It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 185

Episode Date: June 7, 2025

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  The FDA Wants to Take Away Your Covid Vaccine, ft. Dr. Kaveh Hoda Tiananmen Remastered, Part 1 Tiananmen Remastered, Part 2 Governing Fertility: How Pronatalist Policies Kill Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #19 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone  Sources/Links: The FDA Wants to Take Away Your Covid Vaccine, ft. Dr. Kaveh Hoda https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsb2506929 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-panel-says-covid-vaccines-can-stay-fall-access-concerns-rcna208492 Tiananmen Remastered https://lausancollective.com/2021/communists-crushed-international-workers-movement/ https://chuangcn.org/journal/two/red-dust/sinosphere/ http://www.tsquare.tv/links/Walder.html https://chuangcn.org/2019/06/tiananmen-square-the-march-into-the-institutions/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/ https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4 https://libcom.org/article/utopia-rules-technology-stupidity-and-secret-joys-bureaucracy-david-graeber Governing Fertility: How Pronatalist Policies Kill https://www.vscw.ca/en/node/119 https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203059913-9/pronatalism-motherhood-franco-spain-mary-nash https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781438402062/html?lang=en https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15335899 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237296749_Marriage_squeeze_and_changes_in_family_formation_historical_comparative_evidence_in_Spain_France_and_the_United_States_in_the_twentieth_century   https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ypdy05jl9o https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/politics/trump-birthrate-proposals.html https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/treating-infertility-the-new-frontier-reproductive-medicine  https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/2/2155893/-Texas-Republican-channels-Stalin-and-Putin-to-glorify-motherhood  https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dot-memo-funds-communities-marriage-birth-rates_n_679bf8d8e4b0e1faebeef9c8 Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #19 https://www.kpbs.org/news/public-safety/2025/05/19/san-diegos-highest-paid-city-employees-cops-racking-up-overtime-and-earning-over-400-000 https://www.nilc.org/resources/how-calif-dl-records-shared-with-dhs/ https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-detained-buona-forchetta-employees https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/expedited-removal  https://www.npr.org/2025/06/04/nx-s1-5422248/trump-steel-aluminum-50-tariffs-double-prices https://finance.yahoo.com/news/live/trump-tariffs-live-updates-trump-and-chinas-xi-jinping-speak-at-last-agree-to-more-talks-191201181.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/06/02/immigration-restrictions-pile-up-on-international-students/ https://apnews.com/article/international-students-visas-trump-guidance-social-media-a1f5180ce83560aff66dd65534906697 https://apnews.com/article/international-students-visas-trump-guidance-social-media-a1f5180ce83560aff66dd65534906697 https://sahanjournal.com/public-safety/minneapolis-lake-street-law-enforcement-ice-homeland-security/ https://www.axios.com/2025/06/03/elon-musk-trump-white-house-relationship https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/elon-musk-privately-expresses-frustration-range-recent-moves/story?id=122485920 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/us/politics/elon-musk-trump-doge.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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A lot of times, big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways. Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. Small but important ways. Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up. So now I only buy one. Small but important ways. From tech billionaires to the bond market to, yeah, banana pudding. If it's happening in business, our new podcast is on it.

I'm Max Chastin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio 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. Every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to

the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen, a show about things falling apart. This week, the thing falling apart is the US healthcare system, science in general, but specifically the healthcare system. I'm Garrison Davis, and today I'm joined by a very special returning guest, Dr. Kavahode. Hello. Kavahode Hey, yes, the thing falling apart is you, the listener. So it's very important that you listen up.

You are going to anyways, but in particular, you should be paying attention here because this is important stuff. So in mid-May, we got some news in the FDA, CDC, Human Health Services front, as there's been. There's been a lot of news in the health front, but specifically we're going to be talking about the new guidelines for COVID vaccines that the FDA is trying to push through in the United States. So the new FDA commissioner, Marty McCarray, and the top vaccine regulator of an APRASAD have published a quote unquote study, you pushed back on the use of the word study

in the New England Journal of Medicine about the COVID vaccine booster shots and are going to be changing the guidelines for how these are going to be administered and who has access to them. Particularly those under the age of 65 might have a harder time getting the COVID booster that they have like the past few years, requiring certain pre-existing conditions to qualify. And they have a whole bunch of arguments for this. They say they're trying to make this more in line with the vaccine guidelines in other countries. They're proposing further studies on the necessity of COVID vaccines for those under 65. And for someone like me who tries to keep up with COVID boosters and, you know, doesn't like getting infected with COVID, some of this can seem a little bit both confusing

and worrying and considering like the anti-vaccine takeover of the FDA and like the federal health services in general. It's a frightening move, I guess. Yeah, I think you're right to feel concerned. It is something I am a little concerned about for a couple of reasons one I I mean, I just don't flatly agree with Limiting the use of the vaccines to the people they're planning to limit it to I mean This is coming from the medical freedom crowd

I feel like people should at least have the bodily autonomy to have the vaccine if they want it That's a part of it, but I'm actually even more concerned about the bigger sense of what this represents. You know, on the surface, making some changes is not totally unreasonable to our vaccine policy. And we generally reassess our COVID vaccine policy annually. So that's not too abnormal. But the thing is, we have this whole system set in place to do it in a efficient, smart way that is public. And there's a process to it. If I can give you a little bit of a sense of how it normally runs and what's going to happen now, I think it will explain why I might have my concerns.

Yeah, that would be very useful to hear. concerns. Yeah, that would be very useful to hear. So normally there are some clinical trials. There's some studies that happen, some real world data, some some points that can be looked at. And then the FDA uses this advisory committee. Again, these advisory committees are not career politicians. They're scientists, they're public health officials, they're doctors, people volunteering their time. I don't think they get paid other than maybe food and their expenses, but other than that, they're not paid for just this job. And what that this

group, the first group is called the VRBPAC, and they determine if it's a safe and effective vaccine. If it is determined that way, then the FDA grants a license and approval. From there, there's another group, the ACIP, and that's an advisory committee on immunization practices, and it's the same sort of thing. It's a group made up of scientists, health care professionals, public health professionals, and people will come together. They'll determine who should get it. And then the CDC director signs off and then it gets out there to the world. Now, basically what we have is two political pointies, both of which have these massive axes to grind on the subject, have some severe chips on their shoulder

about what's happened so far to them in this in this conversation and this dialogue, who are going to bypass this whole scientific system, who aren't going to be looking at these questions like what is our growing immunity? Is annual booster still warranted? And they're going to take this outside of that and basically make the decision. And I find that to be very concerning even past like this, this basic premise of like, you know, does this mean that my friends or myself,

I won't be able to get the vaccine that I wanna get? So I find it to be very concerning. And you alluded to that article in the New England Journal of Medicine, it did not alleviate my concerns. What one of the guys here, the guy who's heading up the vaccine regulations has compared the US COVID response to Nazi Germany,

he has boosted anti-vax claims from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And he blocked me on Twitter. Come on. And truly his most heinous offense. How could you block me? I'm lovable. No, me and this guy, Robert Evans, were joking yesterday. Never heard of him. Evans were joking yesterday about how some of your like personal nemeses have been put into positions of like government power and how you're upset about that.

And I remarked, oh, first time? Because this has unfortunately been the trend of our work the past few years. These weird online figures who we've developed personal grievances against for being bad people suddenly now are like in the upper echelons of power in the US government. Hey, I like them. They just don't like me. I don't know if that's true, but regardless.

Do you have any other notes on Makari and Prasad specifically? You know what I'll say. So a big thing about this article that they put in there and what they talk about a lot is trying to get more farm companies to do large studies, which, you know, on the surface, totally reasonable. But the thing about it is not every problem can be solved with what's considered the quote unquote golden standard of studies, the double blind randomized control study.

Some studies just can't. They want to see that these companies are doing these studies to say that it's good and safe and beneficial for younger people. But there's a couple of problems with this. Okay, one, I'm not entirely sure that's ethical. Like if we have something that works, if we know this vaccine helps, and we do, CDC studies have shown that these boosters help

for at least four to six months. Possibly life-saving medication. Exactly. Is it ethical to deny somebody that? Like would I wanna be a part of that study? I wouldn't. I wouldn't wanna get potentially the placebo. So be a part of that study? I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to get potentially the placebo. So that's part of it. But even beyond that, to do these studies, it's lengthy.

They're long studies. If you want to do it and you want to do it right, it takes a while. So by the time they do this, by the time they do the study, even if I'm being very generous in how long it takes them, by the time we get the results, we'll be onto a different mutation. We know that this thing mutates. We know it's going to change into a different virus, and we won't even know if that study that we just spent all the time doing works on it. So we have other options for studying these things.

They're not double blind, randomized controlled studies, but we have other studies that work and there are plenty of epidemiologists out there, vaccinologists, people who know way more about this than me, and to be fair, know more about this than Prasad and Makari. They're the ones saying this is not a good idea. So I'm like saying, let's listen to them. Let's listen. They know what they're talking about. They're smart people. I've met some of them. Let's listen. They know what they're talking about. They're smart people. I've met some of them. They're great.

And it doesn't make sense to me on an ethical or practical level to do it that way. Jared Suellentrop Do you know what doesn't make sense to me, Kaveh? Kaveh I know. I do. I do. I do. Can I say? Can I guess?

Jared Suellentrop You can guess. Kaveh I'm guessing that commercials don't make sense to you, but really at this point in your career, they should make sense. Jared Suellentrop I should know by now, but still the concept is a little bizarre. Here they are. Okay, we are back. I guess let's get into more how this will affect the average listener. Like, what these things could mean.

Like, both in, I guess, the short term and then, like, the long term. If you're trying to plan out your, you know, your health journey, what kind of, like, risks you have. If you're, you know, compromised, what that means for you, versus if you're magical, perfectly healthy, you know, 25-year-olds... Yeah. ...prancing around with no issues. Prancing, as the kids do.

Kids love to prance. So, in the short term, it's not clear. In a month, that advisory committee I mentioned, the ACIP, is going to meet, or they're supposed to meet, I don't know if it's still going to happen, and they're supposed to determine who should get this. So, first things first, they could disagree. It would be the first time I've seen it. I've never seen the FDA and the ACIP not be in lockstep in this regard. And maybe it's happened, but I can't think of it. And like, I don't know. I don't know what will happen. That'll be a little bit of chaos. And it'll be interesting to see what happens at that point. But if it goes as the FDA now plans,

it will limit who can potentially get these vaccines if you're not over 65, if you don't have what's considered a risk for serious disease like asthma, cancer, kidney disease, certain types of liver, lung disease, diabetes. If you don't have any of these things, then it's not clear to me, will the pharmacist not give it to you? Will the pharmacist check if you don't have any of these things, then it's not clear to me. Will the pharmacist not give it to you?

Will the pharmacist check if you tell them you have one of these things? Will insurance cover it? I don't know. And that's really concerning. I think the price is going to go up. And that does relate to the bigger concern, the long-term problem in this, which is, I mean, Kennedy has said he's not taking away vaccines. Great. He doesn't actually need to take away vaccines.

He just needs to do things like this so that nobody wants to pay for it. Nobody wants to go through the process of studying it. Nobody's going to make them. Insurance companies are going to pay for it. People aren't going to end up being able to afford it. They're going to be lesser and fewer of them, and they will go away naturally on their own because of this. That's really the long-term concern that I have with this.

The short term concern. I mean, I don't know. It's going to be interesting, you know, like they have, there's certain things on this list that the CDC has, like for example, physical inactivity is on this list. I mean, how, who could argue with you on that? Like, you know, if you tell the pharmacist you're having physical inactivity, like, will they, I don't know, will they check that? How will they check that?

So I don't know what will happen in the short term. In the long term, definitely big concerns. It seems like part of their strategy here is just putting as many roadblocks in between you and vaccines that could save your life as possible to further whatever conspiracy-driven worldview that the people at the top have and just the inhumane side effects that's going to have across the entire population. Absolutely. I mean, to also put this into context, COVID, we're in a better situation than we were years ago. That's certainly true. But at least from the CDC records alone, 47,000 Americans died from COVID related diseases last year. At least two

thirds of that number were directly due to COVID. And amongst that, there are about 230 deaths from kids. That is a significant number. And at least you can say at least 130 of those kids were directly related to COVID and not from some other problems. So this is significant stuff that we're still dealing with. And long COVID can affect people. Long COVID can affect all groups. It can affect young and old. So it is concerning and it bothers me in particular that the group doing this, as I said in the beginning, is the medical freedom group. And this is sort of the exact opposite of this. I think this demonstrates how much medical freedom has actually just been a dog whistle for like this conspiracy theory driven belief this entire time. Like,

people clamoring for medical freedom don't actually believe in it. They're against trans health care. They're against vaccines in general. They want to put autistic kids into like behavioral therapy programs to try to make them not autistic. Like, it's not actually about medical freedom. It's about advancing a very specific conservative and conspiratorial worldview that actually controls what other people are allowed to do with their bodies. This is like a massive, a massive part of their project. Yeah. And like, I don't know how else you can like interpret moves like this, which are just going to jeopardize people and put them even in more danger.

Yeah. And it's going to get worse. We can see the effects already. Just today, Moderna withdrew their application for a COVID flu combo vaccine, a one shot vaccine that would have both. And the studies on that so far were really good. Actually they showed, they looked really promising and they're just doing this because, you know, okay, now do we have to have these double blind control studies for this? And they know it's going to be a hostile environment and now it's withdrawn and there's going to be more and more of that. Like way way before your time or my time there used to be more pharmaceutical companies

making vaccines. There used to be a lot more than there are now. There's only a handful now but there used to be a lot. And then there was like this CBS show about the pertussis vaccine and it was called like Russian roulette. This could give you like this could end your life. And there's like one like made for TV like show about it. It wasn't a movie, but it was like a special they did. And it raised such concerns that letters started pouring in to the network and they then started pouring into Congress. and there was a

whole hearing and after that we had a significant drop-off in regards to the companies that make these vaccines and we have a few now and I am worried that this could be another sort of inflection point in that in that history in that arc of vaccines and we we're going to get even fewer now. I mean, it's been devastating watching the advancement of the HIV vaccine, which seemed like it was near completion, get stalled for a number of reasons, including DEI policies getting pushed across these health departments because the HIV vaccine research uses terms

like gay and trans and it mentions... Gender. Yeah, you know, all that kind of stuff, which people focused on in the first few months. I'm super nervous about the COVID nasal vaccine getting basically shelved. And every new thing we see come out of the FDA just makes those fears heightened. Yeah, it's just pretty rad. Not to be too like depressing, but that is kind of the that is that is the mood of the show.

I in some in some ways, you know, like people people can still, you know, wash hands, mask up. At this point, people can still get the vaccine. But like the way that the way that we've been like treating like the widespread health of this country has has already been pretty bad the past few years. Yeah. And this is like trying to intentionally make it worse. Yeah, it does. It does feel like that sometimes. Yeah, I am concerned about it all. But you're right. We still have as of now. I mean, there's still some options going forward in terms of vaccines, and hopefully we'll continue to have them totally. And we'll see how this plays out. I'm really

curious. The next month will be very telling when we have that ACIP advisory committee, again, if it's allowed to happen, and they allow people like Paul Offit, people who are real vaccinologists, people who know about vaccines, not just appointed political people, but people who actually study this know it. If they come on and they can provide enough pressure, if people can support them, then I do think that there is some hope that the pushback will help us alleviate some of this restriction, I hope.

Would the people on the like ACIP panel be like political appointees? Do they have the same like risk of all these other people put in under RFK Jr. where they're very clearly politically there versus like careerists who are actually actual experts in the field? Well, unless they change it, the ACIP is not set up like that. The ACIP is just, you know, these really great group of independent doctors and scientists, public health experts that are using real world data. They're looking at how the immunity shifts over time.

They're looking at the virus and seeing if it's changing, really volunteers that come from the world of science to do so. So as of now, they're not, that's not how the group works. I don't know if that'll hold. I mean, I don't see any reason why they couldn't if they wanted to scrap the ACIP, get rid of the people on it, you know, people who are vaccinologists who are of great significance to the community, like, you know, Peter Hotez or your Paul Offitz, these scientists who really study and look at these things

and put in just people who are already in line. I mean, unless I'm missing something about it, I don't see why they couldn't do that. I hope they don't. I think there's enough scientific background in Prasad and Makkari that they would recognize the importance of an independent council, but yeah I'm not sure. Well that's good to know. We don't need to be fully doomer-pilled on that, but it's a good thing to watch out for. You know what I'm gonna be watching out for, Kava? I do. I certainly do. You're gonna be listening more than watching, but you're gonna be listening

for some really great ads. Okay, Kava, I guess I'd also like to touch on this actual piece in the New England Journal of Medicine. Yeah. Their quote unquote evidence-based approach to COVID-19 vaccination, which is more of a blog post, right? It is not a study. It is a blog post.

And specifically, they talk about how the United States has a much more like severe vaccine strategy than other countries in Europe. And they try to use this to justify their own beliefs, saying that they're trying to bring things in line with the vaccine policies in other countries. Is this real? Is this true? I don't live in Europe. I'm not super familiar with the European vaccine guidelines. I don't expect you to be an expert either. No, it's really funny though that you mentioned it because it's so funny what they decide to endorse about European policy. Like, will socialize medicine? Most of these European countries have socialized medicine. They will have nothing to do with that.

And then they'll nitpick certain things. So there is some truth to the fact that we are doing things differently. And again, I'm not opposed to looking at that and being like, okay, what are other countries doing? Does it work? And could we do that? So there is a difference. Currently, until now in the US, it was generally recommended for anyone over six months. People weren't being made to have this, by the way. Again, medical freedom, you know. No, I was pretty sure that Joe Biden will send a SWAT team to your house and shoot you unless you get the COVID vaccine. That's what I was told on the RFK Jr. podcast. I mean, he is somehow simultaneously a decrepit old man

who's certainly confused, but somehow able to orchestrate the incredible from the depths darkness, deep state espionage. So I guess it's possible. And that's how we do it. It's how Canada does it. The UK, they do do it a little differently. They do it for people greater than 65.

They do it for residents in care homes. They do it for people greater than six months and high risk and people who are greater than 12 years of age, but are in a house where someone's immunocompromised. They do it for anyone who's over 16, who helps care for someone who's vulnerable. And They do it for anyone who's over 16 who helps care for someone who's vulnerable and they do it for all social and health care workers. I mean they have a

different system in place. They have, as I mentioned, socialized health care in general. They're very good about their vaccines. So it's hard to tell. It's a little bit of apples and oranges, but it's funny what they decided to pick and not pick about that. And it's also funny why some groups are missing under our care. Like a lot of places will vaccinate anyone who's overweight. Here they don't consider being overweight a risk for COVID. So it is funny how they're choosing, they're nitpicking certain things that are recommendations, common recommendations in other countries and not using them here.

So they do it a little differently in Europe, that is true. And again, this is the kind of stuff that they're gonna evaluate every year. The ACIP will evaluate, they'll look at the emerging data, they'll look at the other countries, they'll look at what's being done and they'll discuss it. So it is true and it does seem reasonable on the surface when they say it like that.

Hey, we're just trying to get, and they mentioned this in the New England Journal of Medicine article, we're just trying to get more in line with the rest of the world. And that's not really true. It's like they're just picking certain things that they want to agree with and ignoring

all the other stuff about their healthcare system that we could benefit from. One of the more wild aspects of this, again, glorified blog post is talking about how the other stuff about their healthcare system that we could benefit from. One of the more wild aspects of this, again, glorified blog post is talking about how the COVID vaccine booster program has actually undermined public trust in vaccinations. Which is like, again, this is like, we're all looking for the guy who did this moment, wearing the hot dog costume,ote, even healthcare workers remain hesitant with less than one third participating

in 2023 to 2024 fall booster program. There may even be a ripple effect. Public trust in vaccination in general has declined, resulting in reluctance to vaccinate that is affecting even vital immunization programs, such as that for measles, m mumps and rubella. Oh So weird I wonder if it's the people that have been talking about how corrupt and terrible the FDA and CDC are like the last five six Years, it's insane that they're that they're like able to like do this like it's

Yeah, I mean it is an ongoing Inside joke amongst people in the medical community, the hot dog meme guy that's a very common like attribute to these characters who talk about, you know, how they're clearly sowing the seeds of mistrust and then capitalizing off of it. I don't know if they even mean to or not. And people ask me a lot, they're like, you know, why, why are they, why, why do they do this? And I, that's a tough one for me. That's your friend, Robert Evans. I ask him that every time I'm on his podcast guy, there's a point in the podcast where

I earnestly, I don't do this on purpose, where I just don't understand. And I need to understand why it's being done. And in these cases, it's hard, You know, previously, Vinay Prasad had a podcast that people really like called the Planetary Podcast in the medical community. I never listened to it because I don't listen to medical podcasts. Why would I? And what it did basically was it would break down like studies and go over them in a very sort of skeptical way. And I think it's good as a doctor to be skeptical. I think that's a good attribute for us to have.

And it was useful in many ways. But then I don't know if it's audience capture. I don't know if it's true belief. I don't know what shifted, but it does seem that it was a steady growth into this contrarian perspective from the medical community that doesn't totally make sense to me. Like they all kind of feel like they're Galileo or Sammelweis that they had this rare contrarian opinion that made them special and they were attacked for. But in my mind, it's not so much that as it is, you know, there is a scientific process that we have. Galileo followed a scientific process,

and that's how he came to those conclusions. These people, I don't feel are following that. And they are strict to their method, idolatry to what they feel needs to be done. And I don't feel like they're listening to the experts in the field explain to them why that's not the case. That's how every hero probably feels in every situation, but they have somehow become the victims in this story.

And I am very curious to see now that they're in power, how that shifts and if they maintain this sort of victim mentality. Well, how can you be a victim when we have beef tallow back at Steak and Shake, everyone? We did it. Beef tallow. We did it, Joe. We're back. We sure did.

Maga-coated coconut oil. Now I'll be completely healthy again. Yeah. Yeah. That is so funny to me. I mean, like, we could talk about seed oils. We could talk about the quote unquote hateful eight. We could talk about seed oils, we could talk about the quote unquote hateful eight, we could talk about all that stuff.

But it's it's pretty clear that oils are better than tallow for your health. And beef tallow, there's very little like, there's a little proof to prove that it's good for you and a lot of proof to say that animal products are bad for your heart. Yeah. So it's it's absurd that that's an argument that we're still having in 2025. No, instead of frying in beef tallow oil, instead I just drink a full a full eight ounces of grape seed oil every morning to wake up. It does wonders for me. It just gets the whole body up and running. Lubricates the whole system. That's right. I know you can't give medical advice, but do you have any advice to give listeners before we close? At least people who are like, you know, afraid of what these changes from RFK's FDA will mean for like them and their community. Yeah, I think it's okay to be concerned about it, but I do think there is some time to go.

There's going to be a lot of people from the medical community fighting to try and fight these restrictions on the vaccine. So we'll see how that goes. You will probably be able to find ways to do it. You should talk to your doctor about it because your doctor probably can see a risk factor that you don't. If you don't see one that automatically fits that list from the CDC, your doctor might be able to find one that that is.

And I'm not talking about fraud. I'm talking about like real things. Your doctor may be able to look through your chart, look through your history, talk to you and find a risk factor that you didn't think was a risk factor. Like for example, physical inactivity or, you know, smoking. So there are things that we can look for. And as they shift those goalposts, which I'm sure they will we'll also be trying to find ways around that as well and

You know when the ACIP comes out there's gonna be a lot of pressure on them and I think we can pressure our Congress and we can pressure our representatives to support them At least nominally to discuss it, if nothing else. Because I don't think this is getting talked about that much. So I think if we can bring it to the public attention,

I think we can shift the narrative on vaccines. I do believe that the narrative has shifted on COVID and vaccines in this terrible way, this revisionist way where everyone pretends it's not, it wasn't a big deal and that we didn't lose millions of people. And I think if we can keep that in the public discourse, I think that alone will help.

I think that's important for us to do. And that's what people on Reddit and people on the internet and Facebook and all that stuff can do is they can help keep this in the public eye and fight that incipient, I don't know if that's the right word, insidious, is probably the right word.

It's this really subtle sort of reconstructing of the narrative of what COVID was and how important these vaccines are. So that's how people can help in the immediate future. And then, you know, stay tuned, talk to your doctor about vaccines and when you can get them and get them as soon as you can. I do think that's a good idea for both flu

and for COVID boosters when available. Kave, lovely talking with you as always. Where can people hear you talk more on the internet? I am on a podcast called The House of Pod, and it is a humor adjacent, fun-ish medical podcast. I would say it's not adjacent to humor. I would say it is on target. We're next door to humor.

We- Next door to humor? We speak a little humor, not a ton, but you will like the show. If you like this. I think you're gonna recognize a lot of the same people. Gare, for example, has just recently been on an episode and you know, we'll get Gare on again, I hope. And you'll find people that you like there,

a lot of the same sorts of people. We take a skeptical look at medical grifters and the wellness community. So a lot of the same stuff you love from these shows in the extended behind the bastard universe, you'll also get into, I think, our podcast, the house of pod and finding it anywhere. The house of pod, the house of pod. The first time I met you online, I was invited onto the show and I, you know, it

was a pretty busy year, 2020. There was a lot going on for me with the riots and such and the, you know, it was a pretty busy year, 2020. There was a lot going on for me with the, you know, riots and such and, you know, whatever damage was done to my brain via all that tear gas. And for some reason, and I don't quite know why, I wonder if I was just conflating two messages, but I thought I agreed to go on to a medieval history podcast, not a medical podcast. So as things started, I was a little bit confused. And then I went back to reread the message and like, oh no, it definitely says medical. And I still don't quite know how I did that. Like I said, a lot going on that year.

You did great, whatever it was. Whatever you thought you were doing, you did it well. But whenever I think of your podcast, I now also think about medieval history. So there you go. Yeah. Hey, okay. That's cool. I'll take it. I think we did do an episode. Well, I mean, not every episode is strictly like medical stuff. Like I did an episode with these guys who wrote this book on Sparta and the battle with the Persians and how the story has been sort of turned into something grossly that's not partially because of 300 and partially because of other reasons. Yeah.

And so there's a little bit of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. You would like that episode. How often do you think about the Roman Empire? I don't. I think about how the Persians killed a lot of them over the Thermophilia. That brings me a little spark of joy. Okay, good to know. Just kidding, listeners. I don't approve of people being murdered.

I don't, I don't, even if they're jerks. Good to say this day and age. Yeah. Thank you so much, Kaveh. Thank you. Thank you for having me. DNA Test proves he is not the father, now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John, who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son. Even though it was promised to us, now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up, so what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago.

Scandalous! But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my god. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So, do they get the millions of dollars back, or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeart Ready Web, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover?

I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024 VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political It's societal and at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be These days I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover to make it I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships.

I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that are being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children

was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so

long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up,

so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action, and that's just one of the things we'll be covering on everybody's business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chafkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters and how it shows up in our everyday lives.

With guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the With guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull, we'll take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to IKED Appin' Here. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Today is the day before the 36th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. We're doing something a little bit different. Three years ago, I wrote a pair of episodes about Tiananmen, democracy, and the International Workers' Movement, expanding off a piece I'd written for Lausanne a year before that. That was a long time ago. The world is a fundamentally different place than it was in 2021. Europe has been consumed by war.

Whole revolutions rose and fell. The fascist threat we defeated in the streets returned to power in a new and more terrifying form. In this new, uglier, and more brutal world, I wanted to return to Tiananmen. To return to one of the great horrors of another age, to see if we can take anything new from the wreckage of the Death of Hope. I'm no longer the same person I was when I originally wrote these episodes, and so today and tomorrow are Tiananmen remastered.

There were really three Tiananmens. The first and most famous Tiananmen was the student protest inside Tiananmen Square itself. If you've heard the word Tiananmen before, this is a story you know. The second Tiananmen was the Tiananmen of the blocks of Beijing around the square. Blocks seized and transformed by Beijing's working class. If you've heard about this Tiananmen at all, it's probably in the context of the tanks rolling through them on their way to the square. And then there was the third Tiananmen, the protests in other cities, of which we still,

years after I wrote the original piece, know distressingly little about. Our focus today is on the first two. The students of the student protests were a weird ideological grab-back that cannot simply be reduced down to the simplistic pro-democracy label they've been saddled with in the three-and-a-half decades since Tiananmen. The short version is this. The students were pissed off about what's called reform and opening, not going fast enough. And we should talk about what reform and opening actually was.

On the one hand, you had some steps to ease restrictions on free speech, rehabilitate intellectuals, and other people with so-called bad class backgrounds, and allow for a broader public discourse. This was paired with market reforms that started to bring capitalism back to China. This was a shit show in a lot of ways. If you want to hear about the CCP reinventing what's essentially debt peonage about five years into this process, go listen to my Behind the Bastards episode about the Poison Milk Scandal. But reform and opening is remembered as a kind of golden age of free expression, a golden

age of hope and possibility, where things really seemed like they could be different. This is not entirely accurate. Reform and opening also saw a bunch of absolutely draconian crackdowns on the social sphere. There was the one-child policy, a hideous expansion of the state into the sphere of social reproduction, replete with forced sterilizations and the reimposition of patriarchal power. It saw the tightening of one-man rule in the factory, the destruction of any form of workers' decision-making, and control over the process of their own labor. In these horrors, you can see the beginning of the fragmentation of Tiananmen, and Chinese

politics more broadly, already forming. The students wanted market reform to go faster. They wanted more freedom of speech. They sort of wanted democracy, but mostly they wanted to be in charge of the party so they could crush the bureaucracy that was holding market reforms back. It's worth noting, of course, that many of these students were involved in what became known as neo-authoritarianism, which holds that the strong central party should take full control of society and destroy factions and the bureaucracy.

It was an ideology that survived the death of the protests and went on to become a major faction of the CCP itself in the 90s and 2000s. And this is where some of the truly weird shit at Tiananmen comes from. The students were in many ways an incredibly hierarchical movement, which escalated to the point where student leaders were kidnapping each other for control over stages and microphones. And these protests, in terms of their nominally stated goal of influencing the factional fights inside the party, were stunningly ineffectual. The guy they were trying to defend inside the party wound up getting ousted and put under house arrest for the rest of his life, and the changes they demanded failed to occur. But Tandemann,

as I mentioned earlier, was also the workers. And for most of the protests, the students absolutely hated them. Students barred workers from entering the square itself until the final hours of the protests, tried to stop workers from carrying out a general strike, and relations were, in general, extremely bad. This raises the question, what were the workers doing there in the first place? There's a few answers. The simplest and most immediate one is that the workers were pissed off at how badly the party was treating students in the square. But there were other things going on too. The late 1980s in China saw rampant and skyrocketing inflation.

The rapid price increases threatened the supply of cheap grain that composed a huge supply of welfare services provided to urban workers. Meanwhile, marketization was accelerating. And suddenly you had CCP princelings racing down the streets in imported sports cars, driving past workers on their bikes and spending a year's salary gambling at the racetrack. And this pissed people off. So they started organizing. I'm going to read a section from a piece by Yoran Zhang about what the workers were

doing. During the struggle to obstruct the military, workers started to realize the power of their spontaneous organization and action. This was self-liberation on an unprecedented level. A huge wave of self-organization ensued. The Workers' Autonomous Federation membership grew exponentially, and other workers' organizations, both within and across the workplace, mushroomed. The development of organization led to a radicalization of action.

Workers started organizing self-armed quasi-militias, such as picket corps and near-to-die brigades, to monitor and broadcast the military's whereabouts. These quasi-militias were also responsible for maintaining public order, so as not to provide any pretext for military intervention. In a sense, Beijing became a city self-managed by workers. It was reminiscent of Petrograd's self-armed workers organized in the months between Russia's February and October revolutions. At the same time, Beijing workers built many more barricades

and fortifications on the street. In many factories that organized strikes and slowdowns, a possible general strike was put on the table as well. Many workers started to build connections between factories to prepare for a general strike. This was unacceptable to the party. And so, for the third time in 70 years, the CCP fed its own working class to the machine guns. On the night of June 3rd, the army began to slaughter its way through the workers defending the square. It was the workers who bore the brunt of the massacre. Most of the casualty and later political repression were against members of the workers' faction. The army soon reached the square itself, where the Western press corps bore witness to what

became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre. This is where you get Tank Man and the most famous accounts of the massacre. But by that point, it was almost all over. The protests were crushed, and the Chinese working class died with it. But before the last bullet had even been fired, every faction under the sun began to construct their own narratives about what had just happened. The most common narrative is that Tiananmen was a clash between democracy and authoritarianism, and to some extent, it's not exactly wrong.

There were a lot of other pro-democracy movements in this period. You see them in Taiwan and Korea. They swept across huge swaths of Latin America and eventually spread to places like the Philippines. But the real question of the pro-democracy movements was what kind of democracy? The students at Tiananmen, to the extent that their democratic principles were sincere and not simply cover for a deeply authoritarian version of liberalism that demanded rule of law by a new class of intellectuals to oversee market reforms, believed in a narrow conception of political democracy. This political democracy operates at the level of the state.

It's based on free citizens, equal before the law, participating in elections to choose representatives who pass laws and generally oversee and manage the state bureaucracy. This model of political democracy relegates the workplace to a separate economic sphere into which democracy does not extend. The capitalist firm, or its state-owned equivalent, remained the absolute dictatorship of the capitalists and their managerial flunkies. Even the progressive wings of the pro-democracy movements in Taiwan and South Korea maintained this private dictatorship. Workers would be given rights under the progressive regimes, permission to form unions, access to the welfare

state, limited protections from the worst physical and psychological abuses their bosses could inflict. But no matter how progressive the pro-democracy movement, the legitimacy of the dictatorship of the bosses was not up for dispute. To them, democracy meant a democratic state, not a democratic workplace. The workers of Tiananmen alone disagreed. They stood against not only the rest of the world's pro-democracy movements, but the tide of history itself.

By applying the principles of the pro-democracy movement to their own concerns, skyrocketing inflation, mounting debt, rampant corruption by government officials, spiraling inequality, and petty bureaucratic oppression, Beijing's working class reinvented an old and now largely forgotten traditional democracy in the factory. Democratic Workers' Self-Management This is, to a large extent, what Tiananmen was actually about. It was the culmination of a century and a half long war between the democratic wing

of the classical workers' movement and essentially every other ideological movement on earth. The workers movement would fight capitalists and communists, liberals and fascists, monarchies and republics, social democracies and theocracies. And at Tiananmen, they would lose one final time. That defeat is the origin of the modern world. One man rule in the factory in its thousand, thousand forms is the author of the hell of the 21st century. And when we come back, we're going to look at the international part of the struggle

that ended Tiananmen. To fully understand the magnitude of Tiananmen, we need to go back to the Revolutions of 1848. If you want a detailed accounting of 1848, go listen to the Revolutions podcast. It's great. It's also many, many, many, many, many, many episodes. The short version is that there were a bunch of revolutions across Europe in 1848 collectively known as the springtime of the peoples. It was the first wave of revolutions where socialists were a real political faction.

Frederick Engels, yeah, that Engels of Marx and Engels fame, was on the barricades with a rifle fighting in Prussia. There was a huge revolution in France where they deposed the king. And the question of how far democracy was going to go came for the first time to the forefront. Inside of the democratic movement itself, you had a split between the sort of French radicals who'd done the original French revolution, who wanted electoral democracy but to cater ship in the workplace, and the new socialists

who wanted to question property relations and the question of class itself, and most importantly for our purposes, whether democracy would extend past the political sphere and directly into economics. This prefigures a split inside the socialist movement itself. For the most radical factions, control over the means of production meant that workers would control the production process directly through free associations of workers. Direct democratic unions, opposition later known as syndicalism, were workers councils. But more conservative factions of the socialists became enamored with the bureaucratic technologies of the state. They watched with envy as the

industrializing powers of the 1860s and 1870s engaged in increasingly elaborate planning schemes first of roads, canals, and railroads, then of entire cities with complex electrical grids, gas lines, and plumbing systems, and began to believe that centralized state planning, not the democratic association of workers, could bring about the long sought after cooperative commonwealth of socialism, and that planning-obsessed faction began to encompass more and more of the left. In Germany, home to the powerful German Social Democratic Party, socialists became divided

between two camps, the revisionists, led by Edward Bernstein, who renounced Marxism and revolution entirely in favor of reforming capitalism and the state from within, and Karl Wachowski's Orthodox Marxists. Basically, the only two things these factions, who otherwise despised each other, agreed on was supremacy of state bureaucratic planning over workplace democracy. This led to the Social Democratic Party disastrously working to break the workplace autonomy of many of its own workers. But worse still, the person who became most obsessed with the potential of bureaucratic state planning was one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, as the anthropologist David Graeber pointed

out. Lenin's obsession with the German Postal Service was such that he included this passage about the future socialist state in his famous State and Revolution, a text written between the February and October revolutions of 1917. Quote, a witty German social democrat of the seventies of the last century called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. This is very true. At present, the postal Service is a business organized on

the lines of a state capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type. To organize the whole national economy on the lines of the Postal Service, so that technicians, foremen, bookkeepers, as well as all officials that receive salaries no higher than a quote workman's wage, all under the leadership and control of the armed proletariat, this is our immediate aim. Lenin's idealized form of socialism would thus take the form of a total state bureaucracy tasked with planning the entire economy. This would set off a massive series of confrontations with the part of the workers' movement who wanted workers' control over the means of production to mean workers making decisions

over work themselves and not just working for a different set of bureaucrats. The struggle between bureaucracy and democracy in the workers' movement mirrored the struggle between the workers' movement and the capitalist state. By the 1880s, the workers' movement had created variable states within a state, in countries like Germany and Italy. These quote-unquote states were vast networks of workers' institutions, ranging from, as Graeber described, free schools, workers' associations, friendly societies, libraries and theatres, end quote, to unions, co-ops, neighborhood

associations, tennis unions, mutual aid societies, and political parties ran democratically by workers themselves, which provided vital services to workers and their families and served, so the workers hoped, as the basis for a new socialist society. Fearing the popularity of these democratic workers' institutions, Autofund Bismarck created bureaucratic, state-run versions of the libraries, theaters, and welfare services to replace them, telling an American observer, quote, "...my idea was to bribe the working class, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.

And this works. It was enormously successful. Socialists themselves came to confuse Bismarck's welfare state bribe with socialism itself. And when they took power, they replicated the bureaucratic nature of many of Bismarck's programs, eliminating the democratic aspects of the older workers' institutions entirely. But where their leaders had eliminating the democratic aspects of the older workers' institutions entirely. But where their leaders had forgotten the democratic core of their own ideology, workers themselves never did. As the 19th century drew to a close and the 20th century began, workers who engaged in spontaneous uprisings instinctively began to form democratic institutions, particularly workers' councils.

The most famous of these councils, of course, were formed during the spontaneous Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. These councils, called Soviets, were originally formed in 1905 out of ad hoc strike committees that became formalized elected bodies of representatives in the various factions who worked to coordinate the general strike. The revolution of 1905 was crushed by the Tsar, but in 1917 the Russian working class would once again form workers councils as another revolution commenced. This time the councils would take control of production directly, coordinating between

various factories and industries as well as serving as a workers' counter power to the new revolutionary government. The Russian Revolution kicked off a period of open warfare that stretched from Italy to Argentina between the forces of democracy in the factory and the newly formed anti-democratic alliance of social democrats, Bolsheviks, and capitalists. Between 1917 and 1920, workers' councils formed in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, and Ireland and were matched by revolts of syndicalist unions in Brazil and Argentina. These uprisings were all crushed. In Italy, which saw some of the most intense conflict between syndicalists and the Italian

state, the famous occupation of the factories was ended not by the Italian government, but by the Italian Socialist Party and their union, the General Confederation of Labour. This, in large part, was how Fascism won in Italy and in Germany. Faced with workers' movements on the verge of seizing power, Social Democrats turned on the working class and slaughtered their own comrades, propelling the fascists into power in their wake. Ironically, the worst defeat of the Democratic workers' movements would come not at the hands of the capitalists or Social Democrats, but from Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The very party at the workers' councils had put in power.

Lenin began to undermine the power of the Soviets almost immediately. Published mere days after the October Revolution, his draft decrees on workers control stated in no uncertain terms that real power and authority lay with the new state and the Bolshevik-dominated trade unions. In the face of massive and unexpected resistance from the workers councils, the decree is needed to be modified before they could be implemented. But while publicly declaring his support for the Workers' Councils, the Bolshevik slogan was, after all, all power to the Soviets, Lenin continued to chip away at their power

until he finally admitted his real position of democracy in the factory in 1918 in the horrifying The Immediate Tas tasks of the Soviet government, quote, unquestioning submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of labor processes that are based on large scale machine industry. Today, the revolution demands, in the interest of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process. This is obviously one of the most disturbing things I've ever read.

But to be clear, while Lenin is more candid about what one-man rule in the factory actually entails, the system he's describing isn't actually different from one-man rule in any other political system. Bolshevik rule in the factory would be no different than capitalist, social-democratic, or even fascist rule. The movement for democracy in the factory now faced four implacable enemies willing to put aside their ideological differences to ensure that workers would not run their workplaces directly.

And as the 1920s bled into the 1930s, the movement seemed to have all but disappeared in a hail of bullets and blood. But they didn't. In next episode, our heroes, the collective hero, the world's working class, will be back. They will do many, many more revolutions. And we're going to talk about why those revolutions happened, what the ruling class did to stop them, and then return to the lead up to Tiananmen Square to see the final stand of the Chinese working class. DNA test proves he is not the father, now I'm taking the inheritance.

Wait a minute John, who's not the father? Well Sam, luckily it's your Not The Father Week on the OK Storytime Podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead,

but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up, so what are they gonna do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time.

Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeart ReadyWAP, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation.

To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us

think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that are being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. prioritizing other parts of that relationship that are being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves.

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children

was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment

and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up. So now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering

on everybody's business from Bloomberg Business Week. I'm Max Chafkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. With guests like Business Week editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing.

So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Kid Appin' Here. I'm your host, Mia Wong. When we last left the story of Tiananmen, one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had, in theory, crushed the last remnants of the faction of the workers movement that actually wanted democracy to extend into the factories. Unfortunately for the Leninists, no matter how many workers they killed, the demand for democracy in the factory simply refused to die.

For over a hundred years, the development of the mass factory system and the logistical infrastructure necessary to support it, perhaps most importantly coal mines and the railroads used to transport that coal, generated an especially militant working class that saw democratic control over the workplace as a fundamental aspect of its liberation. Ideologically, as the journal Endnotes pointed out, this manifested in a series of interlocking beliefs about the nature of the working class and class society, all of which were necessary for the instinctive formation of workers' councils to manifest themselves in moments of revolutionary crisis.

In the midst of the rapid technological expansions of the second and third industrial revolutions, workers came to see themselves as the creators of the New World. This produced the second belief that drove the classical workers' movement. The producers of this New World should also be its inheritors. Thus, the goal of the workers' movement was to take control of production in itself, and manage it for the common benefit of workers themselves. These two beliefs, in and of themselves, were not unique to the democratic wing of the workers movement.

They broadly comprised the ideology of the movement as a whole. And by this point, the workers movement was extremely broad, stretching from social democratic trade unionists to the intellectual heads of the Leninist vanguard parties. What made the democratic wing unique was its concern with the fundamental alienation of factory life, with the condition of being reduced to an object by bosses who simply used workers as human tools. For the Leninists and social democrats, alienation was simply a product of ownership or distribution. The liberation of the working class would be found in its productive capacity,

not in its innate humanity and creativity. But for the democratic wing of the workers movement, this solved nothing. As long as the fundamental reduction from human to object that characterized one-man rule in the factory persisted, changes in ownership, structure, and health benefits missed the entire point. That degradation could only be solved by returning agency and autonomy to the working class by giving the class itself control over the production process that for so long had controlled them. In 1936, Spanish workers decided to take matters into their own hands and seize control over their workplaces en masse. The Spanish Revolution, as it later became known, would become the largest and most extensive experiment in democratic workers' self-management before or since. Everything from public utilities to bakeries to hospitals to shoe factories fell under

the control of the direct democratic unions. And once their former bosses had been chased from the premises, the workers set about transforming the entirety of Spanish society along democratic lines, pulling their resources collectively and allocating them democratically for the benefit of everyone. For a brief moment, the triumphant experiments in democratic self-management delivered on its promises. Output increased dramatically, social services were expanded, and the workers of Spain, by their own self-organization, developed a universal healthcare system that dramatically

expanded service into rural areas where care was previously inaccessible. But the revolution had begun amidst a violent civil war in Spain, and under the guise of an anti-fascist alliance, liberal, socialist, and Stalinist forces brutally stamped out any attempt at democratic self-management and return the factories to their owners before losing the war to the fascist armies of Francisco Franco. Undeterred by the mounting casualty tolls of pro-managerial massacres, revolutionary workers formed workers councils and mass factory assemblies once again in Hungary in 1956 and then again in Italy, France and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Hungary in particular is an interesting revolution, because over the years it has been subjected to so much of the same liberal mythologization you get with Tienanmen, but this time even worse. The Hungarian Revolution is remembered as a liberal democratic revolution. But if you talk to the actual people who did the revolution, they were saying things like, and this is a direct quote from a member of a Hungarian Workers' Council, quote, the time when the boss decided our fate is over. In reality, far from simply instituting Liberal democratic democracy, Hungarian workers seized control

of their factories and workplaces, formed workers councils, and overthrew the government before Russian tanks slaughtered them. This was not a liberal democratic revolution at all. Almost identical revolts broke out across the capitalist world as well. In Italy, in France, in Chile, communes broke out and colonized Vietnam. They spread everywhere. And to the dismay of capitalists and communists alike, the development and implementation of the democratic solution to alienation these revolts provided was largely instinctual, and it often

emerged in places without established workers movements and their political education effects. Typical of such movements was the course of the revolution in Algeria. without established workers' movements and their political education effects. Typical of such movements was the course of the revolution in Algeria. The political education Algerian workers had received was from the nationalist, vanguardist National Liberation Front, FLN, which had prosecuted the war against the French colonizers. The FLN's ideology emphasized the decisive role of the state in national development. Upon taking power, however, Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria's first president, discovered the question of the economic structure of Algeria had already been answered for him.

Production would be managed by democratic workers' councils built on the properties seized by Algerian workers after the mass exodus of French settlers who fled the country following independence, left much of their property uninhabited. Benbella's administration took a page out of Lenin's book and publicly supported the councils while privately undermining them, but the whole dispute was made irrelevant by a military coup two years later that dismantled the councils completely and reimposed one-man rule in the factory. Still even by the late 70s it was by no means clear that one-man rule in the factory would

triumph as a political system. Workers and students almost took Italy in 1977 and the CNT, the anarchist union that had led so much of the Spanish revolution, reappeared after the death of Franco. For a brief fleeting moment in the late 1970s, it really looked like they were going to do it. The persistence of these revolts in the face of pure military repression caused capitalist managerial elites to look for ways to dismantle the systemic structures that produced the democratic revolts without giving up their power. As author and friend of the show Vicky Ostewild points out, the instinctive embrace of democracy

in the factory was only possible so long as the factory remained a point of encounter. A kind of dark agora that at once both exploited workers and facilitated the interactions that allowed them to identify with each other as a class and find and produce collective meaning. Thus, the fundamental thrust of the attack against democratic self-management would take the form of an attack on the shop floor as a site of collective identity formation and as a space that could be seen in any way as liberatory. This assault took a number of forms, most famously deindustrialization itself, as well

as the spatial relocation of factories from urban centers into the suburbs, where workers could be isolated from each other and turned into homeowners, bought off with the combination of cheap credit and the promise that the new homes would also function as assets. The quote-unquote democratization of finance replaced the democratization of the factory, as the capitalist class funneled union pensions into the stock market, thus tying what remained of organized labor to the fate of capitalism itself. Corporations began to turn the workplace into an immense propaganda apparatus, replete with mass ideological programming designed to promote identification with the corporation itself and not the working class

as a whole. Worst of all, the mobility of capital and the immobility of workers combined with the new logistics networks and technological advances in containerized shipping to create a world where if workers ever began to get the upper hand, capitalists could simply move elsewhere. As the total size of the industrial working class contracted, capitalists increasingly took that option and left, spitting vast populations out of the traditional workforce entirely. These developments would eventually destroy the classical workers movement, but in order for the anti-democratic counterrevolution to succeed, it needed somewhere to move their production too, somewhere with a large, exploitable labor supply. The capitalist

class found that answer in China. In the wake of the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Chinese factory system was extremely different from the system that existed anywhere else in the world. Chinese state-owned firms virtually lacked the ability to fire workers. People's entire social sphere was built around their work units, which provided everything from their healthcare to their retirement, to their food, to often their entertainment. The CCP also eliminated the piece rate system, a system in which people were paid per unit they produced, which is, for example, how the USSR worked. This meant that in order to get people to work, bosses had very little leverage. They were thus forced to allow a degree of participation in the labor process and the ability to criticize bosses,

because otherwise it was virtually impossible to get anyone to do anything. Chinese bosses solved this problem through a combination of mass ideological work and a parentalistic, semi-democratic system for determining the heads of work teams that, while raked by the party, ensured that managers would at least be somewhat popular. Till the process was strictly managed, workers had the ability to criticize the cadre who governed them and combine the work unit's system of folding home and social life into the factory system. The product of this system was that because there was already a greater degree of workers participation in Chinese factories than workers elsewhere,

and because of some of the structural elements of Maoism, demands for democracy became delinked from the workplace. And it meant that the system, at least in the cities, worked sort of okay until the Cultural Revolution. This means that it is time for me to do the Cultural Revolution rant. Everyone gets the Cultural Revolution completely wrong. The initial targets of the Cultural Revolution were kids with quote-unquote black blood. The children of people who had quote bad class backgrounds. These people were heavily persecuted. And you can make arguments about what you do with, you know, a Shanghai oligarch

who collaborates with the Japanese imperialists, but this extends to the children of people from quote unquote bad class backgrounds. And that term is extremely loose. I know people whose families were declared of black class background who had quote unquote black blood and weren't allowed to hold government positions because her family had made bird feeders before the revolution. It was, as a system, absolutely nonsense. So what the early phases of the Cultural Revolution amounted to was a bunch of privileged kids from red class backgrounds in a new system attacking a bunch of kids who were being persecuted for stuff that was literally not their fault at all. they had no way to control who their parents were.

Now, the initial stages of the Cultural Revolution were largely driven by Mao attempting to play power games inside the party. But as things became more and more chaotic, and the attacks on CCP bureaucrats and cadre escalated, it spiraled nearly out of Mao's control entirely and produced what's called the January Storm, where rebel workers seized control of Shanghai and drove out the CCP. And this caused what I would describe as an oh fuck moment for Mao, because now, despite all his rhetoric about bombarding the headquarters, he had to actually deal with a worker-controlled city. And I found this incredible line from Zhou Enlai in a meeting with Mao where they were attempting to figure out what to do with, you know, this new revolutionary Shanghai.

Quote, when asked whether the new leadership should be elected from the bottom up, Zhou Enlai bluntly replied that, quote, anarchism is bound to develop if we immediately implement direct election of the Paris Commune style. And this was obviously a problem for Mao because there was no way for the party to maintain its long term control if you know, you actually implemented the direct elections in the style of the Paris Commune. And so instead, we saw a full-on counterrevolution. By about 1968, rebel workers and students were getting slaughtered everywhere. The initial uprisings, the stuff

that everyone remembers with the dunce caps and the placards, was, staggeringly, by far the least violent part of the Cultural Revolution. Here's from Walder, an academic who spent a significant amount of time studying the actual death records city by city and province by province in the Chinese archives. Quote, more than three fourths of all documented deaths in local annals are due to the actions of authorities in this third phase, and more than 90% of those persecuted for alleged political crimes. This third phase, 1968 onward, is where most of the people

in the Cultural Revolution gets killed. And this is the opposite of the way that the Cultural Revolution is understood. Most of the killing wasn't the product of student radicalism gone out of control. It was the state slaughtering its way through the various rebel factions that did most of the killing and the political persecution. And this has enormous

effects on subsequent Chinese history. It creates a ruling class that's incredibly paranoid about anything that even smells like organizing happening outside the party, and the most radical students and workers were simply butchered by the state. And by the late 1970s, radical politics in China that could have produced anything even remotely like democratic control of the workplace had by the state, and by the late 1970s, radical politics in China that could have produced anything even remotely like democratic control of the workplace had collapsed almost entirely in the face of state repression. In their wake, politics moved towards more intellectual-driven liberal-democratic politics that broadly ignored the working class entirely, as Deng Xiaoping

unleashed the horrific one-child policy in a draconian and ultimately successful attempt to re-establish the state's patriarchal control over the household and strip hundreds of millions of women of even the limited autonomy they had clawed out of the Cultural Revolution. But the beginning of marketization, the gradual dismantling of the socialist welfare state, and a wave of inflation produced a series of economic changes that turned Chinese society into a powder keg. By 1989, the classical workers movement globally was on its last legs. Unable to spark its own uprisings, it latched onto a series of other social and political movements, most notably the pro-democracy movement in China.

But democratic self-management and its critique of one-man rule in the factory was utterly alien to the pro-democracy movement, which meant that its development by the workers of Tiananmen was a spontaneous product of the application of the principles of democracy to their own situation. This led to formulations that would have been unfamiliar to previous incarnations of the workers' movement. One worker interviewed by Walder said this about democracy in the factory, Why do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom? In the workshop, does what the workers say count? Or what the leader says? We later talked about it. In the workshop, does what the workers say count or what the leader says? We later talked about it. In the factory, the director is a dictator.

What one man says goes. If you view the state through the factory, it's about the same. One man rule. Our objective was not very high. We just wanted workers to have their own independent organization. In work units, it's personal rule. For example, if I want to change jobs, the bus company foreman won't let me go. I ought to go home at five, but he tells

me to work overtime for two hours, and if I don't, he'll cut my bonuses. This is personal rule. A factory should have a system. If a worker wants to change jobs, they ought to have a system of rules to decide how to do it. Also, these rules should be decided upon by everyone, and then afterwards anyone who violates them will be punished according to the rules. This is rule by law. Now, we don't have this kind of legal system. Now, this is obviously an extremely conservative framing of the classical critique of one-man rule in the factory, couched in the dominant political rhetoric of the rule of law. But any attempt to actually implement a system by which workers controlled the factories

they work in, how long they work, and what the bonus rate was democratically to an independent organization could only end in democratic self-managed workplaces. As Waldron Zhang have pointed out, the workers at the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation were uniformly uneducated and had little or no connection to any of the various liberal intellectual circles. This was as pure a worker as we've been to any in Chinese history, and for one final time the instinct of that working class was to demand democracy in the factory. This demand, above all others, was politically unacceptable. When the army marched on Beijing, it was the

Chinese working class they wiped out. Even the memory of the demand for democracy in the factory would be scrubbed from the records of the CCP and the pro-democracy movements alike, thus ensuring the meaning of the events would be lost. What, then, was Tiananmen? In some sense, it was the transition point between two different Chinese working classes. The protests were the high watermark of the political mobilization of the old industrial working class, who, in the streets surrounding Tiananmen, mounted the final attack of the classical workers' movement. Their defeat ended the old working class as a political force, and they were annihilated

altogether in the economic restructuring of the 1990s, which crushed the last vestiges of workers' autonomy in the factory and destroyed what remained of the Chinese welfare state. They were replaced by a new working class, drawn from the rural and semi-urban underclasses of the old socialist system, who were dragged into the cities to fill the ranks of the 277 million migrant workers that today comprise the background of China's working class. This new working class, with rural household registration in no way into the remaining state-owned factories, would have none of the benefits of the previous one.

It would instead face a full-raft capitalist ideology, baked into every aspect of workplace culture and a massive attempt to encourage home ownership. While the previous working class could at least posit a democratic form of the factory through which life could be improved, this new working class's greatest desire was to leave the factory entirely and become a business owner. In this sense, it considers itself to be a temporarily embarrassed petit bourgeoisie. Such ideological self-conceptions are inimical to the formation of the classical workers' movement, and indeed, the new Chinese working class has largely failed to find the collective identity in the workplace.

The situation is not unique. The death of the classical workers' movement has seen the collapse of their demands for democratic self-management everywhere in the face of a working class that refuses to cohere itself in the factory. China was just late to the game. The fact remains, however, that the global economic system has lurched from crisis to crisis for the better part of my lifetime. Setting off in its wake an increasing number of revolutions even as the dark agor of the factory ceased to function as a place to form identities. For this new working class, if a collective identity could not be forged in the factory, it would be forged in the street instead. Lacking a positive identity to cohere itself around, workers were only able to mobilize

on a mass basis in direct opposition to a force that threatens it on a cross-sectoral basis. The state, with its ability to increase the price of basic commodities and slash welfare benefits, became the only available enemy, and the constant fights against the police became the sole basis for new collective identity formation. Contemporary revolts have thus taken the form of mass street movements and almost continuous confrontations with the states. Factory occupations were replaced with square occupations, and as the squares were revealed to be indefensible, they too were replaced by running fights with the police.

But this placed the new revolutionaries in a dangerous bind. Without the leverage against the state the classical workers' movement's control over the workplace provided, they lacked the ability to bring down a government firmly committed to fighting it out. Even the attempts over the last five or six years to carry out general strikes in Peru, in France, Hong Kong, and Sudan were, as Melitesta predicted in the early 20s, easily defeated without the accompanying factory occupations. But with current labor conditions exceedingly unlikely to produce another wave of factory occupations, the way forward for any political movement that seeks to reintroduce democracy

into the economic sphere is unclear. Perhaps that is the greatest legacy of Tiananmen. The workers who assembled outside Tiananmen Square had already abandoned their factories. For all that they spoke the language of the old workers' movement, they stood and fought and died like we do, in the streets. They were the bridge between the world of the workers' movements and the world we live in today, and thus faced the same revolutionary crisis we face today. The crisis of Papua and Palestine, of Colombia and Iran, of Myanmar and Hong Kong, of victory

just beyond the horizon that nevertheless cannot yet be grasped. The workers of Tiananmen, I suspect, have no answers to give us now, but expecting answers from the dead is demanding too much of those, past and present, who died fighting for liberation. All we can do now is find our own way, and with the names of the dead on our lips, build the world they died fighting for. DNA test proves he is not the father, now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute John, who's not the father? Well Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast so we'll

find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us, now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up, so what are they gonna do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband

found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family

in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back, or does she keep the family this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships.

It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that are being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high.

And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld

of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus.

So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action,

and that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Business Week. I'm Max Chafkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters and how it shows up in our everyday lives. With guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, Sports Reporter Randall Williams and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull, we'll take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick.

Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the only podcast where anti-British discrimination is a way of life. James, are we allowed to say that? Do you remember the training I haven't done yet? I was given that training with full attention throughout the duration of the video.

Every single time I've watched it at various employers for the last half decade or so. There was no section on anti-British discrimination. Yet again, another example. Can't see that. Imagine again, another example of that. Can't say that. We have been victimized. Yeah, we have been victimized. Last time I took that training, there was just straight up anti-Asian racism in it that

they didn't address at all. So I'm assuming if that's okay, then anti-British racism is fine. There's some shit in those videos, which is wild. Okay. There you go. I think there's a lady who's literally called Karen and they do her wrong in the, uh, in the end of video. See, I am, I am definitely pro British discrimination, but you do get a point for having Peter O'Toole. So at least it's, it's, it's not all the way because the O'Toole factor keeps you, uh, from the full might of my wrath, frankly.

Fairly the greatest person. There we go. Yeah, I'm sure that's the case. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stone, and Robert Evans. This episode we are talking about babies. Should there be more? Yeah. We're on a pronatalist kick. We're going to have that off-putting couple who look like vampires, but like not any of the good kinds of vampires on the show. Very excited to have those people on. They seem nice.

But before we do that, we all decided maybe we should talk about other pronatalist policies in world history and how well they've worked generally. We're gonna start by talking about what the US policy might be or that the people proposing US policy. And then we will discuss how those policies went historically. So to start with Trump's, besides one executive order in February supporting IVF, the new administration has yet to tackle pro-natatalist concerns on the policy front, but a collection of lobbyists, activists, and influencers are vying for the president's ear while proposing

a multitude of plans to grow the number of heterosexual marriages and incentivize childbirth. The pronatalists certainly think that the new administration is at the very least ideologically sympathetic if not in cahoots with their agenda. The main ins on the pro-natalist front have come from the Peter Thiel tech-right wing of the White House. This is like JD Vance and previously Elon Musk. Musk has been doom-posting for years about how a drop in fertility rates could be leading to a large-scale population collapse. And at an anti-abortion rally this past January, Vance addressed the crowd saying, quote, I want more babies in the United States of America. I want more happy children in

our country. And I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them. Uh huh. Yeah. And you got to like whatever you're listening to, one of these things, you gotta like have a little parentheses anytime, anytime someone says baby, there's a little parentheses there that says white. White, white. Because this is real Nazi shit.

Like, this is. A lot of this stuff is certainly like, based on like, great replacement rhetoric that the alt-right like, Trojan-horsed and like, pushed forward in like, 2018, which is now so widely normalized, thanks to, I mean, really Musk has done a lot of work in normalizing great replacement stuff.

Yeah. Tucker Carlson too. And Carlson, of course. Well, and Musk's family goes into this, right? Like, this is the kind of thing like, his grandparents were involved in. Like, it was a little bit less of like the standard great replacement shit and a little more like focused on like, we need to be breeding high IQ white people together. Yeah, you, Jen. But like that is what he inherits. He comes by it honestly, I guess you could say.

Well, and oftentimes Pernadine Lestrade-Rick is also tied in with like the trad wife and like loss of traditional family structure type stuff. Vance has laid blame at childless cat ladies and referred to our quote unquote broken culture that attacks masculinity and turns our nation's youth into androgynous idiots. Hey, shout out. Yeah. I've also started referring to women with kids as catless child ladies as a result of this.

I don't think you should say that. which has not gotten any some good reactions actually. I don't know. People reacted very negatively. No, no. Don't do that stuff you rubbed in. A declining birth rate has also been attributed to women in the workplace who are not getting married and raising kids at home from an early enough age.

Yeah. And some of this rhetoric has rubbed off on Trump, right? In Trump at CPAC in 2023, he said, quote, we will support baby booms, and we will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom. I want a baby boom. Cool. Trump has floated a $5,000 cash, quote, unquote,

baby bonus to American mothers after delivering a baby, calling this proposal a good idea Well garrison that's almost three months at a preschool. Oh, yeah, I'm sure that's enough Not quite three months at a lot of preschools like not even great preschools It's very preschools and unbelievably expensive the actual cause of like of a declining birthrate is due to skyrocketing cost of living So people aren't financially stable enough to have kids in their early 20s anymore. So instead, they're waiting until their 30s. That's part of it, at least. Yes. If you want people to have kids more, you should make the world more affordable. And

a $5,000 baby bonus does not actually solve the key issues that would cause people to be worried about, you know, trying to like get married and have kids at a young age in a world where that seems kind of like unfathomably expensive. Now luckily Trump does have a few other ways of sorting out this problem. The new big beautiful budget bill that recently passed the House will create quote unquote mega savings accounts for new kids. And here, mega stands for money accounts Accounts for Growth and Advancement. Just fucking stop. Stop it. So, when parents or guardians open a new MEGA savings account for their kids,

the federal government will contribute $1,000 for babies born between January 1st, 2024, and December 31st, 2028. That'll help. Great. Great. I believe California also does it. Yeah, California has something called the California Child Saving Accounts Program, which already gives children up to $1,000.

And I think it's like a college savings account, from what I understand. Yeah, that's pretty much what this is. Although, specifically for the MAGA accounts, it also lists home ownership. Oh, cool. Because this is a big part of this pronatalist thing is you need to own a home, get in a straight marriage, start having kids in your early 20s.

Yeah, sure. Make Instagram videos of yourself chopping wood badly. Like we understand. Yeah, yeah. The big, beautiful budget bill also prohibits Medicare funds from going to Planned Parenthood. Great, yeah. Let me tell you, $1,000 American dollars, even with compounding interest, isn't going

to do shit to buy you a home anywhere in the United States. Now the Heritage Foundation's DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family have pushed for a policy that exponentially increases the child tax credit for each additional child a married couple has. This is a little bit similar to a policy proposed in 2023 by Republican Representative Brian Slaton of Texas, who proposed increasing property tax cuts for married heterosexual couples who have never been divorced and have four or more children starting after marriage. So there's a lot of caveats there.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Yeah. No, this is, are we taking issue with this? That is some, yeah, look, this is part of my British heritage, right? We developed our own religion so that dudes could get divorced.

It is, it is, it is the Bill of Rights for British guys. Obviously a lot of caveats in there so that you can have your little like trad Christian family. But four kids would equal a 40% cut. Ten kids would equal no property taxes at all. Well, I mean, shit, that's hard to argue with. This is property taxes.

You also have to own the property to begin with to be paying property taxes. All also have to own the property to begin with to be paying property taxes. All of these people want you to be homeowners with a stay at home wife. This is what they want. But they don't want to actually do things to meaningfully make home ownership accessible to you. No, this is just like self-selecting for well-off white Christians. Yes, 100%. Slayton said in a statement, quote, With this bill, Texas will start saying to couples get married, stay married and be fruitful and multiply, unquote. For fuck's sake.

It's a disaster. And yeah, and like and like a lot of this stuff is to is it's there. This is the sort of flailing reaction to like one of the things that actually drives like declining birth rates, which is not having teen pregnancies, like significantly decreases birth rates because it turns out they're like, Oh yeah, right. It turns out a huge part of like why birth rate is so high is just direct social coercion. And if you stop having that or like, you know, the amount of the coercion decreases, then yeah, like fucking birth rates are going to decline because women aren't being forced to have babies.

Like and you know, and so they're trying to do all this like, you know, unhinged tinkering then yeah like fucking birth rates are gonna decline because women aren't being forced to have babies like and you know and so they're trying to do all this like you know unhinged tinkering bullshit to sort of like Deal with the fact that if you don't force people to have children as teenagers they won't Yeah, cuz life they quickly realized there's things in life like, you know, drugs and stuff. Uh... Yeah. Go back to the club. Yeah, we'll go back to the club. In March, Trump called himself the quote-unquote, fertilization president.

Oh my god. Jesus fucking Christ. Oh no. And the White House is expected to soon release a report on how to expand access and affordability of IVF. Now, this is where things get sticky. Uh, insert pun. There is hot debate amongst advisors and think tanks on the religious ethics of IVF, right?

There's no real consensus among the pronatalist voices who are lobbying Trump. This sort of breaks down into like the new tech right versus the more religious, Christian, family sector of conservatism. And Vance is kind of caught in the middle of this. But these groups may end up compromising to form an alliance. Now, Heritage, the Heritage Foundation, recommends a program to use government funds for education that promotes quote-unquote natural fertility. Teaching women how to track their menstrual cycles, using charting courses to both help get pregnant and avoid using birth control. They propose that food, nutrition, and lifestyle changes

could improve quote unquote natural conception instead of using assisted reproductive technologies. Heritage proposes something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as a holistic approach to treating infertility through quote-unquote hormone balancing dieting and Nutritional adjustments environmental changes and surgery unquote. Yeah, you just need some fucking Some of those some of those baby teething pills Highlands made that kill babies. That's that's what you gotta take

It's a holistic approach to your raw. Get some raw milk in there. Put a bunch of random chemicals and lead in your body from an unregulated supplement company. Heritage itself critiques IVF as failing to address the underlying causes of infertility, as well as, you know, out of concern for embryo personhood rights. For fuck's sake. So they advocate for embryo adoption and have proposed legislation to make the production of embryo spares illegal. Embryo adoption? Because they believe that these are full people.

God fucking damn it. Now, on the other side of the, you know, pronatalist right, you have people like the vampire couple that Robert mentioned, Simone Collins, a pron-natalist activist and failed Pennsylvania congressional candidate. She could still pull it off. Stay in line if your vote hasn't been counted, people. Her and her husband are self-described, quote unquote, techno-puretans.

And she is the fucking stupidest shit. Like, fucking damn it. Oh my god. Can's the Shaggy. Oh my God. Can we put these people on a boat and send it across the Atlantic? Like, can they get scurvy? Have they already got, they look a little bit like

they may already have scurvy to be fair. They do look like they have scurvy constantly. Can we deprive them of lime juice and save the world from a fucking crisis? Put them on the next starship and see how far up it gets. Yeah, let them colonize Mars. No, they won't get there. let him try I support the human spirit

Collins is also the former managing director of an exclusive Peter Thiel founded social club called a dialogue Now she has called the new administration quote-unquote to inherently pro-natalist and has sent several draft pro-natalist executive orders to the White House, one of which would award a quote unquote national medal of motherhood to mothers with six or more children. This is some Trichescu shit. Like, I know we're going to talk about that, but Jesus Christ. She herself wants at least seven kids and she claims to use special technology to select embryos with high IQs, which relates back to what Robert was saying earlier. So they use IVF to specifically select embryos

that they think are naturally predisposed to have more desirable traits, including high IQs. They have not discussed the exact method. That's why it's called special technology. Are they looking for the one with the big head or something? I guess they're not even that far along, are they, when they're IVF? So that's obviously pretty fucked up. And then I guess, finally, one of the few things that actually has happened in advancement of this ideology was way back in February, Trump's transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who is a father of nine and has 10 siblings, sent out a memo directing his staff to prioritize transportation funds to quote, give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than

the national average, unquote. Which would in effect mean less money for urban public transit and instead send it towards like wealthier, rural, white conservative areas. Yeah, I'd imagine Latino communities have higher marriage rates at least than like the national average. Yeah, I'm not sure if Sean Duffy really wants his employees to select for that though. No, neither am I.

That's what I'm wondering for. Yeah. Samuel Huntington thinks they have higher birth rates, right, like that's his whole shtick. If you look at the full memo, I think this is just like a dog whistle for like white Christians. Like, that is really what he's saying. Sick. Anyway, that is what I have for the current pro-natalist policies.

We should go on an ad break and then return to learn the historical implications of pro-natalist policies. Mm-hmm. And to learn the historical implications of pronatalist policies. All right. We are back and we are spinning our globe, our big ball of pronatalism. And it is slowing down and has landed on Japan where Meir is gonna explain pronatalist policy. Yeah I guess I want to open on a kind of global thing which is that concern over like birth rates for like fascists is a really old thing I mean it predates fascism like this is like like if you go to like the 1870s every single person is complaining about like my God, the birth rate of the right with the white race keeps

declining and we're going to get like overwhelmed by the Asiatic hordes. And then you go to like the Asiatic hordes and it's like, Japan has been having the same fucking panic for literally so long. Like I cannot emphasize enough. You can just go back through newspaper archives and you just it's's, you're literally reading the same article over and over and over again, going back just decades and decades and decades. So like the first big modern freak out about birth rates is in like 1987. Yeah. They have the first big like Japan birth rate declining freak out.

This has been happening longer than like most of the people here have been alive. I can remember this from like my child. It's just been like, oh, they're panicking about their birth rates again. Yeah. So like the running thing with Japanese politics, so we're roughly doing these in order of like

most to least hinged in terms of like, in terms of these like natalist policies. Japan, I think has an interesting series of sort of political contradictions in their like kind of pro-natalist Paul it's if they have political contradictions in their pro-natalist politics and political contradictions in Their conservative faction because Japan is basically like a one-party liberal democratic state liberal democratic party is the one party This is a party established by World War Two Nazi, but that means that they run all of politics. So like every political faction effectively runs through them. Their early attempts in like the 90s are focused

on the deregulation of daycare jobs. So basically their plan is like in the 90s and 2000s, they're like, okay, we're going to like deregulate the childcare industry so that we can have more affordable child, there'll be more childcare jobs so people can pay for childcare. This is how we're going to promote this. And this is sort of one of the first places you see this huge intra-class conflict between the peer social conservatives who want to just like send every woman back to the household to raise children and the business people who are like no you can't do that We need we need to explain these women's labor to like make money

Mm-hmm, and so the the fight that starts to break out is this fight between like paying for childcare leave versus like paying for daycare So they've originally that their plan is like, okay, so we're gonna do the daycare stuff That doesn't work like none of the none of these things they're going to do does jack shit, right? It like that's going to be a through line here. Yeah, yeah, like none of this stuff works. And so like Shinzo Abe, I think, is the most famous person who spends much time trying to deal with this. And like, again, so they have started worrying about this in 1987.

It is now 2013. The birth rate keeps declining precipitously. Shinzo Abe, rest in piss, you fascist bastard, is still trying to like cook something. Right, I'm gonna read this quote from the archives of clinical pediatrics. Shortly after the formation of Abe's second cabinet, the quote, task force for overcoming population decline

was established in 2013, introducing three key strategies, supporting child rearing, reforming work styles, and promoting marriage, pregnancy and childbirth. So you can do these are going to become sort of like the three pillars of Japanese pronatalist policy, right? A lot of it is focused on this sort of social push stuff to like promote the traditional family and promote marriage. And this hasn't ever really worked for this. Supporting child rearing is one that is going to get a lot of attention in subsequent administrations. There's a lot of attempts to reduce like to reduce the cost of child rearing, but we're

going to see them try like 35,000 different like proposals to do this. The one that's actually interesting is reforming work style. So like part of the problem here is that, you know, everyone in Japan is working a just genuinely unhinged amount, unbelievably staggering overwork, right? I mean, it's one of these things that's like a persistent social crisis. There's a persistent sort of suicide crisis because of how long everyone is working all the time. So Shinto Abe's plan for this was to put into place a soft cap of you can only work a hundred

hours a month of overtime. Now this doesn't do shit, right? Like a hundred hours a month of overtime is enough to kill you. Right? Like, you know, especially when like your regular hours are this long. But this is again, this problem that he's having, which is that like, okay, so yes, you probably could maybe, like people maybe would have more children if you weren't working literally all the time, you weren't just like being worked to death.

But that's really bad for Japanese business. And like, quote unquote, Abe-nomics, which is like Abe sort of, you know, economic plan, like relies on maintaining this extremely high level of labor hours from everyone in the entire population. And it's also based on putting more women into the workforce to expand the size of the workforce, to, you know, extract more hours so they can all the people can make more money. Right. They were also supposed to do free preschool for all children. And this just

like didn't happen, which over and over again, they're like, we're going to do these kind of like, these these kind of like, okay, we'll give we'll give you some kind of welfare state bullshit, but only in order to like have kids and it just doesn't happen. And so, you know, this is one of Abe's big initiatives. But by the time he's like assassinated in 2022... He what? He was, uh... By time his political coalition was finally detonated by one guy with an electric plunder bus. My favorite politics. Oh, God, it's so good. It's so good. We have covered this extensively on the show.

If you want to hear the happiest I've ever been during an episode, Oh God, it's so good. It's so good. We have covered this extensively on the show If you want to hear the happiest I've ever been during an episode Including the day after Kissinger died go find the episode I did right after Shinzo Abe was assassinated The holy trinity of great days on the internet is that big stuck boat in the submarine that killed all those Biden gave us nothing. There were some bangers on the timeline. There you go. So, all right, Shinzo Apei's successor is a guy named Fumio Kishida, who lasts for a little bit.

And Kishida, every single Japanese government announces that they're going to spend like somewhere between 20 and like 15 and 20 billion dollars on pronatalist policies and mostly doesn't happen. But Kishida promises that he is going to spend 24 and a half billion dollars. A lot of this money is going to be just straight up like child allowance. Japan has the system that they've been you know, they've been sort of implementing over the course of like all of these fucking reforms, which is just like, all right, we're just going to like hand you cash. It's still not enough money to like substantively change stuff, but there's a lot of different kinds of cash policies. They have they have cash transfer policies that are just straight up like, okay, here you had a baby. We're going to give you this amount per month.

I think it's like 10 to 15,000 yen, which hold on. Yeah. So it's like, like $70 a month, which is like not. Yeah, they are trying to expense that research on this is supposed to have these like counselors that like come check in on you and like give you education and stuff. They're also supposed to just like give you a whole bunch of basically like child care equipment stuff and make sure you're getting medical care. And that's supposed to come out to about like $700 ish roughly. You know, this is like the big sort of plan that they're doing. And then in 2024, Kishida is replaced by like some other dipshit who, you know, if he lasts

more than like two years, I guess I'll tell you his name. In 2004, Kishida is replaced by like some other dipshit who, you know, if he lasts more than like two years, I guess I'll tell you his name, but he's, you know, attempting to go back to the sort of childcare side of it, right? Which is his plan involves a bunch of things like childcare subsidies and very importantly, like tuition free high school. So one of the continuous plans, if you like go back to like what I was talking about with, they were supposed to do free preschool for all children, right? That never got implemented except in like the last two years,

like Tokyo has started doing it just like as a city. Because Tokyo is one of the places where like, you know, the birth rate has been like dropping the fastest or whatever. Sure. I imagine cost of living is also really high. So like, yeah, cost of living is really high. And it's also just like, you know, if you're working in an urban, like in an extremely urban city, you're working a just hideous number of hours, right?

Yeah. There's also this supposed to be these massive like investments in providing child care and nursing and you can see These kind of like this this this point where they've reached this desperation point where they're trying both the sort of pro business Like okay fuck it will pay for your child care and also we will raise taxes to like hand you money and also nursing stuff And also they're trying to there's like giant carve outs for this But they're they're trying to set up a system where you can get full pay for couples who both take parental leave at the same time So they're trying everything right? They're trying like paid child care. They're trying fuck it We'll just pay people to leave the workforce to have children

They're trying just straight-up cash transfers. They're trying paying for medical care, especially medical care for disabled kids. And none of this shit has done anything at all. Right? Like, it just, just absolutely jack shit. Right? And if you want to look at like, okay, so like what's sort of actually happening here? Right? A lot, some of it is just like overwork. Some of it is just, if people who can have children have any kind of freedom and autonomy, they just decide not to. And so part of this is also just like, and then this has been one of the social pushes that that the conservatives have been dealing with is they've been trying to get people to marry younger, because people are marrying later and thus they are like, you know, they're having kids later because they're marrying later. So and this is not working at all. Right. But you can look at the series of structural contradictions in their political coalition and then you can look at the fact that like, again, one of the important ideological things here is that these people hate immigrants.

Right. And they don't they don't want immigrants. They want they want like Japanese babies and so this is kind of like if you look at like okay why is none of this shit working right they're trying all these things to just avoid having more immigrants in the country and none of it is fucking working at all but you know like insofar as it's failing it's mostly they're trying some limited welfare stuff and they're doing a bunch of weird ideological stuff And it is going to get so much worse when every other country tries this Yeah, cool. Well, you know what else is gonna get worse probably the products and services that support this show. Yeah. Yeah

Alright, we're back. It's me. And predictably, I suppose I am talking about Franco as Spain. So Francisco Franco attempted to rebuild Spain after civil war, both through explicit eugenics and through the nationalization of women's bodies. Abortion and contraception were banned, so abortion had been legal. Spain was one of the first countries to do that when the Federale Comunicación Anarchist Minister made that legal, Minister of Public Health, that was made illegal. I think it didn't become legal again until about 2010 in Spain. Abortion, and unless it like a serious health issue, an act of abortion, I guess. Franco's military in the civil war consistently use sexual violence as a weapon, and we can see this as a kind of prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies, right? Quebodellano, who is a Francoist general, right, makes a speech in July 1936, quote,

our valiant legionnaires and regulares have shown the red cowards what true men are and their women as well. This is totally justified because these communists and anarchists, anarchate free love. At least now they will know what real men are, not the militia gays. This is a translation that I'm reading to so people can go to the original document, but But gaze is not the word he used. A better translation would be a word that begins with F. Yeah, OK. They will not escape, however much

they kick their legs and scream. This is a general and their army making explicit rape threats. They weren't subtle about this. Yes. The Spanish Falange, which is Spain's fascist party, also had a ceci on Feminina, a women's section. My PhD supervisor, Pamela Radcliffe, has written extensively about this. The group very much served as kind of the propaganda arm of state natalist policy. It taught women from a

young age, they were inferior and subject to men. They had to go through the organization's programs to do anything, any engagement with the state. it had to first go through the women's section, right? If they wanted to get a passport, they wanted to get a driving license. If they wanted to engage with the world outside of their homes in any way, they had to go through this program which indoctrinated them that their highest calling and only value was to have children. Women's role in the Francoist project then was childbearing and childrearing. Francoists, I'm going to use intellectuals here in quotation, scare quotes, frequently turned to phrenology to justify women's domestic role. They fucking

loved a phrenology. It's great to go to antiques markets in Spain, because you can always buy like a phrenology head. Jesus Christ. You can acquire like an OG one, you know, like I bet if you know the right place to look, you can find some, find the calipers. That's the dream. There's actually a lot of those at secondhand stores in Portland. Yeah, shocking.

Hands clasping me with Francoism. I found a lot of uses for those calipers, let me tell ya. No, I mean the phrenology skulls. Oh, okay. I've seen them all over town. Yeah, but I bet yours are replicas. I bet they're not like OG phrenology skulls.

There's a market in France I went to that just had a bunch of monk skulls, like real ones. Real monk skulls, yeah, seems fine. There was one that had been turned into a holder for a Bible, like they'd cut like an L-shaped cut in the skull. It was pretty cool. It was like three grand.

Like you make a cursi for the Quran, but like- This was a while ago, but seemed like a good price. Welcome to Skull Talk, your favorite podcast discussing craniums. Yeah. Yeah. Using the discount code, it could happen here. You can get 10% off your skull Bible holder. Yeah, that's right.

Okay, so one of the things they did was to increasingly marginalize midwives and instead like have males doctors taking control of the child birthing process because midwives would advocate for their patients too much and they didn't feel that women belonged in work outside the home, right? A big part of Franco's pro-natalism was the repudiation of anarcho-feminism that had been relatively important to the Spanish Revolution. The anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage and free love. Their follow through on those beliefs varied wildly. So we can see that in some collectivized industries, for instance,

the unions took on the role. They would assign women, I guess, I was going to say mentors, but apprenticeships. So they wanted, for instance, the CNT Transport Union, once the revolution had happened and the CNT Transport Union had been collectivized, Women who wished to be tram drivers or bus drivers could apprentice to men in that position so that in order to achieve more gender equality within that sphere. This is something that the Franco estate hated. It also had its own kind of unique take on eugenics that manifested in its pronatalism. Spain couldn't really do the straight racial eugenics, right? Like that doesn't really work with Spanish history, but instead they saw leftism as being some kind of genetic defect and something of a pathogen

that spread within society. Woke mind virus. Yeah, yeah, God god, fuck it. No, it's pulling from the same type of fascist thought. Yes, yes. You're 100% right. Yep, yep. It also practiced something called antisemitism without Jews at this time.

So there was a very, very small Jewish population in Spain. A real step forward. But nonetheless, Franco was constantly freaking out about Judeo-Bolshevism. He saw liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Judaism, et cetera, as completely antithetical to Spanishness. And of course, they blamed us for their national decline, something that all fascists like to talk about. This anti-leftist eugenics and pronatalism extended to something called níños robalos,

nens for stats in Catalan. These children were abducted from their parents. Sometimes this is when their parents were in jail. Sometimes it was when the parents had been killed. Sometimes it was when the mother had been forced into incarceration by something called the Women's Protection Board. This theoretically run by Franka's wife was a way of institutionalizing quote-unquote fallen women or women who were quote at risk of falling. It provides a way to force any woman you want to into an institution at a rate. These children who were taken from their mothers were often

trafficked and some cases sold to approved families by nuns and priests. I'm going to quote one example from a BBC article. In 1971, Manoli, who was 23 at the time and not long married, gave birth to what she was told was a healthy baby boy, but he was immediately taken away for what were called routine tests. Nine interminable hours passed. Then a nun, who was a nurse, coldly informed me that my baby had died, she said. They would not let her have her son's body, nor would they tell her when the funeral would be. Some of these clinics went as far as to keep the body of a dead baby in a freezer, and

they would bring it out to show mothers. They even dug graves for babies, but many of those graves just contained stones or the remains of adults. These babies were then given or sold to other families and raised. In some cases, they lived their whole lives and died without ever knowing who their parents were. I remember I was doing my PhD when the initial research into this was being done and it is fucking horrible for people to find this out. Because the people who were stolen from their families, in many cases, are still alive.

And in most cases, their birth certificate, if it exists, will say mother unknown. That was a process that existed to protect women who had children outside of marriage, but it was also used to steal babies and leave no paper trail. Yes. At least in 2011, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who was doing this. It's kind of a wild BBC. I've linked it as an article. There was also like a, I guess it's like a podcast, a radio documentary,

where one of their reporters had recently had a baby, so was able to make an appointment with the OBGYN who was stealing these babies. And when she confronted him, he grasped the crucifix and started brandishing at her in his- Jesus Christ. Yeah. Incredible country. Oh no. The reason that they did this, right, was because their fascism was of a unique kind that was, you know, Paul Preston said that Franco wasn't fascist, he was something worse.

They had what's called national Catholicism, which prevented them from doing sterilization or abortion. So instead, they felt that they could steal these children and sort of raise them outside of this leftist kind of pathogen. I do love, I'm working on the Salazar episodes right now. I love how often Iberians are like, we're gonna do fascism, but we're gonna put some spins on it, like how the Portuguese were like,

we're gonna do fascism, but with us having sex with absolutely everyone we're colonizing, and trying to make an argument to the fact that that makes us the good colonizers, because of all of the sex assaults, we're not racist guys. It's fine. We're communing. Iberia, baby.

Spain is different as the slogan used to go. That was a Francoist tourism slogan back in the day. Yeah. So the discourse of quote, true Catholic womanhood was essential to Francoist nationalization of women. And they were raised to serve the patria, right? The was essential to Francoist nationalization of women. They were raised to serve the patria, right, the fatherland with their bodies, not their minds.

In the Republic, Spain had used secular education to fight its perceived and real backwardness compared to the rest of Europe. The Francoist project did the opposite. It returned for its inspiration to 16th century Catholic texts, and they saw intellectual development as a risk to femininity and a risk to the ultimate goal of women's lives, which was motherhood. In terms of birth rates, you have a post-war baby boom, right? You have that everywhere that is affected by a large war. There are pretty obvious reasons for this. Then birth

rates do go up until the 1970s, 1980s, and then they start declining rapidly. And Spain is once again in a sort of, not so much a birth rate panic, I don't think, but it is noted that Spanish birth rates have gone down since the 1980s. But nonetheless, Spanish birth rates never were particularly high compared to those in the rest of Europe because Francoism absolutely rat-fucked the economy, which made it harder for people to have more children. But yeah, that's what I've got. If you want to read more on Niños Robados, I think there's a TV series about it now,

Stolen Children. I'm sure you can find it with subtitles, but someone made a documentary on this that was presented in an academic conference I did, and if I find the link, I will put it in the show notes. Hell yeah. Well, I think it's time to talk about Romania. Now, when it comes to who is the worst at doing pro-natalism, there's a lot of contenders, but I feel like we got the Usain Bolt of natalism right here, and it's the Ceausescu regime.

So we've got to peel back a little bit here and talk about, you know, when communism first came to Romania, which was like kind of the end of 47, early 1948. And in the first years of the communist regime, it brought the same changes that communist governments in Europe all tended to bring in the post-war period, obviously earlier for the USSR. And a lot of these are good actually, right? Not to deny all the horrible things that were happening, but life changes pretty dramatically in a positive way for a lot of women.

This is true in Russia as well. Literacy for women rises, the employment rate for women rises, and this happens across society, right? A lot of the poorest people in these societies experience substantial initial lifts, right? And along with that, lifespan increases pretty dramatically, rates of accidental death fall pretty dramatically, and literacy increases. And again, it increases across the board, but it is particularly significant for women, right? And this is all lovely. These are good things, right? However,

it comes with a problem for a lot of the leaders, and this is not just true in Romania, but we're talking about Romania here. It comes with a problem for a lot of the leadership of Romania's Communist Party, which is that one of the things we see in every society when people have more and are doing better and live longer is that they start having less kids because among other things, all their kids aren't dying. One reason why birth rates are high is people are like, yeah, well like but three of them might live, right? You know, I gotta I gotta really pump these numbers up

and I'm gonna have enough kids to keep this fucking farm going, right? And when that stops happening, women are like, well, maybe I don't need to have 11 kids. Yeah, right? Like if they're all gonna live to adulthood, I don't need 11 children to be adults, right? So birth rates start to fall. This freaks out though, a lot of these communists, because the kind of communists who are like leading Romania are very traditional Marxists, right? And Marx was what you call a physiocrat, right? Which is a term that I found for the first time

in a Journal of Family History article, but it's a term you could find other places. And the basic idea is that, and this is an idea that, then it goes back to the original Marx more people equals better economy right equals more productivity So falling fertility is seen as a potential calamity for the state You know obviously this isn't how it works like the US has had fertility rates falling and like economic prosperity rise in the same period of time But this is like a thing that they think right then, that like if we don't bump up these

birth rates, we're going to deal with like an actual economic disaster. So by the time Nicolae Ceausescu takes over as party leader on June 23rd, 1966, the problem is serious enough in his eyes that it had become a crisis. And the birth rate had declined pretty precipitously. In 1955, there were about 25.6 live births per thousand people in Romania. And by the time Ceausescu takes over, there's about 14 live births per thousand people, right? Now, for reference, both of those are still higher than the US birth rate right now. We're at about 11, a little less than 11 live births per thousand people in the country.

The only reason why the US population continues to grow is immigration. But that's a topic for another day. Chichescu stated that women needed to use their influence to rebuild the family. And per that article in the Journal of Family History, Chichescu declared that backward attitudes and expressions of levity toward the family must be combated with determination because they result in an increase in the number of divorces and the disintegration of the family and in the neglect of the children's education and training for life. This is something that had come alongside the revolution, right?

That there's a lot of more critical ideas about these traditional concepts like the family in the society that had existed before. A lot of people are like, well, but we're becoming more scientific. We have like women have jobs now. Maybe a lot of these attitudes about what the family should be are kind of outdated. And he's saying, no, no, no, no, they're not. They're not.

You need to go back to having a shitload of kids, right? And he announces a new initiative to increase the population of Romania by 30% by 1990. So, which I don't know if the idea that would ever be possible is a long shot, right? So unhinged that's that's a massive change in society, but she Chescu isn't a logic thinker guy, right? He's not he's not like running the numbers hardcore here He's just sort of throwing out some shit that sounds good

And so to encourage the shift he unleashes a famous raft of new legislation aimed towards like pro-natalism, towards massively increasing the birth rate. The first step is that abortion is banned for nearly all women in the country. There are some exceptions. For example, you can qualify for an abortion if you already have five children under 18 in the house concurrently, which is nuts. There's one or two other exceptions based on your age, but there aren't many exceptions.

Per an article in PubMed, in addition, employed women under age 45 years are required to undergo monthly gynecologic examinations at their workplaces, and any pregnancies detected are monitored to term. Unmarried persons over 25 years of age and childless married couples without a valid medical reason for infertility are assessed a 30% tax on income.

Jesus. Yeah. Women who refuse to have children have been termed deserters. Despite official pronatalist policies, it has been estimated that 40% of the 700,000 Romanian women pregnant in 1985 had illegal abortions. A special unit has been established within the state security police to combat this practice. So- We're so close to this.

We are not, they really want to do all of this. We're like knocking on the door. They are, like that is the thing that I really wanna drive home, is that the closest that I have found in all of my readings, the closest direct graph to what guys like Vance and Musk are suggesting for US policy is Romania. It's Romania, yeah.

Right. Like, and it's also the worst this has ever worked. Yeah. When I was a lot younger, like when I was 16, I volunteered in an orphanage for neo-divergent kids in Romania. Jesus fucking Christ. Well, I mean, they created a culture of child abandonment, right? Like-

Yes. Yeah. We'll be talking about that. That shit fucked me up. And you shouldn't send your 16-year-old children to do that, to be clear. No, and you're encountering it after the worst of it too, which we'll talk about here, not to minimize the experience, but we'll be discussing where it was at its worst. So it's worth noting that while women did start working at a higher rate after the communist takeover, that started to plateau by the time that Ceausescu, because obviously like there was still a lot of

communism doesn't get rid of men being shitty to women, right? It does tend to, things do get a lot better, right? Yeah, sometimes it empowers shitty men. And at the start, like kind of right around when he announces these, this set of fertility laws, he does try to institute a policy with the goal of increasing the number of women working at high positions in different state departments. There is an initial, like, we're going to break the glass ceiling kind of thing, but that doesn't last long.

He basically cancels any sort of messaging or work on the policy after his wife, Elena, is made a member of the party executive committee. He's like, women have gone fired up, look at my wife. Hey. Classic Chichescu. Yeah, sample size of one. Classic guy who's gonna die with his wife in a basement.

So as is always the case with shit like this, women were not equally impacted by the abortion ban. Largely the impacts were pretty wildly divergent based on your level of wealth and social class. And I'm gonna quote from an investigation by the NGO ban. Largely, the impacts were pretty wildly divergent based on your level of wealth and social class. And I'm going to quote from an investigation by the NGO Helsinki Watch, who conducted a deep investigation into all of this immediately after the regime fell.

Women were not equally affected by the pronatalist policies. Members of the urban middle class managed somehow or another to get contraceptives on the black market. Oh, I should also note contraceptives were basically made illegal, with the exception of light condoms. They could also obtain medical abortions. A Bucharest student candidly informed Helsinki Watch that several years ago when his girlfriend

became pregnant, the abortion had cost him 5,000 lei, or about $50 on the black market. Several women with professional degrees reported matter of factly that they had simply refused to cooperate with government gynecological inspectors who came to their institutes without suffering any reprisals, nor were the most rural segments of the population deeply affected. The Orthodox Christians had long shunned birth control and abortion, and others, like the Roma, had not practiced it. The brunt of the policy fell on the lower middle class, particularly factory workers, single women, urban Roma, and those from disorganized or troubled families, none of whom had the money or connections to circumvent the regulations.

Their options were as limited as they were life-threatening. Some used a variety of would-be abortifacients, others availed themselves of the services of a back-alley abortionist. Still others carried the term. And the number of deaths, the mortality rate for women as a result of this did rise. There's a lot of hideous stuff there. We're kind of doing the shortest version of this, but I don't mean to paper over that. A lot of women died and suffered lasting injury, infertility, and a number of other things

because of different back alley abortions and weird drugs that they were given. But it's important to note that women who had money and a position in the social class could still gain access to this shit. And that's how it will work here too. These Republican congressmen will not be restricting their family members from having access to this stuff. They'll be restricting poor people. The first thing I should know about this whole raft of policies Juchescu introduced is that

they did not work. That Journal of Family History article that I've quoted from a couple of times here ran the numbers to try to analyze how well did these policies correspond to birth rates in Romania. It is true that after the first major laws were pushed in 67 and 68, there was a brief surge in birth rates, but that fell very quickly and had completely disappeared by the 1970s. Things were back to baseline. In 1974, Ceausescu launches another push to increase birth rates.

And again, they briefly increase and then fall a year or two later. This process plays out a couple times throughout the administration. And one of the things that's important to note is that the increase that happens after every new sort of like focus on birth rates is less each time, right? It gets less effective every time. Now, the analysis in that paper concluded the birth rate would only rise when the state rates is less each time. It gets less effective every time. The analysis in that paper concluded that birth rate would only rise when the state applied direct pressures on the population.

Otherwise it dropped. Because this just doesn't work. You're not fundamentally changing anything and none of these incentives, because they're expensive, and in Romania's case the country literally didn't have money to provide much of the way of incentives, right? But they never are going to work. As we went over earlier, the ones being proposed here are wildly insufficient to deal with the cost of having kids, let alone a bunch of fucking kids.

And none of the people in charge in the Republican Party have any interest in making life affordable for people who are not rich. Now, the situation that this led to by the time the Tuchescu regime fell in 89 was also pretty catastrophic because there had been surges in births, right? In births of kids to parents who, because the people who can't get away from this tend to be the poor, could not take care of these kids, right? And there was also a surge in kids as a result of the general surge in birth rate, but also as a result of different sort of issues with nutrition and whatnot in Romania. A lot of kids who had different physical and mental disabilities, right, who were just

abandoned straight away because their parents could not take care of them. By 1990, there were an estimated 130,000 children in orphanages and homes for the handicapped, these institutions that had been set up in Romania. And there were like posters that were going around that were part of the pro-natalist campaign that basically said hey If you have a kid you can't take care of or that's not like working out for you The Romanian government can handle it better than you so like who cares have another kid and we'll just drop it off with us If you can't take care of them, right? Like that was literally part of the propaganda campaign that led to again, like 130,000 kids in orphanages.

Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah. That Helsinki article I found quoted from a different piece of Western news media, like a team of journalists that went to a town called the Dell after Ceausescu fell. And this is how that article opens. On the second floor of the state run institution, here dazed toddlers lie or sit in iron cribs

in close stuffy rooms. Their foreheads are speckled with flies and with scabs and bruises that come from banging their heads and mouths on crib rails. Some cry, but most are silent and appear bewildered behind their bars, with the doomed air of laboratory animals. Down the hall, other cribs hold smaller children, pale skeletons suffering from malnutrition and disease. Despite the heat of the day, several of the children are wrapped in dirty blankets.

From one still bundle, only a bluish patch of scalp is visible. Asked if the child inside is alive, an orderly says, of course, and pulls back the covers. The tiny skeleton stirs, turned onto its side and groans. Ugh, Gar. There's worse. This is not the worst.

Like this, like Helsinki article goes into like how in the homes for the handicapped, the children are just ignored. They can go months without any real human contact other than the bare minimum of being fed. There's no, there's no one watching these kids. Like this is some of the most cruelest and most hideous systematic abuse of children I've ever heard of. A lot of children die.

AIDS spreads through some of these facilities like wildfire. I really cannot exaggerate the horror of these institutions. If you do want to read more, there's two articles I'll recommend for you that I'm not going to quote up from now because we're already going long enough. The Romanian Orphans Are Ad are adults now an article in the Atlantic that's the title you should check that out and then Ceausescu's children and the Guardian both of those articles do a good job of providing additional context and horror on this but I think it's important to

note that what happened in Romania is what sounds most familiar to the programs being pushed today and also easily the worst this has ever gone. I mean, yeah, especially combined with like RFK Jr.'s policies. Yeah. That is like... Yeah. Yeah. It takes a lot for me to be like kind of shocked and horrified these days.

Yeah. But that stuff is grim. It's some of the worst shit. Yeah. Yeah. Oh boy. I remember the time there was like concern if like kids were really non-verbal. Yeah.

Like, or they just had never been talked to. Oh my God. Because right, they've been institutionalized from such a young, like I was there probably about 12 years after the end of the regime. So like these kids were in their teens, I guess. Oh my God. Yeah. I remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like had never really been able to play outside very much. Oh my god. Yeah. I remember teaching little kids to ride bikes

who like had never really been able to play outside very much and it was fucking... Yeah. Yeah, that shit will fuck you up. That's a good museum. I'll see if I can find where it is because they've maintained one of the old orphanages as it was, like with the iron cribs and shit. And they have like projections on the walls of the kids rocking and banging their heads that someone had filmed.

Yeah, that someone had filmed. Yep, that shit is disturbing. Like I wouldn't read any of those articles before going to bed. Yeah. Anyway, this has been It Could Happen Here. Alright, bye. DNA test proves he is not the father, now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute John, who's not the father? Well Sam, luckily it's your Not The Father Week on the OK Storytime Podcast, so we'll

find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son Even though it was promised to us now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead But I have DNA proof that could get the money back hold up So what are they gonna do to get those millions back? That's so unfair Well the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago.

Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secret? Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeart ReadyWAP Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going

voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other.

It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that are being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room.

You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Yes. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies

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It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait.

Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways. Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action, and that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek.

I'm Max Chafkin. And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. With guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull, Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want

to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing. So listen to everybody's business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, we're joined by Mia Wong, James Tote, and Robert Evans. Yes. Taco Trump sweeps the nation. Musk is out with Stephen Miller's wife. Liberation Day tariffs are fought in court. This episode covering the week of May 28th to June 4th. So much good stuff this week. Also a terrorist attack, not good. But before we get into that, I want to let you guys know I watched the movie Mountainhead,

and then I had a dream starring all of you in the movie Mountainhead. What? And it went a lot better since we were just skiing and enjoying the woods. That's nice, I don't know anything about the film Mountainhead. Nobody launched an AI that destroyed civilization.

Steve Carell wasn't there. Actually, I wouldn't mind hanging out with Steve Carell, but not the Steve Carell from that movie. Anyway, interesting movie. Yeah. Yeah, interesting dream too, better sounds of it. Wow. Thanks for that. That quick Robert film review. Thanks for sharing, bud. Yeah. I guess a side piece of news that we aren't focusing on like much today,

but we will do a piece on in the future. Is Trump is going to deal with Palantir to create an extensive new database that compiles information on everybody in the country. This covers bank numbers, student debt, medical claims, disability status. I think this summer, myself or a few other people on this episode will work together on an episode just about surveillance, like Flock, Gideon, Foundry, these surveillance systems that are getting spread all across the country. So we will do a whole episode on that in the future, but let's start with that and then pivot to Robert Evans to discuss terrorism. I hardly know-er-ism. Someone else should continue the episode now.

No this is your segment. Am I going right now? You're out of luck! Sorry, Robert. That was a perfect segue! Nobody's bailing you out of this shit. Then we're fine! Then we're fine! You know, when this place- Then we're fine! You know, when this place- Then we're fine! Oh my god! Alright, let me pull up the right- the proper doc.

Because I did this on my Chichescu doc. Because we recorded both of those episodes today. Mm-hmm. God, what a- what a hot, warming day you've had, Robert. Oh, yeah, Chichescu, a guy firebombing a- a rally in Denver. Huuuuhhh. It's- it's all been really good stuff. Yeah, um, mostly. Mostly chill things.

So on June 2, there was a rally in Boulder, Colorado for a group that was protesting for hostages that were taken by Hamas on October 7. There's like, I think 50, somewhere around 50, who are still unaccounted for, for varying reasons. And that was what the protest was for. And there was like a gathering and they were supposed to be doing like a run, right, in order to raise awareness about the hostages, right? So that's the event that happened on the second. And a man approached during that gathering, Mohammed Sabri Suleiman, and he started throwing molotov cocktails.

Every story I have gives slightly different numbers for how many molotovs he had prepared and how many he had when he was taken. Like an AP News story said that he had 16 unused molotovs that were covered by law enforcement after the attack. But I think CNN said 14. Yeah, 14 unlit molotovs, so it's kind of unclear to me how many they were, but he threw a number of these at the group of demonstrators. He also had what's described in most of the articles, I find, as a improvised flamethrower. And so, you know, when I heard that,

my first question was like, a makeshift flamethrower, sorry, was the exact term the police used. And when I first heard that, I was like, well, that could mean a lot of things. That could literally just be like he had like a candle like spray that's flammable that he like hooked a lighter up to. Could have link steoder. No, it was apparently like a fertilizer or pesticide sprayer type deal that he had fuel in. Right? So it actually was a makeshift flamethrower. He was attempting, but he did not use it on the demonstrators. He did burn himself pretty badly.

He had like body armor on that he took off after he like, basically what seems to have happened is he throws something like half a dozen fire bombs at this crowd and he, he injures a number of people, several of them quite severely. There's at least, last I checked, six people who are still in the hospital, one in critical condition. Although that may have changed since we recorded this podcast, the victims who are wounded range in age from 52 to 88. And yeah, so he hurts a number of people with these molotovs. And then the way he described it, he felt like he couldn't continue going through with the attack.

He had been planning this thing for more than a year, we know, or at least that's what he claimed. He basically said that once I actually started it, I found it very difficult to continue. It seems like he didn't go as far with this thing as he could have because it turns out lighting people on fire even when you're very angry is something that most people cannot bring themselves to do past a certain point. Yeah. He is on video screaming Palestine is free and he stated to the authorities that when he'd been planning this for a year, his goal was to kill Zionists. So, you know, this is very it very clear, like what this is motivated by, right? Like what his motivation was. His background is interesting, I guess you'd say. He and his

family come from Egypt. And yeah, he attended like high school in Egypt, and later moved to Kuwait. He has a history of like, it seems like he kind of got politically active during the Arab Spring. He posted a bunch of pictures of Mohammed Morsi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who served as Egypt's president from 2012 to 2013. He protested against the military coup that removed Morsi from power. And he and his family interviewed the United States in August of 2022 as a non-immigrant visitor. And in 2023, he received a two-year work authorization, which expired in March.

He had tried to come to the US in 2005. His primary goal in coming here in 2022 was to get his daughter primarily into a good medical school. He moved there with his wife and his kids. His daughter was on the process of graduating. They had been living in Kuwait, but for a variety of reasons, especially the fact that they were not citizens. She was like, I'm not going to be able to go into medicine in Kuwait.

His daughter seems to be a very gifted medical student. Yeah. And so they moved here and she got into a medical school. And in fact, he seems to have waited to carry out his attack until her graduation. Like he wanted her to be started on her path to becoming a doctor before he carried out this attack. I think both in the hope that it would protect her and she wouldn't get forced out of the country, which we'll talk about in a little bit.

And I think probably just because he's your dad and he wanted to see her graduate, right? But then he carries out this attack. His family does not seem to have known. He basically left some messages for them as he left to carry it out. His wife took his phone into the authorities, which I read as her being like, I'm at this point trying to do whatever I can to make the government less likely to prosecute the rest of my family. Like he's a write off, right?

Like, I can't be concerned about him, right? Like dad, like he like, I, like, I can't be concerned about him, right? I've got kids, you know, and like potentially trying to stop anything else happening if he was, you know, like maybe he had other people who had been playing this with who were planning other things, right? She doesn't know. Did he build a bomb? Right. She has no idea. Yeah. I should also note here that when he was planning this attack, he initially planned to do a shooting. He took a concealed carry class, or at least he told investigators he took a concealed carry class, right? He could be lying about some of this, this is what the police have reported.

But he took a concealed carry class, but he was not able to buy a gun. The AP News article says, was denied because he's not a legal US citizen. You don't have to be a citizen to buy a gun. Yeah, that's not correct. But you do have to be in the country legally, right? Like you do not have to be a citizen to purchase guns in this country, but you do have to be legal. I think you have to be a resident, like certain visa categories.

There's a number of ways to get a gun while not a citizen, but he was not able to. And thank goodness, right? Like, it's horrifying, like obviously burning people is horrifying, like the injuries that these people suffered are deeply, like there's no pleasant burn injury, but people would have just died if he'd shot them, right? That's just the reality of the situation. That's already happened in Boulder once. Boulder had a mass shooting at a supermarket not so long ago.

So that's the bones of what happened here. Now, I mean, having this like less than a week after the embassy shooting is pretty notable. Not great. Yeah. Speaks to the contagion way these kinds of things spread, right? Exactly. Last week we talked about how like this plays into like media that only benefits the actions that Israel is continuing to take and how much immediate attention was going towards the shooting and like the immediate aftermath. And something that I found a little bit interesting is how fast that story kind of went away, which I wasn't really expecting.

I thought it would be relevant for a little bit longer. People would try to keep it relevant for a little bit longer. I think part of the reason why maybe it went away faster than what we thought is so that it would not encourage copycat attacks. And that still seems to happen to a degree. faster than what we thought is so that it would not encourage like copycat attacks. And that still seems to happen to a degree. And I mean, it sounds like this guy was planning something for a little bit longer. But certainly having that other shooting in like a close time proximity is notable.

Yeah. I mean, the unfortunate reality is that like, I'm sure there's someone else, multiple other people who have been planning for different periods of time, other kinds of attacks, and we will continue to see stuff like this happen. Some of this is when something as terrible as the genocide happening in Gaza is happening on a small screen in front of your face, and you are consuming hours of the curated worst footage of it every day, people are going to react, and they're not always going to react in the most thoughtful way. footage of it every day, people are going to react and they're not always going to react

in the most thoughtful way. Sometimes they're going to make a bunch of fucking fire bombs and attack a group of people who there's not really any argument that these particular groups of people had any influence. Any material consequence. Any power in the Israeli government. One of them's a Holocaust survivor. People are going to take irrational, terrible action. That's just going to happen, you know?

Yeah, it breaks people. Yeah. That kind of prolonged vicarious trauma, especially is not good for you. I think a lot of this lone wolf attack is almost a way that people like cope with themselves after watching this thing unfold on your screen. Right. And then as a response, I have to do something is what he said. Yeah.

Like I'm never going to be able to live with myself. Exactly. Do something. And then as a response, you use the violence of a gun to carve your name into history. And yeah. As someone who did something. I did something. Yeah, this is this is a something.

And you know, it's it's it's it's bad. Like it just it's just some number of people, this is how they're gonna react. And to an extent, I don't know how you seek to stop this. The authorities have confirmed this guy was not on anyone's watch list. I'm sure neither will the next guy or gal who does something. This is the world, quite frankly, this is in part the world the internet has made, right? Not that it would be good if horrifying footage of the genocide in Gaza wasn't getting out to people, but this isn't the first time we have watched a series of attacks carried out

and copy attacks and copycat attacks carried out and spread as a result of things that are spreading in digital media, right? Like this is a this is like a thing that's happened over and over again This is just kind of how the internet and radical violence works Well, it's one of the things we're like, you know, there is a clear way to end the violence which is to end the genocide Yes, the other benefit of ending the genocide, but these people have no interest in that No these people and I don't I don't know how to right like

Like like I don't like if you're asking, well, how do we end the genocide? We're like, I guess you could get the entire international community to stop trading or selling weapons to Israel and also blockade the country. But like, well, then how do we do that? They're not gonna, right? I can't make them, I can't make the US shoot down Israeli missiles or aircraft. Like, I don't have the ability to like yell our government

into doing that. Yeah. It's how do you write like as a person, potentially a person who's isolated. I don't know, man. If this person is doesn't isn't part of a community, right? I hasn't found community like processing that trauma and feeling like you have to do something.

Some people's brains will break in a way that leads to violence. Yeah. I want to talk about state violence now, if that's OK, because I think what we did was fucked up and wrong. And no one should obviously be firebombing Holocaust survivors. I think that's something we can agree on. What has happened to his family is also wrong. Right. Like you shouldn't be punished for being related to someone who did a bad thing.

And oh, God. And this is yeah, this is also horrifying. Yeah. Yeah, the whole thing is a story of like collateral damage. Yeah, so the White House on 412 p.m. On the 3rd of June tweeted seated Just in colon the wife and five children of illegal alien Muhammad Solomon the suspect in the anti-semitic firebombing of Jewish Americans Have been captured and are now in ICE custody for expedited removal. The next part is in block capitals. They could be deported as early as tonight." This is heartbreaking, right? Again, we've talked about habeas before, but the foundation of everything that legal systems based on English common law hold is you have to have evidence that the person did something wrong, not that they're related to the person who did something wrong.

Right. You know, Robert and I are both intimately familiar, at least, you know, I've received calls from young people in Burma who we've interviewed whose families have been captured because of their participation in the revolution and like, yeah, this is not a path the US should be going down. I want to explain very briefly what expedited removal is because I have seen some shit that suggests maybe folks don't understand it. That's fine. It's complicated.

So expedited removal is supposed to be reserved for people who arrive at a land border port of entry or IWI. IWI is an acronym entering without inspection. That means entering between ports of entry, right? Over the wall, under the wall, over the beach, what have you, right? Entering without going through a port of entry. And they're supposed to have been here for less than two years. The Trump administration has been massively expanding the use of expedited removal recently. Why they're doing this is the use of expedited removal recently. Why they're doing this is because in an expedited removal proceeding, lower level immigration

officials can remove people without them seeing a judge. Those people can still make a credible fear claim, which has to be assessed by an asylum officer and then approved by a judge. But this is a lot harder than going through the asylum process. And they have to prove beyond reasonable doubt, I guess. I think it's a reasonable fear frame. I think a credible fear is a higher standard for another removal proceeding. That they are likely to be tortured by the government or with the acquiescence of their government if they're sent home. It's use had previously peaked with 197 cases in 2013. That was under Obama, right? And surprisingly, you didn't see people writing about it then. It was used even more extensively by the Biden administration,

especially in 2024, when Biden passed his asylum ban, right, by executive order. The first Trump administration did use it. They used it in a more broad range of cases, but they didn't use it in as many cases as either the Obama or the Biden administration. Expedited removal is supposed to be for the most serious cases, for things where the person is a threat or a danger or for other reasons need to be removed quickly. It was never designed. It was passed in, I think, in the early 2000s, the first decade of this century. It was never supposed to be used like this, right? Robert, you mentioned these people had entered the United States in 2023, I think.

2022. And then he got a visa, a two year visa to work in 2023. They entered on a tourist visa, essentially. Yeah, they're not within that two year window, right? To the extent that that matters, I don't know, right? So they will now, having done nothing wrong in the case of his wife having attempted to cooperate with law enforcement to stop her husband or anyone with him hurting anyone else, they will be detained in the Nice detention center. And they will have to make a claim of credible fear, right? They will have to say, it is dangerous for you to send us back. I presume their citizenship

is Egyptian, so I presume they'll be sent there. That's a very high hurdle for them to clear. And I mean, I'm sure that there are national immigration nonprofits who are willing to fight their case because the abuse of expedited removal in the last two years, to be very clear, by the Biden administration as well, has seriously undermined the due process rights of migrants. So this is still a further step, and a significant step in removing those. So I'm going to follow this case. I'm sure I'll update you on it next week. I also just want to note that this has dominated the news cycle. Yesterday, 27 people were killed in Gaza attempting to obtain humanitarian aid, right? The IDF is still denying that.

I don't really care. The Red Cross, as well as health authorities in Gaza have confirmed that 27 people were killed en route to one of the humanitarian aid distribution point where they've concentrated it in the southern end of the garden strip. We will have an episode on Palestine next week. I don't want one person's kind of stupid action to overshadow the killing of many more people and that tragic loss of life, right? So I don't think that we won't be covering that. We will.

What we will also be doing is pivoting to advertisements right now. That's right, baby. Let me maybe get out my guacamole. You're fucking out there, I can't stop it. I'm gonna become the Joker. Is that the pivot to the... Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh God. Okay. Let's talk about Taco Trump. Woo! Oh yeah! I hate the entire world. Finally. Finally.

Get out your hot sauce. Get out your guac. Let's go. Taco Trump party. If you're doing getting full DNC style, pick a slightly racist Mexican costume or something, I guess. So, many years ago, I was a professional StarCraft 2 fan. And this meant that I was exposed to Gungan style a full two weeks before everyone else. And this was my experience with Taco, because I started hearing this from like financial news

outlets and like my friend Vicky was sending me things they're like yeah they came up with this thing they're calling it TACO and then like four days later all of the like regular news outlets caught up to it and I didn't want to say shit. It's sweeping the nation. Mia liked it before it was cool. So TACO is this like unbelievable delusion that the finance people have had to like, like program into their brains in order to like, keep themselves from believing their own eyes about what's happening with the economy. So TACO stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. And it's these people's belief that Trump will like always inevitably in the end back down from the terrace. And I've been seeing this a lot, right? Like I've been seeing this from people who

were like, who's analysis I respect been seeing this in people who are like, whose analysis I respect, who are talking about how like, yeah, the structural conditions of the economy are such that Trump will always be forced to like roll the terrorists back and then it's like, okay, like the 50% steel tariff went into effect like today, right? Like, I don't know. I'm going to get some cumin, I'm going gonna get some coriander, we're gonna mix that up.

Oh God. Yum yum. This is a financial thing, right? This is the thing that all the day traders have to convince themselves in order to keep the stock market going. That like, no, no, no, it's gonna be fine. This is a magic spell that's being like, waved over the economy to keep it kind of holding together.

They're like, ooh, it's gonna be fine. Ignore the 30% tariffs on all Chinese goods. Ignore the tariffs on the, 50% steel tariff today. You might say, Mia, these economists are saying, Tarif, we if you like it Rockin' the Casbah, rockin' the Casbah Ah, God. We had to make up for it.

Garrison wouldn't let us last time. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I know. The royalties were getting too much. I took an entire week's pay cut so that we could pay back the royalty. Now, the good news is, everybody, we did manage to work out a new healthcare plan for everybody. It is the next time you need to go to a doctor, there will be an unmarked car with a loaded 38 special in the glove box.

So it is a step up from United Healthcare. We've actually significantly improved things. And I'm actually taking no pay for a year so we can do a white riot, which is just white genocide. It's about the genocide of the of the poor people. It's surreal. So, okay, speaking of United Health, one of these tariffs that all these people have convinced themselves is not going to happen is the pharmaceutical tariffs, which are still like, coming, right? But what sort of happened with this taco shit right is the Democrats were like okay I have found a way to criticize Trump that is a racist they're all just calling him talk like so does it actually critique his policies like

they're they're calling him taco and Trump in relation to like the negotiations with Iran yeah yeah shit that he should chicken out of it's good if he doesn't do it yeah yeah like I'm watching them do like like fucking Chuck Schumer is out here tweeting about how Biden deported more people than Trump did and like the thing that this reminds me of the most is like the Chavez era Venezuelan opposition where every single year they would haul some dipshit out and their platform was like I'm gonna do travesty better than Chavez era of Venezuelan opposition, where every single year they would haul some dipshit out and their platform was like, I'm gonna do Trivisional better than Chavez,

and every single year they would lose by 40 points. And it's like, the Democrats are like, those guys, those people are no fucking winners. We're going to adopt every single one of his platforms and then we're gonna run on he's not doing it well enough. And then we're gonna get fucking annihilated in every single election until like, the democratic process itself simply ceases to exist and he's not doing it well enough. And then we're going to get fucking annihilated in every single election until like the democratic process itself simply ceases to exist.

And this will be good for us somehow. This is just, it's pure cope. Like the entire, our entire economy is being supported by the just collective delusion that these people have built. But they fucked up. Right. And the thing about taco and thing I got from like the first time I heard about this, it was like, if this gets out

These people are fucked because Trump is going to see this and it is going to piss him off He's going to like I'm like now that it's like no kind of thing is like no no like the next the next series of Terrors that's gonna come off is I'm pretty sure the China one in like the beginning of July Could have the math wrong. I don't know. I hate math. I'm pretty sure the China one in like the beginning of July could have the math wrong. I don't know. I hate math. I'm pretty sure that's the next one. I mean, it's it's this is the thing that I'm still like questioning about. And like we've talked about this before is like one of those 30 day deadlines for tariffs on Canada and Mexico expired.

Yeah, he just forgot about that one. And no one was keeping count or they were like distracted. Yeah, I think specifically they were putting in some like European Union like tariffs like that day and then just nothing like happened. And like I am wondering how much of that is like, he's just going to announce tariffs, put them on hold and then just forget about them but still announce new different tariffs in the future that may cover some of the same stuff. Well, so here's the thing.

Here's the thing. Some of these you remember something doesn't because so the steel tariff doubled from 25 to 50. Yeah, that did happen. And that was one of the Rolling Gate ones, right? Yeah. And so I think it's like there are some that he like cares about and there are some that he kind of doesn't. I mean I feel the same way when I'm getting tacos like pork tacos, no thank you. Fish tacos, maybe. I don't, I don't endorse Gerson's opinion on tacos This this taco Trump shit is like I long for the days of orange man bad

Drunk was better than this. This is this is the worst it's ever been like God get me get me comedians cutting his head off live on stage again like sure. Yes, that was fine This is just like what are we doing here? Oh my god? Yeah I mean, it's really tough because cilantro prices are gonna spike these tariffs, too So I mean we can't even call them tacos. It's okay, you know Garrett garrison That's actually just good politics right because some people have some people have a disability where they can't test taste cilantro Cilantro Previous statements I will not be canceled by this I do not buy the cilantro gene. I don't think it's real

Okay, I don't think it's a gene I don't think people without the cilantro with the cilantro tastes bad gene I don't know if we'd call them people right if it tastes like soap. Yeah, I just don't know I don't know Talks with China have been breaking down both sides have been accusing each other of Violating the the agreement they had come to to roll the tariffs back which they'd like both have I believe both sides on that actually Yeah, and and again this this this comes to like the actual fundamental structural problem of this which is that? And I think this is why a lot of people think that everything will sort of eventually go back to normal and it'll turn into sort of like bluster like it did the first time. Is that like, okay, again, Trump's actual goal here, which is

to not have a trade deficit with China is unachievable, right? There's nothing that can actually be done in order to do that. And there's no good way to claim victory either. And so what we're sort of escalating towards is July, like the 130% tariffs sort of like, coming back into effect. So people are building up, I think this like, I don't know, the sort of like psychological wall to the fact that this could happen again. And the fact that like these negotiations are breaking down, I think is just making it increasingly likely that it is just going to explode again the steel tariffs also are just a shit show for a whole bunch of different

manufacturing sectors it's very bad for the US auto industry there's already been reports on the effect of 25% steel tariff has had on like on the construction industry this has been tied into sort of like oh yeah the US is like not replenishing its housing stock because you know but it's it's fucked it's real bad I don't I don't have a I don't know I don't have a better thing yeah to say about it than that and that it's gonna continue to get worse and at some points probably the taco is gonna be fucking over and people are gonna realize that he's gonna do this and especially now they just

pissed him off oh god yeah well what will they do then with a giant inflatable chicken send it to the ride this is the biggest live brain stuff I've ever seen I am living in a world where like a group chat that I made on Signal when I was manic last year has had more policy effects on preserving trans healthcare in that fucking budget bill than the entire Democratic Party, and they are spending their money fucking hauling out chicken, fucking chicken inflatable... Like hauling out chicken fucking chicken inflatable No, don't don't listen to me a Democrats for just 20 million dollars. I will guarantee you the youth vote not a guarantee I I propose that we rename this segment from the tariff talk to Mia Mole

Garrison as a Canadian are you allowed to use that word? Yeah. Um, let's go on an ad break before I lose my job. Okay, we are back. James Stout. It's me. What's been going on? Hey everyone, it's James.

It's Thursday night here and I'm just recording a little pickup to update you that the Trump administration has issued another travel ban. This travel ban bans travel or bans all new visas for people from 12 countries. One of those is Myanmar and travel is further restricted for seven other countries. There are exemptions for people who are already in the country with a valid visa. There are exemptions for Afghan people who have an SIV, a special immigrant visa. There are other smaller exemptions for the Olympic Games and sporting events, for example. We will do a whole episode on this because we need longer

than we have to explain it, but I just wanted to make people aware that we are tracking that, planning on getting something out about it, but we don't have enough space in this episode or time to edit to address it in full today. Well, some things have been happening, Garrison, here in sunny San Diego, with, from what I hear, actually great tacos. Yes, tacos are actually very good in San Diego. Yes, oh, excellent tacos, some of the best tacos in Southern California, which is saying something.

Yeah, mm-hmm. Come and visit us, eat our tacos. Cross the border, get some extended release Mexican tram at all. Let me know where you are. Anyway, continue, James. Or tacos, whatever you want to get across the border. So Ice Agents raided Buona Forchetta, which is a pizza place in South Park. I used to stay just above here.

I would get late night pizza there all the time when my job was riding my bike and my hobby was drinking at Hamilton's RIP, which was a craft beer next door. In this bungled raid, they entered during the late afternoon and evening of Friday and ICE agents soon found themselves surrounded by an angry crowd of local people, patrons from the vegan small plates cocktail place across the street and the brewery. It's now South Park Brewing, as well as folks from the neighborhood. This is one of those neighborhoods that like South Park as a concept was kind of invented by real estate agents so that it wouldn't seem like Golden Hill or Bankers Hill and it would have like a more upmarket branding. So you have these

very nice bars and restaurants, but then you also have like a laundromat on the corner and like a food market, like a non-chained supermarket that serves primarily Latino clientele, I would imagine. It's one of these very sort of class diverse neighborhoods, I guess. When people came out en masse, they surrounded these vehicles, right? They were chanting, let them go. ICE and HSI agents decided to defuse the situation by throwing flashbangs and then leaving with four employees. I should add here that as KPBS put it, quote, flashbangs were thrown, which is a cowardly use of the passive voice to obscure culpability. I think flashbangs spontaneously were deployed.

Right, yeah, right. Who can say, Garrison, maybe the people at the Death Metal Vegan restaurant bought the flashbangs. Well, and I also do want to say, I have gotten word from some exclusive sources that these were actually secret militia members masquerading as ice ages. Yeah, let's just fucking address it because it's very silly. The understandable degree of it is that like they are addressing like Proud Boys now.

They look exactly like Proud Boys in Portland in 2019, right? Like they are indistinguishable visually. Their uniform standards have like kind of gone away. They seem like they don't have standards anymore. Yes. And now they are just dressing like how Proud Boys and 3%ers used to dress. Yeah. So like I think this kind of conspiracy theory stems from the initial misidentification of the Ginger Ice agent who smashed someone's window as Michael Maia, aka Lewis Arthur, who's one of the veterans on patrol leaders.

He was live streaming in Oklahoma at the time that that raid happened. It's not him. Yeah. It's just two people who are ginger. Yeah. That that is possible. There are lots of them. Then I've seen this in multiple other cases, often from the kind of more Lib Sky people

you see on blue sky, right? Who seem unable to comprehend the fact that no, they are cops and they are doing evil shit and cops do evil shit Cops can do bad things and and now yeah cops are more likely especially immigration officers to not have Their names on their kit Yeah Something that we saw like in Portland in 2020 and it was worrying, and now it's spreading all around the entire country, to the point where most people enacting these raids are both hiding their identities and also obscuring what agencies they are actually from. Which is why people are concerned at you, like, what if these guys aren't even from the government?

What if these are just some kind of right-wing militia? And with a little bit of checking, you can usually tell that they are in fact from usually DHS. Yeah. I mean, the California one was somewhat ridiculous, right? There is not an exemption to the California assault weapons ban for militias. These guys had guns which would have been about four felonies each. Yes.

Not saying people don't do felony things. They do. But you'd have to be a bit of a tool to just stand on the street with your felonies select fire MPX. And part of this is a very, and a lot of leftists fell for this too, but this is fundamentally rooted in a liberal delusion, which is that the danger is unaccountable groups of civilians with guns, not the police. The danger is the cops.

The danger has always been the cops. Yes. We need to push back on this, right? The proud boys are not like the be all and end all of evil No, are they bad? Sure, of course. I've had like I've had my hand broken by what I don't like them But I'm not as scared of them as I am of just the cops Like yeah We need to push back on this because it fundamentally Misidentifies the problem and until these people wake up and realize that they're not going to respond in the correct manner.

Yeah. And I mean, like, you know, one of the things that you can point out here is it's like, yeah, there were a bunch of police in Nazi Germany. And the moment that they started carrying out the orders of the Nazi government, they became Nazis. Like, that's, that's just how this works. Right? You don't get a polo like, oh, I was just a Weimar police guy, just enforcing the laws of the Nazi government. It's like, okay, you are a Nazi, and you are a Nazi because you are an agent of the Nazi state, not because you were like, you were like necessarily in some paramilitary or whatever.

Yeah, a member of the party. Yeah, like that's what happens when you work for a fascist state, you are now a fascist. So in documents I've reviewed, I've claimed that 19 employees at a restaurant were using falsified green cards. They were acting on a tip from November 2020 and then they received a follow up tip in late January 2025. The tip claimed that many of the staff at Boniforte Jetta were undocumented, that the owner made them work long shifts and verbally abused them. I have seen no evidence that this is true

beyond that claim. I've been to and past that restaurant hundreds of times. I've never seen anyone who looks sad to be there, but that doesn't mean that's not happening. But I've seen nothing to lead me to believe that it is beyond this claim, right? HSI had been in communication with Buonaorte Cesar's lawyer since February and they had been cooperating.

Boniforte Cesar had given them these documents, which they claimed were fake green cards. They applied for this warrant, which they got an exceedingly broad warrant. One of the things that allowed was for everyone inside to be detained and fingerprinted if necessary, even people who are not accused of any immigration offence, right, people who are United States citizens. The warrant also detailed that they had been surveilling the location. City councilman Seanilo Riviera called the HSI agent terrorists in a social media post. Bill Mulligan got sad about this. Stephen Miller quote tweeted Bill Mulligan getting sad about this. Stephen Miller quote tweeted, Bill Mulligan getting sad about this.

Talk Gloria came out with three paragraphs of total bullshit and continued to unabashedly support stripping our city of all its socially beneficial services in order to direct a fire hose of our money to the cops. One of whom earned $430,000 in 2023. Jesus, what? Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

San Diego's highest paid public officials are cops by... Oh my god. Yeah. We are becoming a police department with a city attached because of Todd Gloria, someone who ran in 2020 on a reform agenda, right? Who earns himself $250,000, much less... That's unhinged. That's more than a football coach makes, which is completely... I thought that the Portland police were paid too much. That's for that's a football coach place, which is I thought that the Portland police were paid too much this that's That's wild. Yeah

Yeah, this person worked on alleged three thousand hours of overtime. I believe mm-hmm It's like what scrolling tick scrolling tick-tock in your car like come on keep an eye keeping an eye on kids. Yeah, yeah You can't you you can't be? an eye on kids. Yeah, yeah. You can't you you can't be 3000 hours. I mean, I someone could be 3000 divided by 5052 weeks a year or whatever. Like it's it's it's an unfathomable amount of overtime. Yeah, it's just 58 hours a week. Whoa.

Yeah. So that's full time plus one and a half full-time jobs. Yeah. Hard worker. There's a KPBS article on it. I'll link it. Multiple police officers, I guess, in 2024 are on track to earn over $400,000 with the bulk of it coming from overtime pay. San Diego never gets enough attention for being a complete shit show of the city, right? And run by the sea is the best way I've heard it described

Oh like our city Consistently has massive corruption and scandals and nothing happens It's it's a problem when it a place is that nice, right? Yeah, like that's really the fundamental issue is like people be like hey, do you hear about that fucked up thing? The mayor did Yeah, but like look at the look at the beach fucked up thing the mayor did. Yeah, but like, look at the look at the beach. Yeah, I mean, that's literally, yeah, that's literally the thesis of Under the Perfect Sun. Yeah. She said, but that should be should be obligatory. If you want to move to San Diego. Yeah, I

think it's one of the one of the earlier Mike Davis books. Yeah. But again, San Diego, a place where the politics are bad. It's also what happens when everyone votes Dem no matter what, right? Also, people in general, if you want to understand why Southern California be like a do, read Mike Davis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In general, Mike. Just read Mike Davis, actually, wherever you are. Read some Mike Davis. Yep. Ise seems to have used, I want to get into this because I think this is an important issue that hasn't been raised in the coverage I see.

I seem to have used AB 60 driver's licenses to identify the people in Buona Fortuna or at least use California DMV documents of some kind. Jesus. Yeah. So there's this misunderstanding. People think that if you have a driver's license in California, that information isn't accessible to immigration and that's not true. AB 60 licenses, so that's assembly bill 60, right, California piece of law, allow people

to get a license without having legal immigration status. This is a good thing. It means that undocumented people are less likely to drive unlicensed and uninsured, right? And therefore it means that people are likely to stay at the scene of car accidents and people who get in car accidents are likely covered by insurance, right? I've been hit by an unsure driver. It fucking sucks. Oh yeah. DHS cannot access information on whose license is an AB60 license, but they can access through

a variety of databases and mechanisms, other DMV data, which may include things like photographs, addresses, or thumb prints. So in this case, they were able to look at the fake green card and then look at other data both in federal and local databases from various things. And some of these people had overstayed visas, they're claiming, right? Be like, okay, well, we found a guy with his name and this date of birth, but the person hasn't been issued a green card. That's their claim, right?

And the same with the driver's license database. So obviously, just to finish up on that thought, I guess, this disincentivizes people from doing the thing which I've just said is good, which is getting a driver's license, right? It disincentivizes. I mean, I'm seeing things from students right now being afraid of going to their own graduation, being afraid of having their parents at their own graduation, right? This was like two blocks from a school. Fucking chicken.

Do not. She's on top of the fence. Sorry. Um, Can we leave this in? I'm just going to go put her back in the box. She's going to fucking get out. Oh yeah, please.

Chicken break. I really, I really, truly think that's a good thing. Oh, yeah, please chicken break I really I really truly thought that that was part of the sentence and I was trying to process in my brain What the fight? All right, we're back Did you know did you pick up the chicken? Yep. Did you say that you were kind of a chicken jockey? No.

Everyone, no, no. Just another 30 seconds of silence, everybody. Let's really give that its due. Has anyone got a gong that we could play? No, no. Alright. Pouring one out for Garrison. So to finish up, right now both Bonaforte Jetta locations are closed. A GoFundMe for the impacted employees and their families has already hit twice its goal,

$120,000. As I've said, there have been suggestions, which as far as I'm aware, were unfounded that a restaurant forced a documented employees to work long hours. It doesn't matter, right? Even if they did, you shouldn't be punishing the people who are being in theory abused, right? I don't understand how you get to that logic.

And even if that is the case, like having ice available on call to deport your employees only plays into the hands of abusive bosses who don't want to pay people, right? They can just call ICE instead. This is a tactic that's been used for decades against migrants. So yeah, that's all I got. Good times. Good times in San Diego. Yeah.

Yeah. We're going to talk about this more in another episode. There was also a rage in Minneapolis that, you know, there's like 30 agents out multi-agency raid and Like a hundred people just showed up and got them to fuck off and they didn't end up arresting anybody Yeah, I think well, so I think they arrested all the protesters But like they didn't end up detaining any they did not detain the people they were going after they stopped them Yeah And there's there's there's this great line that fucking every single person from Minneapolis who I know now is Quoting where one of the people who got interviewed

In Sahan Journal said that's Minneapolis, baby We pull up so you too could pull up and stop these fucking that's right. You see four cowards. You can stop them Now speaking of incredible cowardice one of the things that's been happening On a sort of another immigration front is the US's attempt to revoke student visas for Chinese international students. We don't actually know what this means yet and what it's going to look like. All they've said is that they're working to aggressively to revoke visas as a direct quote from them.

And this is this was from Marco Rubio on fucking whatever social media app And he also said quote we will revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa Applications from the people's Republic of China and Hong Kong so it fucking rip all of the Hong Kong liberals who supported Trump. Yeah Bad shit. Yeah, no one knows exactly what this is going to mean I've seen speculation that this could be a full ban I that's what Stephen Miller has wanted for a long time. I don't know If that's going to happen, they've been talking about like what unquote critical fields like stem stuff It could also be a you know, the specific language they're using is like anyone who's linked to the Communist Party

That's a lot. What does that mean? Yeah, who the fuck knows, right? Linked. You know, like some of these people are the kids of like Chinese Communist Party members, but like, that's like 7% of the population of China, right? Like that's a lot of people, and then linked can be fucking anything, right? Like, yeah. You know, so no one is entirely sure what this means yet. My guess is that it's going to be combined with the other horrible thing they're doing right now,

which is that they've suspended consular visits to get student visas while they try to figure out how to implement this new social media policy where they want to just effectively what it looks like they want to do is just like if you've posted about Palestine, they deny you student visa. That seems like the thing that they're trying to put in place yet they haven't yet my guess is that these two are going to end up being linked and they're gonna and that that's gonna be what they're doing it could also just be a some sort of large-scale rollback of student visas for Chinese international students here

Chinese international students have been targeted under so many goddamn administrations now it's fucking horrible. These are just like people. It's interesting because when you read media accounts of this, a lot of them will be like, well, people aren't that, like, we're not that scared. That's okay. It's like, well, no, you, you are talking to the people who are stupid enough to talk to an American journalist, right?

Most people just say no, because they're genuine. The is like creating an atmosphere of fucking terror where people don't want to people don't want to speak out about it in this and this has been something that's been used to like break grad student unions um you know like over the years this has been a kind of repression that's very useful this is also I think part of their of just a broader war against higher education because a lot of Chinese international students like come in on full tuition so they're paying for a large percentage of like a bunch of university budgets. But yeah we will we will we will keep you informed as to what this actually looks like

that's what we know about it for now it fucking sucks. Let's end with some semi good news I guess we will return into my horribly named segment, Stinky Musk. Oh, God. Hey, this is Gare from the future, just cutting in here at the beginning because oh boy, in the 24 hours after we recorded this initial segment, there has been substantial developments in the Elon Musk Donald Trump breakup story. It is getting quite ugly out there, folks. The girls are fighting, Diva down. JD Vance is hiding in the closet as the parents are screaming down the hallway.

It is getting quite ugly. Trump's gotten rid of the electric vehicle mandate and is threatening to terminate Elon's government subsidies and contracts. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is talking about how Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. Like duh, like we don't already know this. But for some reason, this is blowing the minds of people like Alex Jones, who are now crashing

out on the timeline. Huge, huge shakeups in the mega world. We saw people trying to cope, claiming that this is a 5D chess move and that Elon and Trump are going to come back together in the end, which is completely absurd. This is a huge, huge shift in the power balance in the new right. We will be doing a whole new piece in the near future on the Elon Musk Donald Trump breakup story and how it will affect the Republican Party.

But the following segment, which we recorded on Wednesday, will essentially outline how we got right up to this point. All of these slow microaggressions and fractures that led to this much more explosive breakup. So enjoy that and keep your ears peeled for a future piece on Elon Musk and Donald Trump's messy situation ship. So, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are now officially in their messy breakup phase, where they're both trying to kind of play it cool, but resentment is clearly bubbling. So after reports surfaced about the growing rift between Musk and Trump, the White House gave Musk one last farewell hurrah on Friday, May 30th, where Musk, sporting a black eye

and a t-shirt reading The Doge Father, was gifted a gold key to the White House by Donald Trump. A day later, Trump withdrew the nomination of Musk ally Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator. So as Musk's special government employee designation expired, nothing was renewed. They did not try to push him through as a more permanent advisor, he is essentially getting the soft boot. According to Axios, Musk had asked the White House about staying on as an advisor past the 130-day special government employee threshold, but that was denied. Musk has been reportedly disillusioned by the Wisconsin election and the unexpected difficulty in pushing through some of his Doge cuts. Along with the Wisconsin election and the unexpected difficulty in pushing through some

of his Doge cuts, along with the growing frustration regarding the Liberation Day tariffs, which affect his businesses. To add to the tension, according to the New York Times, Musk has been upset that Trump has been negotiating deals with OpenAI instead of Musk's own competitor, Grok. God. Yeah. In late May, Musk posted on X, the Everything app, quote, Back to spending 24-7 at work. I must be super focused on X slash XAI and Tesla. Well, to be fair, Garrison, have you seen Chet GPT

ever speak in the style of Jaraja Binks in such a convincing? You know, that is true. It's that USP right there. Yeah, not well talking about the plight of the boars. So as Musk was preparing to exit the White House, he began airing his beef with the new big, beautiful budget bill. Quote, I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don't know if it can be both." Telling CBS News, quote, I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,

which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing, unquote. After this, Stephen Miller started subtweeting Musk on X everything app outlining the different types of cuts that Doge can make versus reconciliation bills can make and defend it. The big beautiful bill calling it quote, the single largest welfare reform in American history, along with the largest tax cut reform in American history, the most aggressive energy exploration in American history, and the strongest border bill in American history, all while reducing the deficit." Which it does not. It does not reduce the

deficit. But now that Musk's White House exit has been more solidified, Musk's animosity towards Trump's main policy bill has just skyrocketed, posting on June 3rd on X, the everything app, I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it. You know you did wrong. You know it. Similarly, Stephen Miller has also been crashing out on the timeline, attempting to defend the

bill and push back on Musk's attacks in a flurry of tweets, one of which reads, quote, the big beautiful budget bill will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale, and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens from the United States. For that reason alone, it's the most essential piece of legislation currently under construction in the entire Western world in generations. Wow. Now, Stephen seems pretty worked up. And I think this could actually have to do not just about Musk's tweets, but also maybe

about Stephen's own personal life because Stephen's animosity could relate to the fact that Musk seems to be stealing Stephen Miller's own Katie Miller Katie Miller was working in a top position a doge as a special government employee and now that her designation has also expired She is leaving the government to continue working with Musk full-time Including arranging Musk's own interview appearances. It is not looking great, folks. The cock chair is getting warmed.

Um, I am not thrilled about Elon Musk possibly having a baby with Stephen Miller's wife. This is really dark timeline stuff. I think all of them should be doing better. Different? Different. I certainly can critique the way polyamory functions in, you know, leftist anarchist spaces. This is the most toxic thrumble I've ever seen before. This is by far the worst.

This is a night of wrong wives too, and hopefully it ends up for all of these motherfuckers like it did for Heimbach. So fuck them. Stephen Miller went on TV last week to talk about how much he cares about his family. It's such good timing. It's really dark for him. Yeah. If you marry Stephen Miller,

it's because you're both the same kind of evil. And if that's the kind of person you are, Elon Musk is going to give you more opportunities to be the kind of evil you wanna be. It's amazing, right? Like, it's just obvious. Like, this is big. Like, I can't just tell if Musk is an upgrade or a lateral move from Stephen Miller. It's really tough to say. Yeah. This is very funny.

But yeah, this is one of the, you know, last bits in the White House Elon Musk saga. He really tried to, like, push forward this doge, retire all government employees agenda. And it ran into way more roadblocks than what he was expecting. And he seems really upset about that. And now he has to return to the private sector to save his failing businesses, which have only started to fail more now that he damaged an already kind of troubling reputation the past few months. Yeah. So, yeah, that is the update on Elon Musk.

Awesome. Well, everybody, we reported the news. I love reporting the news and that you did it. Goodbye. 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, coolzonemedia.com, or check 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. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute John, who's not the father? Well Sam, luckily it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast so we'll find out soon. This author writes that my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son,

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