It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 173

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Starting point is 00:01:06 Why would you do that to me? Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Blum was a professional con artist, So you didn't stand a chance. But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. I'm Caroline DeMore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told. This season explores women from the 19th century to now. Women who were murderers and scammers,

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Starting point is 00:02:46 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 your own decisions. Welcome to I Can't Stop Me't Hear a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout.

Starting point is 00:03:11 Hi, Mia. Happy to be here again. Yeah, I am, I don't know, I have mixed emotions about this one. So today we are talking about how the American state, particularly the sort of neoliberal American state of the last about 50 years created Elon Musk and how it is destroying itself. And we'll start with the fun part of this,

Starting point is 00:03:33 which is that Tesla stock is down 25% in the last month. Yay. It's extremely funny. The protests are working. People are like lighting them up, cars on fire, literally all over the world. Like there was just a big rash in France the day we're recording this The pressure is working. He's having a bad time 25% is just the start we can get the other 75%

Starting point is 00:03:55 Yeah, and like for people who like I guess don't know the value of Tesla stock is directly tied to Elon Musk's net worth Like obviously he's diversified. He doesn't have all of his wealth in net stocks, but like, when Tesla stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer. Yep. It's great. It's great. We love making Elon Musk poorer. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:04:15 It's the one line we like to see. However, comma. So we've talked a lot on this show about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the American state and about all of the people who he is harming and the lives he's destroying, the people who are dead because of his actions. And I think it's worth actually getting into how he was produced and how it came to be that, at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously wrote, did the bourgeoisie produce their own gravediggers? Yep.

Starting point is 00:04:39 And his promised inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus far failed to materialize, And his promised inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and this specific state seems to have produced their own gravediggers partially in the form of Trump, partially in the form of Elon Musk. And it's worth actually going into the story of how specifically this happens. And also, I think what neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of, I think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines of the story of the extent to which, you know, Tesla and SpaceX were built by American subsidies,

Starting point is 00:05:15 but it's worth going into some of the more structural elements of how this happened and why. So one of the problems that we have here, and I say we have here because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates. Yeah, he says a lot of things he doesn't understand there. Yeah, and unfortunately he has inherited like the greatest of all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism,

Starting point is 00:05:50 whatever you call his sort of ideology, you know, is supposed to be. And you know, I get like he is just sort of a fascist. But on the other hand, he's a product of this wing of that movement that was created out of out of the neoliberal thing about like, you must like decrease the size of the State you got it. You got to eliminate all regulations You have to you know, you keep keep decreasing the size of the state keep fire like, you know fire all government employees, etc Etc. Yeah, and again, this is I think largely what a lot of people think neoliberalism is right They think it's like okay neoliberalism is when the state gets smaller and this has always been a fucking joke

Starting point is 00:06:21 like through this entire neoliberal period the size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing. And this has always allowed a kind of like controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to you know, when 2008 happens, right? Yeah, economy, entire economy collapses. And then out of the woodwork come all of these like Rand Paul sort of like quote unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and like all of these all these sort of fascist paramilitaries. But you know, come out of the woodwork and say oh the reason that the 2008 collapse happened was because There is too much government regulation

Starting point is 00:06:51 And this is like sort of what Bitcoin is right like ah the evils of capitalism are happening because like not enough capitalism Yeah, well, it's cuz like they but like specifically like the evil entrenched interests have taken over the state You don't have the power to access the things that they do which is obviously You know like it is obviously true that these people have control of the state and you don't have the power to access the things that they do, which is obviously, you know, like it is obviously true that these people have control of the state and you don't, but this sort of controlled opposition of if you put us in power, we'll eliminate parts of the state, we'll get rid of all this regulation that you can suddenly be in power. This has always been a controlled opposition thing, you know, and this is disappears in the form of sort of libertarianism or like on the most extreme end Narco capitalism. Yeah, and this is something that the Montpelier Society

Starting point is 00:07:27 Which is like the people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all of like their academics come from they still have conferences They've always had a problem with this Where there's always been a branch of a narco capitalist there who think the only thing that the state should do is Enforce contracts or just that it shouldn't exist Yeah is in force contracts or just that it shouldn't exist. Everything should just be. Yeah. And the neoliberals are like, OK, you guys are fucking ridiculous. And the reason they think this is that the actual thing that these people believe

Starting point is 00:07:52 and this is something that if you read more Hayek than just like the road to serfdom, right, that's like the stuff for public consumption. If you read the stuff that you ask for public consumption, if you read sort of like Ropekeying, you read all of it, all of the sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF and, you know, of it, all of the sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF and you know, you go through all the different schools, what they actually believe, contra the things that they say were like,

Starting point is 00:08:13 oh, markets naturally emerge and the state just like exists to control them. What they believe is that you have to use the state specifically to create markets and you have to use the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until they become sort of like good neoliberal market subjects. You go to work, go home, buy things and do nothing else. And the product of this is the 1980s, right? It's the replacement of the welfare state, you know, which is the sort of carrot of this system with just the purest stake of the police baton and the prison system. Yeah. It's the end of like the post second world war welfare state order, right?

Starting point is 00:08:48 That we saw certainly in, in the U S but mostly in Europe, right? Yeah. Yeah. But this, and this is very important. This never actually decreased the size of the state because what the state, you know, what it was, was it was a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from like the state giving you things towards the state, you know, like beating you over the head with a hammer and also insofar as it gives you things, making you go through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort of like scant welfare

Starting point is 00:09:18 policies still exist. Yeah, the state surveilling you both for violence reasons and for withdrawing your benefits reasons. Yeah, and this is always something that all of these people have supported, right? Now the other important part for our purposes is the thing I said earlier about the state creating markets. And that's kind of like an abstract thing, right? There are sort of historical examples you can go through to look at what this looks like in a place where there aren't markets. But this is something

Starting point is 00:09:48 that's very important because a huge amount of what Tesla is, is a direct result of, you know, pure neoliberalism in action, which is the state stepping in to create a market as its way of doing regulation and the way it interacts with the world. Yeah. And so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now, selling selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits. In 2024, the selling of carbon credits was 43% of Tesla's net income. 43%. Yeah. So we should explain what a carbon credit is if people aren't familiar. Yeah, well, Axios has numbers on this. Their numbers are that since 2014, 34% of the total profits of Tesla

Starting point is 00:10:30 are from selling these carbon credits. So the way the system works is that the EPA sets standards for how much is this like, you know, read the Axios thing too, but like the EPA set standards for how much like CO2 per mile, all of the cars and trucks combined that a car company makes can emit. And instead of doing the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just gonna be like a firm cap

Starting point is 00:10:55 on these emissions, they're like, no, no, no, this is what I say when I say they create a market. So what happens if you go over the cap, isn't that like people get hauled off to jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to buy someone else's carbon credits. And if you're below the cap, it gives you credits you can sell to other companies. So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right, their cars produced like zero basically like they don't have any fossil fuel use at all within their line.

Starting point is 00:11:22 Yeah, yeah. Now, obviously, like, whereas, you know, you can ask the question, where is that electricity coming from? But you know, like, but that's what that's what doesn't get factored into it, which is part of the sort of problem with trying to use the state like this to solve. Right. It doesn't look at life cycle. Yeah, yeah. Just looks at driving the car emissions. You know, this is the problem with trying to use a regulatory state like this to solve the problem of climate change by creating a market. And so Tesla makes and again, this is this last year, this was 43% of its net income

Starting point is 00:11:50 came not from selling cars, but from selling these carbon clients. So what they're doing is making it so that other companies can produce more cars that are less fuel efficient, can produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids. It's why you couldn't get a plug-in hybrid EV pickup truck. Like, I think there may be plug-in hybrid Mavericks now, but like, the reason that no US manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck, like the F-150 Lightning that they have now, is because they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead.

Starting point is 00:12:25 Yeah, and this is a fucking disaster for climate policy, because instead of having all the car companies just like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one car company that makes electric cars, and then all the rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like CO2 per like miles, etc, etc. And the secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now, is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort of, in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of what a market is, right? When they explain it, it's like, ah, there's gonna be all this like competition in the market, the competition's gonna create the best product.

Starting point is 00:12:56 And what actually happens, and the neoliberals, in their private doctrine understand this, is that when the state creates a market like this, what it's doing is handing like a person, like a single individual, a giant monopoly. Yeah. And that's what happens. And that monopoly is one Elon Musk, who has now been handed the title of the richest man in human history by the state's regulatory apparatus.

Starting point is 00:13:20 Because they've given him basically complete control over, I mean, there are other EV only companies, but they're minute, right right Rivian or something like that And he's got this scarce resource that the entire automotive industry now needs Yeah, and again, this is you know going back to the market creation part of this none of this shit existed Right like carbon caps are not something the market would ever produce by itself or whatever. Like this is a direct neoliberal intervention into the market, which is what neoliberalism is, right? It's the neoliberal state coming into great markets. And the product of it is Elon Musk.

Starting point is 00:13:54 Yeah, it's a monopoly. Yeah. And when we come back from ads, we'll go into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon Musk and not all of these other companies that became the sort of single guy and how else he's benefited from the state. We are back. So the other aspect, you know, so we've gone into how Tesla is built on this carbon credit trading. The other aspect of it is that Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts. The Washington Post in probably the last like expose they're ever going to do like this now that Bezos has been like we are free-market capitalists Yeah, like tried to go through and find all of the money in government contracts that they've gotten they totaled it

Starting point is 00:14:51 Well, I think I think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that But I told was it at 38 billion dollars and that's just the ones that are unclassified Which is a very important because a bunch of what SpaceX does, SpaceX is, you know, most other company is a bunch of a bunch of contracts for classified like the deployment of spy satellites So it's definitely way more than that, right? Yeah But this comes to the other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies Like in general do not make money, right?

Starting point is 00:15:21 They hemorrhage money for basically their entire existence until they can find a bunch of government contracts that can make them money. And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating shit after 2008. And you know, WAPO talks about this. They got a $465 million low interest loan for the Department of Energy in 2010 that basically saved the company from the brink of collapse.

Starting point is 00:15:43 Good thing there's nothing else to spend the money on in 2010. No one else needed low interest loans or anything. It was fine. No, no, there was no attempt to build like a giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed. Yeah. You know, nothing else was happening. I wasn't living in my car at that time.

Starting point is 00:15:58 It was fine. Yeah. Thank you, Obama. And so and so as this goes on, right, the goal of you as a tech company, there's two things you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire on your pile of money. Or if you're a larger tech company, you are trying to amass enough U.S. contracts, like U.S. government contracts to like get you to sort of stability.

Starting point is 00:16:20 And this is what happens with SpaceX. SpaceX now has gotten 18 billion dollars of contracts with NASA and this is sort of a part of like I mean NASA has always used government contractors, but like this is different like this is just straight up They are using Tesla's rockets to do things and this is also part of why like Tesla and Boeing fucking this up is part Of why a bunch of astronauts are fucking stranded on the space station right now. Because these things do not work. But there's been an enormous amount of money here. And the other thing, you know, this is one of the other sort of like great neoliberal things is that a lot of the factories that Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones that are in the US are there because they get unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from from from local

Starting point is 00:17:07 states themselves. All of this brings us to, you know, one of one of the other really core aspects of sort of the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling, in terms of selling cars. By the way, we should also mention is something Axios talks about that, like, if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, his company would literally never make money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this has been the case. I wrote about this like I think two years ago Yeah, I'm gonna writing about this and before Elon Musk had gone full fucking evil villain I guess but that's what they are. They're a carbon credit company that makes cars

Starting point is 00:17:38 Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by a seven thousand five hundred dollar Tax credit for for electric cars. Oh yeah, I got some tax credit information on electric cars. So it's now the time. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to talk about the other one that's driving these unhinged sales? Yes, I do. Because I have been driving around San Diego and I have seen an obscene number of cyber

Starting point is 00:18:02 trucks wrapped in people's business livery. And it occurs to me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck, nor do people who need a pickup truck for work buy Cybertrucks because they suck at being trucks. And so I did some digging and I discovered that the IRS has a special tax deduction for vehicles which are rated over 6,000 pounds gross vehicle weight. The gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not like the mass of the vehicle if you drove it off the dealer lot onto a scale. That's the maximum operating weight of the vehicle as specified by the manufacturer.

Starting point is 00:18:37 So like it's your Tesla with, I mean there are very funny videos of guys loading one bag of compasks into the back of a Tesla and being, it's a great truck for truck stuff. The other really funny one is when they try to attach like a winch to it and try to use it to pull heavy things, the back of the truck comes off because it's just like made of like, it's like secured by like glue. Is it a unibody? Yeah, it might not be a body on frame. Like it might not be a proper truck.

Starting point is 00:19:02 I actually don't know. No, I will look into that afterwards. I bet it's, I bet most of the electric or like high mileage pickup trucks are not. So yeah, not a good truck actually under it's called section 179 under section 179. A vehicle with a gross vehicle rate rating over 6,000 pounds. You can deduct up to 31,000 in the first year, rather than deducting the depreciation of the capital good over time. So instead of deducting the depreciation of your vehicle that you purchased your business

Starting point is 00:19:34 over time and not paying tax on that amount, you can not pay tax on 31,000 in the first year of your vehicle if it's over 6,000 pounds. There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've got a Maybach or something really fucking heavy. So that would even cover the Model X, right? A Tesla Model X has a GBWR above that. With a truck, there are exemptions for work vehicles and they have to have a separate cargo compartment that is not the driver's compartment that is six feet or more in length.

Starting point is 00:20:04 So the cyber truck just happened to have a six foot bed. that is not the driver's compartment, that is six feet or more in length. So the Cybertruck just happened to have a six-foot bed. Yeah, so you can deduct a hundred percent of value in the first year, from what I understand, for these vehicles, which have a six-foot bed. At least this was the case when I was looking. I became aware of the exact nature of this when I went on the Cybertruck Owners Club Forum and looked what tax deduction people were doing, right? And then I worked back from there. And it does seem that people are doing this.

Starting point is 00:20:29 I think it might be changing, so you can only deduct a certain percentage soon. It will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you tax advice, nor am I qualified to do so. I'm not an accountant. This is not accounting advice. On top of that, Mia mentioned the IRS commercial clean vehicle credit, right? That's a credit, not a deduction. So the deduction would discount the amount of your income that you pay tax on versus the credit, which is just rate credit. So potentially the person

Starting point is 00:20:56 could deduct the cost of the cyber truck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking cyber truck right to prove it's a business vehicle. And then if you're wrapping it, from what I understand, like these deductions somewhat depend on the percentage of the vehicle's use that is business. I guess this could be like the equivalent of a fringes on the flag tax theory. People claiming that when they're driving their Cybertruck to go to Whole Foods, but it's wrapped, they're advertising a business so it's a business use. I don't understand how viable that is as a claim, but. Well, you know, but like part of this is like, it's very easy.

Starting point is 00:21:33 Like, especially right now when the IRS is being gutted, like it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit. People are not getting audited. Yeah. Yeah. So they can take a 7,500 commercial vehicle, clean vehicle credit, in addition to deducting that much. And like, you would struggle to persuade me that that is not why a lot of

Starting point is 00:21:54 people are buying cyber trucks, right? Like it's got the weight rating, it's got the bed size, like, it's a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily, like not all trucks have six foot beds now. I will never buy a new truck because I can't find a truck that has like a decent seating arrangement and larger than six foot bed and four by four. And doesn't cost more than I earn in a year, but like it's quite a like niche overlap of trucks that apply. And like for a truck with a six foot bed and a 6,000 pound gross vehicle weight

Starting point is 00:22:22 rating, the Cybertruck is pretty small and it fits kind of with people who don't actually need a work truck, but can nonetheless take advantage of the work truck tax deduction. So once again, thank you government for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the roads today. Yeah, and it's worth noting. So like Tesla, you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is like one of the like bestselling car manufacturers, right? And part of it is from this but also, you know, and this is this is the other aspect of This it's worth noting. There's a very good Bloomberg article out today by Amanda mold that talks about how 50% of all American consumer spending is now by people who in the top 10% of the income bracket

Starting point is 00:23:04 American consumer spending is now by people in the top 10% of the income bracket. So people make $250,000 a year or more. And that means increasingly that everything in the United States reflects the, you know, the sort of like cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes who all also want to buy this for their sort of like, like cultural grudges and you know, to like to own the libs and like show how like much of a fucking man they are. Yeah. And you know, and so you already you have that initial incentive and then you suddenly

Starting point is 00:23:30 have all of these fucking tax incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that like definitely this is like designed with a shit in mind. Yeah, without a doubt. And it becomes, like you say, it becomes like a status good and it becomes like a culture war signifier. Yeah. In addition to all those things. I guess people also like, I've noticed so there's been a lot of backlash against people who own Teslas. If you go on the front, the day we're recording, the top article on the front page of Reddit on the third article, Reddit, the top post is someone

Starting point is 00:24:00 who's been putting pictures that say, sell your car. It's got a picture of Musk's e-kiling on people's Teslas in Boston. Yep, yep, yep. Shout out to that person. Yeah. Okay, so we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to sort of finish this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going. We are back. Now I think this all, I think if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard

Starting point is 00:24:35 of most of this. I actually, okay, you've heard of most of what I've said to some extent. I don't think you've heard what James has said before because I've seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here is that Elon Musk, on a fundamental level, is also a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all been living in for decades now. It's a product of an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Keynesianism.

Starting point is 00:25:01 So regular Keynesianism is about having the government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation Also, you know also like the military to write like let's not sort of like trigger-coded but it's about using a bunch of state money to like make there be jobs and using this to sort of The way they call is like counter cyclical spending but it's like they want to use the state to spend money to make there be Jobs and to put money into the economy to put goods into the economy to counteract economic downturns. Yeah. Asset Keynesianism is still the state spending a bunch of resources, right? But it's the state expending those resources, both bureaucratically in terms of incentives and in terms of sort of tax structures, and specifically also very much in terms of the Federal Reserve's interest rates, specifically to increase the price of stocks and also, you know,

Starting point is 00:25:49 and the reason he calls it assets, right, because it's not just stocks, right? It's also things like real estate. It's to increase the value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you think it's going to be worth more later. I have talked about this a lot on this show. This has been the fundamental global economic strategy of most of the world's economies ever since sort of Japan kind of pioneered it in the 80s as after the US sort of like kneecapped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy

Starting point is 00:26:15 to the Plaza Accords. And by the end of this fucking administration, everyone who listened to the show will be able to explain what the Plaza Accords and the reverse Plaza Accords are. When we stop, it won't happen here after that, because you'll all understand and you'll stop it here. It can no longer happen here. You'll know, you'll know, you'll know the origin of the economy.

Starting point is 00:26:32 Yes. So again, the Plaza Accords, the US forces all of these countries to increase the value of their currencies relative to the dollar. This makes American manufacturing more competitive. It nukes all of their manufacturing. These countries need to find another place to, you know, develop their economy. Right.

Starting point is 00:26:48 And the thing that the solution Japan comes to is real estate speculation. This blows up this blows up in the nineties. This is this is a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse stuff is from this and then the US is forced to do the reverse plaza accords in the nineties. This is Bill Clinton and, you know and sort of annihilate American manufacturing in order to prop up the rest, like, proper Japanese manufacturing to keep their economy from completely imploding. Japan was the number two economy in the world at that point. But again, this means that the US has now been doing this. There's the famous things called the Greenspan

Starting point is 00:27:17 puts where to try to stop a market collapse that was obviously coming when the tech bubble blew up, Greenspan kept cutting the interest rates over and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing and just making it bigger, and then tech bubble blew up. Greenspan kept cutting the interest rates over and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing and just making it bigger. And then eventually it blew up. This is what 2008 is was, you know, we did a whole bubble. I mean, there's there's there's another bubble and collapse between there. But like, you know, and this is what we've been doing for the last two decades, like since since 2008, we've been creating this giant tech bubble.

Starting point is 00:27:40 And this tech bubble shit and this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part of the value of Tesla stock is just, you know, people who've been given a whole bunch of access to cheap credit. And by people, I mean, like, not really you and me, like a bunch of unbelievably rich people have access to, like, incredibly cheap loans. And they use that money to buy Tesla stock. This is a sort of cyclical thing that just continuously increases the value of the company. And it's not just sort of like banks and investors a Lot of money that goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension funds Yep from punch bunches of a whole bunch of countries and also like a huge number of American states like your teachers pensions are all

Starting point is 00:28:16 Tied up in this because yeah pension reform But with the way that we sort of like lost the pension as a normal thing Was that it was you know is converted to 401ks and the people who still have like regular state pensions, all of that money is now sort of invested in the stock market and it puts a billions of dollars in into Tesla every year. Yeah. And so this is also another aspect. This is, this is the broader structural level on which, on which us macroeconomic

Starting point is 00:28:41 policy was designed to create a bunch of companies like Tesla and then us sort of like micro policy the micro creation of markets to tax credits and you know all of these government contracts they've been given to do like everything from like fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit right and like the US is like contracting out star like now I mean like all of this stuff right is is literally how Elon Musk was created Yeah, but there is a third even deeper level in which you know we can look at at how how these cars are actually produced and how these rockets are actually produced and they're produced by just Incredible the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers and I think people tend to think about You know Tesla workers in the US, but there's Tesla workers all over the world. There's a huge gig of factory In Xinjiang, you know, there's factories all over China and yeah, you know these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit They work in unbelievably dangerous conditions and at the end of the day They get a very small amount of money so that the richest man in the world can get fucking richer every day.

Starting point is 00:29:47 Yeah. And that's before we consider like ingredient parts to Teslas, right? Like the lithium, you know, that we just addressed, for instance, in our episode on Congo. Yeah. Like, there are parts for your Tesla that come out of this country where there has been a war for as long as most of us has been alive. Really very little effort has gone into improving conditions for people there, certainly for workers there doing jobs that are essential to like our economy until like Mia and my 401k line going up comes from exploiting workers in Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world. Yeah. And you know, this is something that's something our standard of living is based

Starting point is 00:30:28 off of. But at the end of the day, right, you on musks, all of Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the state's monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these people from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in order to stop these people from taking back the fucking value that they create. Now, unfortunately, all of this sort of neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last 50 years, right, this attempt to sort of like, depoliticize everything and have everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this sort of like non-politics where you're voting for two parties that are like literally even more the same than they are now.

Starting point is 00:31:07 This attempt to do things like solve climate change through these promotion of carbon markets and create this sort of like stable like capitalist genominy forever has ultimately been self-defeating. It's why all attempts to regulate capital inevitably fail because the functioning of the capitalist system and particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism has worked has concentrated like the most wealth ever held by a single human being into the hands of one guy who was a Nazi. And then these people use their wealth to accumulate political power and seize control of the state, dismantling the systems that were meant to regulate them. And you can't solve this problem with regulation. Because again, eventually, they will simply

Starting point is 00:31:49 accumulate enough power, retake power, and eliminate the regulations. You can't even solve this problem just by killing them. I see people talk about like the killing of billionaires in China as like an example of this and like A, that's all political factional and fighting stuff and B, they'll execute people specifically to sort of appease like the Chinese worker so that they never have to fucking watch the PLA get ran out of Shanghai again. Yeah. But the thing is, even if somehow you use the state to just kill them, right, it doesn't work because capitalism will just produce more of these people.

Starting point is 00:32:19 If you actually want to stop this, if you want to stop this Elon Musk from destroying the entire country and quite possibly ending all life on earth by fucking with with America's nuclear weapons until there's some other simply not enough safety mechanisms to stop someone from accidentally sending one off you were going to have to destroy them completely the permanent base of their power the power of the oligarch the power of the billionaire the power of the dictator must be broken this tiny group of men cannot, as a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals, supply chains, to produce everything we need to survive.

Starting point is 00:32:53 It must belong to us. We create their wealth. The only way to save this world is to take it back. If we want to save democracy, the only way to do it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon Musk rules as a tyrant. Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast at its lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too. They must cease to rule. They must cease to exist, not as individuals, but as a class. And the only way to do that is by giving control of their power and their property and their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of it in the first

Starting point is 00:33:29 place. That is the tax that we have in front of us. The challenge that we face is that we face effectively the entire might of the American state, which is the most like one of the most powerful apparatuses of oppression that has ever been built. Our advantage is that that apparatus of oppression is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk who are, and I cannot emphasize this enough, maybe the two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan's after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the Revolutions podcast concluded to be the great idiots of history who by their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision at every

Starting point is 00:34:06 single moment are what makes revolutions possible. And if these people are not the great idiots of history that allow us to bring them down and stop them from destroying everything that has ever been in this world that is good, then nothing else is. Yeah, we have the one great stroke of good fortune we have, right, is that all power has been concentrated in the hands of complete idiots who are addicted to diet coke and being mad at their children. Yep, and they, you know, we have already seen,

Starting point is 00:34:41 they don't understand how this apparatus works, right? They fired the nuke police by accident. Yeah. So... It's very funny that they're stripping themselves of the means of coercive violence. Yeah. When we started, mate, you spoke about controlled opposition, right? And the idea that the great debate of our time is how much state regulation we should

Starting point is 00:35:00 have and how much unfettered anarcho-capitalism we should have. They are drinking the Kool-Aid that got them in power. That is the one thing going in our favor right now that they are dismantling the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe the myth that if the state didn't exist they could be even more wealthy and even more tyrannical. Yeah, and well and the second advantage that we have is that they have been they have said about Systematically alienating every single group of people who they would need as their political base. They are pissing off the military They are pissing off the intelligence services

Starting point is 00:35:33 They are going through and they are like systematically pissing off the farm states And you know like the farmers obviously do not have that like don't fucking matter, but they're picking they're pissing off the agro businesses They are individually going through and pissing off a whole bunch of the of the of the country scientific resources they're going through. They're like fucking with the Social Security Administration. They are individually going through and pissing off every single group of people on Earth who matter and people who like us under this system aren't supposed to matter until we fucking do something about it.

Starting point is 00:36:02 And, you know, the other big thing that we have right now is that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by by actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do and By pulling apart his base of support and by putting together Coalitions of some of these people and not all of them some of them some of them you just need to divide and conquer by Getting them out from backing him right like the whole thing With with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was that people just mostly stayed home. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:27 And that was how they won. Like that is largely what we need. We need these people to stay home, but these people can and will, if we have anything to say about it, be fucking driven home, and hopefully we can bury both the gravediggers and the people whose graves they were digging in the same spot in the dustbin of history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again. and I'll see you next time. Plus I Heart Innovator Award recipient, Lady Gaga. I Heart Icon Award recipient, Mariah Carey. And I Heart Breakthrough Award recipient, Gracie Abrams. Watch live on Fox, Monday, March 17th. At 8, 7 Central. Do you remember what you said

Starting point is 00:37:36 the first night I came over here? How goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, I Heart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person?

Starting point is 00:37:58 Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Hmm, pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill-conceived investigative hookups. Mama always used to say, God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now, take a big whiff my brah. Listen to the hookup on the iHeart Radio

Starting point is 00:38:28 app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Mark Seale and I'm Nathan King. This is Leave the Gun, Take the Canole. The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. Leave the Gun, Take the Canole is based on my co-host Mark's best-selling book of the same title. And on this show, we call upon his years of research to help unpack the story behind the godfather's birth from start to finish. This is really the first interview I've done in bed.

Starting point is 00:38:59 We sift through innumerable accounts. I see 35 pages in the real world. Many of them conflicting. That's nonsense. There were 60 pages. And try to very much. Many of them conflicting. That's nonsense. There were 60 pages. And try to get to the truth of what really happened. And they said, we're finished, this is over. They know this is not gonna work.

Starting point is 00:39:12 You gotta get rid of those guys, this is a disaster. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Kahn, Talia Shire, and many others. Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:39:35 My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious. Somebody violated the FBI and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. The FBI went around to all their neighbors and said to them, do you think these people are good Americans?

Starting point is 00:40:04 It's got heists, tragedy, a trial of the century, and the god damn best love story you've ever heard. I picked up the phone and my thought was, this is the most important phone call I'll ever make in my life. I couldn't believe it. I mean, Brendan, it was divine intervention. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your

Starting point is 00:40:29 podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen here, the show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis, and I'm joined today by a special guest host, Bridget Todd. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I am completely excited to be here. I am a listener of the show. So it feels like getting to be on a show that I actually freak out too often. And I'm very excited for you to be here because you have a special report on

Starting point is 00:41:04 one of the people who I've been cyberstalking for years. Uh... Uh... And I'm very excited to hear the details of what she's been up to these past few weeks. I kind of know the rough overview, because again, because of my cyberstalking. But I've not done a deep dive the way you have. So I'm very excited to hear an update on this character. So it sounds like we are in a similar place when it comes to this person.

Starting point is 00:41:30 And this person is none other than Candice Owens. First of all, what are your thoughts on her? Because I am low key fascinated with her. I follow her on social media. I watch her videos. Like I am like weirdly captivated by her. I mean, I've covered her mostly through her involvement with Daily Wire. I've talked a little bit about kind of how that all fell apart, you know, like a year and a half ago or so.

Starting point is 00:41:55 I've talked a little bit about her involvement in Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk. And she's just kind of been one of these like randomly, you know, like orbiters of like the online,, right-wing content sphere for, I don't know, the past six years at least. And I typically focus more on the Ben Shapiro's, the Matt Walsh's, you know, back in the day, the Steven Crowder's and stuff. But Candace was always just like around. And she definitely went after a different demographic than what my usual focus is, right? I'm focused on what's going on with straight white men.

Starting point is 00:42:29 Like, why are they like this? And who is targeting them? And that's like the Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder kind of angle. Candace Owens has kind of a broader net that she targets with her content. So she's always kind of come up as a side character. I don't think I've ever done like a distinct focus on her before, besides just, you know, whatever kind of crazy post or like, you know, anti-trans or like very like weird, like racist rant that she goes on like every once in a while.

Starting point is 00:42:57 Yes. So there is so much to talk about when it comes to Candace Owens. I'm sort of like you, like I sort of saw her as a side character, but only recently have I realized, like, oh, people in my life are listening to Candace Owens and citing Candace Owens, and they have no idea anything about her backstory, all the stuff that you were just talking about. She's like reinvented herself like multiple times.

Starting point is 00:43:20 And, you know, some people who mainly come at this from like the anti-fascist research perspective might not be aware of her, like, latest rebrand, which is what I'm excited to hear about today. Yes. I just remembered how she had that whole event with Kanye when she did her, like, BLM documentary. That was a whole other Candice era.

Starting point is 00:43:38 Yeah, so much. Oh, my God. I have to say, I was, like, low-key embarrassed for her because, like, during her Kanye West era she was like Kanye West designed the couture outfits for my blexit movement and Kanye West was like no I fucking didn't and like I was like Oh, they're so embarrassing that you like that you like publicly aligned yourself with Kanye West only for him to basically like Dis you publicly right after.

Starting point is 00:44:06 Yeah. And then come out as like an explicit neo-Nazi like two weeks later. Yes! Yes! Ugh. Candice, girl. So I want to talk about her. Like, I don't want to spend too much time on her background, but there are some pieces that I think like are good for understanding kind of who she is, this chameleon figure that she's been. Totally.

Starting point is 00:44:23 If there is not like a behind the bastards on her, do you know if there is? There should be if there's not. Not yet. Similarly on Bastards, she's been one of one of these like recurring characters. Oh, my God. But she has not had a distinct focus. Robert Evans, get on it, because we need the Candace Owens behind the Bastards. So Candace grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. While she was a student there, she went through this horrible sounding racial harassment.

Starting point is 00:44:47 A classmate left her like this racist death threat on her voicemail that turned into like a pretty serious local scandal because it turned out the student who made that threat via voicemail did so in a car with a group of students that included the son of the then mayor and then future Democratic governor of Connecticut, Danil Malloy. So she got tons of support from the local chapter of the NAACP and her family ended up suing the Stamford Board of Education and Federal Court for failing to protect her rights resulting in a $37,500 settlement. She went on to study journalism at University of Rhode Island before dropping out This is like the early 2000s Yes This was like young like baby Candace high school Candace before she was the Candace Owen that we know today Yeah

Starting point is 00:45:35 So I sort of like almost see a little bit of myself and where she got her star Like me she was an early adopter of using the internet to talk about things like race and politics. Like me, that also seemed to sort of manifest in a lot of like low-hanging fruit shitposts on the early days of blogging. Like in 2015, she was writing blogs making fun of Trump's penis size. Sure. Many such cases. Yes, many such cases. Yes, many such cases. So in 2015, Owens is writing a blog called Degree 180, where she wrote pieces criticizing conservative Republicans writing about the quote,

Starting point is 00:46:12 that shit crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party. The good news is they will eventually die off peacefully and in their sleep, we hope. And then we can get right on with the obvious social change that needs to happen immediately, she wrote on her blog. So back then, she was really someone who had like a progressive point of view and was doing a lot of public writing about what she was seeing and experiencing in politics at the time.

Starting point is 00:46:37 Yeah, no, this is something that I guess some people might not know if they've only like become aware of her through daily wires. Yeah, like in the pre 2016, like Buzzfeed internet kind of sphere, she was just like one of like these people who would have like progressive like ish takes, criticize embarrassing politicians and like overtly racist stuff happening. And then the degree to which this this like heel turn happens is like one of the most stark examples I've seen in like a... I don't know, I'm trying to think of it if there's like any exact parallel. I don't know, there's like certainly some detransitioned grifters.

Starting point is 00:47:15 There used to be like ex-gay influencers or, you know, this is like proto-influencers, kind of before influencers were a thing, like ex-gay speakers. But yeah, the switch around on Candace from these blog posts is so concentrated. So in her own words, she describes it as happening overnight. There you go. Yeah, how it happened is like fascinating to me. So in 2016, when Gamergate was in full swing,

Starting point is 00:47:42 Owens launched a Kickstarter for a project called Social Autopsy, which she described as a way to catalog the abuses of trolls and cyberbullies. Fun fact, that Kickstarter is still up today. It is such a weird time capsule of a different time. There's like a video of her speaking earnestly about the need to like have the internet be a like safer, more equitable landscape. It is nuts.

Starting point is 00:48:04 Like people should go listen to her speaking about this project. So the plan for this project was essentially that she would create a way to de-anonymize online commentators and then connect them with their real names and their real life employers. And what's so funny is that that is the very same argument that a lot of people use people who like want to Restrict the open internet still use today that like problems on the internet Online harassment and abuse would all be improved if only everybody had to use their government ID and government names to access the internet And so like it's very funny that that idea it was bad then and it didn't really die It was just recycled into today.

Starting point is 00:48:46 Yeah. I mean, like there's a version of this that happens, or at least it kind of used to happen more in regards to like anti-fascist research where like you're like, you know, identify specific, like extremely racist accounts or like explicit neo-Nazis and contact their employer in an attempt to get, to get them fired so they can focus on getting a new job and supporting themselves rather than doing racism online and in person. Especially if he's like, you know, a member of like a group, whether that be, you know, the Proud Boys back in the day

Starting point is 00:49:15 or many, many other groups. Patriot Prayer, now Patriot Front, that sort of thing. It's funny how hated this tactic is soon to be by people like Candace and the Daily Wire people, but he or she's advocating it herself. Exactly. And it's like post Anita Sarkeesian kind of content like world. Yeah. So pretty much everybody thought this was a bad idea, including video game developer

Starting point is 00:49:39 Zoe Quinn, who folks might remember was kind of at the center of Gamergate and was, like, viciously attacked. Owens was subsequently harassed and doxed, and she blamed Zo Hwin and other feminists for this and said so publicly. As you can probably guess, like, people like Milo Yiannopoulos loved this. People who were promoters of Gamergate really hyped up Owens' claims that, like, yes, feminists were actually the ones doing all the online harassing.

Starting point is 00:50:06 Okay. I can see where this is going. So this event is what Owens credits with her turn from progressive to, quote, becoming a red-pilled radical. She says, I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls. She starts promoting right-wing viewpoints

Starting point is 00:50:26 on her YouTube channel, calling herself, quote, red pill black, which I gotta say is pretty good branding. Like, I'm not mad at the branding there. It's like, okay, black woman talking about right-wing stuff, red pill black, I get it, I get it. Yeah, I'm interested to see how much the checkbook was a consideration here. Oh, yes. How much her Kickstarter got versus how much she realized she could get

Starting point is 00:50:49 if she jumped on the other side of the content churn. Well, she almost instantly gets noticed by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Points USA, right? And he hires her almost immediately. She starts cranking out these videos that really perform quite well, like her videos really go viral. immediately. She starts cranking out these videos that really perform quite well. Like her videos really go viral. Videos where she's doing things like dismissing the 2017 white supremacist

Starting point is 00:51:12 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Alex Jones gets her to co-host some of his Infowars show. She's doing stints on Fox News as a paid commentator. Like, business is booming for Candace Owens from this turn. Yeah, this is this is around when I became aware of her. Yes. In 2021, she joins up with the Daily Wire. There was so much fanfare around them hiring Candace. Like it was a big deal. She moved to Nashville.

Starting point is 00:51:37 Yeah. Fun fact, there was even a House Joint Resolution, House Joint Resolution 350, a resolution in the Tennessee government to congratulate Candace Owens on relocating to Tennessee and for her work at Daily Wire that reads, whereas Ms. Owens has earned the admiration and respect of millions of Americans through her activism in support of President Trump as a black woman and her perceptive criticism of creeping socialism and leftist political tyranny. Very cool stuff. Yeah. Imagine it being like a joint resolution in your local government when you move someplace.

Starting point is 00:52:12 Yeah. The governor of Tennessee was like super excited when the Daily Wire relocated their headquarters to Tennessee and brought in all these people. There was like so many private dinners, meetings. There was a number of resolutions welcoming the Daily Wire to Tennessee in this 2021 period as they were just starting to launch their own streaming service website. Which is why they recruited Candace, is because they were looking for content creators to fill out their slate. So you would think that this should be a match made in heaven, right?

Starting point is 00:52:44 Smooth sailing, they need incendiary content creators, she's an incendiary content creator, should be a match made in heaven. Perfect. Not quite. Because things end in like this really messy public fallout just a few years later. So, I know that you've done episodes on this. From my perspective, and I would love to know what you think, it's not 100% clear what went down, but the public friction between Candice Owens and Ben Shapiro,

Starting point is 00:53:11 one of the founders of Daily Wire, it seemed to be, like, related to reactions around the situation in Gaza. Yeah, totally. So, Ben Shapiro is Jewish, and Owens, as we said, has said and done, like, a lot of anti-Semitic stuff, like a lot. And like actual anti-Semitic stuff, like that people use that as a way to like shut down like very very admirable like like like pro-Palestinian like activism. No, like Candice Owens just is anti-Semitic. And it's the same thing with Jackson Hinkel.

Starting point is 00:53:46 And she made an escalating series of anti-Semitic claims after October 7th, which slowly kind of broke with the company and banned more and more and more over a series of a few months. Yes. It's funny because it also kind of mirrors this online fight she had with Steven Crowder like a year or so prior when Daily Wire was trying to recruit him. And then she got informed about how abusive he was to his wife. And then she went on a media blitz against him as he was in negotiations with the Daily Wire. She's very willing to stir shit up.

Starting point is 00:54:24 Even if it goes against her own interests or the interests of like whatever company she works for. Like she is absolutely willing to like make like some kind of like chaotic spectacle regardless of her own like, you know, financial security, I guess. Yes, like she, I'm so glad that you mentioned that. She is not afraid to get down and dirty in public. And I do think like, you know, as a black woman who works with a lot of white men,

Starting point is 00:54:48 I would imagine that she's probably thinking, I have to have some kind of decorum. I don't want anyone to say that I'm being a crazy black woman or whatever. It seems like she has no such qualms. She is like, I will make this a public messy fight, and I am not afraid to make a genuine spectacle of myself. Yeah. And so it is really important to note that, like, as you said,

Starting point is 00:55:10 she wasn't just, like, criticizing the Israeli state. She was, like, getting into, like, blood libel and, like, deep conspiracy theories. Yeah, no, it was, there was some really nasty posts. Yeah, like, one of the things that she said, she's claimed that Judaism was, quote, a pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons and child sacrifice, and that

Starting point is 00:55:30 she was waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power. Like, stuff like that. Not great. Not good. Not good. So, as you said, like, this starts to become like a public feud toward her employer. She wrote on Twitter, no one can serve two masters and ended her post writing,

Starting point is 00:55:48 you cannot serve both God and money. To which Ben Shapiro, her boss tweets, like quote tweeted, Oh my God, like Candice, if you feel that taking money from the daily wire somehow becomes between you and God, by all means quit. Like messy as hell.

Starting point is 00:56:02 It's crazy that instead of having like a company meeting they were just doing this on Twitter.com. Oh my god. My messy ass was eating it up. I was like keep fighting let them fight. Oh, yeah No, absolutely. I'm totally willing to like watch this watch this go down. I do not want to get involved Right, right, right Owens like went on Tucker Carlson show and said that Ben Shapiro was, quote, acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged for weeks now. She said that Shapiro, quote, crossed a certain line. When you come for scripture and read yourself into it, I will not tolerate it. Very cool.

Starting point is 00:56:35 Yeah. So at one point, Owens tweets that she wants Ben Shapiro to have a public, like, debate with her, moderated by podcaster Patrick Bett-David. Ben Shapiro was having a public like debate with her moderated by podcaster Patrick Bette-David. Ben Shapiro was having none of this. He tweets, Candice, I can see why you'd want to hide behind a moderator, particularly one who said we should rename our company, quote, daily Jewish wire just yesterday. No. Jesus Christ.

Starting point is 00:56:58 One on one, Monday at five, we can sit down and have a healthy debate like adults and we'll live stream it on X and YouTube. Take it or leave it. As to the true reason why you didn't respond to my offer to sit down with you and discuss these issues publicly or privately back in February, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about." Like this is lawyer employee going at it on Twitter. I can't believe I'm taking Ben Shapiro's side here, not just because he's Ben Shapiro, but also because he's an employer. But it's a really, it's a really tough situation here.

Starting point is 00:57:26 Yeah, I feel the same way because like, it's just not a great look to have somebody that you just hired to all this fanfare coming at you like this on Twitter. Like, and I think, I mean, this is just my opinion. So like, take that for what it's worth. Just as somebody who has worked in media and been around the block. The reason why I'm not comfortable saying their feud was entirely based on Owens' anti-Semitic comments and behavior is that she just went so hard and so public

Starting point is 00:57:53 that something to me, I almost wonder if there was a contract dispute here that she was like, oh, I can make more money on my own. I gotta get out of this contract or something because it just doesn't smell right. I mean, yeah. If she had an inclination that she could afford to lose this job because she might make more money on her own, then yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:58:11 That would allow her to push this further than what she might otherwise might. There's been a lot of discussion in the right wing content sphere about the Daily Wire's fairly restrictive contracts, despite still getting paid like tens of millions of dollars. There is restrictions on what happens when you lose monetization, because the Daily Wire is like a company trying to make a profit. So totally, there could absolutely be other financial stuff going on here. I think it's more like an interlocking series of issues rather than just one thing or another.

Starting point is 00:58:39 TIA It's like a series of issues rather than just one thing or another. Yes. So after Rabbi Shmuley Boteach criticized Owens for her defenses of Kanye West, Owens liked to tweet asking Boteach if he was, quote, drunk on Christian blood again. Jesus. And I guess that was the final straw. A few days later, Daily Wire and Candace Owens ended their relationship with Owens tweeting, the rumors are true. I am finally free. Whew. Ha ha ha.

Starting point is 00:59:06 ["The Daily Wire"] Okay, so that's what happened with her and Daily Wire. So where is she now? Well, this is where the story gets interesting because I had not heard from Candace Owens in a minute, and my reintroduction to her happened recently when I was trying to make sense of the dispute between two Hollywood A-listers,

Starting point is 00:59:33 Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. So the issue between Blake and Justin, it's a little bit complicated and ongoing, but it's actually a pretty interesting story that includes a lot of things that I enjoy, like how celebrities use media and how social media platforms can be weaponized for or against specific people.

Starting point is 00:59:50 Email correspondence, where people make themselves look terrible in writing because they do not expect those emails to be in a deposition later. Like, that is my favorite thing in the world. Like, please continue to put your wrongdoing in writing so that my nosy ass can read it later and be like, ooh, messy. So I do encourage like folks to read up on it because it does go beyond just like two

Starting point is 01:00:11 celebrities having a feud. But you don't really need to know the specifics for our purposes. The quick and dirty version is that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were in a movie adaptation of the very popular novel by Colleen Hoover called It Starts With Us. In December, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and starting a smear campaign against her. Baldoni strongly denies that

Starting point is 01:00:33 and has sued her in response. Both cams have released information like emails, text messages, and video, attempting to make the other look bad. So it has kind of turned into one of those ink blot tests that changes depending on whose version you buy. Version one is that Blake Lively was being sexually harassed on set by a fake feminist ally

Starting point is 01:00:54 who is actually an abusive man. Or version two, that Blake Lively is an egomaniac who was using her star power and A-list celebrity network like her husband, Ryan Reynolds, from Deadpool, to control the narrative around her being a nightmare on set and steamrolling everybody on this project. Cool. Yes.

Starting point is 01:01:13 And so, what's interesting about this to me is that it's one of those stories where algorithmically, it depends on what silo or what pocket of the internet you're at to determine what version of this story you're getting, much like Johnny Depp's defamation lawsuit. It sounds too much like the Johnny Depp thing, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And so, for whatever reason, TikTok thinks I hate Blake Lively

Starting point is 01:01:37 and want to pour over every nuance of how she is a fraud, right? But someone else's TikTok might be like, no, Blake Lively, we should be supporting her. It's one of those situations where, just depending on where you are on the internet, you might get a very different impression of the public sentiment leaning one way or another. Yeah, yeah, this is all the types of things

Starting point is 01:01:56 I try to avoid learning about at almost all costs. So, thanks. Yes, I do not blame you. Thanks for letting me know. So, I was trying to get to the bottom of it, because I kept hearing about it, like everyone was talking about it. So, I'm talking to my cousins, who I would lovingly describe as normies, and that they are not super online.

Starting point is 01:02:15 It's like they're not like you and me, they're not like deep into the depths of extremism or anything like that. No, they're not watching like the Daily Wire for fun slash for work. Yes. Yes. And my cousins are like, oh my God, there is this black girl journalist who has been following everything and breaking it down. She has all the tea. We'll tag you. That journalist was Candace Owens.

Starting point is 01:02:37 Okay. So, you know, Candace has been making so many videos off of this and like her coverage, coverage in quotes, has really taken off online. As The Cut put it in a piece called Candace Owens has gone mainstream, they write, the right-wing commentators coverage of the Blake Lively Justin Boldani case has reached millions of viewers. Owens' podcast was hours and hours of analysis of the case, deep dives into court filings,

Starting point is 01:03:04 tabloid news stories, even Ryan Reynolds' recent SNL 50th anniversary special appearance. One listener said, she's really been able to go in and pinpoint discrepancies in some of the things Blake Lively has said, rather than us having to go through it on our own. Ah, of course. It's the woman who's lying about being sexually harassed, of course. One listener of her podcast says she recognizes that Owen seems to have a pro-Baldani bias, but she doesn't care because, quote, she's urging us to look past the fact that this

Starting point is 01:03:31 is not a feminist issue at all, that it's about getting justice for whoever is being wronged here. She's uniting the left and the right. The right-wing women's magazine also published a headline about this, saying, how Candace Owens is uniting conservatives and liberals with her It Ends With Us coverage. So her coverage of this dispute has really allowed her to attract a lot more viewers beyond her like normal right-wing extremist base which has generally been like a lot of white men like that who was really listening to her content before when she

Starting point is 01:04:03 was with Daily Wire now She has really branched out So like normies like my cousins who have no idea who Owens is have no idea her background her past the work that she Has done and just think like oh, she's a normal entertainment journalist like digging and getting the dirt I know she's doing this like on her podcast. I assume YouTube as well She also just like kind of like flood TikTok, trying to flood like Instagram Reels. Is this kind of part of how she's trying to like expand her reach?

Starting point is 01:04:30 It is like she's everywhere. And then she has her longer form podcast and YouTube, but then clips of her like, you know, breaking down the top lies or top inaccuracies and things that Blake Lively has said, those go super viral on social media, the short clips.

Starting point is 01:04:46 Yeah. Okay. And all of this has been just gangbusters for her growth and engagement. Here's how The Cut put it. Since Owen started covering the Lively-Baldani case, her YouTube channel has exploded in popularity, allowing her to attract a much larger fan base than the audience of hardcore conservatives she has amassed over the years. Each episode about Lively racks up at least 1.5 million views.

Starting point is 01:05:10 In the past month alone, Owens has amassed more than 450,000 new subscribers on YouTube, and her total video views have quadrupled since this time last year. This is according to data from the platform Social Blade. Oh, no. Over the past three months, her audience on YouTube has almost started skewing 65% female, according to data provided by a spokesperson,

Starting point is 01:05:29 a marked shift from her past fan base. So, yeah, she's exploding in popularity. She's everywhere. And now she's attracting, like, normie women who are just coming in for this celebrity dispute. Yeah. That's probably not gonna end well, huh? Well, I don't think it will end well.

Starting point is 01:05:47 You know, I was, like, racking my brain trying to figure out, like, why has this story taken off so much for Owens? And there are a couple of reasons I think this is, like, working for her. One, I hate to say it, but she is actually genuinely interesting to listen to. You know, when she was a progressive voice online, she definitely was somebody who had a point of view and a clear voice and a perspective.

Starting point is 01:06:10 And that really comes through when she's breaking down Blake Lively in these videos. She has a way of speaking that really makes you pay attention and signals to the listener, like, this person is really breaking it down. It's the same reason why on TikTok or social media, when someone is like story time or like, I'm about to tell you all the details of something, those videos always perform very well on social media. And I think that Owens is just very good at knowing

Starting point is 01:06:36 how to hold somebody's attention online. Like I have to say it. Sure, I mean, she's been doing the content churn for almost a decade now. Like, yeah, you do get good at it on like a technical proficiency level. Yes. Also, you know, we just love good old fashioned misogyny. And if that misogyny can be laced with like a conspiracy theory, I think that it's even

Starting point is 01:07:00 better. So like, I think that part of this is just like, social media platforms are always going to amplify misogyny. I would argue that things like misogyny, transphobia, misogynoir, racism, all of that is like baked into the experience of showing up online as a feature, not a bug. And I think that Owens takes it even further because she is breaking it down.

Starting point is 01:07:22 Like she's uncovering some conspiracy. Like it's not just, let's talk about Blake Lively. It's I'm uncovering the web of lies and I'm gonna expose Blake Lively's dark truth, right? And so like, of course that's gonna take off. And she does gain this element of authority because she's a woman talking about this. It makes men feel better about being misogynistic

Starting point is 01:07:44 because a woman's telling them it's okay to. I mean, this is the same thing that she was able to weaponize for all of her anti-Black Lives Matter stuff, for all of her racism isn't real things. She tries to use that to her advantage, mostly to make white members of her audience feel good about their own racism because a black woman told them it's actually okay. And that's been a big part of her audience feel good about their own racism because a black woman told them it's actually okay. And that's been a big part of her career

Starting point is 01:08:09 the past few years. Exactly that. And I think she really understands the inviting power of taking what you might think of as a contrarian stance on something. Yeah, totally. After the Me Too movement, how many women got engagement by taking a contrarian stance, right?

Starting point is 01:08:26 Like, I think going against the conventional attitude that says like, oh, we have to automatically support the woman in this dispute probably makes people tuning into Owens' breakdowns feel like they're like free thinkers who are going against the grain, you know, by taking an unpopular opinion, which I do think connects to her more odious stances on things like trans people and women and Jewish people. Yeah. No, I mean, like you say the same thing with like, you know, like the gaze against groomers thing, right wing trans influencers, D trans influencers. It's the same like Gambit.

Starting point is 01:08:58 And certainly I think like, yeah, like your identification of her as like a professional contrarian is like very very key to her success Exactly. I also think like part of the reason why people are attracted to conspiracy theories is that it allows for Like fantasy world-building and I think that I really see the ways that she injects that into her coverage even the word coverage I put that in quotes because like She is like a wild person so her coverage is like also wild. She does not adhere to as she puts it quote a traditional style of reporting. You know, I'll take her word for that one. You know what? I'll I'll believe her on that that single point.

Starting point is 01:09:36 Yeah, I believe her. I believe that. You know, she amplifies rumors and even once she read a letter that she said that she got from rumors and even once she read a letter that she said that she got from Blake Lively's husband Ryan Reynolds his acting coach when he was 12 and His acting coach said that Ryan Reynolds was an obnoxious kid. You know what I also believe it. I I have no trouble believing that like her coverage. It includes like side. Yeah, things that have no bearing on this whatsoever. I mean, this focus on this conspiratorial Ben is like this same... She's using the same tactics she did for her Black Lives Matter documentary, for most of her political work.

Starting point is 01:10:16 She's using the same tactics over and over again. And eventually she reaches this stress point or this threshold where she cannot see a path forward or she can't see a way to surpass it and then she does a pivot. This happened with her progressive blog. This happened even at the Daily Wire. She doesn't work with Turning Point USA anymore. And this new pivot is learning, hey, it's super lucrative to be a tabloid entertainment

Starting point is 01:10:41 quote unquote journalist. Very easy, super lucrative, and all of the tactics you learned on the right-wing media sphere work great here. Like all of this like conspiratorial thinking, really a disregard for like facts and evidence, works perfect for this sort of like rumor based reporting. And it spreads like crazy. And yeah, it spreads across political lines. You don't, you aren't just targeting the mega people or like the far right. This can be so much more broad to like the giant audience

Starting point is 01:11:09 of like, you know, quote unquote, like apolitical people go to these platforms for a form of like, of like escapism and entertainment rather than just hearing about politics yet again. Because that's, you know, very, very tiring. Yeah, and I think in my mind, all of it is sort of connected. Like, Ben Shapiro, nobody cared more about celebrities or talked more about celebrities than Ben Shapiro.

Starting point is 01:11:34 He would love to be like, I don't care what Hollywood is doing, but he was obsessed with, like, Beyonce and Meg Thee Stallion. Like, it was just like a negative obsession. Like, you know, anti-fandom is still fandom. When you make video after video about how much you don't like Meg Thee Stallion, like, it was just like a negative obsession. Like, you know, anti-fandom is still fandom. When you make video after video about how much you don't like Meg The Stallion, in a kind of way, you are a fan just in the opposite direction. And so I think that Candace Owens really took that and learned how to perfect it. Because she is much, I think that she is much better at this than Ben Shapiro is,

Starting point is 01:12:01 like, the evidence being that, like, her YouTube channel is exploding with people who probably would never watch any of Ben Shapiro's content. The big bummer for me is that the Daily Wire's first film, Lady Ballers, left us on a cliffhanger with Candace Owens and Matt Walsh sitting in a car talking about how Matt Walsh planned this entire like plot of the film as as some kind of scheme or social experiment. And it was implied there would be more. It was like Avengers Nick Fury type post-credit scene. And now we're never gonna learn what Candace Owens and Matt Walsh get up to now. Because she's left the company, she's now doing her own thing.

Starting point is 01:12:42 So now we just have this dangling plot thread that's just gonna bug me forever. Like, what does the Candace Owens character at the end of Lady Ballers do next? I'm gonna be thinking about this for like years. America deserves closure. We deserve to know. Just putting that out there. Uh, I think we do deserve closure. I just think my closure's gonna be a little bit different.

Starting point is 01:13:01 I am very fine having all of these plot threads wrapped up quite quickly, but I do not see that in the cards immediately. So in terms of where she's at now, like, you know, my question is like, has Owens, has this kind of like mainstream audience that she's been able to amass, has she changed her views? Is she trying to do a rebrand or a pivot? In an interview she said, in terms of my perspective, I haven't changed anything. I've been anti-MeToo since long before it was cool.

Starting point is 01:13:42 Sure. I mean, that can be true. It's also true that she's getting better at propaganda and widening her footprint, which, yeah, then once her audience gets bigger, she might be able to slip in more things that I would find unsavory to a larger audience over time. But she also might be content to keep growing that and be slightly less off putting in the meantime. But no, I mean, like there's also just a huge audience for like the anti-woke

Starting point is 01:14:07 backlash, anti-MeToo stuff right now. Like that's kind of that's kind of like the new mainstream, frankly. So I am certain that she's going to try to continue to like flex that and grow that in the in the next few months, years. Yeah. So I agree with you. I believe Owens when she says that like her stances have not changed much. It's easy to be like, oh, well, she's pivoting to go mainstream now that she has these like women in her audience who are interested in celebrity. And you can honestly, you can sort of see some of this in changes to her physical appearance.

Starting point is 01:14:38 Like she was sort of known for having very severe hair. The joke being that she had alienated herself so much from her fellow black people that like, no black person was going to do her hair and that's why it looks that way. But lately, you've really seen this like softening. She's kind of going for like a softer public look. She is pivoting to different kinds of programming. She's branched out into doing a book club for paying subscribers and some kind of a fitness program. That makes sense.

Starting point is 01:15:05 Yeah, totally. Like the health guru fitness entertainment bubble. Yeah, that's huge. That's such a good grift. She's gonna make so much money. Yeah. Yeah, she is. But I really agree with you, Gare,

Starting point is 01:15:17 that I think that these new followers are certainly going to be walked out a pipeline that includes per extremist attitude just using celebrity scandal as a hook. Because like, as you said, celebrity scandals and celebrity stories are just considered fluff for a lot of people. So like, people who care about extremist content and ideology are maybe not seeing that as a space that they need to pay too close of attention to about these stories that you

Starting point is 01:15:43 might see on the cover of an US Weekly. But these stories actually can be used to tap into extremist ideologies and unleash them in a whole new audience. And like you were saying, if you are just watching a podcast because you wanna be entertained about a story about two celebrities,

Starting point is 01:15:59 you might not have your bullshit detector up to be like, wait, is this extremist content? Because it's seen and treated as a less charged space. And so that line of thinking that says that this is just fluff, it doesn't really matter what happens in celebrity news, it's incorrect, it is dangerous because it lends itself to people being more susceptible to it

Starting point is 01:16:20 when extremist content is slipped in without even really realizing it. I mean, and that relates even to the originator of this Gamergate stuff and the whole like anti-woke like media fandom content sphere, right? Where so much of like the anti-woke backlash has been built on people complaining that Star Wars is too woke now. There's too many women in movies. There's too many black people in commercials. Where do all the white people go? There's too many gay people in TV. There's too many black people in commercials, where do all the white people go? There's too many gay people in TV, there's too many trans people in TV. And like that

Starting point is 01:16:49 is his is definitely focused on by the rest of the Daily Wire goons. And you can very easily pivot back to that sort of cultural commentary. After you're done talking about Blake Lively, like this is this is a very small jump where you're still talking about the entertainment industry. But with this like is a very small jump where you're still talking about the entertainment industry. But with this like anti woke framing of like, you know, why is all these minorities here? Why are they pushing transgenderism on kids? You know, whether that be talking about, you know, trans actors in the business, whether you be talking about, you know, like female led or like diversity casting, like all that

Starting point is 01:17:23 kind of stuff that especially Candace can use her like contrarian position to speak on authority about talking about why are you recasting these legacy characters to be people of color or why is a woman the lead of this thing when it should be actually a man, you know, just like very, very basic stuff that's been a part of like the YouTube slop for a decade now. But it still takes in a lot of clicks. And it is a lot of the Daily Wire and right wing content still does. It's all this weird culture war stuff. It's very, very tied in with Hollywood.

Starting point is 01:17:59 Like you were saying about how Ben Shapiro claims to hate Hollywood, he's trying to build his own alternative to it? But he can't stop talking about it. Like he can't stop complaining about Disney's Snow White. And I can see Candace doing like the exact same thing. But now with like an honestly, like a bigger, a bigger, more like a political audience that's much more malleable and can be shaped around these larger cultural trends when you think about this, like perception of this backlash against wokeness.

Starting point is 01:18:25 I absolutely think that's what we're going to see. And I can tell you, we can finish by, I can tell you about her next big pet issue, which is going to be championing Harvey Weinstein, who she has been interviewing him since 2022. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she explains while he is, quote, an immoral man, he is also a victim of the justice system. A victim, sure. A victim. And she says, I've always had faith in our court system, and now it's beginning to change.

Starting point is 01:18:56 Now I'm beginning to wonder if our courtrooms have been politicized. And the thing that's made her think this is Harvey Weinstein. It's wild. I mean, like, Ben Shapiro is starting his own campaign to free Derek Chauvin. I think there's going to be a lot of pressure on the courts right now. I mean, you're seeing that from, like, Elon and Trump as well. I think undermining the authority of the court, I think, is actually kind of part of this larger concerted issue amongst the entirety of the right right now, because this is like their biggest remaining roadblock to achieving their

Starting point is 01:19:25 right wing utopia is the court system. And I, you know, this may not be intentional on every person's part, like Ben Shapiro and Candice Owens aren't, aren't like intentionally collaborating on this, but they may be copying each other's trends. And if they're seeing this, this wider push across a large amount of the right-wing content people to put pressure on various aspects of the courts, including by using high-profile cases like Harvey Weinstein or Derek Chauvin, that's not a great sign. And I can definitely see them trying to do that in conjunction, I guess. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:00 I think we're going to see a lot more of it. Candice has a series coming out called Harvey Speaks that apparently tells his side of the story. So look out for that. And I think that's the thing, like, I think with her content, like when asked why it was, she thought that her Blake Lively stuff was really taking off.

Starting point is 01:20:18 She says that she believes her new fans on the left, quote, have just kind of gotten wise to the fact that maybe women lie just like men. And so I just implore folks that, like, even if you think that you're just, like, retaking in this content because you're following fluffy celebrity news or whatever, it is so easy to go from maybe women lie to maybe women can't be trusted,

Starting point is 01:20:40 or maybe women shouldn't work and have jobs, a stance that Candace herself has actually advocated for, despite very obviously being a working woman. And so I don't think we should trust Candace Owens, even if she does this rebrand. Like, don't let her rebrand herself as like just a celebrity investigative journalist. Like, she put all of these odious views out into the world,

Starting point is 01:20:59 and I don't want her to be able to like soften it, or, you know, soften what it is that she advocates for and what it is that she believes in if that is truly what she's trying to do to just sort of like amass a more mainstream audience. So don't fall for it. If you're getting tagged in Candace Owens' videos, just know what she actually is about. I mean, yeah, I think for our audience, it's more likely that you'll have like family members who are going to be finding this stuff.

Starting point is 01:21:25 And you should find a list of sources, maybe this episode included, but probably you can find some articles as well. Think of some background on Candace's history and previous beliefs. You can pick and choose some of her most outrageous claims. So when your aunt sends you a video about how Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are kidnapping children or something, you can You can maybe inform Aunt Judy that maybe you shouldn't listen to everything this Candace Owens character is saying. Yeah, this Candace Owens might not be on the money.

Starting point is 01:21:59 Might not be on the level. No. Yeah, inform an auntie today. Yes, that's right. And that's all I got. That's it. I don't know how you usually end these episodes. Usually by getting sad, but I don't know. This has been an interesting dive into the life of a woman with many careers.

Starting point is 01:22:21 A chameleon. Many personalities. A chameleon. A chameleon. Many personalities. A chameleon. A chameleon of contrarianism. Ooh, I like that. If I ever write a book about her, that'll be the title. Jesus Christ. Oh, what a nightmare that would be.

Starting point is 01:22:35 Man. Scary. Bridget, where can people find you online? You can find me on my podcast. There are other girls on the internet on this network. I heart radio, I mean. You can find me on Instagram podcast, there are no girls on the internet on this network. I heart radio, I mean. You can find me on Instagram at BridgetMarianDC or on BlueSky at Bridget Todd. Well, thank you so much.

Starting point is 01:22:51 Good luck in DC. Thanks for holding the line out there as Elon puts a killdozer through your entire city. We're doing our best. I would love to talk again about a DC update maybe next time you come on the show. Oh my god, yes please. There we go. Well, we will talk then. Goodbye, everybody. and I'll see you next time. Your host, I Heart Radio, LL Cool J. Are you guys ready to have some fun tonight? Plus I Heart Innovator Award recipient, Lady Gaga.

Starting point is 01:23:47 I Heart Icon Award recipient, Moriah Carey. And I Heart Breakthrough Award recipient, Gracie Abrams. Watch live on Fox, Monday, March 17th. At 8, 7 Central. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, Iart Podcasts, and Ember 20

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Starting point is 01:24:25 Hmm, pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill-conceived, investigative hookups. Mama always used to say, God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn,

Starting point is 01:24:41 no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now, take a big whiff, my brah. Listen to The Hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Mark Seale. And I'm Nathan King.

Starting point is 01:25:02 This is Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli. The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. I'm Mark Seal. And I'm Nathan King. This is Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli. The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli is based on my co-host Mark's best-selling book of the same title. And on this show, we call upon his years of research to help unpack the story behind the godfather's birth from start to finish.

Starting point is 01:25:19 This is really the first interview I've done in bed. We sift through innumerable accounts, I see 35 pages in the re-elections. many of them conflicting, That's nonsense. There were 60 pages. and try to get to the truth of what really happened. And they said, we're finished, this is over.

Starting point is 01:25:35 They know this stuff's gonna work. You gotta get rid of those guys. This is a disaster. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Kahn, Talia Shire, and many others.

Starting point is 01:25:48 Yes, that was the real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Canole on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious somebody violated the FBI and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees.

Starting point is 01:26:22 The FBI went around to all their neighbors and said to them, you think these people are good Americans? It's got heists, tragedy, a trial of the century, and the god damnest love story you've ever heard. I picked up the phone, and my thought was this is the most important phone call I'll ever make in my life. I couldn't believe it.

Starting point is 01:26:43 I mean, Brendan, it was divine intervention. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis, still banned from one of the top 15 highest endowment universities in the country, but I am not banned from this podcast. Today I'm joined by Robert Evans and James Stout to discuss the very troubling news of students having their visas and or green cards revoked by U.S. Customs in relation to anti-genocide protests. James, this is something that you've been putting together a piece on for a while.

Starting point is 01:27:38 Yeah. Repeatedly trying to warn people of Cassandra-like to no avail. Yes. Yes. I do feel like we kind of saw this one coming a little bit, but that doesn't mean it's not bad and specifically the case we're talking about today, I think is particularly egregious because it doesn't actually involve someone's student visa, right? So I've been working for a while on people who actually under the Biden administration were

Starting point is 01:28:06 potentially facing deportation, right? But the material difference between that and now is that those people were facing deportation because the university removed their visas or the university removed them from the university and therefore their visa was no longer valid. In this case, it seems that the order came directly from the State Department to deport a guy whose name is Mahmood Khalil. So Khalil was a prominent activist in the encampment at Columbia, right? But what's notable is that, and the events here, as best we can tell, went down like this. I'm referencing an AP article here that we'll link in the show notes.

Starting point is 01:28:51 ICE agents came to his front door, which is on university property, and told him that they were revoking his student visa and therefore he was being deported. He then informed them that he didn't have a student visa, that he was a legal permanent resident, right? Colloquially referred to as a green card holder. They then told him or his lawyer, at some point he got his lawyer on the phone and was communicating with them through his lawyer. They then told the lawyer that they were revoking the green card. And at some point it's reported that they attempted to detain his wife, who is a US citizen, which of course is not a thing that ICE can do. So the difference between a legal permanent resident and a student visa is like the place I want to start this because they are materially very different, right? Student visas are pretty fragile. People lose

Starting point is 01:29:40 their student visas for lots of things all the time. A green card is a much higher barrier. And the revocation of his green card, we spoke a lot before this episode about exactly kind of where this comes from in Trump's mishmash of executive orders and speeches, right? Because after he was detained, we saw Trump truthing about specifically using the word green card. We also saw Marco Rubio tweeting about removing green cards, right? Rubio being the Secretary of State. Normally the green card wouldn't be a State Department thing. No.

Starting point is 01:30:17 It seems the most likely cause of events, as far as we can tell from what we know right now, today is the 10th of March, is that ICE came thinking he had a student visa. It's not particularly uncommon for ICE raids to not have all the information on someone, from what I understand. I mean, this is just a police thing. Yeah, yeah. It's not just that.

Starting point is 01:30:37 Cops who are doing raids very often don't have all or accurate information. Yeah, ICE in particular very often don't have a judicial warrant. They have a warrant that they made to assign themselves, which is a different thing. They're supposed to require a warrant to get onto Columbia University campus, but as of now, I don't believe Columbia have clarified that they did have. And I think the apology also allows them to allow ICE onto campus in like exigent circumstances.

Starting point is 01:31:01 So we'll have to see what exactly that warrant was for and why exactly Columbia allowed them onto campus. So it seems like they came attempting to evoke this guy's student visa, realized he didn't have a student visa, detained him anyway, and then kind of ex post facto these tweets and statements came out. But Garrison, you found some stuff in, I mean Trump has made previous statements that are kind of unclear, right?

Starting point is 01:31:25 He uses the word aliens a lot. Yeah. So we've been trying to kind of figure out the exact details of like what is going on, what justification they have for doing this and how we can like extrapolate this out to larger trends because deporting like legal residents for college protests is pretty insane. And also the rhetoric coming out of the White House and the White House social media accounts around this incident is extremely worrying. The way they're basically putting up wanted posters for protesters and in general the way that the White House account has been doing this like own the libs like the medic

Starting point is 01:32:05 nationalism that the past few weeks has been has been really upsetting. And this is this has continued around this issue. And I think it is worth focusing on this as like a specific escalation, because you had people like Mamadou Tal, who I think Cornell tried to revoke their student visa, and then he's in some way negotiated back into that to stay on the Interim Provost John Siciliano eventually ruled in Tull's favor. So he did not end up getting deported last year. And now this new development in relation to the Columbia protests is a significant escalation.

Starting point is 01:32:42 Yeah. Because not only is this not just like the university revoking NF1, which they do have the authority to, this is like coming directly from the Trump administration where they are going after specific students without the involvement of the university. And students who may be legal permanent residents. Yeah. Garrison found a fact sheet on Whitehouse.gov

Starting point is 01:33:03 where Trump is quoted as saying, quote, 12 resident aliens who joined in the pro jihadist protests, we put you on notice. Come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you. And that would seem to include the legal permanent residents. Yes. Right. Like resident alien is a tax status. But again, like, I think it's quite possible that the vagueness in the language is deliberate, not necessarily from Trump, but there are other people within the Trump cabinet who might seek to use vagueness for things like this, right? Like, who might see that as a

Starting point is 01:33:35 benefit? Yeah. Well, and you see that with other things like with like with Rubio's State Department directives on trans people right now, where they keep the language intentionally vague. They leave the enforcement up to individual actors, and then they can eventually figure out the logistics in court once people be like, oh no, this is illegal. So yeah, it is vague, because they want to test the actual full authority of their power. But I think the specific fact sheet, which is like a sister article towards this executive order, says, like James was saying, to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice, come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you.

Starting point is 01:34:16 I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before." So there you have him saying both, resident aliens, which we can infer probably refers to green card holders, as well as student visas. So these are two separate things that he has specifically named as going after. And now you see more direction from Rubio after this arrest that happened on Monday, you see more direction from Rubio and the State Department in specifically naming legal permanent residents as targets for removal and targets for ICE actions, which is not something that is extremely common.

Starting point is 01:34:58 Yeah. Where I've seen it before is in cases of material support for terrorism. But that has quite a high bar of proof, right? That's like a listed organization approving a material, i.e. financial or physical support, right? Like in-kind donations. I've written about a guy who was providing material aid to the Islamic State called Sikhi Rami Hodzic, sending stuff from Bass Pro, actually, like thermal scopes and hunting scopes and things like that. But that has a much higher bar than this, which we will see, because we have a legal permanent resident here and they're seeking to revoke that, I imagine we will

Starting point is 01:35:34 see a court case and we will see exactly the justification for revoking his green card in that court case. That will be sometime in the future. Let's go on a quick break and we will come back to discuss some more of the details on what Mark Rubio is actually saying and where this could all end up. Okay, we are back. I would like to talk about specifically some of the rhetoric that Rubio has been using since this arrest and a little bit of what he was saying before. Like we were saying before the break, some of this kind of vague language can kind of be used

Starting point is 01:36:15 to their advantage. And this is certainly like riffing off of very vague language that Trump would use on the campaign trail, right? Where he would talk about wanting to jail or deport protesters like in general, regardless of their student visa holders, green card holders, or just US citizens, right? Like Trump has made statements about wanting to do all of that. And campaigns, like off the cuff statements, and actual like government policy are two different things. And right now, like they're trying to figure out where the line between that is like how much of this

Starting point is 01:36:45 rhetoric can be turned into government policy and we mentioned like the fact sheet from that from the executive order That I believe was signed in January, which is you know to quote unquote combat anti-semitism And then like last week so before this arrest happened we had a post from the secretary Mark Rubio Twitter account official, quote, those who support designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, threaten our national security. The United States has zero tolerance for foreign visitors who support terrorists. Violators of US law, including international students, face visa denial or revocation and deportation, unquote. So that one specifically focuses, I would say, pretty firmly on people who have student

Starting point is 01:37:30 visas, right? He names like visitors. Yeah. And then after the arrest happened, he posted a different statement on his own personal account. Quote, we will be revoking the visas and or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so that they can be deported." Sharing an AP article, and then the Homeland Security DHSGov account posted on March 9,

Starting point is 01:37:56 2025, in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump's executive orders and protecting US national security." And there's now been a flurry of posts from both the White House account and DHS accounts basically posting like a picture of this person saying that he's aligned with Hamas in celebration, almost like styled after a wanted poster, but instead it just reads like arrested. And that is like the rhetoric that they're using right now on their official accounts. Something that like James I think noted noted, it's important to think about if ICE was just freestyling this action

Starting point is 01:38:51 or if there was a directive beforehand to go after green cards specifically, right? And it seems like, at least for the people doing the raid, they did not care. Nor did they know. They weren't informed. They just were told to go after this person from someone higher up. Right. And that, that very well could be Rubio and a lot of DHS is being ran by Stephen Miller right now. Um, a lot of this feels very Miller-esque.

Starting point is 01:39:16 Yeah. We've got an update. As of the time of recording, I've just discovered that Mahmoud Khalil's lawyers filed a lawsuit challenging his detention and a judge in New York City, a federal judge obviously, ordered that Khalil shouldn't be deported while that court then considered his case. Yes, I was going to bring that up. So that also like his case will be considered in New York City, which is probably good for him as opposed to a more conservative jurisdiction elsewhere, right?

Starting point is 01:39:43 Totally. Like this happening in Texas, like in all of those districts where Elon Musk is trying to set up his corporations because there's friendly judges, this would be handled quite differently, right? Yeah. This is something migrants I speak to are at least aware of sometimes that they don't want to enter into Texas because the Fifth Circuit is seen as less favorable to them than, say, the Ninth Circuit, where they would be if they entered in California. I'm sort of surprised if it is a Miller joint, that it isn't someone

Starting point is 01:40:07 like UT Austin or somewhere like that. No, they're going directly after this individual in part because he's somebody that a lot of folks who might otherwise be like up in arms about a move like this would say because of some of his connections and some of the things he said in the past, well, he's, you know, supported groups that are really bad. Like, I think they're really trying to find the first case is they want someone that they can calve a lot of like liberals off from being too scared to support because he said some things that like they don't want to have attached to them.

Starting point is 01:40:41 Like that's, that's how they're and they're going to keep pushing that further and further each time you find some folks who you can scare off a lot of maybe what you might call like their otherwise natural support base, because you can point out this thing or that thing they did that was that was not great. Yeah, ACLU types. Like when I'm not I'm not insulting or trying to say bad things about this guy. I'm just saying like that's that's the tactic here. Right. No. Try to paint this guy as like, well, this guy did this, you do really want to support that,

Starting point is 01:41:07 which is why you have to take an incredibly firm stance that no, the government doesn't get to do this. The State Department doesn't get to do this. Yeah, regardless of any things that this person may have said. Yeah, the First Amendment is for everyone. I don't care what he said, you know? So like, it's also worth noting that Columbia,

Starting point is 01:41:22 specifically, the Interceptors reported on this, that there is a WhatsApp group called Columbia Alumni for Israel. And they have been explicitly trying to identify these students and to call for like prosecution and I guess persecution of these students. So like, I think the Columbia encampment was particularly objectionable to a lot of people. That was kind of the one that got a lot of the national focus in the reporting, right? So it's understandable that that's where they went for this. Yeah, it's high visibility. And I think it's also very likely that they are just looking to have a test case for this

Starting point is 01:42:00 to see if they can create legal precedent for removing people's green cards for, you know, anti-genocide protests, right? And the specific details of that will become more and more or less important based on like the results of the case. As long as they can create that precedent, right? And specifically, like the precedent for revoking a green card, something that's pretty substantial. Yeah. They want something that's like, you know, in their mind, like the most favorable towards their outcome. So, I mean, that's part of what they're trying to do with this specific case. And like it is very much in line with Trump's campaign rhetoric and versions of what Trump has said before.

Starting point is 01:42:36 And now you're seeing someone like Rubio, someone who's, you know, a little bit more policy minded, taking steps towards this outcome. Yeah, which I think is, you know, like the other thing they didn't get to do, I guess, is that they weren't able to like deport the guy at hyper speed, which they have been doing with some people. Yeah. He was detained in New York and then moved to Louisiana. People were very upset about this, rightly, because it's removing him from easy access

Starting point is 01:43:02 to his lawyer and to his family and to his eight month pregnant wife, right? That's all things that should be done. Yeah. It's also something that the Biden administration did routinely. We have other episodes on this, actually, especially in San Diego, where we have some funding that allows people who are detained access to legal assistance. It has been very common for those migrants to be then moved to Texas. I've seen it with migrants I've met at the border and I've looked for them in the ICE immigrant detention locator and they've been moved to Texas. It's not uncommon at all. So it's bad that it happened. It was

Starting point is 01:43:33 bad that it happened under Biden. It's still bad that it's happening now. We shouldn't have let it happen then. We shouldn't support it when it happens now. And I think before we go and break again, I do want to kind of close this section by talking about how like they don't necessarily need an executive order specifically allowing Trump to do this. Like Trump doesn't need to make an executive order like explicitly for this based on like immigration deportation law. Like there will be an argument made in like in court that they have justification for

Starting point is 01:44:04 this action already This is something that I've already been through when I immigrated to the country and like did like my citizenship interview Right, like if you if you have discussed in the past, you know Something that can be construed as support for a terrorist organization that does disqualify you from US citizenship Yeah, right. So there's gonna be a lot of arguments US citizenship. And right. So there's going to be a lot of arguments like around, like specifically these terrorism statutes that will make someone like this a subject for removal. And that's going to be like the angle in which they go about this. And I think that's like worth keeping in mind.

Starting point is 01:44:37 I also think it's worth because I don't want to make this because a lot of people online have this shouldn't be our immediate primary concern. Our immediate primary concern should be Mahmoud and the other people like him who are in situations like him who are going to be targeted. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that like, if they get away with this, at some point they will start saying like,

Starting point is 01:44:55 look, if you support the government describes, like, or any support for any group that the government considers a terrorist, it doesn't matter if you were born here as a citizen, you know, we can start. Like that is a potential in-state of this, considers a terrorist, it doesn't matter if you were born here as a citizen, we can start. That is a potential in-state of this, which is, again, should not be on your front burner, it should be the people being targeted right now, but also an awareness of this is part

Starting point is 01:45:16 of why you have to draw such a hard line. If the situation was reversed, and this were a democratic administration coming after an anti-vaccine student activist who was a permanent legal resident It would be wrong for them to disappear them, right? Like that has to be like where the line is drawn Yeah, yeah The state should not have this like ability like we should not let them get away with this and we should put as much Support and legal support into preventing this from happening. I really can't say which way this will go. Like immigration law is one of the most headache-inducing things

Starting point is 01:45:48 I've ever had to go through in my entire life. Like... He will be spending a lot of money on immigration lawyers now. Also, be really clear, I'm not equating support for Palestine to being anti-vax. I'm just saying, like, if this was like a shitty guy, right, it would still be wrong. It was something that we like to like laugh at for getting measles in Texas.

Starting point is 01:46:08 Disappearing people bad. If you thought Russia was doing anti-fascism in Ukraine, it would still be important. Right. You know, to do this. And should we take a break and come back and discuss some more? Yes.

Starting point is 01:46:22 Yes. Yes. I wanted to give a little bit of background here, some of the stuff that I've been looking into. So on the 5th of February, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a series of memos. One of these was establishing a quote October 7th task force. I'm going to quote from it here. To prioritize seeking justice for victims of October 7th, 2023 terrorist attack in Israel, addressing the ongoing threat posed by Hamas and its affiliates and combating anti-semitic acts of terrorism and civil rights violations in the homeland. It then lifts several action items for the FBI,

Starting point is 01:47:05 among them as investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, anti-Semitic civil rights violations and other federal crimes committed by Hamas supporters in the United States, including on college campuses. The final point is, quote, supporting efforts by the Israeli government, Department of Defense and Department of Treasury to pursue non-criminal responses to the October 7th attack and other terrorist activities by Hamas. There's a couple of things that are concerned. Obviously, the non-criminal responses could include deportation, right? Like if the person is not being accused of a crime, but nonetheless having their visa revoked. Also, the idea of cooperating with a foreign government, a government which is currently committing a genocide, potentially against US citizens or US residents, is quite concerning.

Starting point is 01:47:52 It's especially concerning when we talk about that Trump executive order that we've already discussed. One of the parts of that Trump executive order that I noticed that I haven't seen any reporting on was the, quote, infantry and analysis of all the Title Six complaints and administrative actions, including in K through 12 education related to antisemitism pending or resolved after October the 7th, 2023. Can you explain what Title Six is? Yeah, I can, Garrison, and I would love to. So Title VI is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, right?

Starting point is 01:48:26 It prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin. DEI. Yes. It applies to federally funded programs, activities or institutions which receive federal funding, right? Which will cover almost every institution of education in this country, apart from some like religious private schools, I guess. Maybe they still get some federal funding.

Starting point is 01:48:45 There have been a number of Title VI cases filed for anti-Semitic discrimination and anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab or Islamophobic discrimination since October 7th, 2023. The ones filed for Islamophobic discrimination don't seem to be covered by this, but the other ones do. The Biden administration kind of rushed to finish up and resolve some of these in the last few weeks of his tenure. And normally the results were pretty ineffectual. It was like some more training, a review of policies. Anyone who's been an educator at one of these institutions will have already been very familiar with

Starting point is 01:49:22 the sort of anti-discrimination training video that you have to watch, and they were suggesting that you watch more of those videos. I'm not really convinced that that is the way we deal with hatred, but that's what they recommended. The Emory one I thought was interesting because they told Emory that it had to commit to a quote equitable handling of protest after its campus police were so violent towards anti-genocide protesters. A lot of the other cases are still pending, but it seems like the Trump administration is going to go back and review all of them anyway.

Starting point is 01:49:50 It does seem like whether it's spread organically or whether it was some kind of campaign to file Title VI complaints, a lot of Title VI complaints were filed after October 7th. During this time when we saw campus protests and we saw support by some faculty for those campus protests, right? And we saw some faculty who may or may not have supported the protest but felt very strongly about the right of students to have freedom of speech on campus. And I'm sure they will have been kind of wrapped up in this big dragnet too. This potentially raises the specter of like at least career threatening. And again, lots of faculty are not US citizens, right? They might be permanent residents, they might be married to citizens, they might be here

Starting point is 01:50:31 on a visa. There are a number of different immigration statuses that they could have that are not US citizen that they could potentially lose. So what is Trump trying to do about these cases, which could be pending or have already been resolved? Yeah. Well, what they said is they want to familiarize institutions with the grounds for inadmissibility. So that's not allowing someone to enter the United States, right. And read out the section of the United States Code, a section of the United States Code. Quote, so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead

Starting point is 01:51:10 as appropriate and consistent with applicable law to investigations and, comma, if warranted, comma, actions to remove such aliens. So it's in there, right? This is in Trump's late January executive order. This is the legal argument that they're making there and they're asking universities to do some of that legwork for them, it seems. I imagine that this is the same section of the United States code that we'll see, use of reference to Khalil, but it refers to like excludable or inadmissible

Starting point is 01:51:42 aliens, which is people coming into the country. But I guess they could make an argument that, like, he disguised his inadmissible status or became inadmissible. Sure. I mean, there's these two sections, right? There's this one that revolves around who can be, like, admitted, who can be accepted. And there's that one section, which is, I believe, section 1227, subsection A4A-C, which is the section specifically on deportation as relating to supporting quote unquote terrorist activities. So I think they will try to use these both in conjunction. I think it's also important to note out here the use of the word aliens as opposed to the

Starting point is 01:52:21 word that Rubio was using previously, which is like visitors, right? Like visitors, I would say, probably applies more to student visa holders. Yeah, non-residents. Versus aliens. Aliens can be anyone, right? Like aliens can be visa holders, can be green card holders, right? And so at least in the official wording here, they of the word aliens is important as opposed to Rubio's like, you know, posts on x.com, which now become official policy because we're in the hell world.

Starting point is 01:52:54 That refers to like, just like, you know, visitors to this country. Yeah, the right has used aliens for a long time, right, because it differentiates them from people. Yeah, it's like, it's very basic, like, dehumanization language, right? In this case, it's, I think it's Yeah, it's like it's very basic, like dehumanization language. Yeah, in this case, it's I think it's important. It's pivotal. So like we have a sense of what will happen there. And maybe I could just finish up by saying if you are faculty or a student,

Starting point is 01:53:16 if you're encountering this, you can reach out to us using our encrypted email. So if you'd like to reach out to us, it is coolzontips at proton.me. It's only encrypted if it's encrypted from the sender as well as a recipient. So that would mean using a proton or other encrypted email to reach out rather than using an unencrypted email. If you'd like to reach out again,

Starting point is 01:53:37 coolzontips at proton.me. Obviously this is something we're gonna continue taking an interest in. And obviously it's something that we can't report the entirety of now because we're still waiting on the court case, but we are very interested in learning more about it. So please feel free to reach out. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:53:53 Well, and it's something that Trump is also saying they will be taking a continued interest in. He is he is promising that this is the first arrest of, quote unquote, many to come. So as they continue to focus on this, we will as well. James, did you have anything else you wanted to say, like, re-lawyers? Uh, yes. So as I mentioned before, right, people under the Biden administration have been moved away from their lawyers. This is very common. It seems that now people are being moved away from their lawyers

Starting point is 01:54:23 and having teleconference requests denied. I let's say Garrison, you're a lawyer and you have a client detained to San Diego, they moved to Texas and now you can't teleconference in for a 10 minute hearing. So you would have to fly right for that 10 minute here. Yeah. Which is going to make it impossible both in time terms and financial terms. What I'm understanding, I'm still digging into this a little bit more,

Starting point is 01:54:45 but that's what I'm hearing. So this is going to be an ongoing thing. I guess if you're an immigration lawyer and one of the places people are being sent to, like Texas, you can help, but you probably already know that. And you're probably already doing that and you're probably already very, very overworked if you work asylum cases. So yeah, I think now is the time for groups like the ACLU to step up or shut up. And we'll see. Well, the ACLU to step up or shut up and we'll see.

Starting point is 01:55:06 Well, the ACLU has come out against Mahmood's arrest. Okay, good. The ADL, obviously, totally for it. Shocked. The ADL, an organization formed to help avoid another Holocaust, does not see any potential danger in a state redefining citizenship in order to disappear its political enemy. So we love the ADL here folks, but the ACLU did, I mean, we'll see if they do anything, but they did like make a statement.

Starting point is 01:55:31 Yeah. And they've been very good. I should say the ACLU has been pursuing a lot of litigation against Trump administration. This is the sort of thing they're pretty consistently anti. Yes. Especially at a national level. They've been very good at this.

Starting point is 01:55:42 And so, yeah, you know, shout out to them, I guess. I don't know, we don't need to shout it out. It's their job. Yeah, they get millions of dollars to do this. Like this is literally why you're there. Do a good job or else. You'd better do something else too. Like.

Starting point is 01:55:57 Yeah, yeah, you'd better show up. Yeah, I know, don't donate to the ADL, I guess, if you were thinking of doing that after listening to this podcast. Don't. Don't f- F- B- B- Our iHeart Radio Music Awards are coming back Monday March 17th on Fox, starring Bad Bunny,

Starting point is 01:56:30 Glowrilla, Kenny Chesney, Money Long, Nelly, your host, iHeart Radio, LL Cool J, are you guys ready to have some fun tonight? Plus iHeart Innovator Award recipient, Lady Gaga, iHeart Icon Award recipient, Mariah Carey. And I Heart Breakthrough Award recipient, Gracie Abrams. Watch live on Fox, Monday, March 17th. At 8, 7 Central. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here?

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Starting point is 01:57:45 Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Mark Seale. And I'm Nathan King. This is Leave the Gun, Take the Canole. The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. Leave the Gun, Take the Canole is based on my co-host Mark's best-selling book of the same title. And on this show, we call upon his years of research to help unpack the story

Starting point is 01:58:11 behind the godfather's birth from start to finish. – This is really the first interview I've done in bed. – Ha ha ha ha! – We sift through innumerable accounts. – I see 35 pages in the re-election. – Many of them conflicting. – That's nonsense. There were 60 pages. And try to get to the truth of what really happened.

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Starting point is 01:58:40 Talia Shire, and many others. Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war.

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Starting point is 01:59:48 podcasts. Oh my God, you guys, it could happen here. Meaning our podcast. It could. It is. It's happened. It could. It is. It's happened. It did. Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast

Starting point is 02:00:08 It Is Happening Here? Yeah, uh-huh. That's a fun joke that I only hear 47 times a day. Yeah. And the whole point of the podcast was, well, initially, I was a crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen, and now it's a bunch of that stuff happened and

Starting point is 02:00:27 Even more of it looks a lot very likely and so now I just feel bad all the time It's gonna be called. I fucking called it. I fucking told you bro. I said this was gonna happen Why don't you read in the podcast? I just feel bad all the time Yeah, why don't you rename the podcast Robert should have bought more stock and ammunition companies? Than he did and DJI Stock and DJI I'm gonna buy a little DJI drone here soon. Yeah, there we go A lot of people are gonna be buying little DJI drones here very soon James

Starting point is 02:01:02 DJI drones here very soon, James. I should point out that I'm buying one that's not capable of carrying a payload. It's definitely a safer investment to pull out your FUR0-1K now when the market's crashing. Use that money, buy drones. Those drones will be worth a lot more in five years. Or, what is that? That is a sound of a sound investment. A box of bullets. It's like how boomers used to invest in silver or gold as a stable currency. No, we're investing

Starting point is 02:01:33 in DJI. Like physical DJI drones. We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder. You've got to get it in a bottle, Rubbit. In a box it can get lightstruck or get moist. You want to get it in a bottle, Rub it in a box. It can get light struck or get moist. You want to get it in a special black, black bottle. James, I keep all of my gunpowder in, uh, you know how like people used to take cocaine by wrapping it in toilet paper and swallowing it? No, sure. Okay.

Starting point is 02:01:57 Well, if you say so, buddy. Speaking of toilet paper, Nate Silver has a newsletter. And it would be useful as toilet paper, more so than it is as a newsletter. Sorry, I just got PTSD flashbacks from 2024 when you said that. It's okay. Normally my rule of thumb is, every election, usually starting in December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or four times in a bucket, and then head over to Nate

Starting point is 02:02:31 Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls. And I do this, I hate that I keep having, I have regularly on election years, people were like, but he was always wrong. He's like, no, he's reasonably good on polls. He's usually, if you read what he's saying about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close to that. So I read him during elections, and I hate it because he's never been right about anything else, but he's a gambler. He's a degenerate, filthy gambler. And so when we're talking about degenerate, filthy gambler stuff, and by God, election polls are the most degenerate type of gambling that exists

Starting point is 02:03:08 He's worth reading and then after the election no matter how well or badly it goes I ignore him again for four years and I didn't get to do that this year because on February 25th 2025 Nate wrote a column called Elon Musk and spiky intelligence. Spiky intelligence. Am I hearing that right? Spiky intelligence, yes. And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm sure he used some AI, like he must have used some AI like video software to do that just like shows you a kind of spiky star looking thing and then like a blob with rounded edges. I can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver thought

Starting point is 02:03:49 that like we needed this illustrated. I have to see this. Yeah, yeah, I would like it to be shared. Look at this. Why did you like, oh wow. The promise of AI, we couldn't have envisioned a spiky thing. That's Boba and Kiki. Yes.

Starting point is 02:04:01 Wow, yeah, it looks like maybe an amoeba if you were forced to conceive. It looks like an amoeba and then like a poorly drawn star Is it? This is this is an actual thing. This is if you wait. This is a thing This is this is Boba and Kiki with a weird like digital fuzz Over the fucker Boba and Kiki. Yeah, okay garrison. Yeah It's a it's like a social experiment to like ask people What like the emotional correspondence of each of these shapes are like which like a Rorschach? Oh

Starting point is 02:04:30 It's like a Rorschach thing sure or like like which one looks which one looks nicer which one looks meaner You know that sort of thing. I'm a kiki type like like I I am a kiki In terms in terms of my behavior I am Garrison now that you bring up Rorschach all I can think of is how cool it Would be if Rorschach from the watchmen showed up in Nate Silver's house and did his thing Unfortunately, I think Rorschach and night silver might actually get along friends Actually, yeah, no no Nate would but After them getting along for like 45 minutes Nate would take him to an illegal card game and Rorschach

Starting point is 02:05:06 Would murder everybody in the room Because they were gambling without a license So I'm assuming Nate's gonna try to argue that that Musk's intelligence is akin to the Kiki drawing here as opposed to like the Empathetic boba right? I'm curious, yes, there is a little bit of that in there. He does not mention this Kiki and Boba thing. I don't know if that's because I'm supposed to just infer it from the image or if he's... Okay. We'll get your opinion on it. Is he ripping these people off? Because this doesn't count as enough

Starting point is 02:05:39 for him to be crediting them if this is the underpinning of his stupid idea, which he credits to his stupid book that he came up with later. But I'm just going to start reading the stupid column. Well, hit us with the second paragraph, because that fucking must go. We haven't gotten paragraph one, James. That radicalized me immediately. There's been a debate raging on Twitter.

Starting point is 02:05:56 Noah Smith can run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the platform's owner, Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest, and then there's a little I in parentheses because we need that, Elon is obviously pretty bright and then there's two I's in parentheses. This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment. Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things. Okay. You'd think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves Elon and

Starting point is 02:06:20 intelligence, well it was. Elon has run founded or co-founded Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, XAI, PayPal, and more recently Twitter. He's also managed to steer himself into a position where he's now the de facto chief of staff to the president of the United States. I do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects. Some of these were long shot bets and Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk documents, he thought he'd be ruined if there'd been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success of some of these enterprises might also be debated.

Starting point is 02:06:50 Twitter was a canny play for cultural and political influence, but it probably, and he doesn't bring up in this whole thing where he's talking about like all his successful companies, not a word about the boring company, not a word about Hyperloop, right? Yeah, any of the failure ones his record does seem better if you ignore the two Massively publicized and invested absolute failures. Yes well and last week. I know there was a spaceX launch I'm sure it went well. I'm sure it didn't fling debris all over Lower, I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft also crediting it like yeah I guess technically

Starting point is 02:07:25 co-founded OpenAI, but not in a way that mattered. He just shot down money in there and then kind of edged out. Yeah, sure. Yes. And is actively in a conflict with everybody who did make OpenAI as prominent as it is. Again, Natla has to leave a lot out in order to start making this case.

Starting point is 02:07:43 So he's gonna argue that, you know, we going to see how well this co-presidency goes, but he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all of this stuff done, right? Yeah, and he's also saying, well, like, maybe Twitter won't be profitable, but we'll see how, you know, he could probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff. Not a word from Nate about, like, yeah, but he's just, like, they're just breaking the law. So why aren't we including in our canny businessman guys that get rich selling like shitloads of heroin for the Cartels because yes, if you are breaking the law sometimes that goes well for you financially

Starting point is 02:08:15 Well, Walter White may have done some bad things. Yeah, but but you can't deny he was a brilliant method But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is. 1400 according to Isaacson, he's clearly some sort of outlier. In many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably even a genius. And yet, first off, it becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider a 1400 to be an impressive SAT score and would normally be judgmental of someone who had an SAT score of 1400 if it weren't for all of Elon's other genius accomplishments.

Starting point is 02:08:52 And yet, when my partner and I were heading to dinner the other day and we saw some tweet that Elon sent, I forget which one because he tweets so much, we were both like, man, he's such a dumbass. Yes, someone can be both a genius and a dumbass. Welcome to what I call spiky intelligence. Here we go. This gets to like the core of what's annoying about Nate is his need to, he's one of these guys, you know what it is?

Starting point is 02:09:15 He's an intellectual enclosureist, right? Where he's not confident to be like, everyone is very aware of the fact that no one is good at everything and that people have holes in their competence and that there are like Brilliant surgeons who are bad fathers or whatever because there are different kinds of intelligence. This is like a broadly common understanding Yeah, Nate has to give it a name so that he can sell his book. So he gives it the names It's like an intellectual now. It's my idea I'm the one who came up with the concept that smart people can be dumbasses. Stop it mate. It's like an intellectual, no, it's my idea. I'm the one who came up with the concept that smart people can be dumbasses. Stop it, Nate, it's annoying.

Starting point is 02:09:47 Capital S, capital I, registered trademarks by Keen Intelligence, yeah. Yeah, now he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original and then links to somebody without really crediting them. Interestingly, many of the instances online refer to people on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he has Asperger's syndrome. But the concept is simple.

Starting point is 02:10:09 While intelligence is a multidimensional phenomenon, the scientific consensus is that there's also something known as a G-factor, sometimes also called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and verbal skills in the GRE are correlated. The correlations are loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's just going into like, he talks about like the absent-minded profess- like it's all just these, these very common ideas that like, yeah, people are usually bad at more

Starting point is 02:10:40 things than they're good at, right? Like it's, there's Like there's no need to explain how Elon Musk has been successful at certain things, but Nate does and he has to keep going back to, like he makes a comment later in here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that like, well, if you read the book

Starting point is 02:11:01 that Ashley Vance wrote, he obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves. But you notice the fact that like he's not making any of these decisions. Like he bought a company that already had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket engineers to design rockets. Elon is arguably good at hiring in certain circumstances and he is inarguably a great hype man, right? Like that's the actual brilliance that Elon has is he was very, very good at hyping people

Starting point is 02:11:29 up and getting people to believe in him until he was too big to fail. Like that's the one thing he actually did. But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of, among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is, who is a guy who was really good at one narrow thing, and now has a career writing about everything. And he can't, that's like a dangerous thing for Nate to think too hard about. Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very soft and soothing ads. Yeah. We're back. I want to talk a little bit about the danger of being a guy who gets

Starting point is 02:12:18 famous for being really good at one thing and then gets a job talking about everything because I've had a version of that experience. And let me tell you, you're not ever going to be competent to discuss all of the things that you can make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No one ever has been, no one ever will be. Which is why what you ought to do is the thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on a bunch

Starting point is 02:12:44 of people to run a website with you, where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately, it turns out 538 was a bad business venture. It got massively overvalued. A company spent a shitload more money on it than it was capable of making, and now everyone's gotten laid off. And Nate left years ago to do his his sub stack. You know, it's a tragic case in the problem of like hubris and the fact that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't run an entire media enterprise.

Starting point is 02:13:14 But Nate doesn't like thinking about that. It isn't like thinking about the fact that maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at was being the guy from the music man. Because I think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period of time. A lot of people do. He still clearly does. Yes. Yeah. And there's been this thing lately where a lot of folks on the left have been like, oh,

Starting point is 02:13:36 you couldn't always tell that he was a con man. You couldn't always tell that he was this bad. Like he was always the worst. And I was like, no. Back in 2014, 15, when I was writing about the billionaires and rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie Dimon because he had helped create the 2008 financial collapse.

Starting point is 02:13:54 And he just seemed obviously much worse than this guy who up to that point was pretty much just making cars and rockets, you know? He had two companies doing that. Musk was not top of most people's radars for a very good reason, which gets to like, there's this thing that's been created because of some of like the sinister beliefs

Starting point is 02:14:12 that his grandfather had and his like family background, which has a lot of white supremacy in it, to that this has been Elon's sort of like grand plan from the beginning and that it's all come together for him. Like as if he's, you know, a Marvel or a James Bond villain who's been executing this like 30 year plan to get where he is. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:14:33 I think when you look at his cognition, like he's not the same man he was 10 years ago. He's not the same guy he was when he started dating Grimes. And I'm saying he was a good man before then. I don't think he particularly ever was, but he's clearly, his brain has degraded, in part due to contact through Twitter. And you can measure this through his posting as well.

Starting point is 02:14:56 The types of posts he would make in 2017 are completely opposite to the way that he would talk about certain social issues now. Oh yeah. He's not like memeing about like anarcho-syndicalism. Yeah. We get to a few of those things, but I want to read another quote from Nate's article because he's going to talk about his book, On the Edge, which quote, describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call the river. These people who occupy a range of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital,

Starting point is 02:15:25 are bright, but in spiky ways. In Baron Cohen's Dockotomy, they lean heavily towards the systematic side of the equation. They're good at abstract, analytic reasoning, but they may lack other forms of intelligence, like empathy, judgment, and self-awareness. They also have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence. For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrarian. And again, what you are talking about all of these people, number one, when he says AI research, he's not talking about people who are doing like the gut level coding.

Starting point is 02:15:55 He's talking about Sam Altman, right? Poker, venture capital. This is all gambling. You're all talking about gamblers. The river is just gamblers, Nate. It's people like you who put money on bets and they are contrarian and competitive because that's how gamblers are. That's the river. He's thinking about it as this specific chunk of intellectuals who have, you know, there's some dangers, but they have great potential to make the world brilliant. Like, no, no, no, no.

Starting point is 02:16:29 These are just people who like wind up shooting themselves outside of a sports betting facility. Like that's the river, Nate. I have been turning into a monster during our friend poker nights recently. It's tough. Garrison, by the way, I've been meaning to talk to you about wearing the full data makeup because you know your skin can't breathe if you coat your whole body. You're only supposed to put that on your face. I don't do that every time I play.

Starting point is 02:16:53 You get a gold finger yourself, Garrison. I don't put on the data makeup every time I play poker. Just that one time. Actually, no, I've done that twice now, never mind. I had to do that two times. Okay. It's becoming a habit. I also have the little hats. I ordered a 12 pack of like the little like poker visors to complete the outfit. Of course you did.

Starting point is 02:17:15 Wonderful. Of course you did. It would be rude not to. For better or worse, this typology, the river, is associated with high achievement in certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is also associated with high variance. Sam Bankman-Free built FTX into a company that investors valued at 32 billion before the House of Cards collapsed.

Starting point is 02:17:34 Again, because he was gambling. Yeah, because he was a con man. Yeah. And again, Nate can't just accept, oh, he was never actually very smart. He just got really lucky for a while, and then gambled it all away, because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought. Nate says, I interviewed SPF several times for the book, and I can tell you that he very much falls

Starting point is 02:17:53 into the genius but dumbass category. How about just dumbass? Lucky dumbass, it's not hard. What's the genius? Where did he prove that? I mean, he proved that by fooling Nate Silver a man who probably values his own intelligence like a great deal I mean, that's the whole thing right Nate Silver kind of like it would be ego death to admit that there are just some lucky Dumb white dudes. Yeah, if a guy had won like one of the lotteries was like a billion and a half dollars

Starting point is 02:18:22 Right got crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks because he just kept putting half a million dollars at a time on 21 black at a roulette table in Vegas. And I would be like, well, obviously he's a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How else could he have made the money in the first place? No, he's like, no, he got lucky. And then he gambled it all away because he's he doesn't have good judgment Yeah, so it's important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence Namely neither their worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story and I don't disagree with that

Starting point is 02:18:57 However, it's a meaningless statement because that's true of every human being ever born Yeah but clearly Nate doesn't feel that way because only, I think the undercurrent here is that only people like this in Nate's mind are worth talking about because only gamblers bring the world forward, right? Yeah, no one else deserves empathy. Yeah, yes.

Starting point is 02:19:18 Like you're just addicted to putting money on sports games and elections, Nate Silver. Anyway, so here's the two things he wants to warn us of, or wants people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent in several ways, but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects, just because he isn't in others. And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does! It's not high school!

Starting point is 02:19:48 Nobody cares about his SAT skills. Elon's what, like 50, like 55 or something? Like what are we doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You are a middle-aged man. I don't even know what my SAT score was. I was gonna say, like, I never took an SAT, but I spent more than a decade in full-time education,

Starting point is 02:20:06 and anyone who ever told me their SAT scores, I immediately hated and never took them seriously. I've spent almost 20 years asking people questions for a living, and I've never asked anyone their SAT scores. Sorry, Garrison. Although SAT might not be like a stable metric for evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method. Absolutely not, Garrison. Just how much wealth he does actually do. He does has an alternative method. Absolutely not, Garrison. Just how much wealth he does have. Well, he does have an alternative method. I'm seeing what you might call an infographic.

Starting point is 02:20:32 Because the next section of the article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence. So first he admits he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to talk to him. Because, Elon, even, I have to say, Elon does have better shit to do than talk to Nate Silver, because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree, and that is a better use of his time than talking to Nate Silver. So, since he can't actually talk to Musk,

Starting point is 02:21:02 he's going to model and extrapolate from, quote, many other Silicon Valley bigwigs I have met. Okay. Helping him in this is the fact that, quote, Musk maintains an extremely public profile. He's turned X into a running diary of his innermost thoughts. And in addition to that, the biographies of the guy. One more caveat here. I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory

Starting point is 02:21:22 of Elon's career, not just his recent antics. So we go down here and the next segment is Dimensions Where Musk Has Exceptionally High or Genius Level Intelligence. So finally, Nate's going to prove it. And I'm gonna show you guys how he chooses to do that. What the evidence he gives us here is. And I think this is something that we should reveal to the audience after these ads. Good point, Gare.

Starting point is 02:21:46 INTRO All right, we're back. So let's look at what Nate shows us is the chief dimension where Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence. I'm just reading that first line, man. So the first words under this are cognitive load capacity and overall horsepower slash ram. He's always on.

Starting point is 02:22:14 I mean, literally look at how often he's tweeting. And then a huge graph that shows the density of tweets posted and win, which has been used by other people to prove that since sometime in late 2022 he's almost never gone more than about three hours without posting a tweet like It's just a solid red after he buys the site. That's like graph of like when he makes his posts. He's never offline now He's not sleeping. So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from 2014 to 2024 Sleeping so this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from 2014 to 2024

Starting point is 02:22:50 Showing the time of day and when a post is posted represented by small red dots And yes at around 2022 the thickness of the red increases Dramatically, it's almost just a straight red line the period of where he must be sleeping in this Is very concerning. No, he sometimes sleeps from about 6 to 9 a.m. as far as we can tell, but not regularly or often. That's like a streak of 2023 where he just isn't sleeping. He's not sleeping. And again, he's on drugs, people. I think they're probably prescriptive.

Starting point is 02:23:23 I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed. When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you want to do recreationally prescribed, right? But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that to judge drug users. I say that as someone who had a drug problem. Like, this is drug user behavior. And specifically, Silver is using this. And Elon's sobriety is possible. Sorry. And specifically, Silver is using this as evidence of Musk's intelligence. Yeah, it's not. He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he must be like a special type of person. He's railing Adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day every day. That's what this is a sign of and no one is allowed to take his phone away Anyway, here's how Nate explains why this is smart in NBA terms

Starting point is 02:24:12 We say this is a player with an exceptionally high motor And this is undoubtedly a valuable trade as the world becomes more complex last fall I was simultaneously doing an extensive book media tour running the the election model, trying to build up Silver Bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work. Even if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would only have been sustainable for a short burst. But Elon is taking on, I don't know, approximately a thousand times more stress than that and has done so for years. No, he's not.

Starting point is 02:24:41 That's the thing. He just tweets. He has a massive number one, all of the businesses are being run by people who are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to sit in meetings and say yes or no to stuff and occasionally tells him to do something crazy that causes issues, right? And they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now than it gained after the election. And SpaceX just had a giant rocket explode.

Starting point is 02:25:08 Again, the boring company has not done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas and the Hyperloop is nothing. Like this is just full of shit, Nate. What you have just described, running an election model that's functional, going on a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing.

Starting point is 02:25:34 Oh yeah. More actual effort work, right? Musk is mostly like sitting in an occasional meeting, doing drugs and injecting random women with his sperm. Yes. And sending tweets. He doesn't do the injecting, I think. Oh God, Garrison, that comes up too! No! No!

Starting point is 02:25:48 No! And it's crazy how it does. Right before he posts the graph of how much Elon tweets. Oh God, okay, there it is! Okay, okay. Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains. Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating, especially if Muska ostracizes people who might keep him grounded. More sympathetically, he's taking on

Starting point is 02:26:09 an incredible array of responsibilities, doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which would be stressful on their own, while still managing to father 13 children and tweeting hundreds of times per week. Again, equivalent efforts,eting hundreds of times a week and fathering 13 children. He's not a father to them. No, he just- He contributed by, he didn't even have sex. No. Yeah, it is literally the lowest possible effort way

Starting point is 02:26:36 to have a child. Wait, like, I'm gonna guess most of the people with penises listening to this, come. Like, that's not a big effort. You wouldn't include that as like, what did I get done this week? Well, in addition to working 40 hours, I jacked off. That's a little transphobic.

Starting point is 02:26:52 So. I said most. This is an HRT joke. Anyway, continue. I said, I'm just saying it doesn't count as work. No, no. Yeah. Certainly not from us.

Starting point is 02:27:04 Unless you're a sex worker than it does Yeah, okay, like especially I know a lot of male porn stars That's that is a difficult part of the job. That's why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that kill their hearts I would like to get into more of silver's like justification for why why he associates this this high tweet load with like intelligence Well because it shows rapid cognition and thin slicing ability, okay? Mm-hmm Indeed in a capitalist system with a significant premium

Starting point is 02:27:38 I'm being first to market making decent judgments fast is often more important than making better judgments slowly decent judgments fast is often more important than making better judgments slowly. Canonically, VCs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders as though on Shark Tank, relying on well-known gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble, as it has for Elon. What is Shark Tank's success rate? I bet there's a quick answer to that. Considering that it has built- in free television advertising for any product Less than 50% of deals are successfully closed

Starting point is 02:28:12 Yeah, so I I don't know all this tweeting also shows abstract problem-solving capability This is related to the idea of creativity though in Musk's case It seemingly doesn't manifest itself in artistic prowess. Seemingly. You know what? I'll give it to Nate there. I'll give it to Nate. I don't disagree with you there. And then of course, instrumental rationality. Philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types of rationality. Instrumental rationality is a lining means with ends, basically figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want.

Starting point is 02:28:46 For this category, I think you have to point towards the scoreboard. Musk has some unparalleled accomplishments and isn't about to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole, not one for nice guys. Now, and again, if Musk's actual goal is his stated goal, getting to Mars, then backing the political party that is actively doing as much damage to the biosphere as possible, ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind of off-world civilization

Starting point is 02:29:16 likely, I would argue is a stupid decision. But he doesn't actually want us to get to Mars, right? He just wants to be in charge of everything. No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference. That's really all it is. Yes. Yes. And he has been very successful at that. But again, it's the success of brute force. It's the same way as like, if you hire a thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps of a guy who annoys you, like you could say like like I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who annoy me but really you just have a lot of dudes who can beat people up for you.

Starting point is 02:29:49 Like is that intelligence or did you just have enough money to hire thugs? Or are you just a mob boss? Right, are you just a mob boss? And a mob boss no one is allowed to attack because it's going to be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon, you know? Anyway, we need Ghost Dog. It's pretty upsetting, because you know, a few weeks ago I was having a little bit of a resist-live moment, and I actually asched my clove cigarette on a parked Tesla. Felt pretty cool about it.

Starting point is 02:30:18 But now I guess I can't even do that. It's too dangerous. No, no you can't. I could face substantial charges. You might want to text resist to a certain five digit number or something. That's probably the best way to solve this garrison. I just text resist to every single person in my phone book every day. It takes about seven hours. I have fallen behind on work, you know. But it's the only thing we

Starting point is 02:30:40 can do to fight fascism. The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep deprivation and drug problem, apparently. Or at least that is how you show for it. It's funny, because I saw Brian Johnson, the billionaire who's eating his son's blood, or now Plasma. Oh, yeah, the dead guy. Posted his own self-study on the damaging effects of sleep deprivation, and I'm pretty sure Musk retweeted it with an emoji or something. I'm like, dude, your brain is completely soup. No, you are fried. You are the most cooked a man has ever been.

Starting point is 02:31:16 It's an interesting study. There is legitimately interesting things to look at in Elon Musk's brain. Well, yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data put together exhaustively by researchers studying how not just sleep deprivation, but like wealth and power impact the brain. And like all of it makes a strong case that Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to his brain than like a career, one of those career WWE wrestlers who like kills their

Starting point is 02:31:43 whole family and then shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their brain later. Yeah, I mean. Well, before before we close, I do want to say before any psychologists or sociologists or like, like, like, linguists get mad at me. Yes, I know, Boba and Kiki is a shape language correlation test. I myself, as well as Nate here, have kind of expanded its usage to projecting even more like human or like emotional qualities onto these shapes or onto these specific words. So please, sociologists, leave me alone. Do not message me about Popeye Kiki.

Starting point is 02:32:25 Please send Garrison your favorite French sociologist by direct message on x.com. I'm afraid it's already too late. I think I already hear like 12 different Redditors typing. But yes, I think Nate's just using that image there as like a metaphor to like show how aggressive or manipulative Musk's own intelligence is as symbolized by a Kiki as opposed to, you know, maybe like a Bill

Starting point is 02:32:53 Gates, which might be more of like a Boba intelligence type. Okay. A little softer, a little bit more philanthropy, you know. I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist and Zizian literature for two straight weeks. About a quarter of a million words by my last count, Garrison. I don't have it in me to do this. Again, I'm going to get back to my Hitler books, you know, where things make sense, where the world is comforting and safe.

Starting point is 02:33:21 I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War, which is my comparative happy place. The Syrian Civil War. It's a really great world. I do wonder if he's trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing by using that little filter that he used over the booboo and kee-hee. No, because it would be, it's actually not fair use now, as opposed to if he just mentioned that thing. Yeah, because he doesn't talk about them. Then it is fair use, right?

Starting point is 02:33:50 And he could use like a little clip of it as an, to illustrate the point. Yeah, like I did with Manu Chow. Anyway, this is all I wanna say again about Nate Silver until 2028. And if, you know what the upside, if democracy really does die is we'll never have to talk about him again.

Starting point is 02:34:06 If Trump and Musk really take over fully and do a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silver. Cut to nine minutes from now I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin t-shirt. No, but they'll be doing Assad numbers and he will still be analyzing that data. Like straight regime capture of Nate Silver. Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten 104 percent of the vote. But there's a spiky percentages. Those are spiky percentages.

Starting point is 02:34:34 Why can't they still just like run like Trump's casino or something? Right. This is just like just like put him away. I understand if Nate because Nate's rich, He doesn't need to do the other stuff. And if he was like just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well, yeah, that's what he loves. If I had Nate Silver money, I'd probably just write novels for the rest of my life, because that's what I like to do. I don't understand why he keeps writing about politics.

Starting point is 02:35:00 He's not good at it, and he can't like it. He needs to feel special. He wants to feel like a special boy who knows the answers that no one else does. All right. Well, anyway, this is us making fun of Nate Silver, so you don't... Well, you can still make fun of him, but you don't have to read him. We did that for you. Good night. I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star.

Starting point is 02:35:26 I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star.

Starting point is 02:35:42 I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star. I'm gonna be a rock star. Bad Bunny, Glowrilla, Kenny Chesney, Money Long, Nellie, your host, I Heart Radio, LL Cool J, are you guys ready to have some fun tonight? Plus I Heart Innovator Award recipient, Lady Gaga, I Heart Icon Award recipient, Moriah Carey, and I Heart Breakthrough Award recipient, Gracie Abrams. Watch live on Fox, Monday, March 17th, at 8, 7 Central. Do you remember what you said

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Starting point is 02:37:16 best-selling book of the same title. And on this show, we call upon his years of research to help unpack the story behind the godfather's birth from start to finish. This is really the first interview I've done in bed. Ha ha ha ha! We sift through innumerable accounts. I see 35 pages, isn't it, really?

Starting point is 02:37:32 Many of them conflicting. That's nonsense. There were 60 pages. And try to get to the truth of what really happened. And they said, we're finished, this is over. They know this is not gonna work. You gotta get rid of those guys, this is a disaster. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford

Starting point is 02:37:48 Kobla, Robert Evans, James Kahn, Talia Shire, and many others. I guess that was the real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover

Starting point is 02:38:15 in a hell bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious. Somebody violated the FBI and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. The FBI went around to all their neighbors and said to them, do you think these people are good Americans? It's got heists, tragedy, a trial of the century, and the god-damnedest love story you've ever heard. I picked up the phone and my thought was,

Starting point is 02:38:43 this is the most important phone call I'll ever make in my life. I couldn't believe it. I mean, Brendan, it was divine intervention. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of the world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis, today I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans. This episode, recovering the week of March 5 to March 12. Trump films a Tesla commercial, RFK Jr. eats beef tallow french fries at Steak and Shake, and Sam Seder commits a mass casualty event on YouTube. How's everyone doing today?

Starting point is 02:39:40 Very happy to join you for ED this week. Huge fan of ED. Just like, just big, big ED guy. So, you know, psyched to be here. I feel like we should mention up top, there's also a bunch of unhinged terror reviews and the most like, electing fucking Caligula's horse to the Senate thing I've seen in a long time. So stay tuned for that. Lots of good stuff.

Starting point is 02:40:00 Yes, we will get to it. First, I would like to give a little bit of an update on a story that we talked about a few days ago. The detention and the revocation of a green card for a Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. As of Wednesday, his lawyers have still been unable to even contact their client. There was a large rally outside the first court conference in New York this Wednesday. So we talked about this a few days ago for some background,

Starting point is 02:40:31 an episode with James, Robert, and myself. Robert, do you wanna briefly summarize the situation and then I'll play a clip from one of his lawyers? The situation is that this guy got taken into custody. My understanding is it was at an apartment that he lived in with his wife. He was a U.S. citizen. He became aware, it looks like at least about 24 hours before, probably became aware that he was being... It's a little clear if he was just like being surveilled or there was something else that tipped them off,

Starting point is 02:41:00 but he contacted the school asking for help, convinced that ICE was coming for him about a day before they did. When they entered the house, my understanding is based on the claims being made by his wife, that they didn't produce a warrant or anything. He's still not charged with any crime. No, he's not been charged with any crime. They just took him and turned off the phone

Starting point is 02:41:22 when they were on the phone to their lawyers, if I'm remembering correctly. Correct. So it's like none of this is the way they should have gone. If this was an arrest. No, he was just black-bagged from campus. But it's not an arrest. Again, and they've been very clear about this, that they have specifically stated, we're

Starting point is 02:41:39 not accusing him of breaking the law. That's not what's going on here. Correct. And we will get to some of that later. I'm gonna play a clip from a press conference outside court that happened on Wednesday, March 12th. This is one of his lawyers. Mr. Khalil's detention has nothing to do with security. It is only about repression.

Starting point is 02:42:02 The United States government has taken the position that it can arrest, detain, and seek to deport a lawful permanent resident exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism. In this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and an end to the genocide in Gaza. The government takes the position that because the Secretary of State finds his dissent unacceptable or contrary to U.S. foreign policy, he can be deported. As Ramsey suggested, it's largely unprecedented save for ugly historical precedents, including the Red Scare and McCarthyism. That's what we're talking about.

Starting point is 02:42:56 We're also talking about a period of repression that the Center for Constitutional Rights knows well following 9-11, when we were in the courts trying to get people out of secret detention. One thing that's different now is the legal infrastructure is so much stronger and everyone out here on the streets knows that we cannot hide in the face of this amount of repression. We will be fighting in the courts and fighting in the streets to bring Mahmoud home and prevent this level of repression from spreading to many others as the administration has threatened to do.

Starting point is 02:43:39 So that was on Wednesday. For now, Khalil will be remaining in ICE detention in Louisiana, and ICE director Tom Homan said Wednesday that, quote, free speech has its limitations, unquote. Yeah, I have found some stuff today of people on the right attacking the judge who put out a, I guess, called a stay on this, in part because the judge is Jewish. So it's nice to see the anti-Semitism being used in that way as well in this instance.

Starting point is 02:44:13 Just fascinating. We're really breaking new ground in all of this. A White House official did tell Friend of the Pod, the Free Press, not necessarily our favorite publication, but they do have an exclusive quote here that the basis for targeting Khalil is being used as a blueprint for investigations against other students. Saying Khalil is, quote, a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States, unquote, said the official.

Starting point is 02:44:39 Noting that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest, saying, quote, the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law so we have this official like open openly saying like he's not charged with a crime we're just wanting to see if we can do this can we deport a legal permanent resident for saying something that we don't like yeah and I think that there's been a lot of comparisons to this to direct McCarthyism I think that's accurate to some extent I think the most direct comparison to this is not McCarthyism. It's the Palmer raids Yep, which I think people tend to be way less familiar with that was the first red scare

Starting point is 02:45:10 Which was largely targeted at the industrial workers of the world for their opposition to World War one And they did basically the same shit a lot of people would give anti-war speeches and then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort of like leftists would get fucking deported for it So yeah, that was a Absolutely terrifying period of repression if the line is not drawn here and it should have been drawn like 200 miles back from here, but if it isn't drawn here, this is going to continue This is going to continue to get worse and I mean all this is all this is in relation to Trump's executive order You know about quote-unquote anti-semitism

Starting point is 02:45:43 Meanwhile today in the Oval Office, he said something incredibly anti-Semitic and also anti-Arab somehow, like in the same statement, saying, quote, Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I'm concerned. He's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian." Which is just an unbelievably anti-Semitic and anti-Arab statement all at once, like removing someone's Jewishness because of how they act or things they've said or things

Starting point is 02:46:15 they believe in. Yeah. And it's one of those things, again, like it's worth covering this as it develops. There's not much to say other than like this is incredibly illegal and has to be opposed immediately and vigorously like Yeah, yeah, no, it's really bad. And of course you're not gonna have the ADL coming out against Trump here Yeah, the ACLU did I should which I should note because I heard some people saying they did not expect the ACLU to they have But yeah, the ADL is fully in the camp of lock anyone up

Starting point is 02:46:42 Who's ever protested Israel and they're not gonna call Trump anti-Semitic for making a statement like this. No. Because their interests are fairly aligned at this point, re what's happening in Gaza. So I think now we're going to play a special report from James, who can't be on the recording here today, but he does have a report on deportations in Panama. So James, take it away. So something that we've seen in the last week is that the people who the US government has deported to Panama, who it can't deport to their home countries, have in some cases been

Starting point is 02:47:15 released by the Panamanian government and given a 30 day visa or 30 days to essentially exit Panama. And they're not really being given any support. So they're in some cases just sleeping on the streets in Panama City, just wandering around trying to work out how to get home and trying to work out what they should do next. Obviously these people who have fled places like Afghanistan, Iran, places where they can't go back to, they would face persecution just for the act of having tried to leave

Starting point is 02:47:44 even if they weren't already facing persecution before, which many of them were, that that's why they fled. So they've just kind of kicked it down the road a little bit, and we'll see where this leads. But it's another piece of evidence that this wasn't hugely well planned, that the Trump administration just wanted to get these deportation numbers up at almost any cost. All right. We're going to go on a break and come back to talk about the Department of Education and tariff talk with Mia Wong. Wow. Well, we are back and you know, it's everyone's favorite time of the podcast, talking about

Starting point is 02:48:32 tariffs. And before we get to Mia, I want to bring on a musical guest to set this section of the program up. Oh yeah! Oh my gosh. That was worth the rest of our year's budget. Now everyone will be getting paid for the rest of the year in Denny's coupons. That's all we have left after paying for this, but I think we can all agree, worth it. Do you want to explain what that is?

Starting point is 02:49:11 Because I still don't really have a clue what exactly that opening theme song is for Tariff Talk. Well, there was a great band called The Clash once, and they wrote one song that wasn't very good. And in it, somebody says something that wasn't very good and in it somebody says something that didn't sound very much like the word tariff but if you mispronounce the word tariff it fit in and that's where $42,000 of our operating budget this year went. Anyway, Mia, let's talk about tariffs. Yeah, now that I've gotten one of the two things I've ever wanted in life, play on music. So since last week week, this has been an entire rollercoaster, because right after we finished recording in like the next two days, everyone went, oh, the tariffs aren't going to be that

Starting point is 02:49:53 bad because a lot of the tariffs that were hit with Trump sort of general 25% Canada Mexico tariff got waived after Trump agreed not to apply them to goods covered by the USMCA free trade agreement. But then everyone remembered that the 25% steel and aluminum tariff was still going into effect. And so that went into effect this week. Now there was also a brief incredible moment of panic where Trump was talking about doubling them to 50%.

Starting point is 02:50:20 He backs off of this in exchange for Ontario's Doug Ford stopping a like 25% increase in electricity prices. However, comma, the trade war is 100% still on. Canada is doing a whole like sort of slate of reciprocal tariffs specifically on steel and also tariffs and taxes on a whole suite of other US goods. I'm just going to read this from the Associated Press because this is no longer the trade war here is no longer limited to the US, Canada, China, and to some extent Mexico. So Mexico's really hasn't been responding in the same way as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs or these the sort of main focuses of these

Starting point is 02:50:57 tariffs. But this week, the EU officially joined the fray. So here's from the AP quote, across the Atlantic, the European Union will raise tariffs on American beef poultry bourbon and motorcycles bourbon again Yeah, yeah bourbon twice. Yeah, it's twice as important as the other thing Yes, peanut butter and jeans actually you say this there was a whole like part of the whole Speech that was not a joke Mia People the EU would like this was this was part of the whole speech, that was not a joke Mia. People from the EU,

Starting point is 02:51:25 like this was part of the thing was yeah, like we're hoping to restore the profitability of the American spirits markets with the US backs down. It was also the only American product that Trudeau could name during his big speech. Very funny. Let's be honest, outside of music, this nation has produced one thing of value to the world

Starting point is 02:51:41 and it's bourbon. Pretty reasonable. It's also very funny that it was like, bourbon was like our, what attempt number was it at making whiskey before we finally got one that was like, exportable? Terrible. Oh, I mean, yeah, it took generations. Look, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day and bourbon is the Rome of liquors produced in Kentucky. Yeah, well, and speaking of it being produced in Kentucky, this is actually deliberately...

Starting point is 02:52:07 Okay, well, all right, so the EU in theory, the line that they're saying is that these are deliberately designed to like target things that are made in red states. They also did do soybean tariffs too though, which is, you know, like, you're dropping a nuke on Illinois here. Okay, so the EU has imposed reciprocal tariffs on $28 billion of US goods. Also, on Tuesday, China's tariffs went into effect, which means the agricultural tariffs that we talked about last week, and notably, I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such a critical part of the system of American agriculture as the crop that you rotate out with corn to sort of like preserve soil integrity. The Chinese tariffs are now in effect. It's mostly agricultural goods. Yeah, and this has, I think in ways that are pretty predictable, at least to me, this has caused a lot of panic in the markets, there's been some sort of rallying as like more information comes in. But there's stuff that I did not predict, which is so okay, Goldman Sachs has downgraded

Starting point is 02:53:09 its projection for US GDP growth. Their chief economist is talking about how he thinks we're going to get stagflation again, which is sort of wild. Stagflation was the thing in the 70s that was, you know, like you have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time. This is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state and allowed to write to take power in the first place that's funny because when I google stag inflation I get very different results that could just be my own no that's

Starting point is 02:53:34 that stag fallation garrison to do very different things oh sorry yeah I think I think I'm sorry yeah things I have to deal with on this job. They never, they didn't warn me. Every single time I mention translation. It's true, it's true, it's true. This makes up for a lot. If you ever get to fight the Undertaker, you have a song to go on to. It's true.

Starting point is 02:53:58 So, okay, now sort of more surprisingly, and this is something I have literally never seen before with the US. both Citibank, well, Citibank, like change its name to City or something, but Citibank and UBS, the giant Swiss bank, downgraded the status of all US equities. I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. They are also boosting the status of Chinese and EU equity. So this is basically like, this doesn't have like a technical official effect, but this is like, this is basically their their evaluation of what countries like stocks basically you should purchase, right?

Starting point is 02:54:36 And this is also sort of applies to bonds. So is that bad? This is like, I assumed that the US would get its actual credit rating Devalued before this happens I've never this is this is unreal like the argument that they are making here is that it is because of the instability in the US Like it because because of the tariffs and because of everything that's going on That like you should just fucking pull your money out of the out of the US and American companies and put it somewhere else And they're specifically boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities,

Starting point is 02:55:07 which is astonishing because again, one of the countries again, whose equities status that they are boosting is China. China's economy is a fucking disaster right now. They're dealing with like their fucking housing bubble going under. They've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer based economy for years and years and years and years and it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough to actually like fuel an economy consumer spending like they're you know they're about to take giant damage from the trade war and also that like you

Starting point is 02:55:32 know like it was only like three years ago the CCP faced their first like nationwide mass protests like since Tiananmen right and these guys like it again these are these are the financial analysts of Citibank and UBS have looked at that and went you are better off putting your money there than you are putting it in the US. At this point, I think Trump's tariffs have wiped out. I'm reading four trillion from the US stock market just in this past month. Now trillion is that? Okay, so for example, I have $32 right now in my pocket. Is it more than that?

Starting point is 02:56:07 I think it's a little bit more. Okay, okay, okay. So it is enough to buy two different servings of pizza. Okay. I'm trying to put this into terms I can understand. Thank you. It is, imagine one burger, right? And a burger in Portland does cost $32 so yes, yes Does cost four trillion dollars Probably tomorrow right like who knows I don't know if The fucking plagues that we're doing having adding levity because this is it legitimately kind of frightening

Starting point is 02:56:41 No, like this is I I have never seen the financial press like yes like the only times I've ever seen the financial press react frightening no like this is I have never seen the financial press like yes like the only times I've ever seen the financial press react to something like this is like They were kind of acting like this about the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn like taking power in the UK Like they're like I watched a guy on CNBC, right? This is not like like this is this is not MSNBC this is not even like CNN this is CNBC Literally go on air and call what Trump is doing quote insane and start talking about how and this is something This is I think what these people are worried about is there you know the thing that they're seeing that's starting right now And it's starting with these sort of with these downgrades of US equities is capital flight

Starting point is 02:57:21 Which is straight up a butt like international capital taking their money from the US and fucking literally moving out of the country, moving it somewhere else because the US is so unstable. This is I don't know if anyone knows what mass capital flight from the US would do because I've never seen anything like this. So part of what's going on right. Part of the reason the markets have kind of recovered in the last few days after the tanking they did Monday is that like the inflation data came out and it wasn't that bad. But the thing is all of the inflation data we're getting right now and all of the economic indicators we're getting right now. It's going to take a little bit of time for the actual effects of these tariffs to set in. Right. Like these are these are things that like you know it's going to take it's going to take like six months maybe a year before we fully fully see the impact of that and but when we do it is going to fucking blow a smoking crater into the economy. And the worst part about this is this isn't even the most unhinged part of this. The most unhinged part of this is how the Republicans have been reacting to all of this in Congress. So one of the few things the Democrats have been trying to do, and I say one of the few because like the response has been downright Collaborationist but they've been trying to force Republicans to take a vote on the tariffs because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular and They're particularly unbelievably unpopular among like the capital-owning class who you know actually matter So what they've been trying to do is that Trump did these tariffs by declaring a state of emergency and the Democrats wanted to use the National Emergencies Act to force a vote on the tariffs. I'm just going to read this from the New York Times. The national emergency law lays out a fast track process for Congress to consider a resolution

Starting point is 02:58:55 ending a presidential emergency requiring committee consideration within 15 calendar days after one is introduced and a floor vote within three days after that. But the language the House Republicans inserted into their measure on Tuesday declare that quote, each day for the remainder of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that Trump declared on February 1st. So the point we are at right now is is in order to preserve a bunch of tariffs Which are effectively about to fucking obliterate the entire world economy congress has declared that days don't pass This is fucking this is completely unhinged

Starting point is 02:59:36 This is fucking like Caligula's horse in the Senate ship like they again they are literally did they have literally Declared that calendar days passing are not actually calendar days so that Trump can just keep doing tariff shit and rule by fiat Like the Israelites they have stopped time in order to win the battle It's it's genuinely astonishing and and the extent to which this has kind of just been swept under the rug the Republicans have been You know doing this kind of quietly right and and the fact that like the rug. The Republicans have been, you know, doing this kind of quietly, right? And the fact that like the fact that Democrats are not literally on TV every single second of every day going, the Republicans are voting to stop time so that Trump can destroy the economy is astonishing.

Starting point is 03:00:15 It's this real like sort of admission by the Republican Congress that like they're ceding authority over policy to Trump completely, right? Like the government now is Trump ruling by sort of Fiat and people attempting to sort of like run circles around him in courts, which is not, you know working enormously Well, yeah, we'll see and and you know, and this this is starting to have effects on Like investor confidence like in Indian in like the US as a political entity and the US is an economic entity, which is unprecedented in like the US as a political entity and the US as an economic entity, which is unprecedented. The other thing I think it's worth noting is that these people like Elon Musk, Donald

Starting point is 03:00:49 Trump, the people around them have been saying for a long time that the plan is to cause a recession and then after the recession things are going to get better and the financial pressures hasn't believed them. And this right now is the period in which they're starting to realize that they were serious about this. And I don't know what the political ramifications of that are going to be, because these are people who actually matter in the political system. And I think we'll see the ramifications of this play out in the sort of coming weeks and months,

Starting point is 03:01:17 but this is a fucking cliff that we've hit, and we're now like wily coyote, like running off the side and trying not to look down. But on the upside, we have a great new song for everybody. So who's to say if any of this has been bad? All right, we are back. Speaking of running circles around the courts, we do have a small update re-USAID. Last week in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court denied an appeal from the Trump administration in a case regarding Trump's attempted federal funds freeze and the shuttering of USAID. This was a case filed by the AIDS Vaccine Advoc funds freeze and the shuttering of USAID. This was a case filed by the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council. The White House is now required to pay foreign aid contractors for work that has already been completed, and further details will be worked out back in the district court.

Starting point is 03:02:19 And it's still unclear, you know, if the Trump administration is going to abide by the court's ruling and resume all required payments. But this is the first move from the Supreme Court regarding, you know, Trump's actions the past few months. This has also not stopped Trump from trying to slowly close other entire government agencies. This very week, the Education Department laid off nearly half of its workforce, over 1,300 employees. Late Tuesday night, Education Secretary Linda McMahon went on to Fox News to say that this

Starting point is 03:02:51 reduction forces only the first step towards abolishing the entire Education Department, saying quote, This was the president's mandate. His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work with Congress, you know is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know will have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is a bureaucratic bloat." Yeah, and I mean, like, you know, we've talked on this show for a long time how eliminating Department of Education and eventually destroying public education has been a long running goal

Starting point is 03:03:24 of the most absolutely unhinged of these people who are the people now in charge and Yeah, they've decided to just like Individually fuck every child in the US It's incredible. Well and so far the way that they're trying to close up the Department of Education is kind of in a more Selective manner because they're still keeping certain parts of the department active. On March 10th, the Education Department announced that they were launching investigations into 60 universities for quote, Title VI violations relating to anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination,

Starting point is 03:03:56 unquote. And this is in relation to anti-genocide protests on campus. And this comes after Trump announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University. The Education Department is threatening that these other 59 universities may lose their funding if they do not, quote, enforce Title Six of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin. National origin includes shared Jewish ancestry." I don't know what to say here. You get to see all the threads of this admin coming together,

Starting point is 03:04:36 right? Which is that, you know, these people are also attempting to effectively destroy like the secondary education system in this country too. For reasons that are sort of unclear to me, I don't know. But what we're seeing here, right, is the ways that the Democrats sort of like falling into locks up with the Republicans on backing the genocide in Israel has sort of led to this thing where the Republicans are using this to just straight up obliterate like all of the US's like political, economic, and social institutions? Well, and specifically with this investigation, they are trying to get all these universities

Starting point is 03:05:10 to cooperate in efforts to selectively remove students who have protested against the genocide in Gaza, right? This is the same attack on free speech and free expression that they're doing against Khalil. Like this is the same exact purpose. And now they're trying to get more and more universities to be complicit in like the selective removal of people in this country who choose to express their First Amendment rights, regardless of whether they're a citizen, a green card holder, or on a student visa. So this is all deeply, deeply worrying.

Starting point is 03:05:45 Robert, you have a small segment you wanna discuss before we start to close out. Yeah, just a little bit at the end here. So in the subreddit for the 50501 protests campaign, which is an attempt to do protests in all 50 states simultaneously, right? I think their next day of action is coming up in April. I'm not giving an opinion on the overall thing, but in the subreddit, somebody posted claiming

Starting point is 03:06:12 to be a National Guard soldier, giving kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would respond to orders to carry out violence against US citizens. And I just wanted to chat about this, because it's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly. My opinion is that one of the likely ways things come to a head, probably as early as this summer, is that there is mass protests in DC, and the Insurrection Act gets used,

Starting point is 03:06:40 and the Guard at least are brought in to attempt to crack down. I mean, obviously Trump has done a version of this before and Trump and his state attorney have both discussed using the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests. I think they see DC as the place they want to do that. So it's interesting to me to see a post like this. This is not a thing where I've been able to verify this guy yet. There's a couple of points that make me think he's probably is a National Guardsman for one thing There's a lot of them right like this is not like a National Guardsman. Where'd you find one?

Starting point is 03:07:10 There's a ton of fucking dudes the National Guard for the other thing everything He says is consistent with things that I have seen and talked to other people who are in and were in the guard about There's one little bit where he advises people on like stop the bleed gear and he gives good advice. He says on the buy from NAR, North American rescue. It's the same advice we would have given. He cites DOD directive 134410, which is why he believes he's well within his rights to make a post like this.

Starting point is 03:07:38 In essence, what he's saying is that it is his belief that most of the military chain of command from NCOs up to officers would not be down with following illegal orders to fire on US citizens. But the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon, would get over whatever issues they have with that very quickly. That's the gist of it, is that I think within the officer class and the NCO class, there are a lot of resistance to the idea of the military being used for domestic policing. That is less clear with the enlisted class, who are a significant chunk of them are very

Starting point is 03:08:16 much down for Trump. But whatever divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon. I think this is probably, assuming this is accurate, and I don't really see a reason to doubt it. There's nothing he's saying here that's crazy. I think this is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind, that when you're looking at the military, it's not the police. If I have to have armed agents of the state cracking down on a protest, I'm less worried

Starting point is 03:08:47 about people being killed if it's the National Guard in general. But that situation can change very, very rapidly if the situation becomes an active firefight. I do think that's a thing we have to consider right now is the possibility that we have US soldiers, whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in shooting at American protesters. That's in the cards as early as this summer. It's not a fun thing to think about, but I'm seeing more and more, not just posts like this, but I'm having more and more conversations with people who are in the military or who were

Starting point is 03:09:27 in the are in the National Guard about their concerns about what they might be called upon to do. Some of this has to do with the border, but like it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military to worry about how they are going to be used in the immediate future. We're not talking about years. We're talking about this summer, right? Is when there's a very good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head. So these are things you should be thinking about if you're listening and you

Starting point is 03:09:52 are in the military. These are things that you should be thinking about because the people who are in charge of our government right now have made a lot of statements about how they want to use the military to deal with protests. And the idea that that's going to happen very soon is not not fringe or crazy. Well, and although these people might have, you know, slightly more discipline when it comes to actual firearms, there is also incidents like in 2020. Yeah. For the Kentucky Army National Guard killed someone via the misuse of crowd control. Absolutely. Munitions think that this is also worth stating, even if, you know, like a Kent State situation

Starting point is 03:10:28 maybe is not as likely in like the modern day, there's certainly other ways to cause grievous harm in these sorts of like protest environments. And when we've seen, I mean, even in Portland, when we have seen, which you witnessed personally, unfortunately Garrison, the worst injuries to crowd control devices are usually people, in our case, it was federal agents, but who are utilizing crowd control weapons and have not trained on them. Because there's certain ways you're supposed to

Starting point is 03:10:57 and not supposed to use them. And these guys are just, hey, you know how to use a gun, you must know how to use the rubber bullet thing. No, if you use less lethals the way you would use a regular firearm, it actually leads to much more possible lethal consequences or life-changing consequences. Which police are more familiar with the regular use of crowd control munitions than necessarily like BORATAC or state national guards. Something that's also worth keeping in mind.

Starting point is 03:11:26 Let's close by my least favorite segment, Stinky Musk, which still has a really bad name. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Musk's doge should be subject to comply with FOIA requests and public disclosures of information required of government agencies, with the judge ordering the release of email correspondence between Musk's team and the Office of Management and Budget, and was ordered to quote, begin producing documents on a rolling basis as

Starting point is 03:11:53 soon as practicable, unquote. Now, despite Musk's claims of quote unquote maximum transparency, last month the Trump administration tried to shield Doge from public records requests by labeling the agency's documents as quote-unquote presidential records, which carry special protections. This specific case is super interesting. The judge, a federal judge by the name of Cooper, also critiqued the way that the Trump admin tried to litigate this case, quoting from Politico, quote, The lawyers offered virtually nothing in the way of evidence about Doge's operations or management. Indeed, the court wonders whether this decision was strategic,

Starting point is 03:12:29 Cooper said, noting that the Trump administration lawyers had taken competing positions, including that Doge qualifies as an agency under some sections of law, but not others when it suits it. Thus, Doge becomes, on the defendant's view, a Goldilocks entity, Cooper wrote. Not an agency when it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient." And I do like Cooper's analysis here of how Doge is very selectively an agency only when it causes, you know, benefit to Trump or Musk. And finally, we have one other Musk story to close out this episode. Admits Tesla's plummeting stock price, protests outside Tesla dealerships, and reports of vandalism of dealerships

Starting point is 03:13:12 across the country. Trump has essentially started doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway. Upon climbing in a red car that he's not allowed to operate, Trump remarked, wow, everything is computer. So this was a very odd and kind of embarrassing show of favoritism, where Musk brought out like a number of different Tesla models, and Trump got to quote unquote, you know, pick the one that he wanted to buy, as he just like sat in on this like televised advertisement for Tesla as his company is losing a shocking amount of money in the stock market. Yeah, and there's literally a picture of him with like the notes that he has this like

Starting point is 03:13:58 in a really, really giant lunchbox. Like a Tesla sales note, like bullet point of like how much certain models are, what their different features are, which ones have self-driving features included, which ones you have to pay extra for. Yeah, no, he's literally carrying like a Tesla sales pitch as he does this televised appearance boosting his new best friends and co-presidents company. Trump said on True Social, the radical left lunatics are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers, and Elon's baby, in order to attack

Starting point is 03:14:34 and do harm to Elon and everything he stands for. So now not only has Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, which is its own form of unhinged, but on Tuesday Trump announced that vandalism of Teslas will be labeled as domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will quote unquote go through hell. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote, ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Tesla's by radical leftist activists are nothing short of domestic terror, unquote. So that will be fun to see how that plays out. I feel like we're genuinely are not that far off from just like Trump trying to hand down

Starting point is 03:15:20 legal mandate saying you must buy a Tesla. Like this is this is the this is the kind of shit that we're in now. No, this is one of the most like bizarre things I've ever seen. If Biden or any Democratic president did anything similar to this, you would have like thralls of people screaming for his impeachment. Similar to like the Eric Adams thing. It's like one of the most blatant open displays of corruption I've ever seen, where a president is using his office to boost the personal financial interests of one of his top advisors, who's also running

Starting point is 03:15:51 government agencies essentially and doing massive, massive cuts to prohibit their ability to investigate his own businesses, while also taking massive amounts of government money to keep businesses like Tesla and SpaceX operable. So this has been a pretty silly thing to watch unfold the past few days. And now Tesla shares have risen 4% after Trump's support for Musk and Tesla. Great. Well, I think that's going to do it here at us with the ED. To play us out, we're going to refer back to our friend, the Narcissist Cookbook,

Starting point is 03:16:26 who put together our lovely new tariff theme song that you Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. 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. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here?

Starting point is 03:17:24 How goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Listen to The Hook Up on the iHeart Radio app,, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Why would you do that to me? Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true.

Starting point is 03:18:02 Let's not forget that David Bl Bloom was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance. But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. I'm Caroline Demore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Love at first swipe?

Starting point is 03:18:24 I highly doubt it. Reality TV and social media have love all wrong. So what really makes relationships last? On this episode of Dope Labs, poet and relationship expert, Young Pueblo breaks down the psychology of love and provides eye-opening insights and advice we all need. It's a big realization moment that you should not be postponing your happiness. Like your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to

Starting point is 03:18:51 like come from every relationship. Your partner, they should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you. Listen to Dope Labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild-haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war.

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