It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 156

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Starting point is 00:00:36 Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end

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Starting point is 00:02:43 New episodes every Thursday. Now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Call Zone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make

Starting point is 00:03:08 your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong. It's the start of a new week. So let's start preparing for what these next few months are going to look like in the wake of Trump's election victory last week. So one thing I was thinking about after the results kind of rolled in and seeing everyone's reactions online, you have a, you know, a mix of people going full Doomer, some people trying to get hopped up on hopium, some people on copium, right? Just trying to like find any psychological way to survive. And for me me kind of the way i like to survive is just through information so this episode we're going to get into how we see life

Starting point is 00:03:51 for trans people under a second trump term based on both what he's done in the past what he's promised to do in the future and i i know in like the days after the election, LGBTQ crisis hotlines all saw a massive spike in people calling in to the point where some people were even unable to reach someone. And I understand this is a very scary moment in time. And as much as it might not be fun

Starting point is 00:04:18 to hear about how things are all going to get worse, there's also some misconceptions and I think there's also a degree of power in actually being able to reasonably ascertain what things could look like instead of just kind of feeling it out and just going purely on vibes. So to kind of start, I guess I'll mention some things that Trump did in his first term that then got undone by Biden, which will probably just end up being reinstated. We don't know these for sure, but that's like a decent guess. So one of the first things Trump did when he got into office is he rolled back an Obama-era memo

Starting point is 00:04:52 directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination. Yeah, and that, by the way, discrimination protection is a constant theme in this episode. It's going to get a lot worse. Trump later went on to ban trans people from serving in the military. He also went after trans prisoners, making it so that trans people usually would need to be housed in prisons and jails according to their assigned sex at birth,

Starting point is 00:05:15 which is, of course, a very dangerous situation for people incarcerated, specifically trans women. Yeah, and I think there is good reason to expect that treatment there is going to get worse there's been you know we'll get into this more later in the episode but there's been a real focus on incarcerated trans people getting health care yeah and this is one of the things that's kind of ambiguous as to how trump could go about trying to stop these people from getting health care so the thing about providing health care to trans people who have been incarcerated is that they have to do it it is it is something that is required

Starting point is 00:05:49 by the constitution of the united states the eighth amendment holds that there is a ban on cruel unusual punishment and withholding medical care is so obviously a form of cruel unusual punishment that even staggeringly right-wing supreme courts have been like no you actually have to give people medical care in prison so this is one that's going to be a little bit difficult for him to do i don't know he might find some way to do it this is one of the ones where there's a real potential for it to get worse and we simply do not know enough about what legal strategy is going to be here to say for sure but it's also worth mentioning, like people have had to fight for access to healthcare in prison.

Starting point is 00:06:29 Like it's not something that comes easily. Like people have had to sue to make sure that they get the healthcare that they are legally required to receive. And we can just assume that that process will probably be slightly more difficult under a second Trump term like it was under a first Trump term than it may kind of currently be now. So that's kind of one shift in how things might be slightly more challenging. Yeah. And I want to also mention, so that analysis and a lot of the

Starting point is 00:06:56 analysis, the policy analysis that I'm going to be doing going forward is heavily indebted to trans policy expert Corinne Green, who we've had on the show a couple of times before amazingly she was one of the people who ended up working on compliance for that lawsuit where kamala harris tried to keep trans prisoners from getting health care and she came in and like had to like ensure that the state of california was doing it and they weren't so that's something that has been fought for and that's something i mean the trans community is small enough that that is the thing that has specifically been fought for, and that's something, I mean, the trans community is small enough that that is the thing that has specifically been fought for by people who I consulted to make this episode,

Starting point is 00:07:29 so, yeah, these rights have been dearly won, and it's going to be very hard to protect them. If I'm doing something where there's something about policy implementation, assume that I talked to Corinne about this, and that's why it's accurate. And while I'm doing this, I want to bug a couple of the projects

Starting point is 00:07:47 that she works on but there's there's something you can do very immediately right now before we get into all of the terrible stuff that's going to happen which is you can donate to the trans income project which is a project that supports trans people and trans sex workers in particular which is a lot of trans people and supports them by just giving them direct cash transfers they do some other work too but yeah and it's it direct cash transfers are one of the most effective ways that you can help trans people and if you give money to this organization there'll be links in the chat you can help do this so let's get into how things are going to get worse unfortunately trump administration congress and state legislatures have an enormous amount of power to make everything worse. We're mostly going to be focusing on what Trump and Congress can do.

Starting point is 00:08:29 Well, we'll get into the legislators a bit at the end. So there are a lot of levers of state power and sort of policy techniques that Trump can pull here to make things worse. We're going to go roughly from easiest to hardest to pull off. So the first lever is federal funding probably the easiest place that this lever can get pulled is in the education system trump can unfortunately fairly easily implement what amounts to a don't say trans ban on a federal level by threatening to withhold federal funding for any school that doesn't mandate things like misgendering and dead naming students and banned and this is something he's explicitly talked about is like

Starting point is 00:09:07 banning anyone in classes any teachers from talking about transitioning at all he's also you know threatened to have teachers who talk to students about being trans like investigated by the department of justice we'll get more into department just investigations in a bit he's also used explicit threat the same threat of cutting state funding to stop schools from letting kids use the right bathroom in the locker room it's also possible he will do that through title nine but there's a lot of ways that he can do this very easily that are probably not going to be able to be stopped and this is going to get extremely bad very quickly another sort of avenue that he

Starting point is 00:09:45 has is i i guess what do you call like the hyde amendment for trans people so for people who don't know what the hyde amendment is the hyde amendment is a writer that bans federal spending on abortion it's been like modified it's not like the 100 ban that it used to be because now there's like exceptions for rape and incest and stuff, right? For the parents too. But it is a very, very effective Republican tool. It's actually also Joe Biden helped implement that.

Starting point is 00:10:11 That's been used to limit access to abortion. And we already have seen the start of these kinds of things. Even under Biden, there was a version of this, of a kind of height amendment for trans healthcare. That was an attempt to get the DOD to not be able to spend money on trans health care that that's already a provision that's been tacked on to like one of the most recent spending bills that went through because joe mansion like defected and joined the republicans to get it on to one of the spending

Starting point is 00:10:40 omnibuses and that was again just for the department of defense we are very likely to see versions of these attached to every single spending bill that explicitly say that government funding cannot be used for trans health care it will definitely be used to do to say you can't use it for trans health care for minors it is possible this will be expanded to adults we don't know it depends how far there's sort of anti-trans i don't know derangement goes but that that is a real danger and this can also be expanded to refusing to allow medicare and medicaid to pay for anything at a clinic that does trans health care even if the money isn't funding the health care that's also possible that would be absolutely catastrophic for the medical system even just a government ban that you know prevents things like medicare and medicaid and like government health care from

Starting point is 00:11:31 covering transition in the first place is a disaster but if they go further and you know prevent clinics who like provide trans health care from taking medicare medicaid that's bad enough that i think that is in terms of what what is the thing we most need to be worried about right now, I think that's the worst possible thing that can happen very quickly. Because it could basically pressure medical clinics into refusing to offer any kind of gender-affirming care because it would threaten their just base ability to operate as a medical clinic, taking Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Yeah, this is something I talked about a bit in our Agenda 47 episode on this, but this

Starting point is 00:12:05 effectively creates Sophie's choice for these clinics, because either you treat trans people who have private insurance, right? Or you can treat people who are on Medicare and Medicaid. So it's like, okay, either you let trans people get fucked, or you let

Starting point is 00:12:22 every poor person or old person in the u.s like eat shit so there aren't good options here for that how do we think something like this would be implemented like is this an executive order or does this have to go through congress so that's the other part about this that's very bad um the way this this is being done is these things are attached as what are called writers to to spending. So any spending bill the Republicans put in front of the House, they will have this provision in it, right? And the really big problem for us is that spending bills

Starting point is 00:12:53 usually get passed now out of this thing called Senate reconciliation. And the thing about Senate reconciliation is that you can't filibuster them. So these can just get rammed through really really quickly and there's not going to be enough opposition in the house to stop it either so i mean some of this stuff probably could be done with executive orders but it's quite possible you won't even need that because it can just be rammed through in spending bills which is a little bit harder to undo from my understanding yeah yeah executive orders can be overturned by the next guy whereas getting these provisions out is going to take a long time yeah you know this is another issue that we have the

Starting point is 00:13:29 the map for the democrats retaking the senate is terrible in 2026 and it's bad in 2028 too so i still don't think this is being recorded friday i don't think we still actually know what their majority in the senate is going to be but it it's a lot. And also, we know that Joe Manchin is willing to vote for stuff like this because he's done it already. So this is probably coming quickly. It basically depends on how good their policy people are, which who knows. But yeah, this is not going to be difficult for them to implement, and it's going to be extremely damaging.

Starting point is 00:14:05 Well, that was a lot. Let's take a little bit of a break. And when we come back, take another look into what life could be like under a second Trump term. we are back so the threat to trans people does not only come from congress and the president one of the things that's almost certainly going to happen very soon is there is currently a case about a trans health care ban for minors in tennessee in front of the supreme court it's called scrametti versus us we are almost certainly going to lose this not losing this requires a bunch of extremely unlikely things happening and this is very very bad what scrimmetti versus us is probably going to cost us is trans people as a group being protected by the 14th amendment so the 14th amendment is supposed to provide everyone equal

Starting point is 00:15:04 protection under the law the way this has been interpreted is that if you're passing a law that directly targets a group there's certain levels of scrutiny that have to be applied to it to see whether or not it's discriminatory and can like be allowed to proceed what's probably going to happen here is that trans people aren't going to be held as protected at all which means that the 14th amendment will not protect us from things that are unbelievably, obviously discriminatory, like trans health care bans for youth, which is, again, literally the same procedures that are happening for trans children

Starting point is 00:15:34 are done to cis children all the time, and it's fine. So this is very obviously discrimination. We're probably going to lose it because the Supreme Court is full of a bunch of the worst people in the entire world. It is technically possible that Gorsuch defects and drags someone else over, and we get a thing that says we have intermediate scrutiny. That would be the best win we could possibly get on this. It's unlikely. We're probably going to lose it. And this is also going to overturn the landmark case,

Starting point is 00:16:04 Bostock v versus Clayton County, which is the one that rules that you can't discriminate against trans people based on gender identity. Specifically for like employers as well. Yeah, for employers, specifically for employers. So what we could very well be about to lose, and again, this is another thing that's very high likelihood because this case is already in front of the Supreme Court

Starting point is 00:16:21 and the Supreme Court hates us. We could be about to lose employment discrimination protections. Now, to be fair, and I think most trans people who are listening to the show know this. I don't know how many cis people understand this, but the level of trans employment discrimination in the workplace is unbelievable. Yeah, this isn't really enforced at all. It's pretty bad. It is something that right now is technically possible to do and you're not allowed to just straight up say it but you know like there there is a reason that the unemployment rate for trans people is like three times as high no it's actually yeah i think it's about three times as high as the rate for cis people right we don't have great data there's some data from

Starting point is 00:16:59 the trans longitudinal survey from 2022 but the full report isn't out yet. But what I will say is that the trans level of unemployment right now in the US is very low. The level of unemployment for trans people is 1936 Great Depression levels. And this is before we lose these protections. It is also worth noting, this will not overturn

Starting point is 00:17:19 like state level protections. So if you're in a state that like has specifically banned it, you will have some more recourse. But we're losing 14th Amendment protections. On a federal level, it would basically allow explicit employment discrimination if someone's trans. It's possible that case goes marginally better for us, and that doesn't happen. But it's hard to see how that would happen.

Starting point is 00:17:42 The lawyers I talk to will say this is not a this is not a legal opinion but they seem to think that this is how this would go and the policy people seem to think it'd be going the same way yeah there's some other things that can happen trump has been promising we're going to get federal investigations into clinics that provide gender affirming care also into hospitals you know there's gonna be enormous legal harassment this has already been happening on a sort of lower level but from sort of individual lawsuits and state attorney generals yeah but this is going to be happening with the full backing of the department of justice you can look at like what texas has been doing the past four years yeah with them investigating not just

Starting point is 00:18:17 clinics but also like parents of trans kids yeah parents like individual health care providers he was also pledging to investigate like the companies that make hormones so that's bad there's also the department of justice has been making some incredibly half-assed attempts to try to go after some of the health care bans that's all gonna stop they're just gonna give all that up there's also a bunch of bills that could be passed depending on the democrats willingness to filibuster them so trump has called for a ban of trans people like playing sports that correspond with their gender and that may well pass because the democrats are cowards and the republicans are going to have a large majority in the senate yep trump has also pushed for a ban on gender affirming care for minors including

Starting point is 00:19:01 hrt's hormone replacement therapy which is like one of the main ways you transition and puberty blockers that one is less likely to make it through the senate but it also again depends on how cowardly the democrats are and how much they decide to cave and this is the moment that there is another thing that you can do and you should start doing this right now which is this is the moment right now to start pressuring your congressperson about this like start calling them start pressuring them and start making sure that they don't fully sort of turn on trans rights this is something that you can concretely do right now because these people need to understand that there are consequences for turning on trans people because if there aren't consequences they're going to do it now trump has also called for a ban on

Starting point is 00:19:45 recognizing trans people at the federal level on like all identification documents things like that also would outlaw non-binary markings on passports and stuff that would also be really bad that's also something that probably requires a law and that's again and everything call your congress people like pressure them now start doing it now do not wait until he's actually in office and like all of these issues are things that public opinion has been shifting on greatly the past like two years yeah these things used to be much more kind of seen as like yeah this like makes sense this is like a humane and reasonable effort to include a group of discriminated people and now we see in a growing number a majority of people poll on this

Starting point is 00:20:25 issue do not support these measures they don't support having the ability to have your gender marker match your gender identity they don't support your ability to participate in public life and that is the result of a of an intentional misinformation campaign and essentially like a hate crime campaign uh and a hate speech campaign that has been going on for the past like four years because republicans knew that they already lost the battle on like regular gay people so they so they moved on to the next subjugated class and that's something we've talked about for a while and this is like something that is shifting so you have to actually verbally express to to your representatives that this is something that you actually do care about

Starting point is 00:21:03 otherwise they will look at these these general polls and be like, oh, I guess this isn't popular anymore and shift and cave on it. They need to know that their constituents actually do care about these things if we want these things to not get passed through Congress. And it's also worth mentioning that a lot of this, people just don't know anything

Starting point is 00:21:20 about trans people because we're like 1% of the population right now. Part of the reason the Republican campaign is working is that people are susceptible to being told things about trans people and believing them. But that also works for us, right? It goes both ways. Part of what's been going on is that we haven't had the kind of giant advocacy push outside of some trans people, but we have no money, we have no resources resources and we need there to actually be large widespread and vocal public support because otherwise all of the stuff that's happening here is going to get

Starting point is 00:21:51 even worse and you know the word and we could get very well the worst case scenario things which are full bans for adults that's the thing that they could pass through congress but right now they don't have support for it however comma as kirsten is going to get to there are signs that the democratic party is deciding to throw us under the bus yeah not as steadfast on this issue than what uh we would probably prefer yeah and on the state level i guess the important thing for the state level is that once we lose 14th amendment protections it's going to be so much harder for there to be legal challenges to any of this. And this means we're going to see a proliferation of these state level bans on health care, even sort of marching ahead of where the federal

Starting point is 00:22:34 government is. Let's have our last break. And when we come back, we will close the episode by discussing Trump's focus on trans issues during his campaign, as well as things that you can start doing like right now to get ready and prepare for these next four years. All right, we are back. During the last few months of Trump's campaign, his team shifted away from the key issues of the economy and immigration in their national election ad efforts and specifically honed in on trans issues as a wedge against Kamala Harris and the Democrats in general. The infamous Kamala is for they them ad being the prime example of this. According to a PBS report,

Starting point is 00:23:24 from October 7th to October 20th, Trump's campaign and pro-Trump groups spent an estimated $39 million on anti-trans ads. And Trump ended up spending more money on these ads than on housing, immigration, and the economy combined. This was his main focus in his final ad push, specifically after the September debate. A new report from journalist Casey Parks using data from Ad Impact shows that Republicans spent nearly $215 million on anti-trans ads this election cycle. And this figure does not include cable or streaming ads. This is just network TV. And these anti-trans ads weren't

Starting point is 00:24:06 just focused on the presidential election. Other Republicans in various Senate races picked up on the success of these anti-trans ads and used them in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Now, initially, some thought that maybe this would be a repeat of 2022. Maybe this extra focus on this small group of the population wouldn't lead to kind of electoral successes, pointing to how a similar strategy failed during the 2022 midterms. But then election day came and we saw that there was a degree of success, or at least these did not hurt them in any substantial way. And Republicans won many of the Senate races on anti-trans campaign messages. I'm going to quote from an article in the New York Times called Trump and the Republicans Bet Big on Anti-Trans Ads

Starting point is 00:24:51 Across the Country. Quote, the Kamala is for they them ad was rated as one of his campaigns more effective in September in some Democratic testing, according to results reviewed by the Times. Republican strategists said the focus on transgender women and girls in sports had been particularly effective with a key group of voters the party had hemorrhaged support from in recent years, college-educated women. One of the things you see in the focus groups is that the moms get really visibly angry on this issue, said Jim McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who works for Mr. Trump and other Republican campaigns. Quote, it's a fairness issue. They don't want their daughters to lose a scholarship

Starting point is 00:25:30 and they don't want them to get hurt. Unquote. The enthusiasm for this issue kind of lines up with what me, Sophie and Robert saw at the RNC, where anti-trans statements consistently got the loudest applause. Though some state-level Democrats, like Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Tom Sulzy of New York, as well as some other DNC advisors, have jumped onto the blame game, citing trans issues as, if not the reason, then a reason, Democrats just completely fumbled this election, claiming that the Democratic Party is far to the left on trans issues than the average American. But largely, the Dems were not out campaigning for trans people, like loud and proud, this election cycle.

Starting point is 00:26:09 Trans issues were intentionally pushed offstage at the DNC, and the Harris campaign tried their hardest to sidestep this issue, giving vague non-answers on whether trans people should be able to receive healthcare by just stating that her administration would quote-unquote follow the law and invoking states rights type framing and i see this as just a massive failure to confront an issue that republicans have like slingshotted into the spotlight and it shows a failure to do things because it's like the right thing to do not just necessarily for some like electoral gain well even even on a strategic level

Starting point is 00:26:44 right we solve this with border policy too right exactly democrats adopted the republicans border policy and then they lost exactly and it's like yeah if you just agree or refuse to contest them on their core issues then that's what people are going to believe because people have a tendency to believe what their elites are telling them you can't defeat these people's ideology by just agreeing with it or stepping out of the way of it. That just lets it spread. I think this is going to be proven to be like the biggest mistake Democrats made this election cycle.

Starting point is 00:27:11 Like you can't just cede territory to the right based on a massive disinformation campaign, which is exactly what the Democrats did on immigration and crime. And they showed a willingness to do that on trans rights. they showed a willingness to do that on trans rights. Now, even if some of these people, Democrats included, claim to not hate trans people individually, they have allowed questions around access to bathrooms, sports, and government-funded healthcare to be used as a wedge against trans rights as a whole, and the ability for trans people to be able to exist in public life. To close, I think we should have just a brief discussion on what people can do, specifically during these next 75 days, and even in the months after, like what people can do to prepare for some of the worst aspects of this, specifically on the healthcare front. Now, we did

Starting point is 00:27:56 a series of episodes a few years ago on DIY HRT. There are both pharmaceutical and home-brewed options for hormones that can be ordered online. Now, since that episode, home-brewed options for hormones that can be ordered online. Now, since that episode, home-brewed distribution networks have spread throughout the United States. There's probably one already in whatever city is closest to you. Now, access to those networks does require a degree of in-person community. And I know that can be challenging. You can certainly do organizing online on Discord. You can certainly find trans people on Discord that can help you learn where pharmaceutical-grade estrogen

Starting point is 00:28:29 can be ordered online. But that type of online organizing will only get more dangerous under a Trump term, especially if the legal status of these hormones change. So I will always emphasize the importance of in-person community. And it might just take like learning if there's a trans band in the city you're in going to some shows learning where trans people go where

Starting point is 00:28:51 trans people gather is there community picnics is there book fairs is there zine fairs like is there like even gaming conventions right just places that there there might be a number of trans people gathered and talk to them about being trans. Talk to them about the issues that you're facing. It might take a few months to gain trust and become friends, but that's just how friendships work anyway. And that can be challenging. And there may not be something like this in a city super close to you,

Starting point is 00:29:19 which is why online connections are useful. And sometimes that might require a little bit of travel. Now, what we can do, at least right now, is stockpile things in case things get harder to maintain or produce. There's multiple forms of these hormones that can be stored, and I do believe that there will be some form of home-brewed option that will most likely continue to exist even if prescribed hormones get restricted. And a part of why I emphasize kind of doing this in person as well, especially if you're a minor, that will just get more dangerous to do under a second Trump term. I will point people to the website diyhrt.wiki. It's currently the best information source on

Starting point is 00:29:58 dosing, testing, how to find supplies, and options for ordering hormones. Now, because changing legal paperwork on the federal or state level often takes a while, if that's something that you want to do, now is the time to start. There's still 70 days until Trump takes office and some of these changes could start being put into effect. You should absolutely apply for a passport. Now, depending on many variables, it may be advantageous to have your legal name and gender marker match whatever you more easily pass as rather than your gender identity. Now, I understand why this is less than ideal. And if you think that this might just inhibit your transition progress and push you further back into the closet, especially if the option of changing your gender marker on federal documents just like goes away during the next four years, then people should just go ahead and get that stuff changed ASAP.

Starting point is 00:30:57 But it's something to reflect on and consider. Lastly, I want to mention something about personal safety. Lastly, I want to mention something about personal safety. Over the course of the past week, I've heard from friends around the country experiencing a spike in anti-queer and misogynistic violence. Chuds, frat boys, and just asshole men have been way more willing to just openly harass queer people out in public. Some of this, I think, is just Trump supporters, quote unquote, celebrating the election results. But once Trump takes office, I expect this type of harassment to start slowly increasing as Truds feel like they can get away with more just open misogyny, homophobia, racism, etc. I know a lot of people have been talking about or posting about buying firearms. And firearms is one of the last things you should buy in a panic. This is a very careful and calculated choice you need to

Starting point is 00:31:51 make about your own personal safety, your own mental health, your own willingness to carry and train with a gun. This is its own topic. But I do recommend buying and carrying pepper gel for basically all queer people and women. It's a great self-defense tool. It spreads less than pepper spray, so you're going to be less likely to just spray yourself. Saber is a good brand. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for your friends. Mia, do you have anything else you want to add? Yeah, yeah. Two things. One, people have been asking for book recommendations, so we're giving them to you. We're only giving them to you at the end of the episode, so you gotta stay around.

Starting point is 00:32:27 And I think something that's good to read in this moment on trans issues is Julia Serrano's book, Whipping Girl. I've had Julia Serrano on the show before. She is one of the most important I mean, honestly, feminist theorists of the last of this century.

Starting point is 00:32:43 And there's a new edition of Whipping Girl that's out recently and it is it is one of the fundamental sort of texts to understand the experience of trans femme people in this country and why things have gotten the way that they've gotten so yeah go go read whipping girl it's spectacular and then i want to plug one more thing that you can give money to so i mean again another very effective way for cis people to support trans people is give them money because all of us are unbelievably broke like all of the time another place you can give money to is the trans justice funding project we'll have that in this too and they they give out grants to other just like trans groups who are doing organizing or doing other kinds of sort of support

Starting point is 00:33:24 work mutual aid etc etc so that's money that just goes directly to trans people yeah and then obviously as we've said this is the forces people part of the episode after our after our four trans people part go call your congress people go pressure them go show up to their offices and make it extremely clear that it is unacceptable to write off trans people and that they need to be willing to successfully stop these writers and successfully do whatever they can to channel the works to make sure that the Republicans cannot pass bills that will harm us even more than the things that they're already going to do. hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series the running interview show

Starting point is 00:34:20 where i run with celebrities athletes entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High.

Starting point is 00:34:58 It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley

Starting point is 00:35:22 into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every

Starting point is 00:35:58 week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game.

Starting point is 00:36:23 If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you we're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles and successes you know it's going to be filled with chisme

Starting point is 00:36:39 laughs and all the vibes that you love each week we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app,

Starting point is 00:37:03 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Starting point is 00:37:29 Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

Starting point is 00:37:50 At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, the Eliane Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:38:11 Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first

Starting point is 00:38:26 real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Starting point is 00:39:05 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans. And, you know, along with all of our other correspondents, I'm looking forward to what we can expect from the Trump administration, which is a broad and far-reaching question, given the ambitions that Trump and the others who I think will be involved in this new administration have already expressed. And the elevator pitch theme of today's episode is what's going to happen in Gaza once Trump is president again? Will things get better or worse? Obviously, the expectation is worse. I think that's where certainly the safe money goes if you're putting money on this. But the short answer to that question is no one fully knows.

Starting point is 00:40:01 Now, the first thing that I did when trying to prepare for this episode was track down as many articles as I could that included interviews with Gazans about their expectations. And those expectations were largely negative, but a little more mixed than you might expect. A Reuters reporter interviewed Abu Osama, living in Khan Yunus in the southern Gaza Strip. He called Trump's election a, quote, new catastrophe in the history of the Palestinian people, adding, despite the destruction, death, and displacement that we have witnessed, what is coming will be more difficult. It will be politically devastating. This essentially agrees with what a Palestinian from Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Ahmed Jarad, told Al Jazeera,

Starting point is 00:40:46 quote, Trump and Netanyahu are an evil alliance against the Palestinians, and our fate will be very difficult, not only in the fateful issues, but also in our daily concerns. This is a sad day for Palestinians. Trump will endorse Netanyahu's free hand regarding the possibility of the return of settlements to the Gaza Strip, and even the displacement of large numbers of Palestinians outside it. We hope to return to the north, and now all of our hopes have been shattered. And unfortunately, Jarad's fears here have been immediately proven well-founded. On November 6th, as the rest of the world reeled from Trump's victory, IDF Brigadier General Itzik Cohen told Israeli

Starting point is 00:41:25 reporters, there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes. Humanitarian aid would only be allowed to enter through the south. His justification was that there are no more civilians in the north. Reporting from The Guardian interviewed several international humanitarian law experts, and the members of that likely dying field described Israeli actions here as war crimes. The forcible transfer of civilian populations and the use of food as a weapon are supposed to be banned. Despite this, we can safely assume that there will be no serious consequences as a result of any of this. Now, the timing of

Starting point is 00:42:05 this announcement was predominant, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that Israel might not have been as bold as they're currently being if Harris had won. Another Gazan, 70-year-old Dr. Zakia Hilal, told Al Jazeera, it is true that American administrations do not differ in supporting Israel, but some are more severe and more intense than others, like Trump. You can find numerous Gazans expressing feelings along these lines if you read long enough, but you will also find a number who feel like what's coming won't be worse, or at least won't be very different from what they've already endured. Jihad Malaka, a researcher at the Palestinian Planning Center, told Al Jazeera

Starting point is 00:42:45 he does not expect Trump's administration to be wildly different from Biden's in this regard. Trump uses rough tools, and Biden and the Democrats resort to soft tools, but the politics are the same. Biden did not make any decision in favor of the Palestinians and was unable to achieve a ceasefire. He did not change the reality of the decisions of his predecessor Trump at all. The positions of the two administrations regarding Israel are the same and identical, and they put its interests above all other considerations. You can also find some Gazans who see a sliver of hope in Trump's new administration. Reuters spoke with the owner of a grocery store in Gaza, Khaled D'Souza,

Starting point is 00:43:25 who told their reporter, I think Donald Trump, if he wins, he promised the Muslim people in America to stop the war in Gaza. We hope that happens. And it's not necessarily absurd to hope that there may be some positive effects here. Trump has said many horrible things about Palestinians, obviously, several weeks before the election. He had a phone call with Netanyahu that may have been a violation of the Logan Act, although laws don't really matter anymore. Here's how Slate.com summarized what happened in that call. According to Trump, the Israeli leader said he disregarded President Joe Biden's warning to keep troops out of Rafah in southern Gaza,

Starting point is 00:44:01 a decision that resulted in the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Senwar in a shootout in the area. Trump also said Netanyahu asked him for advice on how to respond to Iran's missile attack on Israel, to which Trump said he responded, do whatever you have to do. Now, that's a dire sign, and it is impossible to imagine that a new Trump regime

Starting point is 00:44:20 won't restart the sale and shipment of specific munitions that Biden banned for export to Israel. This July, Biden halted the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to the IDF because, quote, they cannot be used in Gaza or any populated area without causing great human tragedy and damage. Now, the fact that munitions like this will very likely be used is hideous, and I think it's extremely unlikely that we do not see an immediate rise in the death toll. But at the same time, Israel's extant acts have caused great human tragedy and damage. The munitions they have have already been responsible for calamitous death and destruction on a fairly wide scale.

Starting point is 00:44:59 So where's the cause for any optimism on this at all? It comes from Trump's own self-interest. As Khalid D'Souza noted, Trump ran promising to end wars. This means he does have some vested interest, even if only in his own ego, in forcing Netanyahu to draw things to a close in short order. And there is indeed reporting that Trump has told Netanyahu to wrap things up by January so that he can take office with an end to the conflict and ideally use that as a way to kind of bolster his early

Starting point is 00:45:32 popularity and gain some political capital for the other sweeping changes he wants to make. Now, the fact that Trump is pushing Netanyahu on ending things in January doesn't mean a sudden peaceful ceasefire. For one thing, nothing is going to happen in the months between then and now to reduce the level of bloodshed. And almost every likely theoretical ends with Israel massively escalating violence and using new, more destructive weapons

Starting point is 00:45:56 before bringing an end to their campaign. But it does mean that Trump might be able to pressure Bibi to bring things to an end. There's a good article on this in the BBC. No guarantees Trump will give Netanyahu all he wants. Now in that piece, Mideast correspondent Lucy Williamson writes, Donald Trump's first term in office was exemplary as far as Israel is concerned, said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. The hope is that he'll revisit that, but we have to be very clear-sighted about who Donald Trump is and what he stands for. Firstly, he said, the former president

Starting point is 00:46:30 doesn't like wars, seeing them as expensive. Trump has urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly. He's also not a big fan of Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank, said Ambassador Oren, and has opposed the wishes of some Israeli leaders to annex parts of it. Both of these policies could put him in conflict with far-right parties in Netanyahu's current governing coalition, who have threatened to bring down the government if the prime minister pursues policies they reject. Michael Oren believes Netanyahu will need to take a different approach with the incoming president. If Donald Trump comes to office in January and says, okay, you have a week to finish the war, Netanyahu is going to have to respect that.

Starting point is 00:47:10 And we'll continue talking about what this means, but first, here's some ants. So, it is possible that we will see a a massive escalation in violence as the IDF seeks to force more people out of northern Gaza and end the conflict with a large slice of Gaza permanently wrenched from Palestinian control and handed over to Israeli settlers. There is no version of what comes next that is not a calamity to the Palestinian people. Now the signs from within the Israeli government on what a new Trump administration means for them are certainly bullish, you could say.

Starting point is 00:48:11 And reading these tea leaves provides very little fuel for optimism. Itmar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security, posted yes with several S's and an emoji of a flexed bicep in a post on social media when the first good returns started coming in for Trump. On the day of the election itself, and a sign of confidence in the coming results, Bibi Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Galant,

Starting point is 00:48:36 who had been his primary point of contact with the Biden administration. And it's harder to imagine a much more direct sign of what he wants to do than that. Now, I've struggled to present the sweep of possible results of this, and it bears reiterating that the bulk of predictions from Gazans who are plugged into the politics of the region are incredibly negative. Ahmed Fayyad, an independent researcher in Israeli affairs who currently resides in central Gaza, told Al Jazeera that

Starting point is 00:49:05 he felt Trump's influence would be entirely negative, adding that Trump was a, quote, more dominating figure than Biden, and his influence would allow Netanyahu to, quote, conquer Gaza. Quote, amidst the weakened Palestinian front and absence of any Arab unity and solidarity, the whole Palestinian cause faces its worst threat yet. Now, what does bear watching is the degree to which Bibi might face threats from his own right flank. Netanyahu himself is almost certainly on the side of doing what will please his patron Trump all the more, and that would be forcing a quick, violent end to the fighting and taking northern Gaza as the spoils of war. But this might bring him into conflict with radicals on his own side, who can't be

Starting point is 00:49:50 placated by anything but what they would see as total victory. In the event Netanyahu feels pushed, it is not impossible that he will wind up in conflict with Trump. This has happened before, as Bibi's sense of self-preservation led him to take actions that enraged Trump. This has happened before, as Beebe's sense of self-preservation led him to take actions that enraged Trump. The best example of this took place in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, if you want to think back to those happier days. Beebe was again the first world leader to call and offer Biden congratulations on his victory as he was with Trump. This is a habit for the man who, among other things, is an expert at toadying for favor with U.S. leaders. Trump was livid, and he spoke out about this, telling

Starting point is 00:50:31 Israeli journalist Barak Ravid that he believed that he had saved Israel from destruction, and in response, Netanyahu had stabbed him in the back. I'm going to quote now from an article in the BBC. Mr. Trump accused Mr. Netanyahu of congratulating too quickly Mr. Trump's successor, Joe Biden, on winning the 2020 U.S. election. Mr. Trump disputed the election result, though his claims were never upheld. The first person who congratulated Joe Biden was Bibi, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with. Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake. He was very early, Mr. Trump said, like earlier than most. I haven't spoken to him since. Fuck him. I actually don't

Starting point is 00:51:10 know that he said fuck. The actual text of the article says expletive him, but I'm assuming he said fuck him. I think that's probably a fair assumption for me to make. Now, some evidence does suggest that Trump and Bibi don't personally get along, as that quote I just read implies. Certainly not to the degree that Netanyahu and Biden once did. Once, I should say. This may hinge partly on the fact that Trump really only believes in himself and his own benefit, whereas Joe Biden was a strong and committed believer in Israel and was willing to take actions against his own political self-interest in furtherance of that belief.

Starting point is 00:51:48 And we've all seen where those actions got him. Just last December, Trump attacked Netanyahu at an early campaign rally in New York, saying Bibi had, quote, let us down by pulling Israeli support for the operation that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani at the last minute.

Starting point is 00:52:05 He also criticized the Israeli leader for not being prepared for Hamas's October 7th attack. Now, I want to be clear here that these divisions between both men are blisteringly unlikely to mean anything that approaches relief for the Palestinian people, at least in the near term. The immediate and probably long-term future of Gaza is much bleaker today than it was a few weeks ago. The Guardian recently published an article interviewing former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta.

Starting point is 00:52:36 He predicted Trump would give Bibi a blank check for aggression, which might invite the possibility of open war with Iran. Now, that's the kind of thing that can lead one to panic, especially when you assume a guy like Panetta is privy to a lot of inside information. We may not be, but I'm actually not really sure that he is.

Starting point is 00:52:54 I don't see any evidence from this article that Panetta is speaking from direct personal knowledge about extant plans to carry out an attack. Instead, he quoted Trump's description of the call that Trump had had with Bibi before the election, telling Netanyahu, do whatever you have to do. So, Leon may just be working from the same information the rest of us have and coming to a somewhat different conclusion. I'm not as sure as he is about an imminent attack on Iran because Trump

Starting point is 00:53:22 campaigned heavily on ending wars. And while I don't credit Trump as a particularly honest man, I do think he sees his personal benefit right now in being able to portray himself as a peacemaker, in part because he has so much domestically he wants to do and so much else internationally he wants to do, right? Expending a bunch of political capital, dealing with the kinds of protests and unrest and even anger from his base that a war with Iran would mean, especially once it gets bogged down

Starting point is 00:53:49 in the kind of violence that would come with that, he may not and likely doesn't see that as being of benefit to him. Now, that doesn't mean it will never happen. It doesn't mean his calculus won't change. I do foresee some situations in which Trump might decide that his personal benefit

Starting point is 00:54:05 is in there being a wider ground conflict with Iran that U.S. forces get drawn into. We'll talk a little bit about some of the possibilities around this, and we're getting outside of the realm of kind of established fact at this point, but I do think it's worth considering some of this. But first, consider these ads. So, when we talk about the possibility of a ground conflict with Iran starting between Israel and Iran, but almost inevitably drawing in more U.S. forces, the known unknowns and unknown knowns in this situation are pretty staggering. If I let myself analyze every possibility, my mind can go to some dark places.

Starting point is 00:54:59 Trump sees war with Iran as a negative now, I'm quite sure, but how would he feel about it in the wake of, say, a Musk-centered plan to end the Federal Reserve and tank the dollar in the wake of the changes that all of his immigration policies would make on the price of food, the Depression-era levels of inflation and unemployment returning to the United States, and the attendant social unrest that that would cause. If Americans find themselves on the verge of food rights, perhaps Trump would gamble on war being the best distraction he could manage. It's certainly not impossible. Now, I don't know how useful it is to bury myself in theoreticals and probabilities.

Starting point is 00:55:31 The known threats are dire enough, and they demand full-time awareness in order to attempt to counter and endure. So instead of spiraling, I'm going to leave you today with the words of another Gazan, Mohamed R. Moush. He's a journalist who wrote an article for MSNBC right after the election titled, My Family and I Survived the War in Gaza. We Know Trump's America Won't Save Us. And here's Mohamed. For us, the election of Donald Trump isn't just a blip on the political radar or a shift in foreign policy. It's a challenge to sustain existence while the world seems intent on erasing us. It's about surviving 77 years under occupation and over a year of ongoing genocide. The very genocide I barely survived last December,

Starting point is 00:56:15 when my family and I, including my elderly parents and three-year-old son, were buried under the rubble of what was once our home after it was struck by an Israeli-fired U.S. missile. the rubble of what was once our home after it was struck by an Israeli-fired U.S. missile. The date, December 7, 2023. Our bones were crushed between layers of concrete and twisted metal as we spent hours in the dark, buried together and praying to be pulled out in one piece. The trauma of that night, and both its physical and emotional toll of my son's small, fragile hand clinging to mind, comes back to me now as Trump prepares to take power once more. I've seen how American political leaders toy with the idea of change,

Starting point is 00:56:52 how they dress up their campaigns with grand ideas about peace and justice. Yet each president brushes off our reality. Barack Obama promised hope and change we could believe in, yet we got more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging and yielding support for Israel, leaving in, yet we got more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging and yielding support for Israel, leaving us to live through even more horror. Vice President Kamala Harris's niceties included no concrete promises to protect Palestinians,

Starting point is 00:57:15 but she did pledge to continue financial support for Israel. And Trump's bluntness, as he promises to come back swinging, reminds us not to hold out hope for change. So, you know, not much optimism here, but I do really recommend reading that article that MSNBC published. You know, it's bleak but important, especially given the fact that, you know, we may be soon entering a world where it would be harder for people like Mohammed to express their feelings and their truth to an audience. I don't think it's unlikely that a clampdown is coming on some of these things. It's hard to say how extensive it will be. But there's a threat that Israel and their backers see in the way that public sympathy

Starting point is 00:58:03 has built so quickly for Gaza in a way that wasn't present with a lot of previous stages of violence between Israel and Gaza, right? Now, this is the result of a lot of videos spreading on social media. It's the result of voices from Gaza getting out and getting to people in a way they really hadn't before. And so one thing that does worry me greatly when I think about what's going to happen in Gaza under President Trump is not just what's going to happen to the people living there right now, but what's going to happen to their ability to tell their story, to get information out to the rest of us. That is very much an open question at this

Starting point is 00:58:41 moment, but it's certainly one that should be on your lips, and it's one that we will be investigating here at Cool Zone as long as we're able to continue doing that. Until next time, I'm Robert Evans. We'll be back tomorrow and every other day reporting on, you know, the world. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going.

Starting point is 00:59:28 That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app,

Starting point is 01:00:09 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

Starting point is 01:00:34 This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

Starting point is 01:00:54 I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again,

Starting point is 01:01:15 the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes.

Starting point is 01:01:37 You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente,

Starting point is 01:01:52 and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

Starting point is 01:02:03 or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Starting point is 01:02:39 Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen

Starting point is 01:02:57 to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and

Starting point is 01:03:19 iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud,

Starting point is 01:03:46 but I'm like every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

Starting point is 01:04:07 welcome to it could happen here a podcast that's about trade policy now i'm your host via long this is amazingly going to be the fun one of all of these episodes. It's about tariffs. So it's going to be a long week. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that that was the voice of the singular Garrison Davis. The one, the only. Yes.

Starting point is 01:04:35 Hello. I'm excited to hear about tariffs. It's tariff talk here. And it could happen here. One of my favorite, favorite topics, I guess. Now. All right. we're putting you on the spot what is a tariff uh it's basically googling tariffs no um a tariff is when trump says

Starting point is 01:04:56 china's bad so he makes china pay extra money to sell their goods to americans and luckily china pays for all of it and the american consumer gets off with a boosting economy that's at least what i've heard yeah so unfortunately for everyone i don't know i mean i guess i guess there's some accelerationists who are probably really excited about this most certainly the way the way this actually works is, okay, so the government sets up a tariff, and that means if anyone is bringing a good into the U.S., they have to pay the tariff on it, and that money goes to the government. So, okay, there's been a long history of tariffs in the U.S.

Starting point is 01:05:35 This was a huge domestic policy thing, particularly in the 1800s. That's really fucking boring. The incredibly short version of it is that the thing about tariffs is that, especially tariffs on a specific sector, is that they're good for you manufacturing that thing kind of mostly and they're bad for anyone trying to buy that good because it's now more expensive so trump's plan and we're going to get into a bit more detail about this because there's parts of

Starting point is 01:06:01 trump's tariff plan that everyone seems to have forgotten about for some reason that i i don't know why they've forgotten about but the basic plan is to impose something like a 10 to 20 tariff on all goods that enter the u.s from anywhere there's specifically one from mexico but the numbers on what the mexico tariff is changes every time he opens his mouth sometimes it's like 25 there's one where it's like 250 of course two interchangeable percentages yeah and then for china it's supposed to be a tariff of somewhere between 60 60 is the most commonly cited number but he's also said 100 tariff once again basically the same thing yeah and so you know part of part of what we unfortunately the rest of us who live in the normal world have to do is figure out what is actually going to happen if we get for example 20 tariffs on all goods entering the u.s and a 60 tariff on goods from china so the first thing you

Starting point is 01:06:58 need to understand i think most people kind of get this now but the thing about a tariff is that you pay for it so the way that it works in general is that this is just an additional cost for the company that's doing that that's doing the like moving the good around right and so they are almost always going to just pass that cost directly on to you obviously sometimes we've talked about pricing the way the pricing works a lot on this show companies tend not to want to raise prices largely because of their effects on consumer happiness and brand loyalty and stuff like that so sometimes people will just eat shit on it but if you're talking about a 60 tariff like you the 60 tariff is going to be paid for by you so that means that anytime we buy something that's either from mexico or china or any of the other

Starting point is 01:07:42 countries that this will be applied to. The easiest way for these companies to get around the tariff is just to pass off the cost to the consumer. Yeah. And it's actually worse than that because, and this is something I don't think people really understand. When you think about global trade, right, people tend to think about trade as something that happens between countries. And this is something that was an old, you know, dream, like the anti-globalization movement. People sort of understood this and kind of don't now. Trade doesn't actually really happen between countries.

Starting point is 01:08:10 Most trade is one company, an international company, moving a resource from one country to another, right? So like trade is fucking Amazon moving something from a warehouse in one country to a warehouse in a second country, right? Now, I've seen a lot of people, moving something from a warehouse in one country to a warehouse in a second country right now i've seen a lot of people and this this ranges from like very very serious sort of you know news sources and economists trying to sort of just directly model what the price increases are going to be i've seen people be like oh your shirts are going to cost 60 more or physical

Starting point is 01:08:39 video games will stop existing because they're too expensive and who gives a shit what why are we even trying to do sectoral modeling of the impacts of this if you try to impose a 60 to 100 tariff on goods from china and a 20 tariff on all goes into the country the economy will collapse i don't i don't know why everyone is pretending that this won't fucking happen we're going to get into it a second i guess the reason why people are pretending this is happening, because the way the way they're doing the modeling kind of assumes that it won't, which is baffling, incomprehensible nonsense. around the globe the u.s has actually weathered it decently well although there's been a catastrophic failure in communicating that and listening to the actual complaints from like people on how they're still struggling with rising inflation but still a big reason why trump was elected is because he simply is not joe biden yeah and he's not from the biden harris administration and there's this

Starting point is 01:09:42 perception that he will be able to fix the economy he will be able to get around inflation lower prices when seemingly his main economic proposal will lead to what's probably going to be an economic collapse if it happens in the brutality of which he proposes yeah and there's there's another element of this right when i say the likely result of trump actually trying to implement his tariff policy is a global economic collapse there's another part of this that everyone seems to have forgotten. And I don't know why they've forgotten this. I guess it's because nobody actually reads any of the things that Trump puts out on his website. Which is true. No one actually reads that stuff. It's nuts. Especially his own supporters. Yeah. A majority of his own supporters do not pay

Starting point is 01:10:19 attention to like daily news. Yes. And now I remember this because I did an episode about these tariffs like like six months ago and one of the things about this he has a thing called agenda 47 right which was his agenda for what what he's going to do when he takes power which no one has cared about and now everyone is going through and posting policy proposals from like fucking two years ago with the headline breaking news trump announces new plan they're like no he hasn't yeah these are old plans this stuff is like two years old he's been openly talking about all this yeah for ages and one of the important parts of this i'm just going to read this quote because it is a part of this

Starting point is 01:10:53 has been ignored by every single fucking analysis i've seen from like fucking the center for american progress who obviously we're going to screw this up to like stamford's labs like everyone who's been writing about this has just ignored this part, which is, quote, as one of his top economic priorities, President Trump will stop the flow of American jobs overseas by passing the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act. Under the landmark legislation, if any foreign country imposes a tariff on American made goods that is higher than the tariff imposed by the U.S., President Trump will have the authority to impose a reciprocal tariff on that country's goods. OK, so what this would this would do again is that any country that has a tariff already or imposes a tariff and this is important if we get into a trade war where countries start imposing tariffs

Starting point is 01:11:34 on each other in retaliation for their other tariffs which is what happened when he did this trade war with china in like 2018 2019 that means that we're also going to impose a tariff which means that the tariff rates don't stay at 10 to 20 they cyclically spiral upwards that's just like an escalating series of tariffs yeah and the thing is right the policy proposals that they have on his page are like well okay we're going to do this through like a presidential act right but the thing is the president actually has really really under under a number of different acts has extremely wide discretionary authority to set tariffs as long as he can basically sort of like cobble together some kind of bullshit excuse for it and at that point you're relying on the supreme court to stop

Starting point is 01:12:13 literally anything that trump does like they don't give a shit well i mean i don't know maybe maybe someone will like go up to like in clarence thomas and go like hey if we do this like importing new like windshield wipers for your rv is going to cost 10 million dollars more or whatever but like there's there's no shot of this stuff getting stopped and the thing is right the the reciprocal tariff stuff he could just do this through his existing tariff authority he doesn't actually even need to pass something through congress which should actually be i think tricky for him but he doesn't need to you know what we need to do right now, though, Mia? Just badly, badly. Cut to a bunch of companies that are going to be absolutely fucking eviscerated

Starting point is 01:12:50 if this goes through. That's right. Donald Trump stands for anti-capitalist action. He's going to destroy free trade. So enjoy these ads when you still can. Okay, we are back. Mia, let's hear how Trump is going to perfect the capitalist economic system by a series of escalating tariffs that will destroy the economy and in doing so, providing the opportunity for Marxists to seize power and change the world economic system. Yeah. So I'm going to read another quote from that same Agenda 47 thing. Quote, for example, food items like cereals or other preparatory goods are tariffed at 32.9% by India, 19.5% by China, and only 3.1% by the US.

Starting point is 01:13:40 India applies a tariff of 25.3% on transportation while the u.s only tariffs goes at 2.9 now those exact numbers are debatable but it doesn't matter because these these are going to be vibes based ones based on how pissed off trump is at a country yeah as trump is usually a vibes based guy yeah especially when it comes to the economy especially when it comes to like these numbers he's pulling out like between 60 to%, he doesn't know what any of those numbers means. He's just thinking of a number and saying it out loud. And the thing about all of these things, right?

Starting point is 01:14:12 Even just the base 20%, or let's go to the lowest numbers he's talked about, which is a 10% tariff on all goods and a 60% tariff on Chinese goods, right? That, in and of itself, blows a smoking crater in in the world economy and none of the the assessments that you will read are talking about this one of the things

Starting point is 01:14:31 that they will mention that is true but they're not you know getting to the importance of is that this affects stuff that's made in the u.s because the thing about things that are made in the u.s is that they're made from components that are from elsewhere because that's how international supply chains work oh wait even though we have through tariffs moved all manufacturing of toyota into the united states you're saying that still some of the materials are not all solely made and produced within the country and it actually requires on foreign trade yeah and part of the problem i think of like okay so if you logically think out the conclusions of what that means, right?

Starting point is 01:15:06 OK, first mistake, Amiya, that you're trying to solve this problem through logic. You won't, but here's the thing, right? Obviously, Trump is not going to think through this, right? But I kind of expect people who are like writing about this for a living to do mildly better than this. And possibly some of the people that he like hires onto his cabinet and team, maybe, but we'll see. No, I'm not talking about like his critics oh sure sure that one of the numbers you'll see all the time the center for american progress has this line about how the tariffs will function as a tax that cost the american consumer like 1700 a year right which was the line that kamala

Starting point is 01:15:37 used pretty often yeah framing his tariffs as like a sales tax this is fucking horseshit the the only way you can think that the the net effect of this would just be a 1700 tax is if you don't understand how the economy works at all right so i went through and read this and the way that they model it is just by like they find the like net dollar value of imported goods and then apply a tax to it and then try to figure out like how much of those goods that the average person would buy in a year and then increase the price but and this is something that's very important at the end of the analysis right at the very end there's a little section where they say that they assume this would have no other effects on the economy this is unbelievably fucking stupid i cannot emphasize enough can you explain why that doesn't make any sense so okay so

Starting point is 01:16:21 here's the thing right prices go up now people can buy less things what does that do to the economy well it slows its growth rate right companies start to go out of business and we're going to get into more of the ways that this plays out in a second right but a bunch of a bunch of people in a bunch of places fucking lose their jobs because suddenly the reduction in consumer demand means that there's a there's a fucking reduction in necessary production and this has cyclical effects throughout the entire economy as more and more people fucking lose their jobs. And also,

Starting point is 01:16:50 you know, the thing, the thing about those people who lose their jobs is that that also fucking reduces demand because those people are now even like less able to afford the stuff that's been increased by, by inflation prices. And this, this spirals through the entire world economy in order to understand what exactly this is going to do i

Starting point is 01:17:07 think we need to understand why you know because like if kamala harris i don't know if it makes any difference in the election but kamala harris walks on the stage and says this is going to cost you 1700 she does not walk on the stage and say this is going to cause an economic collapse right and i i think i think the reason that happened is because we've gotten into this place where nobody fucking understands how the economy works at all in a way that's even worse than it was even in like the 2010s it's like in the 2010s i think people sort of had a vague understanding the thing that was happening to the economy was uberization whatever you call it was the expansion of gig work right there was sort of an understanding and a focus on the very sort of low level parts of the economy like what what are you a poor person doing for your job right how does how does your income work and

Starting point is 01:17:49 and not purely on these sort of like high finance or in the in the case in the case of what's been happening here everyone has been unbelievably completely focused on like the chips act and like state-led industrialization and all that stuff is fucking bullshit it's it basically hasn't done anything yet it's not going to do anything for like a decade and it's not mostly what's going on in the economy i've been holding my tongue on this for years but the people who have been writing about the economy don't understand how the fuck it works because they've been completely myopically obsessed with the idea that we're in this new era of state capitalism and no like the actual thing that's been happening in the economy and i think if if you are like a person who buys

Starting point is 01:18:31 stuff you probably understand this but for some reason this has never made it to like economists or like people who fucking write about the economy for a living is consumer to manufacturer sales so this is stuff like temu this is stuff like shu. This is stuff like Shien, who... Shien, I mean, invented is a strong word, but they're one of the first people who sort of popularized this model, right? And this is a thing where you have a platform that lets people nominally buy directly

Starting point is 01:18:56 from the factories or from the people who are producing fruit, right? And these factories aren't producing goods until basically either people order the goods or like analytics tells them to order it so they don't have a lot of the problems that other kind of like distribution bottles have you have a bunch of goods sitting in a warehouse you just like you just don't have that because you don't start production until your sort of orders come in your analytics come in and the theory here is you can reduce costs by eliminating the middleman but of course a new kind of middleman emerged and that is the drop shipper oh god so the drop shipper is just

Starting point is 01:19:31 someone using the the consumer to manufacturer pipeline right the the platforms that are supposed to let you the consumer sort of just like buy directly from the thing and cut out middlemen it's just someone doing that but then turning around and selling you the result and this has become just utterly fucking ubiquitous in the american economy it's it's sort of like an integral part of the american scam economy now too as the american economy has been increasingly sort of riddled and consumed by scams and riddled and consumed by sort of like people trying to capitalize on like some fucking meme or some political thing you know you have all these people doing like dropship t-shirts right but they can immediately come in and yeah sell all of this stuff these like short-lived like trend meme based either like fashion or even like goods

Starting point is 01:20:14 you know we can talk about like the amount of like content creator merch that is all funneled through these like drop shipping companies yeah and it's also what's been it's it's the thing that's enabled fast fashion to function in the way that it is right now, right? Absolutely. And this has become what consumption is in large swaths of the world, is from this sort of direct-to-consumer

Starting point is 01:20:34 dropshipping shit, right? Yeah. Now, the thing about these dropshipping things is that their profit margins are really, really low. They don't make that much money. And in fact, a lot of these things like hemorrhage money until they've basically you know they do the thing that amazon did right where like you lose money for a million years but then eventually you have

Starting point is 01:20:51 enough market share that you start making money again yeah because you make it so all your competitors basically can't function because you have prices that are so low and then when you're the only one in the game with a sizable power influence you can raise prices and then you make tons of money also the uber model although uber still isn't profitable yeah well so yeah uber will never make any money right um but the other thing here that's important is that you know so the the margins of of a company like temu right which is like probably the biggest of these sort of companies now are low but temu technically has tech money like they have money to back them up right you know who doesn't have

Starting point is 01:21:24 an unbelievable amount of just like capital sitting around that they could just instantly pull from. If suddenly there is, I don't know, a 60% fucking price shock. Oh wait, it's all of the fucking manufacturing, you know,

Starting point is 01:21:35 tiny manufacturing firms that these drop shipping things use to produce all their stuff, right? That infrastructure is very fragile. It's, it's margins are very bad. And Oh, guess what happens to that shit? If you impose 60% tariffs on it, right? That infrastructure is very fragile. Its margins are very bad. And, oh, guess what happens to that shit if you impose 60% tariffs on it, right?

Starting point is 01:21:49 It just shuts down because that's the easiest option, right? Yeah, and presumably, I think one of the other parts of this would be part of the reason this has been happening is that all of this stuff isn't being imported under tariff loopholes. But that loophole is not hard to close, right? What tariff loopholes are you referring to? Oh, hard to close right what tariff loopholes are you like referring to oh yeah so i talked about this the 10-week episode there's loopholes on american tariffs where like if you're if you're bringing stuff into the country that's below a certain value it has to be above like a 600 or something to like trigger a threshold okay to like activate

Starting point is 01:22:21 the the tariff supply into it so so people just ship a bunch of 1 billion boxes individually that are like $599 to go under the thing. So you're saying, I can still maybe buy my new Sonic the Hedgehog PS5 game though. That should be fine. I'll be totally good.

Starting point is 01:22:39 Oh god. The other part of this that's important, this is the kind of, I don't know if new is the right word, but this is the kind of recent part of the economy that's incredibly dependent on Chinese supply chains, right? That gets just liquefied if these tariffs go through. These are enormous companies that, you know, are going to just eat shit. And those companies eating shit have these sort of effects we talked about earlier, right? Which is people to get fired it causes growth collapses it causes cyclical decreases in people's ability to buy things and then also like demand decreases because people can't buy things but this is like the new school supply chain stuff right temu's a product of really the last six or seven years and it really only functions the way it does now and lasts about four but the previous two eras supply chain logistics right which is sort of walmart and amazon are both also almost completely dependent on chinese supply chains right yeah there's a good jd supra article which

Starting point is 01:23:35 is a they're like a business intelligence website right you know it talks about how walmart imports 70 percent of all of its goods from China. Yeah, that tracks. 70%. 7-0, right? And the reason that it works like this is because Walmart's entire business model, all of their supply chains, all of their logistics, everything that they do, right, was designed basically hand-in-hand to be integrated into Chinese economic production. And you can't just move that shit instantly, right?

Starting point is 01:24:02 And this is also true of something like Amazon, right? Where Amazon, like 63% of independent sellers on amazon this is from the same source are chinese right so what you're dealing with is vast parts of of the american economy right the the parts of the american economy that where you interface to buy things are based on goods that are suddenly going to have like 60 to 100% tariffs stapled onto them. Now, the thing that people have been talking about as the like, oh, well, here's the thing that will happen instead, instead of like, instead of the thing that's pretty obviously going to happen if this stuff happens, which is just the economic bubble we're in pops and everything starts to go to shit.

Starting point is 01:24:40 People have been like, oh, well, this will just accelerate the shift of production of goods out from china and like i've been talking about this for like a fucking decade right like the journal chuang which is something that i talk about a lot that i recommend people read talking about this for literally ages and ages and ages so people have been trying to move production out of china for ages i mean like one of the first big attempts to do this was in 2011, when there is there's a series of riots in China, and people tried to move production of goods out of China, and they couldn't do it. And the reason that they couldn't do it was because you have to find a country that has both the relatively skilled and educated labor force, and also has the infrastructure to be able to like, match Chinese production. And so we're talking about

Starting point is 01:25:24 things like they have to have like a functioning electrical grid that is stable enough for production to function and this rules out an enormous number of countries and it's just really really hard and yeah like capital has chinese capital hasn't moving away from its sort of old centers in the pro delta to places like vietnam right but and this is the fucking big one, right? A lot of what's been happening, people have been talking about this thing called, quote-unquote, decoupling, which is the separation of the US and Chinese economy, so that they're not trying with each other.

Starting point is 01:25:53 People think this is good for ideological reasons, or they think it's just something that's happening, and it's not happening. You know what else isn't happening? It's us not plugging these products and services. I think we do legally have to plug them. So here they are. Here's the plugs for the products and services.

Starting point is 01:26:19 All right, now that you've decoupled yourself from your money to buy these products and services, let's talk a bit more about why decoupling is fucking bullshit. One, and this is something I've been saying on the show for years, like, people have this sort of fantasy that what's happening is that, okay, instead of making your thing in China, you make your thing somewhere else. And this means that American companies no longer have the supply chains running through China. That's not what's happening at all on on the financial front what you have is actually increasing integration as as china attempts to sort of like you know has been lifting restrictions on the ownership of different types of corporations to make it easier for foreign owners to actually come in and invest and put capital in china right the second thing

Starting point is 01:26:57 that's happening is a lot of these supposedly like we're cutting china out of the supply chain things have been a bunch of chinese companies start starting to set up production in mexico now the thing about that right if Mexico was supposed to be the fucking panacea for getting us out of these tariffs remember that Trump was talking about 200% tariffs on Mexico and that's the country that's supposed to like fucking get us out of this mess by like oh it'll be fine because like production will just shift away from China to like to where like a lot of the a lot of the assumptions I was reading was people were talking about, oh, 25% of production will shift to Canada.

Starting point is 01:27:29 I was like, no, it won't. Canada doesn't have the fucking production facilities to do this. What are you talking about? Canada doesn't have the population to do this. No, it doesn't. This is the sort of problem, right? On the one hand, China has been deindustrializing for a decade and a half now, right? And kind of slowly, but the one hand, you know, China has been deindustrializing for a decade and a half now.

Starting point is 01:27:45 Right. And kind of slowly. But the percentage of the population that's working in manufacturing has been steadily decreasing for years and years and years and years. But the problem is that when you move production out of a place, you actually have to have a second place to produce it. And there just haven't been. Right. Like you. It's pretty easy to move low end manufacturing. This is what's been happening, right? Like really cheap garment stuff, for example, has been moving to places like Bangladesh and Vietnam for a while.

Starting point is 01:28:10 But once you start getting into the stuff that China produces the most of, which is things like fucking cell phones, sort of mid-tier commodity production, that gets way, way, way, way, way harder. No, but the chips act will save us, Mia. I heard it from everyone on the television. I just got it. This is the sort of thing about this right is if you look if you read the analyses that people are doing of this they just sort of assume that you can just like oh well like

Starting point is 01:28:33 naturally a bunch of the consumption that americans are doing will stay the same because they'll go buy goods that aren't produced in china it's like okay like what where are you finding these goods from like what production facilities are you just, like, suddenly that have just been, like, sitting there fallow are just suddenly going to, like, appear out of nowhere? And the answer is, like, that's not going to happen. And it's not going to happen partially because they don't exist and partially because, again, the immediate consequence of this is a massive economic collapse. China's economy has already been slowing for the, like, basically, I mean, since like 2008 really well i see us in 11 kind of but it's especially been slowing in the past two or three years because of sort of covid restriction stuff and also just a kind of lackluster rate of returns on their own like they had their own version of the 2008 housing bubble

Starting point is 01:29:21 um and that's annihilated an unbelievable amount of money because it turns out investing in real estate doesn't work as is basis for economy but like that's the thing right if the chinese economy fucking goes down right that's like that's 17 percent of the world's gdp 17 yeah of the total gdp right and it's like the economy isn't national in a way where you can have an economic collapse in another country and just and just a country that's that large and ignore it and i think i want to close on and the reason we know that this is true is that it is actually possible kind of to restart american domestic manufacturing right reagan was able to do it in the 80s and reagan did it through this thing

Starting point is 01:30:00 called the plaza accords where he basically he didn't literally put the prime ministers of japan and west germany at gunpoint but he basically put them at gunpoint and forced them to increase the value of their currencies so that the u.s currency would devalue which would make which makes it like a more competitive export economy and this actually brought back american manufacturing for a while until it had to all be reversed under the clinton administration in the reverse plaza accords because the problem was when you sort of nuked the zero-sum manufacturing of a country like japan their fucking economy didn't work anymore and in order to sort of bail out the japanese economy and stop just a sort of world-running economic collapse that would have just like tore the absolute shit out of the economy the u.s had to fucking re-increase the

Starting point is 01:30:43 value of its currency and lose its whole domestic production base right you can't actually increase a production base in in the world right now without decreasing it somewhere else and that has sort of staggering ripple economic effects for the for the entire global economy which which is why even if trump's plan worked somehow and didn't immediately cause an economic collapse by like the the direct effect on american consumers it would cause another economic collapse by like the the direct effect on american consumers it would cause another economic collapse by the effect on fucking people in china so well mia i think you might be overreacting here a little bit because at least food will be available obviously i and i i learned this on x my main source for news uh is that agriculture almost all done in the states so we should be fine like

Starting point is 01:31:26 we'll still be able to eat food right i say staring no to the voice no you can't because unfortunately the thing about american agriculture is it's all fucking mechanized agriculture the thing about mechanized agriculture is that you need the mechanized part and that's all fucking produced either in other countries or the john deere fucking like tractor factories in the u.s are all unbelievably reliant on a bunch of parts that are made overseas so also we do import a great deal of food oh we do yeah even just talking about the food that we produce here right like that's also going to be fun. I wonder where your strawberries in November are coming from. Oh, God.

Starting point is 01:32:09 Curious? Yeah, yeah. I think the other thing to keep in mind here is that this is only one aspect of how Trump will impact the economy. Obviously, his immigration policies could serve a similarly large financial problem if a whole bunch of agricultural jobs suddenly kind of

Starting point is 01:32:27 vanish and farms and other processing plants just go out of business due to a lack in workers yeah and even some people on trump's team have started to acknowledge this mostly elon musk who has openly said that trump's term will involve some, quote, temporary hardship. So between tariffs and mass deportations, like even people on his team know that this is going to damage the economy, especially in the short term, if not the like forever term. Yeah. And yet he was still elected as the economically viable candidate.

Starting point is 01:33:00 Yeah. And I think the last part we should say in this is it's not that you can't like fucking obliterate a giant portion of the american economy and still come out extremely popular because you've crushed the american working class like that that's what reagan did right like reagan and the volker shocks did this enormous i mean just put a crater in the american economy in the in reagan's first term like they're skyrocketing unemployment just like real real sort of economic devastation but the thing about the volker shock was that the way he blew up the economy was really really good for people who like fucking owned assets like people who who like owned bonds like people like people who held other people's debt it was great for those people and like the burgeoning

Starting point is 01:33:42 investment economy which now kind of dominates our entire economic system yeah and it was great for those people and like the burgeoning investment economy which now kind of dominates our entire economic system yeah and it was incredible for those people and so it was fine but the thing about this economic collapse that this is also going to just absolutely fuck up the days of a bunch of extremely wealthy and influential capitalists so including by the way elon musk whose teslas are produced in china like he has a gigafactory he's a gigafactory in xinjiang so we'll see if trump actually is able to implement this stuff he's i think he's able to on a policy level it's just politically can he actually do these tariffs yeah it's unclear it's also unclear what exact numbers he's going to run with a 10 tariff will still be bad but it's nothing compared to 100 tariff i think trump by large, just says whatever comes into his head

Starting point is 01:34:25 without thinking through the actual logistical ends of what he's saying. And I think most Trump supporters do not take him literally as a person. At least they don't take what he says necessarily literally all the time. They take him seriously, but perhaps not literally.

Starting point is 01:34:39 Yeah, so we'll have to see how this actually plays out. If it does play out in the ways that Trump has said that it's going to play out, it is going to just unbelievably tank the economy in ways that absolutely suck. So yeah, that's happening here in the future, maybe. That's the name of the podcast, right? So stock up on your PS5s now before they get harder to buy

Starting point is 01:35:06 and it'll be fine yeah there'll be there'll be nothing else bad that happens to the economy as long as you have your ps5s yeah people always want fucking books at the end of episodes so i'm just putting books at the end of episodes this is my plugging chuang c-h-u-a-n-g we'll put it in the description it's a bunch of stuff about Chinese economics. Mostly it's a sort of economic history of originally the socialist period and then the transition to capitalism. But it also has a bunch of very, very good stuff on trying to understand

Starting point is 01:35:34 the Chinese economy. And so if you want to be about 10 years ahead of like guys who write for The Economist, if you read Chuang, you will end up being like 10 years ahead of those guys. So yeah, great stuff. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about.

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Starting point is 01:37:33 to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second

Starting point is 01:38:02 season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in

Starting point is 01:38:42 the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Starting point is 01:39:14 Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

Starting point is 01:39:25 His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the

Starting point is 01:39:52 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu,

Starting point is 01:40:27 aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight,

Starting point is 01:40:46 that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. And what it is today is me james and mia wong hi mia hello hi what we are here to talk to you about today is something else which despite my uh positive tone of voice is sad and depressing yeah yeah it's just a lot of that and like we don't want

Starting point is 01:41:21 you to be too sad it doesn't bear moping around, you know, like, uh, we've got time to get organized and that's what we should be doing. And also like, just get out and go outside and see your friends and do things that bring you joy.

Starting point is 01:41:34 Like we'll work out how to get through it. So, you know, like, I think it's really easy. And I found myself doing this stay at home and be sad, but don't like, I went out with some friends for a hike on Friday.

Starting point is 01:41:45 I feel so much better. So I would advise you to do that. Maybe you're listening on your hike. That would be fun. Actually, I think if I was hiking, I would skip this one and listen to the birds and enjoy the outdoors. Well, I mean, if you want the ideological framing of it,

Starting point is 01:42:01 the ideological framing of it is that morale is a terrain of struggle. Yes. And it is very easy to lose if your morale is absolutely terrible so yeah we got four years we can't be uh be moping around like we will get through it we will find ways to make it better and part of the way we do that yeah it's keeping our morale up and doing things that bring us joy. The thing that brings me joy is talking about Rojava, the autonomous administration of North and East Syria. And we're going to talk about that today because we're talking about Donald Trump's foreign policy in his second term. So his previous foreign policy was a pretty mixed bag. And he bombed the shit out of the Islamic State, right? Cool, based.

Starting point is 01:42:44 He also bombed the shit out of thousands islamic state right cool based he also bombed the shit out of thousands of syrian and iraqi civilians not so cool also we should note not so different from every other president this century bombing civilians has been pretty much the uh the through line of american foreign policy in that part of the world for for a very long time in particular in the trump administration i want to talk about there was a single US strike cell called Talon Anvil. I think they were mainly like CAG guys from what I read. So Delta Force guys, Army Special Forces guys

Starting point is 01:43:15 who were making these decisions. They hired an office building in Syria and these guys were constantly looking at drone feeds and various other information and then calling in strikes on various targets right i'm not sure if they had the cag guys in the like watching computers i'm not entirely sure and like uh why they didn't have someone else who knows but this strike cell dropped more than 120 000 bombs and jesus christ yeah this yeah the amount of of ordinance we dropped on on syria is insane it's circumvented procedures are in place to prevent civilian deaths in order to do so

Starting point is 01:43:50 they had embedded lawyers who were supposed to approve the strikes but these these lawyers tried to raise the alarm that some of these strikes were reckless they weren't hitting things that were actual targets and they sort of ran into an organizational brick wall. At some point, pilots even refused to engage targets because they didn't think it was... Jesus. Yeah, which is not usual. Yeah, like, that's pretty fucked for a fighter pilot

Starting point is 01:44:17 to be like, no? I don't think I've ever heard of that before. No. So I found this out in... I think it was the New York Times. New York Times did a pretty good investigation, which we linked in our sources. And yeah, it's like a throwaway line, but I would love to hear more about that. It could have been a drone pilot too, which is a slightly different gig, I guess.

Starting point is 01:44:38 You know, if you're sitting north of Las Vegas, they're flying a drone. Kind of a different scene. So in the battle to defeat the Islamic State, thousands of innocent people lost their lives. As we reach the end of that battle, Donald Trump, who was president at the time, personally called Erdogan, who was the president of Turkey at the time, right in late 2018. Trump asked Erdogan, if we withdraw our soldiers, can you clean up ISIS? That's a quote. According to an unnamed Turkish official interviewed by Reuters, Erdogan replied that Turkish forces were capable

Starting point is 01:45:10 of a mission. Quote, then you do it, Trump told him. And asked his national security advisor, John Bolton, who was also on the call to, quote, start work for the withdrawal of US troops from Syria. What this resulted in was U.S. troops pulling out from some locations in Syria, right? Local people threw tomatoes at them. Even worse than the tomatoes was the fact that it gave NATO's second largest army, which is Turkey, of course, free reign to attack the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, which it did in 2018 and it did again in 2019. Those two operations to claim considerable ground in syria cost countless civilian lives continue to perpetrate human

Starting point is 01:45:51 rights abuses to rehabilitate people from isis and other jihadi groups as turkish free syrian army and uh they killed some people who were people i care about and and i continue to to care about the cause of uh rojava or autonomous administration in north east syria very deeply and it really fucking sucks to think about the potential of the u.s abandoning those people again not that biden has done very much yeah now i think this anecdote right of what trump does with the other one tells us a lot about his approach to foreign policy which is he really sees it as very transactional, which isn't that different from everything else he does, I guess.

Starting point is 01:46:29 Like, he's a very transactional person. And he seems really only to be concerned about what he can get out of it. So, like, in this case, I guess, he wants to say he brought US troops home from Syria. Like, he's anti-war. This is one of his things he says now, right? Like, but he's prepared to also, in one of his things he says now right like but he he's he's prepared to

Starting point is 01:46:46 also in in the case of the bombing right he's not so concerned with civilian casualties as long as he can claim that he he was the one who defeated isis right obama couldn't do it he did it and he did it on a pile of civilian remains and also using chiefly the syrian democratic forces right not u.s forces yeah there were u.s forces on the ground they were engaged in combat but in minuscule numbers compared to sdf who lost 15 000 of their children in a battle against isis and i think trump would be very willing to admit that he's transactional right like that's kind of his brand is like america first and then and fuck everyone else so i think he'll probably be similar in this term, right? He will act unilaterally.

Starting point is 01:47:30 He'll pivot whenever the fuck he feels like it. He will continue with his affection for strong men and dictators all around the world. But a lot of stuff has changed since Trump's first term. I think it's illustrative for us to think about how he will engage with things that have changed. So what has changed? There's a much larger conflict between Russia and Ukraine now. And that conflict has been seen massive and overt support, both from the USA and from the rest of NATO.

Starting point is 01:47:57 There's been a revolution in Myanmar. I suppose he doesn't know that. Yeah, I really doubt. Well, maybe some of the like weird pro coup memeing from the right got to him yeah perhaps or like i mean the parallels between the coup in myanmar and january 6th are uh pretty obvious right like if january 6th took the landing it looks a lot like that um except that it was a military party not not just political party the islamic state doesn't exist as a territorial entity but it state doesn't exist as a territorial

Starting point is 01:48:25 entity but it very much does exist as a terrorist group which continues to and has actually increased its activity this month with sleeper cells continued suicide bombings continued attacks and the sdf continue with their anti-isis operations without u. support, those would be harder. And so we have to ask, I guess, on what Trump's going to do with these things. And I want to look at a few different issues and pick apart what Trump said on his campaign website, pick apart what he said on the campaign trail, and then look at who he's appointed so far. We're recording this on Tuesday the 12th, so if someone gets appointed before you hear this that's why we've missed them out so i guess to start with trump's foreign policy we should

Starting point is 01:49:10 talk about uh his number one like peer competitor which is china and in his eyes right not a big china appreciator it's so i looked at his campaign website for this which really has some just incredible use of capital letters he He just fucking does what he wants. It's wild to see. So chiefly, one of the things that he's been on about for a while now is tariffs on Chinese-made goods, right? It's his means of foreign policy. Yeah, we talked about this last episode.

Starting point is 01:49:35 Yeah. You will have heard about tariffs at this point. Yeah. So as we previously mentioned, right, he's talked about these tariffs. These tariffs would cost a lot of money, and they would increase the cost of you going shopping. Yeah. And they would probably destroy vast swaths of the global economy.

Starting point is 01:49:52 Yes. Both the Chinese and the American economy. Yes. Just sort of implode. And then all these countries in Africa and, you know, Myanmar, for instance, exports a lot of these rare earth metals to China. Right. And a lot of countries in Africa do too. Aside from the economic sort of aggression, his stance on Taiwan is weird, which is normally where we would expect to see the most physical friction between US and China, right? Mike Pompeo has pressed for the USA to formally recognize Taiwan before,

Starting point is 01:50:23 which would be a step. You know, there'd be a pretty big swing. Trump, on the other hand, seems to want Taiwan to pay the United States for being its ally right now. Yeah, this is like one of his big sort of foreign policy principles is like trying to get people to pay him for stuff because that's sort of the only way his brain works.

Starting point is 01:50:44 But I remember he did this with nato a lot where he's hit this whole line on nato that like nato should be like paying us because people like you're not spending enough on defense so we're like paying all their defense budgets this is like one of his kind of yeah it's been his like hobby horse yeah like floats around it his brain sort of colliding with its walls yeah an empty space yeah yeah like a ping pong ball with its walls yeah an empty space yeah yeah like a ping pong ball ironically like in the time that trump's been out of office russian aggression has led nato members to spend more on defense yeah rather than donald trump lambasting them so one of his big things is that taiwan should pay the united states but it would seem very unlikely that he if a he's not going to abandon taiwan i

Starting point is 01:51:23 think because it gives him a place to grandstand on china yeah and also like you know i mean one of the things about trump is that one of the best ways to sort of influence him is just get a world leader in a room with him alone yes but unfortunately well fortunately for us trump does not speak chinese and she doesn't seem to like him very much. So, yeah. Yes, we won't be joining the PRC anytime soon. China, along with Russia,

Starting point is 01:51:53 the two countries we've spoken about most so far, both make big plays in Africa. Russia has rebranded what was Wagner as the Africa Corps. And they're sort of providing support to regimes that lack enough legitimacy to exist otherwise. Yeah. They are like sort of classic mercenary shit. Like, is your state illegitimate? And does it lack the capacity to do the violence it needs to maintain itself?

Starting point is 01:52:15 Don't worry. Here are some psychopaths from Russia. Yeah. And there's a lot of people, I think, because like a lot of these sort of governments will kind of like do their like like put a red beret on and start doing their anti-imperialist cosplay and then you like read the the like the fine print of the contracts they've signed with like africa core a thing that like you expect to be spelled like africa and core with a k like k-o-r-p-S. And it's like, oh, okay, so they've signed away a bunch of the country's mineral rights,

Starting point is 01:52:49 and they've signed away a bunch of these specific mines to these mercenary groups. It's like, oh, okay, so this is also just imperialism. It's just new management. Yeah, exactly. It's just different imperialism. And China has big plays in Africa too. I've personally seen a lot of Chinese-owned mines in Africa,

Starting point is 01:53:07 Chinese roads in Africa. China does also like offer infrastructure. China does a kind of quid pro quo. It doesn't come in like with the violence like Russia does. It comes in with the, we'll build you a hospital if we can have all your natural resources. US policy in Africa is pretty much to stop those two countries getting too much influence the biden administration is as many liberals are right like there's actually not that much

Starting point is 01:53:31 difference between what biden and trump will do in africa the difference is that biden is smart enough not to say it trump's ability to do anything useful in africa is going to be masked by his massive racism like when he says things like shithole countries it becomes a lot harder for the u.s to do anything in africa that isn't tinged by that right like it doesn't make that sort of imperialist ambition more obvious u.s politicians rarely talk about africa they rarely campaign on what they were going to do in africa and and so pretty much the only things we're going to hear from donald trump about africa i would imagine are going to be when he lets his racism out yeah that will have results for like u.s

Starting point is 01:54:10 credibility also my guess is we see intensifications of sort of u.s drone strikes particularly in the horn and we see like like all of the stuff that biden is doing but worse and killing even more people somehow yeah i would imagine that we will see these more aggressive drone strikes especially against like islamist groups in africa the u.s has special forces deployments in a few places in africa which will probably maintain i would imagine like i don't think those are like things that trump would he wouldn't see any benefit from stopping them i guess and it may not even know about them. So yeah, I think we will see little change in Africa,

Starting point is 01:54:47 would be my guess. Yeah, mildly worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talking of mildly worse, Mia, the thing that makes these podcasts mildly worse is our obligation to pivot to advertisements, which we must do now.

Starting point is 01:55:00 That was a great one. We've been holding out on you for three years to get you the good ad pivots. Yeah. Well, there it is. That's one we've been holding out on you for three years to get you the good ad pivots yeah anyway well there it is that's what we've got for you all right we're back so i want to talk about europe as you've heard in the tariffs episode right he wants to put tariffs on European goods. The European Union is going to slap tariffs right back on American goods.

Starting point is 01:55:30 That doesn't really help anyone. It will make exporting from the USA very, very hard. One thing that the USA might stop exporting is weapons to Ukraine. It's a little unclear. Trump, he called Zelensky the greatest salesman on earth, but has also claimed that he can personally end the war in 24 hours. I don't think that means he will be deploying himself to the Donbass like a gun dam, but he claims he can do this with his negotiating skills.

Starting point is 01:55:58 This seems unlikely, to put it mildly. I don't think that it would be possible to end this war in 24 hours. If both sides declared peace right now getting communications to their frontline troops would be a challenge in in 24 hours in some places yeah so the way i interpret this and i may be wrong here is that he is likely to leverage the support that the united states gives to ukraine in order to force zelensky into an unfavorable settlement which would achieve his goal of a being able to say he stopped giving american money to ukraine which has been a big talking point for the uh like every time you start with the western north carolina right after the hurricane all these republican sort of talking points were like oh well all the money's in Ukraine, so we can't have fucking MREs for people in Western North Carolina. Like FEMA has no money because we sent Ukraine

Starting point is 01:56:52 some M4s. This is very silly, right? This is not a zero-sum game. It's not really a reasonable critique, but it's one that Trump has kind of managed to stick in the culture wars. His base seems to see the money going to ukraine is directly coming from things that would otherwise be going to them which he would benefit from if he could bring this war to a close right jd vance has mentioned a demilitarized zone in between russia and ukraine which uh yeah who's gonna who's gonna minister the dmc like yeah like do we really want this uh are we gonna have troops there like we do in south korea for you know when when was a career on the 1950s 70 years right i don't think that's really uh that's really what they want yeah the

Starting point is 01:57:37 thing about dmcs no one actually likes them no they suck it sucks yeah they're awful it's just a bit of land that you can yeet weapons over each other, like especially in modern warfare. They're not that effective at stopping two people fighting. Right. But very funny that North Korea will be two for two on DMZs in wars it has been involved with. seems to be advocating for exactly the peace settlement that Putin has proposed and that has been rejected multiple times. Several sources I've seen suggest that Trump has spoken to Putin quite a few times since leaving office. His plan for Ukraine certainly seems closer to the Russian one than the Ukrainian one. The Ukrainian one being stop invading us and go home and one being, well, we'll just keep all the stuff we've taken so far and then add a buffer zone in between. And Ukraine can keep whatever's left of its country, right? What's interesting to me is what other NATO members will do

Starting point is 01:58:38 in the event of the US reducing its aid. I would suspect that they will try and step up and meet that gap. It might also result in the US puts certain restrictions on its aid i would suspect that they will try and step up and meet that gap it might also result in the u.s put certain restrictions on its aid right how it can be used where it can be used crucially right they don't like ukraine using things to attack in russia proper yeah they they don't mind amusing them to attack russian forces but not within russia I did see a picture yesterday of a, I think it was three guys from Rogue, I think it's called, which is a unit within the International Legion who had been killed within Russia.

Starting point is 01:59:12 And they had a lot of like AT4s and things like that, right? Like US anti-tank weapons. But the United States doesn't want Ukraine using the long range artillery and stuff. It's given it to yeetiles at moscow i can see a situation where if the u.s draws down some of its aid european allies of ukraine might not place some of those restrictions on their aid and that could lead to some interesting complications

Starting point is 01:59:38 for russia right if uh if ukraine is is more affected like if they get more aid from europe and europe doesn't place restrictions on the aid, they could potentially strike Russia within Russia, which is not going to be good for Putin. It's probably not going to be good for like bringing, I mean, unless they can deal some really crippling blows, it might not be good for bringing the war to an end, but maybe it will. Maybe like they've done some pretty effective things

Starting point is 02:00:00 with not a huge amount so far. I don't know. Maybe they'll get lucky on a strike on the Kremlin or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah just the one like uh i mean yeah i'm sure that would be their strategy if they wouldn't have uh they didn't have restrictions who would be to just keep pounding places i think putin might be this is the history of russian warfare dumber things than that have happened and i've lost russia wars so yeah yeah a lot dumber than that so yeah i don't think that ukraine will be screwed if the u.s pulls out i do think it will be a lot harder for

Starting point is 02:00:31 them yeah um and you know if that's something there are a lot of u.s citizens still fighting in ukraine would be pretty devastating to abandon ukraine and i think also just from the the sort of stopping russian aggression standpoint it's much better to stop it here than somewhere else but yeah we will see i guess european countries are really ramping up their defense but right now the u.s is like the heart of the military industrial complex and uh europe really can't keep up with with the u.s production of course the u.s being the heart of the military industrial complex does mean that a lot of trump donors will probably be able to leverage some of their donations to his campaign and so we might not see as much of a drawdown of a to ukraine as as we are we're worrying about here

Starting point is 02:01:14 me talking of uh launching things from a long distance at a very small target i would like to launch these advertisements from i heart media's advertising department directly to your ears here you go it's all so bad as we were recording this it's come out that the new secretary of defense is going to be Pete Hegseth, who's like a Fox News guy who doesn't believe germs are real. Yeah, this is a guy who has not washed his hands in 10 years. Great. I mean, at least he might die of COVID.

Starting point is 02:01:55 Yeah, I was going to say, he made it. Wow. Sorry, that hair is really something. Oh, that's not good at all. Yeah. Wait, what? Oh, that's not good at all. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:02:04 Wait, what? On June 14th, 2015, Hank Seth accidentally hit a West Point driver with an axe while filming a live TV segment in honor of Black Day. Oh, the Wikipedia is incredible. Let's get that link pulled up. Alright, this video is unavailable. Alright, no, we're finding this video. Nothing disappears from the internet.

Starting point is 02:02:31 Alright, here we go. No! Oh! I missed the fucking target attack! My God! This is just clown shit. Like, I need to write. Listen, if you were hit in the dick and balls by an axe thrown by future

Starting point is 02:02:56 defense secretary Pete Hegseth, please contact coolzonemedia.com. contact cool zone media, I heart media.com. I hope the VA is paying for this man's benefits. This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen someone do like in, in the course of reporting for this show. Yeah. It's amazing.

Starting point is 02:03:22 Like very funny. Uh, again, please contact us. I hope you're okay. Service-related injury. Yeah, so that's Pete Hegseth, right? Future SecDef. Also, former reservist who deployed to Guantanamo,

Starting point is 02:03:38 was an infantry platoon leader at Guantanamo. I think he also deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, and previously he'd also deployed to Iraq. He did two voluntary deployments, or he's in two locations in Iraq, at least. So he's hit the greatest hits of US foreign policy in the last 20 years, I guess. He's made his career as a Fox News pundit. Yeah, he's just like a right-wing ghoul. Yeah, I mean, in the last Trump administration, when he was punditing,

Starting point is 02:04:03 he advised Trump had been considering pardoning several war criminals and did pardon several war criminals. Right. And Hexeth was one of the people who, A, he talked about on Fox News while he was advising Trump to do it. And B, he was advising Trump to do it. Jesus Christ. Yeah. You can read up about the Trump pardons of war criminals. It's bad enough that a guy was getting turned in by his own special forces unit. Like, do you know how bad, how, like, fucking hideous the shit you have

Starting point is 02:04:30 to do is for, like, your own guys in a special forces unit to be like, holy shit, we have to stop this guy. Like, it's awful. Yeah, I mean, you should look up Clint Laurence's stuff as well. Like, L-O-I-N-C-E if you're interested in this stuff. He was convicted, I mean, you should look up Clint Laurence's stuff as well. Like, L-O-I-N-C-E, if you're interested in this stuff.

Starting point is 02:04:48 He was convicted, I think, of two murder counts for ordering his soldiers to fire on unarmed people. And then, yeah, the other one was a Green Beret named Matt Goltzian, who was also charged with the murder of someone in Afghanistan, someone who had been making IEDs. So, like, I think we can see where this guy is going we've just found this out as well as we're recording for context like that's quite troubling yeah his other two foreign policy appointments that i've seen so far have been less so look i'd

Starting point is 02:05:18 say less so marco rubio is a turd right like i think we all know that we I share very little with Marco Rubio on Turkey and Rojava he is good he is not a fan of Erdogan he's in contact with Gulenists he kind of puts Turkey in the Brits box yeah which which leads us to the very funny idea of Marco Rubio ordering a drone strike on Eric Adams. I mean, well, here's the thing, though. Gulen's dead now. So there's like a secession crisis of who's going to head up the Gulen's network. And I'm proposing it's Marco Rubio. The Gulenist anti-pope, Marco Rubio.

Starting point is 02:05:58 That could be very good for Rojava, at least, right? The big concern among those of us who care very deeply about java has been that trump will abandon them as he did in the past right and so i guess we're looking for glimmers of hope and i think rubio kind of oddly weirdly was one compared to i was expecting more of the heck that's like fox news commentator type people in foreign policy positions because trump fundamentally doesn't care about foreign policy and like it's an area where he can kind of give something to those kind of like insane far-right yeah commentator types he also did appoint mark waltz i think could be walls uh he's one of the first special for army special forces

Starting point is 02:06:41 guys serving congress maybe the first as a national security advisor. Walls is a member of the Kurdish caucus in Congress. So again, positive for Rojava. Talking of army special forces, there's one more insane Trump foreign policy proposal that I want to discuss. And that is his desire to use the United States Army in Mexico. I'm just going to read from his campaign website here. President Trump will take down the drug cartels just as he took down ISIS. He will impose a total naval embargo on cartels, order the Department of Defense to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership and operations, and designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and choke off their access

Starting point is 02:07:25 to the global financial system president trump will get the full cooperation of neighboring governments to dismantle the cartels or else expose every bribe and kickback that allows these criminal networks to preserve their brutal reign he will ask congress to ensure that drug smugglers and traffickers can receive the death penalty there's a lot there the way that donald trump helped defeat isis was exclusively by bombing things and with some small contributions from u.s ground troops but we don't really have a partner force in mexico like that and i think especially with a new administration in mexico and especially with trump proposing 100 tariffs on mexican goods we're unlikely to find one which leaves the very strange kind of prospect of u.s troops carrying out like unapproved undeconflicted hits on mexican

Starting point is 02:08:17 nationals in mexico which like is an act of war yeah you are invading mexico is what you're doing i should point out that bortak under biden did shoot one mexican national this year who was he was holding up migrants with a gun he was he's rubbing with a gun it wasn't it's a place where i've been dozens of times where they shot him and there didn't seem to be much fuffle about that but that is not invading mexico yeah like if they're invading mexico like you know as as close as american mexican sort of security cooperation has been and as many people as that's killed from like the mexican side like that's oh boy yeah like it remains to be seen how much of this actually happens right mexico has a new president the united states has a new president they're not

Starting point is 02:09:01 exactly politically fellow travelers i'll say that but yeah i mean i will say like omlo and trump got along like decently well yeah largely off of omlo's like anti-immigrant policies but i don't know if that's gonna work with shine bomb like and like in the final year of omlo like they definitely they did a lot to help biden with it based on effectively enforcing u.s border policy by deporting people south. People I spoke to in the Darien series have been sent south again this week. But Biden's had actually some pretty high profile cartel arrests, right, within Sinaloa cartel.

Starting point is 02:09:34 He's destabilized that cartel, but those happen within the US. They didn't send teams into Mexico. And the way that the US has traditionally got hold of cartel leaders before is for them to be arrested in Mexico in cooperation with Mexican government forces, be they police or military, and then extradited them to the U.S. for trial. That doesn't seem to be what Trump is proposing. But again, like the bombastic rhetoric and the reality are sometimes very different.

Starting point is 02:10:00 Yeah, I have some vague memory that he like last time he wanted to like send special forces guys to do this and his advisors were like what the fuck are you talking about we can't send yeah like people into mexico yeah look just to be real those organizations have reach inside the united states and that would be an extremely messy situation yeah and like the way this would have to be done right i like i don't think you can do this with drone strikes you have to do this with boots on the ground and that's going to be contrary to what he's promised to do which is not risk more u.s soldiers lives who knows what this will actually look like yeah my guess is he will find a way to get the maximum

Starting point is 02:10:39 number of civilians killed yes yeah yeah we do it himself yeah like it's that's probably would be the result of this yeah exactly and i think as we sort of weigh this down like civilian deaths are probably going to increase right he's never shown himself to be unduly concerned about those things he doesn't see that the problem the second thing the u.s will lose is what joseph nye called soft power right which is like the power to influence people without projecting force cultural power cultural capitals board you might have called it uh really getting heavy on the uh university shit at the back half of this episode the u.s lost a lot of that in the first trump term right and it will lose more of it in the second trump term some of that is you know the

Starting point is 02:11:22 u.s maybe shouldn't be influencing and the u.s has had some pretty malign influence around the world yeah you can listen to a song called washington bullets to learn more about it but it will mean that like there will be a space for other bad actors right russia china you know russia has not shown itself to be uh any more concerned with human rights and probably less so than than the united states went in in its time in Syria, right? It's been an unmitigated disaster for the Syrian people, the Russian cooperation with the Assad regime. We do not need more of that around the world. The Wagner slash Africa Corps deployments in Africa have been horrific in terms of human rights, and this will open more spaces for that. So yeah, I mean, it doesn't look great. Right. And this will open more spaces for that.

Starting point is 02:12:04 So, yeah, I mean, it doesn't look great. This Secretary of Appointment, maybe we'll learn more about that in the coming days. But that doesn't look great. There are some bright spots for a Java, I guess, or some glimmers of hope there, which is a nice thing. Trump's policy on Gaza fits with this general model of like he wants to end conflicts and the way he sees of doing that is doing away with any restraint in terms of civilian casualties and so the way that he went after isis was to just say bomb them all i can see him doing the same thing in gaza right just saying like he wants to claim that he bought an end to the war and he doesn't care how many bodies he's

Starting point is 02:12:43 standing on when he says that yeah same thing in lebanon obviously so yeah these are not great things these are things that we will have to deal with for decades to come whatever happens and uh i guess the way that you can do something here like my little glimmer of hope it's like you can reach out to people all around the world and let them know that like even even if America's foreign policy is shit, you're not. I have sat in Rojava and I have seen them taking the children to the hospitals and I've watched the US soldiers sit in their bases and do nothing. And like, it didn't help really.

Starting point is 02:13:17 I didn't, I wasn't able to do very much. I couldn't even give blood, but I was able to be there with them and maybe that meant something. And like, you can, you can do little things to show your solidarity around the world because there won't be much coming from the government Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show,

Starting point is 02:13:52 where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone

Starting point is 02:15:09 from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Starting point is 02:15:35 Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, Check out betteroffline.com. This is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community,

Starting point is 02:16:19 and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Starting point is 02:16:59 Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Starting point is 02:17:12 Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

Starting point is 02:17:40 or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down.

Starting point is 02:18:16 I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcasts. What up, y'all? Welcome to It Already Happened Here, because this was the goal of this show, was to tell you that things was probably going to happen here, and then it did. I am not one of the normal hosts, as you can tell am your your friendly cousin that that shows up every once in a while during the holidays and if your cousins are anything like my cousins which means we're

Starting point is 02:19:10 immediately going to get in trouble because parents are going to blame you since i'm the cousin because it's not my fault because i'm the guest anyway uh we want to talk about some stuff that like in some senses is a is a bit absurd to talk about because, like, the American understanding of pan-ethnic terms and demographics are just absurd. Yes. Right. It just don't make sense. Like nobody in the group identifies as what the group is called, but that's still the group. Right. Yeah. I recommend a book called Why Fish Don't Exist. It's a great book. but that's still the group, right? I recommend a book called Why Fish Don't Exist. It's a great book.

Starting point is 02:19:51 I am here with the brilliant, brilliant Mia Wong. What's up, Mia? It's all happening. It's all happening here, and it sucks. But at least I'm getting great intros. This is the best one I've ever gotten. Best intro. That's what I come for.

Starting point is 02:20:04 You know what I'm saying? I come for us to be able to have pancakes for breakfast, you know, because your cousin's here. You know what I'm saying? So you get to have, like, pancakes for breakfast and, you know, stay in your pajamas longer. Like, it's great when your cousins are here. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so let's do this. We want to talk about, well, the thing is, like, I don't know if y'all have admitted i admitted this on our

Starting point is 02:20:26 show that like we kind of had to have an all hands on deck uh discussion here as to like okay let's get organized like let's figure out what we're gonna say as a network and kind of brainstorm things to talk about because i'm pretty sure like a lot of us are still like wait what the fuck i'm sorry what like you know yeah and us holding down the dei section of coolzo you know we are the diversity equity and inclusion over here figured you know there were some things that were super shocking around some of the data that was that was coming back from the exit polls as we thought about like okay so who actually voted for who and how much and uh so we kind of wanted to talk about the asian vote right yep

Starting point is 02:21:17 which is again from the intro it's an absurd oh yeah category yeah. Category to say that I get into that because, yeah, totally. Yeah. The Latino vote, which is also equally as absurd as a category. And yeah, just where some of the sort of marginalized groups, like some of the numbers that were in some ways shocking. I will say as far as holding down the black man section, I am very proud of us for eventually coming back home right and voting in the upper 80 for the black woman you know which was encouraging now granted our number of how many of us voted shrank immensely you know yeah but either way we just wanted to talk about those things and i think one caveat for me i would say and then i'll turn it over i think mia like you know you can take it on from there is i am in fact a black man so i think i can speak from a certain level of experience obviously not the experience of every human right but i can speak from a certain level of experience

Starting point is 02:22:21 now as we talk about the latino vote i am in fact news flash not latino you know i'm saying my wife is from east la but obviously proximity is not the same as being a member of yeah so keep that keep that in mind as we discuss these things so let me turn it over to turn it over to mia yeah and you know this is one of these you're talking a bit about the sort of category and coherence here right and like one of the things about the way this is aggregated is that so asian americans as a whole went about five percent to the right in this election but that doesn't capture what was going on because every part of the demographics were just sort of flying in every direction yeah and unfortunately most of the actual

Starting point is 02:23:12 right-wing pull was very specifically from my people which is to say chinese americans who went right in staggering numbers yeah i don't know i i'm not really surprised by because this has just been the way that sort of specifically chinese american communities have been shifting for the past i mean really like eight ten years but particularly intensifying since 2020 yeah and so if you look at sort of where these things happened the biggest biggest ones were New York and LA and, you know, places like Seattle had some shifts, but I think New York in particular,

Starting point is 02:23:51 New York and LA in particular are important for this because a huge part of the reason that this happened was the sort of crime panic stuff. Yeah. And the crime panic didn't 100% start with Chinese Americans, but it's one of the earliest sort of incubators of this entire thing. So the sort of trajectory of this is that in 2020, you have

Starting point is 02:24:11 this sort of like whole Stop Asian Hate campaign, right? And, you know, you have all this race, like sort of like racist like incitement of violence. And you get sort of two responses to it, right? There's the kind of like liberal ish response, which is Stop Asian Hate, but it's kind of vacuous. It doesn't really have any political content at all.

Starting point is 02:24:34 It's kind of vaguely anti-Trump, but there's not much there. And then there's the right-wing response, and the right-wing response is just, okay, we're just going to blame black people for this. Yeah. And that's like fucking horse shit it's like no it was almost everyone which is getting killed by white people because that's almost all of them yeah the way racial violence works in this country right yeah but yeah but unfortunately you know this was an area where the left kind of just did nothing and if you look at the left response you know there's there's there's

Starting point is 02:25:07 some people who did stuff right there is you know like some sex worker orgs like red canary song did some great work but most of the rest of the american left saw this and was like okay the thing that matters here and the actual problem with anti-asian violence is that people are criticizing the chinese government too much and that's what's causing this and so we need to defend the ccp and this is just politically this is fucking radioactive to like yeah 80 90 percent of like fucking asian americans because like yeah there's a sort of combinations of factors right you have on the one hand you have sort of immigrant communities where most of this shit doesn't work because you're dealing with people

Starting point is 02:25:46 who were like, I don't know, were fucking sterilized by the government because the CCP decided to, like, do Malthusian fucking population control. Have no love for the CCP. None whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 02:25:57 And this is too reductive even with Cubans, but it's like, this isn't something where you can just sort of brush this away with like, oh, all of these people were like reactionaries from Taiwan or something like that. It's like, no, like a lot of these people came here very recently. And there are, you know, there are sort of Tibetan communities. There's people from Xinjiang here.

Starting point is 02:26:13 Yeah. And all of those people, like all of the sort of pro-CCP shit is radioactive. And that's what was coming out of the American left. The same thing with like sort of with the Hong Kong movement. Right. the american left the same thing with like sort of with the hong kong movement right where there was like you know there was this really broad consensus among sort of american social democracy you know you're sort of like people who were like marginalization left of bernie right that that stuff was all cia stuff and it was bad and that you should support the ccp you know i mean there

Starting point is 02:26:39 are some tenant organizers you do good work we've had on the show right like there there are there are people trying to organize communities but like the mainstream left was just like fuck it we don't care we don't give a shit about you like the important thing about you being killed is that we can defend this fucking state that we like yeah and so what happened to the stop Asian hate thing is that it got folded into the crime panic because the product of this was both the sort of right wing we're going to give you anti-black racism as you're like this is this is going to be your solution quote unquote to this yeah and the sort of stop asian hate like mainstream sort of liberal thing both just fed directly into carceralism yeah and you know so you started like it turned into this rallying cry for

Starting point is 02:27:19 like hate crime bills and then like increasing police presences and you know like the fucking cops were like all over the place where this shit was happening and, you know, didn't do anything because they're cops, right? Like facts, all of this fed into, it went sort of seamlessly into the crime panic where you could just feed

Starting point is 02:27:37 all of these people, the sort of, the sort of memory of, of the fear and the anger over like Asian people getting killed. And you could just lump that in with crime. And these communities also and when i say these communities it's it's kind of important here to do like class breakdowns here too because a big part of what's happening here is is an alignment that i think like if the republicans could be like 15 less racist or figure out how to channel the racism against one target at a time a lot of these people would have fucking fled right in the first place because

Starting point is 02:28:12 yes that's what i was gonna say yeah yeah it's like it's like rich people professionals and like small business owners it's like well yeah of course those people are like unbelievably sort of turbo hardline reactionaries it's like yeah those those are the guys who are like shooting at people from the rooftops and fucking la in 92 like yeah like these same people in china like in taiwan in hong kong like these are people that if you were on the left you would just be fighting every day but you know they kind of have been lumped into the democratic party because of the just unbelievable racism from the republicans and now the sort of crime panic stuff has finally given them this thing where the republican deal is basically like okay if you're if you're okay with sort of being

Starting point is 02:28:50 anti-black with us if you're okay with massive expansions of police presence you're okay with us running on that right and also on on anti-homeless politics that's been a huge extremely effective thing particularly among yeah business owners i mean i remember god i think i've told the story on air but back when I was in Chicago, there was this library in Chinatown that I used to like. It was next to a bunch of shops, so you could get bakery food and you could go sit at these benches. And I came back to them in 2020,

Starting point is 02:29:16 and the benches literally had a thing drilled into the table threatening to arrest you if you sat at them for too long. Oh, gosh. And this was like 2020 2021 yeah so you know that that the sort of anti-homelessness stuff had started really really early there and it's just hideous and you know these places have swung to the right they're electing republicans and they're doing it because this kind of like asian american petite bourgeois like small business class and some of the sort of richer tech people etc etc are swinging really really hard to the right yeah man that actually connected so many dots for me like

Starting point is 02:29:52 first of all like even to like the anti-homeless thing like you know you start seeing that weird middle of the bench arm rail yep yep yep you know like well it's like that's so you won't lay on it you know that's that's why you did this but like i hope what I'm about to say is not a trope. You know what I'm saying? It's just, it's because of like the proximity that I've had with the Asian community in the sense that my stepmom's Filipino, you know, all the DJs I've all worked with, all these just hip hop at some point in the nineties, the Filipinos took over. You know what I'm saying?

Starting point is 02:30:21 So like, that's been a lot of ways our community but i found that you know the like proper asian in the jungle asian thing where it's like depending on your relationship with the united states is almost even if you identify as asian because you sit down 10 filipinos like half of them gonna say they pacific islander yep you know the other half gonna say they asian the other half gonna say they asian pacific islander and then and then my lord cambodia right next to them who are all in long beach in their crypts you know i'm saying so like that sort of world like they were with us you know as far as like they were just a part of our community whereas the sort of northern kind of proper asian world like it cities is like alhambra monterey park this is very california

Starting point is 02:31:05 stuff but they stuck to themselves yeah you know and they they saw a lot of the american thing is like this is pragmatic like we're here to win like you know like so when you started having the asian hate thing like it it's almost like and now that you say it, it's like we just tied that community up into a bow and then handed them to the right. Yeah. Because this all happened at the same time as like the anti-affirmative action. Yep. You know. Although I do want to say on the anti-affirmative action stuff, because I think people mischaracterize what's going on with that.

Starting point is 02:31:40 Asian Americans as a whole and as subgroups support affirmative action. Yes. Very consistently. Every time they're polls There's like 60% support for it, right? Yeah, but there's like 40% of these fucking dipshits who are like, yes I don't know. You know, I'm like my sort of like classic age response to this is like I Fucking did it. I was a terrible student. I fuck I got into the University of Chicago Like you did a fucking study harder Like you're not the reason the reason you're not getting into these universities isn't because like black people are being allowed

Starting point is 02:32:07 in it's because you suck like fucking skill issue what the fuck is wrong with you yeah but like like there's there was this like class yeah you know the sort of class that i was gonna get to is this class distinction in the sense that from a black perspective it was like yo we rallied for y'all over the like stop asian hate thing yeah you know what i mean and then to come back around and see this again from a class perspective because kind of the same thing happened in a lot of ways in the black community because the reasoning as you say that that's why i think it all makes sense the reasoning is the same like the system is not for me so i'm just gonna get mine damn the community yeah you know i'm saying like i'm just gonna go get mine you know and so in the again in the black community

Starting point is 02:32:54 for those that swung right it was just like like in some senses they're like well well i know y'all are fucking racist like you know i'm saying so i'd like as far as like the rights like i know you are with the left it was more like you're just as like the rights, like I know you are with the left. It was more like, you're just gaslighting me. Yeah. So, well, if you're just going to gaslight me and I already know that you hate me,

Starting point is 02:33:11 well, fuck it. I'm just going to get mine, you know? And that becomes the thing. But as a community, like you said, you know,

Starting point is 02:33:17 in the same way, as far as like the beef between like the, you know, the historical LA riots, like Chinese and Korean communities, while their parents were on this, on the roofs roofs of their of their shop shooting at us they kids was breaking into the city they was with us like breaking into the same stores we was breaking into you know so that that class distinction was something that made us kind of be like bro like don't you understand you'll never

Starting point is 02:33:43 be one of them they'll never really love you you know and i feel like even that sort of like appeal would lurch this group even further to be like don't tell me who you are don't tell me what they're they're giving me what i need you know so yeah like i never thought about tying all that together and being that it being like a specific a chinese lurching wow i never thought of that yeah and together and being that it being like a specific, a Chinese lurching. Wow. I never thought of that. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:34:06 And okay. You know, you know what else sells products that are from China? It's these products and services. It's a worth the podcast. We sell products from China. And we're back. So I think that there's one more thing I want to make sure I get to about the Chinese American stuff before we move on.

Starting point is 02:34:38 And that's one of the things you kind of brought up earlier was the insularity. Because part of what's going on here, too, is that there's a lot of Chinese immigrants and people who people who you know you get communities that are speaking like they're usually like kentonese or mandarin and in a lot of cases it's like you get these very very small tight-knit communities with people who are speaking like a provincial dialect that's like yeah semi-incomprehensible to other people right because it's like it's like effectively its own language and one of the problems here and this is one of the places where the left shit the bad like wasn't doing a good organizing right and the consequence of this is that in these a lot of the things that we're getting put out in these spaces the media is all unbelievably right-wing. Yeah. Right. There's Miles Guo, who,

Starting point is 02:35:26 whenever, God, like, 12 years from now, when I finish the Lab Leak episode, which is going to be, he's going to be a big part of this, was he was this Chinese billionaire

Starting point is 02:35:33 who defected to the US, and came here and ran one trillion scams, and is currently going to prison for, like, he, I'm pretty sure he was the guy whose boat Steve Bannon was on

Starting point is 02:35:43 when Steve Bannon got arrested by the post office cops. Let's go. So like just varsity level bad guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like he was he was issuing passports from like a fake government in exile that he set up. He's running every scam in the entire world. But he's also, you know, he's also one of the people

Starting point is 02:35:59 who started the whole lab leak thing. And he was flooding the like all sort of Chinese language media with this hardline right-wing sort of pro-republican hardline anti-china stuff and then you have a very similar thing coming from the fall of gong who are everywhere in any every chinatown there's fallen gong guys everywhere they're posters they the people so they're a cult they run shen yu they run a newspaper called the epoch times which is just a pure fascist propaganda outlet and those things

Starting point is 02:36:34 kind of just like devoured the entire chinese language media ecosystem and it wasn't good before because like there were also a bunch of other weird right-wing groups like part of the problem here too is it's possible for in sort of asian american community for you to have two people who in a by american standards have identical politics right they're they're identically right-wing on things like racial politics on their like anti-crime stuff you know who are incredibly sexist and like homophobic but they absolutely fucking hate each other because one of them is a pro-CCP Chinese nationalist and one of them is an anti-CCP Chinese nationalist.

Starting point is 02:37:07 Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But this kind of like, what's been able to kind of weld that shit together is this sort of Republican anti-black Huff on Crime campaign combined with all of this sort of media sphere stuff. Wow. Yeah. You know, it's Shays' Rebellion rebellion all over again like just at least you're

Starting point is 02:37:26 not them yeah you know and and yeah like the simplicity of that right-wing message of just like here's all your problems all your problems are those fools and i'll just get rid of them yeah and we can solve this with more cops and donald trump we just solve it with war. Yeah. Yeah, man. So for my end, I looked at the black and Latino vote. I can run through the black one pretty quick because it wasn't as interesting of a story. And also because, you know, we did an episode with Garrison Hayes from Mother Jones on like black conservatives and Trump voters. And I think ultimately it comes down to the fact of like the Franz F fernand thought of like okay what is what is liberation like what is freedom and is it you know my ability to

Starting point is 02:38:12 flourish without any hindrances or is it a collective ending of suffering you know i'm saying so like in other words it's like this this plantation would be better if i ran the big house rather than being like burn the fucking big house down because there shouldn't be slavery you know i'm saying so like that sort of approach to again the reality of why i know the system's not for me in a lot of ways that's what's interesting about the understanding of it so when you would look at somebody like a black person like why would you vote for this racist man and it's like well the same reason i would vote for every other racist man you know i'm saying like which find me one that ain't you know so like that attitude is already there so you know obviously all of us would push back and say that like well you choosing

Starting point is 02:38:59 yourself is also a vote against yourself and is destroying your community. Clearly, it's never worked. At some point, which I'm sure y'all can relate to, it's like, I feel two ways when I see black people, specifically black men, sit at this table because I'm like, I can imagine the first joke that you kind of let slide that was like, ah, I was kind of weird, but I don't know. It's not it's no big deal. I'll get over it. Maybe maybe they didn't mean it, you know. And then that joke gets more and more intense. And then all of a sudden you sitting in a room and they cracking jokes about Haitians eating pets. Yeah. And that Puerto Rico's a trap. You know what I'm saying? It's like it didn't start there. It started with you accepting and

Starting point is 02:39:45 just being like all lightened up and at some point somebody said something to you and you made a face and they went dude just it's a joke man it's a joke come on bro you know me you know me right you've had that you know what I'm saying and I know that happened a year ago and now look at you you know so like eventually the point I'm making is like at some point you are going to have to lay down all of your identifying factors to be able to stand that stay at this table and and i hope that i hope that 30-year fixed mortgage was worth it yeah you know so the black story is that is like what is going to get us the financial or get me specifically minds the financial freedom that that the Democrats kept promising but never gave to us. But that's like I said, that's a much less interesting story in my in my opinion than than the Latino vote, which we could talk about after this break. All right. So we're back now. 64 percent right of

Starting point is 02:40:59 air quotes Latinos voted right wing this year. Now, I feel like this. Well, I don't feel like I know this needs a lot of unpacking because first of all, what the hell is a Latino? Yeah. Right. Is the first question that you have to ask. And essentially, I think I've come to the fact that what America means by that is you were colonized by Spain. So in some way, you kind of speak somewhat Spanish unless it's Brazil brazil yeah in which case you were colonized by the portuguese right so it's like you don't even know what you mean like y'all don't even know what you mean it's sort of it's staggering that like one of our primary demographic categories was invented by a coalition of like maoists and uh like like vietnamese marxist

Starting point is 02:41:42 leninist that fell apart immediately with the moment that China invaded Vietnam. And that's only our second most incoherent democratic category. Like it's completely incoherent, right? So you have, exactly. You have my wife, my life partner, who is born in LA, but she is a first gen.

Starting point is 02:42:02 She grew up in Southern Mexico. She is first gen Mexican, but she is a first gen she grew up in southern mexico she is first gen mexican but she's like i identify as indigenous and it's and it's true she is like even when we did the dna test if you believe in that stuff she's like but you can just look at her and i'm like you're inking like you know just i just you're looking at her and she's like yeah you're right like we are overwhelmingly vast majority of her dna is indigenous so for her if you check a demographic box it's like are you are you hispanic she's like why would i identify with the colonizer so no i'm not hispanic like they're the colonizer yeah right whereas you ask a puerto rican or a cuban or dominican they say hispanic but they just mean it differently one because the island was called

Starting point is 02:42:52 hispanola you know what i'm saying so like they just mean something totally different yeah and dominicans is black as hell you know what i'm saying and then what about a cuban the way that they relate to america is also incredibly different especially because of like, you know, I'm pretty sure y'all room knows is if you could touch dry ground. Right. Yeah. And that really just had to do with the fact that we just ain't fuck with Castro. So the way that they relate to even immigration is completely different because if you could make it to the soy, if you could make it to Florida, you a citizen. because if you could make it to the soy, if you could make it to Florida, you're a citizen. So they just didn't go through the same things that people from Central and South America went through

Starting point is 02:43:28 to be able to become a citizen. And on top of all that, California, Arizona, and Texas is Mexico. So like, so some of them ain't immigrants, they was here. Like the border move, we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us. So you put all that together mixed with a group of people who might be ninth generation mexican that people that don't speak

Starting point is 02:43:53 spanish the no sabos and you call it like won't even speak spanish you know i'm saying that like you love all these people who speak so many different languages and have so many different understandings of who they are and you just call them Latino and then you get this number. But if you're willing to accept the absurdity of it, then we could talk about the actual, like what actually happened here. And what you find are two things that are, seem so reductivective but as you look at the exit polls and even like interviews that i actually that i personally conducted if you set aside the person that has been just cooked by just the right wing information like set that person aside that is just you've

Starting point is 02:44:38 just your brain's been cooked like you set that aside and you look at this there there are two very reductive things that just continue to just be true one is latin america is very religious yeah it's still catholic and machismo is a big part of their culture and it just it seems so reductive but it's but it's what happened you know this is still a very patriarchal culture. And, you know, as anecdotal and as running joke as it is that like, if you have a Latina daughter and she's bringing, because again, they're very traditional. That's why I'm saying I'm using cisgender things. It's like you bring a boy over your grandma, all your your tias are watching you make him a plate. You have to go over there and make him a plate and sit it in front of him, or you going to

Starting point is 02:45:29 be judged. This is just the culture, you know? So it's no surprise that that is not going to play into how you vote, right? And then secondly, the religious thing in the sense that like this actually like really blew my mind. And a couple of interviews I had, I wanted to talk to specifically Latina women because I was like, it just seemed as though there was just a triple layer of of shit you'd have to swallow to be able to go this route.

Starting point is 02:46:02 Right. to be able to go this route, right? And my main question was like, what was the non-negotiable? And was there a line that Trump and by extension, the Republican Party could cross? Like, where's the line? What is the too far line, right? And they landed on a few things.

Starting point is 02:46:24 It was crazy. Like after talking to three different women, they all kind of landed on a few things it was it was crazy like after talking to three different women they all kind of landed on the same things it was abortion yeah right they were like at the end of the day this is untenable and to which i pushed back where i was like well trump's not anti-abortion and what they all said was like we could deal with the 16 week like i could deal with the 16 week thing obviously because again they are women and they're not completely peeled they're like we understand that there are situations that happen right that just are untenable and then the next thing that they said was like which was the part that like really just kept putting my brain in a pretzel was

Starting point is 02:47:05 we are really big on anti-sex trafficking and the the idea for us on this knowing that like okay so the right wing stole that like they don't believe it they stole that concept and they wrapped everything around it right but one of them mentioned how she couldn't vote for hillary because she heard rumors about child stuff and she's i mean she's referring to pizzagate you know yeah yeah it's just huge shit of which i was able to push back to be like well that was you know it was debunked like and she was like i just don't want to i just don't like i just don't like how they move i don't trust bill and how he behaved in the oval office and it's like you're looking around like are you they were both on fc played like what

Starting point is 02:47:51 she even said she was like but the epstein thing and i'm like well they're all i don't i don't understand the i don't understand how you don't see this connection. Right? And to which they both said, oh no, we see it. Again, find me someone that's not nasty, is their answer. Find me someone that's not corrupt. Find me someone that's not nasty. At least he's going to save the babies,

Starting point is 02:48:18 was the thing. And then the next question I had about them was the anti-immigration thing, the borders, right? And we're talking to people who are one and two, some of them three generations removed. And one of them gave me an example of a family member's in-law who got deported, 50 years old, got deported from something they did when they were 19. He's like, it's tough. Like, this was a hardworking man who's done his best, who, you know, has done everything they could.

Starting point is 02:48:51 And it's got to, so I asked her like, yo, do you think that, so do you think that that's unfair? She said, no. She was like, our family waited in line. Our family did everything they needed to do. We fought. We came to this, same thing. We came to this country because we believed. We fought, we came to this, same thing, we came to this country because we believed in the dream and we fought for it, you know, and we, and we did it right. You know, obviously like with the Mexican, like sort of like work ethic of like

Starting point is 02:49:15 no excuses, just work. We don't, we can't stand for no cheaters. We don't believe in stuff like that. You have to work for yours, right yours right and we come here there's no cuts in front of the lines there's no shortcuts you do the work right and if you cheat you go to the back of the line that's just what it is so she's like he's talking about criminals i'm not a criminal he's talking about criminals yeah you know that's not me i'm i'm a hardworking citizen, you know? So that sort of mindset. And then she said, at the end of the day, we came for the dream. I'm here to work, you know? And if I put in the work, if my family puts in the work, we succeed. That's what this country's for. You're fucking it up for all of us. You cheating the system is fucking it up for all of us. cheating the system is fucking it up for all of us and so

Starting point is 02:50:05 that sort of like i can swallow the racist shit because i don't give a fuck about you anyway because i already know you don't give a fuck about me i'm just here to get mine so for them at least according to the way they're explaining it is like the prejudice line is not a line they worried about that's something i've already accepted you know but what is a line is not a line they worry about. That's something I've already accepted, you know. But what is a line is, oddly enough, treatment of women and the treatment of children and the ability to flourish. cooked our kids he just cooked them you know and it dovetailed so well into the latino machismo and even on the black shit like i knew we were in trouble when the hood niggas was tom was running around here saying they was gonna vote for trump because it's because they understand it it's like you either get on or get out like i'm here I'm a get with my you either for me or against me. We this is what we doing. You know, I'm saying. Right. I'm a let you be, you know, as as derogatory as this is like, I'm a let you be a man.

Starting point is 02:51:13 You go fight what you go fight and the Democrats are going to turn your sons into daughters. I don't like that. Like, that's the that's the thought. You know, I'm saying It's like, OK, well, well, fuck it. Let's just get ours. You know what I'm saying? That simplicity of a message, it just resonated while you have, which didn't bother me, but you have somebody like Obama coming in there like somebody's uncle. Basically, like you young niggas need to turn, pull up your pants, stop acting like thugs and get in line. You know what I'm saying? It's like, all right, OK, you know, to me, I don't bother me because I'm like, well, yeah, you're somebody's uncle. Like you are that. Oh, of course, that's how you talk, you know? But the street dudes is like, look, man,

Starting point is 02:51:51 I don't need this like, I don't need this Harvard grad, like pretty ass, like rich nigga to tell me what it's like. You was never out. You wasn't out here. You wasn't in the trenches. You know what I'm saying? Like you're a millionaire. I don't like you.

Starting point is 02:52:02 You barely want to. Oh, because you can hoop. Oh, so you like basketball. You one of us. You know what I'm saying? So're a millionaire i don't like you you barely want to oh because you can hoop oh so you like basketball you one of us you know i'm saying so i just think that that like you've already got yours so let me get mine is like at the end of the day was so appealing to this particular demographic and it just made sense so that's why they voted that way yeah and i think there's just sort of like angles of this too that connect with what was going on with with asian americans so partially also the religion angle is a thing that isn't talked about enough and also isn't talked about enough with asian americans like particularly chinese

Starting point is 02:52:37 americans there's a whole bunch of how do i how do i explain this in a way that you know the sort of like zeal of a convert shit where like the first generation converts are the most nuts yeah yeah so that's like a huge portion of like chinese christians are these like first generation evangelical converts and so you get these just like really terrifying like ferociously right-wing yeah stuff that just just kind of like just kind of eats everything around it and i think the second part is i think there's an interesting distinction here too because i think there's like a kind of differing parts of the story-ness of the kind of like we came here to work thing because that was the asian-american thing from maybe 20 years ago and the last 10 years and especially post 2020 has been people realizing

Starting point is 02:53:30 that it's not real yeah and that you know you work you work you work you work and this is this is actually also funny enough exact same thing happening in china with sort of different political results because it's less it's you know we're not dealing with yeah like the same kind of sort of immigrant culture stuff but the chinese-american version of this was like okay we need to figure out who to blame for this yeah and they were like well yeah okay it's because of like all of this crime shit because like people aren't going to prison for one million years and like i see a black person and there's like a homeless person who i have to like walk past every day this is the reason why like our fucking dream died and that

Starting point is 02:54:06 was a really sort of appealing message people and it's the same kind of thing with the the people who went for the affirmative action stuff where it was like the people who yeah you know are like in all seriousness like we're running into kind of like oh no there actually is a sort of wall that you hit yeah where it doesn't matter how hard you work. Like there's only so many spots at university. There's only so many, totally, you know,

Starting point is 02:54:28 there's only so much so far you can go and hitting that wall drove a bunch of people. Right. You make a good point, you know, and, and I'm, I imagine the same sort of reaction to that within the Chinese community is going to be the same with ours, where it's like,

Starting point is 02:54:43 okay, you go learn that you are not welcome to that table. You know, they will always choose themselves. And, you know, you could dress yourself up, you know, and just to the degree for which you can alter all identifying factors. For us, it's like to the degree for which you can remove your blackness is to the degree for which you're welcomed in this table but at some point you can't take it off yeah it don't rub off you know dress your kids up you know that was like for us with respectability politics like teach your kids to speak proper english and dress them up and don't let them

Starting point is 02:55:19 wear hoodies okay good luck you know like jay-z's seminal work look oj said i'm not black i'm oj okay like you know it's just yeah they will never accept you the the world you're trying to get into will never accept you and this step towards trying to be accepted by this world is working against you and everyone else behind you you know yep but this is america you can vote however you want to vote well and i think 2020 like for us was that moment right where like you know everyone kind of got knocked out of the you know whichever way you sort of fragmented politically it's like that's when you got knocked out of the sort of obama multiracial dream yeah was when you realized that like all of this fucking progress you made,

Starting point is 02:56:05 isn't going to stop people from killing you in the street. Yes. And the reaction to that was like, and I saw this on the left where like a bunch of people fracked, basically splintered off and became like hardline Chinese nationalists because they were afraid. And they were like, okay,

Starting point is 02:56:16 well, you know, here's this thing that we have this like strong state that will protect us. And we just have to fight for it here. It's like, well, that didn't work. Right.

Starting point is 02:56:23 You know, and then you have a lot of other people who started to recognize that this wasn't going to happen right that like the the thing that they had bought into was a lie but the part of it that they believed they were just like well okay if we can just like fucking get the black people out of here and like we can get the cops in yeah you know we can go back to living in our fucking fantasy world yeah and that's been just the the sort of dominant response to it and i i don't know it's it's bleak but it's not something that can't be overcome but it's going to require like it's going to require organizing and it's going to require the left to not be about fucking making white people

Starting point is 02:57:03 feel more anti-imperialist which has been what fucking politics for asian americans has been and until that shit gets jettisoned like you're gonna keep seeing this shit accelerate yeah man has there been any um i don't know if the right term is like vision casting among this community because like i say that to say albeit a very small very small fraction of voices but among some of the black thinkers is like a serious consideration of pursuing like creating a third party of just like like but let's like take it serious this time like for real for real yeah you know like there's you know it's like i said it's very small and like obviously like my grandchildren will probably be

Starting point is 02:57:50 the ones to see any sort of beginnings of that actually taking root but it's still like you know if you were to this some of the things that are being talked about right now like we should like really like really consider it is there anything like that going on no like and this is this is also part of the problem is that like the asian american intellectual class is like one of the most bankrupt classes in the entire country there's nothing it's a wasteland out there like it's oh my god yeah like it's it's so bad it's it's like all of the art in the media the culture and the sort of analysis is all... I've talked about it on this show a decent amount,

Starting point is 02:58:27 but it's all wrapped up in this sort of like, oh, you too can integrate and become a small business owner. And those people, you know, the people who believe that and the people who did that don't actually have any interesting ideas. They have the incredibly narrow ideas of their class and the incredibly narrow ideas of their class are completely useless for the sort of task we have ahead of us yeah and and it's kind of working for them yeah i mean it's working for them it's yeah it's working for them it isn't working for anyone

Starting point is 02:58:51 else yeah exactly yeah and like oh my god like i don't know like the people who are supposed to be like wesley yang who was supposed to be like the great sort of like new asian intellectual is now this just completely cooked right winger like some of some of the people have been like turning on like some of the like the big podcasters have been like turning on trans people and i'm just like well fuck all you guys like eat shit um basically yeah so yeah it's it's a the situation's bad it's also the fragmentation is so powerful because you're dealing with so many kinds of like linguistic lines and lines between people who've been here for 10 generations and people who just like walk off the boat

Starting point is 02:59:31 yesterday there's a you know and so the fragmentation i think helps yeah prevent a more coherent sphere but like it's it's bleak out there yeah man it's the diagnosis yeah you know Yeah, man. Yeah. You know, obviously like the black queer community is obviously incredibly vibrant and strong and organized. And, you know, at least from the part of the intersection that I'm a part of, you know, the voice coming out of that, that space of like a lot of times of like very much prophetic and like you know very much like truth-telling that you hear from again like you know black queer community is like from our perspective they continue to be like five steps ahead of us yeah you know of like where we need to go as as a as a people yeah this was like the sex worker orgs for us but then because this is another thing with left just kind of shit the bed right like this is a thing with bernie where bernie voted for sesta fosta right and there's never been a reckoning about that at all yeah and so you know like the stuff that could have come out of that just kind of never did and

Starting point is 03:00:38 we never got the kind of integration the kind of politics that we could have had if people had been like five percent well not five percent they would require them to move their positions a bit but like people had actually cared about sex workers we wouldn't be here right now but you totally have a story yeah yeah well that was informative this has been uh i don't know how do i just how do we describe what this has been well mia you know i think i close with this right like this situation isn't hopeless yeah right there's there's been a lot of good tenant organizing going on like there's a lot of kinds of stuff that can and do work it's nose to the grindstone time right it's time to lock in it's time to organize and these communities can be organized yeah we just haven't yet and you know yeah to your point like for me like all information is helpful

Starting point is 03:01:32 like like if somebody's lying to you like it's it's good information to know that this person thinks that that's something worth lying about you know like you just you just told me something about yourself that the fact that you think that that's worth lying about. So I say all that to say this understanding, a better understanding of like, it's hard to reason with somebody when they hungry, you know? So just a better understanding of what are these communities actually prioritize? What do they actually value? And like you know the dems and and unfortunately even the left was just like just swinging a miss guys like this type of thing like you said it's not hopeless it's like now there's an understanding of like okay

Starting point is 03:02:16 so you you value the hustle all right well let me tell you in the ways for which the choice you just made is working against your hustle you know like or now now here here the ways for which the choice you just made is working against your hustle. You know, like or now. Now, here here are ways for which you can, like you said, nose to the grind and accomplish these goals in a way that's not so detrimental to the people around you. Yeah. You know, I'm with it. Like, I'm not hopeless either. I think that we just need to think about the word our word choice and what hills we willing to die on and be like, this is what we meant when we said this. Yeah. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Starting point is 03:02:53 It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 156

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