MTracey podcast - "Liberation Day," Musk face-plants in Wisconsin, Bombing Iran, and more

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mtracey.netHere’s a recording of my weekly discussion with Richard Hanania.

we're going to be talking about Trump's tariff announcement, which is coming at 4 p.m. Eastern, which is pretty late in the day for this kind of thing. We'll talk about Russia, Ukraine. We'll talk about a lot of other things as soon as Michael gets here. The plans I've seen, they've basically said they've thought about 20% tariffs across the board. And also, hey, Michael, how are you? Hello, I have not tweeted the link yet, so I'm going to do that right now before we even say another word.

Okay, yeah, you should be tweeting the link beforehand now. Now they've fixed it so you can have this link and then people won't get reminded. Oh, really? Okay, I didn't know that. Yeah, I tagged you. You should be checking your notifications. Just refreshing them constantly. Do you get any notifications? What is this image of me?

It's repulsive. What's wrong with that image? It's AI enhanced. It's a better version of you. That doesn't look like you at all. First of all, I have a widow's peak. I guess I'll hire my, I'll fire my graphics guy. I look like a guy who's going to, like, wear a camo outfit and go, like, duck hunting.

Is this kind of, did you once look like this ever? I wouldn't think that was you if I saw that. Oh, you know what? It's some, I know. That's derived from a photo of me that for some reason pops up in all Google searches. But it's from like eight years ago, and I was considerably fatter. I see. I see.

Okay. Anyways. You know, I was just thinking, this is not really relevant to what we were planning on discussing, but people are posting failed college admissions. personal statements. Have you been seeing this? I've seen it. I have never read any of these statements. I haven't read them either, but I was just, I should have like a fleeting thought just before we logged on. Why are 17-year-olds required to write some like grandiloquent personal

treatise about themselves in order to get into college? Like, why not, if you're going have them write something that's mandatory, why not write about some other subject? Like, who cares what a 17-year-old has to say about themselves? It's such a pointless exercise. I think the history is anti-Semitism. I think that they might have actually started this because they had too many Jews getting into the Ivy League in a personal letter. I think I remember reading this. I don't know if I'm getting the details right, but basically holistic admissions were invented to not have too many Jews in elite universities. And the person also say was part of that.

So you would write like, you know, I go yachting and like I, you know, hang out with my ancestors, go to my ancestors, graves who fought in the American Revolution or something. They would say, well, this is our kind of American. And then if you say, yeah, on the weekends, I honor my, like, great, great, great grandfather who came on the Mayflower. Yeah, exactly. So you can say stuff like that instead of, like, like my, you know, my dad from Brooklyn who delivers, you know, milk cartons.

Yeah, or whatever. Yeah, who's a weaver. Yeah, exactly. Well, I should have known that anti-Semitism was the ultimate answer. That's the answer to everything. It's so embedded in American society. It's the Rosetta Stone for everything. It's so embedded that we need it.

We need a full court-pressed government to get rid of it. So we're, the tariff thing, I mean, we're a couple hours away from the announcement. There's no leaking. It's funny. Have you noticed a lot less leaking in this administration than the last one? I mean, the last Trump administration. Yeah, there's less. You know, there was almost none in the Biden administration.

The first Trump administration leaked like a sieve. The Biden administration didn't leak at all, or virtually never. And there's not really much. much in this administration because they know that that would be like offense number one yeah you'll be defying what is your paramount obligation which is loyalty to the supreme leader yeah they've been selecting for that i remember yeah the first i mean if you discount the whole signal week which is in a way was a week a leak however inadvertent the um yeah the first term was really ridiculous because it would be like we talked to

like 40 decision makers had like this thing. It was like every single person was just talking to the New York Times. And this was not the norm. I mean, it was like an abnormally high amount of leaking because there was abnormally high number of people who didn't agree with what Trump was doing and thought Trump was crazy. And you just look at like the list of people who just hated Trump afterwards. It's incredible.

I mean, they really hated the man. And we have much less of that this time. I think, like, I get the feeling from, like, Heng Seth and, like, JD Vads. Like, these are the kind of people who don't let even, like, pure, like, in their minds, in their hearts, like, at night when they're, like, a loaded bed.

Like, they do not allow themselves to think negative thoughts about Trump. Like, I just think that that's how kind of psychologically conditioned are. That they are. That's the kind of person that's been selected for. That's some heavy psychologizing. Um, I don't know. You kind of think that J.D. Vance, I mean, who knows? but part of me has to think that he has had some interior monologue going on,

especially just in light of his whole journey around Trump, which obviously began very negatively. Like what did he do just like get a lobotomy to remove that part of his brain? I think he's oriented towards power. He became friends with Donald Trump. He became a pundit on the basis of his critique of Trump, essentially. That's how he gained a, national profile in conjunction with his book, which I always thought was incredibly overrated.

But that was used as a springboard for him to show why Trump was leading the white working class astray. Yes. It was a very kind of, and it was not only hostile to Trump, it was hostile towards kind of populist, you know, tendencies among the white working class. Yeah. And who blur, because they blame systemic factors for why they have a poor, like China. an Obama, and he was very, it was very personal.

And then he becomes, without any explanation really of like why his world you change, he becomes friends with Donald Trump Jr. I mean, that's like, I don't know, that you had to be friends with Donald Trump Jr. You have to be a believer. I don't know. I don't know if any person who had an internal monologue could be friends with Donald Trump Jr. Especially internal monologue was, gee, I would like to get elected to the Senate in Ohio. In order to do that, I have to win the Republican primary.

In order to do that, I should probably be jokey for the endorsement of Trump. In order to do that, I should make friends with Donald Trump Jr. Like there's an internal monologue going on there that guides the other. No, there is a like, no, that's not the monologue. That is like the hidden part that he can't even see himself. That is the part he can't even reach. The part that's the internal monologue is like, these elites are so bad. They've done these things to the working men.

of the country. They've sold this out on behalf of the globalists and the illegal immigrants. He tells himself what he needs to believe in order to become the kind of guy he needs to be to become a senator and then eventually vice president. But anyways, we don't have to talk about J.D. Bance's internal monologue. But what about me? Just one more point on this. We discussed this last week, but in that signal chat, he at least ostensibly was registering an objection about a Trump policy that had evidently already been decided on. Like, he was objecting after the fact on superficial kind of spurious grounds, but nevertheless. Yeah, that's consistent.

So that must suggest, like, some faculty that he's maintaining for critique. Yeah, no, he can critique Trump's policies. He could critique a specific decision of Trump in his head. He can't critique the Trump phenomenon. I can't critique Trump as a man. I think that, like, that is something you can't do in Republican politics. And if there's any part of you that feels that way, Trump will see it, Don Jr. will probably see it. But I think the base will at some level see it because what these people care about is Trump first and foremost.

So what are you expecting from this tariff thing? How's the market's doing today? Let's see. I mean, one thing I will say about the tariff issue is that it really is true. The Trump has been basically advocating variations of this going back. to the 1980s when he first toyed with running for president in 1988 rogersstone infamously ferried him to new hampshire for like a testing the waters trip and back then he was obsessed with japan as the country that was principally uh ripping the united states off with a

trade imbalance yeah um the thing is that you know so So I don't think that it's inherently objectionable to favor a more protectionist economic policy. I don't have that person. I don't personally have that strong of a feeling about it one way or another. I think it's like a viable political proposition in a pluralistic society for people to want more protectionism. I guess my misgiving here is that it seems to be interwoven with a lot of weirdly. like national security justifications for things. Like,

we're going to tariff, we're going to start a trade war with Canada in particular. And part of that is because they don't pay enough for their defense, or the United States is paying for their defense. And we'd be better able to ward off the influence of China and Russia and the Western Hemisphere if they just became a state. And, oh, by the way, we should annex screenings. as well, and we're going to send J.D. Vance to be the little errand boy in Greenland.

So I just think that there's a lot of, because if you notice, Trump over the weekend called up Christian Welker of NBC News and announced that he was getting, quote, pissed off with Putin. And he was suspecting that Putin was dragging his feet on these nominally. ceasefire negotiations. And he said that one thing he might consider doing, if Putin keeps dragging out the process, is putting on what Trump called secondary tariffs on Russia,

by which I'm pretty sure he means sanctions. So he's kind of collapsing tariffs and sanctions into the same policy. Obviously, sanctions are used to advance, like, national security type prerogatives. So I don't think this is strictly just like an economic policy about onshoreing, manufacturing, or remediating the trade deficit that he feels, feels like it's gone unaddressed for decades. To me, there's a weird national security sort of like dynamic here going on where tariffs and

sanctions get confirmed. inflated, and this, like, new paradigm is going to be used to pursue those objectives in addition to the economic ones. Yeah, so right now the market, the NASDAQ composite is up 1% today. So I think whatever, the market's reading the tea leaves, they think it's maybe not going to be that bad. You're right. It's kind of a confused...

I've been listening to these podcasts, like Ezra Klein had one and Derek Thompson had one where they try to, like, understand, like, the smart version of... what Trump is doing. And it's like, collapse the value of the dollar. The value of the dollar, you know, the dollar becomes less valuable. So people can buy more imports or something like that. There's like all these complicated steps for it to make sense. But that doesn't appear to be what Trump is doing.

Trump appears to be kind of pushing, trying to push people into becoming annexed by the U.S. in some cases, Canada, or just he doesn't like tariffs and he feels like people ripping us off and this is just like his kind of view for seeing the world right so like there's a couple like uh moats like trump is comfortable and it's like they're ripping us off like foreign countries are doing something bad um and i made a deal and me Donald Trump I won right and so it's like it's that's all what we're doing here we're doing some kind of stupid kind of dance to make him uh feel good um or to give him so-called negotiation Negotiating leverage because people think that it's good for Trump to negotiate just for its own sake

It doesn't even really matter what the ultimate objective is of negotiations They just think that it's like this dogmatic article. It's like a dogma to negotiate at all times everywhere and And it's everywhere and be negotiating. He likes the idea of people coming to Trump and saying they want exemptions from the tariffs and they like he likes the idea of people announcing that there's going to be a factory here or there, and he gets to claim political credit for it. So Terrips is really like a thing that he can do on his own, and then he can continuously, you know, get basically sit there like the godfather, dispensing favors, getting kissed up to claiming credit for things. You know, that's hard to do with

just an agreement that leaves the system as is and treats everyone, treats everyone the same. And so we'll see. We'll see what they're going to be like. I've heard 20% across the board, and I've heard reciprocal tariffs. They say they have the plan, but they're not going to tell us what it is, apparently, until the press conference. Also, what exactly are we being liberated from? Other countries are being a strong... Other countries are being liberated from the ability to, like, go to other countries and have an advantage in the strength of our currency?

Yeah, liberated from that. I mean, they really love the idea. These nationals love the idea of manufacturing jobs. It's like the idea that like working in a factory is like the only thing, at least a working class person or a person without a college degree could do that has like any kind of meaning, right? It's like there's no reason to think like factory jobs are that great, like making a thing rather than like delivering a thing or like providing a service. Right. It's a kind of just irrational, like, it's an irrational kind of aesthetic preference for like what these people think a low-class job should look like. So you don't have any, you don't have any sympathy for the idea that in an earlier era, with a different economic paradigm that was prevailing, an ordinary, like, high school graduate could go and work at the local factory. get a living wage where they could buy a house at a car and go on a vacation once a year.

They had job security. They had retirement benefits. And they could plan their entire life around that. Obviously, for certain people, that's not going to be the ideal lifestyle. Maybe if you want to break out of the mold of what's predominant in your community, you're not going to just want to settle into that comfortable routine. but a lot of people would be comfortable doing that, and it's not as much available.

And also, there were some communal benefits to, like, a town revolving around one primary employer in that you're congregating with people in the neighborhood regularly. There's, like, communal events that stem from the workplace. It's much less atomized than, like, working for Uber or Eats or something. So I don't know. I have some. sympathy with people who look with fondness on that being available more so in the past than it is.

Now, I don't know if it can necessarily be restored in the way that some would like, but I don't necessarily begrudge the nostalgic affection. Yeah, I mean, there's all this nostalgia. I mean, there was nostalgia when the Soviet Union collapsed. A lot of people liked the idea of kind of government taking care of them. Yeah, I don't know. It's like, you know, to have that in the first place, like those factory jobs required disruption of like rural life and people's lives and, you know, people who immigrated to the U.S. So it's not a kind of, you know, it's a kind of weird thing to ever try to like just push the pause button and try to stop right there.

I mean, we never, we never do that. We've never done that. I mean, is there like a sympathy for a person who would prefer like a factory job? Some people don't like service jobs. Like, yeah, but it's like the economy is not built around one kind of person who wants one kind of job. I mean, jobs are there based on the needs of the technology and the kind of the preferences of the time. So, yeah, I mean, there can be some sympathy for it. I don't think it's like a good basis for policy or what Trump is doing right now.

A commenter actually just made a good point in line with what I was saying before, which is that there's a national security dimension here that I sort of question. question the validity of in that they're saying we need to revitalize our manufacturing base in the United States because we need to make sure that we're not reliant on supply chains or China for some of our core materials that we would need should there be a ward that breaks out. But that doesn't make any sense for like why you don't want to trade with Canada, why you want to fight with Canada and the Europeans. You need actually more like a policy focused on China would be one thing. It would require like better trading relationship with Japan and Korea

and other countries. But no, it's much more general than that. And China is like, you know, there's reports that China is like coming closer to Japan and Korea based on the way the U.S. is treating the rest of the world. So that could be like a kind of rational thing if it's just about China. But there's like nothing. It's like China is kind of like forgotten about. It was like he rants about Canada and Mexico. Yeah, but just in general, as a general concept, the idea that we all are manufacturing in the domestic United States in the event of a war where trading routes could be disrupted or something like that. Well, I mean, in the United States, I mean, why in the United States, right? Not with China, right? Like, China's going to disrupt trade with Europe and Canada. That seems unlikely. Or with Africa or Latin America or something. I mean, the Pacific, but the Pacific, I mean, those countries are going to be American. you know, they're going to be American allies

in any kind of conflict with China. So they're going to, yeah, I mean, because China is cutting off trade to Japan is kind of... Well, however sound the rationale is, they do also seem to be invoking this national security or like military readiness rationale that I find somewhat ominous. Yeah.

Well, why is it ominous? Well, they're almost like looking at some kind of World War scenario as a foregone conclusion that we all have to, quote, prepare for. But I'm saying they're not. It's just one of those things they throw out there, right? They throw out there everything and you kind of see what sticks just because they don't like trade, right? They're just kind of reverse engineering what Trump wants to do. But anyways, I mean, I think it's hard to say what's going to happen by the time people listen to this.

You know, they'll probably know more than we know now. Anyways, well, let's talk about the election results last night. Yeah, yeah. What do you make? So just some statistics. So the, you know, Trump won Wisconsin, but the Supreme Court race, which determined the composition of the Supreme Court is 3-3. So it's 4-3 now liberals. They won by about 10 points.

And then Florida's first district, this was Matt Gates' old seat. It went from plus 32 for Gates to plus 15 Republicans, so the Republicans held on. 17 points wing in the Democratic direction. Something similar in the 6th District, Mike Walsh's old seat. went from Republican plus 33 to a Republican plus 14, and they're still counting the vote, so it's not going to be maybe exactly like this. So it's like, you know, it's like a 10 point, 12 point shift in Wisconsin, like a, you know, 15 points shift in Florida, 15 to 20 in these races.

Yeah, what do we make of this? Which is a big Democratic shift, which is basically what you would expect. Democrats significantly overperform in special elections now, and they do a cycle after a cycle after a cycle. Democrats are almost better off not even publicizing that a special election is happening because it seems like the effect of that is to inform disengaged Trump-inclined voters

who wouldn't otherwise be paying attention that something is going on, whereas the highly engaged, like, news reading, demographic, which are heavily leaning Democrat, they're already aware that it exists, which is why Elon thinks he has to swoop in and dump 25 million for a state judicial race in Wisconsin, which to me, the funniest aspect of that is that he was running around proclaiming, like, had Elon Musk ever

followed like judicial, state judicial races in Wisconsin before like last week? I tend to doubt it, but suddenly he convinced himself that literally the future of Western civilization, hinged on the outcome of a state judicial race in Wisconsin, which nobody could name the candidates of in a lineup. But it's not completely, it's ridiculous to say this is the future of Western civilization. But like if you're interested in politics, like this is actually an important race because the Supreme Court in Wisconsin has been very interventionist. It's done things on abortion.

It's pushed back on the Republican legislature. And like who has control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court? Even if people don't pay attention to it, even if Elon never did. it is actually a big deal for policy. I mean, it's a moderately significant race if you're like a political junkie or if you live in Wisconsin and you have an interest in judicial affairs. But Trump won Wisconsin in 2024 while there was still a liberal or Democratic majority on the state's Supreme Court.

So obviously it's not as strictly determinative of political outcomes as they want to make it out to be. well it is it's maybe not for the it's not going to determine the presidential race that but it's going to determine other things like what kind of policies they have at the state level also the redistricting thing is apparently a big deal it might swing a few house seats so like yeah if you're a political junkie i mean musk is a political junkie at this point he tweets about politics all day and spends tens and hundreds of millions of dollars on political races so this is like actually a rational place if he wants conservative things to be done and not liberal things for him to put his money

and put his political capital. It wasn't rational if it ended up backfiring because people are increasingly repulsed, especially by his political activism, which seems probably was the case. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, and I'm sorry, I just find it ridiculous that because you think in some future scenario, it might be the case that a. A liberal majority Supreme Court in Wisconsin could read district congressional seats.

And maybe so like one or even two fewer Republicans are in the House. That therefore means of the outcome of this raise is so important that the quote, entire destiny of humanity in the state. Like how could you not find that to be laughable? Of course, it is laughable. I said that's ridiculous. I mean, like of all the ridiculous things he says, probably, you know. It just doesn't kind of register. But no, you're right.

It's not the future of Western civilization. I'm going to give like a million dollars to a couple random people who pledged that they'll vote in this election. Then he had to delete the tweet and say, oh, sorry, I meant that what I'm going to do is give a million dollars to randomly select the people who signed my petition against activist judges. Then he says, oh, if you like, you'll get $50 here and there. If you take a selfie with somebody who's going to vote. Yeah. And then afterwards he says. He's just dumping endless money into races in a way that obviously is going to be very incendiary to people who don't like him.

So you say it's rational for him to be super involved in this race? Maybe it wasn't. I mean, they actually lost by a greater margin that had been projected by the polls. Yeah, I mean, I was saying it was rational. Not that he did necessarily swear a thing, but it was rational for him to care about the Wisconsin. So I said it race. And maybe that means not being involved at all. We don't, I mean, like, look, it's actually the switch in Wisconsin, the shift in Wisconsin was less than the switch in Florida.

So, like, you don't know that Musk made things worse. Musk could have made things better. It's only about, like, a 12-point shift in Wisconsin compared to, like, a, you know, 17, 18-point shift in Florida. So by increasing the salians. Those are individual districts in Florida versus statewide. It's about the direction of the shift. It's about the direction of the shift compared to what. It's not like a one-to-one comparison.

It's not a perfect one-to-one comparison, but, you know, it's like he couldn't have known that beforehand, right? He couldn't have known his, like, sending, you know, giving these million-dollar checks to people, like, wouldn't be enough. It has to be strong, right? It has to be, he has to create a cultural phenomenon that is enough to overcome, like, the political gravity of Democrats. first of all being, first of all, the thermostatic public opinion thing where the public goes in the opposite direction of the administration and Congress, but also Democrats at the same time being the more educated side, right? So that's a lot that you're fighting against. And for him to make up for that, he has to like hand out these million dollar checks. But, you know, it wasn't enough, obviously.

It could have made a little bit of a plus difference. I think those Democratic votes are probably mobilized either way. So now he learned something, right? Like he's going to maybe not interfere. Like maybe he just thinks that the money, it's not a good return. If it did work, it would be a good return for him. I guess I'm just skeptical that even if you're a political insider or a political junkie who's really into the intricacies of political affairs in the United States,

that nationalizing and catastrophizing and turning into the, this like apocalyptic referendum, every race that might have some eventual downstream effect on redistricting proposals. And then within a couple of years might affect like whether a certain part of Dane County, Wisconsin is carved out that gives Republicans like one point less of an advantage in one particular district. I'm skeptical like that that really is that significant of a thing to get some. so singularly obsessed with the point where you're now the front man for like rallying the troops

and telling you're rid of everybody that they must vote. I mean, there's something off about it. Well, they need to do something, right? Are they just going to accept that they're going to crush in the midterms and they're going to crush it every election from now until hopefully 2028? Like, they need something. That's why I'm more like sympathetic to like the rationality of what Musk is doing here because like they're just like, okay, we're the people who only vote every four years. the people who vote every few months and like we're just going to live with that until 2028. That would that's not a good path. Right. So like I don't know, give them lotteries like be hyperbolic. Like it's kind of, it works. That's kind of what the Republican base needs. They need to believe

everything is like either going to make them money or that's going to be the end of Western civilization. Maybe it didn't work sufficiently. But like they need something. They need to, they need to come with that idea. By the way, is Western civilization over as of today? It's so funny. What will tell us that it's over? Are we all going to get? He retweeted the voter ID referendum passing, and he's like, this is, this was the important. I couldn't, I mean, I don't even try to engage with him because it's just pointless, but I couldn't resist, like semi-drunkingly last night, replying to him. Because it's just so ridiculous. I mean, he was in the midst and the throes of this spectacle, hyping and amplifying the significance of that race.

And then all of such, and that he loses. He says, oh, what really mattered was this, the other thing that I didn't focus on at all. Yeah. It was kind of redundancy in that Wisconsin has already had voter ID laws on the book since 2011. Yeah. All this did was also included into the state constitution, but it was already law in Wisconsin. Yeah, I was wondering exactly what that was. Okay, so it's basically he made it in the state constitution.

Just like they want to like double enshrine it, you know. It has no practical impact. Wisconsin has employed voter ID laws for every election cycle in the past like 10 years. And they have a Republican legislature, too, anyway. So it's not like they would probably get rid of voter ID, right? The Republicans are in control of the state legislature, I believe. Yeah. So I replied to him.

So the thing that you said Western civilization hinged on actually wasn't that important. Ooh. Did that you want to reply guys replied to you? Like get a job loser. Do they say something like that? Let's see what people said You're so whiny sometimes I don't know, whenever you've replied him

It hides the replies for some reason So I only see a couple of them And somebody says, you remember why he said that It was directly tied to voter ID No, it wasn't They can retcon anything Wait, so now the liberals can overturn voter Well, I guess it's in the state constitution now

I don't know I guess maybe not Maybe that's the story Yeah, it's a ridiculous It's a ridiculous thing Anyway Somebody says This is why autistic nerds

Need to focus on engineering and coding And leave politics to the professionals What is your thought on that This guy sounds like he's on your side Yeah, he's more sympathetic to my side Good, good That must make you feel good Okay

Let's talk about this story From the New York Times The Secret History of the War in Ukraine My memory is so bad Like, I keep forgetting what, like, whatever I read a report like this, it's like, I forget what's new or what's, and what are things that we do already or I do already. And so, do you have a sense of, like, what's actually new here? I was surprised what I read that the U.S. was giving the exact coordinates and, like, sitting there in a room in Germany. And then the Ukrainians would attack.

That was basically known. I mean, I think they kind of recorded or they crystallized it in this sweeping kind of chronological. narrative, but that was known. Okay. So one thing that I didn't know, and maybe this had been reported, and I might have missed it. I mean, you could have inferred this,

but this is a part that really stuck out to me. So here's a paragraph. And then there were the SMEs. Some months earlier, General Aguto had been allowed to send a small team about a dozen officers to Kiev, easing the prohibition on American boots on Ukrainian ground.

So as not to evoke memories of the American military advisors sent to South Vietnam in the slide to full-scale war, they would be known as, quote, subject matter experts. I love that. Then after the Ukrainian leadership shakeup to build confidence and coordination, the administration more than triple the number of officers in Kiev to about three dozen. They could now plainly be called advisors, though they would still be confined to the Kiev area. So they gave up on this euphemism pretty quickly that was supposed to, I guess, distract people or make people not realize if there were American boots on the ground, which was, of course, one of the core things that Biden had always said was not going to be the gaze. But even that, that was known. Like, I knew that there were American military, quote-unquote, advisors in Keith, like, based out of the consulate, going back to 2022. but there's some additional information here.

But like that really could be turned into a scandal if people wanted to. Like, we were sold this intervention on the premise that there would be no American boots in the ground. And they try to circumvent that being revealed to Americans by employing these incredibly dumb euphemisms because they don't want to invoke Vietnam, even though it's very eerily reminiscent

of how American ground forces ended up accumulating in Vietnam. Yeah. And then there was one other passage that stood out to me. Okay, so eventually these advisors were, first they were sold to, they were apparently limited to staying in the Keeve area. But then the military advisors were allowed to leave.