It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 179

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Starting point is 00:01:30 Hi, I'm Sam Mullins, and I've got a new podcast coming out called Go Boy, the gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. Has spent 24 of those years in jail. But when Roger Caron picked up a pen and paper, he went from an ex-con to a literary darling. From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

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Starting point is 00:02:39 it's happening here. But today, we're here to talk about a show where it happens somewhere else, a place that people aren't yet, but may one day be in the future. We're talking about the Martian Revolution with the great Mike Duncan of the Revolutions Podcast. Mia Wong joining me on this interview. Welcome to the show, Mike.

Starting point is 00:03:00 Thank you very much for having me. So let's talk about this because I've kept up and been listening to revolutions for years, and I started seeing messages earlier this year that like Mike Duncan is doing this fictional revolution podcast on the Martian Revolution, and it seems to map really, really closely with a lot of stuff that's happening right now in the United States.

Starting point is 00:03:20 And I'm wondering kind of, to what extent did you anticipate that being an initial reaction to this when you started really finally laying down like the text for these episodes? I did not expect that at all. Not at all. What has been happening to me has been one of the most surreal six months of my life in terms of what I am writing and dropping out into the world and then I turn on the news three weeks later, four weeks later, and I'm just watching exactly

Starting point is 00:03:52 what I wrote down in the show come to life. It is horrifying and I hate it. Yeah, welcome to the club. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you guys have to change the name of your show because there's no good about it, man, we're just here. It's just going, yeah. You know, I've had the notion to do

Starting point is 00:04:10 this Martian Revolution series for years. Like, I think I first came up with it back during like the French Revolution days, is when I was like, you know, it would be a really cool thing to do. It's like, once I've got all of these under my belt, just like make up a fictional revolution that kind of follows along like many of the plot points

Starting point is 00:04:26 of previous revolutions. And so this has been kind of like years in the making. And a lot of the sort of like plot points and ideas that I wanted to do, you know, I wanted it to be like a monopoly corporation because I also wanted to do some like social commentary and like what are the issues that we're kind of dealing with right now.

Starting point is 00:04:43 And, you know, and then I'm like, okay, then there's this thing called the new protocols that is going to, you know, help jumpstart the revolution. And this is somebody coming in and just, you know, implementing whole new software programs and hardware programs without any care for like what it does to people. Then there's mass layoffs that are a part of this. And then deportations are, you know, like all a part of the story of how the Martian revolution gets going. And, you know, this stuff was plotted out in October.

Starting point is 00:05:11 And I got to tell you, you know, maybe I was naive. Maybe I had my head in the sand. I thought she was gonna win, man. Like I thought Harris was gonna win the election. That's where my head was at in September and October, going into November. I was like, it'll be close, of course it will. It's a toss-up, but I think she'll pull it out in the end.

Starting point is 00:05:28 It sure feels like it because they were running a terrible campaign and they didn't have any field operations and the whole thing just kind of seemed like she was gonna win. So for Trump to win and then start doing all of these things that were just supposed to be fictional plot points. Oh yeah. That were reference, yeah, now I'm just like, are doing all of these things that were just supposed to be fictional plot points. Oh yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:45 That were referenced, yeah, like now I'm just like, Jesus Christ, this is terrible. Well, that's what's so interesting is because yeah, so much of the initial, as you imagine it, the opening stages of the Martian revolution in your series are based on a a guy who is a quote unquote like partly like an auto didact, right? Like a dude who is raised believing that his ideas are good because they're his ideas. And he can kind of jump into any field of human endeavor

Starting point is 00:06:18 and make things work better than the people who have been studying and working in that field for their entire lives. And he just starts changing everything based on his whims. Now, you don't have him staying up until four in the morning on ketamine benders and then tweeting out his ideas for how to change the government. But, you know, I guess I'd say like that's the one the one thing that doesn't map onto right now. And I think this is this almost just goes inherently with the act of crafting fiction. Even your bad guys are a lot more sympathetic than our current ones. Like, yeah, which I think is to your credit,

Starting point is 00:06:51 but like I've enjoyed the degree to which the decisions that are being made that are kind of making this Martian revolution inevitable are the kind of decisions that you make when you've been raised in these sorts of bubbles where you are expected to just sort of be able are the kind of decisions that you make when you've been raised in these sorts of bubbles where you are expected to just sort of be able to run things because like that's the strata

Starting point is 00:07:11 that you come from. And it maps directly to like what we're seeing right now with these Silicon Valley guys who have spent the last few decades getting impossible amounts of money and having that convince them that they know how to do everything. But it also maps back to like Versailles.

Starting point is 00:07:24 I find that compelling. Yeah, and you know, the Timothy Werner character, he's like sort of the figure against whom the revolution is going to start after he comes in and starts doing all this stuff. Like, number one, of course, as I'm releasing this, people are just like, this is just a cardboard cutout of Elon Musk, right? And which I would point out, the first thing is like, actually no, because I very specifically wrote it,

Starting point is 00:07:48 so he was a good husband and father. Yes, he loves his kids. It's obviously not Elon Musk because he loves his kids. He's allowed to be in the same room as all of them. Yeah, yeah, they get along great and everything. So obviously it's not, but honest to God, like it wasn't meant to be just much, but it was meant to be those tech guys, right?

Starting point is 00:08:07 Like this is meant to be thinking about the guys who come in and they're like, we're gonna move fast and break things. And then what they break is like 120 years of like labor law. And that's the only thing that is actually being broken here. Like this is what Uber is and all of those kinds of like, all of that stuff that came at us in the last like 10 or 15 years. And they think that yes, because they can code well, or because they had this one ability to like, you know, market something in an effective way,

Starting point is 00:08:36 that that means that they are brilliant and can do everything and everywhere for everybody. And like, we're going to reinvent this and we're going to reinvent that. But they have no idea what they're doing or what they're talking about. And you run into these people on Twitter all the time, this phenomenon of people being good in one area and then becoming sort of all purpose general knowledge experts when it's like, you don't have any idea what you're talking about.

Starting point is 00:08:59 And so there's a line that's in there where it's like, where Werner, the way that he thought is, I'm smart, therefore the ideas I have must be smart. And that is something that's not about Musk, that's about like just people I run into on Twitter all the time. That's a phenomenon, that's a generalizable phenomenon.

Starting point is 00:09:19 No, I mean, yeah, we talk about that constantly on the show, like we just did that four-parter on the Zizians that come out of like the rationalist, Bay Area tech industry cult, which is both influential in a lot of the people who wound up working at Doge and just to the general tech mindset.

Starting point is 00:09:35 And it's the human embodiment of that idea that like, well, I know how to code, coding's difficult. That means I'm smart. This must mean I know how to run the schools, right? This must mean I know how to replace Medicare, right? And it's this kind of like reasoning from first principles without ever actually like having to sit face to face with the consequences of your decisions. And I think you do a great job of showing how that cascades into a calamity and in a

Starting point is 00:10:04 way that feels very realistic, even though we're talking about Mars and there's also like gravity generators and the like. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, and what, you know, what Werner does here is so much of what Doge basically started doing when they start going into these systems, they start changing codes, they have no idea what are the key things that are actually underpinning our society.

Starting point is 00:10:30 The most recent thing I saw that made me think of this is like they're shutting down all the regional offices of the Social Security Administration and like all communications are now going to be run through Twitter, right? And one of Timothy Warner's things is the centralization of all decision making and the centralization of really everything. And in his mind, it would be more efficient if the company just had one brain and that was his brain and every decision is made by the one brain. And so he's got all this stuff and he's got to make all these decisions, except that is,

Starting point is 00:10:59 that's crazy. That is not actually how you can run anything. And it just creates all of this, like basically everybody, I forget if I wrote this in, no, I definitely did. That like the dreaded like request pending screen that people started getting, they would submit stuff like a fuel requisition order and it would just say request pending. And like request pending would never go away.

Starting point is 00:11:18 It would just, that's what it would say. And then you look at what they're doing now and they are trying to centralize everything. It's a generalized authoritarian power grab, but they are doing these things. Yeah. One of the things that it reminds me the most of from the other revolutions is I immediately went,

Starting point is 00:11:38 wait, this is our Nicholas, where you have less of the reform package. Well, like, yeah, the way that all of the power gets concentrated and centralized into this one guy who's a micromanager and then can't do it because no human could possibly have done it. But they're not, because of just their sort of affect of power and the way that they think about micromanaging anything, they're incapable of letting their subordinates do things.

Starting point is 00:12:03 Yeah. Yeah, it also scans with the loves his kids part. Good husband. Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing is like, everything that's in the show also is like basically something that comes from history, right? Like, and I am trying to do that. And it is something that, you know, like Charles the first,

Starting point is 00:12:20 Louis the 16th, Tsar Nicholas, these guys are all great family men. Their kids love them and they love their kids, right? Like one of the reasons the French Revolution happened is because Louis' son died, like on the eve of the estates general and he was just not there because his son had just died. That's a real thing that happened.

Starting point is 00:12:36 And the other stuff is like that sort of centralization of power is a lot of like what I was trying to get at there was actually like the reforms that went in for the European colonial powers after the seven years war in the Anglo colonies and the Spanish colonies and the French colonies. All of those governments sort of undertook a reorganization of their colonial structures after the seven years war. It kind of like reshuffled who had what territory and all of those moves were about sort of an increasing presence of the Metropole in colonial life. And this is what triggers, you know, the American Revolution,

Starting point is 00:13:11 because there was going to be like two more customs officials in Boston Harbor. And so like we went into revolt about this. Yeah. But this is also true of like the Bourbon reforms in, in, in Spanish America is that kind of like centralization of a community and of colonies that had grown very used to managing their own affairs. And so they're coming in and saying, well, yeah, this is ours and we here on earth should be making these decisions for you Martians. And the Martians were like, well, we've been making

Starting point is 00:13:37 these decisions for ourselves for like 70 years now. That's where that stuff is coming from. And then history is always the place that I can point to. And then I have to watch it also on the TV. Yeah. Yeah, I've had that same experience of like, I'm writing out kind of like this possible, this story about what a future conflict,

Starting point is 00:13:58 civil conflict in the US might look like. And I'm just taking from stuff that happened in the last like 10 years in a lot of cases that I saw in different countries. And people are like, how did you like anticipate this? And my answer is like, I didn't. This is just stuff that happens all the time, right? Cause people don't learn from history as a rule.

Starting point is 00:14:18 Like no one's ever learned a lesson from history is the thing I've kept repeating to people over the last few years. As I continue to fail to learn lessons from history. Yeah, we all do. And no, well, like one of the things that was getting kicked around the other day was like, I came to this point where Werner

Starting point is 00:14:35 is gonna start firing people. He's gonna start firing people because he's changed the metrics for how your employment status is being rated. And he's firing just people essentially randomly, like you are firing the head of this department and now that department can't run anymore but he's like it'll be more efficient and when I was writing it it was originally supposed to be like a kind of a more dramatic

Starting point is 00:14:56 10 percent across the board layoff yeah and as I got closer to actually trying to type that up and write it down I was like this doesn't actually feel believable to me. Like people are gonna really push back. And I mean this sincerely, like people are gonna push back. That nobody would be so stupid as to just across the board do a 10% layoff of something so critical as Mars is to Earth.

Starting point is 00:15:19 Because in the story, Mars is absolutely critical to how Earth is able to function with the resource that they're able to get from there. And so I changed it around and actually looked to like the sullen prescriptions from Roman history to kind of give it a different take where really it was like you woke up every day and there was like 15 more names on the list, 100 more names on the list.

Starting point is 00:15:37 And there was something equally sort of dramatic and cool about that without this like unbelievable, you know, 10% across the board cut. And I wrote a paragraph in there being like, I know that people are gonna think that without this like unbelievable, you know, 10% across the board cut. And I wrote a paragraph in there being like, I know that people are gonna think that this is like unrealistic, but you just have to understand that like throughout history, we have seen these things.

Starting point is 00:15:53 Like people do stupid stuff and they stubbornly cling to it all the time. Because that is something that happens. And life as we know it is actually less, like if I wrote up what was happening right now, like if I was just got like a window into an alternate world and we're living in a different world where Trump lost and I brought all this stuff back,

Starting point is 00:16:13 they'd be like, this is implausible, like this is crazy. They would never be allowed to get away with that. They would never be allowed to do that. They're not allowed to do that. They would never be so stupid as to blow up the global economy with a bunch of tariffs that make no sense to anybody. Who wouldn't want the dollar as their reserve currency?

Starting point is 00:16:27 Yeah, why would they fuck that up? None of nothing that is happening right now is plausible in a fictional storytelling setting. Yeah, yeah. You know, this also gets something that I've been saying a lot in this show that I wanna get your take on, which is like, you know, one of the things

Starting point is 00:16:43 that you wrote about in your sort of like, I guess like recap series of your experience going through the revolutions was about like how much of the stuff is driven by like the great idiots of history. And my God, Elon Musk and Trump look to be like two of the greatest history. And that doesn't like guarantee that it'll happen, but like, Yeah, they're there. The great idiot theory of revolutions is a very simple thing, which is just saying that revolutions don't happen because some tyrant is in power and they are intolerably oppressing their people.

Starting point is 00:17:21 People have been intolerably oppressed for a long time. And Trotsky's got this quote that is if peasant discontentment was the cause of revolution then there would be a revolution happening every single day because the peasants are always discontented. So what it takes to really have a revolution is for somebody in power to be kind of incompetent and to start doing stupid things

Starting point is 00:17:41 that allow the situation to get out of hand. And on top of that really piss off the other elites around them because it's the mismanagement of the state that allows the elites that are kind of necessary for a full blown revolution. Like you need their resources and you need their money and you need them being close to a position of power to be able to pop whoever's in there at the time.

Starting point is 00:18:03 And you gotta be pretty incompetent to like, wreck an elite consensus, right? Like that is in and of itself catastrophically stupid if you're trying to stay in power. Yeah. And so yes, the great idiot theory is getting quite a workout lately. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:19 That's actually something else that I wanted to ask you about in terms of, like you see this in terms of Mabel Door, right, where Mabel Dorr, right? Where Mabel Dorr is this kind of example of like the sort of local, I guess like local colonial elite to some extent. Yeah. I almost saw her as like, yeah, a lot of these kind of American revolutionary figures, right? Where you have this person who holds a fairly high position in the colonial state

Starting point is 00:18:41 as a result of, you know, their birth and the family they come into, but also identifies more as a member of that state of the colony than of the colonizing state. Yep. Yeah. And I think this is something, this is a part of the revolutionary process that I think is really, really badly understood on the left in terms of, in a lot of ways, a necessity of parts of this elite flipping. And like the other example, I think most people kind of are more familiar with is Philippe Egalité, like the Duke d'Or alone, like funding a bunch of these sort of revolutionary groups that eventually kind of like get out of his control.

Starting point is 00:19:16 But can you talk a bit more about sort of the role of these sort of like elite defections and how they end up sort of funding and enabling these revolutionary movements? Yeah, I mean, it's a mix of things. And I mean, you got it. Like Mabledore is meant to be sort of the colonial elite. And she's also meant to be sort of the liberal nobility in lots of different revolutionary settings.

Starting point is 00:19:37 And she is doing that. And when she is, like when I talk about her, like funding the Society of Martians and like funding all these like philanthropic, you know, enterprises to help Martians and funding all these philanthropic enterprises to help Martians. That's a lot of Philippa Galatet straight up. That's what the Duke d'Orléans was doing in 1786, 87, and 89. And so that's the role that she's playing.

Starting point is 00:19:57 But if the elites are unified, it is very difficult for any kind of peasant or worker uprising to actually get traction and succeed in overthrowing the state. Peasant insurrections have happened throughout history without any sort of elite support. They have often accomplished great things, but when you think about the great revolutions in history,

Starting point is 00:20:22 there really have always been people in the inner corridors of power who are ready to get rid of whoever the sovereign is in that moment. Yeah. And you can advance all the way to the Russian revolution. And this is the prototypical, like the workers have risen up and the army is mutinying and it is the people who overthrow the Tsar. And what that story misses is all of the people, even inside the Romanov family itself, who are like so fed up with what Nicholas and Alexander are doing that they're just like,

Starting point is 00:20:55 we don't know what to do anymore, but like, yeah, I guess he's gotta go. You know, like we can't get him to see reason, we can't get him to change course, we can't get him to do anything. we can't get him to change course, we can't get him to do anything. Like the situation is completely out of hand. And without those people leaning on Nicholas to force his abdication and also to say,

Starting point is 00:21:13 like we're not gonna back you up if you try to bring the hammer down on all these people, then that's when sovereigns are actually overthrown. Yes, and I love that you bring that up because it gets to the failure to see that. And this is especially common with people who kind of idolized the 1917 revolution, but it's certainly not limited to that. I mean, every revolution, you have people who are fans of that revolution or who see it as a model for what they want to do and also ignore the realities on the

Starting point is 00:21:42 ground that like made it possible. I think one of my favorite examples is the quote that like you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. Well, I don't know, in those pictures of the 1917 revolution, I see a lot of Mosins that used to be property of the czar, right? Like it happens all the time.

Starting point is 00:21:59 And I think that we always need to be cautious of like seeing just what we want to see in revolutionary history as opposed to seeing what was there. And the thing is, is Lenin understood this, right? Like, Lenin understood what the game was and he understood what was going on. And you don't have to, like if you're a revolutionary and you're sympathetic to the communists in 1917, you don't have to say, oh, well, the elites were necessary for this first revolution and we need, you know,

Starting point is 00:22:27 we need a break inside the ruling class. We need divisions inside the ruling class. That doesn't mean you have to say, and what those people want out of overthrowing the Tsar is what we want and what we're going to accept. Right. You know, obviously like the cousins of Tsar Nicholas and the people who are in those inner circles of power,

Starting point is 00:22:45 they wanted him out of there just so they could run the empire a little bit better. They were frustrated with how poorly the empire was being run. They didn't want a social revolution. But if you're going to take down that whole system, creating a destabilization event at the very top is necessary, but you don't have to support

Starting point is 00:23:03 the ultimate aims of those people. It's just, it's an ingredient. And this is, and you see this in the course of revolutions and you see this in 1917, you see this 1789 and then 1792 where there is that first wave of sort of revolution that overthrows the sovereign. And then there is a second wave that overthrows the people who did it first.

Starting point is 00:23:22 And so, you know, you can hold out hope for getting the job done without thinking that elites do play some role in all of that. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great point. [♪ music playing, fades out. [♪ music playing, fades out. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about, sort of shifting gears a little bit, was about how you were thinking about the deportations when you were writing it and how you were thinking about the way that kind of this like generalized anti-deportation organizing like turns into that and the sort of mutual aid networks that the Society of Martians

Starting point is 00:24:04 are doing like directly turns into this thing and that's something that I don't know it feels very prescience in ways even though it was written out before a lot of this stuff happens. Yeah the deportation stuff is just because of my own personal political commitments over the course of my adult life, which is that we have an insanely cruel immigration system in this country. Oh God, yeah. You know, and they say like, oh, we've got this like open borders.

Starting point is 00:24:36 Like we do not have open borders. It is actually really, really hard to like navigate your way properly through the American immigration system. That's true. The system itself is broken. And we did all of this, we did the worst of the horrors with Trump, right? Like obviously that is on my mind with family separations

Starting point is 00:24:55 and putting people in camps and abusing people and rounding people up, like all of this stuff, which happened under Trump, yes, but it also happened under Obama for eight years and it happened for another four years under Biden. It's just that we kind of stopped talking about it because it wasn't Trump who was doing it. And there is a through line of cruelty inside of this system towards immigrants. So that issue of deportation and like rounding people up and evicting them, especially those who have

Starting point is 00:25:25 lived in this place their entire life. Like that's one of the points that I make. Like the people who are being fired are like born and raised on Mars. Like one of the main characters, Alexandra Claire, she is a fourth generation Martian and she just gets caught up in these like stupid layoffs that that Timothy Werner is pushing through. And now the only choice that she has is to either hide or get deported to Saturn, and nobody's ever come back from Saturn. We have no idea what happens on Saturn because all they know is that nobody ever comes back

Starting point is 00:25:54 from Saturn. And this is a thing, like taking people who were born and raised in America, this is the only place that they have ever known, right? Even if they came here when they were like one, like, okay, they weren't born here, but like they here since they were one. And then you're like, okay,

Starting point is 00:26:07 we're gonna send you back to Mexico. They're not from Mexico. They don't know anybody in Mexico. They don't probably even speak Spanish half the time, you know? And doing this to people is cruel. It is unconscionable what we do to people. And so, yeah, like, so when I was thinking to myself,

Starting point is 00:26:24 okay, I'm gonna write this, like, fictional revolution, and it's gonna be on Mars, what are some of the things that I wanna do that will make the revolution happen? Yeah, some of this does, is like a little bit of like, this is, these are Mike's political interests and the deportation issue and trying to highlight the horror of the deportation issue

Starting point is 00:26:41 and laud those who would hide those people and help those people and bring those people food. Like the bravest people going are the ones who like go out and leave water jugs out in the middle of the desert so people don't die, right? And the cruelest thing is these guys who go out and then break those. Knowing that people are going to die of dehydration and die of starvation, but just not care because they don't care about those people. That's one of the sickest things to me. Like it's just that there's information coming out now

Starting point is 00:27:12 that there's that horrible video of that ICE agent smashing the window of that woman's car to deport her. And then the information's come out that he is a deputized volunteer border guy. And what's really happened, if you look at it, is we've kind of recreated in a decentralized form the Einsatzgruppe, right? Like instead of having a centralized state

Starting point is 00:27:34 having to raise these organizations that are going to be carrying out this kind of violence, like it's largely become something that vigilantes have gotten into on their own as part of like just their special interest in hurting people at scale. And it's such a uniquely, it's so uniquely tied to like this American individualism. It's such a uniquely sick thing about the way things work here, that that's happening. Like that wouldn't have happened, not that Germany is, you know, not that German culture

Starting point is 00:28:03 in the thirties was better, but it just wouldn't have happened because it was a different kind of culture. Yeah, for sure. And then it's really important to remember that this is not just a Trump problem. Like what he's doing right now is like, of course, like we are entering next levels beyond next levels of what he's doing.

Starting point is 00:28:21 And even, you know, just this morning, we've got an American citizen who has been held and they are not being released despite the passport and the social security card being shown to the judge. And the judge is like, I don't, I can't actually release this person. That's sort of where we're at now. But this has been an ongoing thing for 20 years

Starting point is 00:28:41 across both parties and both administrations. And nothing really has like sort of churned my stomach more since Trump got elected than all of the Democrats and people doing like sort of post mortems on the election and being like, well, you know, we really should be tougher on the border and we really should sort of like buy into this framing that there is this like invasion and we just need to do border enforcement better. Like, and they're then even moving, positioning themselves to a place where it's like, Trump's not even doing a good job protecting the border.

Starting point is 00:29:14 And like, there was somebody, I forget even who it was, but somebody, one of them senators like tweeted, you know, this time last year, Biden had deported this many people and Trump isn't even deporting that many people. And he was like trying to make this point that like Trump wasn't following through on his promises or something.

Starting point is 00:29:28 But it's like, do you even hear yourself? Like, do you even hear yourself? Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I can't, you know, stomach the fact that the Democrats are gonna take away from all this, that the American people love cruelty towards immigrants and that we need to lean into that.

Starting point is 00:29:46 And then you see the polls before all the tariffs stuff and all this stuff is going on and Trump is still sitting at like 50% approval and it's like, I don't know, maybe they're right. Maybe the American people really do just love this. So, I mean, I think the other side of that, though, and this is part of the reason I brought up specifically the resistance to it was that the other aspect of the kind of individualism of American culture was that it also meant that a bunch of people went out to the desert. Like our coworker James spent a lot of time during the Biden administration, like at these, I mean, just like the open air prisons they built in the middle of the fucking desert, like on the border.

Starting point is 00:30:18 And, you know, and like one of the stories that he covered extensively was that like, probably most of these people would have died if it wasn't for like literally border volunteers, like passing food and water to the bars. And that's something that I was thinking about a lot, looking at the mutual aid networks and looking at the kind of mutual aid networks that trans people are building up right now. And like, I mean, okay, like,

Starting point is 00:30:39 I mean, there's always been a million mutual aid networks because it's just impossible to survive if you're trans without like getting stuff from other trans people. We're not supposed to do anything alone, man. We're not supposed to do anything alone. We're not supposed to be doing anything alone. That's honestly the most optimistic thing about your podcast is that like Martian society develops this very communal because it's we're living in like an artificial habitat and if shit goes really wrong, everyone dies at once.

Starting point is 00:31:08 You have to have this more collaborative collective attitude towards safety and security that is just so completely absent from American culture. It's the thing that continually sends me into the darkest spirals is because there's no fixing the fundamental underlying problems without fixing that. Yeah. And like on Mars, you know, that sort of communal stuff is like, they're also living in close quarters. So you can't really be somebody who needs to be alone, right? That's the thing. And then also like in terms of like the early colonization of Mars, like, yeah, you have to do this stuff together. And like, there's a, like, when I was doing, like, cultural, like, there's cultural background,

Starting point is 00:31:48 like, works and, you know, like, music that was going on that the Martians were creating. And I didn't quite get into this, but there is a song that I've got, like, half written called The Ballad of Lonely Joe, which is, like, it's like a Martian folk song about Lonely Joe, who went off and tried to, like, do it himself. But, I mean, he never comes back, and now Lon now Lonely Joe like wanders the red sands of Mars because like he tried to go out and not do it like with the group and not do it with the community because he can't survive alone on Mars. But to your other point, like one of the things that I definitely wrote into the show is that

Starting point is 00:32:20 everybody on Mars has a skin chip in their hand and the skin chip in their hand is what like opens door. It like literally opens doors and it gives them access to the commissary and it gives them access to restaurants. It gives them access to food and employment. Like everything goes through that skin chip. And when the people get fired by Werner, their skin chips just get turned off effectively

Starting point is 00:32:43 and it doesn't open doors anymore. They can't get food anymore. They are living inside of a society that they literally cannot interact with anymore. And so it took other Martians around them. And so there's a thing in the show called the No Doors Movement, which is Martians jamming open doors

Starting point is 00:33:01 so that the people who have, they were called the annulled because their contracts were annulled. But so that the annulled could get from here to there without needing their skin chip. Yeah, those are the kinds of things that are necessary and those are the kinds of things that are gonna protect people.

Starting point is 00:33:17 And I hope that those things are going on out there. And I hope that none of us publicly state right now what we may or may not be doing on out there. And I hope that none of us publicly state right now what we may or may not be doing on that front. Yeah. Let's just go ahead and keep that where it's at. I'm a big fan of the don't fed post on social media or in your podcast thing. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:38 Just something you touched on there, I think is interesting about about the way that I being forced to live together like creates this consciousness. It reminds me a lot of when I was a student, I was an anthropology student. And one of the things that we've read was this sort of classic of, I guess, I guess you call it like structuralist Marxist, like anthropology from the 80s. It's this book called We Eat the Minds and the Minds Eat Us, which is about these indigenous Bolivian tin miners. And one of the things that always struck me about that was, you know, like because they're all, they're all literally like sleeping next to each other, like in these rooms, you can

Starting point is 00:34:13 literally hear like the stomach of like the child next to you, like rumbling at night because they don't have enough food. And that like turns them into like one of the most militant sort of like working class, I mean, for like a hundred years, they are like, like they're syndicalists and then they're communists and like they're, they're one of those militant things. And I, I don't know. It's interesting to me that, that this is like this aspect of the society that, that you've, you know, you've sort of drawn out of, of these historical revolutions where

Starting point is 00:34:42 a key element of it again is is this sort of collectivity and also there's this Like if you look at like the trajectory of like the modern American state and like the modern just the modern development of capitalism it's been specifically trying to make that stuff not happen by like kicking people into suburbs and like trying to Physically alienate people and I was I don't know I was wondering how much you were sort of thinking about that kind of stuff when you were like writing the cultural aspects of this. Sure, no, that stuff is all in my mind. And like I said, like we're not meant to do anything alone.

Starting point is 00:35:12 Like humans are communal creatures. Like you don't go anywhere in history, like all the way back to the dawn of the species, you do not find individual humans, like living by themselves. We have always done this as a group. This has always been a group project. And when you go back, this is something that comes out of,

Starting point is 00:35:31 I studied a lot of political theory in school and the state of nature sort of works. These thought experiments that Thomas Paine would do or Rousseau would do. It's like, how did we come together? Why did we come together? Well, let's first imagine an individual human wandering through the forest and they encounter another one. did we come together? Why did we come together? Well, let's first imagine like an individual human wandering through the forest and like,

Starting point is 00:35:47 they encounter another one. So they come together for defense and they come together to share food and do some division of labor. And it's like, no, there's no such thing as a human wandering alone. That's not a thing. Like any outgrowth that comes from our description of what human society is like,

Starting point is 00:36:02 whether it's defense or the division of labor, begins with the fact that we are already a group. There is a mother, there is a child, there is a father, there are aunts and uncles and other, like whatever the group is, we are always doing this as a group. And hyper individualization and hyper atomization of our society is something that is trying to undo one of the most fundamental parts

Starting point is 00:36:28 of what it means to be human. This is something that I thought about a lot too, because when I started having kids and you know, I have two kids and the model for like having a family at this point is like you have a mother, a father or whatever you have kids, but the point being that they are a unit that is unto itself and they live in their own house

Starting point is 00:36:49 and they have to supply their own food and they are in charge of getting their own money and everything that happens is just up to that little nuclear family. And the nuclear family is not really how we've ever done it before. There's always been a broad network, a broad family friend network that has been a part of,

Starting point is 00:37:08 raising our kids and having our families. And if something bad happens, we don't just say, oh, wow, bad luck for them. You support that person. And that is something that we've really gotten away from as a society, obviously. And it's something that we've been pulled away from purposefully, right?

Starting point is 00:37:24 Like the atomization isn't just a byproduct of incentives, right? Like it is a directed move. I mean, you just got to look back to some of the shit Thatcher was saying, right? There's no such thing as a society. There are men and women and there are families, right? This is a directed change.

Starting point is 00:37:41 And I'm not saying this in like the conspiratorial sense. I'm saying this at a, this is what a lot lot of people a lot of the worst people in our society believe because it's convenient for them and they have pushed to make that belief more common and Done so by funding think tanks and funding media organizations in part, right? I was actually about to quote literally that exact thing But the interesting part to me about the Thatcher line is that everyone? I was actually about to quote literally that exact thing, but the interesting part to me about the Thatcher line is that everyone, almost everyone who quotes that line only quotes the part about there are only individuals and then leaves out the part about the family. Yes.

Starting point is 00:38:11 Which I think is a really important connection to what you were saying where it's like, their vision of the family is also still fundamentally this isolated group because they still need some kind of collective because again, you can't just like leave a baby like out in the woods. It just dies, right? But like they had to like create this version to be the like the political base of their thing. They had to create this one collective that would be cut off from everything else that

Starting point is 00:38:41 had normally made it a collective. Yep. You know, people think these days that that atomized nuclear family is like the law of nature, right? That this is like, this is the way it's always been. And like, that's not true. It's just not true. There's a great line. I don't have it right in front of me at the moment, but in Tocqueville's Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, which is really a dynamite book everybody should read. At the end of it, he lays it out. He's writing this in like the 1840s and 1850s.

Starting point is 00:39:12 And he straight up says that like what liberal capitalism is doing, which he was, I mean, he's a conservative liberal. Like it's not like he's on the left or anything, but he's watching as the atomization of families and individuals is happening. And he's like, and that's how, that's what tyranny thrives on.

Starting point is 00:39:31 Tyranny thrives when everybody is disconnected from everybody else and everybody is in competition with everybody else. Because that's the other key part of it, is your family is now pitted against every other family in terms of like getting money, getting jobs, like getting that, getting this other thing. Like we're all scrambling out there in a competition

Starting point is 00:39:50 to get a little bit more, a little bit better, or just have enough. Like I feel this every time I have to sign the kids up for like summer camp. Like I'm at war with every other family in the neighborhood because I'm just trying to get my kid into this camp and some people aren't gonna make it and other people will and you got to be there, you got to have strategies about when to log on to the thing. Because they're pitting us against each other all the time in all of those

Starting point is 00:40:13 little subtle ways. Yep. I think that's what's optimistic kind of about the Martian revolution is like, you know, on the one hand, there is this kind of like collective society. But on the other hand, you know, this is a this is a society entirely ruled by corporations, right? And it is it is literally every single aspect of it is specifically designed to get to do this pitting each other like being people against each other and Yet anyway somehow They they you know even even if it is by accident, which is to be fair how a lot of revolutions start They they do it I think the the key thing is here is that we see throughout time like really extreme societies that try to mold people in certain ways

Starting point is 00:41:03 like really extreme societies that try to mold people in certain ways with the idea of permanently changing them. And what happens in the past, at least to every one of those societies, is that the society dies and people go on being people. Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, there's no year zero. There's no creating a new. Right.

Starting point is 00:41:20 There's no new man. Right. That's not ever gonna happen. That's actually ever gonna happen. That's actually, I mean, just, I wouldn't even have thought that I'm gonna tie this back again to Tocqueville, which the reason I would recommend Ancien Résime is because that is a book about how much

Starting point is 00:41:36 of the revolution was a continuation of what was going on before it. And not actually caused by the revolutionary break. And even if you believe in the revolution and believe it was this, I actually believe in the revolution because it accomplished these great things. But there was no year zero thing that happened. A lot of this stuff like is just on a continuum.

Starting point is 00:41:56 And, you know, like, I don't wanna get in a fight with somebody about whether human nature is a thing that exists or doesn't exist like as an abstract thing, because I'm not sure that it's true but there sure are a lot of things that keep popping up. We're interested in sex and we have to eat food and we live in shelters and we make music and there does seem to be some very human qualities

Starting point is 00:42:21 that exist across all time and across all space. And if you just say to yourself like, well, like, I mean, this is one of the things I'm very sympathetic to anarchists, but like there's a point with anarchism, like especially the early stuff where their idea was that if you smash the state and you destroy the state, then humans will be allowed to flourish

Starting point is 00:42:39 in their natural goodness and communalism, which is, you know, a little bit what we are moving towards right now, but I'm not sure even that exists, because if you crash the state out, it's not the state that's necessarily making us this way. There is stuff inside of human nature that we created the state to begin with. So the whole thing is like a very, it's a balancing act

Starting point is 00:43:01 that has gone way too far in a certain direction. Yeah, and I think that's something I always try to keep in mind. Like, it's not that societies can't alter or improve aspects of like how things are, right? By changing the incentives, by altering like the way things work, you can reduce the prevalence of certain problems.

Starting point is 00:43:23 You can make things better in some ways, but there's certain stuff that you're just never going to. Like when I look at what the white supremacists wanna do, right? Well, you're never going to get people to stop mingling with other kinds of people. You simply can't. It's never worked and it never will, right?

Starting point is 00:43:38 Like that's an impossible dream. So I can just say like, that's a thing, no matter how tightly you grab a hold of the reins of state and how many weapons you deploy, you simply won't succeed in the longterm at doing this, because it's just not something we can do. You can't stop people from mingling. This is actually one of my points about immigration

Starting point is 00:43:57 and migration is that no matter how tightly you try to control it, no matter, you could build every wall you want, you can make it as hard as you want, people are still gonna move here. People are still gonna move away from here. People are still gonna go from here to there and from there to here. And that is something that is going to happen

Starting point is 00:44:15 no matter what. And especially if we're going into the 21st century with all of its various climate disasters that are facing us. On route, yeah. And it's gonna make, yeah, it's already making some places less habitable and other places will be more habitable.

Starting point is 00:44:30 And what's gonna happen is the people who are living in less habitable areas are gonna wanna go to where there are areas that are still habitable. And so there's gonna be movements of people. And the question before us in the 21st century is not, can we keep people in the places that they are now and, you know, like sort of lock in rigidly to like these xenophobic nation states and that will actually stop those migrations from happening? Or do we open ourselves up to the idea that this is going to happen and simply make it more humane and more more rational? more humane and more rational. That's the question.

Starting point is 00:45:04 It's not whether the migrations will happen or not. It's simply how cruel they will be when they happen. And right now we are choosing maximum cruelty. Yep. Sucks. Yeah. It sucks. It does.

Starting point is 00:45:18 Like that's so much of our present society is like, well, yeah, this is the cruelest way I can imagine this happening. You know, like, and we are staring down is the cruelest way I can imagine this happening. And we are staring down the barrel of the worst case scenario, right? That's the thing everyone's had to make peace with. Even once Trump won, there was still a degree of like,

Starting point is 00:45:36 well, I guess we'll see and we've seen, right? And we do just kind of have to guide off that without pretending it's otherwise. That's one of the few things that does give me hope is that the people who are insistent upon pretending otherwise seem to be getting increasingly marginalized. I mean, we'll see. Gavin Newsom still hasn't been sort of choked off of access to the public. But the statements he's been making recently about Abrego Garcia, it's just like, yeah, I just can't imagine this guy being the future

Starting point is 00:46:10 of the Democratic Party if this is just looking at where popular discourse is right now. Right, and there's a lot of them who would like it to be the future of the Democratic Party because they don't care as much as Republicans don't care about the lives of these people who are living on this earth, who are living, breathing human beings,

Starting point is 00:46:30 who are just someplace else and living in a world where like, yeah, the United States and Europe, we suck up the world's wealth and resources. Like we're the imperial center of the globe. And people are like, oh, and even when people say like, well, why do people come here? And there's a kind of a standard American exceptionalist notion, which is like,

Starting point is 00:46:51 well, they come here because they want freedom and freedom is what America offers and like the American dream and all that stuff, like the entrepreneurial spirit, et cetera, et cetera. But mostly it's because this is where you can come and get the world's money. That's, this is where it all is. It's sitting in my pocket, it's because this is where you can come and get the world's money. This is where it all is. It's sitting in my pocket. It's sitting in your pocket, right? We are the ones who have all of the world's money. And so that is why they are coming here.

Starting point is 00:47:14 So you just have to fit that in your brain. And what is happening is this constant division between Americans being more important than anybody else. And I understand why that exists politically. And even these questions of like citizens versus non-citizens, like one of the things that got me when I was reading Bakunin was like, it was a throwaway line. It wasn't even like a point he was making,

Starting point is 00:47:41 but he referred to something as mere citizenship, which kind of struck me because I grew up very liberal. Like I come from like the liberal suburbs of Seattle and I had very liberal notions. And citizenship in sort of the liberal imagination is the highest thing that you can be, be a citizen of a polity with rights. There's a constitution,

Starting point is 00:48:00 you get to participate in the government. Like citizen and citizenship are these words that had great profound meaning. And really kind of like knocked me sideways to have them be like mere citizenship, right? You've been reduced to simply a part of apolity and your humanity has been taken away from you. You're no longer being recognized as a human being,

Starting point is 00:48:20 you're being recognized as a citizen. And if you're not a citizen, then you just don't count at all. And it totally wipes out their humanity. So not only do I not have humanity because I'm simply a part of some polity, rather than being me, Mike Duncan, a human being, but it's erasing our human obligations to each other to non-citizens.

Starting point is 00:48:40 And the idea, like, and you just see this very casually, like right now, like all over the place, it's just like, they're not citizens, so they don't deserve due process. They're not citizens, so we can just send them to El Salvadorian torture prisons, and it's fine, because they're not citizens, and therefore they don't have rights.

Starting point is 00:48:55 It's like, what about, you know, just being a person thinking about other people? And one of the greatest, one of my very favorite, and I know I'm steamrolling here, I'll let you get a word in edgewise here in a second. But I forget what the court case was, but there was a court case out of Texas, back in like the 60s when they decided

Starting point is 00:49:16 that the Texas school districts had to open the schools to undocumented children. And they said that because it says in the 14th Amendment, persons, it doesn't say citizens. And they were resting a lot of this on the notion that like, it says person has these rights, not citizen has these rights. And this is what conservatives and MAGA hate, hate, hate,

Starting point is 00:49:39 hate this is why they're gonna try to undo the 14th Amendment. But to have the Supreme Court at one point in the past be like, no, you have to do this because you owe an obligation to them as a person, not just as a citizen. That's like mind blowing. I could not see the Supreme Court today making that same decision.

Starting point is 00:49:54 But that's the kernel of something really good, I think, for the future of humanity rather than clinging to this citizen or non-citizen thing. Yeah. I guess, kind of for me, the most important belief I ever came to was the understanding that like, I don't care about citizenship and I don't care about who is supposed to be in a specific place, right? I think one of the most toxic ideas possible is that like your rights as a person are dependent on where you were born.

Starting point is 00:50:26 Yeah. That's just the thing I'll never believe. And it's the fight we've lost the worst as the left or, you know, I should even say getting beyond left and right because I really think those are not the most useful ways to look at things. It's like human beings, the fact that that battle, the battle to just see people as humans with inherent value as humans, regardless on their place of birth, the fact that that that battle the battle to just see people as humans with inherent value as humans Regardless on their place of birth the fact that that has been botched so badly is Maybe the greatest calamity of the 21st century

Starting point is 00:50:54 Although there's a few there's a few contenders. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, there's a lot Well, it's so it's so deeply ingrained something I'm gonna talk about more like in different place but like It's so deeply ingrained. This is something I'm gonna talk about more in a different place, but one of the things that's been driving me the most up the walls is, so I've had to read every single piece of tariff coverage that's been written by fucking all these analysts, all of these media people. And every single one of them only fucking talks about its impact on Americans. Right?

Starting point is 00:51:20 And if you look at the Liberation Day turf tariff package, the single country that is the most far from this is Sri Lanka Yep And if those tariffs go back into effect in like in like 50 days, whatever whatever like 80 days Like the entire country of Sri Lanka is fucked. They're doomed They're completely fucked and all of these countries, you know these countries need US dollars in order to like literally to buy fucking fuel and then suddenly Oh wait, hold on. You can't do exports to the US and like the entire, there's something that affects literally the

Starting point is 00:51:47 entire world, right? You can look at the tariff rates on every single country, like in the world and everyone writing about it only writes about its effect upon the US because there's this just like, like there's this, this, this pure sort of Ameri-centrism thing where like people and this, I see this on the left too It's like they fundamentally don't see anyone who's not in the US as human and the people in the US who are seen as like people who seems like humans who you know, like think and feel and Like act and like hurt in the same ways that we do Like that's only a thing that happens if you're a very specific kind of American citizen. And if you're not, or God help you, you were born in like most of the, like the rest of

Starting point is 00:52:30 the world, which is again, it, it unhideous super majority of everyone on earth. You just, you don't matter. And yep, they don't. Yeah. Not, not, not in all this. And like, I mean, to bring it back to the Martian Revolution, like one of the things that is happening right now, like in the series, you know, it's gonna be 30 episodes long

Starting point is 00:52:49 and I'm writing episode 23 right now, but like we've gone through the revolution. There's been, I don't wanna give away too many spoilers, but obviously like they win, you know, at certain points, otherwise it wouldn't be a very interesting story. And there is a debate right now among the victorious Martian revolutionaries about who should count inside of the Martian constitution and this thing called the Republic of Mars that they have just declared.

Starting point is 00:53:15 They're no longer a part of a corporation. They're going to be this thing called the Republic of Mars. And there is a guy who is passionately committed to Mars and to the Martian people, and he hates Earthlings and he doesn't trust Earthlings and there's no reason for him to trust Earthlings. They have tried to screw them over a bunch of times and it caused nothing but pain. But there are a bunch of Earth born Earthlings on Mars and he wants to exclude them from the Republic of Mars. If you're born on Mars, then you should get to participate and if you're not, then you

Starting point is 00:53:42 shouldn't have rights. You shouldn't be a part of this project. I would love to just, I would love to deport you. That's what, that's what he's going to be arguing. And then there is another side that has a more universalist take on this. And my character, Alexandra Claire, who is like a D class, she comes out of the Warrens, which you can just, that's basically like the working class. You know, she's like, when Earthlings come here, yeah, I don't like it when they bungle things because they're new and they don't know what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:54:11 Like I'm as annoyed by the new guy as anybody, but like they've suffered right alongside me, like suffering the same conditions. Like the fact that they were born on Earth doesn't mean that they're not suffering right now, that their contracts weren't annulled, that they are not suffering from the new protocols. Like, and you know, when during these revolutions, did they hold neutron guns in their hands and fight and die for Mars?

Starting point is 00:54:31 Yeah, they did. And so probably we should say that it's not Martian good, Earthling bad, but like, let's just open it up to everybody and we will sort out like, you know, who's, you know, who's in on this and who's actually trying to undermine us. Because, you know, there are loyalist fifth columnists that they are gonna have to deal with. Yeah. Well, I think we're encroaching on an hour here. So I think we need to probably call this for the day. But Mike, I really appreciate your time.

Starting point is 00:55:01 You've been so generous and I can't wait to see where you end. I know that you're also can't wait to see where you end. I know that you're also can't wait to see where you land on all of this. Right, right, right. I've got all the plot points, you know, I know where it's going, but just getting there is,

Starting point is 00:55:16 it's weird because sometimes when you write fiction, characters are like, you weren't supposed to do that and now I've got to deal with that. And like, what are you, well, she wouldn't do that in this moment. So I guess I was gonna have her do it, but I just can't believe that she would ever do that in now I've got to deal with that and like what do you well she wouldn't do that in this moment so I guess I was gonna have her do it but I just can't believe that she would ever do that in that situation so I guess she can't do it and I'll have to figure that out and that's my weekly struggle these days yeah yeah that's the that's the struggle of releasing fiction before

Starting point is 00:55:37 you're entirely done with it yeah well I write I mean I wake up I wake up every Monday morning with a blank piece of paper and have to have that week's episode done by Sunday night. So I'm writing these in real time. Yeah, well, I congratulate you on trapping yourself in such an exquisite hell. I'm enjoying listening to it. I know everyone else is as well. Oh, it's great, I love it.

Starting point is 00:55:57 All right, that's the episode, everybody. Thank you. Bye. Fight! My daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language.

Starting point is 00:56:34 It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. It could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless D***less Me on the iHeartRad radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Courtside with Laura Corenti, the podcast that's changing the game and breaking down the business of women's sports like never before. I'm Laura, the founder and CEO of

Starting point is 00:56:55 Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment, your inside source on the biggest deals, power moves and game changers, writing the playbook on all things women's sports. From the heavy hitters in the front office to the powerhouse women on the pitch, we're talking to commissioners, team owners, influential athletes and the investors betting big on women's sports. We'll break down the numbers, get under the hood and go deep on what's next. Women's sports are the moment so if you're not paying attention, you're already behind. Join me, Courtside, for a front row seat into the making of the business of women's sports. Courtside with Laura Currenti

Starting point is 00:57:30 is an iHeart Women's Sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Listen to Courtside with Laura Currenti starting April 3rd on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network. You say you never give into a meltdown

Starting point is 00:57:50 and never fill your feed with kid photos. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it and never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop.

Starting point is 00:58:14 Look. Lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. On November 5th, 2018, at 6.33 a.m., a red Volkswagen Golf was found abandoned in a ditch out in Sleephole Valley. The driver's seat door was open. No traces of footsteps leaving the vehicle. No belongings were found, except for a cassette tape lodged in the player. On that tape were 10 vile, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and kept restricted from the public until now.

Starting point is 00:59:12 You feel in this too, a horror anthology podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, y'all? It's your favorite cousin. I just came over, you feel me? Y'all don't have no cousins that just kind of pop up, just be at the house like a 90s sitcom where you don't knock on the door, you just be walking in. That wasn't my life, mainly because most of the cousins on my mother's side lived on the other side of the country.

Starting point is 00:59:41 And then my cousins on my father's side, since we lived in gang infested areas, you didn't just pop up. That was just not the safest thing to do. But I'm doing that at your house. And you know what happens when you have cousins come over. Well, now a small percentage of y'all are black, but a lot of percentages y'all grew up poor,

Starting point is 01:00:02 which means that you got whoopings, just like we did. So, you know, usually when your cousin comes over, somebody's getting, we all, somebody getting in trouble. And it's usually you, cause you supposed to know better. I never got more spankings than when my cousins came over, because we would just get into stuff. And then since I'm the one that lived there

Starting point is 01:00:26 and I was cutting up in front of company, I ended up getting into most trouble. Anyway, this isn't where I'm working out trauma. Although it is called, It Can Happen Here podcast. So I feel like we all collectively working out trauma of being Americans. And lastly, on the rambling preamble, I got a dog now. Well, my daughter got a dog.

Starting point is 01:00:45 And to all the parents that listen, you know when your child gets a pet, whose pet that actually is. So I find myself doing a lot more chores than I signed up for, but it's a pug. And it keeps trying to eat the cat's food. Therefore it's got liquid doo-doo. and I'm not a fan of that. And since I get to work in my pajamas

Starting point is 01:01:10 because I'm just recording podcasts and rap music back here, seems to fall on me to scoop up this liquid doo-doo. But that's only when she eats the cat's food. Stupid dog, eat your own food. Anyway, I'm here to talk about something that you can do nothing about. All right, y'all ready?

Starting point is 01:01:29 Here we go. A brother like me who bleeds Los Angeles, you cut me open and Pacific Ocean saltwater comes out. You poke my lungs and smog pours out of me. I could work for the tourist department of Los Angeles. I love this city at an unhealthy level. There are things about this place that is absolute trash. Don't get me wrong.

Starting point is 01:01:58 There is a lot wrong with this city, with this place. The ground shakes up under us. We've been such a horrible steward as to how to take care of this land. I'm gonna include myself, even though I am not the invasive colonizer, but there are really only nine native trees to California, two of which are not the palm tree

Starting point is 01:02:25 or the eucalyptus. The plants that are here naturally are drought resistant and fire resistant. They don't burn that easy. The ones that burn up real quick are the sycamores and the palm trees. And if you may have noticed, Los Angeles hit a bit of a dry spell recently

Starting point is 01:02:45 and had quite the disaster. Now, I'm slowly backing that thing up into what we're going to talk about right now, which you should probably know if you have already read the show title when you clicked play. But I'm going to back that thing up into it. California catches fire every year in some location. Now my mother, you know, mama, mama prop, she worked 30 years for the LA County fire department, you know, in the city of West Covina,

Starting point is 01:03:17 cause I'm a six to sixer. And I have vivid memories of the different firemen, fire chiefs. I think I talked about this in the LA on fire episode, block is literally hot on the hood politics show, which hopefully you guys are supporting and listening to also. But even my boy Chris, who's, you know, firefighter, you know, been fighting the fires out here.

Starting point is 01:03:41 Everybody knew that one day this day would come. And that let's just say all of the bureaucratic failures had not happened. If the water was as full as possible, the fire hydrants were fine. If everything was the budget, if everything was done perfectly, this was going to happen. This day was going to come. That it's a perfect storm. We had a specific type of drought, lack of rain, the Santa Ana winds, and then a fire sparking,

Starting point is 01:04:16 and that fire sparking in a densely populated urban area. It was, every fireman I knew was like, yeah, one day it's gonna happen. And like I said in the last episode, yeah, like, you know, we could find ourselves a time machine and practice the indigenous practices. Oh, actually as a small little beacon of light, there's an area out at Dina that was actually given back

Starting point is 01:04:40 to the Tongva tribe many years back. There was a first like actual land back, given back to the Tongva tribe many years back. There was a first like actual land back given back to the tribe. And they started taking care of the land the way that their elders and ancestors did and guess what that area didn't burn. Anyway, in the midst of this disaster that we were having a desperate desperate man who I completely understand is desperation. On Tuesday night on January 7th, while the fires were just rumbling through the palisades,

Starting point is 01:05:15 a man named Keith Wasserman, who's the co-founder of a real estate investment firm, desperately took to Twitter and said, "'Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home? Need to act fast here. All neighbors houses burning will pay any amount. There was another click of Rick Caruso

Starting point is 01:05:38 who almost in a multiverse situation is our mayor, a billionaire developer who owns the Grove and on the West side, just that if you ever watched TMZ, whenever somebody's walking out of a place, it's probably at the Grove. And was a real estate magnate. Anyway, there were videos of him driving through an area that he had with his like private security

Starting point is 01:06:08 and private firefighters where it is smoke billowing all around the place, but his situation was fine. Why? Because he had private firefighters. They shaved his shopping center, but he tried to unsuccessfully save nearby homes as well. Which reminded everybody about the time that Kanye and Kim tweeted about their house being saved

Starting point is 01:06:30 by firefighters and which made people be like, wait a minute, you can buy a fire department? Man, what the hell is this? What type of shit? Man, what? We over here arguing over fire hydrants and tanks running low, and somebody just paid up,

Starting point is 01:06:51 where they get the water from? How the hell you can just, oh my God, what the hell water you using? Nigga, that's not your water. And what you gonna do, are you gonna? Nigga, that's not your water. And what you gonna do? Are you gonna help out the neighbors? Okay, so if I buy a fire department, fire department show up at my house,

Starting point is 01:07:12 but the neighbor's house is burning. You just gonna leave the neighbor's house? You gonna tell them to call the city's fire department? What the hell is happening? How does this shit work? Is there any other way rich people can be evil? What is happening right now? Which is basically what happened and how most of the regulars felt.

Starting point is 01:07:31 So this episode is not just about private fire departments because that would not be a very interesting full episode. It's about the question that private fire departments bring up, which is like, nigga, whose water is that? Wait a minute, who owns the water? Is the water private too? And if the water's private too,

Starting point is 01:07:56 what else of my utilities are private? And this is what I mean by there is nothing you can do about it. Now, if there is any of you that are built like Robert and Magpie, then maybe you ain't gotta worry about this. Maybe you could dig your own well and find the groundwater. However, there are things called water land rights, which I will talk about into this.

Starting point is 01:08:19 So even if you move off the grid to live on a mountain, you find somewhere in the backwoods, you know, four acres away from magpie, wherever the hell magpie live, and you dig to find some water, somebody own that water. It already happened here, y'all. Let's go. All right. This may or may not be a shock to y'all. I know in the first, the block is literally hot episode I did way, way, way,

Starting point is 01:08:47 way back when I first joined, when Cool Zone Media first launched, when I first joined the team, my first episodes. It was one of those things where it's like, the thought has probably never crossed your mind. And some of it's like sitting, I'm talking to y'all who pay bills. Some of this stuff is sitting right up under your nose.

Starting point is 01:09:04 Like Southern California Edison is one of our power companies. But then there's PG&E. This isn't the city of Los Angeles providing this. That's a company. In the same way that your internet come from a company, what makes you think your power don't come from a company? And if your power come from a company and the internet come from a company,

Starting point is 01:09:24 why wouldn't your water come from a company? Well, I don't know what a company. And if your power come from a company and the internet come from a company, why wouldn't your water come from a company? Well, I don't know what would make you think that that's just a city municipality. Well, because duh, because water fall from the sky. What the shit? I'm paying for you to pump it through the dog on pipes? Boy, I mean, I understand that, that's a service, but what the hell are my taxes for?

Starting point is 01:09:47 And you see, somebody like, I don't know if you notice, you can own the rain. So the water that fill inside a lake, somebody bought the lake. This is the episode that I'm going to tell you all right now. So your utilities, most likely your city has sold your water and your sewage processing to a private company. And the bills that you pay in, your water bill, is not going to the city for the service you are receiving. It is paying the company back the money

Starting point is 01:10:20 that the company paid your city to get this gig. Let me back up here. First, let me cover the private fire departments. the money that the company paid your city to get this gig. Let me back up here. First, let me cover the private fire departments. Now, here's the thing. Private fire departments usually are hired by insurance companies. So what they do a lot of time is like prevention.

Starting point is 01:10:38 They're coming here and clear out shrub, make sure that your house is not like set up for failure. You know, in California, I mean, people always talk about our strict laws and building codes and it's like, well, nigga, do you see why every time you got a bureaucratic law, like there might be a historical evidence as to why we need that. One of which is, my nigga, California ain't got a lot of water. So if you gonna build a house,

Starting point is 01:11:10 you can't just have dry shrubbery up around your house. Why? Because you just basically put a box of matches just around your house. So yes, fam, like that's why you can't do that. Why you not allowed to have a lot of trash in your house? Nigga, I mean, what the hell you think? Because this shit will catch on fire.

Starting point is 01:11:32 So these private companies, private fire companies usually come through and again, they hire body insurance companies normally to come and clear shrubbery, make sure that your lint, that your dryer is cleared out, make sure your HVAC is good. And usually they got their own little tank, right? So they come in with their own little tank of water,

Starting point is 01:11:53 that's their private water. They basically, they bring in their bottled water, you know what I'm saying? While the rest of us is using tap, right? But eventually that little tank go run out, you feel me? And then at that point, you got to tap it to the fire hydrant, right? Now, what most of these companies will say is like, the guys were not monsters, dude. Like if, if the neighborhood is on fire, of course, we're going to help. What are you like, what are you talking about? Which I truly believe for this reason, if I'm paying to protect this house, but the neighbor's house is on fire, that probably means that the neighbor's house is going to cause my house to catch on fire. So of course, it would be in my best interest to help put that one out.

Starting point is 01:12:33 According to the New York Times, they reported that, yeah, good 45% of all firefighters working in the United States today are employed privately. Now, a lot of those are like wildlife suppression. Now there's such thing as called the National Wildlife Suppression Association, which represents more than like 300 private firefighting groups. And a lot of them work more as like government contractors,

Starting point is 01:13:00 right, as far as like, again, supplement for like wildfires, right? And like I said, the others are hired by private companies. Yo, and peep this like a little two person private firefighting crew with a small vehicle. I mean, it could cost like three grand a day, like a large crew of like 20 firefighters and four trucks can run $10,000 a day. This is according to Brian Wheelock, the vice president of the Grayback Forestry.

Starting point is 01:13:30 It's a private firefighting company in Oregon. But most of the time, like I said, these people don't really work directly with homeowners. But that's not what's the interesting part of this story to me. The interesting part of this story to me is the reality of the utilities that we live in. Now, let me go ahead and run off some statistics to you.

Starting point is 01:14:01 I just want to go ahead and add to the dystopia that we live in because we need to say, we need to change the name of this show to it has happened here. I'ma link all this data to the show notes. Now you're ready for this? Water and wastewater service privatization follows broader trends.

Starting point is 01:14:24 More than 40% of drinking water systems nationwide are private, regulated utility systems. Of the 60% of the systems owned by local governments, privatization by contracting of operations management has grown rapidly since 2001. Nationwide, the privatization of water, wastewater grew by 13% after growing 84% over the decade in the 1990s. Right? So what that means is almost half of y'all are paying a private company for your water. Now, let's make some distinctions here between public utilities and private utilities. And, you know, what are we even talking about? So public utilities are owned and operated by your local state and federal governments on behalf of the citizens

Starting point is 01:15:12 and customers in that area. So a public utility would be your municipal water, sewage, sanitation services. Like if you have a public electricity providers, government ran public transit systems, state-owned telecommunication companies, public utilities, right? Now listen, here's where it's interesting.

Starting point is 01:15:36 Have to balance serving the public interests while remaining financially sustainable. Since they are not profit driven, any revenue earned is invested back into maintaining the infrastructure of the operations, which seems like a big old duh. We're not here to make money. This is not our money making interest. This is living, right?

Starting point is 01:16:01 It's a utility. Like it's just, I'm not trying to make money off it. I'm trying to keep the lights on, right? But as we know, it costs to do those things. So the temptation becomes easy to be like, how do I offload this cost, right? And make sure that this service is there. Because as you know,

Starting point is 01:16:21 oftentimes public utilities don't be very good. You know what I'm saying? Flint still ain't got fresh water. Right now, Altadena is in a situation where they was like, look, don't even boil the water. Like whatever coming out of your tap is just not good. Boiling's not good enough. Like do not drink this water, right?

Starting point is 01:16:45 Is the situation that they in and it's like, well, where the money at? Like, how are we going to fix this? Now that's a public utility. Now a private utility is utilities obviously owned and operated by private companies. So that would be an investor-owned electricity company, like a private telecommunication,

Starting point is 01:17:07 private-owned oil, gas, and pipelines, and private-owned waste management companies. Now, their goal, because it's a company, is still to make profit for their shareholders while also delivering reliable service. Now, they argument, their defense would be, if we don't give you a good product, we won't have customers. So it is in our best interest for our own money to give you a best

Starting point is 01:17:33 service. However, are you seeing the truck size hole in a logic? Nigga, we don't have a choice. Do you have a choice as to what water company provides the water to your house? Who will run the sewer? I don't have an option anyway. So the key differences are very obvious, right? One is the ownership and motives, like publicly owned utilities serve the public interest

Starting point is 01:17:56 rather than pursue profits, right? Private owned utilities are there for their investors and to maximize returns. Regulation and pricing. Public utilities are regulated by the government- returns. Regulation and pricing. Public utilities are regulated by the government-appointed commissions that oversee pricing. Private utilities are also regulated,

Starting point is 01:18:12 but usually more flexible in a rate setting. Because what the hell you gonna do? Yeah, you gonna call the water company and be like, I ain't paying this bill. They gonna be like, cool, no problem. Service areas. Most public utility service customers are within municipal boundaries.

Starting point is 01:18:26 Investor-owned utilities often are defined by regional monopolies with little overlap or competition with customers. Listen, if you ever moved into an apartment and you was like, y'all, I'm trying to install cable, and they was like, or your internet, it was like, oh, it's AT&T over here. I was like, oh, you know, install cable. And they was like, or your Internet. It was like, oh, it's AT&T over here. I was like, oh, but I have spectrum.

Starting point is 01:18:49 They're like, spectrum don't serve this area. Nigga, it's the Internet. It's the air. It's wires, this poles. I'm not allowed to. You can't come over here because it's a private company. Now I'm in a situation where AT&T knock on my door every day and being like, yo, we laying fiber optics, you know, we laying new pipes down here up under your street.

Starting point is 01:19:11 We can move faster than Spectrum. I done ditched them both. And then Spectrum still email me every day. Spectrum sent somebody, it's like, we heard you left Spectrum, we're trying to figure out why. I'm like, nigga, cause I don't want to use either of y'all. But we're the area you serve. When I first moved into the house that I'm like, nigga, because I don't want to use either of y'all. But we're the area you serve. When I first moved into the house that I'm in now,

Starting point is 01:19:29 like, I made a account on Edison and they were like, oh, nigga, Edison don't serve here. You have SoCal gas. And I was like, who the hell is SoCal gas? They was like, that's who, that like, who else gonna give me the gas? I don't have no options. I live in LA, this is who serves LA. Infrastructure spending.

Starting point is 01:19:53 With public utilities, they might find it easier to raise funds for long-term capital projects and maintain infrastructure proactively while privately owned businesses and utilities answer to shareholders seeking returns, which impact investment decisions. Meaning if I'm like, yo, somebody gotta clean this sewer pipe because this water ain't good in this neighborhood. It will behoove the city of Los Angeles to fix this.

Starting point is 01:20:21 And it will be easy for them because I am a Los Angeles resident, this is a public utility. If I had private water, they might be like, how much money does that neighborhood give us? You know, if we fixed the water up there in Palace Verde, you know what I'm saying? Like we gotta talk to them cause they, you know what I mean? They kind of give us the bread.

Starting point is 01:20:41 So they're not incentivized necessarily to fix my infrastructure, right? And then the customer service focus, right? Public utilities often focus more on customer satisfaction and addressing community complaints while private entities have profit motives. I mean, I don't know what else I need to explain to y'all. Right?

Starting point is 01:21:01 Now, let me show you how this works and what the allure is for a public city council to make this decision. Are y'all hip to more perfect union? It's another one of those podcasts folks that just got more money than us. They able to produce things that we had bred, we would produce.

Starting point is 01:21:21 Anyway, they did one about investor owned water companies and how they lobby to give them the contract to run their sewage and water, right? And it's a super dope study. It's a good like focused study to show like as sort of an example of how it could happen anywhere. And they focused this one study on this city in Pennsylvania, right?

Starting point is 01:21:47 And here's the ill part about all of this is that how would you know this is happening? I mean, are you really looking at the logo on your water bill? I mean, no, you just like looking at the costs, right? And hoping that it don't be that much. Now, again, if you rent an apartment, I don't know what utilities you got to cover, right? And hoping that it don't be that much. Now, again, if you rent an apartment, I don't know what utilities you gotta cover, right?

Starting point is 01:22:09 Let's say you are renting an apartment, you know what I'm saying? Like a lot of times your utilities, it's like they cover water and gas, you cover electricity and internet. And then whatever it is, I'm not thinking about who the company is. I'm just like, I'm paying the bill.

Starting point is 01:22:22 But if one day your bill triple, I mean, who do you call? You're like, I haven't used more water. I don't understand why it costs more now. You might call the city, the city like, oh, we don't even run the water no more. And that's exactly what happened. So in 2020 in New Garden, Pennsylvania, they sold their water to get this, Agua, Pennsylvania.

Starting point is 01:22:43 in Pennsylvania, they sold their water to get this, Agua, Pennsylvania, jerks, a subsidiary of essential utilities. And they sold their water for $30 million. And just for you to get a grasp on how much money can be made by doing this, if you're a company, that company made $2.05 billion in 2023. And essentially, if you're the city, the city runs up, you are, you have all kinds of problems.

Starting point is 01:23:08 You got people not paying bills on time. You got all these different, you know, all this stuff. You got to hire the workers. You got to do all this stuff. And this company runs up and was like, yo, we'll take all this off your hands. Not only will we take it off your hands, we'll pay you for it.

Starting point is 01:23:22 So to the city and they say, look, I do a better job than y'all do. Why? Because this is all we do. You got all this other stuff. You got to take care. We don't only take care of the water. Look, we'll give you 30 million dollars for it. That's free money. And you ain't got to worry about it. All you got to do when people call complaining about their water is just say,

Starting point is 01:23:40 please hold and transfer it to us. You ain't got nothing to worry about. And the city say, okay, that sounds good. Now, are you going, you're going to change your prices? It's like, why would we change our prices? We don't need to change our price. Matter of fact, we could probably charge less because we ain't got the same things y'all got, well, at least for the first few years, kind of like the phone bill

Starting point is 01:24:01 when they like, oh, you sign up for this much money a month for the first three months or your cable for the first three months, or your cable for the first two years. And then one day your cable bill come in and it's just psycho. And you like, I don't know why the hell this costs so much more. And they're like, oh yeah, the contract was for this long.

Starting point is 01:24:16 And then after that, it went back to regular price. That's essentially what's happening. That's why I was like, if your water bill go crazy, who you gonna call? Like, what you gonna say? Like, they could just be like, yeah, it just costs more now. So for the city, the city is like, look, it's free money. We could put this money into other stuff we've been trying to work on and y'all

Starting point is 01:24:35 gonna get a better situation. And again, no one looks at the logo on their bill. So the utilities industries, right. A few years ago, I think in 2016, got this law passed that made cities want to sell it. It's called the Fair Market Value Laws. One example is in Pennsylvania was Act 12,

Starting point is 01:24:55 which was in 2016. And the concern is cities feel like they can keep up with, dun, dun, dun, environmental laws and keep up with city growth. Cities are growing so fast. So many people are moving in. We're destroying the earth at a particular exponential rate and the government wants us to not destroy the planet.

Starting point is 01:25:22 Oh, hum. So I got all these laws. I got, we just, he doesn't have the money for it. He doesn't have the money for it. What other time? So when you're evaluating how much this utility would be worth, you can include, because of Act 12 in Pennsylvania,

Starting point is 01:25:42 the median income, the expected repairs and future revenue, which means it makes that water worth way much more. And a lot of times when you selling this utility, the price tag, what these people be paying you be six times the city's budget. So think about this. I just trying to make this real for you. Let's just say somebody comes in and says, I'll buy your car.

Starting point is 01:26:16 You say word for how much and they say, I tell you what, I'll pay you your year salary for this car. The fam you go ahead. I for this car, the fam. You gonna add, I add another car in there for that. You know what I'm saying? Hey, you know, throwing another six months worth of salary, I'll make you some dinner. Like it's kind of a no brainer.

Starting point is 01:26:37 You like, our entire year's budget, just for the water? No brainer. But who pays the water? No brainer. But who pays the company? Nigga you, you paying the company. What do I mean by that? The company cuts the city a check. Now the company gotta make their money back. How they make their money back?

Starting point is 01:27:00 Nigga, yo bills. What is you saying? Of course they gonna make their money back now again. They're incentivized to make that money back as fast as possible, which means they're not going to spend more than they had already spent 30 million dollars to get the thing. But then they'll promise to like fix their systems, their promise. Like you, you, you, you sold the city saying,

Starting point is 01:27:23 I'm going to be able to spend some time to upgrade and do all this difference. And they don't ever upgrade nothing because it's kind of a no brainer. This is easy money to them. In Philly, there's this area called the Chester water authority that went straight up bankrupt. So like the city's water authority just went bankrupt. So they was like, yo, we got to sell it. They got offered $410 million. Well, the city did. And the city says, nigga, Chester Water Authority, you ain't got the right to sell

Starting point is 01:27:52 because you are not a company. You are part of the city of Philadelphia. Chester Water Authority is like, my G, I mean, what the hell you want us to do? How does this stuff become legal? Well, like same way any other stick come legal. They just, you lobby candidates all the time. And the only way to stop this is you got to sign up to some sort of city council newsletter or something to be able to walk up in there and protest the shit.

Starting point is 01:28:21 Nigga, good luck. Now let's talk about specifically California. All right. I bring up specifically California because of all the stuff about the fire hydrants and water issues that we had recently. Remember that the water that waters Los Angeles comes from the North, right?

Starting point is 01:28:49 It comes from right up under Sacramento through the California aqueduct that was put together by this man named Mulholland. So the Mulholland Pass, Mulholland Drive, that was all based on this man that made Los Angeles be possible because he just went up there just like any other colonizer was like, I'll buy your water. And they was like, water ain't for sale. He was like, yeah, it is. And went over their heads and bought the water.

Starting point is 01:29:19 Built a hole basically like when you was a kid at the beach and you dig a little thing in the sand to make the water go a certain way. That's basically what he did through the middle of California to bring water to Los Angeles. Now Los Angeles did have one river that was the San Gabriel River that starts in the top of the San Gabriel foothills and comes into what we call the LA River, which is paved, which there is a movement to unpave that because that would probably help us with a lot of climate issues. But either way, that was an actual river. It was enough to support the native tribes here because it wasn't that many people here. And they had sense enough to not plant plants

Starting point is 01:29:55 that need the water that they ain't got. They wasn't trying to build a city in the area that ain't supposed to be a city. Nigga, have you ever been to Las Vegas? There should not be a city there. Y'all ever been ever been to Las Vegas? There should not be a city there. Y'all ever been to the Inland Empire? There should not be that many humans there according to the earth, unless you pump water over there.

Starting point is 01:30:14 The natives were fine. The indigenous communities figured out how to live in the shit for thousands of years. But you know, we had to do our thing. Now, some vocabulary. California got a thing called senior water rights, which means whoever got there first gets the water. Like basically it's my land, I licked it, right?

Starting point is 01:30:36 But they only got them rights when it started from the gold rush. So they was like, well, who was there first? It was this white man, not the people that already lived there, but these white men. So if you happen to have a farm, you know, up near North Fresno, if your family been there longer than somebody else's family, then that water is yours. Right. That's senior

Starting point is 01:30:55 water rights. And then there's junior water rights, which is like the second person. So whatever water you don't use, they get to use. Right. Now, why that is specifically important for California, especially the Central Valley, is because Cali provides everybody's produce. I mean, for the rest of the country. The vast majority of the fruits, vegetables, nuts, and lagoons that you eat come from California. We got to have water. It would behoove of rest of America to make sure that Cali got water. So those are water rights.

Starting point is 01:31:27 Now, the water that gets pumped down into our fire hydrants, here's the situation, like that had to do a water pressure. Now you could refer to the block is literally hot episode where I go into detail as to what happened with that. But there was this whole thing about the water being owned by some billionaires. Now I would love to run with that one, but the fact is that's just not true.

Starting point is 01:31:52 It's not that simple. Let me go ahead and fact check that. So the wonderful co, which is who they were talking about, it's Stewart and Linda Resnick. They do have a majority stake in a water bank that can store up to 1.5 million acres, right? Which is close to 500 billion gallons of water.

Starting point is 01:32:14 But the realness is that's like a tiny fraction of the water capacity of California. California's groundwater basins combined can hold more than 566 times as much water with a storage capacity of 850 million to 1.3 billion acres a feet across the California Department of Water Sources. The state's surface resources hold more than 40 million acres on top of that. So there's two types of water here. There's surface water and there's groundwater.

Starting point is 01:32:48 Groundwater, obviously that's stuff that you would dig in for a well. That's a whole other thing, right? Now it is true. This family owns brands as like Wonderful Pistachios, Fiji Water, Wonderful Land Halos, Wonderful Halos and palm wonderful. And that's a, you know, I don't know

Starting point is 01:33:07 if you're into pomegranate juice, but if that's your thing. But anyway, let me quote from PolitiFact. The water the Resnick's use gets stored underground initially before the water is delivered to the roots of Resnick's pistachios, almonds, pomegranate orchards. Specifically it's stored in the Kern Water Bank that is the most valuable water resource in the region and critical to America's fresh food supplies.

Starting point is 01:33:32 The water bank, which is, watch this, the bank itself, a public-private partnership with the Resnick's own 57% of the stake is 32 square mile recharge basin, which looks like flood lands from the street that essentially stores again, the 1.5 million acre feet of water, 500 billion gallons. The Resnick's storage arrangement is very controversial. They've been banking on the water

Starting point is 01:33:59 by using public and private dollars to corral public resource. Because of their water rights and their wealth, they are insulating themselves from this type of drought, which of course, that's what rich do, right? This is what Chas Miller says, the director of environmental analysis at Pomona College. Private capital has no problem with the drought

Starting point is 01:34:23 while the rest of us are looking at deep social divides. Somebody bought the water. But water isn't the only thing, like I said, that somebody else owes. According to publicpower.org, utilities that were sold since 1980 have ranged dramatically in size, although many had a small number of customers

Starting point is 01:34:45 at the time of the sale with the median of fewer than 600 customers. Less than 30% of utilities sold had more than a thousand customers at the time of sale, right? So back then it was a small amount of people, right? Watch this, only five public power utilities with 10,000 or more customers have sold, right? And four of those five sales occurred were approved since 2015. Now, the largest sale of such electric department was the city of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which had about 68,000 customers.

Starting point is 01:35:25 And when it sold to the Middle Tennessee Electric Membership Cooperative in 2020, other utilities, substantial size, include those serving the cities of Vero Beach, Anchorage, Alaska, Eagle Mountain, Utah, and altogether we are talking about 800,000 citizens today have their electricity private. Sales have occurred in 26 states and almost all of Kansas was sold

Starting point is 01:35:56 and it was sold in the 1980s. Now, why even make an episode on this? And it's because of this last thing, corporate cities. Now, of course, company towns is as old as companies are. You had train things and stuff like that, where a company moves in and it just made sense for the company to make sure that they were providing housing and saloons and stuff like that for the people that,

Starting point is 01:36:28 you know, lived in their area. That it just made sense. That was just, it was just good business, right? You wanted to attract more people to stay in this area. If you've ever been in Northwest Arkansas, city called Bentonville, it's actually very dope to be in, but it is the headquarters for Walmart. So if you're going to work in corporate Walmart, you got to be in, but it is the headquarters for Walmart. So if you're gonna work in corporate Walmart, you gotta live in Bentonville.

Starting point is 01:36:48 Now the city's dope. Is that a corporate town? Not in what I'm talking about. It is a company that said, we're gonna dump a kajillion dollars to make this city as dope as possible. That's one thing. I am talking about a brand making a city.

Starting point is 01:37:08 I wish I was making this up. Google got one. It's working on a community called North Bay Shore in Mountain View, California. That'll have 7,000 housing units and another called Middlefield Park that'll have 2,000 units. Metta is building Willow Village,

Starting point is 01:37:27 dubbed Zuck Town in Menlo Park, California. And they'll have 1700 housing units, a hotel and plenty of retail. Disney is developing a 1400 housing units across 80 acres in Kissimmee, Florida, right near Walt Disney World. Elon Musk is building his city called in Snailbrook, outside of Austin, Texas for employees of his constellations

Starting point is 01:37:58 of startups, including SpaceX, Tesla, and Boeing. But the most ambitious is California forever. It's supposed to be Silicon Valley 2.0. It's this group ran by the former golden sax trader, Jane Simark and is backed by investors like the LinkedIn co-founder, Reed Hoffman, Chris Dixon, and this philanthropist named Loreen Powell. And it plans to create this new city in Solano County,

Starting point is 01:38:26 60 miles north of San Bernardino, with tens of thousands of homes, large solar energy, orchards with a million new trees and a hundred thousand acres of new park space. And they hope to build this community will generate thousands of jobs in a walkable Paris or West Village in New York. And there was this reporting of this unknown group

Starting point is 01:38:51 that was coming up and just like, just buying farmland. It was called Flannery Associates. And for years, nobody had any idea who these people were. They purchased 52,000 acres, spent $800 million, paying five times a market rate. And nobody knew who they were. It's a little po-duck town, people selling their little farms. And it's because these billionaires is building a city. Now, I am telling you all this ultimately to introduce you to Kurdish Yarvin, who is probably going to be a future Basterpod person

Starting point is 01:39:29 or either way, one of these shows is gonna cover this man. Cause this man in a lot of ways is the patient zero, the contagion number one of these new Republicans, this new conservatism, this new extremists that's been kind of been trying to tell everybody, here's why it's so poisonous. He's like, because not only is democracy dead, democracy been dead.

Starting point is 01:39:59 And whatever you think you have now, ain't a democracy to which all of us would be like, nigga, yes. That's why it's so dangerous. Cause I'd be like, yeah, he's like the system's failing you. And I'm like, amen. So his solution is a monarchy, but he made a monarchy like a CEO. So this man says if the country was ran like a tech company, everything would be cool, we would all be better.

Starting point is 01:40:25 And his example of that is, he would say, okay, look at that laptop you're using. Look at that phone you got. Do you think you would have got to that phone, to that laptop, the quality of that laptop you had, if it was done by the city of California's tech municipal department? He's like, nigga, no, you got that because of Steve Jobs.

Starting point is 01:40:47 That's why you got that phone. Cause that nigga was like, look, this is what we doing. This how we doing it. He would argue that Roosevelt over the new deal. He was a tech bro. He ran his mug like a tech startup. He was like, look, nigga, this is what we doing. We building freeways.

Starting point is 01:41:02 I don't care what y'all say, we building freeways. He's like like if the country Was ran like a tech company Then maybe this country would work better and he's like and news flash Whatever the hell you think you got now Ain't working. Anyway, we might as well just lean into it All I'm saying is I don't know what I'm saying is I don't know what I'm saying.

Starting point is 01:41:26 Fam, it could happen here. So this is your favorite cousin swooping in and signing off ruining another thing for you. Don't catch me at the hood politics pop. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, D***less Me. I'm the old one.

Starting point is 01:42:03 I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. It could be a family show. We're not quite sure.

Starting point is 01:42:15 We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, I'm the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Courtside with Laura Corenti, the podcast that's changing the game and breaking down the business of women's sports like never before. I'm Laura, the founder and CEO of Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment, your inside source on the biggest deals, power moves and game changers, writing the playbook on all things women's sports.

Starting point is 01:42:41 From the heavy hitters in the front office to the powerhouse women on the pitch. We're talking to commissioners, team owners, influential athletes, and the investors betting big on women's sports. We'll break down the numbers, get under the hood and go deep on what's next. Women's sports are the moment. So if you're not paying attention, you're already behind. Join me, Courtside, for a front row seat into the making of the business of women's sports. Courtside with Laura Carrenty is an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Listen to Courtside with Laura Carrenty starting April 3rd on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown.

Starting point is 01:43:27 Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like, uh, less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store.

Starting point is 01:44:01 We have one aisle clear. And aisle three. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos.

Starting point is 01:44:36 It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet

Starting point is 01:44:53 and to the front lines of a global battle against deep fake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville.

Starting point is 01:45:11 This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart, and this episode is about the people who want to make it, being the United States, fall apart even faster, allowing them to install a white supremacist ethno-state, though it kind of feels like

Starting point is 01:45:45 that's pretty much already happening. This episode is also about the people in government who categorize and classify wannabe terrorists who want the country to collapse faster, and what these changes in categorization methods can tell us about the future of the country. I'm Garrison Davis, and today I'm joined by a very special guest, philosopher and comedian Michael Burns of the YouTube channel Michael O'Byrne's and formerly Wisecrack RIP. How you doing? Pretty good, you know, besides living in the world that you just described. Past that, everything's going great. Yeah, that's kind of been the my mood the past three months, maybe

Starting point is 01:46:27 longer. There's a tad, a tad like liminality. But I don't know if that's just like living in denial and trying to cope. But hey, you know, what's wrong with a little bit of coping? Especially if it helps one simply survive these times. So you know, I encourage a healthy dose of, of coping or sort of a, you know, mental bifurcation if that's what we need to do to get up in the morning and get through it all. Yay. Now, unfortunately, this episode that I have prepared today is not a super cheery one for you, Michael, which is, which is maybe kind of kind of appropriate because the reason why I have you on this episode today

Starting point is 01:47:05 is because the FBI and the Department of Justice have come up with a new terrorism classification acronym, which name drops the Internet's favorite and sometimes least favorite philosophy, nihilism. They're calling these guys nihilistic violent extremists. Oh boy. We will we will get into this. Do you want to give like a philosophy 101 definition of nihilism, a super well-known and universally agreed upon term that always means the same thing

Starting point is 01:47:36 to everybody? So yeah, it's not confusing at all. And yeah, I mean, I think the root of it, at least in like a modern philosophical sense is Nietzsche At least that's a common reference point and when Nietzsche is talking about nihilism Especially in a book like the genealogy of morality and a lot of other places He is making the argument that sort of Christian European culture and particularly a Christian European culture influenced by idealist philosophy

Starting point is 01:48:04 particularly a Christian European culture influenced by idealist philosophy creates nihilism. The reason he says it creates nihilism is because people care more about heaven than they do about earth. They care more about the life they're going to have in eternity than the life they have in the here and now. So for him it's like this devaluement of life that happens via Christianity, more speaking nihilism has a I guess more positive usage Which is the you know? disbelief in the inherent or necessary meaning in an overarching system like in like the existential sense Yeah So you kind of have this this distinction and some people use of positive and negative nihilism and to be really crass and simple here

Starting point is 01:48:43 Negative nihilism is nothing means anything, so I don't give a shit, I'm just gonna hang out and do whatever. Positive nihilism is there's no inherent meaning in reality, but cool, now me and the homies can construct meaning as we see fit, which is more like the existentialist response. We're gonna create meaning where maybe there wasn't

Starting point is 01:49:03 natural meaning in this old school platonic or Christian sense. And I'm not sure how much the FBI agents who are doing these federal court filings have read Nietzsche or the French existentialists and instead are probably using a colloquial definition of nihilism, right? This like, oh, nothing matters. You know, this like apathetic postmodernist like idea to go, to go a little Jordan Petersony, right? Yeah. I mean, I think there is this sense in which it is the kind of weird Jordan Petersony alt-right philosophy version of nihilism, which just means like people that think the dominance of the West is bad. And it also reeks a little bit of like big Lebowski nihilism for-

Starting point is 01:49:48 Totally, totally. You know, and of course in that movie, nihilism is represented by a crew of I think Austrian techno producers called Autobahn, who are also nihilist. And they say throughout the film, like we are nihilist, we believe in nothing. We would just really, and obviously the Coen brothers made that film, at least one of them was a philosophy major, so they know what they're doing.

Starting point is 01:50:06 That's kind of the really basic, not good enough version of this thing that it seems like the FBI is operating with, like people who don't believe in the goodness of the Western project. Correct. And that's what they're really honing in on. I will read an expanded definition of nihilist violent extremism. This is from a federal court filing dated March 18, 2025. Nihilist violent extremists are individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that

Starting point is 01:50:37 derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability. Nihilist violent extremists work individually or as a part of a network with these goals of destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations which often include minors. This is where it's going to get into some kind of weirder stuff that we will kind of explain later. They have like a second definition here, quote, nihilist violent extremists both individually and as a network systematically and methodically target vulnerable populations

Starting point is 01:51:13 across the United States and the globe. They frequently use social media communication platforms to connect with individuals and desensitize them to violence, among other things, breaking down societal norms regarding engaging in violence, normalizing the possession, production, and sharing of gore materials, and otherwise corrupting and grooming those individuals towards committing future acts of violence." Unquote. And that kind of outlines some of the strategy of these groups. The groups that they're kind of going to mention here, I've been doing like freelance research on for about four years now.

Starting point is 01:51:47 I've been trying to publish a few articles on these guys over the years, but it's always tricky. And we will get to kind of the darker corners of that in a sec. But let's first kind of talk about what this new term, is itVEs, Nihilist Violent Extremists, what this is kind of replacing in the FBI lexicon. Now it seems that this term is being used in place of two previous FBI terrorism categories. This is from a November 2020 FBI bulletin, quote, anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism. This threat encompasses the potentially unlawful use or threat of force or violence in furtherance

Starting point is 01:52:31 of ideological agendas derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment, including opposition to perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies, or perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy. Whew. Can I say something that stood out to me about those definitions? perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy. Can I say something that stood out to me about those definitions? The hatred thing I found really interesting, in like the very first definition you give, that nihilism is defined as like in a motive state, because again, I think nihilism is

Starting point is 01:52:58 classically conceived is almost more like ontological or metaphysical, and by that I just mean looking at these structures of belief in the world. So rather than being like motivated by hatred or love or fear or whatever, a more classically nihilist view is just again like, oh I've been sold a bill of goods on what the meaning of existence is or what the underlying principles of political reality are, and now I see that they are maybe BS. Not the hatred of society and wanting to collapse it.

Starting point is 01:53:28 Yeah, I guess there's just this negativity associated with all that language, and of course, I was, having never heard the definitions that you were just bringing up, the way in which it just quickly zigs and zags to some very dark stuff in terms of radicalization, it seemed like there was a reference towards like pedophilia or something there. Child sexual abuse materials. Yeah, come up

Starting point is 01:53:49 a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So it just getting from A to B there is more like getting from A to Z or something. It's just not a connection that I think would be obvious to anyone who has thought about read about written about nihilism as more of an intellectual or even like a political and philosophical concept. Totally. Because there, written about nihilism as more of an intellectual or even like a political and philosophical concept. Totally, because there is like political nihilists in like the Russian tradition and more recently in like the American anarchist tradition or the Greek anarchist tradition where they believe in this like idea of like negation and trying to like negate government institutions.

Starting point is 01:54:22 Yeah, but which is still a far cry from believing in causing active harm psychologically, physically, whatever, to human beings. Like vulnerable populations, yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's a sense in which it's painted as, like if you knew nothing else, and you were to read those definitions, and you were just a scared suburban insurance salesman or something, it would sound as if it was like a death cult

Starting point is 01:54:44 infecting the minds of children, like zombie-esque little super soldiers. That's actually what they're going for. And I have a lot of mixed opinions on this term, because I think this term is trying to describe a group that does kind of defy classification, but I think the use of the nihilist term is also not good. So I'm kind of in a rock and a hard place here as someone who does a lot of extremism research. Now the other term that the FBI is probably seeking to replace, at least in part, with this new nihilism definition is racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism.

Starting point is 01:55:21 This is like your what term assists your neo-Nazis, the FBI defines it as, This threat encompasses the potentially unlawful use or threat of force or violence and furtherance of ideological agendas derived from bias, often relating to race or ethnicity, held by the actor against others or a given population group. Racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists purported to use both political and religious justifications to support their racially or ethnically based ideological objectives and criminal activities. This was the group that saw like a massive explosion in growth the past 10 years, really starting around 2016 to 2017 with, you know, the neo-Nazi mass shooting epidemic, especially

Starting point is 01:56:03 around like 2017 to 2019. This is the most lethal group and it grew exponentially during that period. And we're kind of seeing some of these groups start to reform now. Now, there's been some reporting that this anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism, which I'm just going to say agave, which is the acronym, which does make me a little bit hungry for a glucose syrup, but it's fine. Now, there's been some reporting that state agave is specifically like a Biden era term, but it actually predates the Biden presidency and was in use under Trump. In fact, a lot of the internal FBI reforms that are being reported on right now are actually undoing changes and counterterrorism strategies that started under the first Trump presidency.

Starting point is 01:56:50 But we'll get more on that later. We're going to go on an ad break real quick and return to talk about a gruesome act of violence in Wisconsin last month. Alright, we are back. I'm going to get more into how the government is using this term and what they are applying it to, what they're applying the nihilist violent extremism label to. Earlier this year, a Wisconsin teen male named Nikita Kasap killed his parents in an attempt to gain the financial means and autonomy necessary to carry out a plot to assassinate President Trump and accelerate the collapse of the United States. I'm going to read a quote from a federal criminal complaint filed last month. Quote, on March 3rd, 2025, county sheriffs obtained a search warrant for CASP's cell

Starting point is 01:57:49 phone. During the review, they identified material on the phone related to, quote, unquote, the Order of Nine Angles. The sheriff's review of the phone identified possible usernames for CASP, including Accelerationist 14 and Awoken, unquote. Now, Michael, are you unfortunate enough to be familiar with the Order of Nine Angles? I am not. So this is a group that was originally based in the UK and now is primarily active in Eastern Europe,

Starting point is 01:58:17 though there are branches or spinoffs called Nexions in the United States. This is a group that is kind of hard to define. People often call it a Nazi Satanist group. I think it's more accurate to call them a like white supremacist occultic group who essentially try to cultivate evil for the sake of evil. They're like a left-hand path occult group that has orchestrated multiple terrorist attacks, especially through radicalizing US soldiers. At this point, they're pretty mythic with their writing and tactics leaving a strong lingering presence across the left-hand path fascist occult milieu. We also have a reference to quote-unquote accelerationism here, which is similar to nihilism, is like

Starting point is 01:59:02 this philosophical term which has kind of been warped and changed via people's application of it in politics. And specifically kind of the way that we're going to be using this word here is this idea of trying to like accelerate the collapse of the country, mostly to install like a white supremacist ethno-state after the country has collapsed. This is how most Nazis use the term, even though it has a slightly different cultural background with the work of Nick Land and Mark Fisher. When I was growing up, acceleration just meant accelerating the contradictions of capitalism,

Starting point is 01:59:32 but kids these days took it in all the direction. Not a good one. So this federal criminal complaint alleges that Kassip was communicating with people on the messaging app Telegram, and these people were possibly in Ukraine and or Russia, and these people helped him plan this attack. The FBI found TikTok messages on his phone where he discussed the struggle of telling his friends that he quote unquote follows the O9A teachings, that's

Starting point is 02:00:00 order of nine angles, and he discussed a previous FBI visit to his home in 2023 In other exchanges on tik-tok. He shared information with a user named Nihilus About how to find Nazi telegram channels. I'm gonna I'm gonna read through some of this some of this chat transcript Nihilus hey, dude. Do you know any telegram groups where Niners? That's oh nine a and Drex can interact and exchange info? Awoken. That's Kassip.

Starting point is 02:00:30 Sorry, no, I'm mostly in NSWP telegram groups. LOL. If you do find any, it'd be nice if you tell me. Nihilus. What's WP? Awoke. Wikipedia.org slash national underscore socialism underscore white power. Nihilus. Oh, white power. W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W- Awoken, can you send me the link to the account? Awoken, it says I can't access the message. Nihilus, how can I do that? Wait a second, Awoken, here's my Telegram username.

Starting point is 02:01:09 Accelerationist14, Nihilus, I sent a message. So there you go, that's a... Man, just... There is some later Telegram messages that are archived in this complaint as well, where at Acc accelerationist says, what country do you think will get the blame for this? Meaning his planned attack.

Starting point is 02:01:30 An unknown user replied, Russia will be blamed for it. This is the goal. Accelerationist said, quote, when the time comes for me to send my manifesto to you, so you can spread it online, should it be a PDF? Also. Sorry. Sorry. I just like that when the context of all that they're discussing file types.

Starting point is 02:01:50 And also, you won't anyhow change or modify the manifesto. The unknown user replies, write it on a piece of paper and take a picture. The FBI personnel performing the preliminary review saw images of a three-page document titled Accelerate the Collapse. The images are screen grabs displayed on a phone, and these images were created on February 28, 2025. This document is the manifesto referred to by at Accelerationist. The manifesto calls for the assassination of the President of the United States in order

Starting point is 02:02:21 to ferment a political revolution in the United States to quote unquote save the white race from quote unquote Jewish controlled politicians. The third page of the document contains images of Adolf Hitler with text that reads quote, Hail Hitler, hail the white race, hail victory. Now, from what I can read of this manifesto, it's pretty basic. It's heavily plagiarized like most of these kind of white supremacist accelerationist manifestos are. It's heavily plagiarized like most of these white supremacist, accelerationist manifestos are. It talks about how Jews control white countries and are promoting white genocide and degeneracy. It talks about the need to quote unquote collapse Jewish occupied governments.

Starting point is 02:02:58 The manifesto states that his motivation for wanting to kill Trump was to sow chaos and raise public awareness that quote, assassinations and accelerating the collapse are possible things to do unquote. Not that possible since he's arrested and did not accelerate the collapse but he also advocates that people unable to commit to taking direct action instead make connections with other white supremacists and grow a network to take over the country once America collapses. He recommends the writing of Nazi accelerationists including James Mason, who wrote the influential Nazi book Siege, and the Terrorgram Collective, a group of white supremacists from around the world who organize

Starting point is 02:03:35 on the messaging platform Telegram to share guides on how to do terrorism. He also recommends the writings of former Atomwaffen members, an American accelerationist group, writing quote, there is much to learn from the successes and mistakes of Adam Waffen. I think it's worth noting that Adam Waffen was also either like infiltrated or partially co-opted and inspired by some 09A teachings. This is kind of how the more bizarre and occultic influence of 09A seeped more into the kind of general American accelerationist Nazi milieu. This was like in like 2018. Now Kasip advises that if the reader of the manifesto is already like, pilled, that you

Starting point is 02:04:16 should just skip the theory and just read practical how-to guides for terrorism and bomb making, since quote unquote, there is no political solution. Huge amounts of violence will be required. Long past the days where we can vote for a Hitler to save us, white revolution is the only solution, unquote. Which is, I guess I'm kind of desensitized to this sort of stuff. In fact, I just find this slightly funny, considering kind of the victory lap that Stephen Miller and white nationalists are currently having in the government where many of them do think they can just vote for a Hitler to save us and that Hitler may already be in office forever. Well, that is what's so shocking hearing all this

Starting point is 02:04:54 is someone that doesn't know all these details. I mean, A, I feel like the blinders just got taken off me and I'm seeing the world anew. But B, shocking that from a more normie perspective, in my mind I would think all of these types would be pretty excited about how things are going politically not trying to tear things down further It's like you guys won, you know accept it even Trump is not extremely enough for a lot of these guys Yeah, they really go places

Starting point is 02:05:19 Now Casper was coordinating with multiple telegram users likely in Ukraine and Russia on how to build a drone Now, Kasap was coordinating with multiple Telegram users, likely in Ukraine and Russia, on how to build a drone that can drop an explosive and paid some individuals for some of the required materials, and also had a plan to flee to Ukraine after his attack that he was coordinating with Ukrainian Nazis on Telegram. Tough look for Telegram. It's always a tough look for Telegram. Not great. Not a great platform. Pretty much only used by these guys. Yeah, no, he was talking about how he probably needs to quote-unquote brush up on my Russian.

Starting point is 02:05:54 Oh yeah, definitely. Before he flees to Ukraine after trying to kill the president. You know, you download Duolingo after you do that. That's right, that's right. He had plans to meet up with 10 people with similar beliefs in Ukraine. My mind is just so blown by all this. I thought I thought I knew things. I know nothing. Now, on March 10th, sheriffs interviewed a classmate of Kassop,

Starting point is 02:06:19 and the classmate told them that the Kassop would send, quote unquote, gore edit videos The classmate told them that the cast would send quote unquote gore edit videos that includes flashing like gore like a body gore imagery and war images put to Russian music sent via Snapchat. This is a common tactic done by these sort of like teenage extremists. This is a whole like sub genre of video that has changed and altered inesthetic multiple times. Frankly, if you spend enough time on Twitter now, in the comments of blue-check neo-Nazis, you can find some of these edits where they have techno, fast-paced, sometimes Russian music set to glorified images of Rome or Nazi Germany or a large variety of stuff. But the gore genre is specifically unique to kind of the, to the 09A, like a cultic Nazi branch, because they think that like viewing these images,

Starting point is 02:07:13 like increases your power level of like evil, right? It's a very video game view of like, of like spiritual development of like, you have to, you have to like raise your evil stat by looking at gore. And this will make you more able to commit big acts of violence. Whoa. So just desensitizing yourself to them just makes you a more violent person

Starting point is 02:07:31 and capable of doing these things yourself. Correct. Correct. And that's a big part of their praxis. This is why they send this type of stuff to a lot of kids on the internet, because they hope that if they desensitize these kids, it'll be easier to convince them to then do acts of violence themselves.

Starting point is 02:07:47 Kasap told his classmate that he intended to kill his parents by shooting them, but could not because he didn't have access to a gun. He later told his classmate that he would befriend someone with a gun and then steal it, and told him that he was in contact with a male in Russia via telegram, and that they were both plotting

Starting point is 02:08:04 to overthrow the government of the United States and assassinate President Trump. Kassip told the classmate that when he saw 10 consecutive attacks in the news, it would have to be him. I've already transitioned to the sort of person who can now laugh at this because of the absurdity. Oh my gosh. And get those laughs in now because the next section is much more dark. Oh no. Because it's funny to laugh at a guy like this who mostly failed.

Starting point is 02:08:30 I mean, he did kill his parents. That is bad. Really happened. Okay. Oh no, he did. He did kill his parents. He did flee to a different state. He wasn't smart enough though.

Starting point is 02:08:40 He at least tracked him on him and his parents' cell phone and their car who he still had with him. So, again, not not a very good attacker, I guess. But no, like this, this, this, this kid murdered his parents, sat in the house with their decomposing bodies for 12 days before trying to carry out the rest of his attack on the United States. So, yeah, though he did not succeed in his larger goals, these people still absolutely do get groomed into doing violence. And this is something that happens at a pretty frequent basis, honestly, to the point where these types of things don't make giant headlines anymore.

Starting point is 02:09:17 They would have maybe in 2017. But now a lot of journalists are desensitized to this. And because it happens so frequently frequently it is less newsworthy Which is a very unfortunate place to be in for a country You know what else is unfortunate Michael? Oh, what's that? having to pivot to ads actually Necessary evil it's way better than killing your parents. Yes. Yes. I will I will go on record I will go on record eat me get go on record. Eat me, Gita board. Sorry.

Starting point is 02:09:46 I love ads, actually. [♪ Music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A bit of music playing. A As a heads up, the next section will reference online exploitation and child sexual abuse material. Alright, we are back. Let's get more depressing, unfortunately, but I think we will find a way to turn this around. Well, not like in an optimistic way, but in a way that it's like useful. We'll learn something together. So at the end of this section of this complaint that attempts to describe Kacop's collapse-driven political ideology is the appearance of this new term nihilistic violent extremists, right? Now, this was actually the second time this term has appeared

Starting point is 02:10:36 in court documents. The earliest appearance of this term was in a March sentencing memo for a child sexual abuse material case first filed in November of 2024, which was linked to the 764 child extortion and exploitation network. Ken Klepinsdeen, who first reported on the use of the nihilism term, missed this first appearance and attributed the origin to the Kassop case. Michael, are you similarly unfortunate enough to be aware of 764? This is another one where my brain is more pure than yours, I guess, at this point. But it's about to get ruined. So let's do it.

Starting point is 02:11:12 Yeah, I mean, it has been for a lot of people. Like, I've been doing like extremism research and I've been aware of these guys for about four years. The FBI, I think, first did their public announcement warning parents about this in 2023. 764 is a network of groups that operate either on Discord, Telegram, Instagram, social media apps. They're kind of inspired by some aspects of 09A, but they are much more focused on the production and distribution of child sexual abuse materials and trying to manipulate a groom and blackmail and extort minors into producing this material. A lot of it's done by other minors too. A lot of

Starting point is 02:11:52 this is teens targeting other teens with adults kind of helping this process along. It's a pretty big problem. There's been some good reporting on it in Wired and The Guardian the past few years if you want to read more. Now this March sentencing memo for the 764 case describes 764 and related groups as, quote, nihilist violent extremists who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and engage with other extremists abroad. 764 network's accelerationist goals include social unrest and the downfall of the current world order, including the United States government. Members of 764 work in concert with one another towards

Starting point is 02:12:28 a common purpose of destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, including minors." Now I think this definition may be a bit too generalizing, but it's not incorrect. Like this is correct in what the explicit goals of this group are, maybe not just every individual member of this group. But I think it would be a mistake to kind of dismiss this definition as outlandishly grandiose, right? It kind of, it calls into like mine, you know,

Starting point is 02:13:01 like conspiracy theory, like framing, because it sounds very like extravagant and complicated. And it kind of is, but it's also, it's also like simple. It's people trying to automate the process of producing and distributing illegal materials. But I do believe it is a mistake to completely dismiss this, both in terms of like the government trying to ascribe political motive for the distribution of these materials, and also the ideological justifications held by some members of these groups. Now, there have been two more 764 cases from April of 2025 that have used the nihilist violent extremism designation in court documents. Now, part of kind

Starting point is 02:13:38 of the struggle with this is like, Ken Klippenstein reported, quote, it sounds to me like some demented philosophical justification for just being a pedophile. And like, it sounds to me like some demented philosophical justification for just being a pedophile. And like, it is, but that doesn't mean the political motivations shouldn't be discounted. Uh, because those motivations impact how they operate, how these groups spread, which targets they pick, and other political actions members might take,

Starting point is 02:14:01 like mass shootings, targeting racial minorities, targeting LGBTQ individuals. So yeah, this is kind of why I push back a little bit on this kind of dismissive tone towards this larger, almost conspiratorial kind of matrix put onto groups like 764. Now, part of the tricky thing with use of this new nihilism term is that it's being used to rope in a variety of horrific incidents under a singular nebulous category. Right? So let's take the case of Kassop here. Kassop, the guy who killed his parents in a plot to collapse the United States, is a relatively bog standard like neo-Nazi accelerationist with seemingly no direct

Starting point is 02:14:41 ties to 764 activity besides an interest in 09A, which was just one of the inspirations that influenced 764 as it evolved into its own complex machine about five years ago. But Kasup openly admitted to being radicalized by Nazism and the white power movement online, and yet, in his criminal complaint, contains an expanded version of the nihilist violent extremism definition, which is literally copy and pasted from a child sexual abuse material sentencing memo from five days before. So they just use this same thing, despite it not really applying. Reading quote, individuals are targeted online often through synchronized group chats. nihilist violent extremists frequently conduct coordinated extortions of individuals by blackmailing

Starting point is 02:15:22 them so they comply with demands of the network. These demands vary and include but are not limited to self-mutilation, online or in-person sexual acts, harms to animals, sexual exploitation of siblings and others, acts of violence, threats of violence, suicide, and murder. So very, very dark stuff. The definition goes on to state how vulnerable individuals are targeted and members of the group attempt to gain notoriety throughout the network and spread fear among those targeted individuals for the purpose of accelerating the downfall of society and otherwise achieving the goal of nihilist violent extremists. So, while that does accurately describe groups like 764, it doesn't really relate to the case of CASA. It's tricky because a lot of these 764 guys are also Nazis, and a lot of Nazis are also pedophiles.

Starting point is 02:16:06 Some of these guys start off as like evil occultic pedophiles who associate with Nazism because it's a pretty universal symbol of evil, and sometimes it's the vice versa, where they start off as like an anti-Semitic right-winger, a Nazi, or a fascist, who then associate with this weird pedo-occult stuff for a variety of reasons, like spiritual, perverted pleasure, or tactical network building. Usually, it's a mix. Klippenstein writes, quote, The warrant alleges Kassip was in touch with the Order of Nine Angles, a satanic neo-Nazi group that espouses accelerationism, a fancy word for the belief

Starting point is 02:16:42 that destabilizing the social order allows for radical change. That is pretty heady stuff to ascribe to a 17-year-old and ends up having the feeling of an episode of altered carbon." And I kind of like reject this dismissive framing like, no, these 17-year-olds are thinking about this. They are getting convinced of this material online. That is the motivation for it. This isn't like a science fiction thing. This is real and it's pretty common among like extremists this age. There's a lot of young teenage male extremists. That's kind of their main demographic.

Starting point is 02:17:14 And this type of stuff is popular. Like this is at least popular within this small group of extremists. So so, yeah, it is a little bit heady, but this is what they are genuinely thinking about. It's not incorrect to, like, ascribe that to them. Kassab openly admitted to this connection. Well, and even speak to the flip side of that, you know, over the years making philosophy stuff on YouTube, I've gotten in touch with people who reached out to be like, oh, I've

Starting point is 02:17:40 been watching stuff since high school. When I was like 15, I was watching these like philosophy YouTube videos on heady ideas and reading stuff. So like- Me, I was one of these people. Yeah, there's like young folks out there who take big ideas very seriously and they have more access than ever to these things. So it doesn't, I mean, it doesn't shock me at all

Starting point is 02:17:58 that some teen could go down that rabbit hole or even could start reading like a Curtis Yarvin or Nick Land and going down those rabbit holes and stuff, especially now that some of these people are, you know, put on like the New York Times and stuff like that. So, yeah, it seems weird to dismiss that. I can understand the impulse to be like, this just seems like a very stupid, evil teen kid,

Starting point is 02:18:18 but it seems just as plausible, like you're pointing out, that there could be an actual engagement with ideas, and it's important to recognize that, because then you have to get at the root of that. just as plausible like you're pointing out that there could be an actual engagement with ideas and that's it's important to recognize that because Then you have to get at the root of that exactly and like these people aren't necessarily like Philosophical nihilists or existential nihilists Yeah But they could be interpreted as reacting to a general like passive nihilist culture with this form of like pseudo political nihilism

Starting point is 02:18:40 This attempt at like social negation like total systems collapse But even still they aren't totally political nihilists since they have a very clear System of hierarchy that they want the current world order replaced with though These individuals may be seen as like victims of nihilism and like in like in like the Nietzschean sense Now like my main problem with the nihilist violent extremism term is that it's so The main problem with the nihilist violent extremism term is that it's so depoliticized and in a way that's rife for political abuse. This term can be used to cover what the government deems as violence stemming from apathy, from frustration with society, as well as anti-tech or anti-civilization politics.

Starting point is 02:19:20 And this is all coming from top down at the new Federal Bureau of Investigation. For years, Cash Patel has closely associated with QAnon, has helped the legal defense campaigns for January 6th insurrectionists, which included Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and 3%ers. And now, as head of the FBI, he's investigating FBI agents who worked those January 6th cases. Joe Kent, the new director of the National Counterterrorism Center, has made media appearances with Nick Fuentes and neo-Nazi YouTuber David Carlson. He hired Proud Boys to consult in his failed congressional campaign, and his friends with Patriot prayer leader Joey Gibson.

Starting point is 02:19:54 Kent has repeatedly called for the FBI to investigate Antifa. The co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, Heidi Baric, has said that Patel's QAnon links and Deputy Director Dan Bongino's public conspiracism and bigotry make taking the threat of far-right extremism quote-unquote impossible for these two men. She says, quote, I think it makes it very unlikely that the far-right will continue to be seen as the threat it actually is in terms of hate crimes and domestic terrorism. All of this marks a huge departure from the first Trump administration, where the FBI for the first time declared white supremacy the country's

Starting point is 02:20:28 greatest domestic terrorism threat. Facts about violence and its perpetuators probably won't matter this time around." These changes are already taking place. An old counterterrorism strategy guide was removed from the White House website in January. A current FBI agent was quoted in Vanity Fair as saying, quote, The key is the Domestic Intelligence Operations Guide. If they change that, Patel will be able to shift domestic terrorism investigations away from the accelerationists and the right-wing street fighters and towards things like BLM and Antifa, unquote. Patel has cut the domestic terrorism office staffing and reassigned agents and intelligence analysts, with new senior FBI officials reportedly considering to disband the entire domestic

Starting point is 02:21:11 terrorism operations section. In addition, the FBI has discontinued their previous domestic terrorism tracking tool, where they take relevant investigations to identify and track trends for terrorism probes across the country. Sources for outlets like Reuters say that changes to the agency will reduce counterterrorism to identify and track trends for terrorism probes across the country. Sources for outlets like Reuters say that changes to the agency will reduce counterterrorism operations against far-right and racially motivated extremists and militias. Jacob Ware, a domestic terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Reuters,

Starting point is 02:21:38 quote, there is a broader desire, I think, within the administration to at best ignore data and put their head in the sand, and at worst to realign resources away from this battle." A spokesperson for Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told Reuters that the termination of the domestic terrorism tracking tool is a quote, great step in the right direction of returning the FBI to its primary crime fighting mission. Representative Jordan previously in 2023 ran a congressional panel that alleged the FBI terrorism case-tagging tool was being improperly used to target conservatives after January 6th.

Starting point is 02:22:14 Three former FBI agents testified at the Republican-led panel, and two of those former agents admitted to being paid by Patel, who at the time was not director of the FBI, he was just a right wing influencer after being kicked out of the government after the first Trump administration. We've also seen the Joint Terrorism Task Force largely shift their efforts towards immigration enforcement, helping ICE with deportations, and the so-called wave of Tesla terrorism. And like, the other thing is that this new nihilist violent extremism term isn't just replacing agave, it's not just replacing the anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism, because the agave term itself has three subcategories,

Starting point is 02:22:58 as referenced in an FBI document that outlines domestic terrorism activity from 2015 to 2019. This includes militia violent extremists, anarchist violent extremists, and sovereign citizen violent extremists. And even in addition to those three, there's actually a newer sub classification from 2023 called agave other, which really isn't a great term at all. This is the problem with trying to use these like tracking and tagging tools is that they can get very convoluted, but now they've seemingly collapsed all of these and are just using the term nihilism. So would you say, like, when you bring up the Tesla example, is one of, to be very reductive here, the big risks at play that someone who starts Tesla on fire or causes some damage at a Tesla dealership, largely

Starting point is 02:23:46 for the motivation of trying to stick it to Elon Musk or something like that, gets classified in a way by the FBI that is similar to some of the folks you have previously talked about doing things that most rational humans could agree are deeply more insidious than like setting a car on fire. They can frame this as like a rejection of society. The same way like there's been talk that they're going to try to use this label to explain and like set a car on fire. They can frame this as like a rejection of society. Yeah. The same way, like there's been talk that they're gonna try to use this label

Starting point is 02:24:07 to explain cases like United Healthcare CEO shooting, the arson attack at Josh Shapiro's house. They're gonna be using this term to apply to kind of any act that they see is like contrary to like society and civilization. And anything that's stemming from frustration with society. And that's a huge problem. And in doing so, they're shifting focus away from right-wing militias who do the majority of actual lethal violence. When these reports from the past

Starting point is 02:24:37 five years talk about militia violent extremism, it talks about how there is an increased lethal threat from these militias to law enforcement and government personnel due to factors related to grievances from the perceptions of fraud in the 2020 election government measures related to cova 19 And legislation to restrict firearms or expand immigration or manage public land And these are the people that do the vast majority of planned attacks or executed attacks This report for 2023 outlines two attempted bombings by militia violent extremists in early 2021, one by an individual targeted against a data center thought to provide services to the FBI and CIA, the other by two people

Starting point is 02:25:14 against a state Democratic party headquarters in Sacramento, California, as well as the quote unquote, dozens of militia violent extremists arrested for their involvement in January 6th. So even though we're going to take the gas off of groups like those, as well as racially motivated violent extremists, this definition can still include a lot of anarchist violent extremists, which the FBI admits in a 2023 report, are most likely to engage in non-lethal criminal activity and just impact law enforcement operations.

Starting point is 02:25:43 You know, this makes me think of climate activism as well and the work of those in the climate community that call for the destruction of equipment and not the harm of human life. Totally. And the irony, of course, that you could call someone disabling an oil pipeline, a nihilist extremist when the act they're doing is precisely for the purpose of ensuring the continued existence of human civilization on a large scale. That's the big issue here. The Trump government still wants a term that focuses on what some people would colloquially refer to as accelerationist terrorism.

Starting point is 02:26:17 And that does encompass some of the extremist violence from the weirder corners of the far right, like in the case of Kasup, but as well well as leftist or post-left anarchist extremism. But in the administration's mind, the previous terms for this were tainted by crackdowns on right-wing or patriot movements after January 6th. And the nihilist violent extremism term is not replacing the term terrorism necessarily, like the way Klippenstein suggested in his article. The word terrorism appears frequently in these very documents that we've been discussing, nor does the term terrorism have quote-unquote limitations in law, as Klippenstein said, that like prevent its use in political prosecution. If anything, it carries kind of special powers of

Starting point is 02:26:59 punishment which can be over applied to increase sentences, sway juries, and strip rights. We've seen bills to label Antifa as terrorists introduced to this year, the whole Tesla terrorism thing, and historically like the use of terrorism has been used as a repression tool in Atlanta's Stop Cop City movement, which similarly has like a climate focus like you mentioned. And what this new nihilism term lets them do is it allows the Trump administration to signal to their base that they aren't going to be going after like right wing militia style groups anymore, not not anti government anti authority extremists. Instead, they're just going to target zany weirdos who want to destroy society. It's a looser, more flexible term that can be applied to a much wider swath of people. And like the kind of final thing I want to I want to note here is that for groups like like 764, we really don't have a good term for them. Like some people have defended this nihilist term specifically for groups like 764 since that was where it originally appeared.

Starting point is 02:27:56 And it is true that these groups kind of defy classic categorization. Some of them are certainly motivated by racial bias. In the case of Casup, who's like tied tied with O9A but not specifically 764, but a lot of these other 764 guys who are mostly in it for the pedophilia still do have anti-government ideologies that they are roped in with. Now I have seen a few alternative terms lofted by certain independent researchers that don't really do a good job but are gaining influence under Trump's government. There's this like freelance researcher named Becca or Bix Rites, who mostly operates on Twitter. She's proposed the term Satanic Accelerationism, or SAC.

Starting point is 02:28:35 Not good. And this kind of outlines my problems with this person's research. Now because all of the legitimate extremism researchers have kind of moved away from Twitter and are just on blue sky now, people like this have exploded in influence under Elon's shepherding of Twitter. And this person just spreads satanic panic style writing that appeals to conservative Christian audiences. She boasts about how many mutuals she has with these Nazi terrorists. She posts on Rumble, she went on Infowars. So that kind of tells you everything you need to know about this person.

Starting point is 02:29:07 And a big part of her work is trying to downplay the right wing and a white supremacist influence in extremism. She excitedly posted, quote, the FBI has coined a new term for this type of individual, nihilist violent extremists. This makes me so happy because it indicates that law enforcement are listening to researchers on the ground and are no longer considering these groups neo-nazis or quote-unquote white supremacist So yeah

Starting point is 02:29:32 This is a big part of this push is appealing to these types of people who don't want their weird Pedofreaks to be labeled as right-wing even though they all are pretty far right-wing terrorists in in most cases even though they all are pretty far-right-wing terrorists in most cases. This researcher also falsely linked Kassap with a Ukrainian Nazi occult group called MKU. She later retracted this claim on Substack, but left the original viral tweet up online, because hey, engagement. Her Substack post reads, quote, When I first heard the news of Nikita Kassap, my mind immediately darted to another O9A

Starting point is 02:30:04 and MKU-linked individual named Nikita. This turned out to be a mere coincidence. I know because the other Nikita reached out to me personally to clarify. It's moments like these that cause me to reflect on just how big this movement really is, and just how close to the fire I am. Unquote. This is not how you do extremism reporting. This is not how you do journalism. But. This is not how you do journalism. But this does demonstrate kind of the problem with this term is that, yeah, groups like this do need a different term. Maybe like accelerationist violent extremists.

Starting point is 02:30:33 That's a term. You could use that if you're going to remove all the other acronyms. But certainly the nihilism label just kind of complicates things and allows for the targeting of just a massive swath of the population that could become like Political prosecutions that then get linked to these child sexual abuse material cases Okay, that is my that's my That's my script Michael. How do you feel about that info dump? I'm so sorry truly You know you've and I can send it to it

Starting point is 02:31:02 You've extracted a part of my soul and put it into a cosmic toilet today I know more than I've known before as a Human as an American as a parent. I'm terrified on every front and you know, my my simple guy takeaway here is Yeah, like the idea that this is going to both Let some of the worst folks off the hook, or at least make it harder to classify them with the groups they should be classified with, while also making it easier to lump in forms of what many of us would consider more reasonable political activism under that umbrella, is quite bad. And I think, of course, for me, due to my pet interest, you know, all of these instances

Starting point is 02:31:47 of continuing to like pervert and misuse philosophical terms to have meanings developed over hundreds and thousands of years for these political ends is very upsetting. Well, I'm excited to usher in the new wave of Kierkegaardian violent extremists who are going to usher in the- Don't get me on a list. Stop it. Ha ha! I am actually sorry that this went on nearly double the length of which I thought it had planned after such a depressing episode. I'm going to ask a kind of an odd question.

Starting point is 02:32:17 What philosophy books do you think people should read in this political moment? Because a lot of people are approaching me with like, how do I stay sane? How do I stay? How do I like keep going when things feel so bad? And for me, I've always turned to philosophy. I've been recommending different books to different friends. And I'm kind of interested in like what you have to say about kind of what philosophy can like offer us in these times of like existential torment. Yeah. I mean, a really simple one that I talk about way too much is

Starting point is 02:32:47 Cure Curgards, the present age, which you find in this book called Two Ages. That's easy to buy. It's normally really cheap. Or you can just read it online someplace that kind of describes a society in which people get caught up in media and reflection and the BS they are told rather than developing their subjectivity for themselves. I think that one's really great. In terms of more contemporary stuff, I've been very Frederick Jameson-pilled recently. Right, nice. And I think, I mean, I've read Jameson before on and off, but recently dove in more deeply. And there's one,

Starting point is 02:33:19 okay, I have it at arm's reach so I can say the title correctly, that I've really been enjoying. It's called An American Utopia, Dual Power in the Universal Army by Frederick Jameson, edited by Slavoj Žižek. And it's this large Jameson essay about what he sees as an alternative for leftist power in America, responses from a bunch of other scholars. I have found it very interesting, but for me at least, I find comfort in the fact that others have accurately diagnosed and understood what is happening right now and at least give us the tools to understand the thing so it feels less nebulous and mysterious.

Starting point is 02:33:57 We don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. Yeah. And that's something I feel like some leftists kind of get trapped in. Or it's kind of a two sides thing is what some people just get fully lost in, like the labyrinth of theory and the other people get lost in trying to constantly reinvent or like make for the first time stuff that already exists. Right. And I think there's a really careful balance between like reading some stuff so that you can like know what's going on and not feel the need to try to like you cause every you know philosophical evolution to come about via your own thought. Yeah you don't have to be the one to do it someone else already did it. You're not alone like other people have done this and you should still like think

Starting point is 02:34:36 for yourself and still compare but but people have thought about this type of stuff before people have been in bad political situations before and it's it's useful to know what they've thought. And like this is like, you know, my work is mostly looking at like current events and like trying to track like extremism and like what the government is doing. And you know, more information always helps me choose how to navigate in the world. That's why I do episodes like this. And I think philosophy is just one other side of that.

Starting point is 02:35:00 Unless you have anything else to say, do you want to talk about where people can find you online and your new YouTube channel? Yeah, I have a recently launched YouTube channel that's just under the name Michael O. Burns. And I think it's literally just YouTube slash Michael O. Burns. I'm quickly. Yep. YouTube slash Michael O. Burns, where I'm going to be doing more stuff quite regularly like streams and video essays Largely doing some of the stuff we're just talking about using philosophy and concepts from theory and from theory to try to understand what's going on in both the political and like the social and interpersonal levels and I'm working on a

Starting point is 02:35:36 Thing I'm excited about on a like depression and capitalism and mental health So yeah, and I'm on all most of the social medias I'm just Michael burns or Michael O. Burns, relatively easy to find on most places. Well, thank you so much, Michael, for joining me in this dive through the darkest depths of the internet and the extremism milieu that is festering in America and abroad.

Starting point is 02:36:02 Thanks for having me. It's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language.

Starting point is 02:36:37 It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. It could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless D***less Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 02:36:50 This is Courtside with Laura Corenti, the podcast that's changing the game and breaking down the business of women's sports like never before. I'm Laura, the founder and CEO of Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment, your inside source on the biggest deals, power moves, and game changers, writing the playbook on all things women's sports. From the heavy hitters in the front office to the powerhouse women on the pitch, we're talking to commissioners, team owners, influential athletes, and the investors betting big on women's sports.

Starting point is 02:37:17 We'll break down the numbers, get under the hood, and go deep on what's next. Women's sports are the moment. So if you're not paying attention, you're already behind. Join me, Courtside, for a front row seat into the making of the business of women's sports. Courtside with Laura Currenti is an iHeart women's sports production

Starting point is 02:37:35 in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Listen to Courtside with Laura Currenti starting April 3rd on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house and never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule.

Starting point is 02:38:07 Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets

Starting point is 02:38:40 into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. On November 5th, 2018, at 6.33 a.m., a red Volkswagen Golf was found abandoned in a ditch out in Sleephole Valley. The driver's seat door was open. No traces of footsteps leaving the vehicle. No belongings were found,

Starting point is 02:39:12 except for a cassette tape lodged in the player. On that tape were 10 vile. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! Ah! Grotesque. Oh my that to this day have been kept restricted from the public. Until now. You feeling this too?

Starting point is 02:39:43 A horror anthology podcast. Welcome to It Could Happen here. I'm Robert Evans and this is a podcast about things falling apart, which they always seem to be these days, and in particular, this is an episode about what to expect out of the next six months to a year. If you're not sure what else to do, try and spread calm. I first learned this lesson back in 2016, hanging out with perennial libertarian presidential candidate vermin supreme during the protests around that year's Democratic convention in Philadelphia.

Starting point is 02:40:27 If you've never had the pleasure of seeing Vermin at a protest, he's essentially a rodeo clown for riot cops, and his example taught me a lot about how to communicate to a group of angry, scared people in tense situations. Those lessons came in handy for me back in 2020. But the George Floyd uprising is now almost five years in the past. Trump is once again in power. Very little seems to stand between him and the exercise of a kind of arbitrary dictatorial violence that this nation has seldom seen within its own borders, but has often sponsored

Starting point is 02:41:00 elsewhere, including El Salvador, where Trump has sent hundreds of American residents and plans to send thousands, perhaps tens of thousands more. The purpose of this essay is to provide my predictions for the next six months to a year. What I'm writing here is speculative, but it is based on the best data I have available and numerous conversations I've had with activists, current federal employees, former soldiers, and retired law enforcement. There are a million places where I could start, but I feel like the most responsible place to begin is by answering this question.

Starting point is 02:41:34 Is now the time to panic? Last year, after Biden's disastrous debate performance, I put out a podcast essay titled �Don't Panic.� It was my most shared episode of this podcast that year. And I felt pretty good about the response. Until Trump won again, and I found it briefly impossible to take my own advice. Since January of 2025, the fascist takeover has only accelerated. And I have lost count of the number of people who've asked me, is it time to panic? The answer to that is still no.

Starting point is 02:42:07 But not because there's no reason to panic. In fact, panic is a natural reaction to our present moment. If your fight or flight reflexes haven't been triggered, well, they might be broken. Even so, don't panic. Because in combat, in disasters, in any dangerous situation you might find yourself, panic is what will kill you as surely as anything else. There's a concept in military theory I bring up often, something introduced to soldiers undergoing training today.

Starting point is 02:42:37 It's called the Oda Loop. It describes the process people go through while acting and reacting under fire, and particularly while deciding how to act and react under fire. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. If you can interrupt any part of that loop, you can stop your enemy from fighting back effectively. The basic principle of the Oda loop functions on the grand strategy scale, as well as it does in a gunfight.

Starting point is 02:43:05 This is the point behind the Fled the Zone strategy orchestrated by Stephen Miller and the other intellectual luminaries behind Trump, too. The fire hose of outrage is to distract you from observing everything that's happening, to keep you off balance so you can't orient yourself, to stop you from deciding and acting. Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter helped to supercharge the bullshit cannon. AI accelerated the spread of lies on social media beyond all of our worst nightmares.

Starting point is 02:43:35 And this has helped blind and divide the people who should have linked arms to stop this shit before it got to the point that it's at today. I want you to think of how many prominent leftists have fallen repeatedly for right-wing propaganda, like that Russia would never invade Ukraine, or that Trump might actually be somehow better for Gaza. These and a million other things have blinded and hobbled potential resistance. I might also bring up the whole MAGA communist movement, but the less said about those people, the better.

Starting point is 02:44:04 Meanwhile, columnists at liberal legacy publications like the Times have fallen for every hyped-up bring up the whole MAGA communist movement, but the less said about those people, the better. Meanwhile, columnists at liberal legacy publications like the Times have fallen for every hyped up story about transgender athletes or woke kids on college campuses, and the danger the illiberal left poses to free speech. They've denied genocide and demonized those who protest against it, and too many elected Democrats have taken their lead as the path of least resistance. Many have pulled right for reasons far more sinister. The fact that Gavin Newsom, governor of California, is hosting fascists on his new podcast while

Starting point is 02:44:35 mailing burner phones to tech CEOs points towards something dark, immediate, and deadly. We live now in the culmination of a successful, decades-long plot to, in the words of Curtis Yarvin, repeal the 20th century and turn this nation into a dictatorship where our lives and our collective national arsenal are the personal property of some dudes who inherited oil money or invested in Facebook back in like 2005. The early stages of the plan, of course, date back well before Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Donald Trump. They began when a coalition of would-be oligarchs

Starting point is 02:45:13 tried to overthrow FDR in what has become known as the business plot and were thwarted by a Marine general named Smedley Butler. These men wanted revenge for the New Deal, but they found seizing power at the top harder than they'd hoped. And so they embarked on a slower, bottom-up approach. Hence the John Birch Society, the creation of countless think tanks and the generations-long effort to stack the Supreme Court. The war on

Starting point is 02:45:39 abortion was a concerted step towards this plan, an artificial creation alongside the birth of the religious right as a political coalition. There was initially a small group of men at the center of the web, guys like William Rigneri I and William Rigneri II, or Paul Weyrich. But the engine of cultural and political change forged from the late 40s to the 1970s was so successful that at some point it became self-perpetuating. And when a gaggle of tech bros found themselves with more wealth than any humans had ever

Starting point is 02:46:09 held, the machine was there to mold them, and to be used by them. It's all worked so damn well that many people I know have lost hope entirely. We're fucked, goes the script. They're gonna send us to the camps, and they can't be stopped, at least not without apocalyptic bloodshed. Well, that's not necessarily so. Now, people have already died as a result of this administration, a lot of them, and that will continue to happen. But a collapse into total carnage is not inevitable, nor is a future that offers us nothing but

Starting point is 02:46:41 a boot upon our necks. Despite the money that went into building it, this is a new house made with cheap materials, and there are already cracks in the foundation. So my first prediction for the coming months is this. The cracks will widen. And we'll talk about that, but first, as we're obligated to do, here's some ads. Trump and the men who swim in his wake signal only strength. Honesty is neither in their interest nor a strong suit.

Starting point is 02:47:18 But Curtis Yarvin, chief prophet of the Neo-Reactionaries and Peter Thiel's pet philosopher, is in a different position. He knows people in power listen to some of what he has to say, and over the last few months his profile has risen enormously. I can take credit for at least a tiny amount of that. Many normal liberals and elected Democrats now know who he is. This exposes him to a danger that was not present for him during Trump's first term. If the current fascist salient should be pushed back and this movement fails, there could

Starting point is 02:47:49 be and should be prosecutions, and he rightly fears that if this happens, he might follow in the footsteps of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi high theoretician who was executed in Nuremberg. That's why, on March 6th, he published a messy, sprawling, seven thousand word essay titled Barbarians and Mandarins in his trademark, nigh unreadable style. It comes with the subheading, as soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes. If you want to spare yourself the headache of reading through one-tenth of a novel of Yárván's, at best, turgid prose. There's a good article by the nerd Reich that breaks all this down.

Starting point is 02:48:28 We'll link it in the show notes. But the gist is that Yarvin thinks Musk and Trump have been too slow, have embraced too many half-measures, and the whole authoritarian project is careening towards disaster. Quote, unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and February are dwarfed in March and April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to wither and eventually dissipate. It cannot stay at its current level of power, which is too high to sustain, but too low to succeed.

Starting point is 02:48:57 It has to keep doing things that have never been done before. As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes. Now the weeks since have seen massive and rising public awareness of CICOT, the terrorism detention facility in El Salvador being used as a concentration camp by the Trump regime. This might rightly be called a new and unprecedented abuse. But there's a couple of issues here, at least as far as Yarvin sees them. For one thing, the people targeted there have been migrants. People who are in the US either illegally or in the US on visas that have been revoked.

Starting point is 02:49:33 People who have been accused of being part of Trinidad. But not the people that Yarvin wants to see liquidated. Because as he writes in this column, the thing that he thinks the Trump administration should be doing right now is quite literally gassing media personalities and politicians who don't align with his viewpoint, basically literally killing the opposition. And since he's shown to be unwilling to do that, the fact that he's shipping people to concentration camps on its own isn't terrifying enough. Now the other thing that's concerning Yarvin is that while the use of this facility in El Salvador as a foreign concentration camp by the Trump regime is terrifying and is unprecedented,

Starting point is 02:50:16 it's also been met with a significant response, one that burges on unprecedented itself. I'm not just talking about the protests, or of the recent Supreme Court ruling ordering a temporary halt to such deportations. I'm referring to something else that's happened, due to the sheer panic caused by the knowledge that our President has a concentration camp and has been talking about shipping US citizen dissidents there. I'm talking about stuff like the fact that formerly conservative columnist Bill Kristol is now calling for the outright abolition of ICE.

Starting point is 02:50:47 And the arch-neoliberal mealy-mouth David Brooks calling for a general strike in the pages of the New York Times while quoting from the Communist Manifesto. This is more than just a vibe shift, it's an open realization and acceptance by prominent people who are neither radical nor revolutionaries that any action, even the formerly unimaginable, might be necessary and justified to end this regime. Now, make no mistake, first off, this is because a lot of these people are worried about their own privileges going away under a dictatorial regime. But that doesn't change the fact that this is a crack in the very foundation of the authoritarian

Starting point is 02:51:27 power structure. Yarvin is scared, then, because we weren't supposed to be here now. Harvard was supposed to have folded like Columbia, and then have been slowly and quietly liquidated. The tame press was supposed to turn wholly for the regime or be disappeared, not quote Karl Marx and urge people into the streets to do a general strike. So I don't find all this cheery because I think David Brooks is going to become shithead Shay Govara. I am braced, however, by the failure that this represents for the men above us who seek unchecked dominance. Cracks are also visible in the recent history of Elon Musk, who has

Starting point is 02:52:02 watched the value of the stock that underpins his whole empire collapse. He fought desperately to convince Trump not to go through with the tariffs that would punish it further. The result? We see Trump assuring his inner circle that Elon is on the way out, while Musk himself prepares to step back from Doge in the hope that it will somehow protect the remainder of his ambitions. These are all good signs, and the damage will continue to spread.

Starting point is 02:52:27 However, and this brings me to my next prediction, the empire's gonna strike back. We are in for a hot summer, my friends, and there's no way around that. I mean this in the literal sense that it will probably be the hottest summer on record, although that fact will be true of every subsequent summer in our lives. But I also mean this in the sense that things are going to cook off in the streets very soon. This is something the administration has quite openly been waiting to see. Trump has made no secret of his desire to use the Insurrection Act, not only at the border, but to send US troops into US cities to crush riots and punish leftist demonstrators. This was a desire hatched in reaction to the George Floyd uprising, and it always seems

Starting point is 02:53:07 to be envisioned by the right as targeted against black-clad Antifa types. The reality is that anti-fascists have not been a consistent presence on the ground around the country for some time, at least not organizing in the way that they were back when Antifa was a buzzword. There are numerous reasons for this, but the biggest is that the fascist movement has moved beyond waving flags in the street and getting into fistfights to try and scare people. A lot of them are running federal law enforcement agencies and the military now. Proud Boys just ain't a priority.

Starting point is 02:53:38 Not for those on the left who want to stop this, or, frankly, for the administration. I expect protests around the country in the coming months for several reasons, but the likeliest event to provoke severe civil disruption is a rise in food prices, and the rise of everything else in price, as well as a collapsing economy courtesy of the President's tariffs. There are already numerous signs of this, both in terms of the volume of shipping coming into the United States, and early signs of collapsing crop yields in the United States. And this is where a study of history helps one out, because nothing but nothing brings

Starting point is 02:54:13 down regimes like rising bread prices. And any attempt to crack down will be stymied by the fact that a decent chunk of the elites who backed Trump before will be suffering too. Obviously, the people closest to him are making bank off the economic upswings and downswings over the whole tariff issue, but there's a lot of other people, people who supported him, people who thought he had their back, who aren't quite close enough to power, and they're watching Trump shoot their own fortunes in the kneecap because they built their money on free trade.

Starting point is 02:54:44 I won't pretend to know where things are going to pop off or will be the hottest, but the evidence shows the regime at least expects Washington, D.C. to play a central role in what comes next. Republican Congress members recently reintroduced a bill to repeal D.C. self-rule, and Trump appointed Ed Martin to be the city attorney, a man who, in the words of USA Today columnist Chris Brennan, quote, lacks experience, but loves revenge. Now, the fact that Elon Musk and his Doge cronies left so many in the city and the surrounding area unemployed after their purge of the administrative state means that there's an even higher number

Starting point is 02:55:20 of motivated, angry people with free time and experiencing organizing large, complex systems who have nothing to do right now. A similar set of circumstances brought us to the 2020 uprisings. This was not just a product of the months of isolation or of the brutality of George Floyd's murder, but of the sheer number of people who were out of work and who were finally given a chance to take out their anxiety at an authoritarian president tightening his grip. And today, that grip is even tighter, and the danger more real. We have a president openly discussing his desire to put American citizens

Starting point is 02:55:55 in a foreign concentration camp. Trump and his inner circle are hoping for protests that stay isolated to DC and perhaps a few major blue cities, Portland and the like. This would provide an opportunity to send in the troops to utilize the Insurrection Act to shoot people in the street and to send some ringleaders off to El Salvador. This would be the riskiest option for Trump in some ways. Pete Hegseth has not been a competent or popular Secretary of Defense, and asking U.S. troops

Starting point is 02:56:23 to fire on protesters opens up the risk that some junior officer might balk at that order, which could create a cascading chain of disobedience. Such things have sparked rapid collapse in other dictatorships throughout history. There's also the chance that spectacular and comprehensive violence by the military might succeed and thus strangle any protest movement in the cradle. So we might call this the high risk, high reward option, and I should note that Donald Trump has, more than a few times in the past, chosen the high risk, high reward option. So I don't consider this unlikely.

Starting point is 02:56:58 But it won't be lost on Trump or his cronies that the violence which met the first protest in 2020 provoked the largest domestic uprising in living memory. People have not forgotten this, and some blue state democrats have even made, let's say, confusing noises to that effect. Case in point, Governor Bob Ferguson of Washington just signed a bill barring other state National Guard units from entering Washington without his approval, unless they were mobilized by the President. Now, as that last part might key you in on, this bill doesn't have a lot of legal force, or any really at all, but it's a sign that even fairly milquetoast elected Democrats are

Starting point is 02:57:34 starting to consider the real possibility of a federal invasion of their states. The President has discussed sending out of state troops into blue cities before, largely in the context of cracking down on immigration in sanctuary cities. This is all dangerous language, but going further than just language carries risk for the regime, too. I would not be shocked if we were to see the Texas National Guard, or whoever, whichever state, occupying, let's say, Chicago, after federal law enforcement makes good on the threats that have been made by members of the Trump administration to arrest governors who aid and abet undocumented migrants,

Starting point is 02:58:10 like J.B. Pritzker, and an act like that would surely spark mass protests in Chicago and very likely elsewhere. The fact that a move like that would have such a risk of sparking mass resistance, as well as further legal challenges, might keep the Trump administration focused on smaller fish and less dangerous outrages, at least for the time being. And if that's the route they choose, I think something different might be likely, and I call this potential path forward.

Starting point is 02:58:39 The pressure cooker. And we'll talk about that, but first, here's more ads. When public unrest exploded in 2020, it did so after four solid years of buildup. If you'll remember, the earliest fascist-antifascist street clashes of that period started before the 2016 election. These were largely focused around speeches at campuses by right-wing provocateurs and dueling demonstrations in a handful of cities. The first wave of such activity crested in Charlottesville 2017 with tragic results.

Starting point is 02:59:20 But the vibe it set and the people it trained continued to take part in street actions, and many of them formed the infrastructural core of the movement that exploded onto the scene after George Floyd's murder. The last year of serious protests have focused more on the genocide in Gaza than anything, and it's not coincidental that the first wave of deportations have heavily targeted legal residents who took part in those demonstrations. Since Trump took office and Doze started doing its thing, there have been more large-scale demos that focus directly on the regime.

Starting point is 02:59:51 These have been quite manageable from the regime's point of view, and they have not yet attracted the same kind of crackdown. But that won't remain the case as people grow more desperate. Any fool can see that the apparatus of repression constructed to punish genocide protesters will be turned on Democrats, former federal employees, and people who are just hungry and pissed about rising food prices. However, this represents another tightrope scenario for the regime. These demonstrations are large, and unlike student protests against Israel, the media

Starting point is 03:00:21 has proved less eager to marginalize the participants as extremists. As time goes on and things get worse, folks who last year scoffed at college students occupying campus buildings may themselves consider if perhaps it might be time to fuck some shit up. This will be an uneven process, with sudden leaps forward and pulls back, and it will provoke an equally uneven state response. There will be attempts to send so-called instigators and organizers overseas, to El Salvador unless the public reaction to this, which is building as I type, continues to escalate to the extent

Starting point is 03:00:56 that it becomes unfeasible. If so, there are ample domestic locations to detain, or even disappear, those the regime considers dangerous. First on the chopping block will be the people whose heads are currently closest to the blade, organizers and demonstrators against genocide whose citizenship is not at all in question. I expect if large, disruptive demonstrations do threaten the administration's hold, they will also start to target Antifa again, which will start with the targeting of longtime activists, many of whom would have been people arrested or at least heavily surveilled in

Starting point is 03:01:29 2020. However, it won't end there, and it will quickly expand to elected Democrats, new people organizing protests, folks who have never had anything to do with any of the kind of anti-fascist actions that so captivated Fox News back in 2020. I will be shocked if we make it more than another year without a serious attempt to brand Antifa a domestic terror organization, and if that succeeds in a way that has legal force, then the fact that there is no such organization won't matter. Trump's feds will do what we've watched ICE do with Trenda Agua. They'll break down the door of whoever they wish, argue tattoos or possessions of certain literature or whatever is proof of membership, and then

Starting point is 03:02:09 those who survive the raids will find themselves in the most restrictive detention the regime feels secure placing them in. If things follow what I suspect is the likeliest path, we will watch this process ebb and flow over the next several months. Each spring and summer protests will grow and peak in the hottest months, with new cities and tactics being attempted regularly by groups constantly reeling from raids that are devastating and terrifying but, due to the incompetence of an FBI whose investigative capacity has been neutered, fail to really disrupt things. As the weather cools off, exhausted activists will lick their wounds and make new plans. Scattered acts of disruption carried out by small groups or individual

Starting point is 03:02:49 cells will occur year round, but I expect large-scale demonstrations and clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement to follow a pattern not so different from what Afghanistan veterans knew as fighting season. Hot summers of mass activity, winters of raids and experimentation to scout holes for the next year's offensive. And as time goes on, the energy will build, the tension will build, and, of course, we might find ourselves reaching towards something that explodes in the not-too-distant future, perhaps a year or two down the line. Now, of course, none of this will occur in a vacuum or independent of the news churn that we've been drowning in for years.

Starting point is 03:03:30 And this brings me to my next prediction, which is the coming of politics as unusual. I apologize for coming back to the David Brooks of it all, but seeing a man who in 2017 wrote that Trump had changed and we really needed to stop stressing out over him, and then wrote a column attacking millennials for their tribalism, call for a general strike is a sign, and it's not a sign that Brooks has gotten smarter, it's a sign that we've entered radical times, and that radicalization spares not even the centrist. If the worst case scenario occurs, and a few weeks from now US soldiers are gunning down demonstrators while ICE officers cart elected Democrats off to Seacat, feel free to disregard

Starting point is 03:04:09 this passage. But if the somewhat slower path prevails, I expect to see more politicians and news editors chase viewers as they sprint left, or at least away, from the dissolving center. We've watched this process occur on the right during the Biden years, and to a degree it is still occurring out of a fear of reprisals under the Trump regime. I'm finalizing the script on the day 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens stepped down over interference from Paramount executives into his coverage of Donald Trump. But the polls have started moving against the right.

Starting point is 03:04:39 Trump's public approval on immigration policy is underwater for the first time in years, and his approval on everything else is, while not always at record lows, diving with significant speed. The next several months of shipping data, as well as concerning early reporting on farm yields, suggests a near future in which a lot less will be available for everyone. We saw what a rising price of eggs did to Biden. We've also seen Senator Chris Van Hollen go almost overnight from a marginal figure in U.S. politics to one of the most famous Democrats in the nation, all because he had the modest courage to fly to El Salvador and call the President's use of a foreign black

Starting point is 03:05:16 site what it was. There will be more people like Van Hollen, who display courage previously unseen in a moment of trial. But much more than that, there will be opportunists, those who see the wind blowing and chase the approval of crowds more willing to countenance radical action in the streets than they were a year ago. Most politicians, and most thought leaders in the old media, are reactive, and I'm not saying that this will change.

Starting point is 03:05:40 Merely that what they react to will change, because of who is in charge now, and because of the desperation of the times brought on by Republican policies, which is going to paint a target on the backs of conservative leaders as large as the targets they've been painting on the backs of dissidents. And all of this means one thing, which is, we're approaching the age of weird terror. So much has happened in this shitty, stupid year that I think we've all forgotten. 2025 opened with a military veteran blowing himself up in a cyber truck in front of the Trump Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

Starting point is 03:06:14 His reasoning was based as much on the numerous head injuries he'd suffered in his service as it was on his exposure to right-wing propaganda, which convinced him that the Democrats needed to be dealt with. But he saw things clearly enough to know that yet another mass shooting or self-immolation or even a run-of-the-mill bomb wouldn't have garnered him or his manifesto any attention. So instead, he picked a cyber truck and a Trump building, symbols of the two most viral men of our very stupid era, and he blew one of those up in front of the other. And by gummit,

Starting point is 03:06:45 we all did pay attention. For a few days at least. Late last year, an anonymous gunman, the government believes to be Luigi Mangione, was even more successful at holding our attention, with an even stranger attack, a brazen and nigh-perfectly executed assassination carried out by a man with a dazzling smile, and the wisdom to pick the most universally hated target that exists today, a healthcare CEO. We have all watched so many mass shootings at schools, at grocery stores, nightclubs, everywhere imaginable, that they've lost the ability to shock us.

Starting point is 03:07:18 But targeted assassinations of people at the top of the food chain are so rare that they can't help but draw eyeballs. And sheer, rollicking strangeness, like we saw in Vegas, has a captivating power all its own. We will see more of both kinds of attacks in the months to come. The arson attempt on Governor Shapiro's home, bizarre at least for the extensive damage done, might be seen as another data point on this list. But as new figures rise to prominence, within new protest movements, we will see attempts

Starting point is 03:07:45 to kill them. Furious and deranged Trump supporters armed with cars and guns and Trump-branded pocket dives will do as they've been doing. And this part won't be new. What I do expect will be new is the increased threat felt by the oligarchs at the top of the system as intelligent and patient young people continue to plot ways to go after them in the places and times where they feel invulnerable. And I also expect that editors and journalists will continue to learn that these actions draw eyeballs more than almost anything else. And while all that's going on, the truly unbalanced among us will find ways to hitchhike off the well-publicized turmoil coming our way and make their own confounding statements.

Starting point is 03:08:26 There will be public suicides and attacks utilizing weapons and tools we can't yet imagine, at least not openly on a podcast without receiving a visit from some friendly alphabet boy or another. I don't know what exactly to expect beyond the unexpected and the very, very silly. And of course, as we talk about weird terrorism, I don't mean to discount the Nazi accelerationist types here. They'll keep trying. But if they want to raise above the chatter and an even more crowded media ecosystem,

Starting point is 03:08:54 even they're going to find ways to get weird with it. After all, an attack no one notices isn't likely to accelerate much of anything. And I guess that's what I've got right now. I've got 10 pages or so on what I see coming. I didn't come up with a smooth, sexy ending for this like a writer should because I'm tired and thinking about this isn't fun, but I did a lot and there you are. I suppose the thing you're asking now is what the fuck do I do about it? And you know, that's what we talk about a lot on this show organize with your friends get involved find ways to help people

Starting point is 03:09:31 take a stop the bleed class and The love of God keep your eyes open Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? This is Court Side with Laura Corenti, the podcast that's changing the game

Starting point is 03:10:26 and breaking down the business of women's sports like never before. I'm Laura, the founder and CEO of Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment, your inside source on the biggest deals, power moves, and game changers, writing the playbook on all things women's sports. From the heavy hitters in the front office

Starting point is 03:10:42 to the powerhouse women on the pitch, we're talking to commissioners, team owners, influential athletes, and the investors women's sports. From the heavy hitters in the front office to the powerhouse women on the pitch, we're talking to commissioners, team owners, influential athletes, and the investors betting big on women's sports. We'll break down the numbers, get under the hood, and go deep on what's next. Women's sports are the moment. So if you're not paying attention, you're already behind. Join me, Courtside, for a front row seat into the making of the business of women's sports. Courtside with Laura Karenty is an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment.

Starting point is 03:11:11 Listen to Courtside with Laura Carrenty starting April 3rd on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network. You say you never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face.

Starting point is 03:11:44 Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like, uh, less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. Clean up on aisle six. And aisle three. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out.

Starting point is 03:12:16 Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. I'm Israel Gutierrez, and I'm hosting a new podcast, Dub Dynasty, the story of how the Golden State Warriors have dominated the NBA for over a decade. The Golden State Warriors once again are NBA champions. From the building of the core that included Clay Thompson and Draymond Green to one of the boldest coaching decisions in the history of the core that included Clay Thompson and Draymond Green to one of the boldest coaching decisions

Starting point is 03:12:45 in the history of the sport. I just felt like the biggest thing was to earn the trust of the players and let the players know that we were here to try to help them take the next step, not tear anything down. Today, the Warriors dynasty remains alive, in large part because of a scrawny 6'2 hooper who everyone seems to love.

Starting point is 03:13:03 For what Steph has done for the game, he's certainly on that like Mount Russmore for guys that have changed it. Come revisit this magical Warriors ride. This is Dubb Dynasty. The Dubb's Dynasty is still very much alive. Listen to Dubb Dynasty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of April 17

Starting point is 03:13:51 to April 23. JD Vance has killed the Pope, a second Pete Hegseth unauthorized signal chat has hit the Department of Defense. The White House announces that the Education Department will start collecting on defaulted student loans. Beanie clad Tim Pool joins the White House announces that the Education Department will start collecting on defaulted student loans, beanie-clad Tim Pool joins the White House press pool, and hippie Facebook moms rejoice with artificial food dyes being banned across America. How are we doing, everybody?

Starting point is 03:14:15 Much worse after hearing that. Fine, I guess. I outlived the Pope! I outlived the Pope! Woo! You have to live several more decades to like outlive the Pope officially I Think he was 88 so Thank goodness he did not die on Hitler's birthday because that would have been a whole other whole other Yeah, I'm still one day off. I'm thinking back to my catechism classes and trying to remember like Pope dead on Easter good sign or bad back to my catechism classes and trying to remember like, Pope dead on Easter, good sign or bad.

Starting point is 03:14:45 That's definitely a sign, like it's some kind of sign. What do we, how do we take that? Shout out to the Pistons for holding off winning a playoff game just long enough for the Pope to die such that Francis Reed's entire term in office never saw Pistons playoff win. Congratulations to the Pistons, congratulations to the city of Detroit,

Starting point is 03:15:03 congratulations for withholding that from the Pope. Did not mean love to see it. Did Pope Francis have a strong opinion on the Pistons that he expressed at some point? Because I may have missed that. No, he knew they were in a Macklemore song, so therefore he hated them. He was a huge Macklefan. Yeah, a lot of people don't know this, but the entire time the Pope is lying in state, they'll just going to be looping thrift shop.

Starting point is 03:15:26 So, yeah. As Pope Francis wanted. Yeah, that was his dying wish. Do you know who else probably used to listen to Macklemore? Not anymore, because he got too woke, but Pete Hegseth seems like a 2012 Macklemore guy. Yeah, might have been, might have been. He was sharing plans for Yimini airstrikes with his wife, his brother, and a personal lawyer

Starting point is 03:15:48 in another Signal Chat. I do the same thing. Yeah, well. Yeah, you've yet to act on your plans, it's a difference. They are not interested. Looping at the lawyer is the real God-tier move there. That is so funny. Because, I mean, it says so much,

Starting point is 03:16:03 both about what's going on in Pete Hedges Seth's brain But of the quality of lawyer because any lawyer worth assault would be like please remove me. I'm not in this chat Yeah, you need to get me out of this chat. What is wrong with you? Are you are you texting me missile package information? That's the thing though. We've gotten great evidence like this guy for Giuliani from all of the lawyers these like random cartoon dipshits The right keeps finding that like they will just hand you a law degree like if you hand the state enough money They will just hand you a law degree And you can just like bullshit your way through the bar and you'll be fine like they give that shit out to anyone

Starting point is 03:16:43 You can tell a really good lawyer in a room where illegal things are being discussed, and I've had this happen several times because they just leave, they bounce, they get the fuck out of the room, and that's a smart lawyer. I don't know if you saw, but the state of California was using AI to send its bar exam questions.

Starting point is 03:17:01 Oh, wonderful. You don't even have to be someone. I bet the AI would be able to tell you don't text your wife, lawyer, and son classified information about missile strikes. But whatever. Now hopefully if they start using AI more to get through school, they won't have as many student loans to be collected on.

Starting point is 03:17:21 Yeah, there you go. A practice that has been paused since March of 2020, set to be resumed on May 5th. And then, man, the Tim Pool thing was really wild. Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt gave a glowing introduction to Tim Pool's addition to the press room. And Tim's first question to the administration was asking why news media just lies so much about Trump.

Starting point is 03:17:47 Fantastic journalism here from comrade Tim. Really probing question. Let's pivot towards RFK and the concerning registry that has been discussed, which is a word you never like to hear whenever someone brings up the concept of a registry. It's usually bad. Always bad. So I'm going to talk in general about what RFK, the things that he has said, not just about autistic Americans, but about people who are receiving psychiatric medication,

Starting point is 03:18:16 people who are addicted to opiates, people who are utilizing like stimulants, by which I mean ADHD medicine, which if you have ADHD, that's not exactly the way it functions, but that's the way he frames it. Because these are all tied together, right? I have some frustrations with kind of how it's been taken on social media that I think are not causing people to worry when they don't need to worry, but look at maybe sort of the wrong area to see the immediate threat coming from. So first I'm going to start with like what has been said.

Starting point is 03:18:47 And before we get to the registry, we have to go back to what he was talking about on the campaign trail, because prior, and this is prior to him endorsing Donald Trump when RFK Jr. was like an individual, like running for president on his own, um, under his independent campaign, he started talking about wellness farms. These were specifically in the language that he used, places that people who were addicted to psychiatric medication, antidepressants, he names specifically antidepressants and stimulants, as well as people with opiate addictions.

Starting point is 03:19:20 He has since talked about other drug addictions as well, could go to spend three or four years working on a farm. He always frames it as also like learning skills. So it's this mix of, I want people to be able to work in this lovely bucolic agrarian setting where they'll gain working skills. And then there's also peppered in these very frightening phrases like they need to be reparented. Right? Now, in addition to this, he's not just this is all focused on Americans who are taking medications that he thinks are over overprescribed or purely unnecessary.

Starting point is 03:19:57 Right? That's always the way like psychiatric medication. He almost has a Scientologist attitude towards it, that this is all essentially unnecessary. And obviously, all of this stuff comes out of there are elements of this that were true at one point. For example, back in the 90s, Ritalin was wildly overprescribed to kids. But the way in which he's translated this now is that basically everyone on a stimulant, everyone on an antidepressant is on it unnecessarily.

Starting point is 03:20:23 And in a podcast in 2024, he went further by kind of tying a lot of this to race specifically, stating quote, every black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, on SSRIs, Benzos, which are known to induce violence and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get reparented. So that's all deeply concerning. It's like kidnapping children forcicibly like bemedicating. I will say that's not how he has framed it. So one of the things is people, I've heard it phrased as like,

Starting point is 03:20:52 RFK has admitted he wants to imprison millions of Americans in camps. And like, that's not what he said. The direct quotes about this are not framed as a mandatory thing. It's framed as a replacement for other treatments that people can choose to go into and choose to leave. That's what he said, right? Okay. Now, perfectly reasonable when a when a guy in an administration like this is talking about putting up camps to be like, well, I don't know if I believe him, but it's not accurate that he said he wants to arrest millions of people and force them onto camps. He just

Starting point is 03:21:22 has not said that right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think it behooves us to be honest about what he said. I think it also behooves us to talk about where this idea comes from, right? And what he's looking back to. And again, a lot of the issue here is not necessarily what RFK might do, but the fact that he might not be there forever. And if he starts establishing this,

Starting point is 03:21:43 this kind of program that starts in an attempt to be something that is more, you can choose to be on these camps or not. There's certainly willingness within the Republican Party to force people into different kinds of quote unquote treatment like this. One thing I think of particularly is the way in which the right has liked to shift blame for gun violence and mass shootings off of the availability of firearms

Starting point is 03:22:07 and onto people who are on psychiatric medication, right? And this is an area in which I could see someone taking over from RFK or pushing past the things he specifically has stated he wants to do, because I think he does come out of a more quack medicine goal here, putting people forcibly in camps and colonies like this. I mean, the idea of like re-parenting, I guess, is more-

Starting point is 03:22:28 Is deeply problematic. Yeah, incredibly scary phrase. But it is worth noting as there's a very good Teen Vogue article on the matter called RFK Wants to Send People to Wellness Farms. The US already tried that, that talks about the actual background that he is hearkening back to.

Starting point is 03:22:46 Because his vision of wellness farms is not like the Nazi concentration camp, which doesn't mean that it's not possible that things could wind up in a much darker direction. But this gives you an idea of the history that he is specifically calling back to. Quote, beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the first decades of the 20th century, epileptic and feeble-minded colonies sprung up around the US. The initial purpose of these colonies was to remove patients from overcrowded, badly run asylums and poorhouses in favor of farm life where they would have access to the outdoors. Under the colony model, patients generally lived in cottages, designed to be more home-like

Starting point is 03:23:19 than institutional. Patients were also given jobs, and many were expected to work on colony farms where they grew their own food Dr. William Spratling the medical superintendent of the Craig colony for epileptics in New York declared that the farm model meant nature the great Restorer will have an opportunity to do her best It didn't work supporters of the colony model argued that with time clean air sunshine and a restricted diet physical labor could heal patients But that didn't happen data from the Craig colony, one of America's first epileptic colonies, illustrates this point. During the 1940s, thanks to funding and staff limitations because of World War II, conditions

Starting point is 03:23:53 in North American institutions were particularly grim. The Institutions 1943-1944 annual report to the State Commissioner of Mental Hygiene shows that less than 1% of patients were discharged as cured that year. During that same period, over 200 patients attempted to leave the colony without permission, and 5% of the total patient population died. And so that's reason enough to be deeply worried, right? The fact that without saying like, RFK wants to do what the Nazis did, RFK wants to do what the America already did, and it killed a huge number of the people who were interned

Starting point is 03:24:24 in those camps and I guess the thing I keep bringing up is that When I think about what the threat model is more than fucking Auschwitz for people who want our NSSRIs It's a Judge Rotenberg Center on every corner. It's it's camps like these where Costs are going to be cut and there's not going to be good access for any kind of independent monitors to make sure health and safety are being followed. It's not that people are going to be shoveled into ovens. It's that as a result of this system being incompetently applied to the most vulnerable,

Starting point is 03:25:00 and I'm not even talking about my worry at the moment being that everyone on an SSR will be forced in, it's going to be poor kids. And RFK has already talking about my worry at the moment being that everyone on an SSR will be forced in it's going to be poor kids and RFKs already talked about that right like that's why he's focusing on the black kids right that's who they're going for. We've had some people post up in the subreddit being like I know I'm going to go to a camp because I have autism or I know I go to go to a camp because I have ADHD and I'm telling you I'm not saying don't be scared of fascism. I'm saying this is where to fight right now. It's not RFK wants to send every adult on an SSRI into a death camp. It's that they're going to try and be putting these kids instead of the different juvenile programs that exist instead of any kind of functional medical program, they're going to force them into facilities like this.

Starting point is 03:25:47 And it's going to become easier for facilities like the Judge Rotenberg Center, which horribly abuses and tortures autistic kids, to spread and to get state and federal funding. And that's the threat. It's an extension of what we're doing and what we've done. It's not a carbon copy of what the Nazis are doing. Or did. Speaking of the Nazis. And we're back.

Starting point is 03:26:22 So, a couple of things happen in quick succession that is responsible in part for like why people are so freaked out and rightfully so. One of them is that RFK gave a speech on the back of new data that showed yet another rise in the rate of autism diagnosis. And as I said on a previous episode, it's because we're looking for it more, but he made a statement about people with profound autism not being able to pay taxes or write poems, you know, or that sort of thing. And while he was specifically talking about people with quote unquote profound autism,

Starting point is 03:26:55 it's reasonable for people to assume like, yeah, but that's just kind of what he sees as basically everyone, right? And I don't think that that's an unfair assumption. And then coming right up on the heels of that, there was an announcement from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, about RFK Jr.'s new effort to quote unquote study autism. And basically what they're going to be doing is collecting comprehensive patient data with broad coverage of the US population and kind of organizing it within the NIH. This is the first time this has been done, but they are going to be grabbing basically

Starting point is 03:27:28 everything they can get their hands on. And we're talking about a mix of medication records from pharmacies, lab testing records, genomic data from people who like go to the, you know, department of the V basically data taken by the VA data taken by the Indian Health Service, as well as data from private insurers. And they're also going to be buying data from smartwatch, from stuff like Fitbits, right? Who does sell their data to anybody with like $20 hanging out the back of their pocket. And as a heads up, if you are looking for a fitness tracker, you should look more into

Starting point is 03:28:01 this. There are a few that have reasonably good data protection histories. Garmin is one of them. This does not mean it's perfect. All of them will hand over your data if given a court order to do so. None of them are going to break the law to hold onto your data. But Garmin doesn't just sell willy-nilly to anybody who wants to advertise based on it. That said, most of them do.

Starting point is 03:28:24 The last thing I'd write was something like 12 out of 15 different free fitness tracking apps they checked sold data pretty widely. About 80%. Yeah, it's the vast majority. The NIH is basically looking at taking the data that exists. They're not talking about really gathering new data, but they are talking about collecting everything that exists and putting it under one roof for the first time. This is for a couple of purposes.

Starting point is 03:28:50 They want to be able to track the spread of different illnesses and different health problems within the population. These are their claims. But also, they want to create a disease registry specifically to track Americans with autism. This is because Kennedy describes autism as a preventable disease, which is not accurate. The fact that this database and these other databases are being made should be very worrisome. It's both important to talk about the fact that he is specifically signaling out autism while also stating that's not the only thing they're looking into.

Starting point is 03:29:23 They want data on people who are on SSRIs, who are on ADHD medication. They probably want data on drug use, right? There are a lot of things they are looking to be gathering and none of it is shit that they should have access for. Yeah, you can certainly see them expanding this out to like hormone replacement therapy, transplant or healthcare.

Starting point is 03:29:40 Yes, yes. Yeah, and also like the apps attract like menstrual cycles, right? Yes. People accessing reproductive healthcare. And also like the apps attract like menstrual cycles, right? Yes. People accessing reproductive healthcare. And again, the immediate plan, I'm sorry, I simply don't think that RFK Jr.'s master plan is the mass arrest of everybody with autism in the United States and forcing them into a camp. I don't think that's what he wants in part because, number one, his base of support is a lot of

Starting point is 03:30:06 the parents of these kids. I'm not saying those parents aren't already doing things to their kids that are harmful, but those parents want control over what they see as their kids' healthcare. They want the freedom to experiment with medications on their kids to quote unquote, fix them. And this data is going to be used both to provide, basically to be massaged, to provide evidence that different treatments that don't do shit do in fact work. And I think I have suspicions of financial interests there. I keep getting questioned like, well,

Starting point is 03:30:40 what do you think is going to happen when the autism cures don't work? Well, then they're going to put people in camps. No, the autism cures already don't work. This is an industry. They make money off of this. They make money off of drugging and medically torturing these children. And as far that is the threat is that it is going to get easier to do at a larger

Starting point is 03:30:57 scale and it is going to be harder to fight, even illegal to provide good information on what does and does not work. And that is what's happening right now, as opposed to something we might be worried about years down the line. And yes, we should fight any time the government is trying to put populations of people into a motherfucking database like this. We should fight all of this tooth and nail. I just think this is what I see as the danger.

Starting point is 03:31:24 Yeah, the risk think this is what I see as the danger, you know? Yeah, the risk is this decentralized stuff. It's a centralized acceleration for things that have already been happening, less so than just like large scale direct sedative intervention. Yeah. I think a lot about like in the context of this, of like quote unquote wilderness therapy programs, which Roberts covered these, but which have been abusing children for years. And that is what I see when we talk about these farms. Again, my worry is not RFK wants

Starting point is 03:31:50 to forcibly put everybody into fucking Auschwitz part two. It's RFK wants 100 times as many teen treatment facilities where kids who disobey or get in trouble with the law get caught at fucking protests, can be forced to labor and an amount of them will die and all of them will suffer permanent mental and physical damage as a result of being put in these places. Yeah, like behavioral improvement centers

Starting point is 03:32:16 that are, you could even be part of, you know, like community service. Yes. Yeah. It's extensions of what we do. It's extremely American, you know? I American. That's where my head is. Yeah, it's not great. So talking of where, I guess where my head is, is immigration, right? That's what I tend to update us on. So I guess I've seen it characterized as like legal ping pong between the courts and the DOJ. It would be like if one side was playing ping pong with a regular tennis racket and

Starting point is 03:32:48 everyone was just pretending that they weren't, right? Like the DOJ is just continuing to kind of flout these court orders. If we start from the top and go down, the Supreme Court temporarily banned the government from renditioning Venezuelan men in the district of North Texas to El Salvador. I think people maybe sometimes just got a little misinterpreted on social media. Like you have to look at who the class was. And the class was a group of Venezuelan men who were in immigration detention in North Texas who were going to be sent to El Salvador. And that was who got the relief. The case at the time was pending before the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. And the

Starting point is 03:33:24 Supreme Court said that once that court acted, the government could appeal to the Supreme Court. However, they added the government should not, and I'm quoting here, remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court, i.e. the Supreme Court. To update on the case which we covered a lot here, the Abrego Garcia case. Judge Genis ordered expedited discovery. Discovery is when both parties in a lawsuit amass information, they're able to find out information. And in this case, the government more or less ignored this. And it did so by sticking to its line that they can't bring him home to the United States, saying that the requests were, and I'm quoting again here, based on the false

Starting point is 03:34:08 premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador. They're claiming they were ordered to return him, and somehow in their minds returning him does not include ensuring his release. Like they're saying that they're only obliged to transport him should he be released anyway. Genis, in a court order, called this quote a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with the discovery obligations. Genis also called the government's assertion to executive privilege quote equally specious. The city of Hyattsville in this case also clarified

Starting point is 03:34:45 through a press release that, quote, at no time did any member of HPD identify or file any reports classifying Abrego Garcia as a member of any gang. Despite this, the executive branch is still going with that he's a violent gang member. They also doxed his wife this week by releasing a protective order that she had once filed and withdrawn. When that was released it contained her address so she's now hiding in a safe house. They photoshopped a MS-13 tattoo onto his knuckles above a weed leaf tattoo, a smiley face, a cross and a skull. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:35:28 Yeah, that's what they're going with, I guess. Specious is a good word. Yeah, just hideous nonsense. Yeah, no, absolutely obscenely ridiculous. And then the other angle is just them just saying that you don't have a right to due process, right? Like openly, just like Miller has been saying this, JD Vance has been saying this on X.com, that like, these people don't have a right to due process for them. They've come up with various arguments for that. It

Starting point is 03:35:56 also seems like two people sent to El Salvador no longer appear on any official list of detainees, which is concerning one of them, Ricardo Pradovasquez. He's not among the 238 people we know were on the manifest for those sent to El Salvador. He doesn't appear to be in Venezuela, which is where his passport is from. And the fact that the government claims that they sent him, the government has said they sent him on the March 15th flights, but he's not listed there. He's not visible in photos has led to concerns that we might have sent more people to El Salvador than we currently know about. He entered the country with a CBP one appointment, right, which of all the ways to enter is the one that the US government was trying to force people to use at that time. Right.

Starting point is 03:36:43 He very like legally entered the country. Yes, yeah, to be clear, he entered at a port of entry with an appointment to claim asylum. He appears made a mistake when delivering food and ended up driving into Canada and was arrested when he attempted to return to the United States. He doesn't show up on the ICE detainee locator. And essentially no one knows where he is, right?

Starting point is 03:37:07 This concern has been compounded by the fact that it also emerged this week that the US has sent at least one detainee, Omar Abdul Sattar Amin, to Rwanda. And the combination of these two things raises a concern that they are sending third country nationals to detention in other countries that we are not yet aware of, right? Of course, the Rwanda plan was something that the UK government hatched a long time ago, and the Kagame government in Rwanda seems to see this offer, right, as a way of gaining legitimacy with governments in the global north, especially given the widespread criticism for its actions in the Democratic Republic of Congo recently.

Starting point is 03:37:49 From the Handbasket, which is like a kind of substacky outlet, they've reviewed memos between the US government and the embassy in Rwanda. And I'm quoting from one of them here, the US provided a one-time payment of $100,000 to support social services, residency documents, and work permits. Rwanda has also, according to the Handbasket, agreed to accept 10 more third country nationals. So the US is paying Rwanda a little bit more

Starting point is 03:38:18 than it's paying El Salvador, right? It was paying El Salvador 20,000 per person per year, but it's a one-time payment. Nonetheless, I struggle to believe that you could concoct a way in which it would cost Rwanda 100 grand to produce a residency document and a work permit for an Iraqi national. But yeah, this has obviously led to the concern that people are being sent to other places that we don't yet know about.

Starting point is 03:38:47 Talking of people being sent to other places, a US citizen, Jose Hermosillo, was detained by ICE after approaching a Border Patrol agent to ask for directions. He was detained for 10 days. DHS is claiming that he was arrested near the Nogales border and that he approached a border patrol agent and upon doing so identified himself as a non-citizen who was not in the country legally. Which is what they claim. Yes. So, Hermosio disputes this along with his lawyers. He says that he approached the

Starting point is 03:39:22 agent looking for directions having had a seizure and been in hospital and when he got out of hospital was trying to work out where to go. He is from New Mexico but he was visiting his girlfriend's family in Tucson. He told the agent he was from New Mexico and the agent accused him of lying. In his account, DHS has produced a transcript with, I'm not going to call it a signature because it just has the word Jose written underneath it, right? Mr. Homer's CEO, according to his girlfriend, has some learning difficulties and by her account, he wouldn't have been able to read the English language transcript that he's alleged to have signed. So like whether or

Starting point is 03:40:01 not he signed, this is rather a material, right? He clearly, judging by her account, was not aware that he was in it. Judging by this, like, this is not even a signature with a last name. It's laughable to suggest that he, like, consentingly signed this. Yeah. But nonetheless, he was detained for 10 days till his family produced his documents in court. Yeah, he was arrested, quote unquote, without proper immigration documents, which you don't carry around when you're a US citizen.

Starting point is 03:40:26 Yeah, you're not obliged to. Papers please. Like you don't need that. His family brought his social security card and birth certificate to court. Eventually the case against him was dismissed after being held by ICE for 10 days. This reminds me of a similar case from this past week where a US citizen was detained on Wednesday the 16th. This is a 20-year-old born in Georgia, Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez. He was pulled over while driving to

Starting point is 03:40:52 work near the Florida border. He doesn't speak much English or Spanish, he speaks an indigenous Mayan language, but he gave his real ID card and social security card over to a state trooper. He was detained and charged with illegally entering the state as a quote-unquote unauthorized alien. Similarly, the trooper claims that Lopez Gomez said that he was in the country illegally. This is like some kind of communication error or these like law enforcement officers are just like lying or trying to construct like language traps to make someone agree to a statement that Admits that they're in the country illegally which allows them to be detained

Starting point is 03:41:30 He was put into a 24-hour ice hold the next day a federal judge verified his birth certificate Which was brought by his mother but claims to lack the authority to release him though He was released later Thursday night And he was arrested under a new Florida law signed by DeSantis last month, which a judge blocked earlier this month on April 4th. This basically allows state troopers to act as their state's own border patrol, and it penalizes immigrants who quote unquote, knowingly enter or attempt to enter the state after entering the United States by eluding or avoiding examination or inspection by immigration officers."

Starting point is 03:42:07 Yeah, and like the common thing here, right, is that they're just, we've seen this, I mean, there are a bunch of other cases that are like this too, where it's just like, they see someone who's not white and they're just like, fuck it, we can grab this person and then just lie about what they said. It's like, it's not even- Very basic racial profiling. Yeah, but it's like, the thing is, it's not even like basic racial profiling. Yeah, but it's like this is like it's not even it's not even like racial profiling anymore Like it's it's they're just attempting to blackbag

Starting point is 03:42:28 Like random non white people that they're just running across Yes, and so of course you're like grabbing us citizens, right? So just like grabbing random people but it's like they're just fucking doing this to everyone This has happened in other states as well. There's been instance like this Like the past few months, which have increased in frequency since Trump has taken office. Let's go on a break and return to Talk Tariff. Okay, we are back.

Starting point is 03:43:06 How's the economy going? Do not like. Okay, Mia, what can you tell us about tariffs this week? Rockin' Casbah, rockin' Casbah. Do not like. Okay, Mia, what can you tell us about tariffs this week? So we got a look inside the White House this week at how the tariff, the turf tariff suspension happened. Now remember, so there was there was the deliberation day tariffs a few weeks ago and then they got suspended for 90 days. So we're all still on the 90 day countdown clock on those being unsuspended.

Starting point is 03:43:48 But we got a view of how that happened from the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessett and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick basically waited until Trump advisor Peter Navarro was out of the room and then it was in a meeting and then they cornered Trump and were like you got to roll these tariffs You got you got to do this pause on the tariffs. Honestly iconic, you know, I I hate to say it but iconic That this was also the first Trump administration ran and everyone appears to have forgotten that this is how all of this shit works Well, cuz there was a there were all those stories for the first couple of weeks about how smooth and well-run it was and everything slow

Starting point is 03:44:28 Yeah, and like this many people assume that there was like a plan behind this and like no no I am fucking vindicated They really are just this fucking stupid. No there is not a grand strategy behind their sort of like tariff rollout, right? There is a senile old man and his stupid warring advisors and they're both fighting each other for basically for like, they're trying, like they're trying to wait until the other person's out of the room so they can grab control of the fucking puppet reigns. But this does actually lay bare something that's sort of important about this, which is that like there is a huge fight inside of the Trump administration between kind of Lutnick who's like the representative

Starting point is 03:45:05 of a bunch of different sort of sectors of American capital, right? Like he's, he's representative of like your fucking like Walgreens dipshits, right? And like, he's also representative of the finance people. And those people are losing their fucking minds over the tariffs because it's again, going to destroy the economy. But Navarro is, you know, let's just like a hardline sort of like anti-China idealogue. And Navarro is, you know, just like a hardline sort of like anti-China ideologue. And Navarro is the person who's been driving the most intense versions of these tariffs. And it's a real issue for everyone else in the administration who doesn't want this to happen because Navarro is like the one guy in the administration

Starting point is 03:45:38 that Trump actually likes. And so they can't directly move against him because they'll lose. Like Elon Musk tried this and like it got nowhere and so you know what we've been seeing is is just like Again, the the tariff policy here is just being set by who's the last person in the room with him Yeah, so so we're probably still like about 60 days ish out from these tariffs going back into effect I mean this basically means like They'll be hitting in the summer, which is also just like absolutely the worst conceivable time for these tariffs that take effect in terms of like, if you were just like deliberately trying to

Starting point is 03:46:12 cause a massive popular mobilization against you, this is what you would do. They're not that they're just dumb, but like, you know, so, okay, let's move on to the sort of big news of this week is the press has been carrying stories about Trump backing off of the 145% China tariffs and the fact that there's going to be negotiations and it's all going to get wound down. And like, I'm pretty sure this is just kind of peer-lutnick shit to try to calm the markets down. The issue with this story is that there are no negotiations, right?

Starting point is 03:46:49 Everyone keeps talking about how the US is going to do a negotiated settlement with China. There have not been any negotiations. There are not negotiations. There has not even been a process to start negotiations. Because, you know, the last stories we had about this was that like, neither side wants to be the person to like start going to the table Because like asking the other side for negotiations makes them look weak like Trump has been asking china to ask him to start negotiations the chinese are refusing And the second issue here and this is the more substantive problem with with a sort of negotiated back out is that

Starting point is 03:47:24 The trump navarro position hinges on the line That the trade deficit inherently, like with China, is proof of Chinese market manipulation. And the thing is, there's no actual way to systematically address that, right? Like there's nothing that like either China or the US could do that would reverse the trade deficit. So there's no sort of like, you know, like yeah, like the obvious way out here would be for like Trump to take some kind of weird symbolic victory and like China to be like, we're doing a functional crackdown or some shit. But the thing is like, ideologically for someone

Starting point is 03:47:55 like Navarro and Navarro is the important figure here. Like Navarro just wants China destroyed, right? There's, there's no actual negotiating process that he can do that will actually sort of like make this like negotiation shit happen and have it actually like eliminate the tariffs the only thing that can happen basically is a political battle inside the Trump administration where Navarro gets pushed out somehow but again Navarro is like Trump's guy so I just don't buy all of this all the fucking stories that are coming out and this happens constantly every single time there's one of these things is all these stories being like well, they're gonna get rolled back It doesn't actually mean this and that just happens right we have a hundred forty five percent tariffs on China

Starting point is 03:48:31 Now the last thing I want to talk about is what the actual effects of this has been and the effect is that has been There's been a massive slowdown and a massive like shutdown in in exports from China to the US like in terms of container ship traffic, right? We're talking about, I'm just going to quote from CNBC here. So they're talking about optimizer, which is like a tracking system for ships. And they said quote, year on year, the data shows a 44% drop in vessel scheduled to arrive the week of May 4th to May 10th. Now that's not actually necessarily a 40% drop in traffic because there'll be more shit when like other boats get full. But you know, to put this into perspective,

Starting point is 03:49:13 right, during the worst for trade, the worst parts of the COVID lockdowns, the year on year drop was only 20%. So and 20% is the number that's been that's been being spread around the media for like what roughly the drop looks like for some companies is larger than others and again the tariff we still haven't even seen the actual shocks of the tariffs yet and we're already seeing a decline in exports from China that is like again around the level of the lockdowns and if you know I think like people remember like the kind of unhinged shit that that caused right and That's something that you know is only going to intensify in the other part of this, right?

Starting point is 03:49:48 Is that the strategies right now for how this is being dealt with is moving through Vietnam, moving through Cambodia. But if you remember the rates from the original sort of like turf tariffs from Liberation Day, right? Like the tariff on Vietnam was like 100% or some shit. It was like 80%. I don't remember. I don't remember exactly what I thought in my head, but like there's no actual viable strategy of just of ways you can route these goods through. And it's been especially hitting

Starting point is 03:50:14 the sort of drop shipping companies, right? Like people like Temu and anything that relies on air freight just getting fucked. And so this is all just, you know, just sort of rolling in the background is just this logistics crisis. And it's also an echoing crisis. And the thing I sort of want to close this section on is that like, so the big issue with these sort of empty boats, right, and these cancellations of boat orders is that in order for it to be profitable, because all of these shipping companies run on such low margins, right, they only barely survive the pandemic by taking out a series of just like unhinged sort of

Starting point is 03:50:48 like weird collateral based loans. And in order for these companies to be profitable, they have to continuously keep on completely filling up ships, right? If a ship is not full, it is not profitable for them to run it. So you know, and if that's not happening, the entire system literally grinds to a halt until there's enough orders to move things through. So even the shit that there is demand for, right, can't be shipped because these shipping companies cannot afford to unless the entire thing is full.

Starting point is 03:51:15 So the supply chain disruptions that we are going to see from this as this sort of escalates and as this continues and especially in a few months if the Liberation Day tariffs go back into effect are catastrophic and we really like It's just one of these ways you can hear the thunder you can see the lightning But you the storm hasn't hit yet and it is going to and when it does I don't know I was trying to do a poetic thing about how we're all gonna get fucking drenched, but we're fucked It's going to be unbelievably bad and the only process right now inside of the administration it doesn't involve like some kind of mobilization is like again is is Lutnik winning this fucking intra-administration political battle with Navarro. So, whoo!

Starting point is 03:51:57 Well pre-order your Nintendo Switch 2 right now! Yes. In other news, the Minnesota Attorney General is suing the Trump admin over the executive order about trans women participating in school sports, saying he will, quote, not participate in a shameful bullying, and also says that this order violates the Minnesota Human Rights Act. So we'll see some more court cases over this in the weeks to come. I'd like to talk a little bit about the student crackdowns for Palestine protests, kind of in a different way. We've

Starting point is 03:52:32 discussed ICE going after and detaining and deporting and taking away visas and green cards, so unrelated to that side of it. On the morning of Wednesday, April 23rd, the FBI served multiple search warrants in southeast Michigan, presumably related to Palestine protests and encampments from the past year. There's also some reporting of law enforcement activity in other states like Pennsylvania, but I'm still waiting to confirm that. The press secretary for the Michigan Attorney General confirms investigators executed search warrants for three homes. He said that people were briefly detained during the execution of these warrants, but they were all eventually released. And he noted,

Starting point is 03:53:14 quote, there is no immigration enforcement angle to the execution of these search warrants, unquote. So these these people aren't being investigated like ICE to get deported, necessarily. This is seemingly for other protest activity. A pro-Palestine student group says that these raids happened at around 8am. Early this morning, police and FBI agents raided four residences of University of Michigan pro-Palestine protesters, refusing to show warrants. They seized all electronics and a number of personal belongings." But let's close this episode by returning to my most Stephen Colbert, Skibbity Biden

Starting point is 03:53:52 segment, Stinky Musk, which is still the worst name I've come up with. Last Tuesday, Elon Musk said that, quote, working for the government to get the financial house in order is mostly done, unquote Though Musk is moving closer to stepping back from Doge this May, around the time that his special government employee designation is set to expire. Reporting from Washington Post claims that Musk is growing tired of the vicious and unethical attacks from the left, and that is kind of dragging on him. With other reports suggesting that Musk is annoying other cabinet members and administration officials more than Trump himself, in fact, just this Wednesday, a few hours before recording,

Starting point is 03:54:32 Musk and Bessett were having a pretty intense shouting match in the White House. Going forward, Musk says that he plans to work for the government about one to two days a week for the remainder of the Trump presidency, so that he can quote, make sure that the waste and fraud that we've stopped does not come roaring back unquote. He keeps referring to his work at Doge as like being already completed essentially, like we already found all of the fraud and now we just have to make sure more fraud doesn't happen. We've previously reported on the alleged fraud that he claims to have found and the false

Starting point is 03:55:06 numbers up on the Doge site, but it seems like this work really is winding down. The Musk-Doge reply to this email with five things you've done this week or else be fired directive has essentially sputtered out. Senior officials did not comply with the core aspects of the directive. It was never really enforced, and the Trump Office of Personnel Management later said that this was voluntary, and that OPM officials may have never actually ever read those response emails at all, though a small number of agencies are still requiring compliance with this mandate. And in some fun news, Tesla stock just continues to decline, dropping to half its peak from

Starting point is 03:55:43 last December, and anti-Tesla vandalism is potentially spiking the cost of Tesla insurance. Tesla had a just disastrous earnings call this Tuesday, April 22, showing that Tesla profits have fell 71% over the first three months of the year. Total revenue has decreased 9% compared to 2024, with car sales revenue dropping 20% compared to a year earlier. The Tesla CFO stated that, quote, the negative impact of vandalism and unwarranted hostility towards our brand and our people had an impact in certain markets, unquote. In a company statement before this earnings call, Tesla claimed that quote-unquote, a

Starting point is 03:56:26 changing political sentiment could impact demand for their product. Musk announced that he would be shifting his attention back to Tesla, and that his Doge time allocation will quote-unquote, drop significantly. Musk talked tariffs on this earnings call, and tried to carefully not bash Trump while stating concerns over the high tariffs, saying, quote, I've been on the record many times as saying I believe lower tariffs are generally a good idea, but this decision is fundamentally up to the elected representative of the people being the President of the United States. So you know, I'll continue to advocate for lower tariffs, but that's all I can do." Any thoughts on Musk and Tesla here before we close?

Starting point is 03:57:11 Yeah, one thing I want to remind everyone that is genuinely good news is that the thing about Tesla sales dropping is that it actually fucks them in two different ways, right? Because again, most of their money is from these carbon credits that they're selling But the thing is in order to be able to get the carbon credits They do need to be able to sell cars totally and so and so each like subsequent cycle of people not buying cars is also Destroying their carbon credit subsidies, which is like this sort of like spiraling like cash crisis thing So you know look zero Tesla sales is possible. We can keep driving. A better world is possible. We can destroy these bastards.

Starting point is 03:57:49 We can ruin this one guy specifically's life, and it's not even that difficult, so... Yeah! Well, we reported the news. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back 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, coolzonedmedia.com, or check

Starting point is 03:58:20 us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts,

Starting point is 03:58:52 Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope, about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does.

Starting point is 03:59:27 It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm ready to fight. Oh, this is fighting words. Okay, I'll put the hammer back.

Starting point is 03:59:41 Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a bestselling author with the second most banned book in America. Now more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back. Part of the power of Black queer creativity is the fact that we got us, you know? We are the greatest culture makers in world history. Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention.

Starting point is 04:00:14 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 in a hell-bent effort to sabotage a war. J. Edgar Hoover was furious. He was out of his mind, and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 179

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