in education grants. aimed at trying to boost the number of Americans in the workforce. The Department of the Interior will be taking over the Education Department's Indian education programs and integrating them into existing programs administered by the Department of the Interior with, quote-unquote, proper oversight by the Education Department. College child care programs and foreign medical school accreditation will be administered and overseen by the Health and Human Services.

And the State Department will now oversee all foreign education programs. handle international education grants and fully administer the full Bright program. Justification for this State Department takeover of these funds, specifically cited five instances of grants that were used to fund academic and medical research on trans people, writing that these programs have deviated from the core mission, unquote. The announcement from the Education Department reads that the State Department is, quote, best positioned to tailor foreign education programs with the national security and foreign policy priorities of the United States. This partnership provides an opportunity to streamline international education program funding and data collection measures,

consolidate program management, and advance national security interests, unquote. That's not good. Yeah, that doesn't seem great, huh? Yeah, this last part is particularly concerning that the U.S. previously has done a lot of funding, of education programs around the world and to like see that pretty much like with this current vision of the state department

or disappear or become even more straight up propaganda like it's really worrying look at this kind of builds on that doge stuff that you were talking about like this is the end of the state department doing anything other than propaganda and I guess

war making. And specifically like Rubio's focus on education has been to crack down on academics, Palestinian academics, academics who have protested in support of Palestine. That's specifically what Rubio has talked about in terms of, you know, universities.

Yeah. So with all the stuff in that statement about, you know, national security and foreign policy priorities, it's not hard to see what they could be gesturing towards. Yeah. As the announcements are currently written, a lot of the programs itself, at least in this transitionary period, remain kind of the same. They're shifting who is like, quote, quote, administering them.

That's the word they use a lot. But they're not cutting funds to these programs at the moment. And they do talk about them as, like, legally required programs. But, I mean, Carolyn Leavitt and Lyndon McMahon have said this is just one step towards fully sending education back to the states. Cool. this fall also result like in massive disparities in educational outcomes state by state in the United States right like we already have that to some extent but that's only going to be exacerbated by this right talking about things happening between the states let's talk

about Gregory Buffino a person who supposedly patrols the borders of the United States but has more recently been doing internal enforcement for the border patrol He gave an interview to the AP recently that I was just reading. They did confirm, interestingly, that, like, a few weeks ago, maybe months ago, we've been talking about Bovino and, like, trying to work out if he was still Chief Patrol agent in El Centro. It appears that he is, but he's also a commander of this operation at large, which is their sort of the thing that has moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, which is now in Charlotte, right, like this sort of internal enforcement operation.

He calls his team and now, quote, unquote, sanctuary busters. And he said that, quote, there will be no more sanctuaries, which kind of does build on what I spoke about in the last ED, right, when we spoke about the idea that the reason they had targeted Charlotte was because it appeared on that CIS map, quote unquote, sanctuary city or sanctuary jurisdiction, despite the passage of legislation in the state, which would have prevented it doing the things that sanctuaries do. I also want to talk about this ABC investigation into CBP's use of license plate. readers, CBP has had these for like eight or nine years now. I found the 2017 piece where they wrote out their justification for using them, right? Their use has grown immensely, right? Yeah. And it has grown under both administrations. We've, I suppose, the Trump administration from 2017 to 2020 by the administration, 2020, 2024. We spoke actually in an episode that I think it was just Robert and I on that episode when we spoke about Gavin Newsom.

people love that episode and they send me great feedback because guys it's important that we all know that the only person standing up against Trump right now is Gavin Newsom everything else is pointless but in that episode we spoke about how many California jurisdictions share license plate reader information with federal immigration authorities even when California law prohibits them from doing so right

this is kind of one of those like these things like where it's a ratchet it, right? Once you give that power to the state, it belongs to all of the state and you can never take it back. Automated license plate readers have been a big thing in this kind of the post-2020 tendency of democratic mayors in big cities to massively increase spending on the police and massively increase police surveillance. We have automated cameras on our lamp posts here in San Diego now, right? California has prosecuted one, jurisdiction that I'm aware of, which is El Cajon. People will be familiar with El Cajon from El Cajon Mayor Bill Well's attempt to make a country

music song about how schools are turning kids trans, that is unironically probably the most national use that El Cajon has made for a while. But Bonta has sued El Cajon for showing that data. My guess is that that is because it's El Cajon, right? because El Cajon is a city where the mayor makes a country music song about how schools are turning children trans. Like, it's very obviously like a partisan prosecution. There are many other jurisdictions doing this. What Border Patrol does with these cameras is it targets, quote unquote, suspicious activities.

And then it requests stops. Sometimes these stops are not made by Border Patrol, but are made by local police, right? On the pretext of something like speeding or failing to signal before you change lanes, having a brake light out, it could be many, many things, right? The ABCP's quoted deputy, Joel Bab, of saying, quote, the beautiful thing about the Texas traffic code

is there thousands of things you can stop a vehicle for. The idea here is not to explicitly talk about the license plate readers, right? And the fact that they are using these to do predictive surveillance, is what they call it, right? They're trying to highlight, like, suspicious patterns

of vehicle motion and stop people. The piece has some, they obtained through public records request from a court case, a WhatsApp group chat between Border Patrol and Texas officers, which the officers shared movement, social media profiles, car rentals and home addresses of people who they were interested in surveilling, right? And it reveals a massive level of surveillance. If you know, if you're thinking of Border Patrol and you're still under the impression that in America, the border can't come to you,

wherever you are. This is another example of why that's not true, right? DHS uses these all over the country to include outside of the 100-mile border enforcement zone, right? This piece seems to believe that the border, the 100-mile zone is like a legal hard line. It's not, it's an interpretation of a quote-unquote reasonable distance. There is no hard line stopping BP for operating further from the border than that. That is just generally where the interpretation of a reasonable distance from the border is perceived to fall. Border Patrol has these cameras at fixed points. So, like, that would be Border Patrol crossings, you know, when you enter or enter or leave the country at a port of entry.

And then at checkpoints, right, people will be familiar with checkpoints that live in a border area. And then they also have these in mobile and covert capacities, right? And they're using them to find people who might be driving near the border or staying and then leaving at a strange time. and then they're building a profile of those people's movements and using that to request stops, right? So it's a level of surveillance that I think should be worrying to many people. And they have access to these larger integrated camera networks like by Flock Safety, which I've talked about before,

including I think yesterday's episode, as Flock is like a Nelana-based company that rose to prominence through their surveillance around the forests where Cops City was being constructed. Now Flock is all over the country and Border Patrol has access to the flock system. Yeah. And it's used for a whole bunch of other really dubious stuff, including in Texas.

I think 404 media did a report not too long ago about Texas sheriffs tracking a pregnant woman getting an abortion, not in Texas. Right. Yeah, yeah, I can see, yeah, because Texas law makes it a crime to leave the state in order to get an abortion or something, right? And that would be their, I guess, their excuse here, but, like, I think we can all see that's a pretty disgusting use of the surveillance state. But yeah, these things grew massively in the time period between 2020 and today. And it was not just in Republican jurisdictions, right?

There's this unabated support for state surveillance that we saw all over the United States is now being turned against migrants and anybody who is suspected of helping them, which is not great. Talking of not great, we have an obligation to pivot to add. I'm happy. I think that's great. I love having a job. I enjoy to consume products and services. That's right. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault.

While, I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Edmund Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.

This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product. run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer,

the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie. For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small. town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved, until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her. We know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator

on national TV. Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica occur. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn, or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better work the hell up.

Bad things happen to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Jenna World Jenna Jamison, Vivid Video, and the Valley is a new podcast about the history of the adult film industry.

I'm Molly Lambert, host of Heidi World The Heidi Fly Story, and I'll be your tour guide on a wild ride through adult films. We get paid more than the men. We call the shots. In what way is that degrading? That's us taking hold of our life.

In the 1990s, actress Jenna Jameson crossed over into mainstream culture, redefined stardom, then left it all behind. I'm a powerful woman. I think that's intimidating to a man. With a cast of hundreds of actors and comedians playing key figures, we'll take a look at how adult films became legal in the 70s, hugely profitable in the 80s and 90s, and fell off a financial cliff in the 2000.

Listen to Geno World on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. How's everybody doing? Good? Yeah, banging. Pretty good. Pretty good.

I just finished my Asahi smoothie from the Heritage Social 2024 Cup. So I feel great. That's great. I'm good for you, Garrison. Really coming together. You know, politics from different sides coming together to enjoy a smoothie, not unlike the meeting between Zoroam Dani and Donald Trump. Oh, my God. Oh, how long did you plan that for, Garrison?

Like, literally five seconds. It just, it just came out. We don't do smooth transitions here like that. Well, you know, sometimes. Do you know who was smooth? It was Zora and Maldi during that meeting, which. A bit like a duck's back, like a seal, that kind of smoothness as well. Trump seemed pretty, uh, pretty enamored.

with Mr. Mamdani, mayor-elect Mamdani, quote, we have one thing in common. We want this city of ours to do very well, unquote. So this was on Friday. Trump and Mamdani had a private meeting in the White House. Afterwards, a 30-minute press conference in the Oval Office where Trump was sitting down, and so I was kind of looming over the side of Trump the whole time,

never fully smiling, always having a little bit of like a, a tiny like both-sided smirk, but not doing his traditional happy smile. He had a very different look in the White House. But as soon as the press conference started, it was clear that the meeting went very well for Mamdani. Trump was exuberant about the man. Yeah. He seemed really excited.

Yeah. It's a little weird, but he seemed really excited. He stated that they have common ground on getting housing built, on affordability, on food and prices coming down, saying, unquote, there's no difference in party and we're going to be helping him to make everybody's dream come true, unquote. Everybody's dream come true. Amazing.

Yeah. First, I want to play Zoran's initial statement as the press conference started on what they spoke about during this meeting. I appreciated the meeting with the president. And as he said, it was a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City. and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers, the 8.5 million people who call our city their home, who are struggling to afford life in the most expensive city in the United States of America.

We spoke about rent, we spoke about groceries, we spoke about utilities, we spoke about the different ways in which people are being pushed out. And I appreciated the time with the president. I appreciated the conversation. I look forward to working together to deliver that affordability for New Yorkers. It's one of the posture people with the green line. The green line tours. Yeah, no, I've seen, yeah, that's going on a couple of times.

They've already, they've had their way with this. They've been on it, yeah, yeah. Okay. It does seem tense. The vibes in that room must have been very weird from Zoron's side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Zoron's very tense. Trump's trying to relax him, like, badly.

What is that face that you've posted on, Garris? He is, I can only, it's like a shit-eating grin on Trump's face. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, he does seem genuinely happy. He's thrilled. Yeah. It's weird. He likes to be associated with winners.

This is one of the big things, right? A lot of, I mean, we'll talk about this more in the takes. Okay. But, yeah, I think it's very clear why Trump's actually having a good time here. Zoron's, like, the most popular politician in the country right now, and Trump likes winners. And if anything, Zoran has proven to be an underdog that has an enormous capacity for winning. And I think Trump does like that. And coupled with a genuine love for New York, I think Zoran was able to navigate around

Trump pretty successfully. When asked about Zoron being a communist, Trump said, quote, I feel very confident he can do a good job. I think he's going to surprise some conservative people, actually, unquote. And you should add what he said about liberal people, because I thought that was his funniest line. Oh, and then also liberal people, but they already like him a two or something. Yeah, I don't think they'll be surprised. They'll just be happy. Yeah, yeah, something like that. Because they already like him. It was very funny. It was very funny. Trump also talked about how a lot of Trump voters actually voted for Zoron as well, saying, quote, unquote, I'm okay with that. And Zora mentioned that, yes, one in ten Trump voters in New York voted for Zoron.

And Zoran mentioned the end to forever wars and the cost of living crisis as the driving motivators that voters spoke about as he was campaigning. Throughout this press conference, and we can assume to some degree of the meeting, Zoron was very laser focused on New York specifically. And you've even seen this in interviews that he's given to, like, NBC and other outlets the past few days where people are asking him about, you know, the Democratic Party as a whole on national level. And Zorn repeatedly just goes back to affordability in New York. This is like the one thing that he's going to keep talking about. He doesn't want to talk about anything else, really.

And this was evident throughout this meeting, the way that Zorn would reiterate every question to being about New York. But they didn't shy away from talking about the things they disagreed on, like an ideological sense. ICE being one of them. Here's one of their exchanges about ICE. President, you've threatened to send federal troops to New York City. You both have differences when it comes to ICE agents in New York City. Mr. Mondani, you've called ICE a rogue government entity. I wonder how you reconcile your differences on both of those issues. Well, I think we're going to work them out. And I think that if we have known murderers and known drug dealers and some very bad people, you know, we want to get them out.

And the mayor wants to have, we discuss this at great length, actually, maybe more than anything else. He wants to have a safe New York. Ultimately, a safe New York is going to be a great New York. If it's not safe no matter how well we do with pricing and with anything else, we can talk about anything you want. If you don't have safe streets, it's not going to be a success. So we're going to work together. We're going to make sure that if there are horrible people there, we want to get them out. I think he wants to get them out, maybe more than I do.

So we'll work together. They talked about ICE at one later point in the meeting where you get kind of a peek at what some of this conversation may have been like behind the scenes about trying to target any ICE enforcement against people who have criminal records rather than these roving raids that round up but just swaths of undocumented people like the Canal Street raid a few weeks ago. it's still not super clear what they are talking about but there's not compromise in this point like Trump's obviously

going to try to frame this in a way that strengthens Trump's own positions on this and I think Zoron will do the same before we discuss I do want to play this the second bit of their discussion because you get more of Zoron's angle

We discussed ICE and New York City and I spoke about how the laws that we have in New York City allow for New York New York City government to speak to the federal administration for about 170 serious crimes. The concerns that many New Yorkers have are around the enforcement of immigration laws on New Yorkers across the five boroughs.

And most recently we're talking about a mother and her two children, how this has very little to do with what that is. Mr. Martin is we discuss crime. More than ICE per se, we discuss crime. And he doesn't want to see crime, and I don't want to see crime. And I have very little doubt that we're not going to get along. on that issue. He wants to, and he said some things that were very interesting, very interesting as to housing construction, and he wants to see houses go up. He wants to see a lot of houses

created, a lot of apartments built, et cetera. And, you know, we actually, people would be shocked, but I want to see the same thing. See that, yeah, that worries me a little bit. What about that worries you? I can tell what Trump's trying to do, which is that he really would like to get Mom Donnie on his side. And he's interesting. for Trump, I think he is willing to move on some things if he can fundamentally get Mamdani to agree that ICE has a use. Yeah, right? Like, that's what he's clearly trying to do.

And he's clearly trying to portray it as we've already agreed on that. And I think that within the context of this meeting, because of how the questions were being asked, I don't think Zoran got enough of a chance to fully address that question. So I'll leave it open to see how that is, like, like how he deals. with that in the future, but I don't think he got enough of an opportunity to push back enough on some of the things Trump was claiming here. That does concern me a little bit. Like, I think it's more a factor of how an Oval Office press conference is structured, but I do think that it's, like, I can see what Trump's trying to do.

I think what Mom Donnie is trying to navigate for is if he can put an end to roving ice raids that just, like, that just round up people at whether they're, at restaurants or Home Depos, and if there's people who have been incarcerated, who are incarcerated, and if removal operations are specifically against, he said like, what, 170, like, serious crimes. And if that is a sort of compromise, I guess, I don't know, like, he's, he's not an office, yes, it's unclear the way that this would, this would be enacted. Yeah. But if it's a harm reduction measure of stopping ice raids from happening or limiting the amount of, that ice is able to operate

as basically a rogue entity within the city and I don't think we know enough to actually see what that will look like yet because he's not taking office for another what like 45 days yeah

yeah what he's talking about when Trump calls about crime crime is what they have always talked about right right when they talk about the ice enforcement the crimes that they are speaking about vary right they will always give the example of the person

has been convicted of child abuse, of murder, of domestic violence, right? But then they will also go ahead and say that crossing between ports of entry can be prosecuted as a crime. And then they will use that as a justification for taking anyone, right? And specifically people who have entered within the last two years, many of whom were shipped to New York from other states, and saying, well, these people entered between ports of entry, which they did after the end of Title 42, right, when we returned to processing people under Title 8, and they will place him an

flexibility to remove all proceedings. That is what they have been doing for a while. When he talks about the sanctuary policies, New York right now doesn't honor detainer requests, right? In theory, sanctuary

laws prevent NYC from what I understand from honoring detainer request, which would be an extra 48-hour detainer. We haven't, like as Robert said, we haven't really seen enough to see what he's talking about there, but like, I don't know if he's talking about a change to those sanctuary policies or not, but yeah, that would be disappointing if you did. I don't see there's any indication that he's talking about a change to sanctuary

policies. Well, when he's talking about we can call them on 170 serious crimes, right? What does he mean? Yeah, and I think this gets back to the fact that a press conference in the Oval office is not going to give you a chance to adequately address an issue like this. And I see Trump trying to paper over it and move past as quickly as possible. Yeah. And I understand why you'd show up for this meeting. And I think it was probably on the balance the right thing to do. But, like, I am interested to see what he does next because I think Trump is going to continue trying to push for accommodations. And it is kind of, it is wild and unique to see that he seems to be willing to move on some stuff.

But he's willing to move on some stuff because he thinks he can get Mom Donnie to soften some of his stances. I mean, it's stances on what, I mean, I don't. On ice. I mean, that's what he's trying to do here. He's trying to build a case for that. I mean, I guess I don't know the degree to which we're using the word. From saying that this is a rogue government agency to saying that this is a government agent. That's what Trump is trying to push for. Yeah. I'm not saying Mom Doni agreed with that. I think that the nature of this meeting did not give him enough time to push back on that. Sure, sure. You have Mom Donnie pointing there towards like an instance of like a mother and like a,

and a child getting affected by this and like and using it as an example of like what they are trying to prevent and like focusing on like the this stopping ice raids from happening as as like the thing that momdani is pushing for there and momdani as the new york city mayor cannot abolish the entity of ice and so like the degree to which we're framing that is like mom don't is like softening i think still i mean yeah like as as you've said there's not enough here to make a full determination. Yeah. I just think that's what Trump wants to get out of this.

I think Trump also just wants to be associated with this guy who is currently, as Garrison said, very popular. And it is really wild to see him be so deferential to somebody. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, including in this question about Trump being a fascist, which he handled in a very, a very fascinating way.

This is nuts. Yeah. Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist? I've spoken about... That's okay. You can just say yes. Okay? It's easier.

It's easier than explaining it. Zoran did say yes during that exchange. He did say yes. No. He in fact did. He absolutely did. It's one of the most remarkable moments in American political history.

By any stretch of the imagination. As Trump passed him. As it's on the side. I mean, it's wild. For Trump, this word doesn't mean anything. Right? For Trump, like him saying, it's easier than explaining. That's just indicating to sort on that you don't have to do this little like political game for this reporter and be like, you know, we have, we have disagrees on policies, which blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, Trump's like, no, you don't have to do that. It's easy and explaining. Just say it. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a sort of like a point against like the media. I think that's from Trump's point of view. It's like, you don't have to do the little, you don't have to do the little dance for like this like New York Post reporter or whatever. Just say that I'm a fascist. It's fine. Yeah, and because politics is for him a sort of behind closed doors boys club

And they, yes, they both have to go out And then deal with the media But like you can sort of see that And this sort of highly conviviality That Trump goes for there I'm not saying that Mam Dami is less Necessarily in his boys club I'm just saying that that is how Trump perceives politics

Yeah, I mean he made other references Like when Trump was asked if He considers Zoran a jihadist Like someone else in the Republican Party called him And Trump's like, no. I mean, the man standing in front of me is not a jihadist. People have to say certain things during campaigns. But the man I met with today is a very rational man. And like little lines like that. Like people, when you're campaigning, you have to say things. I think that he's getting

at a similar point there. But there was multiple points at this press conference where Trump defended Mamdani against like other aggressive questions about his focus on international law versus the Constitution or why Zoron flew to D.C. instead of taking a greener train. Yeah. silly stuff and Trump was like Trump like dismissed these questions it's like for Zora essentially being like all stand up for you

yeah it's something else there are more salient criticisms that there are reasonable criticisms you can make of some stuff he's done those are not them yeah it's just gotcha media stuff right like which which it's interesting how well Trump is able to call

sort of their bullshit yeah yeah always fascinating One of the more hilarious attempts at a gotcha question is from Jack Posovic, who was in the room, who asked this. God, he must have been having an absolute meltdown. Yeah, he can't be happy about this. I want to know one of the policies as well that Mayor like Madami talked a number of times about on the campaign was shifting the tax burden for property taxes from what he called minority communities to, white-based communities and putting more taxes on white people.

I also noticed that in your acceptance speech you didn't mention anything about America or Christians or white people in general. And so I didn't know if that was one of the policies that you guys had spoken about. Incredible. And Trump's like smiling

like a proud father this whole time as Zoron's like just mentioned. It's such a odd like schizophrenic moment. It's weird how much more he seems to like Zoran than like his supporters. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of his supporters are losers and Zoron's a winner.

Or even his cabinet members. Yeah, because they're losers, right? Like Pete Hengs Seth, Elon Musk, they're losers. Yeah, they're all dwebs. I mean, J.D. Vons, right? Yeah. Zoron's proved himself to be like an incredibly capable figure. Yeah.

There's a little moment as Jack's first asking the question where Trump indicates to Zoron, like, okay, you handle this guy. You can have fun with this. And it's, it's very odd. Not odd and it's unexplainable. I understand what's happening here, actually. I think this is actually very easy to understand, but it's just still, it feels odd.

Yeah. And just given the adversarial politics we're so used to. Like, there's a lot of moments like this. Like when Trump's asked if he's going to cut off federal funding to New York, he says, quote, I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're going to help. Which is great.

And this is like an indication of like what Zorn was trying to do in terms of harm reduction in this meeting, specifically around raids on National Guard deployment and on cutting off federal funds to the city. One of the methods I think that Zoran used to help get Trump on his side is appeal to like the real estate brain that Trump has with Mamdani's like left-wing Yimbi style policies

talking about rent coming down by building housing and how much that surprised Trump because Trump has this conception of people like if people usually on these like left wing positions are very very nimbie in a lot of ways and trump was like surprised by this i guess he hasn't really encountered like a left wing yimbi before and this like this like caught him off guard yeah there's a good point here where trump expresses this now we may disagree how we get there the rent coming down i think uh one of one of the things i really gleaned very very much uh today we'd like to see him come down

ideally by building a lot of additional housing. That's the ultimate way. He agrees with that, and so do I. But if I read the newspapers and the stories, I don't hear that. But I heard him say it today, and I think that's a very positive step. No, I don't expect, I expect to be helping him, not hurting him. A big help, because I want New York City to be great. Look, I love New York City.

It's where I come from. I spent a lot of years there. Now I'm right here. Oh, me. Okay. And later, Trump clarified that he would feel comfortable living in New York under Mamdani and compared Mamdani's popularity to that of Bernie Sanders, as well as how supporters of Bernie moved over to Trump and then vice versa.

And through Trump talking about this, you can start to kind of peek behind the curtain of like how Zoran was framing his version of populism, which was able to get Trump to be like friendly towards like the economic affordability sides of his. policy proposals in talking about like the crossover of support between Bernie and Trump in 2016 and the crossover support between Trump 24 and Mamdani in 2025. At one point, Mamdani did also address the genocide in Gaza. I asked Mr. Mamdani, you've accused the U.S. government of committing genocide in Gaza while President Trump were working on peace. Why that? I've spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide and I've spoken about our government

funding it. And I shared with the president in our meeting. about the concern that many New Yorkers have of wanting their tax dollars to go towards the benefit of New Yorkers and their ability to afford basic dignity. And what we see right now is we're in the ninth consecutive year of more than 100,000 school children being homeless in our city. And there's a desperate need not only for the following

of human rights, but also the following through on the promises we've made New Yorkers. And I appreciated the meeting we had and the work that we can do. But you agree that President Trump did do a piece and he worked hard to make the peace, because he worked hard to do the peace in the Middle East, everywhere. Do you agree with that? I appreciate all efforts towards peace, and I shared with President Trump that when I spoke

to Trump voters on Hillside Avenue, including one of whom was a pharmacist that spoke about how President Trump's father actually went to that pharmacy, not too far from Jamaica States, that people were tired of seeing our tax dollars fund endless wars, and I also believe that we have to follow through on the international human rights, and I know that still today those are being violated, and that continues to be work that has to be done no matter where we're speaking of. Man, that's so complicated, so conflicting. There's a lot going on there. On one hand, it's really good that somebody on record said in the White House that the U.S. is enabling Israel and continuing a genocide. I'm glad that that happened. Yeah. On the other hand, the fact that it's off-roaded

so quickly to, now let's talk about, like, what we want to do for New Yorkers. And it is like, yeah, It's not, I don't know. It's the only way this was going to happen at all, I suppose. He is the mayor of New York. It's not a national figure. No, I agree. Sure. But he's also a person.

It's tonally awkward. Yeah, it's totally a little awkward. Especially when the topic is genocide. Like the vote from genocide to housing affordability, and I understand that both are serious issues, it's still a tonal shift that is jarring. And like, yes, it's absolutely fair to say he's the mayor of New York. He has no ability.

to influence U.S. policy in terms of selling arms to Israel. And the fact that he brought it up at all is positive. But boy, is that a wild minute or so of talking? I think the reason why he brought that up is to talk about specifically, like funds that we are sending to Israel should not be sent to Israel. There's funds that should be being used in the United States to do things to help people here. And that is like why he brought that up as a segue.

Well, and reiterating that Trump supporters often agree with the idea that we should not be spending this much money on this sending weapons over the world to fund wars overseas. It'll be interesting to see if shit continues with Venezuela, how that all moves. But I think it's valuable to, like, really slam that home in the White House that, like, hey, you ran on getting the U.S. out of these kind of violent entanglements overseas. Yeah. yeah I'm glad someone said it I guess yeah it's just weird this is all a very weird meeting

yeah yeah the whole thing was jarring I guess there was another point there where he was talking about like like local local New York businesses and Trump's father like went to this pharmacy and I think stuff like that was their tactics that he used

to get Trump to be friendly with him as well as Trump later spoke about how in one of the rooms that they were meeting and there was a portrait of FDR which Trump had personally picked out of the story George Valtz to hang and Zoran like Zoran asked him about the portrait and asked if he could get a picture with it. And this seemed to please Trump a lot. Trump was unable to talk about how he picked

out the picture. And then Trump said a few really interesting things. He's like, I guess Zoran's a big fan of FDR and the New Deal, which is phenomenal maneuvering from Zoran. It's a classic, classic technique to get like democratic socialist politics across to someone. Again, there's moments like that, stuff with stuff of how we're talking about. talked about like Bernie, some, some, you know, regular populist rhetoric, uh, talking about the crossover between, you know, voters between Trump and Mamdani, just his general love of New York and FDR, New Deal. You can see all these things that were used to like navigate through this meeting to get, to get Trump to actually seat ground on a lot of stuff with I think very,

very minimal concessions, if any, if any real concessions, even from Zorn, like at all. Like, I think in general, Trump was the one that moved rhetorically throughout this meeting. And, moved on, like, actual, like, actual, like, promises to withhold funds to invade the city with National Guard troops. I think Trump was the one who actually ceded territory in this meeting. I do not see much evidence of things that Mamdani had, could have personal impact on actually, like, losing, losing ground on those things throughout this meeting. It is also important to remember that he has a retar, Mamdami, too, has a rhetorical role to play, right? And yes, he is mayor of New York. He is also an extremely popular politician at the moment.

And, like, when he talks about things like the genocide in Gaza, that that has rhetorical value. I'm not saying he can go to New York City Council and stop it. But, like, him saying that it is a genocide at the White House is important. And, like, it is important that, like, when he has this podium in front of the whole world at the White House, that he used it to talk about the genocide. And he did. But, like, I don't think we should only think about this in terms of New York. Like, it is important that someone said that.

I hope he keeps using that platform he has right now to say that as someone who, like, is definitely looked up to nationally in, like, DSA circles. I mean, yeah, I think, and this goes into some of the, I guess, kind of, I mean, some of them are critiques. A lot of them aren't even really critiques of this meeting. I think a lot of them are people jumping on the opportunity to just attack Soran, with no real constructive critique there. But this kind of relates to these two different forms of politics that people use on the left,

like politics as a form of personal expression as a form of, like, like, posturing as a form of, like, maintaining of moral purity versus politics as an actual practical method of achieving, like, systematic change. And people engage in these two different modes. And there's a role for both of these modes of politics, actually. I think both of these have a degree of necessity. And Zoron has taken one specific path. And there's others who are who are very clear in having taken the other path. And there's a bunch, a bunch of critiques, like from this meeting, quote-unquote critiques, including from a formal Seattle city councilman

who's now running for Congress as a socialist, Kashama Sawant, quote, if I were in Mom Donny's position, instead of asking Trump to meet me, I would have announced a mass rally of tens of thousands of people in New York City to protest against ice raids to declare that New York City

will not tolerate ice and will fight Trump every inch of the way. I would launch a mass campaign for free transit and free childcare and build a militant movement to win. Unquote. These are things Zoron's already participated in. These are things that have happened.

Just one more, like one more protest, that's going to be more effective than actually having Trump cede some ground on the scale of enforcement. This is part of why I have this, like, hesitation around discussion of Zoron because I think he's actually doing kind of strategic moves

to actually limit the amount of damage that Trump's able to do in the city. And he's doing it through, like, rhetorical maneuvers and some of that may feel awkward to watch in a live press conference. But I think the actual end results of that have a lot more potential than, say, you know, a rally of 10,000 people, which effectively does nothing. Yeah, I mean, we've had a bunch of those. That is politics as performance, right?

Yeah. People are very attached to that mode of political engagement in the United States. They're large, you know, walking around besides shouting, demonstration, a political intent, it has not been successful in stopping ice grabbing random people off the street. I'll just say that. And people have been criticizing Zoron just simply for even taking this meeting because it somehow, quote unquote, like humanizes Trump in some way. Like, Trump doesn't need to be humanized, right? Like, it's like Zoron's platforming Donald Trump. He is the president of the United

States. He wins. He has that position. He has bought the legitimacy. Like this, I don't think Zoron being there actually rehabilitates Trump's image in a meaningful way. I think what he's doing is trying to actually make New York a safer and more affordable place to live by doing a kind of complicated political maneuver, which I'm sure is kind of upsetting to kind of go through. But he's doing it. And the wave of criticism that it's kind of based on that sort of humanizing argument or this stuff on like, why doesn't Zoran just protest instead of actually trying to like cut deals or, like, not even cut deals, because that sounds so, like, slimy, but, like, actually, like, negotiate with the president. And, like, this criticism comes on the, like, tail end of, like,

a week's worth of very reflexive criticism of Zoron for his retention of New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch, as well as advocating against the New York City DSA's endorsement of city councilmen and new DSA member Chi Aussie's primary campaign against Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. Some of these criticisms, I get the Jeffers. one a little bit more, but some of these criticisms I find to be a little odd, mostly considering the fact that Zoron's been open about his plan to retain Tish for literal months, for literal months. And just this week, people acted like it was this massive betrayal in his like ideological purity or his stated promises, which just isn't true. He's been open about this, like,

since like last summer. And on the, on the Jeffrey's side of things, I think Zoran's point of view here, is that a difficult primary campaign, one that's probably going to be unsuccessful based on the Zoron 2025 general vote map. It chose that that'd be very, very challenging. But this difficult primary against referees would also inhibit Zoron's ability to implement the affordability agenda in the city. The New York Times quoted a leaked portion of the DSA's endorsement meeting with Zoran saying, quote, the choice before us is not whether to vote for Chai or Hakeem at the ballot box.

The choice is how to spend the next year. We want to spend it defending characters of our movement. or do we want to spend it fulfilling the agenda at the heart of that very same movement, unquote? Zoran has a very specific focus right now on the New York City government and implementing the agenda for New York City and the congressional campaign

would, in his view, only put more roadblocks to that at this point in time versus, you know, keeping a left-wing ally in the New York City Council. I guess I don't see why they can't do both. Like, they will be defending caricatures of their movement for... Sure.

the next forever, right, until the internet and stupid politics stopped in part of our politics, which isn't coming any time soon. Like, I think it would be perfectly possible to give that endorsement and still say, my job as mayor, is to do the shit that I promise to do. I also endorse this person because I think they're a better person and Akeem Jeffries, who has been very poor. Like, I don't see those things as mutually exclusive. We need to talk about MTG, if only very briefly.

What is there to say? that Magic the Gathering has finally reclaimed that acronym Oh good, yeah Yeah, Marjorie Taylor Green Leaving politics Well, maybe Well, she's leaving the house

Is at the end of the year Yeah, leaving the house What she's announced Yeah Yeah, yeah It is unclear how she will continue her career Maybe Zoran will be taking her seat Maybe

Do Trump's new friends I mean, I really don't think He has much interest In being in the House of Representatives especially in Georgia. Who would? Jesus. He has a much more

important role now, I guess. Like he's able to do a lot more as executive in New York than he ever would be as like a single rap in.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, no more MTG. Okay. Well, great.

If you want to contact us, you can reach out to us at cool zone tips at proton. 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, poolzonemedia.com,

or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hi, Kyle. quick document with the basic business plan, just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real

startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Stefan Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut. I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product. With every sip, you get a little something different. Visit Gentleman's Cut Bourbon.com or your nearest Total Wines or Bevmo. This message is intended for audiences 21 and older. Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.

For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit Gentleman's Cut Bourbon.com. enjoy responsibly. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years, until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. America, y'all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another. It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other. I'm Elia Connie, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope. I've always wanted us to have therapy, so this is such a beautiful opportunity. Listen to Season 2 of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.