Some More News - Even More News: The D.C. Aviation Disaster and Trump's Funding Freeze Fiasco

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Hi. On today's episode, Katy, Cody, and Jonathan discuss the tragedy near Reagan National Airport, Trump's suggestion that "DEI" is to blame, and the White House's untimely elimination of FAA infrastructure. Plus, they discuss Trump's confusing pause of federal grants and more horrendous executive orders. Get the world's news at https://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link. Chapters: 00:00 - Intro and Holidays 04:35 - The Potomac River mid-air collision 13:19 - Trump blames diversity (a racist thing that bad people do) 19:33 - Trump’s funding freeze 33:45 - Elon Musk 38:47 - Fear among undocumented workers 41:55 - Guantanamo 44:57 - Gaza 48:07 - Anti-trans executive orders 55:15 - “Breaking” News about Air Traffic Control PATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenews MERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.com

Hi, hello, welcome back to Even More News, the first, the only news podcast. I'm Katie Stoll and I'm feeling great. You are, me too. Me being Cody Johnston on the show. Thank you for welcoming me and us to it. Yeah, you're welcome. Hey, guess what? Hello.

Jonathan is also here. Oh, hey, there he is. Hi, I'm here. That's our Jonathan. Not much else to say other than that. Okay, wow, there sure is a lot of news for us to get to today folks, but more importantly, let's celebrate.

Yay! We gotta celebrate. Something, is it good? Is it normal? These are fine. We're gonna do these quick. There's too much to get to. Yeah, there is too much. Don't worry everybody, there's always time for celebration, but we're gonna get to stuff Friday January 31st is Yadroqablanoshin national backwards day Yad, Nick put this on the screen Yadroqablanoshin Yadroqablanoshin

I don't know guys it national. But everything feels like National Backward Day. Ayo. Oh, wow. You're right. Oh, yeah. Right. When I was learning to drive. Well, when I was learning to drive fresh. Yeah. I remember. No, my high school best friend and I

would be driving and our game would be read every sign backwards. It's not a great game, but I remember exit is TIGSA. POTS.ots. Yep, pots was a great one. POTS! POTS! Anyway, that's my backwards story. They also suggest this is important. Oh. And this is fun. Oh. Eat dessert for breakfast perhaps? Not sure that's backwards, but okay. Yeah, it's not quite backwards There's a lot of them breakfast foods that are desserts for sure. Yes, sweet rolls muffins pancakes and our dessert Many breakfast foods are desserts already. Okay, and well that just dovetails quite nicely into our next holiday Oh perfect Saturday, February 1st is Ice-cream for breakfast day.

Okay. I do sometimes have ice cream with breakfast, but not for breakfast and not a bunch. It's like, you know, I've had my breakfast and I'm just like, I don't wanna work yet, but I want a little something and okay, I'll just go get a spoonful of ice cream. Is it like a spoonful or is it like,

you like scoop out a thing and you're like, here's my morning ice cream? To start it's a spoonful. No, waffles and ice cream are- To start it's a spoonful. Okay. I do reserve for a dessert situation. I'm not opposed to it. And when I'm out of milk for my tea, because I like to put a splash of milk in my tea, I'll sometimes take a tiny spoonful of vanilla ice cream. Mmm.

Like Mrs. Doubtfire. Well, that was icing on a cake, but. Icing in your coffee? Well, as long as it drips off a man's face. No, no, part of it is that good. She sticks her face in the cake. That was cool. It put, oh, sure.

Oh, your teeth. Et cetera. And so on and so forth. Do you wanna do the scene? Should we do the scene? We should do the scene, we should do the scene. Okay, everybody, stop the news. Stop the news. We're gonna do a scene from Mrs. Doubtfire.

It's supposed to drive by. And then we'll do the drive by fruiting. Yeah, we'll skip ahead to the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Run by fruiting. And honestly, we could probably do the scene where he's doing the voiceover stuff too, where he cycles through all the voices.

Oh yeah, we could do that. I do voices. Okay, let's just stop and watch Mrs. Doubtfire, okay? That was great everybody. Oh my god, it's been so long since I've seen Mrs. Doubtfire. I'm so glad we watched that together. I feel better actually. I do too.

I feel much better. I had ice cream for breakfast once on my birthday when I was a child. My parents let me and I regretted it. It was. You did? Yeah, it was a delicious peanut butter, ice cream, chip type of situation.

So good. But it was a morning and I was the child and it didn't. And your tummy felt a little upsetting. Tummy felt a little upsetting, yeah. Tummy felt a little crummy. Tummy felt a little crummy. I keep getting a targeted ad for a shirt that says, more spaghetti, less upsetting.

And I do want it, but I don't want to buy it. Do you support these shirts that say more spaghetti, less upsetting? Perfect. Do you support the onesies? Jonathan, get us on track. You've got so much to get through. We're recording this on Thursday morning. So last night to us, there was a collision between an American Airlines jet carrying

60 passengers and four crew members and an Army Black Hawk helicopter with three soldiers on board. It happened near Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC with all the debris crashing down into the Potomac River. Apparently so far officials believe there are no survivors. It's the deadliest plane crash in the US since 9-11 and the first deadly US commercial passenger airline crash since February 2009.

We don't know as of the time we're recording this, specifically how this happened, who's to blame. Obviously, a helicopter probably should not have been flying in the landing flight path of a plane. There's a suggestion that the air traffic controller warning came in too late. Lots of stuff going on. Pretty devastating tragedy. And of course, this morning now we're dealing with the immediate politics of the situation, the right saying it's DEI and diversity. Healthy politics? Oh, not healthy politics.

Okay. Well, the Trump administration eliminated the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, froze the hiring of new air traffic controllers. Elon Musk pushed out the FAA administrator because that administrator had been critical of SpaceX's safety record. Because it was bad. I would posit that it's a stretch to say that the Trump administration specifically caused this or that if Kamala Harris was president, it wouldn't have happened.

But these actions probably make things like this more likely. That's where I'm at. I think it's unlike, I don't know. I need more information about specifically what transpired to know if any of these actions directly affected this moment. We don't have that information. It is fucking wild that the helicopter was flying there

in the first place. It's hard to wrap my mind around how that kind of information, how there wasn't some sort of a warning in time. It's just hard for me to wrap my mind around how that happens outside of personnel error, but we don't know. And unlike some of these fucks, I don't think it's appropriate quite yet.

It's appropriate to be aware of all the things, but we need more information before we start saying loudly and boldly online, it's Donald Trump's fault, you know? Just the way it's bullshit to be up there saying, oh, this is DEI. Yeah, I generally agree with that. I do think that, I mean, there was already there was even a tweet that morning before this even happened of like, yeah, I've been in contact with like people in the FAA, and

they're like very worried about something exactly like this happening. Like it is, it is the chaos which we'll get to like, all the other stuff has been going on. The chaos, which we'll get to, all the other stuff that's been going on, but the chaos that the Trump administration is causing on purpose is the kind of thing that does create situations like this. And again, I'm not gonna be like, oh, because they got rid of this committee, that's what caused it.

That's not the case, but there has been a lot of just instability and chaos this past week really compressed together and seeing that be a warning that day and then like 10 hours later this happens. It's like, oh, I mean, this probably related in some way. Also, and I'm not out here being like, we need to like take all the tactics of MAGA and Trump and do them ourselves and we need to be just like them.

I completely disagree with that. But fuck them. If it was a different president, they would be the worst people in the fucking world about this. 100%, well they would probably be- They'd be mocking everybody. They'd be saying exactly what Donald Trump's saying right now about diversity.

They'd be doing all this kind of stuff. Joe Biden did this, whatever, whatever, whatever. So while I do agree this is a tragedy and we shouldn't be politicizing it, I'm not like, we don't want to blame the Trump administration. No. Fuck them. Fuck them forever. Not an inch for those people.

I agree with you completely 100%. Fuck them, you are completely correct. I'm just saying, I want to be the kind of person that says things when I know that they're accurate. Oh, totally. And what I do know is accurate is that all this shit has been happening this week, exactly as you just described it.

And yeah, this is the kind of shit that happens. But I need some more information before I'm gonna tell you one thing or another, but these kinds of accidents will happen. Oh, well, also there's like a, there's a messaging issue from the Democrats and the attention economy is owned by people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk and whatever they say becomes the truth. Trump's out there saying like, oh, there's the diversity

or whatever. And it's like, that's what so many people are going to like. It was. And I think that in the coming weeks and months and however long, it's important to hammer home the things that Donald Trump is doing and trying to do and the effects that we will see from it. Like this may not be his fault, but this kind of thing will be. Yes. And this kind of thing will be happening because of all the things they want to do. There's so many aspects of the government, of the federal government, that people don't really think about, that they're involved in,

that we're probably gonna talk about it. Like all these people like losing jobs, losing like benefits, losing all these funding and things that like they rely on that we don't think about. And they're just going to try to get rid of it all. And we're gonna see all these domino effects like this. And I think it's important to start pointing that out as early as possible so that when things like this do happen more,

or somebody else loses their job for this reason or this reason, they will remember like, oh yeah, he's dismantling the federal government before our very eyes and getting rid of all these regulations, getting and like getting rid of all these these safety regulations and getting rid of all this, all these programs that help people with all these types of jobs. They help people survive things, they help people live, they help people get through their day, they help people in all these ways we don't understand. And I just think that getting out ahead of this in an honest way, because like you're saying, like he didn't fire the committee

and then they were like, crash more planes. But this is- There was clearly a breakdown of communication at some point last night. Yeah. But we don't know what that looks like or how. We don't know that this is a failure of the administrative state But it's a harbinger for the future failure of the administrative state with the FDA the USDA

With Medicare with all of these different things and of course, we'll talk about the budget thing. Yes, I do want to point out that Pilots FAA officials air traffic controllers have been bringing up stuff like this for a while. Going back years, the GOP has wanted to privatize air traffic control for a decade. I Googled it this morning and there's an article from 2015, GOP pushes to privatize air traffic control. That kind of thing, outsourcing it so there is not a central place with a consistent standard is going to lead to more stuff like this.

None of us, I think, trust a privatized for-profit air traffic control. I don't even know what that would look like. And those companies get away with it too. Right. I mean, yeah, at least then you sue a company when this happens and not the federal government, but that doesn't bring people's lives back. The FAA last year increased its hiring of air traffic controllers. In September 2024, they said they'd met their goal of hiring 1,800 in the previous fiscal

year. Independent of DEI, right? They hired 1,800 people to work as air traffic controller. Incredibly stressful, intense job. Incredibly stressful, yeah. There are a lot of fail safes in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And there's going to be a lot of finger pointing going around when we find out which specific fail safe broke on this one.

Okay, so Trump, he gave a press conference this morning, which I will play a clip from in a minute. I do want to read his initial statement on truth social. And I think I kind of forgot about this stuff. There would be an official statement from the White House, which is like, our hearts go out to blah, blah, blah, like a presidential statement. And then on truth, last night, he truths, "'The airplane was on a perfect and routine line "'of approach to the airport. "'The helicopter was going straight at the airplane

"'for an extended period of time. "'It is a clear night. "'The lights on the plane were blazing. "'Why didn't the helicopter go up or down or turn? "'Why didn't the control tower tell the helicopter "'what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane? "'This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. Not good. Like he's a podcaster.

I know. Like he's a podcaster. Like he's not the president of the United States. Someone's to blame. It's like he frames it like who fucked up versus if, to Cody's point earlier, if it was Joe Biden in office, all that they would be saying is this is Joe Biden's fault. This is Joe Biden's fault. But he does this. So it makes it sound like he's trying to figure out the conspiracy too. He's just posting and it's just like it's expected and we should all remember that this is what it's like, I guess. Yeah. But like just the fact that every time anything, any anything happens, it's like just a guy is like, what's going on here?

I watch the video and I don't understand it. You're the president, man. Like, go get a briefing about it, like, go do your fucking job and then communicate to people. I don't expect him to do that. Obviously, we all experienced the first term, but it is just an hammer hammer that message home. Right? We don't know what caused this It's too early to say but this happened on your watch. You're the president

What are you gonna do about it? And the answer is no more lady pilots. I guess diversity. Yeah astounding All right. Let's hear this clip. All right, let's hear the worst person in the world second worst person I don't know I already know, I already welled up with rage from this earlier, so let's do it again. Mr. President, you have today blamed the diversity elements, but then told us that you weren't sure that the controllers made any mistake.

You then said perhaps the helicopter pilots were the ones who made the mistake. It's all under investigation. I understand that. That's why I'm trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash. Because I have common sense, okay?

And unfortunately, a lot of people don't. I am... I think it's so fucking enraging, shocking. It shouldn't be shocking. No, that's the thing, it's shocking. But every time he does something like this, it's like, well, of course. Under investigation.

He's a monster. To now say, the reason he said, well, it seems like the controllers, the problem wasn't there, because he knows that that looks bad on him with all of this stuff, whether it was his fault or not, but he knows that that looks bad because of all of his bullshit that he's done. And so now you're saying it must be the dead people,

the people that just died, your service members. Still under investigation. That just died, your service members. Still under investigation. That just died. There must be diversity. So the pilots, okay. So the dead people. Got it. If they find out, if it comes out that the pilot of the Black Hawk helicopter was a minority

or a woman, that person's's entire name is gonna be dragged through the mud around a huge chunk of the country. It's really disgusting. It's disgusting. He's also acting so immediately defensive. He's acting like what, he's pretending that everyone's treating him the way he would treat Biden if this happened. He's like, it wasn't my fault. I didn't do it. It's like, okay, no one's saying you crashed the

plane. What do you know? What are we going to do about it? Grow up, man. You're the fucking president of the United States. Again. Dude, be a president. Be presidential. Who cares what people do? Just fuck it. But obviously, he's the unchanging man. Like we're not, you know, it's just like, it's just frustrating to see such disgusting behavior on display again, again, and people love it. That's really disappointing.

Holy moly, have you heard about everything? Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk, bread, what else? We have bones in us, Chevy Chase, ancient Egypt. There's just a lot of things that have words that you can say. It's hard to keep up with all those things, is the point, especially when the news right now is kinda terrible and disheartening.

But that's why I wanted to tell you about Ground News, which you can find over at ground.news.smn. That's a sponsor we specifically sought out to partner with. It's a website and an app that gathers news from all over, from the entire political spectrum, and allows us to compare coverage and verify our information. It's all the tools you will need to navigate the next four years and beyond. Tools like a factuality chart and a blind spot feed that shows you stories that media isn't covering.

Information like the political bias of each news source, as well as who owns them. A lot of rich people owning things right now, you know? That's one of the many things that exists. Rich people, ants, sand castles, other things too, I bet, betting, that's one. So again, you can get all the headlines plus context on each publication over at ground.news slash SMN. With that link, you can save 40% off unlimited access.

What they do is so very important right now because of all the things. So you should check them out. Again, that's ground.news.smn for 40% off unlimited access. The link is in the description. Jonathan, tell us what was going on with this fucking John Dingfries situation. Yeah, I'm gonna try to go through the timeline here. Feel free to interrupt me, of course, because as usual, it's like a three-day timeline that

has 15 stupid things in it. The whole season of a show. So the Office of Management and Budget, part of the federal government, sent out a memo on Monday night to all federal agencies saying they need to, quote, temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance to make sure that funding is in line with Trump's priorities and the executive orders. But that memo was very vague and caused widespread confusion because the federal government pays for a lot of stuff in financial assistance, in grants and loans, potentially totaling

$3 trillion. So all of these different agencies were wondering, do we need to stop paying? Are we not going to get paid? Do we have to shut down? I just want to give a sense of the scope of how much would have been affected by this. Federal grants and loans and financial assistance goes to Head Start Early Childhood Development, School Lunches for Underprivileged Kids, homeless veterans, community health centers, Medicaid, federal student loans, small business loans, disaster relief, domestic violence shelters, suicide hotlines, and freaking meals on wheels, which like had

a pause for a few hours because they didn't know if they were going to be able to get paid to provide the meals to people. Yeah. Wild. provide the meals to people. Is it wild? Again, yeah, as I was saying earlier, there's so many things that the federal government does that is good, that people aren't really aware of necessarily. And I know some people will use that as an argument of like, well, then the government's too big

and we need to shrink it. Like, no, these are all good things. There's 70, like three million people on Medicaid. That's so they can go to the doctor. And all these, there's so many things and they just want to collapse it all to create hard times and enrich themselves. And it's just really, it's so careless on purpose.

And they don't seem, they don't seem to care. Wow, yeah, it's careless, great. Really, particularly. No, I think that's good analysis though. No, it is. It's just like really frustrating to see this like general like vibe of like, yeah, we got it, like the bureaucracy,

we got to take it out. Yeah, there are all these things that are good for people. And you don't know them, you don't feel them, but when they're gone, you do, and you suffer for it. And people depend on it. People depend on it. Regardless if you're going to overhaul the federal government, sure, there's lots of bloating.

There is, there's lots of things. I'm not gonna pretend like there aren't ways that we can change things for the better, but you know what you don't do? Is cut off everything that is directly affecting people's lives, people that desperately need it, and pull the rug out from under their feet in an extremely chaotic fashion,

and then put so many people's immediate jobs in question. This is, it's- Well, maybe those homebound people were getting too many free meals. so many people's immediate jobs in question. This is, it's- Well, maybe those homebound people were getting too many free meals. Yeah, all of these awful programs, these are like the best of the things that we have to offer. This is what's good about America. Cut the fucking bloating, sure.

Tell me what that is, but take your time, don't do this. And it's not early childhood development. It's not meals on wheels. For God's sake. People don't A to C this stuff. It's like, oh, we pay for Medicaid for 70 million Americans. That's so much money. Why is it my responsibility?

Okay, if you want to take all of those people and take away their healthcare, you think ER lines are long now, wait till it's the only way anyone gets healthcare. I know, my God. Think about like one step past it, one step. That's always, I have so many arguments with people, but also in my head, one of them that was today, it's like, what the fuck?

Okay, what do you wanna do? What do you wanna do? You're gonna complain about the homeless crisis, but you don't wanna help them. And you wanna rag on people that are in the throes of addiction, but we don't wanna help them. We don't wanna set up treatment facilities. We don't wanna create programs

that work in other countries to help people. You don't wanna do that. What do you wanna do? Do you want to just complain or do you wanna kill them? Tell me what it is. Deport everyone. Deport everyone, rock them up, send them away. They just want out of sight, out of mind.

Don't have to worry about it. I understand that they don't wanna deal with it, but you have to. One way or the other. The other thing is just to continue ignoring the problem. Okay, let's create more children on the streets. Okay. I'm obviously very fired up this week.

Yesterday, I was like talking about one of these many things and I was like, yeah, it's been, oh, seven days. It's been such a short amount of time and they're doing so much. Again, it's like by design. They want this chaos. They want people to suffer. They want all this stuff to be... They want all this stuff to happen.

The time represented in the film The Ring, that's what this has been. Yep. I haven't seen The Ring, but I assume. They say seven days. It doesn't matter. Okay. Because it's not only a bad thing to do. The rollout of this was of course horrible.

You would think that this Trump administration is trying to be less chaotic than the hitting the ground running that they did eight years ago, and it is not going well. A bunch of agencies were temporarily locked out of their online portals to receive federal money and then the White House later said that it was an outage, just a coincidental outage, just a coincidental outage that took place at the exact same time after a federal judge temporarily blocked the funding freeze, the Office of Management and Budget rescinded the memo, and then Stephen Miller must have leaked like, well, this didn't come to me, right? So it was just OMB getting thrown under the bus.

Their administrator just sent this out without checking with the White House first. Like just a chaotic nonsense embarrassment. And then once it was rescinded, the new press secretary, Carolyn Levitt, which I guess is a name we have to know. Yeah. For now.

She tweeted, this is not a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo. Why? To end any confusion created by the court's injunction. The president's executive orders on federal funding remain in full force and effect and will be rigorously implemented. What does that mean? Yeah, who's to say? Okay. That's so much more confusing.

Great communication from our new press secretary, who also lied about, what was it, like, 30 million dollars worth of condoms going to Gaza it like? 30 million dollars Where the condoms going to Gaza 50 million 50 million. Oh 50 million We don't need to even talk about that But like she's already quite a piece of work and not really great at her job, but that's cool This tweet was used in a hearing finish this I want to hear this part. Oh, right. So there was another case going on where people who were suing agencies or stakeholders suing saying, you should still put a restraining order on this because even though this memo went out saying the orders rescinded, here's a tweet from the White House

saying it's not. And the judge is like, you know what, you're right. Put an additional restraining order on the ability to enforce this. I will say the left, the Dems in disarray, though they are, there have been a few, I don't want to say victories because it's fumbles by the Trump administration, not victories by the Democrats, but this has been so chaotic and judges are saying, no, you can't do this. And I think Trump is probably a little stunned because I think he thinks he's the dictator already. And like, no, no, no, you got to put some more work.

Yeah, you need a few more months before you can really do this. Because there's also, and this is something that I hope I we're not going to let me like talk about Democrats that much today. We will. I really hope they step up and like, yeah, they lost this and this. They are the other party. They are the opposition party. So even though they have limited power now, they need to act like the opposition party and be communicating to people and be doing everything they can. When this happened, there was like a memo that was sent out to Democrats like emergency meeting tomorrow at 1pm. So like all the stuff, Jonathan that you described happened before their emergency meeting. It's stuff like that was like, like, do the call now, cancel stuff, like whatever. But just there's a communication that needs to happen about how not just like

it's illegal to do this. It's this is a fundamental, like this is something he should not be allowed to do. He's the president. He's not Congress. Congress decides what is spent and how much is spent on stuff that is like in the Constitution is something that they are supposed to be in charge of. And what he's trying to do is take it all for himself and just like get rid of Congress. He doesn't want Congress to exist. He's trying to take control of spending and decide like, well, it doesn't align with what I want. So we're not going to do that.

That's not how it works. It might be, unfortunately, how it's going to start working, but it's not how it works. And we need them to be out there and like, yeah, this is like, I don't even know what to say. It's just like, this is the beginning of his attempt to slowly deteriorate the power of Congress and existence of it at all, because it's not in his purview to do this.

You can't, like the president isn't supposed to be doing this. The scope of project 2025, the scope of the things that. Well, they're not gonna do project 2025. They said they're not gonna do it. No, of course not. They said that was fake. Yeah, not that title. The scope of what they wanna do is so beyond Congress.

It's so beyond, they won't get it done working with Congress. So you're going to try to barrel through as much as you can. However you want to rely on the overwhelm to see what sticks to just kind of bulldoze your way through. I wanted to say this. This was chaotic and terrible and bad. And there's going to be a lot of this. There is an element of outrage.

Obviously there was a legal injunctions, things, frustrating, all of this stuff that has happened legally. Thank you everybody who is fighting so hard and moving the ball forward so quickly on those arenas. And there was astounding pushback from all of us as well, from people freaking out, looking over this confusion. And I do think that is a testament to how we have to pay attention.

I'm bringing this back around to someplace with, it's exhausting. I have felt depressed and exhausted all week and cried a lot reading the news and feeling the anxiety. And we have to pay attention. I know a lot of people wanted to take a break. I understand taking a break. If you need to, I get it.

But we do have to be paying attention because it's an overwhelming amount of information coming down the pipeline and we can't handle all of it, but you can't just let it happen. You gotta be reading this and you gotta be watching this and observing this. So I'm gonna step back from that. Yeah. And again, like pointing out like all these things and communicating to people who maybe

foolishly voted for Donald Trump, but were maybe like low information voters or like don't think about this kind of stuff and just point all this stuff out because in Two years if we're still allowed to have elections That's the time to take back a little bit of power and Agree that you're completely so on. The overreach though is real The overreach though is real. He convinced himself he had this mandate. He's more popular than he's ever been.

He is the least popular president after one week in office in the 70 years that Gallup has been doing polling, second only to himself eight years ago. A new Reuters Ipsos poll shows he started at 47% approval last week, which sounds way too high, but it is historically low for a new president being inaugurated. And this week it has slipped two points to 45%. You're not supposed to be at 45% approval rating a week into your second term. A weekend term. Yeah, there's a- He's not popular.

First 100 days are usually pretty good for president. That's the honeymoon period. That's the honeymoon period, exactly. But you just got remarried to this guy and there's no more honeymoon. And you're just like, I can't believe I did this again. What is the parks and rec thing? He's got two Tammies.

I don't know. I don't think that's relevant here actually. I don't think it's relevant to this thing. No, but we needed a little bit of a laugh. So. Technically three Tammys, I think his final wife's middle name was Tammy. I should re-watch that.

I missed the last eight seasons. I don't know. That's good, it's fine. I recommend I guess. Yeah, it's, it's not heartening because he's the president and there's nothing to be done. But it is, again, what we've been saying where it's not heartening because he's the president. There's nothing to be done. But it is, again, what we've been saying where it's like, yeah, he sucks and he's bad at this

and he has even worse people working for him now. They're all worse somehow. And their intentions are worse and they're more incompetent and we're going to see this more and more. More and more people are saying. More and more people. That he sucks shit There's an Elon Musk element to this not directly related to the funding freeze but kind of related to all of this breakdown of our

internal bureaucracy Elon Musk and his cronies it looks like have been put in charge of the office of personnel management Which manages the hiring and firing of federal employees? This is separate from Doge Separate from Doge which is maybe part of the government, but maybe not Right, it's like the Doge's tendrils kind of getting in This man just keeps adding jobs, doesn't he? Yeah, he's the CEO of 12 Rings

No, he's a very busy man who tweets 300 times a day Yeah, he's a very busy man who tweets 300 times a day. There's also like, it's not his cronies, Peter Thiel's cronies, like a lot of these people who are now in charge, like there's this one piece from, I think it like Wired or something, it was like, yeah, they're like just graduated from high school, like people from like Palantir and stuff. Like this is the anti-elites out there working for their tech

oligarchs in the government now. Yeah, they're the non-elites. So the chief of staff of OPM is this person, Amanda Scales, who most recently worked at XAI, which is Musk's AI company that I think built Grok. I don't think they're separate. So they want to reduce the size of the federal workforce and they want everyone to be aligned with MAGA ideals. So a memo was sent out to federal workers saying you can have a deferred resignation, kind of like you would do at a tech company, where you can resign right now before February 6th, you can keep full pay and benefits,

you can work remotely, and regardless of if you have any other work to do, you'll get paid through the end of September. And this memo, well, first of all, it's unclear if the government could do that, companies do that, the federal government, maybe not. So the memo- Yeah, Twitter did it to a T.

Yes, the memo that got sent out, and you can see this at opm.gov slash fork, is called Fork in the Road, and it looks a lot like a Fork in the Road memo sent out to Twitter employees right after Elon took over. When Amanda Scales worked there? Well, for XAI, so a different company. For XAI, okay. Question, I don't, okay, it's to reduce the size of the federal workforce and purge non-maga true believers so that you're sent out a memo to everybody offering, not to everybody, how are they picking? Who are the people that

are getting fired? If you, they basically are like, if you don't like Trump and you don't want to work for what this is going to be anymore. That doesn't feel legal. Well, right. And also, I would argue if you are, say, an air traffic controller or something, it doesn't matter if you like Trump or not. Right. These are the jobs that are... This should be nonpartisan.

These are people, federal employees, and we value longevity in a lot of these roles, maybe not all of them, this is a wide swath of people, but in general, people that know what they're doing for the FAA is important, and you want people to say like, oh, actually, this is what worked with Biden, this is what didn't. And you want an environment where you're learning from your history and from experience.

I'm not saying that every job in the world needs all of that experience. There's a value to young new blood and new ideas and energy, but not these jobs. Yeah, there's so much institutional knowledge that is important to retain. Institutional knowledge. And they are willingly and gleefully burning it all down.

And it's going to cause so many more problems that we can't even really foresee. Like there are things that, again, so much goes on that we don't really think about. And they're like, yeah, this is what we do. We did it like this and it worked for Biden and for Trump and for Obama and for George. Like you're saying, it's a nonpartisan situation in a lot of these cases. And if they're just going to get rid of the institutional knowledge, then they're going to have to build it back up. And I personally don't want Elon Musk and Donald Trump to build a new government.

That sounds like a bad government for bad people who suck. Also, it's just chilling that you would say like, look, it's my first week, I need everyone to swear fealty to me. That's not great. Truly chilling. It's not good.

Because there's the deep state, right? They're all gonna go in and do their own thing unless you make them swear loyalty. Yeah, well, they have to make their the deep state, right? They're all gonna go in and do their own thing unless you make them swear loyalty. Yeah, well, they have to make their own deep state, which is what they're doing right now. That's why all these grokkies and palantiriots are in the fucking, these positions now, because they're making their own little deep state

for everybody. Can't wait. 06. There has been understandable fear among many undocumented workers on farms and factories, not knowing if and when ICE is going to show up for them. There was a post that went viral this week that claimed that 75% of the farm workers in Bakersfield didn't show up one day this week because of ICE raids several weeks ago. The United Farm Workers said that's not true, but that they've heard from a lot of their

members there. There is a definite fear out there. So at this point, it's anecdotal. There's been that post. I've seen other stuff though. There is a construction Reddit and apparently for the past week, it's been very difficult to get people to show up to jobs. I do believe that a you know, a viral post I always take with many, many grains of salt, not that, so there's that one, but there have been a conf, many different things that I've seen suggesting

that this is happening to a degree, whether or not people are going to officially acknowledge that there is some level of people not being able, not feeling safe to show up. Yeah, there's a chilling effect for sure. We also, we have a Google hangout with one of the tiers of our Patreon and had a conversation that just gutted me this week

where we heard from someone who works at a school district as a lawyer and all the steps that they're doing to prepare and how panicked the parents are, you know, not sending their children to school. And the pressure that puts on a school system as well because they're obligated to give these children an education, the conversation about whether or not,

like they should have their papers on hand at school or if that is a bad idea, it's terrifying, and it's real, and it's happening. And people are being deported. People are being rounded up, and then they finally give their IDs and like, oh, nevermind, you're released. And it's just like this, again,

this sort of indiscriminate, chaotic attempt to just round people up, kick them out, put them in. I know it's not just violent criminals, we're talking about people with no record and. Creating these traumatic experiences for these people that are completely unnecessary. And yeah, whether it's like at work or schools,

just this chilling effect of like, we don't know what to do. I have seen a lot of good information and good effective information being disseminated where it's just like, know your rights and know what you were able to do and know how to handle this. I even saw Libs of TikTok be like, are you okay with this?

Like they're telling people how to break the law. No, no, no, they're telling people their rights, ma'am. It's an absurd like framing of it. But yeah, I don't know. It's just it's very scary. And as we alluded to, maybe unless it was cut, Donald Trump is going to send thousands of these people to Guantanamo without being charged for anything one would assume. Jonathan give us some information about this. Yeah he's going to or he signs an executive order instructing the Pentagon and DHS to

prepare a 30,000 person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay. He said we have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to det He said, we have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. That's a concentration camp. If you just detain a bunch of people living and working in America and then put them somewhere and don't charge them with a crime or anything.

Well, I don't see this in here. And we also, it's a torture concentration camp, as we've been familiar with Guantanamo. I will just say real quick, real shame that none of our previous presidents got to shut that place down. Yeah, what a bummer. But it still exists.

Maybe all presidents are bad too. This one's worse, let's be clear. I don't know what it is that he said, there was some clip and then quote tweet that I seen going around and essentially saying, and yeah, we'll put them in Guantanamo Bay because we can't trust, we can't even trust the home countries.

We can't send them back because we can't trust them not to send them back to us. So that's why we're putting them in Guantanamo Bay. And somebody says, and then what? And then what? What are you doing? What are we doing? You're just gonna keep them there?

Oh, eventually. In a concentrated area. Yeah. In a concentrated area. And it's gonna be like a camp, it's fun. It'll be like a fun camp, yeah. It'll be a fun, camp. Yeah, it'd be a fun Fun camp where you concentrate like this

You know, they're just able to Dissemble and qualify everything So they'll be like well, no, this is not like that. Obviously you're making allusions to the Nazis. Not everything is like a Nazi allusions to the Nazis. Not everything is like a Nazi. Debatable. A lot of things right now are like Nazis. But if you just look at what the definition of some of what the Nazis did was, or what we did during World War II in Japanese internment camps, there's a lot of stuff in history, so you don't just have to go to Nazis. No, but yeah, it's fascist. It's illegal According not that anyone cares but according to the Constitution it's illegal and has been illegal what we've been doing there for Well, they're gonna rewrite the Constitution. They're gonna have a new Constitution a couple years

Yeah, there's so there's so much. Um, yeah, it's really really chilling stuff. That's not surprising We haven't even mentioned There's so much. Yeah, it's really, really chilling stuff that's not surprising. We haven't even mentioned what he's been saying about Gaza. And oh my God. And his very clear intentions there that were obvious last year and obvious now. He his plan for the Gaza Strip is to clean out the whole thing. That's another thing that made me cry this week. Yeah, it's, so like a cleansing. Well, when you play something that's a cleansing,

it's synonymous, yeah. Pretty strong language there. It's all horrific, I don't know. It's just, it's all so overwhelming. Because yes, this is something that we explicitly said many times on this specific show. No, we don't think Donald Trump will get some sort of stupid credit for ending the war and then be so unbelievably terrible

for the people of Palestine. And that's what we've been saying. That's a part of why it was so overwhelmingly frustrating in the election to also see our candidate doing jack shit, but knowing that our candidate would also be better for Palestinians in the long run, but doing nothing actionable in the meantime, it's just a fucking mess.

I'm furious. I'm furious. I'm furious. Yeah, it's infuriating. And even now you're still seeing so much like, well, this is what you wanted folks. No, it's not. Do you think we criticized

Joe Biden because we wanted him to lose? No, the criticism was so that he would win. And then Kamala Harris, it was so that she would win. Like everything that was said wasn't like we want to undermine her and make sure Trump wins. No, no, no. We knew that these were issues that were important that needed to be vocally defended and discussed in a different way and action needed to be taken so that she would win. And now they're like, well, this is what you want to know. This is what you wanted. Fuck off. It sucks.

Did you see that Mattie Glacius blog post this week where he said, throw Biden under the bus. Sleepy Joe landed us in this mess with bad selfish decisions. I haven't read it, so I don't know what decisions he calls out, but dude, stop. Bro, I can't. So many people sharing that. I co-sign. You spent four years saying Joe Biden was the sharpest man in the world.

You said he could dunk on everybody. Like, and in fairness, he later said he was wrong about that. Like, great, great. But like, just this, like I'm, that is a whole other conversation to the, the lack of actual introspection and just like the, the sort of like this reclaiming of like, wow, we need to do this. Oh, you mean the thing that like we other people have been saying for years. And now everyone needs to listen to you because you're finally coming around to something that was obvious for so long. Maybe you're like a little behind and will continue to be a little behind on what needs to happen.

Or we can just blame trans people. We can do that. Speaking of which. Speaking of which, a lot of executive orders about that. Yeah, speaking of not doing that, a few executive orders banning any gender affirming care for people under 19 odd age to choose, whatever, 18 year olds or legal adults.

I don't understand that. And also defining, defining, it's an executive order, defines that there are two sexes, male and female. We have an entire episode, it's about an hour long about that. It's not like, it doesn't actually directly address the most recent executive order because that happened a day before the video was released. But it works out that it really does address that that executive order in a lot of different

ways. And so while we don't have time necessarily to really unpack that, we urge you to check out that. It's an hour long and I hope it helps. I hope it does a good job in defending these kinds of things because first people under the bus are trans people. I want to shout out our writer, L. Yermin, who's been working on this for a while. We released this video yesterday, so Wednesday of this week, and the response on Twitter to me was shocking,

and I shouldn't be, because it's Twitter, but it's quite ugly, and even amongst some people presumably that watch our shows and videos and like some of our videos, but that is Twitter and maybe that's just somebody trolling people. I don't know, but I would also urge you to look at the comments on YouTube because there is an overwhelming amount of comments from people sharing their stories. And that is where community lies.

If you dig into the healthy spaces and you see what other people are saying and relating to each other, and I found it comforting personally, and I'm not trans. And so if you're feeling scared, if you're feeling targeted, I hope you have the, and if you're feeling scared, if you're feeling targeted,

I hope you have the, and if you have the space, because I know it's also hard to consume all this content, check it out and then check out some of the comments. I mean, I don't know, maybe there's some bad ones buried in there, but so many stories of people talking about their experiences and people saying what, that they detransition, a lot of people talking about their experiences and people saying what, that they detransition, a lot of people saying that they detransitioned solely because of social pressure.

Of not being accepted. The pressure that we talked about in the episode, yeah. And then lots of people saying they detransitioned and then retransitioned. There's so much misinformation. There's so much bullshit being circulated around this, but we need to just keep checking in and remembering the humanity

of the people being affected here. And it's so scary and ugly and hateful. But there, there is a lot of beauty out there to be found in the community is my point. And yeah, so completely. Yeah. And I think, I mean, yeah, time I worked out, it's just this kind of thing. It seems like so many people don't care. And like, even like you're saying, a lot of some of the comments were like, why are you talking about this? It's important actually. Right away, everybody blaming the trans issue

on Trump winning and all this sort of stuff. It is like, you know, first they came for like, it is just, I don't know, it's came for, like, it is just, I don't know, it's important, I think, to- I do too. I'd apologetically defend trans people. So people, you know what the things I'm saying is like, look at all this other stuff going on. Like, yes, of course, we're gonna talk about that.

Like we do. We have episodes in the work for months. Yeah. Just a reminder that it's not an overnight process. Sometimes, sometimes Dave, our head writer just knocks out a really amazing script that can be fast responding. But a lot of our topics we spend,

which you guys like, I think, a lot of time researching and fact checking and dialing in. Yeah, we don't wanna just be impulsive and like, oh, we got to say something. You don't always have to say something. That's what this show is for. Exactly. Or we force you to say things.

Yeah, we don't need to, sorry if we're talking too much about comments and things and the process, but instead of the actual issue. But I don't know how to end the sentence. No, that is. I'm not going to. I agree. I guess that counts as how to end this sentence. No, that is. I'm not gonna. I agree. I guess that counts as an end of the sentence.

The point was we're out of time today, but we want you to know that we, this is forefront of our minds and we do have an hour long video on this topic. And yeah, I specifically am mentioning the comments because there is a bunch of great ones on YouTube. Yes, it's really positive. And I want you to go there and check it out

if you think that will be a healthy experience for you. Yes. End of sentence. End of sentence. End of show maybe? I don't know, y'all, I think it's time. This feels like broken record already. So much to get through and we're really working on getting

through things quicker while also giving the appropriate amount of time. I don't know, maybe we'll do more shows in the future. Who knows? Yeah, we're really trying to figure out the best way to address all this stuff. It is overwhelming every day to find out the new chaotic distraction or chaotic actual thing that is important. And it's a few of them every single day. And we're going to try to get to everything and not rush important topics. But sometimes we might. So we're sorry. I personally feel better at the end of this episode than I did at the beginning. There is something cathartic about getting to talk and go through it with like minds and so.

Oh, he wants to deport pro-Palestinian protesters. Oh, that's another fun one. We forgot to mention that. I'm so sorry, we forgot to mention that. That's fucked up. I did actually want to point out that, hey, fucked up. And also, I don't want to point out that, hey, fucked up. And also, I don't want to make this about Democrats again,

but the Democrats spent about a year demonizing the protesters and calling them terrorists and pro-Hamas terrorists. And maybe they shouldn't have done that because it would have made it less easy for Trump to be like, yeah, we're gonna get rid of them. Cody, not to put you on the spot, but you totally predicted this too.

I did say this. I did say this was going to happen and they shouldn't be doing what they were doing at the time because it would lead to exactly this happening. Yeah. But whatever. Anyway, I was in the middle of telling people how grateful I am for them, but that was a very cool thing.

No, I know, I'm sorry. I was just like, oh right, the thing. Don't be sorry. It underscores my point, which is that there's so much. But we're going to be doing our best. And like and subscribe. I also just read breaking news, not to you listening, but to us now.

A preliminary FAA report says staffing in the air traffic control tower at Reagan National was not normal last night That's the quote not normal. Well, well one controller managing both helicopters in the vicinity and planes One one doing both. This is typically a two-person thing and they did that change We don't know that part yet. There I don't we, but we'll find out. We don't know yet. Okay, great. Maybe not planned. Looking forward to all of this information.

Wowza. Wowza. Shocker. All right, guys. What was I saying? Like and subscribe. Wowza, like and subscribe. Leave a nice comment.

I just wanna say one thing to the audio listeners. Do it. People are loving it over here on the video side. They are, they like it. I really wanna give her a shot. I love your songs. Most importantly, what I wanna say is, sincerely, we love you very much.

I mean, that made it sound not sincere. Well, that's every time though. It's sincere every time. We love you very much. Much. Much. Hey girlies, I'm Cody Rigsby. And I'm Andrew Chappelle.

We're here to announce our brand new podcast, Tactful Pettiness. Now on Podcast One. We have a lot of opinions. Flip flops in New York City? You don't love yourself. If I'm not seated, I'm not tipping. Do I want to see a picture of your baby? No.

If I have to scroll more than 10 seconds, he's not cute. Settling gets you an ugly boyfriend. So we're gonna help you out. We sure are, because we have the life expertise. We have mastered throwing shade with intention. We are in the business of helping you find and keep your man. And we're here to teach you the fine art of tactful pettiness. Join us each week as we traverse the world of pop culture, chat with our celebrity friends,

and show you how to accept yourself without taking life too seriously. Get new episodes of tactful pettiness with me, Cody Rigsby. And me, Andrew Chappelle. Every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and anywhere you get your podcasts. Stay petty, bestie.