It Could Happen Here Weekly 176

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
to let you know this is a compilation episode, So
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

(00:23):
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's just me
James today and I'm joined by Jamie who is a librarian,
and we are here to discuss the pending federal cuts
on library funding and I guess years of attacks on
library funding. So welcome to the show. Jamie, thanks for
joining us.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Hi, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, this is really great for me because I have
been trying to find librarian for a very long time
to talk to us on the podcast. I understand that
lots of people have been like really concerned that we
cover this, but also very afraid for their jobs, which
is a rough position to be in, So thank you
for coming on. I thought we'd start with like there
was an executive order on the fourteenth of March I
think it was called something like further something the federal bureaucracy, cutting, slashing, diminishing, whatever,

(01:15):
you know, I don't really care. One of the outcomes
of this was I believe the Trump administration moving towards
a complete closure of IMLS. Is that right?

Speaker 3 (01:26):
So it depends upon how much joj and Trump and
company are going to listen to Congress, because Congress has
already funded IMLS, just the Institute of Museum and Library
Services for this year, so that money already exists, it's
already been allocated, and so in theory, they should be

(01:47):
good for at least a year, and then next year
when the budget comes up again, it should be up
to Congress because Congress created this institution and Congress funds it.
But the Executive Order and the commentary on it does
say that they would like to dissolve it kind of
as soon as possible, definitely next year. So it's really
up in the air about how fast things would move,

(02:09):
what exactly would happen, if it would be this year,
if it'd be next year, whether anyone's going to listen
to Congress.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, we will find out, I guess. So can you
explain for listeners who aren't familiar what IMLS is and
what it does.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yeah, So it's, as I said, the Institute of Museum
and Library Services, And so basically they are allocated money
by Congress every year and then they hand it out
to states, especially them, who kind of break it down
into other grants. They give grants to states and libraries
and institutions for things that museums and libraries do. So

(02:46):
that includes things like on the museum side, maybe you know,
putting together programming or doing big digitization projects. I used
to work at an institution where we had a grant
that did a lot of digitization of historic documents. And
on the library side, they do all sorts of stuff,
especially for public libraries. They end up funding things like

(03:09):
summer reading programs, equipment, especially for Internet access, you know,
all this stuff related to job training and those services
that libraries offer. And interlibrary loan is a big one,
so that people can access materials of their library doesn't hold,
but it's held by other libraries. And rural libraries and
tribal libraries especially really really benefit from this. Every single
state and territory in the country gets these funds.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Okay, yeah, I was, I was wondering why who fund
it interlibrary loans so that they're the ones who facilitate
like the trandsporting of the books.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, well, you know, depending on how your library, some
libraries will fund it from their operations budget. But if okay,
you know, especially for small rural public libraries where that
might be very expensive, that is one thing that these
grants go to is interlibrary loan.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Okay. Yeah, So there are lots of very important services.
And what would it mean if we didn't have that
IMLS budget at all? Like, what would it mean especially
for like, like you said, those kind of libraries that
are financially I guess more marginalized in tribal libraries and
rural areas and stuff.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
So I first want to mention that the entire budget
of IMLS for twenty twenty four was something like two
hundred and sixty six million dollars. We're not talking about
huge sums of money in terms of the federal government.
It comes out to about seventy five percent per person
in the country. So yeah, we're not going to be
saving on our taxes if this goes away, but that
money makes a really big difference. So even smaller states

(04:29):
that you know, maybe have a million people in it,
might see a couple million dollars of these grants per year.
And so what that would mean is that the things
that maybe not all of them, but most of the
thing that these grants cover would not be there. So
that means that there wouldn't be summer reading in some places.
That means that they wouldn't be able to buy the

(04:52):
hot spots that they lend out to people who don't
have internet at home. That means that maybe there wouldn't
be the class that teaches your grandma how to not
get caught in a fishing scam. So all sorts of things,
those things just wouldn't be there because there's probably not,
especially in red states, other funds that are going to
come to cover that.

Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yeah, Like I think I was looking online and that
by Judy something, it's something like zero point zero zero
three percent of the federal budget is going to It's trivial.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
It's so small, right, Yeah, you could like take the
I don't know, the gold toilets away from the Navy
and cover it in yeah, right, Like it's so small, yeah, yeah,
and yet it has this enormous outsized impact. You know,
the statistics say that every dollar spent on imls returns
two dollars to the economy. So it's actually, if you're

(05:40):
going to measure it that way, highly beneficial, especially to
these more marginalized areas.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Yeah, maybe we should talk about that because I think
if people like maybe they just don't happen to go
to the library, maybe they don't you know, realize they
have services they need, or maybe they don't live in
the US. The library is not just a place where
you can go and borrow the books, right, Can you
explain some of the services that libraries provide, like you
mentioned some, but they really help people.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah, So, in for better or for worse, public libraries
in the United States have become the social safety net
of last resort because they already exist almost everywhere and
it's so hard to get you know, not right now,
but even in the past couple decades, other social programs
started in many parts of the US that things kind

(06:25):
of just get lumped into the libraries. So now you
get your tax forms there, maybe they have a social
worker on staff. It's the place that homeless folks can
sit when it's snowing.

Speaker 4 (06:33):
Yeah, so that kind of is like a little bit.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
Of side from what we're talking about right here, but
I really do want to point out that public libraries
have become the social safety net in many many places,
so that aside, you know, offerings of aside from books
and other media including ebooks, audiobooks, movies, and lots of formats, magazines, newspapers,

(06:55):
there are tons of classes about all sorts of things,
especially technology claus It's a place that a lot of
people it's their only reliable Internet access. So you know,
in twenty twenty five, you can't do mostly anything without
the internet. You can't get a job without the internet,
you can't maybe pay your bills without the internet. So
that's a reliable place that people who don't have internet

(07:17):
for various reasons. Maybe they live so far out in
the country that just doesn't go there unless you have
satellite right even now, or maybe you can't afford it
or whatever, or there's one computer in your house and
there's six kids and someone has to do their homework,
so what everyone else is going to do, so then
the computers themselves. And then also the other thing that
I am less also does is those grants will sometimes
purchase research databases. So if people kids, especially are trying

(07:41):
to do their homework. Again, like children's and teens programming
is another thing between homework help, social things clubs. So
in a lot of places where there's not much going on,
it's one of the places where young people can go
in the afternoon or on the weekend and not be
getting in trouble, either because they're making trouble or the
adults think they are. Because there's somewhere productive to be.

(08:02):
There's somewhere that's inside supervised or something to do. And
so that's the kind of stuff we talk about in
normal times when we're trying to fight for like weekend
service or later hours. But if we're looking at it
in the lens of IMLS, the building might be open,
maybe because maybe they have the foundational operationals. But but
then there won't be these programs, there won't be these resources.

(08:23):
There will just be a bunch of books on the shelves.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, It's like, I don't know, I'm amazed how many
of my friends and neighbors don't understand how much celebrity does.
Like I'm forever Like San Diego A, housing prices are
ridiculous and no one seems to want them to not
be ridiculous with lots of us do, but we don't
get to choose it. And so like we have a
larger house population, and I'm always like helping my in

(08:46):
house neighbors go to the library and give them a
ride or whatever so they can yet, like you say,
access internet services life for benefits.

Speaker 3 (08:53):
Yeah, or just like sit and read the paper and
know what's going on in the world.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yeah, and like not get harassed by the cops just
for existing, which is the rest of their existence here. Certainly. Yeah,
these are massively important. I think most people like have
it no one because there's not really a big like
fuck the library's movement, you know, like I think people
I mean, yeah, I guess, yeah, I guess that's the
whole Like people should only read stories if they conformed

(09:20):
and whatnot. Yeah, well fuck those people absolutely. Yeah. Talking
of fuck those people, we unfortunately have to pivot to ads,
so you know, here is some unfortunate advertisements. All right,

(09:43):
we're back talking to people I dislike. Actually, San Diego
mayor Todd Gloria, who was elected in twenty twenty and
re elected shamefully this year, which is very disappointing. One
of his first actions was to propose a budget which
increased the bunding to the police, surprise, and decrease the
funding to the libraries. It would lead to them closing

(10:03):
for an extra day. Right, and this is our quote
unquote progressive mayor, who you know has been anything but
but this isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, right. I've spoken
since then to librarians around the country who, for the
last at least half decade have faced funding cuts. Can
you explain, like, why doesn't the state see value in

(10:26):
these services? I mean, I don't wanted to speak for
you know, the Democrats defunding the libraries to give the
cops more money, but can you explain, like why there
has been this ongoing assault on library budgets.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
So you know, you're talking about the last decade and
a half decade. I think we can really trace it
back much farther, at least thirty years to the Clinton administration. Actually, okay,
I want to talk about the Democrats, but even you know,
the roots farther back than that, because we have a
neo liberal problem. Right, So it's basically the idea that
all activities should generate obvious immediate monetary profit, that everything

(10:59):
should be run by a business, that everything should be
subject to the market, quote unquote, And so that's where
we are with libraries. Is that even though I can
sit here and say every dollar that the IMLS spends
generates two dollars of economic activity, then that somehow isn't
even good enough because when the powers that be look
at libraries, they just see money being flushed down the

(11:21):
toilet and that's the only way they can measure anything.
So if you look at it and you're just saying, well,
this is a place we spend money. This doesn't create money,
This doesn't make more money happen. The idea that everything
should be run by a business and everything is it
should be subject to market logics, that that would say, well,
if we're going to subject everything to market logics, libraries

(11:43):
have no value because we're only measuring it. And can
this make the balance sheet? Can this make number go up?

Speaker 5 (11:49):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (11:50):
And even though libraries do make number go up, it's
not obvious. You can't make it obvious. There's no direct
line between what libraries do and number go up, even
though there are actually is for example with IMLS. So
you know, starting during the Clinton administration, when the federal
government changed, and how the federal government work changed very
much under the guise of increasing service quality, but what

(12:14):
they actually did was lay off a quarter million workers
and you know, turn everything into contract work instead of
regular labor. And that I think filtered down from the
federal level into states and municipalities, so that those levels
of government too also started to look at how they
ran their government things. And in many places public libraries

(12:39):
are arms of local government. That those two should also
be run like a business and be subject to market logics,
and therefore number does not go up. We don't value this,
and that's basically it is that you know. There, it's
hard now that we've had thirty years of overt neoliberalism
in our government system and a couple decades more of

(13:01):
less obvious versions of it to make government, which is
now being run like a business, even in the best
of times, value things that aren't that aren't valued strictly monetarily, right,
So there's no cultural value. And even if the monetary
value isn't extremely obvious, if somehow doesn't.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
Count, yeah, yeah, I guess it. Kind of. I used
to lecture it, so do lecture a university actually starting
again next month, but like we pivoted towards like everything
has to be stem in education Germany because.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
So that'll make money or something.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah, I don't know why, because like Bill Gates make
the line go up, and yeah, we lost so much
that has not just intangible value you say, but actual
tangible value, very very obvious value. But nonetheless, like like
you say, it's not easy to purn on a graph,
so it disappears.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Right, and then you know, even though cops also don't
make money, yeah, in a direct sense, somehow we can
still fund that. So it really shows that like in
the case of where you are, but the carcel solution
is now the solution we have. Yeah, and when we
sit here as abolitionists and we say, well, let's get
rid of all that stuff, and people say, well, what
are you going to do instead, our answer is often

(14:09):
it would be so different that it wouldn't be necessary,
so we'd have prevention of the entire situation. And that's
one of the things that libraries offer is prevention of
the entire situation, making vaslavs of the carcial state unnecessary.
So there's a conscious choice there, especially when money is
being taken out of the balance sheets of a city
government from the libraries and put into the cops of
this carcural choice of saying, we'd rather everyone in life

(14:32):
is shit, so we can throw them in jail. Then
everyone have a nice life and no one would have
to go to jail.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, and then they can come read a book instead,
and yeah, it would be nice. It reminds me of
one of the big projects of the anarchists in Spain
in the nineteen thirties was to create popular education centers,
which included libraries, right, And they funded these entirely. They
were not funded by the state. The state was not
interested in making libraries in nineteen twenties ninety thirties in Spain,
and they funded them from popular subscription and from people

(15:00):
union dues, and they built these atta nails which are
now really beautiful places. So one of the places I
did my PhD in Barcelona, and like, I wonder if
there is I guess it's it's very hard for us
to conceive of like a library without the state in
the United States, right, And it like rich people putting
little libraries in in their middle class neighborhoods is not

(15:21):
the same thing, right, As much as they'd like to
think it is like your little phone box library. It
is not replacing these services. So like, is there a
model for like recreating this in a way that isn't
reliant on the state, which seems increasingly hostile to it.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
I think there's a couple models, and it depends upon
how far down the revelution you go. So the example
you gave of Spain, we have contemporary with that and
slightly more recent versions of that in the US. So
the Workmen's Circle, now the workers circle, they funded really
wonderful culture programs, including libraries. Unions often had libraries, especially
back when they used to have more buildings, like my union.

(15:59):
I'm part of my union, and aside from just like
being where I work, we don't necessarily have a building
per se. Yeah, So those things have always existed, especially
in the workmen circle in ethnic communities who were trying
to preserve a culture. And that's something that fit into
twentieth century capitalism. And so if we go farther than

(16:20):
the Revolution, I read a really great pamphlet recently from
the seventies, actually that was from the UK, and it
kind of discussed libraries. You know, if we make it
through the revolution a little bit as being operated as
under a syndicalist model where workers and patrons is what
we call them now, that wouldn't be quite that split.

(16:40):
Then would be able to govern and run these libraries.
And there was a really great diagram. So there's definitely
been ideas for a long time about what this could
look like.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Yeah, yeah, I guess in the collective's economy of revolutionary Barcelona,
library still existed at the nails existed, and I'm sure
it was a long a syndicalist model because everything was
so Yeah, I think that's like a good thing for
people to look towards. I want to stop and take
one more break, and then I want to talk about
what people can do to protect libraries. All right, we

(17:21):
are back so currently, Like I mean, this is like
a funding cliff for the library system, right, I suppose
it's hard to say, but like, how long would it
take before people stop seeing these services if DOGE was
to start doging tomorrow?

Speaker 3 (17:34):
I honestly can't tell, you know, I think that people
it really doesn't. It's hard to say now, right because
we do have the funding there. It just will it
actually happen? Will the thing happen?

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (17:47):
That has already been allocated. I think we have a
little bit of time, but I would expect if that
congressional isn't expressed that, especially when summer reading rolls around,
will really start to see it, because that's something that
a lot of people depend on to keep their kids
occupied during the summer. Yeah, and especially out you know,

(18:07):
in red states and rural areas. It's going to be
very much like the I never thought the leopards were
going to eat my face.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yeah, yeah, kind of situation, which is sad, like because
it's someone's kid who doesn't get to go to the
library very.

Speaker 4 (18:20):
Often, right right, right.

Speaker 3 (18:22):
That sucks, you know, because it's going to be a
lot of a lot of kids, especially without those resources.

Speaker 4 (18:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
I think about like how like I wouldn't have survived
my undergraduate without libraries book only grad school books are
super expensive, especially academic books, and like I relied very
heavily on intolibrary loan.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
Yeah. And this is you know, at the university level,
to be sure, where books are very expensive. Yeah, but
at the public and school library level, you know, this
is exactly why this is happening, is because there is
this ongoing narrative from the last few decades where where people,
especially like queer kids, say that the library saves their lives. Yeah,
young people of color saying like this is the only
place I could see myself in culture by reading these books.

(19:06):
So of course, of course this is happening because that
you know, they want to take that away.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a place where people can kind
of exist yeah without that. Yeah, So let's talk about, like,
how can people engage to protect their libraries. What can
they do?

Speaker 6 (19:22):
What?

Speaker 2 (19:22):
I like some action items they can take.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
I unfortunately don't have great news. I don't think, you know,
because of the way this is working, and it is
so much about just like raw brute power that no
one at the federal government or even state governments for
the most part, seems to be able to counter. It's
just like not something they can conceive of, Yeah, because
they already are doing things that supposedly shouldn't be allowed. Right,

(19:45):
We've already had the congressional funding. This should have a
congressional you know, this is passed by Congress, and yet
an executive order and Elon Muskin undo it.

Speaker 5 (19:52):
Right.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
If things were working, this wouldn't be happening, right, So
we are really kind of down down the line a
little bit in what we can do and how effective
it's going to be. That said, there are things we
can do. A lot of them are the things that
liberals usually do, which is like calling your senator over
and over and over again every day, and your representatives

(20:13):
and your state or state government too, to make sure
that your state government is paying attention to what they're
going to lose. There are certainly, you know, things one
can sign on to for major library organizations. The ALA
has been writing a lot, and less formal organizations than that.
I think one thing that we can always be doing,
not just in the situation, but if you want to

(20:35):
be supporting libraries, one of the best thing and easiest
things you can do is go get a library card
if you don't already have one, and use your damn library.
There's probably something there that you want and that actually
really does help. Because libraries, whether it's with something like
IMLS or whether it's grants from foundations and or local funders,
you know, their local government are better able to make

(20:58):
their argument for why they should be given money if
they have good statistics to say we had ten percent
more readers this year. You know the number of books
we loan this year is higher than it's ever been.
People are coming to our events and droves that kind
of you know, success breeds success. If they can show
that to potential funders, they're more likely to get money.
So don't about the read the book. Just check the

(21:21):
book out, keep it for we can give it back,
you know, on time. Make those numbers go up.

Speaker 7 (21:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah, And you can even like, let's say you're not
inclined to go to the library for whatever reason and
you don't like going out, or worried about COVID or
something like, you can do most of this online, right, Like,
if you have Libby, you can certainly you can borrow books.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
You can borrow ebooks and audiobooks from Libby. Some libraries
have streaming movies. A lot of libraries have still either
all online or hybrid events that you can watch rather
than having to go to the event at the library.
You know, the one thing about about some of those
streaming services and Libby that I will caution about is
that you're data is less secure. If that's something you're

(22:01):
concerned about, then it would be borrowing paper books. It's
good to be because most libraries, even in the kind
of tech dystopian future we live in, do a decent job,
or at least try to be good about your borrowing
data when you borrow hard copies. But because things like
Libby and the streaming services are third party integrations, those

(22:23):
collect some amount of use data. So it's absolutely great
to use those. But I would caution that if if
you are a person who has a very high front
model and you want to be careful about your data,
go for the paper.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
Okay, yeah, yeah, it's kind nicer, nicer experience to read
a paper book as well. It is what about like
if people I know lots of people who are librarians
listen see email me like is their way that they
can organize? Who is the way the people are organizing,
either to prevent this or like as a way of
harm reduction, right, like, as a way of reducing the

(22:57):
damage to the state can do to people's access to Yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:00):
So there are a few more radical organizations that I
think are worth paying attention to. My favorite is Library
Freedom Project. They're really wonderful and more willing to say
the thing without bullshit, Yeah, the thing that you know.
I would obviously urge every worker to do this, but
if you're if your workplace is not unionized, start working
on that. Yeah, that will always give you more power,

(23:24):
So you should you should start trying to organize your workplace.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah, definitely, hopefully hopey there's still time for people to
do that.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
Yeah, who knows where that's going to go, but you
can at least try.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
It's still legal now, yeah, right when it starts, and like,
regardless of what happens, Like, we're stronger in this together
than we are a part. And the unions have done
a lot to prevent fascism in the past.

Speaker 3 (23:47):
And similarly, there are depending upon what state you live in,
there might be a state library organization that is active
and that would be just a good way to make
connections with other libraries near you and their librarians. And
you know, maybe if you do lose some of your funding,
you can put your heads together and you know, use
each other's resources and have joint programming and things like that.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
That makes sense. Are people like attempting so some of
the stuff i mls have is like online archives. Are
people attempting to somehow to download that in order to
preserve it in the event that it goes away?

Speaker 8 (24:21):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (24:21):
That that's really is that not what's a threat?

Speaker 3 (24:25):
That's not really what we Yeah, I think that there
are other kind of data rescue projects with the federal
government that have better data than that. IMLS doesn't get
that much data, So I wouldn't be too concerned with.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
That, Okay, So it's more like along the workplace organizing side.

Speaker 3 (24:41):
Yeah, it's definitely like trying to figure out to make
how to make your and the libraries around you keep
going and offering the things to your communities that they've
been offering.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
Yeah, definitely, it would be pretty tragic, Like there's a
library not so far from my house, Like I can
rent my bike do it. I get it all the time,
and it would be be really tragic to be without that. Yeah,
So yeah, please continue to organize your libraries. Is there
anything else that you'd like to plug or suggest people?

Speaker 5 (25:08):
Like?

Speaker 2 (25:08):
It's a pretty bleak time generally, and I think a
lot of us take refuge, especially in reading. Actually think
it's a way you can escape terrible things. Is there
anything else you'd like to kind of suggest for people
as we dive deeper into fascism every day at the moment.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
I think in libraries and elsewhere where. It's just being
able to offer a counter narrative, like not buying into
the idea that the library is a money hole. You know,
it can only be valued monetarily. So when you hear that,
maybe start going to your library's board meetings and when
you hear those kinds of things said, get online for

(25:46):
the comments and offer a different narrative. And you can
do that all over your life in different in different ways.
When you hear that narrative that is monetary and neoliberal
and harmful, offer a different one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
I think it's like, it's so sad to think that
we should have to quantify the value of everything monetarity,
but especially something like a library, like so many people
have had such positive engagements with them which have nothing
to do with the with the cash next. The's sort
of like generating revenue and that's what makes them valuable
and what makes them special sometimes. So yeah, hopefully people,

(26:21):
hopefully people can advocate for that. How would you find
your library board meeting if you wanted to look?

Speaker 3 (26:25):
If you you're a library, if you have a public
library near you, they should have a website and the
website should have an events page that includes board meetings.
Hopefully other information about your library's board as well, and
if you can't find it, maybe call it the library
and ask. I'll probably just tell you they're really good
at information there.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah, yeah, that is the thing that they do. All right, Well,
thank you so much for joining us, Jamie. That was
that was great. It was really really helpful.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 5 (27:11):
Hey and welcome. Take it happen here. Today we'll continue
our journey through Latin American anarchism where we last left
off with a look at the anarchist history of Uruguay.
We talked about Uruguay's general history, it's radical influences anarchism,
this period of popularity in the early twentieth century, it's
radical experiments and it's cultural influence. So today James and I,

(27:36):
because James is here, Hello, James.

Speaker 4 (27:38):
Hi Andrew.

Speaker 5 (27:39):
Today we're going to look at what Iuruguaian anarchists have
been up to from the fifties onward, paying special attentions
the activity of the Ferracion Anarchista Uruguaya and the idea
of especifismo. By the way, as James is indicated, I
am Andrew Andrew Saige. You can find me on YouTube
as Andrewism. But all that aside, let's get into it.

(28:02):
The Feracion Anarchista Irguaya or FAU, was founded in Montevideo, Uruguay,
in nineteen fifty six. According to Paul Sharki in the
Feracion and Aquista Iraguaia, the FAU had very strong work
in class roots, as many of the militans came from
labor heavy districts like Zero, which definitely shaped their outlook.

(28:25):
The FAU was also very much emphasized in direct action
over electoral strategies. It favored armed struggle as a necessity
in reaction to save repression and economic exploitation, and the
FAU had a very strong stance against Marxist Leninism. Although

(28:45):
some members sympathized with aspects of Marxism, many of them
resisted to bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies that influenced that miliu.
Unlike in many other Latin American countries, as you may
have recalled us covering in the past, anarchism persisted in
mainstream relevance even after the rise of the Bolsheviks and

(29:06):
the influence globally, and of course the coincide and fall
of the anarchists in Spain. According to all of us
Zenkos sixty five years of revolution, the FAU came about
in a time when u requires prosperity coming out of
World War two had come to an end, as its
agricultural exports were no longer needed to feed the alli's
massive standing armies. This economic downturn triggered major social unrest,

(29:30):
which the anarchist presence was able to spring upon. One
such instance of unrest involved one hundred and fifty thousand
workers going on strike in Salidarity with their fellow workers
in a tire factory. During the strike and after, the
FAU involved students, unionists, intellectuals, community organizers, and even a
few exiles from the Spanish Civil War to build up

(29:52):
a more united labor movement. So rather than having unions
split along political ideological affiliations like moderates, socialists, anarchists, right
populists and so on, there'll be one big tent just
focused on labor. Now, I personally think a big tent
has its benefits and its drawbacks, as with any other strategy.

(30:15):
I think the benefit is obviously that it has the
ability to mobilize a large number of people. But I
think the difficulty in the drawback is that having so
many affiliations under that big tent can mean it there's
not really much of a shared goal left behind, Like, yeah,
the anarchists want anarchy, the right populists might just want
to secure some benefits and protections, and the socialists will

(30:38):
be interested in launching a party. Sure they all proclaim
to have some interest on the side of the workers
or how that manifests looks different from group to group.
But we'll see how that big tent approach turned out
for the FAU. So they formed the National Confederation of
Workers or CNT as that big tent in nineteen sixty four,

(31:01):
but even before that there was a split, not too
much of a surprise. After the Cuban Revolution, the FAU
is actually divided between those who were opposed to Castro
and those who critically supported the revolution. Those who were
opposed to Castro eventually broke away from the FAU in
nineteen sixty three as Castro entrenched himself in the Soviet Bloc,

(31:25):
while those who remained in the FAU were critical of
Castro and his government but still supported the fall of Batista.
Of course, with the Cuban Revolution, came that very noticeable
shift in American foreign policy. They saw that with all
that happening right in their backyard, they need to take

(31:46):
a very different approach if they wanted to win the
Cold War. Such a Zignco actually describes how in nineteen
sixty one JFK changed the approach of the now infamous
School of the Americas from preparing for Soviet invasion to
prepare in for anti communist counterinsurgency against homegrown revolutions. So

(32:07):
as a result, militaries across Latin America became more right
wing and seized power for themselves to protect civilians from
the danger of their rights. In nineteen sixty four, it
was Brazil, in nineteen sixty eight, it was Peru, in
nineteen seventy three was Chile, and Uruguay fell, and in
nineteen seventy six Argentina fell. So Zenko noted in jest,

(32:31):
over a decade, Uruguayan and anarchists would becomes surrounded by
right wing dictatorships which collaborated to round up and extillminate
left wing dissidents of all flavors. Not to mention, the
economic situation wasn't exactly getting better. According to Paul Sharky.
Between nineteen fifty five and nineteen fifty nine, the cost

(32:53):
of living doubled and wages did not keep pace. By
nineteen sixty five, inflation was running one hundred percent ABU
nineteen sixty seven at one hundred and forty percent madness.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah, well just wait and see, Andrew, Oh yea, yeah,
we are living in some interesting times.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
Yeah, yeah, you never know.

Speaker 5 (33:16):
So the president that preceded the military dictator imposed a
wage freeze and devalue the currency. That was his bright idea,
his solution to the crisis. So people's lives were obviously
getting worse and the time had come for some decisive action.

(33:36):
So the CNT aided in strikes across sectors and even
tried to call for a general strike as the encle rights.
The FAU decided that they were going to take on
a strategy of urban guerrilla warfare, so they tapped into
a coalition of leftist groups to robin hood food from
the corporations to be able to the poor. Awesome, have

(33:57):
just hit it, Yeah, But sadly the coalition couldn't last
very long. Differences in strategy would lead to the FAU
doing its thing by building defense councils similar to those
organized in the Spanish Civil War.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (34:10):
Interesting, while the other groups copied a Sheikwavara style gorilla
army approach, forming the National Liberation Movement to Permeros or
the MLNT.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
The existential debate among anarchists in arms is this that
you've just like highlighted, right, it's need we form authoritarian
structures similar to those using, for example, the Cuban Revolution,
the Russian Revolution, these kind of statist revolutions which characterize
the left in the twentieth century in some ways. Or

(34:43):
is it possible for us to go from our community
defense and the defense committees like the six person groups
that the CNT organized in Spain to a more egalitarian
large formation, like a like a truly revolutionary army. And
like the split that you're talking about is the split
that almost every movement had.

Speaker 5 (35:03):
Yeah. Although the mlent T was necessarily anarchists.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
Right, they were like following the Castro model, Is that right?
Like the Shagha Vara kind of guerrilla warfare.

Speaker 5 (35:14):
Doctrine, pretty much the Gervara sort of model.

Speaker 8 (35:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (35:18):
Although I'm glad that you bring up this point because
it's actually something that I was writing about earlier today
in preparation for a video.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
Interesting.

Speaker 5 (35:28):
I think there's a conflation that anarchists need to be
careful with between leadership in the sense of authority, as
in the right to command and control and that kind
of thing, versus leadership in the sense of guidance, advice, coordination, expertise.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (35:48):
I think that just as that you might have even
you might have an anarchist construction collective, right and they're
building a house, you might have something like foreman who
is coordinating all the actions and all the different builders
and all the different treatsment of engaging in to ensure
that the different parts of the house come together cohesively

(36:11):
and seamlessly, that nobody is like stepping on anybody's tools,
that everything is being done in a proper timement. That
is an instance where there will be coordination without necessarily
having authority. It's just really a division of labor to
ensure that the task that everybody is there to accomplish
can be accomplished. And the person who is given that

(36:33):
particular task within that division of labor is doing so
by taking all that responsibility. But just as they have
the responsibility, others will also have the responsibilities and that
does not elevate them above the other people in that association, right, yeah,
and so kind of in the same way that you
have that in a construction site. I think that that

(36:56):
is the kind of approach we need to take in
a military formation, where the person who is you know,
respected for their knowledge of military strategy or has the
information or the expertise to be able to handle the
planning of that approach. Because we're all here to win, right,
We're all here to defend our freedom and to defend
the freedom of the people we love. So there's no

(37:18):
sense in splitting off into a bunch of different groups
and failing out our task when we can come together
where necessary to engage in the coordination of our strategy
to improve the chances of our success. You know. And
of course there is a vulnerability in times of warfare
that we do have the knowledge because warfare historically is

(37:41):
one of the times that is the most ripe for
authoritarian and seizure and control. But because that vulnerability exists
in those times is when I think we have to
be extra vigilant of how that could potentially manifest. You know,
we don't sacrifice our course and defense of the course,
you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Definitely, because it's easy to do that. It's easy to
be persuaded that this situation is unique and different, and
therefore we need to accept some kind of compromise of
the very essence of what we're doing, the method that
like the people I have spoken to, both those within
formations today in Rajava and West in Java, but also
in the Emma and those for instance in the Iron Column,

(38:22):
which was a FI column in the spanishivil War. They're
probably the most famous for leaving the front line to
attack the cops because they felt they didn't have enough
weapons and that the cops had too many. And what
they did was that they created a concept of the
minimum necessary discipline, discipline being something that one has for oneself,
not the hunting that comes from above. And they had

(38:44):
leaders who would lead in times of combat right when
we needed to make swift and decisive action. There wasn't
time to obtain consensus. They used consensus to arrive at
those leaders. Those leaders were able in times of urgency
to make urgent decisions, but that didn't confer to power
or status outside of that moment.

Speaker 5 (39:07):
Yeah, yeah, it's just like in an emergency scenario, you know,
somebody is, you know, leading a surgery, for example, or
leading a rescue operation. That doesn't mean that they're elevated
above everybody else. That just means that they have the
knowledge and the skills to accomplish that particular task, and
the others of their own free will respect that knowledge

(39:30):
enough to go out with what the person is recommending exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
Yeah, and that, yeah, that doesn't mean that that person
is inherently capable of bossing you around, exactly.

Speaker 5 (39:40):
And I like the mention of discipline in particular because
that really is a distinction, because he will talk about, oh,
you need to have military discipline, how you school stab
military discipline without blind obedience to authority, I'm sure we're
not going to have we're ever going to have discipline
to the extent that soldiers are dehumanized and treated like
canon fodder as you would find in a traditional authoritaria

(40:04):
and military. But the discipline is derived from solidarity, is
derived from the responsibility people have for each other, the
capable have for each other within their formulation, and the
responsible do they have for their own actions as being
part of that formation, and for how their actions will
affect those around them.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Yeah, exactly, And I think that's something like you say
it again and again when you read the column, the
Derouty column newspaper, right, they talk about discipline and how
we have to have a discipline comes from our commitment
to our cause and to each other, not from any
fear of repercussions or like quote unquote disciplinary action, but
from like the fact that we we don't want to
let our comrades down, or do we want to let

(40:43):
our course down, and like when people do do that. Right,
there are It doesn't mean there aren't disciplinary actions, but
it means that those are like like you said before,
you don't break away from the core of what you're doing.
So they agree by consensus to include with the person
who has done the thing that is considered to be wrong,
what a suitable punishment would be or a suitable set

(41:06):
of repercussions would be. So then it reinforces the idea
of like consensus and like discipline coming from oneself rather
than from fear of punishment.

Speaker 5 (41:15):
Yeah, I think there is, of course the potential for
processes to potentially become How do I want to put this?
What I will say is I think it's necessary. But
even in engaging with those who have you broken trust

(41:35):
or who have seemingly split from the association or have
jeopardized the safety and security of the association, that you
find we us to deal with those situations on a
case by keyse basis. You know that you're responsive to
the particular circumstances that cause that action that particular outcome,

(41:57):
rather than as you would find in modernil ries where
you have like a very clear this action has this consequence,
this action has this concert this action like a lot
more flexibility is required because we understand that we don't
have this matrix of crime that authorities do. You know,
we're dealing with calm. They deal with crime, right, and

(42:18):
so in dealing with harm, we have to approach each
of those situations in the context of their situations rather
than in some sort of cold like distant calculation, you know.
And I think in approaching it in that way, people
are more willing I think, to fess up or to

(42:38):
take accountability for their harm because they know that there's
that relationship there that you're going to try to work
through it. That well, there may be many potential consequences
to their actions there's an openness to dialogue there rather
than a rigidity of this is what you did, so
this is the outcome automatically.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, I mean that is the latter is like a
system that looks not at people but quote unquote crimes, right,
and like this is the opposite of a restorative justice system,
which looks at people in the situation they are in
and not just the worst thing that they happen to
have done.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
It.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
We should return to South America and really once again diverted.

Speaker 5 (43:16):
Yes, yes, although I feel like these digressions always get
to something essential and brings out something extra to what
I would have, you know, prepared in advance. So we

(43:37):
had this split, right, we had the FAU and then
you had the m L and T. And they did
collaborate where there was a common cause, but it wasn't
a permanent collaboration, you know. And while this was taking
place in the urban guerrilla warfare sphere, you had different
things taking place in the labor movement. The FAU was

(43:58):
dealing with the consequences of big tent to organize in
as they found that the Uruguayan Communist Party or PCU
had pretty successfully claimed significant influence in the cnt SO.
In response, according to Suzenko, the FAU created a rank
and file alliance called the Combative Tendency, which pushed for

(44:18):
more militancy and less bureaucracy in the union movement. Through
that alliance, the FAU was able to accomplish a lot
more outreach and action, but in return, the President of
Uruguay introduced emergency laws executed by the military to counter
the unrest. The revolutionary Left continued to fight against military's

(44:40):
involvement in civilian life and also formed a daily people
called Ipoca. When the government was like, stop, don't do that,
that's illegal. And when the government says stopped on that,
that's illegal, that means they put boots on the ground,
and you know, raided their offices, and so the people
fell apart and the groups involved went under around and

(45:02):
like I said, the military raided their bases. But then
when the FAU was like, let's get the band back together, unfortunately,
the other groups were too scared to resurface, understandably, and
so because of that fear, the PCU kind of had

(45:22):
a fall from Greece. You know, for a while they
were big boys on campus and the cnt but after
the FAU kind of came to the forefront again in
called its bravery and stuff. They kind of end up
falling back. And you see, the PCU had chosen to
appease the military because they believed that a leftist faction

(45:45):
within the rounds the army might support their bid for power,
kind of like what happened in the Russian Revolution. And so,
you know, they really thought they were cooking something. But
as it saying goes, the store was not even on.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
I haven't heard that one in this game.

Speaker 5 (46:03):
Yeah, the military saw them as pretty much insignificant, so
much so that while other leftist groups were facing severe oppression,
the PCU was actually pretty much left alone. And so
when the union rank and files saw that and tilling
their backs on the PCU, they ended up turning their
focus toward the combative tendency because at least they were

(46:25):
doing radical and serious stuff. And so the unions were
under attack from all sides, the police, the military, and
even neo fascist gangs, and the FAU led combatitive tendancy
was focused on defending these workers' movements from those threats.
According to the Zenko, the FAU held a secret congress
and formed their own armed wing the OPR thirty three,

(46:48):
which unlike other gorilla groups in the region, wasn't a
top down organization. Instead, individual cells had the freedom to
decide how they carry out missions and which actions it
took part in the affair. You still set the overall strategy,
but it wasn't about becoming some kind of vanguard. And
some of the actions, by the way, according to Sharki,

(47:08):
included bank robberies and factory owner kidnappings.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
It's like old school Spanish anarchism.

Speaker 5 (47:16):
Yeah, well there were some old school Spanish anarchists within
their ranks. Yeah, so he really can't be surprised.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Yeah, yeah, I drew. There's this wonderful line in able
Pass's book about de Ruti that de Ruti was very
fond of children, so he risked his life robbing banks
to fund their education.

Speaker 5 (47:33):
Oh that's beautiful.

Speaker 4 (47:35):
It's such a wonderful Like, yeah, it's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
Yeah. I don't know, I just enjoy it very much
the whole Like you never know what direction that sentence
is going to go in.

Speaker 5 (47:45):
That is a quintessential example of that, Yeah, I think. Yeah,
so you know, you do what you have to do
pretty much.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Yeah. Yeah, And like I think it's really like he
wasn't maximalist for the sake of maximalism. He was maximalist
for the sake of like educating children. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't.
He didn't see the violence as and ended.

Speaker 5 (48:03):
Itself exactly exactly. It had a cause and reasoning behind it. Yeah,
And the FAU was the same way. Or their reasoning
was just that if the capitalist class was going to
use force to protect their interests, then the workers should
be able to use force to defend theirs.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Yeah, yeah, fannel and stuff, And so.

Speaker 5 (48:22):
They did what they had to do. Meanwhile, the PCU
was stuck to their policy of appeasement, which actually had
a detrimental effect in the broader movement. As a military
kept growing in strength, and so the very anti communist
military's involvement in breaking up all the work activities emboldened
their role in politics. And then, once they defeated the

(48:43):
m l n T, with the FAU struggling to resist
isolated by the PCU's in action, the military to on
the opportunity to coop the government, leading to the rise
of Juan Maria Porteraberi, the first president of the Civic
military dictatorship in ninety seventy three. In the aftermath, the
FAU made the tough call to move the operations to Argentina,

(49:06):
which hadn't yet fallen to military distatorship. From there, they
worked within the CNT to organize a massive fifteen day
general strike. It shut the country down for a time,
but it wasn't enough, and the efforts to keep up
the fight were constantly undermined by the PCU, which still
insisted on negotiating instead of taking real action. Meanwhile, the

(49:29):
people were suffering. According to Sharky, between nineteen seventy one
and nineteen seventy six there was a thirty five percent
fall in real wages, and by nineteen seventy nine inflation
was running at eighty percent, with wages limping behind at
forty five percent. So until nineteen seventy six, the FAU
continued to work between Argentina and Uruguay, but after Argentina's

(49:53):
coup that was it. The coach Enko directly. During the
US's operation, Condo dictatorships across Latin America continued coordinated to kidnap, torture,
and murder leftists across the continent. Between sixty eight thousand
and eighty thousand leftists were killed and more than four
hundred thousand were placed in political prisons end courde Jesus,

(50:18):
And I think we need to sit with those numbers,
because it's very easy to hear numbers like that and
just think, you know, that's just a statistic. Pretty much
we hear big numbers of mine, kind of goes statistic. Yeah,
but to like think about the impact that would have
for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people
to be just taken out, whether killed or imprisoned, leaving

(50:42):
like a keeping a whole of knowledge, of experience, of education,
of radicalism. Yeah, a country may take decades to recover
from something like that. It's a cultural death in a sense.
You know, this is a political movement, but it's it's

(51:02):
kind of similar to how during Cluanissm, elders would be
wiped out and with them all of their knowledge, all
of their oral histories, all their languages just wiped out
in an instant.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (51:16):
This is different, of course as a political ideology as
opposed to an entire culture and ethnicity, but it's still
just a massive loss of all that history, all that experience,
all that radicalism and information just gone.

Speaker 4 (51:31):
Right, Yeah, it's hard for a movement to recover from that.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
Yeah, it's not like a genocide or its colonial kind
of you could call it like a dec well, it's
like a decapitation of the movement, I suppose.

Speaker 5 (51:41):
Well, I would say it's more than a decapitation, because
it's not just like notable figures that were taken out,
or particularly influential thought leaders or anything. It's almost everybody. Yeah,
anybody who had that fight in them, or had that
radical knowledge or consciousness.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
Yeah, anyone with any lived experience, all the things they'd learned,
all the mistakes they'd made, learned from like a garden
that the movement has to begin almost from like a
blank slate.

Speaker 5 (52:08):
Yeah, the history is basically raised in a sense, all
this left is really what they might have written down, yeah,
which is obviously only a small portion of what they
might have had to share with the rest of the world.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
Yeah, especially in a movement that's been criminalized and pursued
by the state. Right, Like what they write down is
what they risk the state discovering, so that they're only
going to risk write sen things down.

Speaker 5 (52:28):
Yeah. Yeah, and then you know, when you look at this,
this this didn't just happen, you require, that's happened all
over the world. In some cases, this massive wipeout of
the anarchists movement took place even earlier, you know, in
the nineteen hundreds, nineteen tens, nineteen twenties. But in all
these cases, that loss is something that we are still

(52:50):
in a sense recovering from. We kind of had to
solly build back, but we still haven't ever reached in
many places the heights that anarchism's at at certain points
in its history. It's in parts of the world.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
Yeah, I mean, look at even like Spain still has
a very strong anarchosyndicalist movement, right, but like the best
of the anarchists died in Aragon, in Madrid and in
concentration camps afterwards, or fighting in the Second World War,
and like, it took decades for that movement to recover,

(53:25):
and it's still not as strong as it was. That
this was one of the high points.

Speaker 5 (53:29):
Especially when the legacy is so much erased. You know,
when you look at how histories are taught everywhere in
the world, you're barely going to get a mention of
anarchism despite the massive role that plead in sheep in
the twentieth century, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
Yeah, this has been one of my constant things as
a historian, is that like, when people write histories today,
they write them from the perspective of the inevitability of
the state. And like, I'm not alone in making this analysis.
David Graeber does it. Scott did it too. The idea
is that people who exist outside of the state are behind,
and that they have failed or chosen not to advance

(54:09):
to the more advanced human existence that is a state.
And Jim Scott does this in the art of not
being governed, right, Like, if we look instead as people
who have chosen to refuse the state, then we understand
anarchism as a choice that people would make knowing the
options available to them, rather than a step backwards of

(54:30):
failure to advance to the state. And we can look
at a whole of history from that perspective and see
it very differently. But most historians don't exactly.

Speaker 5 (54:49):
I'm sure you've in commented this where people just kind
of assume, all, well, the anarchists lost, so that means
the destined to lose. Yeah, they lost that particular fight
that doesn't mean the war necessarily lost. And additionally, states
have lost too.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Yeah, states continue to lose.

Speaker 5 (55:06):
States, state projects have lost, continue to lose, you know,
the capitalist project, capitalist businesses, they lose, they fail. That
doesn't mean that the project is destined to lose. The
destined to feel just means that particular iteration or that
particular attempt was not able to succeed in all its ambitions.

Speaker 2 (55:27):
Yeah, and like, as historians, we shouldn't be making that judgment, right,
We should be attempting to learn from and document the
past rather than to sort of categorize it into like
failed and successful.

Speaker 5 (55:38):
Yeah, that too, because the standards, the standards of failure
and success are often dictated by the standpoint of the
status school.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
Yes, very much so.

Speaker 5 (55:51):
Yeah, It's kind of like how the Heitian Revolution is
spoken of as the only succes sucessful slave revolts, or
one of the only successful slave revolts. Understand for success
in that case is that they were able to establish
an independent state, whereas other slave revolts in other parts

(56:13):
of the world, including within the Caribbean, would have taken
different paths. The Maroons, for example, their former revolts was
a withdrawal from the system that surrounded them, creating a
pocket of resistance, isolating themselves. Same thing in Brazil we
had Kilombo's these set of ones that extracted themselves from

(56:35):
the surround and oppressive structure and try to survive to
the extent that they could not. All of them lasted.
But nothing lasts forever, you know, Countries rise and fall.
And so I think if we limit ourselves to just
the example of Haiti, particularly in the context of success
in a slave revolution, I think we miss out on

(56:56):
a lot of those other examples and opportunities for inspiration guidance.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
Yeah, I think you're right. I think like it supplies
to lots of places. I think about it, Like, you know,
I'm fortunate to have this like background in history, but
also to be with people in their moments of revolution
and to spend time with revolutionaries in the MR. And like,
one of the analysies that you always see is that, like,
this creation of liberated spaces is a not enough or

(57:24):
be like there are also places within the non government though,
and where there is still very strong control from a
pseudo state, right, Like, but I think that overlooks the
fact that, yeah, there are not like like libertarian states,
but people are living their lives without gods and masters,
that they are like experiencing freedom in every moment, and

(57:47):
they are liberated in their own lives as they continue
to struggle to liberate territory in other people. That might
be what success looks like, like that they are able
to be self realized.

Speaker 5 (58:01):
Yeah, just the psychological experience in itself, it cand of
be under understated or underrated, even if it's on that
small scale of the individual, that's still valuable.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
Yeah, and like if we if we acknowledge that, it's
much harder to go back, Like those people can't go
back because they've existed in liberation, right, Like that that
they've lived in a free way. Yeah, and like they
will always know that that freedom is possible, that they
can live without authority, live with without state power, that

(58:35):
that like liberation is a thing that can exist not
just in our minds but in physical space.

Speaker 5 (58:40):
And like exactly, they.

Speaker 2 (58:42):
Will always know that, like that's that's available, And if
we can tell those stories, so will other people.

Speaker 5 (58:47):
Exactly exactly, because that listening, as we speak about so often,
it's the need in the process of social revolution to
help people's powers drives and consciousness. You do that by
giving people both of course theoretical education and you know,
share knowledge in that sense, but also through experience because

(59:08):
and I've used us phrase before, you can't put the
gene back in the bottle. You can't go from experience
in freedom to a situation of unfreedom and then struggles
rulers and think, oh that's all they could have a
be After you've experienced to the status quo, you're not
going to go back to thinking the status quo is
all there is and all that could ever exist.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. We have to remember that when we're
looking at these things, Like it's easy to look from
where something ended and project that back, but we have
to understand how it felt when people were doing it too.

Speaker 5 (59:42):
Exactly. So what kind of we kind of left on
an on a somber chapter in the Uruguay's anarchist history,
because unfortunately it was only after the fall of Uraguai's
stutatorship in nineteen eighty five the anarchist militants were able
to return to Uruguay and re estableublished the FAU in
a fractured political and social landscape with greatly reduced numbers.

(01:00:07):
Some of the former anarchists involved in the FAU created
the People's Victory Party or PvP in exile, which had
attempted to reorganize resistance efforts but also fell into some
Leninist tendencies. But the main line after you continue to
focus on grassroots organizing, workers struggles and political education. It

(01:00:28):
continues to be engaged in Latin arcananarchist networks, particularly with
Brazilian and Argentine groups like the Ferrascau Anarchista Culture, the
Frau Araquista KABOCLA, the Ferrachau Anarchista do Rio de Janeiro,
and the Argentine organization ALCA. Despite its past radicalism, the

(01:00:48):
FAU has shifted towards a broader approach integrated mass movements
while retaining its equipment to anti authoritarian socialism. Since then
and up to today, they approach has aligned with the
practice of especifismo, which it developed to rebuild their strength
in Irauguaian and political movements. That approach has since been

(01:01:08):
influential across Latin America and beyond, including North America, Europe, Asia, Africa,
and Oceania. I've actually spoken about Especifismo on this podcast
before and on my channel. But to give a quick summary,
Especifismo is an organizational approach guided by three key concepts.
The first is the need for specifically anarchist organization built

(01:01:30):
around a unity of ideas and practice. The second is
the use of the specifically anarchist organization to theorize and
develop strategic political and organize and work. And the food
is active involvement in and shaping of autonomous and popular
social movement, which is described as the process of social
in social as. Pacifists reject the left unity idea of

(01:01:52):
a synthesis organization of revolutionaries or even multiple currents of
anarchists loosely united, because they feel it boils down to
lowest common denominator politics. The feel that when this unity
is preferred at any cost, it leaves little room for
united action or developed political discussion. It can be described
in a sense as an affinity group with the shared

(01:02:14):
interest in the advancement of a very specific politic. But
they aren't just internally focused, you know. Specifismo is focused
and build in popular power as a means of revolutionary transformation,
rejecting both electoral and vang Goddess Marxist approaches. So the
especifies more distinguishes between specifically anarchist political organizations or affinity

(01:02:36):
groups and broader mass movements, and they advocate for anarchists
creating the former and inserting themselves in the latter, building
up anarchist presence and the presence of anarchist ideas in unions,
in student groups, and in community struggles. So, if you
want a more in depth exploration of especifismo, I suggests
reading the discussion between Philippe Korea and Juan Carlos Maco

(01:03:00):
so call the Strategy of a Specifismo on the Anarchist Library,
and they talk about how the fragmentation of the working
class under neoliberalism has created some very distinct challenges that
require fresh organizational strategies and less dogmats of critgity to
simplistic class analysis. But they also speak for the need
to coordinate and discipline and strategically engage anarchist groups within

(01:03:23):
social movements, routaining the independence but engaging in their struggle.
And they also end up in that interview discussed in
the FAUS long Term Strategy as a process of resistance,
rupture and reconstruction resistance, meaning that the strengthening crassroots organizations
direct action and ideological development, rupture meaning that they're breaking

(01:03:44):
away from catalyst institutions through revolutionary action and reconstruction meanings
they establish a new social relations based on self management
and mutual aid. It's kind of similar to the way
that I break down social revolution conceptually as an approach
that incorporates both opposition and the proposal of alternatives. So

(01:04:04):
I have been thinking about specifies more lately. I've made
that video many years ago, and my anarchist understanding has
shifted a lot, especially recently, in going back and looking
at how I would have analyzed things previously, I think
there's some different directions that I might take certain things in.

(01:04:25):
I think, for example, the idea of affinity groups engaging
in social intution is extremely valuable in shifting the conversation
within you know, these mass movements. But I also think
that there's a risk in the ways in which a SPECIFIESMO,
if not properly understood or conceptualized, could end up opening

(01:04:46):
ground for co optation towards some rather unanarchist outcomes. You
know what I mean by that is, I think it's
important one discussing a specifies more to be very careful
against the interpretation of it as some kind of vangguard
as strategy or way to dictate a vision of anarchy.
I think that even if somebody has taken the pacifist

(01:05:08):
approach in creating an efficiency group organized around a very
specific form of anarchism, that group should still be in
conversation with different tendencies and engaging in an ongoing process
of critique and convergence of ideas. I believe this is
the sort of motivation between Malichesta's idea of synthesis and

(01:05:31):
the Synthesis Federation in anarchist history. I've still learn a
bit about that, but anyway, I'd love to hear about
what they are for you, and as anarchists you require
up to here. Now you know they can feel free
to reach out to me. I have a website now,
Andrew Sage dot org, and I wish them or power
to all the people. That's it for me today. You

(01:05:53):
can find me on YouTube and Patreon and this has
been it can happen here peace.

Speaker 8 (01:06:21):
Welcome to kidnapp and hear a podcast where I last
left rfk JR on the proclamation that if he was
able to take off as millions will die, and all
evidence suggests that I am going to be right about this.
I am your host Mia Wong with me is Gare Lou.

Speaker 6 (01:06:37):
He's making the meme come true. He's making the millions
millions must die.

Speaker 8 (01:06:42):
We're really, really, really, truly only the white Man could
make real unlimited gedocide in the first world. It's great,
it's great stuff. So this is going to be a
recap episode of not even all like some of the
stuff AREFK Jr. Has done since he's gotten confirmed as

(01:07:02):
the fucking United States is Secretary of Health and Human Services,
an organization which can includes so many things, but like
for example, the NIH, the cdc DA, I believe, yeah,
many many things. So Okay, there are lots and lots
and lots of different rounds of budget cuts that are

(01:07:26):
happening and grant cuts from a whole bunch of different
departments and agencies. We're going to start with National Institutes
of Health cutting a whole bunch of studies for vaccines
for new diseases. So RFKA Junior's thing was, well, we're
not going to fund any COVID research because COVID is over.

(01:07:47):
So no more research into COVID vaccine treatments. We're not
going to fund that now. Obviously COVID is like not
over trivially. Obviously you catch it and it makes you
sick and sometimes you and sometimes you get debilitating, long
term negative health outcomes. But this is the law to
get they're using to just be like no, fuck it,

(01:08:08):
fuck it, We'll cut all of the funding that we
can find that does the stuff. Now the problem again.
And so these these cuts look a lot like the
very beginning of the Trump administration where they were just
going through and like you'd get a giant list of
grants that got cut in the sense that like they're
like control effing programs, right, and they're like searching for

(01:08:29):
keywords and then just killing all the block grants that
do that. We'll get more into the end of the
episode with like a different set of cuts. But one
of the one of the big issues with this is
that it's it's killing coronavirus research in general, like all
of it is getting like massive cuts, and so this
includes I think it was cnbcors You're putting on this

(01:08:51):
killing a bunch of fairly like late stage research on
things like you know, like like actually having vaccines that
could work across like the broadcast category of coronaviruses, because
like obviously there there are a whole bunch of different
kinds of coronaviruses, and there are certain sort of vaccine
techniques that can work to suppress like the families of them,

(01:09:12):
and fucking I don't know, maybe maybe maybe the europe
and the Chinese will figure out how to do that,
because the surest fuck isn't gonna be US after recud
all this fucking funding. It's great. So all right, we're
starting sort of I guess on the vaccine beat here
because there's there's so many different kinds of bullshit. One
of the other really big things that happened is doctor

(01:09:35):
Mark Peters, who was the guy who like did Operation
Warp Speed, which was Trump's like big push to get
a COVID vaccine now, and this is something I think
is worth highlighting it again. This guy like worked under
Trump right a lot, and some of these programs where
we're talking about later were Trump programs, but Trump won.
I mean, like Trump did do some anti vax shit
and say some anti vac shit, but he wasn't like

(01:09:58):
a hardline anti vaxxer, definitely not now.

Speaker 6 (01:10:02):
Yeah, at many points he tried to take credit himself
for the fast response of the CODE vaccine, which, hey,
as long as we get the vaccine, do whatever you want, buddy.
And the amount that that's been like memory hold and
like they're trying to like just alter alter history regarding
the COVID vaccine is a little, a little head scratching.

(01:10:24):
It gives me that just slow growing headache that I'm
experiencing every day, nearly all the time, just not due
to COVID, because I've actually, to my knowledge, never gotten it,
but it is a headache of political origin.

Speaker 8 (01:10:39):
Yeah, And I think one of the one of the
interesting elements of this is something the thing I've talked
about more like in the wake of like the immediate
wake of twenty twenty, like twenty twelve, twenty two, is
there used to be a big split in the Republican
Party between like the lab leakers and the anti vaxxers,
because the thing about being a lab leak person is that,
like you can't be a chin release a bioweapon person

(01:11:01):
who also thinks that the vaccine is evil or at
least you shouldn't be able to that those are like mutually.
It took years. Legitimately, this is enough cognitive dissidence that
even like the Alex Jones types, it took years for
them to sort of like develop a level of cognitive
dissonance that allowed them to do this. They did do
it eventually. And what we're seeing right now right is
like Trumps a way of sort of shring up his

(01:11:22):
anti vaccine flank has just like handed control over all
public health policy to these just like hideous anti vaccine
like cranks. And so Peter Marx, who was like one
of the big guys from Trump won and you know
who stayed on through Biden, who was like, yeah, okay,
I'm gonna fucking get this vaccine to work. He has
been forced to resign. And Marx also was the guy

(01:11:44):
who was in charge of vaccine safety in the US, right,
and he's forced out. And he said in a statement
for CNN, I mean, you can read the whole thing somewhere,
but quote, it has become clear that truth and transparency
are not desired by the Secretary this is OURFKA junior,
but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.

(01:12:06):
So that's good. That's the guy who used to be
in charge of our country's vaccine safety going like, yeah,
this guy wanted me to just fucking lie about vaccines constantly.

Speaker 4 (01:12:16):
So that's great. That's fun.

Speaker 8 (01:12:19):
So before we get into the people who he's also
he's bringing in to do his like unbelievably fake, hack,
bullshit vaccine study stuff, we should talk a bit about
the measles outbreak in Texas.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
Now.

Speaker 8 (01:12:31):
The reason that this isn't getting more coverage is that
this is going to get a really significant amount of
coverage on this show in the near future when when
those episodes are done, this is going to get significant coverage.
For now, what I think is sort of important about
this is that so there's been an outbreak of measles, which,
like there should not be outbreaks and measles. We have
defeated measles. We have the vaccine that you can take it.

(01:12:52):
It's part of the MMR vaccine. You take it and
then you don't get measles. But there are massive, you know,
like communities who are fucking not vaccinating and as like,
in large part because of the fucking anti vaccine shit
that's being spread by people like RFK Junior, and faced
with this, RFK Junior has done a bunch of unbelievably
mealy mouthed bullshit about his personal choice to do vaccines

(01:13:16):
blah blah blah blah blah, and then also did a
whole thing about how he was going to have the
government sends vitamin A to like combat measles, which is
just nonsense, right, Like, so this, this is obviously just
a complete fucking fiasco. We're going to cover this more
as it goes on. Yeah, so stay tuned for more

(01:13:36):
measles horrors. Yeah. The other thing we're not going to
cover because it's going to be covered by these products
and services are these advertisements.

Speaker 6 (01:13:48):
I would love to talk more about them. Well, we're
still trying to get that hymns and eventually that them
is a sponsorship.

Speaker 8 (01:13:54):
But we're getting closer. We're getting closer, getting closer. We
are back now. What we are not coming closer to
is finding a connection between vaccines and autism, because there
isn't one. It's all fake. However, come up, people who

(01:14:17):
don't believe this include RFKI Junior. So our kid Junior
has been doing something. Okay, it's genuinely a little bit
unclear who exactly is running this, whether this is like
the Department of Health and Human Services is like a
broader organization, or just the CDC. But he's trying to
set up a bunch of people to like basically cook

(01:14:37):
the books and try to publish some shit that shows
a link between vaccines and autism. It's genuinely, deeply murky
and unclear as to who's doing what right now. But
one of the people who's been brought in to do
this is David Gear, who is oh god, oh boy.
I mean, even by the standards of guy whose job

(01:14:58):
it is to like cook evidence to make it look
like there's a connection between vaccines and autism, even by
their standards, Gear is like an absolute fucking hack. So
we talked about Andrew Wakefield on this show, and there
is weirdly a Wayfield connection here too. So Wakefield is
the doctor who originally cooked up like a connection between
the MMR vaccine and autism. Gear is from like a

(01:15:20):
slightly different faction of these cranks, and this is this
is the faction that's work that's like the most closely
aligned with Harf K. Junior. And this is the faction
that thinks that like weird methyl mercury or whatever the
fuck in some older vaccines was causing autism, which like, no,
it wasn't, but he, you know, he and his dad,
Mark Gear like did a whole bunch of work to

(01:15:43):
try to sort of establish this evidence. I'm gonna read
this from NBC just describing their work. Quote, the Gear
is conducted research from a makeshift laboratory in their in
their carpeted, wood paneled suburban Maryland basement, so get They're
doing this shit from their basement. Published several studies, many

(01:16:05):
of which were retracted, and promoted an unproven treatment for
autism that cost families tens of thousands of dollars and
included injections of loopron, a drug used for prostate cancer
and early puberty in children. It's only approved for precocious
puberty and comes with side effects including bone damage, heart issues,
and seizures. They diagnosed kids with precocious puberty without proper

(01:16:28):
testing and misled parents in the thinking they were signing
up for an approved autism therapy. A twenty eleven Maryland
Border Physicians' investigation found the Gears that violated standards of
care so to be back up for a second, right, A,
they claimed that mercury and vaccines is causing autism. B
they claimed to be able to treat it with puberty.

(01:16:49):
But the here autism with a puberty blocker, Yes, which
is an awes extremely funny given like you know all
of that, these people are like, you know what, trying
to bam puberty block give it to them. That's that's fine.

Speaker 6 (01:17:02):
We're gonna cure autism by giving all these autistic kids
puberty blockers and making them trans Sure, sure, let's go
for it. Let's give let's give that a shot. I'm sure,
I'm sure that won't create a whole new problem for them.

Speaker 8 (01:17:15):
Yeah yeah that uh that.

Speaker 6 (01:17:17):
A bone damage thing isn't real. But that's fine.

Speaker 2 (01:17:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:17:21):
Unfortunately, this is one of the other problems is this
is like you get a lot of sources that are
just fucking making ship up about these fucking diseases.

Speaker 6 (01:17:30):
To be fair, I also am probably I'm unfamiliar with
this exact puberty suppresses.

Speaker 8 (01:17:35):
Yeah, I don't think. In general, Yeah, density.

Speaker 6 (01:17:39):
Loss of blockers is mostly mostly negligible.

Speaker 8 (01:17:45):
Yeah. So so again again, this guy is like I
found the cure for autism. And it's puberty blocks.

Speaker 6 (01:17:50):
Very funny, you know, I do know a lot of
autistic people that have gotten how do I say this,
they've seemed more comfortable once they've transitioned.

Speaker 8 (01:18:01):
I guess I'll see it like that. Look, it's being
on the right puberty blocker is better for an autistic
kid than going through puberty if you are trans. Oh
but yess.

Speaker 6 (01:18:12):
But this also shows how like the attack on puberty
blockers for you know, quote unquote trans minors is completely nonsense,
because these drugs have been used for SIS children to
cease early on set puberty. These are fully reversible. Yeah,
these are used for SIS children. It's used by these
like hacks and weirdos to quote unquote cure autism.

Speaker 8 (01:18:34):
Yeah, by these same people as an autism.

Speaker 6 (01:18:36):
Here for the vaccines, oh my, even though these are
the same like drugs, these quote unquote like chemical castration drugs,
as Matt Walsh would put it, are you know now
trying to be banned, uh for for for trans children?
So you know, hypocrisy always, always always matters. It's always
it's always important to point out their hypocrisy because that's

(01:18:57):
how we win. So here this is one one more
step towards victory, Garrison.

Speaker 8 (01:19:02):
Garrison putting out hypocrisy is important because morale's a tarada struggle.
It makes you feel good, and that's a little bit important,
average John Stewart post. But okay, let's continue. So his father,
Mark Gear, who he was doing a bunch of this
research wish, was short of his medical license. Now, David

(01:19:22):
Gear actually amazingly, amazingly was not strict of his medical
license at Garritton. Do you want to guess why he
wasn't strict of his medical license. He didn't have one.
He didn't fucking have one, so instead, instead he was
prosecuted for doing this shit without a medical license. He
also doesn't have a medical degree. He has like a
liberal arts dek okay, that.

Speaker 6 (01:19:45):
Rules these these liberal art students are giving our kids
transgender hormones many such reasons.

Speaker 8 (01:19:54):
He's like the only person I've ever seen who actually
genuinely did do like dangerous and unauthorized like fucking like medical,
like unauthorized medical experiments on children with puberty blockers. Like
He's the only one. Yeah, this is the.

Speaker 6 (01:20:13):
First instance I've like heard of like mass unethical use
of puberty suppressing drugs and it's.

Speaker 8 (01:20:20):
A fucking anti vaxxery and this is the guy they're
bringing into the like the cook up a connection between
vaccines and autism using like fucking bears data or whatever
so investigative journals. Brian Deer, who is i think probably
most famous to people who've watched like an h bomber
guy video as the guy who brought down disgraced X
doctor to Andrew Wakefield. Deer like also wrote about this guy,

(01:20:42):
like in his like unbelievably dog shit study about h SO.
So he publishes like an unbelievably dogshit study about like
the mercury and vaccines causes autism, whatever the fuck, and
it gets basically like immediately obliterated the moment autism, like
activists discover it and like, holy fucking shit, like these
people are evil. I'm going to read a quote from

(01:21:04):
Brian Deer's article about it, one of miss Siedell's that
that's the person who like the auctism like advocate activists
to you, like discovered this stuff. One of her complaints
concerning the Gears a parent institutional review. The seven member
IRB Institutional Review Board consists of Mark and Dave Gear,
doctor Gear's wife, two of his business associates, and two

(01:21:27):
mothers of autistic children, one of whom has publicly acknowledged
that her son is the patient's last subject at doctor
Gear and the other whom is a plaintiff in three
pending vaccine injury claims. So the IRB, right, this is
like an ethical review board thing that you're supposed to
go through to get your studies like approved. So the

(01:21:47):
IRB for the study again is these two guys, his
dad's fucking wife, two of the business associates, and the
mothers of two attic children who think that that vaccines
cause autism and are like one of whom is in
a lawsuit about it and the other the one is
taking the fucking puberty blockers to try to cure the autism.
So this is the guy who is being brought in
to do the book cooking is a guy with no

(01:22:09):
medical license, no medical degree, who had to retract his
papers because they were bullshit.

Speaker 3 (01:22:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:22:17):
Also, and this is something that that's common between him
and R. K. Junior is all these people they think
that like me. And this is gonna be relevant when
we get to the sort of HIV AIDS. Part of
this is that these people think that diseases are caused
by malnutrition and not by you know, like diseases, and
they think that you can treat them with just being
healthy instead of like vaccines. And you know, this is

(01:22:37):
this is their worldview, right, this pepul or sort of
view genesis. This is also why they like one of
the reasons why they fucking hate autism so much is
that they're just you know, just on on a sort
of political level, like that's just that's just sort of
that's just what their ideology is.

Speaker 6 (01:22:52):
Imagine how many skilled drone pilots they're going to lose.
It's really going to backfire on I.

Speaker 8 (01:23:02):
We will see.

Speaker 6 (01:23:03):
Speaking of womp wamp, here's some ads.

Speaker 8 (01:23:17):
All right, we're back. Let's hear more about Robert F.

Speaker 6 (01:23:20):
Kennedy Junior, the second Kennedy to have a hole in
his head, but this one's from a worm WHOA.

Speaker 4 (01:23:31):
Okay, So let's let's talk about the last group of
things here, which is another series of massive budget cuts
that they're doing. This is another thing where they have
a giant list of grants that they're fucking cutting. This
is another like anti DEI and so you know, there's
a lot of the things that I guess you would

(01:23:51):
expect from one of these, like you can only study
white people ones. So, like, there are a whole bunch
of programs in this list of like grants that they're
cutting that are like studying you know, racism and medicine
and like the different medical outcomes between like people of
different races because they're getting different levels of medical care
and because of the environments that they're in. And this

(01:24:12):
is all stuff that like, you know, these people do
not want there to be research demonstrating that like racism
exists in the medical system, because it's it's just extremely
bad for there just to be objective evidence that there
is racism and that it's bad and that it kills people.
So another very bleak thing that I haven't seen much
coverage of is that a lot of these grants were
funding research into trans healthcare and also the effects of

(01:24:37):
like violence against trans people and things like mental health,
you know. And this is also something that's devastating because
like the state of trans medicine, it's like we know
things that are safe and we know things that work,
which is just letting people transition, but also there's so
much more stuff that we need in terms of like

(01:24:58):
hormone regimes that like work better, right and things like that,
and also like you know, just sort of like basic
health outcome stuff. And yeah, these people do not want
anyone to know exactly how bad they're They're fucking transphobia
is affecting the people that they're inflicting it on, and
so yeah, they're like, fuck it, we'll just get rid
of all these people's funding. There's also a whole bunch

(01:25:20):
of stuff that has to do with COVID. I was
going to read the description of one of the fucking
grants they cut to give you a sense of like
the shit that they're cutting. Development of a handheld rapid
air sensing system to monitor and quantify stars COVID too
in aerosols in real time, which actually would be an
unbelievably useful thing, right, Like a system that could detect

(01:25:40):
fucking COVID like aerosols like in real time and tell
you that there's fucking COVID in the air, staggeringly useful.
They don't fucking want it. One of the big things
that they cut is, like you know, we're talking about
this with sort of like cutting like programs that study
structure racism and medicine. They basically went on a like
a county by county basis and found every single grant,
like state by state, Cannaby county, city by city, every

(01:26:02):
single grant that talks about studying the effects of COVID
on non white people, you know, and they're doing this.
I think people have forgotten about this. But one of
the things that RFK Junior said, like I think this
is dream the campaign was he had this giant rants
a boy how COVID was like specifically targeted to leave
Chinese people in Jews alive, Which is great.

Speaker 8 (01:26:24):
That is how he put it.

Speaker 6 (01:26:25):
Someone should probably report that to Trump's Anti Semitism task Force. Yeah, yeah,
you know, Hall monitor whatever.

Speaker 8 (01:26:36):
No one cares anymore. Yeah, I mean there's you know.
So so they're just trying to destroy all the stuff.
They've also just like in blocks, just like got rid
of every single fucking thing that was funding like any
program that was like mental health care as a block thing.
They're just cutting all of it. So that's gonna make
everyone even more normal than we already fucking are.

Speaker 6 (01:26:56):
The Actually I agree with this because this is the
one thing where I think the lifestyle choice thing does
matter because I just read Yawi when I'm sad, and
it fixes me. And if everyone does that, I think
we don't need any of these other mental health services.

Speaker 8 (01:27:11):
What'd you do in your manic though? Read more Yaoi.

Speaker 6 (01:27:19):
Because famously, the Yawi, the Yawi you're reading demographic the
most mentally stable and normal population.

Speaker 8 (01:27:30):
God. One of the other ones that's unbelievably concerning is
again like county by county going through and cutting funding
for like things things that promote child vaccination. They are
systemically trying to cut off kids from getting vaccines, and
they're trying to get rid of anything that opposes like
their efforts to try to convince everyone to, like all

(01:27:51):
parents to fucking not have your kids get vaccines. They
also cut a whole bunch of grants for rapid disease response,
which is great. We'll get to the exact reason why
that's like so fucking terrifying in a second. In the
like very very immediate term. They also have killed in
one hundred and forty five grants for HIV, and this
is a whole bunch of different HIV programs. They are

(01:28:16):
killing funding for distributing and getting people to use PREP,
which is a pill that like massively helps prevent HIV infections,
especially if you were a trans woman and you were
having sex, like you should get on PREP or a twink,
I will say thank you. Yeah, the uptake rates for
trans women are specifically lower, which is the thing that
we know because we have these fucking funding and these

(01:28:36):
and we're not gonna have that shit anymore because they're
they're cutting all the fucking funding for these, for these
fucking research programs.

Speaker 6 (01:28:41):
I sometimes do forget that there are trans women with
different like lived like sexual backgrounds than me, because coming
coming out of coming out of twink culture, it's like ingrained.

Speaker 8 (01:28:52):
Like your co host who permanently has only ever come
out of lesbian culture.

Speaker 6 (01:28:59):
Yes, because in uh, in twin culture, getting on PREP
is is ingrained pretty hard at this point.

Speaker 8 (01:29:06):
Yeah, well it's it's ingrained in a lot of places,
but there's places where where it isn't. And those places
are where things go very very bad, very quickly, which
is why obviously they're they're eliminating the research for this
because they want to fucking kill queer people like they
think they think that HIV is a fucking lifestyle choice.
RF Kid Junior particular things is because of poppers, which is.

Speaker 6 (01:29:26):
Now leading to the poppers raids. Red alert everybody, red alert. Yeah,
it's it's getting pretty scary out there.

Speaker 8 (01:29:33):
So it's it's really fucking bleak. I mean they've cut
you know, I mean they're they're they're trying to just
fucking get rid of this because these people are just
fucking unhinged, virulent homophobes and transphobes, and yeah, they want
to fucking cut these programs because they think it'll hurt us.
They've also laid off the entire Office of Infectious Diseases

(01:29:54):
and HIV AIDS policy staff. Is that bad? Oh it's bad.
Here's it's fairy CBS. Yeah, So they do child they're
one of the other guers that a childhood vaccination efforts.
They also run the fucking National Vaccine Program, which nobody
knows what's gonna happen to it now because again, the
thing that was supposed to run it's just fucking gone.
So who the fuck knows what's happening with that now.
They are probably going to just completely destroy Trump's like

(01:30:17):
giant Trump actually in his first term had a giant
program to like en HIV that like kind of did
stuff because it was someone else's program that Trump just
kind of implemented.

Speaker 6 (01:30:25):
We're getting so close to the HIV vaccine.

Speaker 8 (01:30:29):
Yeah, yeah, and you know, and so who fucking knows,
it's probably just completely fucked. Yeah, this is going to
have just unbelievably hideous consequences on millions and millions of people.
And they that's not even though they don't give a shit,
it's that they think it's cool and funny and based
when people like us fucking die. Now, on the other hands,

(01:30:51):
the rest of the US population is about to run
into the same fucking thing that all of these stupid
ass bankers thought, which is that oh, Trump will just
fuck with the queries and leave us alone. No, we're
gonna was in the same place that I closed the
last time I talked about fucking RFK junior, which is
the fucking bird flu, which is that he wants the
dillusion to the bird flu is he wants to fucking
let it rip, and he just wants to just like
be like, oh, we can just like take the birds

(01:31:11):
to survive the bird flu, and we'll just let the
We'll just let it spread and just use those ones
and those ones will be healthy now. So thing about
this bird flu right is that it kills within three
to four days. I mean ill just Matt Hosey and
Scientific Americas describes how this thing again within three to
four days hasn't a ninety to one hundred percent kill rate.

(01:31:31):
So you know you can't just do this right because
they'll just it just fucking kills all the birds. He
doesn't want to fucking vaccinate the birds, which is the
thing that like, if you want to stop this but
this this fucking pandemic from.

Speaker 4 (01:31:40):
Spreading, then you need to do it right.

Speaker 8 (01:31:43):
And once again I need I need to emphasize enough
that when when I when I talked to virologist about this,
they said that letting the bird flu rip through all
the fucking bird populations, right, just letting you fucking spread,
letting it kill everything until you only have the ones
that like didn't die. Is if you were like trying
to cook up conditions like field conditions specifically to try
to get it to develop a mutation to spread to humans,

(01:32:04):
this is what you would do as you would just
let it fucking spread un controlled and kill everything. So
this is what we're doing at the same time as
again anti vaxxers are fucking running the running our fucking
vaccine services. As we are cutting the staff of cutting
grant funding for people who do response to rapid response
to emerging diseases, as we are cutting the fucking entire

(01:32:26):
policy staff for the Office of Infectious Diseases. They are
building a fucking pandemic. And all of these fucking people
think that COVID was fucking cooked up in a lab.
And what they are doing is like they are, they
are now doing the thing they are accusing everyone else
is doing, which is they are fucking at timpting damblemant
policy to cook up a fucking play in a lab.

Speaker 2 (01:32:44):
Excep.

Speaker 8 (01:32:44):
It's not going in a lab, is going to be
in America's fucking factory farms, and we are all going
to suffer the consequences of it.

Speaker 6 (01:32:50):
Well, I assume you saw the statement from Canter Analysts
on Monday, the Wall Street investment firm. This founder was
like a really was a really big Trump donor, was
on the inauguration committee. But two of their analysts put
out a statement today calling to reevaluate RFK Junior as

(01:33:11):
a Secretary of Health and Human Services, calling out to
quote unquote apparent anti science and libertarian agenda, saying it
will put people's lives in jeopardy to advance a discredited
theory on vaccines.

Speaker 8 (01:33:24):
Look, I will say this, like, there are a lot
of riffs in the Trump coalition. RFK Junior and his
people cannot fucking be allowed to run these institutions. They
need to be fucking brought out now. If we do
not do this now, millions of people are going to die.
I have been saying this. I am going to continue
to say this because you can see in real time
all of the things that are going to lead to
all of these people fucking dying. And you know, his

(01:33:46):
position is not incredibly secure in this coalition, right, Like, Yeah,
there are lots of sectors of capital who don't want
the entire fucking population of the United States die in
a plague.

Speaker 2 (01:33:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:33:56):
After Carl's grandson's resignation to his analysts also put out
a statement advocating for vaccine use and specifically against RFK
Junior and his vaccine rhetoric. Biotech investors also spread similar
anti RFK Junior rhetoric over the weekend following marx resignation.

Speaker 8 (01:34:16):
So, yeah, go fucking I don't know. I don't I
don't know exactly which public official you pressure or who
you go scream at to try to get rid of
this guy before he'd fucking gets us all killed. But
go do that, I don't know, Go harassed or like
legislator or whatever, or like, find find the nearest person
who can can can be yelled at, who will convey this.

Speaker 6 (01:34:35):
Stand outside your local CDC office to sign and protest
the CDC.

Speaker 8 (01:34:41):
The hospitals are empty. It's fake. Oh god, And on
that note, getting us yet another fucking one of those.
Actually do they even do the misinformation labels anymore? Onlike
Spotify and shit and like YouTube, Well, of course not. God,
we lost the election. It's not happy.

Speaker 6 (01:35:02):
Wow, truth and reasonable liss lost the election.

Speaker 8 (01:35:05):
Sorry not we So all right, yeah, this is the
city could appen here. Get this guy out of office
before we all fucking die in a plague.

Speaker 6 (01:35:15):
Again, this is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis today,

(01:35:42):
I'm joined by James Stout. This episode is going to
be about ice actions against students, scholars, and professors around
the country and this wave of deportations targeting people engaged
in pro Palestine speech. Protest, as well as some individuals
who have been roped up in this new way of
deportations who have not publicly engaged in Palestine activism. Let's

(01:36:06):
start on the evening of Saturday, March eighth, my Mood
Khalil and his wife were returning home from dinner when
plane closed. ICE agents followed the couple into their campus
apartment building at Columbia University. A man wearing a Marvel
graphic tea arrested Khalil for then unknown reasons and threatened
to arrest Khalil's wife, who is eight months pregnant and

(01:36:27):
an American citizen. When Khalil's wife brought his green card
from their apartment, she says, one of the ICE agents
placed a phone call informing someone Khalil was a permanent resident,
to which the person on the phone replied, let's bring
him in any way.

Speaker 1 (01:36:42):
You've got to be under arrest, so turn.

Speaker 8 (01:36:46):
Turn around, turn around, going to be his phone?

Speaker 2 (01:36:51):
Okay, you.

Speaker 5 (01:37:01):
Worked anymore?

Speaker 8 (01:37:04):
You guys really don't.

Speaker 6 (01:37:05):
Need to be doing all of that.

Speaker 8 (01:37:13):
During the arrest.

Speaker 6 (01:37:14):
Khalil's lawyer, Amy Greer, spoke in the film with one
of the ICE agents, who said that they were acting
on State Department orders to revoke Khalil's student visa. Greer
reiterated to the agents that Khalil was in fact a
permanent resident with a green card, but the ICE agent
just responded by saying they were revoking the green card instead.

(01:37:34):
Khalil's a graduate student who has been studying at Columbia
for over two years. Last year, Khalil emerged as a
visible figure in the college encampment protests, becoming a public
spokesperson and a lead negotiator on behalf of Columbia University
apartheid divest Though never being arrested, Khalil faced harassment from
right wing Zionist dosing campaigns calling for his deportation, and

(01:37:58):
when ICE did come for Khalil, disappearing him to a
detention facility in Louisiana and cutting him off from communication
with his wife and lawyer. Throughout all of this, he
was not charged with any crime. Instead, I used in
the State Department are using a rarely used Cold War
era immigration statute that gives the Secretary of State the
power to exclude or deport any non citizen of the

(01:38:20):
United States if there are quote reasonable grounds to believe
that in individuals entry, proposed activities, presence or activities in
the United States would have quote potentially serious adverse foreign
policy consequences.

Speaker 2 (01:38:35):
Yeah, that was the one that, like I remember at
the time, you and I were discussing this se in
our group chat, and we were trying to work out,
like how the Secretary of State could be revoking a
green card, Like yeah, and I think you found this,
so you found it somewhere in it. The Trump administration
has been very, very good at finding very obscure pieces

(01:38:56):
of law that it can wheeld against migrants. Right, No
one in twenty sixteen would have foreseen what they did
with Title forty two, which is a public health law,
and they're doing something similar here. I mean, they may
have spent the last four years looking for these things,
escescially when the campus protests began, But this is entirely
unprecedented as far as them weare.

Speaker 6 (01:39:18):
And right off this happened, we discussed how this case
was probably going to be used as a testing ground
for employing these tactics on a more widespread scale, creating
legal precedent, and sure enough, Khalil's case was not an outlier.
This was just the first public instance of the Trump
administrations directed targeting of students they believed to be associated

(01:39:41):
with protests against Israel and its actions in Gaza, and
this wave of actions by ICE had actually already begun
before Khalil's arrest. The day before Khalil was arrested, ICE
agents knocked on the door of PhD student Rajani Shrini Vassen,
who a few days prior was suddenly notified that her
student visa had been revoked. When I saygents knocked, she

(01:40:02):
did not answer the door. The next day, I showed
up again to her Columbia University apartment. Trina Aasen was
not home, but upon hearing of Khalil's arrest just a
few hours later, she decided to quickly collect some belongings
and flee to Canada. Five days later, when ICE returned
to her residence, but this time with a warrant, Trinavasten
was already gone. Homeland Security Secretary Christy nom praised this

(01:40:25):
as quote unquote self deportation.

Speaker 2 (01:40:28):
Yeah, they talk about this a lot, Like self deportation
is definitely one of their goals. They talked about it
before Trump even came into power. Like that's what we're
seeing a lot of these spectacle raids and like spectacle
deportations gear tactic. Yeah, yeah, exactly the desires that people leave.
Is she a Canadian citizen or like I.

Speaker 6 (01:40:48):
Don't believe so, No, Okay, it was just the fastest
flight from LaGuardia out of the country out of like, yeah,
the closest, the closest she could be.

Speaker 2 (01:40:56):
Yeah, I wonder what her immigration states is in Canada
now she.

Speaker 6 (01:41:00):
Is currently figuring this whole situation out still, okay, navigating
her legal options both in Canada and the States.

Speaker 2 (01:41:06):
Yeah, that'd be interesting too to see what Canada can
offer her. And like, I don't think the Trump administration
would go after like having her extradited back because if
she say she's not accused of a crime, and then
they've kind of got what they wanted. It'll be interesting
to follow that.

Speaker 6 (01:41:19):
There is no need for extradition because none of the
people that were talking about today were accused of any crime.

Speaker 2 (01:41:24):
Yeah. With the other cases of quote unquote like self deportation,
one of the issues is people have had their passport
seized and held, like like lots of Venice Whelan migrants,
so they actually can't ye or it would be very
difficult for them to like just get on a fly
and leave, which.

Speaker 6 (01:41:39):
I think is in part why she made the decision
to get out when she could right. DHS claimed in
a statement that Trine of Uson advocated violence and was
quote involved in activities supporting hamas a terrorist organization unquote.
ICE is targeting her seemingly stems from being mass arrested
while trying to return to her apartment from a picnic

(01:42:00):
friends on the same day as the Hamilton Hill occupation.
She couldn't get home and was caught up in the
crowd and was arrested among one hundred other people. She
received two summons for obstructing traffic and failure to disperse,
but her case was quickly dismissed. Homeland Security claims that
failing to declare these two summons is what caused her

(01:42:21):
visa to be revoked.

Speaker 2 (01:42:23):
Okay.

Speaker 6 (01:42:24):
Interesting That same week, ICE went after another Green cardholder
at Columbia, a twenty one year old student named Yung
Sao Chung, a permanent resident who immigrated to the United
States from South Korea with her family when she was seven.
On March ninth, ICE agents visited her parents' home looking
for Chung, and that day she received an odd text message, reading,

(01:42:45):
hi yunsaou. This is Audrey from the police. My job
is to reach out to you and see if you
have any questions about your recent arrest and the process
going forward. When are you available for a phone call unquote.
This recent arrest was allegedly in reference to being detained,
among others, at a sit in protest at Bernard College
on March fifth. Chung was charged and then released with

(01:43:08):
misdemeanor obstruction. After receiving that sketchy text message, Chung got
an email from Columbia Public Safety reading quote, the US
Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has
asked us to inform you that Homeland Security Investigation Agents
are seeking to make contact with you in connection with
an administrative warrant for your arrest. Consistent with universities practice,

(01:43:28):
we wanted to share this information and their request with you.
If you are represented by council, it may make sense
for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS unquote. Chung's
lawyer decided to call quote unquote to Audrey from the police,
who revealed that she was actually an HSI agent and
that the State Department was revoking Miss Chung's residency status. Now,

(01:43:50):
rather than opting for self deportation or turning herself into
immigration authorities, Chung decided to go into hiding and fight
the deportation in the courts while trying to evade ICED attention.
When ICE failed to locate her, they enlisted the help
of federal prosecutors. To quote from the New York Times quote,
on March tenth, Perry Carboni, a high ranking lawyer in

(01:44:10):
the Federal Prosecutor's office, told Miss Amaud, miss Chung's attorney
that the Secretary of State, mister Rubio, had revoked Miss
Chung's visa. Miss A mad responded that Miss Chung was
not in the country on a visa and was a
permanent resident, according to lawsuit. Mister Carboni responded that mister
Rubio had quote revoked that as well unquote. Yeah, So

(01:44:31):
this is the exact same language we saw with Khalil,
and it displays a general uncaring towards who they are
actually targeting and what their actual legal status is in
the United States. They think they're going after people student visas,
but when it turns out they have green cards, that
doesn't stop them, they still continue to do it anyway.
On March thirteenth, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants,

(01:44:53):
citing a statute for harboring non citizens, but Chung was
nowhere to be found. Like Khalil, the Trump administration is
arguing that her presence of the United States hinders the
administration's foreign policy agenda. But her lawyers note that Chung
was not, by any means a quote unquote movement leader.
She was simply one of hundreds of students who joined

(01:45:14):
in nationwide protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. Her lawyer's right, quote,
Miss Chung has not made public statements to the press
or otherwise assumed a high profile role in these protests.
She was rather one of a large group of college
students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns.

Speaker 2 (01:45:30):
Quote.

Speaker 6 (01:45:32):
Chung had previously faced university disciplinary process, which found she
was not in violation of any university policy related to protests.
Last year, Chung's lawyers filed a lawsuit to prevent her deportation,
claiming that ICE's actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional.
This lawsuit reads quote, Officials at the highest echelon's government

(01:45:53):
are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to
suppress speech that they dislike, including Miss Chung's space. ICE's
shocking actions against Miss Chung form a part of a
larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected
protest activity and other forms of speech unquote. On March

(01:46:13):
twenty fifth, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order
halting efforts from ICE to detain or relocate Chung. The
judge said that the government produced quote nothing in the
record to indicate Chung is a danger to the community
or a quote unquote foreign policy risk, or that she
was in any communication with terrorist organizations. The judge said

(01:46:37):
that there would be quote no trip to Louisiana here unquote.
This is in reference to the big ICE attention facility
in Louisiana. We'll be right back after this ad break. Okay,

(01:46:59):
we're back now. Although Chung has at least temporarily halted
ICE's efforts to detain or deporter not all legal recourses
have proven successful. This week, a US district judge declined
a request to block the deportation of Cornell's student Mamadou
Tall after the State Department revoked his visa on March

(01:47:22):
thirty first, Tall released a statement, quote, given what we
have seen across the United States, I have lost faith
that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my
personal safety and ability to express my beliefs. I've lost
faith I could walk the streets without being abducted. Weighing
these options, I took the decision to leave on my
own terms.

Speaker 2 (01:47:43):
Yeah, it's pretty bleak.

Speaker 6 (01:47:45):
So Tall has elected for the quote unquote self deportation option,
at least for now. I believe his case is going
to continue, but he is not going to remain in
the United States.

Speaker 5 (01:47:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:47:55):
I think he returned to the UK, right, I believe so.

Speaker 6 (01:47:58):
Yeah, he's a British citizen now. Interestingly, last September, Cornell
University itself tried to revoke Toall's student visa for involvement
in student protests, but he successfully appealed and was able
to continue his African studies PhD remotely.

Speaker 2 (01:48:14):
Yeah. I spoke to him a little bit back then,
just FIA direct message, and I think at that time,
whatever his agreement was, it seems like there was a
component of it that at least he didn't want to
talk about it in public, which is fine. Everyone has
the right to do that, and he should do it
was better for himself. But maybe I'll try and follow
up with him again now see if he wanted to speak,
because he seems to have like he's been of all

(01:48:36):
of these people at the one who's been able to
make the most statements and then control his narrative to
some degree.

Speaker 8 (01:48:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:48:42):
No, he entered this period of like radio silence after
he won his appeal last fall, and then only started
speaking publicly again once he began getting targeted by the
Trump administration.

Speaker 8 (01:48:54):
Yeah, like the past month and a half.

Speaker 2 (01:48:56):
I think he proactively filed that suit right like before.

Speaker 6 (01:49:00):
Now, the scale that Mark Rubio and Ice are seeking
for in regards to deportations is seemingly going to be
increasingly large. On March twenty seventh, Secretary of State Mark
Rubio claimed that he has revoked over three hundred student
visas so far, saying at a press conference, quote, we
do it every day. Every time I find one of

(01:49:22):
these lunatics, I take away their visas unquote. Now, there
are a few ways the government is currently trying to
find these quote unquote lunatics. ICE seems to be targeting
non citizens who have been arrested or detained at Palestine protests,
even if their charges were subsequently dropped. This is the
case for Chung and Shrini Vawsen, as well as former

(01:49:43):
student Leca Cordia, a Palestinian who was arrested at Columbia
campus protests in April of twenty twenty four She is
currently being held in an ICE attention facility in Texas.
Now beyond arrest records. The government is utilizing the world
Wide Web and social media to identify new and returning
visa applicants and possibly current visa holders that quote support

(01:50:07):
terrorist organizations unquote. Social media screening of immigrants and visa
holders has been slowly ramping up since twenty fourteen and
accelerated during Trump's first term, but a new directive from
Secretary of State Mark Rubio titled Enhanced Screening and Social
Media Vetting for Visa Applicants was sent out on March
twenty fifth and leaked by journalist Ken Clippenstein. The directive

(01:50:30):
cites two executive orders from Trump, measures to combat anti
Semitism end quote protecting the United States from foreign terrorists
and other national security and public safety threats.

Speaker 8 (01:50:40):
Quote.

Speaker 6 (01:50:41):
The State Department is now requiring consular officers to conduct
a quote unquote mandatory social media review with screenshotting for
students and student exchange visitors with the intent of looking
for evidence of quote advocating for, sympathizing with, or persuading
others to endorse or espouse terror activities or support a

(01:51:01):
designated foreign terrorist organization unquote. Now this applies to FM
and JAY visas, so student exchange visas, academic visas, and
vocational visas. The directive also instructs officers to search social
media for quote conduct that bears a hostile attitude towards
US citizens or US culture, including government institutions or founding

(01:51:26):
principles unquote, which is kind of the most incredibly broad
thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (01:51:33):
Yeah, I mean, that's leaving it at the great discretion
of the officer.

Speaker 6 (01:51:36):
Right, There's already been an instance of a US customers
agent's denying entry to someone who had a quote unquote
anti Trump sentiments found on their phone. Now, though this
new directive is focused on denying or revoking student visas,
the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to expand its
social media data collection to US citizenship, green card, and

(01:52:00):
Islam applicants, basically anyone and everyone in the US immigration system,
no matter their current status or what previous vetting they
might have already gone through.

Speaker 2 (01:52:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:52:09):
On March fifth, DHS issued a sixty day notice for
public comment on a proposal for quote uniform of vetting
standards and national security screening unquote that includes the collection
of social media information for all non citizens applying for
immigration benefits like citizenship or permanent residency. A statement from
the US Citizenship and Immigration Service reads, quote, these efforts

(01:52:32):
ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work
in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine
national security, or promote harmful anti American ideologies unquote.

Speaker 2 (01:52:44):
Yeah, Like the anti American ideologies again is just fastly broad.

Speaker 8 (01:52:48):
Right, It's like crazy red scare level stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:52:51):
Yeah. And I'm guessing this will be either like a
literal control f of whatever they can find of your
public social media or AI, some kind of AI assistant.
That's what it seems to be, right, Like.

Speaker 6 (01:53:03):
Former immigration agents have suggested that they're probably going to
use some AI system for this, as they've already kind
of used more primitive versions. But ramping up to this
scale and with like this increased focus and attention on
quote unquote AI is going to affect the way that
they do this betting process.

Speaker 8 (01:53:18):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:53:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:53:20):
Great.

Speaker 6 (01:53:21):
So though the government is trying to increase their social
media screening, so far, they actually haven't had to do
that much of their own research to identify targets for removal.
On March seventeenth, a Georgetown scholar named Badar Khan Suri
was arrested by Homeland Security outside his home in Virginia,
where he lives with his wife, who's a US citizen,

(01:53:43):
and their three kids. According to Surrey's lawyer, masked agents
quote refused to tell him the basis for the arrest,
handcuffed him, and forced him into an unmarked black SUV unquote. Later,
his wife was informed that her husband's visa was revoked
based on social media posts and that Surrey was sent
to ICE attention in Louisiana. Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia

(01:54:07):
McLoughlin posted on x that Surrey was quote actively spreading
Hamas propaganda and promoting anti Semitism on social media. The
Secretary of State issued a determination that Surrey's activities and
presents in the United States rendered him deportable unquote. Of course,
any single post in support of Palestine is going to

(01:54:29):
be seen as quote unquote promoting antisemitism. According to Mark Rubio,
Surrey's lawyer wrote in a court filing, quote, doctor Surrey
is an academic, not an activist. But he spoke out
on social media about his views on the Israel Gazo war.
Even more so, his wife is an outspoken critic of
the Israeli government and the violence it has perpetuated against Palestinians. Yeah,

(01:54:52):
see that he was identified through his wife, right, correct,
and we'll get to that.

Speaker 2 (01:54:56):
Okay.

Speaker 6 (01:54:57):
Surrey has no criminal record, and according to a colleague,
he did not attend campus protests. However, Surre's lawyer writes
that his family have been victims of a docsing campaign,
with his wife stating that a website had quote claimed
falsely that my husband and I have quote ties to
Hamas unquote. The Homeland Security Assistant Secretary references that claim
in a public statement on Twitter. And this harassment stems

(01:55:20):
in part from Surrey's father in law being a maud Yusef,
a former advisor to Hamas a federal judge blocked serious
deportation as immigration court proceedings continue, but he still remains
in iced attention.

Speaker 2 (01:55:34):
What kind of visa was he on?

Speaker 6 (01:55:36):
He's not a green card holder. He received his visa
to continue doctoral research on peace building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's some kind of like academic or exchange visa. I
don't think we know the exact type that he has.

Speaker 2 (01:55:50):
Okay, yeah, that would be it would be interesting to
know if, like, are they searching just through f one
visa databases or they I mean obviously not a find
these green card people, but.

Speaker 6 (01:56:01):
Like, well, I think specifically in this case, they're searching
social media. They're not searching through their own databases. They
don't care what kind of visa he has. They're looking
at this docksing campaign that's been targeted at him and
his family for like over a year and using that
as the basis to deport him.

Speaker 2 (01:56:19):
Right, and then being like, can we deport he's not
a citizen?

Speaker 6 (01:56:22):
So yes, basically even though his wife is a citizen, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:56:25):
It's children puberly therefore also citizens.

Speaker 6 (01:56:28):
His wife, whose father is a mod yusef. They can't
deport her because she's a citizen, or at least they
can't deport her right now. Who knows if they'll try
to denaturalize in the future. Yeah, but this is the
easiest person to target.

Speaker 2 (01:56:41):
Yeah, and I think that's kind of what they're going for.
Like a lot of this is it's like the politics
of owning the Libs, Right, It's like the politics of
being angry at your niece and nephew on Facebook and
wanting to humiliate them. Like, It's not a particularly lately
coherent policy other than like the Palestine protests made a

(01:57:03):
lot of people on the right mad, and they don't
like migrants and that now they're using this obscure legal
provision as a cudgel against everything they dislike.

Speaker 6 (01:57:13):
Yeah, and using social media to identify people who have
never been arrested, never been charged with anything.

Speaker 2 (01:57:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:57:20):
We're going to finished our discussion on these doxing campaigns
and ICE action starting students after this ad break.

Speaker 4 (01:57:36):
All right, we're back.

Speaker 6 (01:57:37):
So right now, the two main vectors for iceed attention,
whether you have a green card or a visa, seems
to be previous arrests or these mass doxing campaigns. Now,
someone like Mahmoud Khalil was never arrested or charged with
a crime, but instead it has been the target of
harassment from both a local campus doxing account run by

(01:57:59):
Columbia professor and fellow students, as well as larger right
wing Zionist organizations like Canary Mission. A few days before
being arrested by Ice, Canary Mission posted a video naming
Khalil as a quote unquote siren moog suspect it foreign
national alert? So what is Canary Mission if you're lucky

(01:58:19):
enough to be unaware? Since twenty fifteen, Canary Mission has
been collecting and publishing personal information of people they accuse
of promoting quote hatred of the United States, Israel, and
Jews on North American college campuses and beyond unquote. Now
they have profiles for a few legitimate American neo Nazis,

(01:58:40):
but many profiles only cite criticism of the Israeli government
and its actions in Gaza as proof of alleged anti Semitism.
And now there is increasing evidence that the government is
using websites like Canary Mission to target students, professors, and
scholars for ICE deportation, essentially outsourcing intail gathering from these

(01:59:00):
pro Israel non government organizations. A few weeks ago, Canary
Mission uploaded a profile for Rumeza oz Turk, a Turkish
graduate student at Tufts University. They included a picture her
resume and linked to an op ed she co wrote
last year for her student paper criticizing the university for
its ties to Israel amidst the Warren Gaza. For this,

(01:59:23):
the Canary Mission claimed oz Turk quote engaged in anti
Israel activism unquote. Two weeks later, while walking alone to
Iftar dinner for Ramadan, a plane closes, ICE agent approached
oz Turk on the sidewalk. As he grabbed her arms
and wrestled away her phone. Five more agents surrounded her

(01:59:43):
and pulled up their gator masks as neighbors began filming
the arrest. Within twenty four hours, she was moved to
ICE attention in Louisiana. A statement from Homeland Security claimed
that HSI Homeland Security investigation had determined that oz Turk
quote engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign
terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans, and Secretary

(02:00:07):
of State Mark Rubio said, quote, we gave you a
visa to come and study and get a degree, not
to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.

Speaker 2 (02:00:17):
Quote yeah, I mean again, Like writing an op ed
is like as central to the First Amendment as things
can be.

Speaker 6 (02:00:25):
Right, Yeah, there's no evidence she was even attending campus protests,
let alone tearing up tearing up the university she co
wrote an op ed. And you should not be deported
for engaging in protest on a university campus at all. Right,
this is flatly unconstitutional, extremely worrying. The fact that this
person just got a profile in the Canary Mission website

(02:00:47):
for writing an op ed and then this is used
as justification for her deportation is still like an even
greater escalation.

Speaker 2 (02:00:55):
Yeah, Like, if we're talking about like this is sort
of like liberal idea of the the marketplace of ideas, right,
the way that the ideas enter the marketplace, Like, you
will find nothing more amenable to liberalism than writing an
op ed in your campus newspaper. Right, that is the
most like well behaved, straight down the middle, constitutionally protected

(02:01:16):
thing way to engage in anti genocide activism, pro Palestine activism.
So like, in a sense, this one is particularly disturbing,
Like as a frontal assault on First Amendment. Rise for
non citizens is what it is. Yes.

Speaker 6 (02:01:30):
On March twenty fourth, Canary Mission published a new section
of their website titled Uncovering Foreign Nationals, which lists the
profiles of non citizens who they believe qualify for deportation.

Speaker 2 (02:01:45):
Jesus.

Speaker 6 (02:01:46):
Another far right pro Israel docsn group called Batar, which
even the ADL lists as an extremist group. Yeah, which
is wild. Batar says that they have given the Troup
administration a deportation list of thousands of names, including citizens
that they expect to be denaturalized. People like Mamado Tall

(02:02:07):
and Mahmood Khalil have been targeted by both of these organizations.

Speaker 2 (02:02:12):
People will be familiar with. I don't know if it's
Bitar or Bitar, but like you probably have seen videos
of them on campus trying to hand pages to people pagers, Yeah,
like making.

Speaker 8 (02:02:22):
Light of the pager attack Israel.

Speaker 2 (02:02:24):
Did I mean making a threat? Like sure, Like if
you're going to come onto a campus and make a
fucking bomb threat and accuse someone else of terrorism, I
mean the hypocrisy is kind of the point.

Speaker 6 (02:02:37):
But or even just like you know, quote unquote celebrating
the deaths of people.

Speaker 2 (02:02:41):
Right yeah, right, like mocking this attack which killed children,
which you know, crippled people. It's just disgusting. It's like
just important. They seem to get a lot of attention
online because they do the thing where they go up
to people and say deliberately provocative things and film their reactions. Right,

(02:03:01):
they're kind of IRL trolling.

Speaker 6 (02:03:04):
The past week, ICE actions against students have seemingly accelerated.
Ali Reza Drudi, a doctoral student from Iran studying at
the University of Alabama, was arrested by ICE on March
twenty fifth in the middle of the night at his
off campus apartment. Drudi's the entry visa expired, but he
was allowed to stay in the States as he still
maintained his student's status. It's unknown why exactly he was targeted.

(02:03:29):
He has no ties to protests or any notable online footprint.

Speaker 2 (02:03:34):
It could be his ethnic origin, right leg yeah, it
could be his name, right yeah. But that we should
explain the status thing a bit more for people who
aren't familiar. So, like, sure, your status is when you're
in good standing with the university, So normally that means
you need to be enrolled in twelve credits per You
might be on semestis, you might be on courts. I
don't think it's usually matters you have to does a

(02:03:55):
minimum course load. It may be different for different systems.
I don't know. You'd also need to be in good
standing in terms of like not lay on your fees, right,
your tuition fees, that kind of stuff, right, not in
any you haven't been expelled or excluded from the university
for any actions that you've taken that kind of thing.
It means you are currently a student at the university.

(02:04:16):
Basically the only time this normally affects international students that
I'm aware of, because a person who now teaches students
is like they can't drop below a certain course load,
when otherwise they may wish to drop below a certain
courseload to either focus on they might have like a
research position, they might be doing other stuff on campus
like taing. Right, Sometimes that ta and counter towards their

(02:04:37):
course load. Sometimes it doesn't, but it can affect things
like that. But generally it would be the university that
would update that status. Right, that would notify US Customs
and Immigration if somebody fell out of compliance with that.
If I'm hearing right, that doesn't seem like that's what
happened here, right.

Speaker 6 (02:04:57):
No, Simply his entry vis a expired, so if he
left the country, he then would have to get another
visa to get back in, but he can stay as
long as he still has his valid student status. So
not only is ICE trying to revoke these like visas,
but they're trying to essentially say that by revoking these visas,
they are also attempting to strip them of their student status,

(02:05:19):
which is like a separate like step. These things can
get kind of very very blurry though.

Speaker 2 (02:05:25):
Yeah, Like I don't quite how that works in terms
of like our ICE supposed to be able to I
don't think it hugely matters at this point.

Speaker 6 (02:05:32):
Technically, the State Department does have that ability, but it's
under the same like foreign policy risk designation, Okay, and
they'll justify it by saying, well, his visa already expired,
so we're just removing him because his visa expired, even
though that's not really how this works.

Speaker 2 (02:05:48):
Yeah, then they don't have to remove him for that reason.
But yeah, in this case, I guess they go for
something else.

Speaker 6 (02:05:54):
No, because the University of Alabama did not elect to
rescind his student status. He was a student good standing, Yeah,
and thus legally allowed in the United States.

Speaker 2 (02:06:04):
Yeah yeah, like everyone else say, he hadn't done anything
that would, under normal circumstances lead to him having any
interactions with USCIS.

Speaker 6 (02:06:14):
Just this last week, I sttained a University of Minnesota
grad student at their off campus housing. The university released
a statement saying that they had no prior knowledge of
this incident and had not shared any information with federal authorities.
This person's name is still not released.

Speaker 5 (02:06:30):
Okay.

Speaker 8 (02:06:31):
Last week, a.

Speaker 6 (02:06:32):
Student at the Southern Illinois University had their visa revoked.
The school administration told their college paper that the university
has no role in the visa revocation process. The Illinois
Governor's office is working with schools across the state to
quote ensure they are being vigilant about what's happening on
their respective campuses. The Governor's team has asked universities to

(02:06:53):
communicate with international students about the general resources available to
them through the institution. In addition, we have suggested that
they connect impacted students with legal resources that have been
in place for several years. According to a statement sent
to the university paper, the Daily Egyptian Tina Sickinger, which
is a very cool name. The school's director of International

(02:07:18):
Student and Scholar Services sent an email to the international
student body of Southern Illinois University advising them to carry
photocopies of immigration documents with them at all times, as
well as proof of enrollment and records of US residences.
The email recommended that students quote use caution on social
media and exercise discretion when participating in political demonstrations or

(02:07:42):
protests unquote, warning that though protests should be protected speech, quote,
such activities can sometimes be misinterpreted and may carry risks
to your immigration status unquote. Unfortunately, I think this is
the university trying to look out for these students.

Speaker 4 (02:07:57):
Yeah, that's the best you could expect from them, really, And.

Speaker 6 (02:08:01):
They are providing like legal resources to these students, but
they're essentially saying like you shouldn't post anything or do
any protests because then ice might come kidnap you. Yeah,
which is just a fucked up situation to be in.
And like, yeah, they don't have any other ability to
like stop this right now. I am curious what Prisker
is going to continue to do here.

Speaker 2 (02:08:21):
Though, Yeah, I mean, none of what they've said is
like wrong, It's kind of what you can expect from university.
The best you can expect from the university really is like, hey,
we've noticed it's happening.

Speaker 6 (02:08:34):
So that is the situation as it currently stands. I
do have one final tidbit here just that highlights the
absurdity of this whole situation. On March twenty fourth, a
lawsuit on behalf of Israeli Columbia students and relatives of
Israeli October seventh victims was filed against Columbia Jewish Voice
for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, Columbia University

(02:08:56):
Apartheid divest and individual Columbia students, including Mahmoud Khalil. The
loss of allege is that these Columbia groups and students
are the domestic propaganda arm of Hamas, and even claims
that these groups had advanced notice that the October seventh
attack was going to take place.

Speaker 4 (02:09:15):
Oh, come on.

Speaker 6 (02:09:17):
So the plan was kept secret among Hamas's own political
allies in the region, but they gave an Ivy League
university in the New York City.

Speaker 2 (02:09:28):
Had tip off. They just let him know what was coming.
Completely absurd, absolutely like like the IDF completely failed to
see this coming, right, But they're not the folks at
the Ivy League universities who were who were ready and waiting.

Speaker 6 (02:09:43):
Hamas didn't tell the who thies, They didn't tell Iran,
they didn't tell Hesbola, but they told student activist groups
in New York City at the Columbia University campus.

Speaker 2 (02:09:56):
Yeah, absolutely ludicrous. Like, await this court case. I guess
to see what evidence they have of this. The evidence
is going to be like someone had a Palestinian flag.

Speaker 6 (02:10:06):
Some of the quote unquote evidence that they that they
allege is that some of these like activist accounts had
a renewed activity in October of twenty twenty three, like
before the attack happened. But this is just a simple coincidence.
Obviously these people did not have a heads up that
the October seventh attack.

Speaker 8 (02:10:26):
Was going to take place. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:10:28):
The lawsuit also argues that protest activity is not First
Amendment protected speech, but in fact, quote substantial assistance in
the form of propaganda and recruiting services and in coordination
with a designated foreign terrorist organization, again alleging there's some
kind of communication between hubmas and student activists in New

(02:10:49):
York City.

Speaker 2 (02:10:50):
Yeah, this is ludicrous. Like one of the reasons maybe
we're seeing this so much over the Palestine advocacy is
that Hamas is enlisted foreign terrorist organization. Many other groups
and lots of groups in that part of the world are,
But like it's just a bigger stick to waive I
guess material aid or that no one has been actually
accused of material aid to foreign terrorist organization as far

(02:11:12):
as I'm aware, but like that is kind of the
sort of stick that they're waving, right, that is the
thing that they're alleging.

Speaker 6 (02:11:19):
I will end us with just this kind of final note. Now,
while there are little signs that this would happen at
a scale this large and disfocused under a democratic president,
a degree of consent for this type of targeting was
manufactured the past year as it relates to Palestine protests,
with some liberals and democratic politicians associating activists as pro

(02:11:41):
Hamas terrorists. And this is the consequence of that public
perception building and the consent being manufactured for that framing.
And now that the even more evil side is in charge,
they can take that justification and run with it way
further than what a Joe Biden or a Kamala Harris
would have done. So it is far worse, but it's
not in a political bubble. This has been like a

(02:12:04):
growing project for the past few years.

Speaker 2 (02:12:07):
There was no point at which to buy the administration really,
like effusively said, this is protected First Amendment speech. Yeah,
we may not like it, but it is central to
the Bill of Rights. It's central to what America is
supposed to be about.

Speaker 6 (02:12:19):
They never defended the constitutionality of this speech. Yeah, nor
would they have intervened to stop the deportation of someone
like Tall if Cornell decided to revoke his status, right right, Yeah,
I don't think they buy an administration or a Kamala
Harris administration would be directed in these these universities to
take that action themselves, nor would they be I think

(02:12:40):
revoking student visas at scale like this, No, but they
would have let Ice do the stuff that ICE does
if universities themselves elect to remove student visas or unenroll
these students, and like, a degree of the complacency here
is placed on the actual university administrations, the university staff
who have beenfying these protesters for the past two years.

Speaker 2 (02:13:04):
Yeah, and I mean in some cases, right, Like I'm
thinking of one of Columbia, Like professors have got away
with things which are absolutely unacceptable and like one hundred
percent in some violation of your agreement with the university
as a member of the faculty, Like doxing your students. Yeah,
photographing students without their consent, following students around like absolutely unacceptable,

(02:13:28):
Like in any other context that you would be immediately
shitcanned for that. Like really, really, the only reason you
can lose tenure seemingly is being a fucking creep to
students or stealing a lot of money, And like universities
did allow that for more than a year under the
Biden administration, and like we're seeing the consequences of that now.

Speaker 6 (02:13:49):
It's also worth noting that, since I've had to quote
from so many government statements this episode, the Trump admin
is continuing to correlate any expression of sympathy or solidarity
with Palestine as explicit support for Hamas. Basically, anything you
say that's critical of the Israeli government its actions in

(02:14:09):
Gaza are being interpreted by the Trump administration as anti
semitism and support for the October seventh massacre. This is
a false equivalency. What the government alleges should not be
automatically taken as the truth. These tactics have been used
for years to broadly smear pro Palestine activists while also
hurting anti Zionist Jews. And I guess, like, finally, we

(02:14:31):
are not necessarily endorsing every single thing that every single
one of these students has said. We do not necessarily
agree with the framing of every single sentence that they
have said.

Speaker 4 (02:14:42):
Yeah, I mean we don't know everything that they've said.

Speaker 8 (02:14:44):
We can, yeah, exactly. This is like completely separate to that.

Speaker 2 (02:14:47):
Yeah, it doesn't matter, Like we are defending their right
to engage in constitutionally protected speaking.

Speaker 6 (02:14:53):
Correct no matter what they're saying, no matter if they
have opinions on hamas that differ from ours. No matter
what they are saying at a campus protest, it should
not result in ICE targeting them and hunting them down
and forcing students who attend to sit in protests into
hiding to defend their own rights and to keep their
green cards. This is like a completely absurd and like

(02:15:16):
blatantly fascist to use the now overused word frankly, but
this is like, this is this is what that is
if this was happening in China, this was happening in Russia,
in other countries, people would be very very quick to call.

Speaker 2 (02:15:29):
Out I mean, it does happen in Russia, right people exactly,
people quick to call it out. Yeah, yeah, And if
the State Department of this country has called it out
right like it at right Ley, Yes, I don't agree
with everything the State Department does, but they do agree
with him on that, like yeah, And I think this
is like I know, if you find yourself having a
discussion about this, I think almost everyone in America can

(02:15:51):
find something that they disagree with the government on or
have disagreed with the government on, and like, this hurts
every single one of us. Right, everyone's right to freedom
of speech is challenged. When someone's right to freedom of
speech is challenged, and like, I think that is the
way to approach this. It doesn't really matter if the
people whose speech is being challenged right now, the speech

(02:16:15):
is if it's odious to us, if it's something that
we don't agree with, Like, that isn't what's at stake.
What's at stake is everyone's right to say everything without
government consequences.

Speaker 6 (02:16:26):
Well, I think that doesn't for us today at it
Could Happen Here? We will continue to report on the
targeting of students, scholars and professors, and immigrants in general
as the Trump administration ramps up its deportation efforts. If
you would like to contact us about these topics, we
have an encrypted email address at cool Zone, tips at

(02:16:49):
proton dot ne. It is end to end encrypted, so
if you use another encrypted email service or another proton
mail account to send the email only, then is it encrypts?

Speaker 4 (02:17:00):
Did this?

Speaker 8 (02:17:25):
Is it could happen here?

Speaker 6 (02:17:26):
Executive Disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
White House, the crumbling economic world, and what this means
for you.

Speaker 8 (02:17:34):
I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout.

Speaker 6 (02:17:37):
And Mio Wong. It is a liberation day in America.

Speaker 8 (02:17:41):
Everyone. How do you feel?

Speaker 1 (02:17:43):
I feel liberated, last, free at last, Thank God Almighty,
we are free at last for being able to afford things.

Speaker 8 (02:17:50):
I am so so liberated right.

Speaker 2 (02:17:54):
Now, unchained from a burden of having money.

Speaker 1 (02:17:57):
Yes, yes, well, as the Buddhists say, know, freeing yourself
from attachment is really the path to nirvana.

Speaker 8 (02:18:03):
Trump really is our first Buddhist president.

Speaker 2 (02:18:06):
Is one thing they say about him.

Speaker 1 (02:18:09):
That's right. He may be the new Dalai Lama who
can say the Dalai Lama and he hasn't, but.

Speaker 2 (02:18:14):
Yeah, yeah, and the priests who looked for him after
he dies. When he comes back. These guys, unfortunately, they're
probably on a fucking travel band list.

Speaker 1 (02:18:24):
Now, oh my god, there's I mean, pretty good chance
they're in ice custody at the moment. If I understand Buddhists.

Speaker 6 (02:18:33):
Well, I think we should just get right to the
most pressing news, which is line go down.

Speaker 1 (02:18:40):
Line, Line is on its way down.

Speaker 2 (02:18:44):
Yeah, line in free fold currently.

Speaker 1 (02:18:47):
Yeah. It's funny because they chose they were supposed to initially.
I think it was like going to be three pm
or something. E St two or three was the initial
time they wanted to announce this, which would have given
this dock market a couple of.

Speaker 8 (02:19:01):
Hours on April second, right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:19:04):
Yeah, on April second, it would have given it Liberation Day.
On Liberation Day, there would have been a couple hours
for it to take effect, and they attempted to mitigate this.
I guess in the hope that we would all get
over it overnight, we would forget some other ship before
the new prices. Even Kevin, we'd be like, ah no,
I'm on and the next thing. But the Dow and

(02:19:26):
the NASA is all all plunged because it's clear if
the president is like deliberately shifting an event to not
hurt the stock market, that's going to hurt the stock market,
you know.

Speaker 2 (02:19:35):
Yeah, yeah, it's good. When you see a ninety degree
angle on the old stock market graph, that's when you
know someone's really crushing it in the economic delug.

Speaker 1 (02:19:43):
And so far, we're recording this a little afternoon on Thursday,
the April the third, So just in the course of today,
major stock indexes have dropped by about five point six percent,
which means about two point seven trillion dollars in market value,
which will be the just declined since March of twenty
twenty sick. So we are it is looking like this

(02:20:04):
is going to be, at the very least a stock
market decline in line with the one that came as
a result of the global pandemic, with the noted caveat
that there's really no reason to believe it will get
better at any point.

Speaker 6 (02:20:16):
Yeah, yeah, you can't ready vaccinate against you now, I'm
not qualified to give financial advice, but I think everyone
should pull out your four O one k right now,
go to the bank, withdraw all your money, all of your.

Speaker 1 (02:20:28):
Rivery bit of it. Put it into the worst tasting
survival foods. Yeah, and you're gonna want to buy Kel texts,
lots of Kel texts in a caliber no one else has.

Speaker 2 (02:20:40):
Five to seven. Yeah, get the one that doesn't take
eighty thirty two ACP. I won the thirty two ACP.

Speaker 8 (02:20:46):
That's it.

Speaker 1 (02:20:46):
That's it, James. Everyone buy thirty two ACP.

Speaker 2 (02:20:49):
And guy, yeah, it's exceeded in ending one World war
and right done.

Speaker 1 (02:20:53):
We call that doing a hitler, but in a good way.

Speaker 8 (02:20:55):
Someone here has to be vaguely responsible and say, don't
fucking do that. Do none of those things, zero zero
of those too. Your accounts, get hard cash.

Speaker 1 (02:21:05):
Mark Cuban told people to do that.

Speaker 8 (02:21:08):
Absolutely not.

Speaker 2 (02:21:09):
Mayor endorses Reagan Coin is the exclusive safe source of
the time savings.

Speaker 1 (02:21:15):
You're gonna want to put every dime you've got in
pressed latinum. Now I know that that's the currency from
star Trek and does not exist. Nevertheless, cancel your accounts,
put it all in latinum.

Speaker 6 (02:21:26):
I mean, it's gonna exist. In like what like forty
years per time.

Speaker 2 (02:21:30):
On the ground, it's not already a meme coin ten
minutes off to discuss more.

Speaker 8 (02:21:34):
Stable than your four oh one k Right now, you can.

Speaker 1 (02:21:37):
Be rich just in time for money to stop being
a thing.

Speaker 8 (02:21:40):
There you go, there you go.

Speaker 2 (02:21:41):
Yeah, this is why we're launching cool zone coin.

Speaker 8 (02:21:44):
Guys.

Speaker 1 (02:21:46):
It's redeemable for whatever money the Ferengi use when they exist.

Speaker 6 (02:21:51):
We should probably talk about why the stock market is
doing poor Leah, So I think Robert, you can handle
this segue.

Speaker 1 (02:21:58):
Well, you know, wait, what is that? Oh my god?

Speaker 9 (02:22:03):
Is that Mina Wong's theme music by god Lock jas
right jas locks right jasp.

Speaker 1 (02:22:22):
Oh god, that was a great purchase, you guys. I mean,
can we all agree with every penny?

Speaker 3 (02:22:28):
Really?

Speaker 6 (02:22:28):
Was the best financial purchase we've made is the Tariff
Talk theme though.

Speaker 8 (02:22:33):
We're gonna get so much mileage out of that thing.
It's an unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (02:22:37):
You're gonna be using this fucker for years.

Speaker 2 (02:22:41):
At least something good came of face. When you're struggling
to get by with your family, just remember the song.

Speaker 1 (02:22:47):
Yeah yeah, this will keep you warm as you huddle
around a barrel waiting for the UH the new police,
which are just called murder police to reach your chanty
town anyway.

Speaker 8 (02:22:59):
Let us talk heraffs. Power sections of the left have
long argued is in logistics. It was logistics that allowed
the capitalists of the nineteen seventies and eighties to crush
the labor movement by enacting the so called spatial fix
to the crisis of capitalism. By shifting production from countries
where workers movements were strong to countries where violence against
workers was easier and workers were thus poorer and more exploited,

(02:23:22):
CEOs could pit workers against each other in an endless
race to the bottom. These practices became known as offshoring.
Infused with the international attack on unions and the power
of workers heralded in the US by Reagan, together they
crushed the workers movement and implemented neoliberal austerity throughout the
globe through a regime that is colloquially known as free trade. Now,

(02:23:44):
there was, of course, resistance to this, maybe most famously
the uprising of the Zapatistas and Chiapas in nineteen ninety four,
on the day the NAFTA went into effect. But for
all of the victories and all of the spaces that
were carved out. It is still the CEOs, the bosses,
and the capitalists to rule the world. However, in the
wake of their defeat, sections of the working class came

(02:24:05):
to see their own power as a product of the
nation of masculinity of American jobs. For American workers, in
this view, you didn't need to form a union, you
didn't need to organize, you didn't need to fight the
bosses who exploit you. All you needed to do for
the high paying blue collar jobs of the nineteen sixties
to return was getting rid of the immigrants and bring
jobs back home. This American nationalist ideology was extremely useful

(02:24:30):
to the ruling class. It allowed them to turn the
rhetoric of the old base of the workers' movement into
a fascist movement, which they could then use to smash
any genuine worker struggle and then ride to power to
impose more brutal austerity and more pro capitalist reforms, too,
in their view, make it impossible for their power ever
to be challenged again. But a strange thing happened in

(02:24:51):
the nationalism bred by the defeat of the workers movement.
The human personifications of the capitalist bubble economy in Donald
Trump and Elon Musk have come to see their own
victory as defeat. They became convinced that the trade deficits,
which from a capitalist perspective simply do not matter as
long as companies are making money.

Speaker 1 (02:25:11):
Yeah, yes, they better for shit.

Speaker 2 (02:25:15):
Yeah here's the fuck.

Speaker 1 (02:25:17):
What you are calling a trade deficit is us getting
things we want from.

Speaker 2 (02:25:21):
People, Like yeah, yeah, it's buying stuff. Like I saw
a good post. It was like, you don't have a
trade deficit with your dentist. You just pay them to
fix your teeth, Like.

Speaker 1 (02:25:31):
Yeah, I was. I was told at one point in
this nation's greatest living previous moment of crisis, that what
we needed to do was go buy things to make
it better.

Speaker 4 (02:25:43):
Not anymore, buddy.

Speaker 8 (02:25:44):
Nope, because because these people, Donald Trump and Elon Musk
and the cadra of weird white nationals fanatic sets around them,
have absolutely convinced themselves that if you have a trade deficit,
you are being ripped off by foreigners.

Speaker 1 (02:25:58):
Yep, yep.

Speaker 8 (02:26:00):
And so they concluded that we needed to put tariffs
on fucking all of the rest of the world in
order to bring American jobs back to Americans. A new
national autarchy for a fascist world now the ruling class,
all the capitalists, all these fucking goddamn Goldman Sachs motherfuckers,
financial analysts, all of these CNBC dipshits, all of these

(02:26:20):
fucking all these motherfuckers at black Rock and all of
the global hedge funds and all of these, all these motherfuckers,
all of the tech dipshits, all of the people who
backed Trump to a hilt, simply assumed that none of
these hairs would ever happen, that it was all campaign bluster,
that he was lying out of his ass. And you know,
Obama again I've said this before, ran an abolishing NAFTA.
So there was you know, and well, what the fuck
ever came from that, right? We of course fucking tried

(02:26:43):
to tell them otherwise. We tried to tell them that
they could not fucking control the fascist beasts, that one
day it would rise to consume them all along with us.
They didn't care. They backed Trump anyways because they thought
they would get fucking tax breaks and now liberation days here.

Speaker 1 (02:26:57):
Don't forget Krypto. They were really bullshot back.

Speaker 8 (02:27:00):
Yeah, all of these motherfuckers, they really thought that Trump
was going to fucking literally all Trump was going to
do was punish the transgenders, get rid of woke, and
give them tax cuts.

Speaker 1 (02:27:11):
Mm hmm yep.

Speaker 8 (02:27:13):
And now if the terror falls have gone up, the
old world is dead, the new world struggles to be born.
Now is the time of monsters.

Speaker 6 (02:27:20):
Now we're in what I'm what I'm referring to as
the Chinese Century. I came up with this this this
week on my own.

Speaker 3 (02:27:25):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (02:27:26):
Yeah, yeah, okay, mm hmm yeah. Good Now.

Speaker 1 (02:27:29):
That's that's of course named after Chinatown in San Francisco,
which Garrison is very bullish about positive, positive real estate
developments there. Uh, you're big into real estate. People don't
know that.

Speaker 8 (02:27:42):
Chinese real estate absolutely where you want to be right now,
both both in Chinatown and in actual China. You put
all your money in the Chinese real estate. The bubble
can't pop a second time, can only go back up.

Speaker 1 (02:27:54):
It does. There were so many like enemies on the
verge of defeat in like the traditional US geopolitical sense,
like China'scconoio was doing great. Russia could have been easily
pushed to collapse, and we were just like Noah, no, no,
you know what's better. We're gonna shoot ourselves right in the.

Speaker 2 (02:28:09):
Deck, which we've snatched defeat from.

Speaker 1 (02:28:11):
The ourselves in a dick with a bullet that venmos,
both of you guys.

Speaker 2 (02:28:18):
It's great. We dug up the Cold War, resurrected it
and then lost.

Speaker 4 (02:28:21):
Yeah, just to lose.

Speaker 2 (02:28:24):
It's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (02:28:25):
You can't. Yeah, it's so it's sort of like Michael
Jackson coming back for Space Jam if he had immediately
like fucking thrown a basketball so hard at a bugs
bunny skull that it put him at traction.

Speaker 8 (02:28:36):
I'm sorry, did you just say Michael Jackson.

Speaker 1 (02:28:38):
Jordan didn't, Okay, Jordan, we just said Jacks Well, definitely,
you know, leave it in different, different movie, maybe better.
You know, he always he always performed well around kids.

Speaker 2 (02:28:49):
So it's good.

Speaker 8 (02:28:52):
God, yeah, I love Space Jam.

Speaker 1 (02:28:54):
It's a good movie.

Speaker 4 (02:28:55):
Anymore.

Speaker 2 (02:28:55):
Garret said, it's forevitainted.

Speaker 1 (02:28:57):
Now, so let's let's talk about the nature of like
what's actually going down with these terrts.

Speaker 8 (02:29:02):
Yeah, let's get to the tariffs.

Speaker 1 (02:29:03):
Terrible, terrifable, terrifable, that's right, garrisons.

Speaker 8 (02:29:06):
Yeah, so okay, so let let me let me let
me just let me just read off some of the
ones that are going to fuck everyone. Great, fifty four
percent tariff on all goods from China. This is a
thirty four percent tariff that is being added on to
the twenty percent tariff that was already on. There is
a twenty percent tariff on all goods from the EU,
forty six percent on Vietnam, which is fucking devastating because

(02:29:28):
there's a huge amount of capital from China.

Speaker 1 (02:29:30):
Also, speaking of the China Panic, our strongest geopolitical ally
in the region, like in terms of having a military right.

Speaker 2 (02:29:39):
Yeah, that we've been discussing going to warfall.

Speaker 8 (02:29:42):
Quite really Yeah, like we we just we we have
literally and this is this is the funny thing about
all of these. Vicky Osto will pointed this out. The
more closely allied with the US, the more fucked you
got by these.

Speaker 1 (02:29:54):
It's such a weird move.

Speaker 8 (02:29:56):
Yeah, yeah, twenty four percent tariff on Japan.

Speaker 1 (02:29:58):
What is it like eighty or ninety percent on fucking
Cambodia why.

Speaker 8 (02:30:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. So we'll we'll get to why
in a second. I want to also cover so there's
there's a thirty seven percent tariff on Bangladesh, which is
going to be devastating. I mean a lot of textile
imports twenty five percent on South Korea. So fucking rip
you ever getting a phone again? On Taiwan. So rip
the entire tech industry. Uh? I fucking rip Taiwan too.

Speaker 5 (02:30:25):
Uh.

Speaker 8 (02:30:26):
These tariffs are going to devastate the international economy. Okay,
I have been angry about this since the fucking election.
People have been calling these tariffs attacks. That is just no,
it is not what's happening here. This is like calling
it a tax is to completely underplay how serious this is.
This is not a fucking tax. This is the wholesale

(02:30:46):
destruction of entire industries. And some of these industries like
fast fashion, which you know has always been undergirded by
the exploitation of workers from China to Bangladesh and also
like in the US two but like you know, fuck
those things whatever, they never needed to exist. Fuck them.
But like you know, like you're probably not gonna be
able to fucking buy board games anymore because they're going
to be too expensive to produce.

Speaker 1 (02:31:04):
Oh, it's gonna shatter games like tabletop gaming.

Speaker 8 (02:31:07):
Yeah yeah, yeah, it's done. Like the economy as we
knew it does not exist as of like this morning, right,
everything that we've known about how this thing works is
fucking done. And some of these are just, you know,
like unbelievably hideously cruel. So, for example, a forty four
percent terriff on me and Mark, Yeah, which you know
is a country, Yeah, devastated by a horrific war wage

(02:31:28):
for a brutal dictatorship and also fucking suffering from a
catastrophic earthquake, and we're like, fuck you eat shit.

Speaker 4 (02:31:33):
Forty four percent tariff also embargoed.

Speaker 2 (02:31:35):
No, like we've seized their government assets in the United States, Like, yep,
it's one of like Diego Garcia for instance.

Speaker 1 (02:31:44):
Yes, there's well it's on the British Indian Ocean Territory,
which collective population is primarily US soldiers.

Speaker 2 (02:31:50):
Yeah, like Christmas Island is on there, like yeah, you know.

Speaker 8 (02:31:54):
And there's one more that I want to talk about,
which is that so Sri Lanka has been suffering from
an unbelievably devastating series of economic crises and they're getting
hit with forty four percent fucking tariff in a moment
when like they already haven't had enough dollars to fucking
import fuel for their economy to function. So this is
going to be devastating not just for us, but for

(02:32:14):
a whole bunch of people across the world. So this
is the other aspect of this too, that's really fucking brtle,
is that for the US, right, we don't need other countries' money,
We don't need to have piles of any other country's
money around, Right, we can just buy things in American dollars.
But if you are Sri Lanka, you need American dollars
to buy oil.

Speaker 1 (02:32:35):
Yes, there are.

Speaker 8 (02:32:36):
So many fucking things that you could only buy in
American dollars. And when these tariffs go up, when the
prices increase, and when they can't fucking sell their stuff,
that means that they don't have dollars, and that means
that they can't get access to a whole bunch of
the vital commodities that they need to survive. And this
is just going to fucking devastate them. And I think
that's been an angle that I really wanted to make
sure we talked about, because it's been I haven't seen

(02:32:57):
any fucking mention of it at all, even though those
are the are going to suffer the most of this
are people who are already completely on the fucking edge,
whose economies have already been collapsed. You've already been so
brutally exploited by these same fucking people, and they're just fucked.

Speaker 1 (02:33:12):
Yep. You know, we always say we know like tarifs,
but we do like these ads.

Speaker 5 (02:33:31):
We're back.

Speaker 1 (02:33:32):
I don't feel great about that.

Speaker 8 (02:33:33):
But now there is a funny part of all of this.
There is some fun here good, which is okay. So
what if the big questions about the tariffs was how
were they going to calculate the tariffs on all of
these countries? Right because they were saying that that their
terrorifts were going to be a projection of like currency
manipulation and like value added taxes and like all of

(02:33:54):
these like like subsidies to vital industries and you know,
and the question again was like literally, how can they
poss cocky at the tariff rates of hundreds of different
countries and taking into account all these things right now
have been making a couple of weeks ago, was that
they were going to do brackets. What they actually appear
to have done is ass chat GPT.

Speaker 1 (02:34:16):
It's entirely people have like reverse engineered the prompts. It's
almost directly just the schatchy probably shit, there's a couple
different engines that gave almost identical responses. But it's probably just.

Speaker 2 (02:34:26):
Amazing that they're doing the same shit as like my
undergraduates and the people are doing the same shit.

Speaker 1 (02:34:31):
Sure you're undergraduates. Spends a little more time trying to
hide it, James.

Speaker 2 (02:34:35):
Most of them a smart enough to to like had
it a little bit so that you can't put prompt
into chat GPT and find it. Yeah, so that my
lowest effa undergrads.

Speaker 8 (02:34:44):
I want to give a lot of credit to the
economist James Sarah reci who's the guy who figured out
their formula. So their formula, and this is drawing for something,
I mean I saw it from from James first. But like,
so their formula is literally just you take a country's
trade depisity with the US. And it's also important to
note here that they're not counting services. They're only counting goods, right.

Speaker 1 (02:35:06):
And again, if you're if you're missing the products and
just getting in services, that's half the economy as I
understand it.

Speaker 8 (02:35:13):
Yeah, yeah, especially provides an enormous number of services. You know,
But these people are fucking fascists, and so they don't
they don't think that like services are fucking real, right,
It's it's the same ideology that undergirds the whole thing
about like service workers not being fucking real works.

Speaker 1 (02:35:27):
Literally, the only real job is that one video of
a guy wrestling with an oil Derek.

Speaker 8 (02:35:32):
Yes, that is the.

Speaker 2 (02:35:32):
Only that is the manager just doing that for the
video and was doing it very wrong.

Speaker 1 (02:35:38):
You've got to.

Speaker 6 (02:35:41):
Take some pieces of metal, move them around to where
they're not supposed to go.

Speaker 8 (02:35:45):
That's that's when you're a real labor, labor that's working.

Speaker 2 (02:35:49):
Only jobs are things where you wear safety toe boots and.

Speaker 8 (02:35:52):
Well and and and that's and that's the thing they'll
learn because like their image of the world is is
the fascist image of the world, and the fascist image
of the world, like labor is just masculinity. Yeah, and
that's like that's why they're fucking doing it like this,
and so you know, and so so the fascists have
asked chat GPT how to do tariffs, and what they
got is again, so do they take the country's trade

(02:36:13):
deficit and divide it by their total exports in the US? Now,
this is nothing, right, like in economic terms.

Speaker 1 (02:36:19):
No, that's not how you do anything.

Speaker 8 (02:36:20):
This is this is not a real thing like this
is this is like trying to measure someone's height by
like dividing their favorite number by the average radius of
an apple. Like it's literally at.

Speaker 1 (02:36:30):
You know, what are we what are you coming after me?

Speaker 2 (02:36:32):
Here?

Speaker 8 (02:36:33):
Look?

Speaker 1 (02:36:34):
Just because I'm imagining so differently, Okay.

Speaker 8 (02:36:37):
There is no scientific basis, Robert for for for measuring
height by dividing favorite number by apple radius. We simply
must accept the truth of science.

Speaker 1 (02:36:44):
That's what you say, Joe Rogan, and I feel it differently.

Speaker 6 (02:36:48):
The dictatorship of chat GPT is just it's so bleak.

Speaker 8 (02:36:52):
Yeah, yeah, it's just they they ask chat GPT.

Speaker 1 (02:36:56):
It's a mix of they don't actually care or think
this will affect them, and also they legitimately think it's
the smartest person in the world. Yeah yeah, it's smarter
than them. Yeah, which is maybe a good thing, but
not in this instant.

Speaker 8 (02:37:11):
Well, and you can tell the extent to which they
were relying on this and didn't calculate themselves, because so
after it started to spread that this is just how
they were doing it, After James Turoreki like calculated it,
the White House said no, no, no, no, no, hold on, no, no, no,
that's not right. We use an actual complex formula, and
so they released a fake formula. But I think about
the formula, right, is it? The formula is just It

(02:37:32):
is literally just trade deficit divided by total exports. But
they threw in two random variables as Greek letters. But
there's one on the top, and there's one of the
numerator one of these denominator, and they're the same, so
they can sell each other out.

Speaker 1 (02:37:44):
That sounds right to me.

Speaker 6 (02:37:45):
That's how you know they're smart. It's because they're using
Greek letters.

Speaker 5 (02:37:49):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (02:37:51):
Which Greek letters did they use? And which person's fraternity
does it represent?

Speaker 1 (02:37:54):
I don't even speak Greek letters, so they are They
must be smarter than me, you know what. I rescind
my complaints.

Speaker 8 (02:38:02):
This This is how the economy dies, not through tragedy
but through farce.

Speaker 1 (02:38:06):
It's both.

Speaker 4 (02:38:08):
Yeah, tragic fuss, I think is what Marx cold it.

Speaker 1 (02:38:10):
A lot of people are gonna die, you know, And
I mean, like, like.

Speaker 8 (02:38:14):
My actual serious line on this is that this is
the great double bind of capitalism, is that we are
all reliant simultaneously, We are reliant for our survival on
the same economy that will make us all homeless, right
is the same economy that we need to fucking eat
every single day, that even in good times, this economy
fucking strips from us the value of the labor we
produce and hands us back a bunch of fucking scraps
that pay for not enough of anything that we need.

(02:38:37):
So even as our enemies, you know, terror part the
system that exploits us, we are the fucking ones who's
going to suffer. Deoliberalism finally has in Trump produced its
own grave digger, And our fucking job and the job
of every single one of us and every single person
listening to this show is to make sure that we
also aren't the ones thrown into this fucking grave. And
this is going to require a kind of organizing that

(02:38:59):
is in some ways like but in some ways unlike
anything we've done before. We're about to experience a level
of unbelievable economic chaos that we sort of saw dream
twenty twenty. But during twenty twenty there was, you know,
as bad as everything got, the state stepped in and
decided to do welfare reforms, right like, they gave people
a bunch of fucking money. Yeah, and it wasn't enough,

(02:39:21):
but they did it now, none of that shit. He
are the only people who are going to be able
to keep each other alive. And that's what we have
to be doing right now, is we have to be
keeping each other alive until we are organized enough and
we are powerful enough to fucking run these people out
so they can't ever fuck us again like this, So.

Speaker 6 (02:39:36):
We can resurrect neoliberal globalism, we can restore free trade, that's.

Speaker 2 (02:39:41):
Right, that's right, and bring it back to the Clinton era.

Speaker 5 (02:39:44):
Oh god.

Speaker 8 (02:39:45):
One last thing we should mention is that like this
has already united the entire world against us effectively, people
countries who have never worked together before in their entire
existence are working together.

Speaker 1 (02:39:55):
And unfortunately, Poles also show Americans can distrust or tendency
to view like Canadians and the EU as enemies is rising,
both for Republicans and Democrats. Yeah, so that's great.

Speaker 2 (02:40:07):
That's great, cool, cool, cool, cool cul cuck cool.

Speaker 8 (02:40:10):
Yeah. And also, you know, and like the thing, the thing,
the other thing that we have to do here, and
this is this is literally our responsibility on this podcast
and also responsibility of like fucking everyone who is having
conversations with another person, is that this is entirely Trump's fault.
He fucking did this, Like, oh yeah, this is not
fucking the EU or whatever the fuck whoever's during retalitary show.

Speaker 1 (02:40:28):
Yeah, this is this is no one else ever wanted this.

Speaker 8 (02:40:32):
Yeah yeah, no, like the people who put Trump in
power didn't want this. This is just him and so yeah,
the the the actual solution to this is all of
us running this fucker out and not us getting drawn
into his fucking bullshit wars with Canada or Greenland or
whatever the fuck country he decides to invade in the

(02:40:54):
next year. Is that all for tariff talk? Yeah, that's
all we got on the terrace.

Speaker 1 (02:41:01):
I don't know what else to say. I mean, I
I'm just looking at the numbers right now where the
Dow Industrial is down a fifteen hundred points since the
start of the day, So it's things are looking very
good all of the lines. Like if you look at
the way in which the line went down, there's like
it's just this direct vertical drop on the third Yep,

(02:41:25):
it's shocking.

Speaker 2 (02:41:26):
No, it is a ninety degree angle.

Speaker 8 (02:41:28):
It is legitimately, if you set the Google stock viewer
thing to a one day view, the drop is so
shocking that it looks like it just started down.

Speaker 2 (02:41:36):
Yeah, it prompts you to turn your phone into other direction.

Speaker 1 (02:41:40):
I've never seen anything like it, but I guess no
one has.

Speaker 2 (02:41:43):
Yeah, no, I mean some of us. I guess people
are still alive in the nineteen thirties. Yeah, yes, ye,
Woody Guthrie.

Speaker 8 (02:41:51):
Has fucking grammar. I guess, like.

Speaker 2 (02:41:55):
Yeah, it's great. We did it in the nineteen thirties.
It was bad then and dates bad now.

Speaker 6 (02:42:01):
Well, now now that we got those pesky tariffs out
of the way, let's talk about the actual most important
thing to happen this week in the news, New Jersey
Senator Cory Booker has broken the record for the longest.

Speaker 8 (02:42:15):
Twenty five hours in five minutes.

Speaker 1 (02:42:17):
Yeah, that's horrible, beating.

Speaker 6 (02:42:18):
Strom Thurmon's filibuster of the nineteen fifty seven Civil Rights
Bill by forty six minutes.

Speaker 1 (02:42:25):
We did it, volks, excellent, outstanding.

Speaker 2 (02:42:30):
Good. I'm just checking on ah Wall Street bets and
they're having a real one today.

Speaker 8 (02:42:34):
That's pretty.

Speaker 4 (02:42:36):
I will say.

Speaker 8 (02:42:36):
I will say the thing about the Booker won. So
if you were writing a parody of the Democratic Party,
you would write that Corey Booker did this, and like
did the did this philibuster and then immediately turned around
and voted yes for a cloture vote to allow Trump
to appoint another nominee. And that's exactly what they did. Yeah,
we can't even you can't peroy to them. It's beyond parody.

(02:42:58):
I like astounding, it's astonishing.

Speaker 6 (02:43:01):
It's not even a filibuster. He's not filibuster or anything.

Speaker 2 (02:43:04):
We didn't he didn't actively stop anything happening other than
people not paying attention to it.

Speaker 1 (02:43:09):
I got a response from someone being like, well, you know,
they didn't get to do anything on Monday, and I
was like, yeah, they weren't really planning on it, and
things continued as normal Tuesday.

Speaker 8 (02:43:18):
Yeah. Yeah, And you know, and here's the thing about that, right, like,
do you know how many Democrats there are in the Senate?
Do you know how many hours you could filibuster them
for if you were actually determined to fucking do this,
and on how many different things? We had a rotating
series of Democrats.

Speaker 2 (02:43:33):
Yeah, show it if you tag teamed it.

Speaker 8 (02:43:35):
Yeah, but they're not They're not willing to fucking do it.

Speaker 1 (02:43:37):
No, and they'd be stopped eventually. The Republicans would do
something fucked up to stop it. But at least you'd
have tried.

Speaker 2 (02:43:43):
Yeah, yeah, and people would maybe take some fucking energy
from that.

Speaker 8 (02:43:47):
And even if you were gonna do this as a
fucking show vote thing, you could have voted no one
the cloture motion to like fucking do the to like
appoint the next nominee. But they're just like no, fuck
you man.

Speaker 6 (02:43:58):
The fact that Chuck Schumber caved on the Republican budget
from a few weeks ago and secretly got a number
of Democratic senators to switch their votes to make it pass,
and no one did this for that which which previously
Democrats were talking about this budget bill like it's the
worst thing to ever happen because it is.

Speaker 8 (02:44:14):
A bad bill. Yeah, it's really bad.

Speaker 6 (02:44:17):
And then they just caved last minute, or specifically Schumer
and the people he talked to caved, and Schumer definitely
would not have been in supportive of Booker doing something
like this for that bill. But now Schumer gets to
applaud along as as Booker delivers a twenty five hour
maybe like well orated speech.

Speaker 1 (02:44:34):
But it was a very well written speech, like technically
it was good, but that didn't matter.

Speaker 8 (02:44:40):
It's just this pure show of like symbolic theater.

Speaker 2 (02:44:43):
Yeah, what's the point.

Speaker 1 (02:44:45):
It's like if a congress person got out and conducted
like a perfect rendition of the Nutcracker like symphony of
like the ballet portion of that on their own in
front of like the Capitol building. Like, well, it's impressive,
it's spectacle. Like you're clearly very good at what you're doing.
But it didn't change anything, Like it had no impact
on the problems. Right, Yeah, like you're good. I'll give

(02:45:09):
you that. Corey Booker can deliver a fucking speech, but
that was really not what I was looking for.

Speaker 2 (02:45:15):
Yeah, fiddling impressively while roam burned. Thanks Corey.

Speaker 8 (02:45:20):
Yeah, and every single moment the Trump is in power,
the way that they fucking just rolled over for him
looks worse and worse.

Speaker 1 (02:45:28):
Knowledge he said, I failed, and so did we. We
didn't rise to the moment, and we let this horrible
thing happen, which I even I got a little briefly,
Oh shit, maybe he actually recognizes like.

Speaker 6 (02:45:41):
No, okay, well, because it took him like twenty hours
to like break emotionally to the point where he could
like admit that to himself.

Speaker 1 (02:45:48):
No knowledge, his deep, deep deep failed.

Speaker 3 (02:45:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:45:51):
Yeah, but like it took having your brain be be
shattered by this like pretty impressive physical act that like
destroys your body. So in spirit and anyway, I think
that's all we have to say about that. Let's go
on and add break and come back to discuss more
sad and I'll actually also possibly good news or at

(02:46:13):
least bad for Elon Musk, which is good for us.

Speaker 8 (02:46:27):
All Right, we are back.

Speaker 6 (02:46:29):
I think let's pivot to James Stout for an update
on Venezuela. Well, no El Salvador, Salvador the torture labor prison.

Speaker 8 (02:46:43):
James m M.

Speaker 2 (02:46:44):
Of course, we have to begin my segment today by saying,
tros be to Abdullah Ojulen, whose birthday it is on
the day that you are hearing this. So if you
want to plant, if you want to plant a tree
for APPO, get it, get out there and plant your tree. Unfortunately,
that is the only good news we have to Border
Patrol has spent most of this week touting the quote
lowest number of border crossings in history. It will shock

(02:47:06):
listeners to hear that this is not historically accurate. Bordering
counters are way down. If there's one thing that I
have ever taught you. It is that bordering counters are
not the same as unique individuals, because people are being
sent directly back to Mexico and will tend to return
attempting a different route crossing the border. Right, there's our
way down. And they're the lowest since they began publishing

(02:47:28):
monthly data in two thousand, but numbers will way lower
in the fifties and sixties and before then. It's relatively immaterial.
It's just sort of a nipiggy point. I guess today,
what I really want to talk about is the case
of mister Kilmar Abrador Garcia. He was removed by the
Trump administration to Elsa aberdoor to SECOT in a way

(02:47:50):
they have admitted was a mistake. So we have to
go back a little bit to understand mister Abergo Garcia's
story and how we got here. He was arrested in
mid March due to the United States mcclaimed that he
played a quote prominent role in MS thirteen M thirteen
being the Salvadorrean gang. Right he'd come to the United
States in twenty eleven. He was fleeing gang violence. He

(02:48:10):
was allegedly arrested in twenty nineteen outside a home depot
where he was standing with other men looking for work. However,
the incident report for that particular incident gives other names,
but not his. At that point, a Prince George's County
Police Department detective filled out a quote gang worksheet and

(02:48:31):
claimed that mister Abergagarcia was associated with a member of
MS thirteen. The evidence he cited for this was a
Chicago bulls hoodie and the claim of a confidential informant.
The competition informant claimed that he was part of a
group within this gang that was set up in a
state that mister Abergagarcia had never lived in the United States.

(02:48:53):
In twenty nineteen, Ice argued that he shouldn't be given
bond because of this alleged gang membership right, and so
he wasn't given bond, but through an asylum claim. Although
he didn't get asylum, he was protected from removal right,
so a judge ruled that he couldn't be removed back
to El Salvador, where he would presumably face violence. When

(02:49:15):
mister abergo Garcia's lawyers tried to interview the police detective
who had filed this report, accusing him of gang membership.
They found no record of his rest and that the
detective has been suspended since then. The Department of question
also settled a lawsuit with its own corps over racism
in the department.

Speaker 8 (02:49:32):
JD.

Speaker 2 (02:49:32):
Vance, who has a law degree. Right the JD is
I guess before and after his name. He has a
law degree from Harvard has claimed that mister Ablergo Garcia
is a convicted member of MS thirteen. This is not true.
I can't find any evidence he has any conviction of
any kind. I'm going to quote here from a filing
by the United States government on the fifteenth of March.

(02:49:52):
Although Ice was aware of his protection from removal to
El Salvador, Abergo Garcia was removed to El Salvador because
of an admis innstrative error. So the government there has
admitted in the court finally that they accidentally sent this
guide to the prison labor camp in El Salvador. Right,
according to ice acting field Officer Robert Cerner quote, he

(02:50:14):
was an alternate as others were removed from the flight
for various reasons. He moved up the list and was
assigned to the flight. So it appears that they had
a large list of people they wanted to put on
this flight. This is interesting, right, It's an insight into
their process for filling that first flight that they some
people they really didn't feel they had enough evidence for.
But somehow this guy, who again has never been convicted

(02:50:36):
of having any membership of any gang, they put on
this flight. Right. His wife and child are both US citizens,
and they have sued in court. That's why we're seeing this. Right.
They've sued for the United States government to stop paying
El Salvador for his detention and for the United States
government to demand he returned. Vance has advanced a kind

(02:50:58):
of unique legal theory response, claiming that withholding of removal
only prevent someone being deported back to the home state.
I mean you could, technically that is what the withholding is, right, Like,
it's like, he can't go back to El Salvador because
he will be at risk in El Salvador, so so
they can deport him to a third state. But they
deported him to El Salvador or renditioned him to El Salvador. Right.

(02:51:20):
I want to read JD. Vance's post here. I'm not
going to read the whole thing, but I'll start with
the second paragraph in twenty nineteen. Immigration judge parentheses under
the Biden administration. For those of you who are familiar
with dates, it's twenty nineteen. Was under the first Trump administration.
That that was the Strong administration. Yeah, moving on, determined

(02:51:42):
that the deported man was, in fact a member of
the MS thirteen gang. He also apparently had multiple traffic
violations for which he failed to appear in court. A
real winner. It is telling that the entire American media
is going to run a propaganda operation today making you
think that an innocent quote father of three was apprehended
by a gula father.

Speaker 8 (02:52:00):
Of threes in quotes here by the way.

Speaker 2 (02:52:03):
Yeah, yeah, And gulags generally not capable of doing the
apprehensions themselves. If we think of a gulag as a place,
is the police who are apprehend the person send them
to the gulag. Moving on, here are the relevant facts.
I'm still quoting. The man is an illegal immigrant with
no right to be in our country. Obviously, the judge
determined that he was protected from removal. Quoting again, and

(02:52:25):
immigration judge during the Biden I've been determined he was
a member of the MS thirteen gang. Again, that's not
the case.

Speaker 8 (02:52:32):
It's staggering the extent to which they can say a
sentence where every single individual word is a lie, like stunning.

Speaker 2 (02:52:38):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:52:39):
The fact that so many members of the Modern Republican
Party have like memory hold twenty nineteen and twenty twenty
as being under the Biden in administration is just insane.

Speaker 2 (02:52:49):
Yeah, it's bizarre. I think what they're referring to is
that the initial hearing right where he was denied bomb
within twenty nineteen, and then he filed his asylum claim
and later was protected from removal. But that's not what
saying here.

Speaker 6 (02:53:00):
But like even the way they talk about, like the
COVID response, they talk about it as if Joe Biden
was the president.

Speaker 1 (02:53:09):
They're not gonna lock us down again, but you locked
us down?

Speaker 2 (02:53:13):
Yeah, who did that? And then the last one, I
think it's most rebelatory because he's not a citizen, he
does not get full jury trial by peers. In other words,
whatever due process he was entitled to he received, the
immigration court doesn't generally present the opportunity for jury trial.
Right once again, holds a JdE and he presumably knows this.
What's more disturbing is the claim made by the United

(02:53:34):
States government in its filing in this lawsuit that the
Abergo Garcia family filed quote, because plaintiffs conceived that Abergogarcia
is not in the United States custody, this court cannot
hear these claims. So they're claiming that no US court
has jurisdiction over the question of these people who are
in El Salvador because they're not in US custody, right, which, obviously,

(02:53:57):
if they stick the landing on this, it suggests like
it is a one way ticket to the prison labor camp,
right that that you cannot challenge that in US court
and you ain't going to get very far in in
court elsauwud all right, So what they're suggesting here is
this is this is a forever detention that that there
is no habeas right that that was they were asking
for habeas corpus.

Speaker 8 (02:54:18):
Can you spen my habest corpus actually is for the listeners.

Speaker 2 (02:54:21):
Yeah, it means bring me the body, right in this
case is.

Speaker 1 (02:54:24):
Yeah, you have to present evidence in order to charge
like convict people and things.

Speaker 2 (02:54:30):
Yeah, it's like the snaqua non of having a justice system,
a criminal justice right, like show something. Yeah, you can't
just be like bad man and then put the guy
in jail.

Speaker 1 (02:54:41):
The most basic thing is that like, yeah, I mean
in literal terms, it means you have to like actually
take somebody in front of a court in order to
determine if they're like being detained for a reason, right,
Like a judge has to see them and say, like, yes,
this is this is not an unlawful imprisonment. There is
a charge, there is some degree of evidence that somebody
did something.

Speaker 2 (02:55:00):
Right, which they have not provided here, right.

Speaker 1 (02:55:03):
Not that like you can prove they did it, but
like something was done and you are here for that
for a reason.

Speaker 2 (02:55:09):
Yeah, yeah, so in this case, we don't have any
of that. Mister Ablogacia is still the way his family
found out he was in second was that his wife
identified him by scars on his head when they shaved
it and a tattoo they.

Speaker 8 (02:55:24):
Saw Jesus Christy.

Speaker 2 (02:55:25):
Yeah, they had no idea. It presumably doesn't come up
on the ice detainee locator. You know that you're going
to look up your family members on if your family
members are detained by I doesn't have l Salvador as
an option. So yeah, this is where we're at. This
is the case I will be following right because I
say it's pretty pivotal if they can argue that the
court doesn't have jurisdiction. Obviously, I'm sure at that point

(02:55:47):
that ruling will be challenged and it will run up
the courts. Currently it seems like the only court they're
going to listen to is a Supreme Court. But evidently
that this is what they're going for, Like this is
their argument here that once you're in El Salvador, out
of their hands and they can't do anything. So sorry,
even though it's a mistake, you have stuck there forever,
which is pretty disturbing.

Speaker 6 (02:56:07):
Yesterday, me and James did an episode on ICE's targeting
of students, scholars, and professors that they believe are associated
with pro Palace time protests. So we did an update
on that story that I did a peace on or
a segment on last week on Executive Disorder. So for
a follow up on that, you can look to yesterday's episode.

(02:56:28):
But we are going to close with I guess kind
of a feel good story because it makes Elon Musk sad.
He has had a bit a bit of a rough
week for mister Musk's businesses and his political projects. I
guess Elon Musk's efforts to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court
have failed, as the Democratic backed candidate swept the election,

(02:56:53):
maintaining four to three Liberal control of the Supreme Court
of Wisconsin.

Speaker 7 (02:56:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:56:59):
I mean the gist of it is of like three
or four days ago, all of my friends from who
are Scanies got furious because Elon Musk wore a cheesehead,
you know, like the ones for the packers that the
people from Wisconsin ware when they're at games while he
got up on stage and gave a million dollars. Basically

(02:57:19):
immediately before, like about little less than a week ago,
a higher court ruled that it was not bribery for
him to offer people a million dollars at random if
they voted or showed up at like you know, different
rallies and stuff, which is like what he's been doing, right,
is making these basically fake offers of a million dollars
because these two went to members of the local Republican party,

(02:57:42):
like it was clearly set up.

Speaker 8 (02:57:44):
The head of the College Republicans.

Speaker 6 (02:57:46):
Of Wisconsin, amazing must fish twenty five million dollars leads
on this race. He danced around on stage wearing a cheesehead,
and he gave out million dollar novelty checks to quote
unquote voters who won a contest by signing his petition
against activist judges, which has been the new rally and
cry on the right is that everything that's going wrong,

(02:58:07):
everything that's stopping Trump, is from these active studges that
we have to unseat. He also gave one hundred dollars
each to every person who signed that petition, and on
election Day, Musk offered voters fifty dollars if they posted
a picture of a Wisconsin resident outside of a polling place.

Speaker 8 (02:58:26):
How is that allowed?

Speaker 6 (02:58:28):
These are the same people who scream about like election interference,
rigging elections, buying elections for the elections, ed like, like
this is insane stuff. You can go to jail for
giving people a water bottle in line at polling places
in multiple states, and Musk is allowed to give people
fifty dollars for pictures posted outside of polling places. What

(02:58:51):
the fuck is happening? But luckily, the negative polarization against
Musk and Tesla that's been increasing the past few months
has resulted in Judge SUVN. Crawford beating the mega had
Republican judge who last year went as Donald Trump for Halloween,
beating this guy by by ten percent. This was a massive,

(02:59:15):
a massive reversal of the twenty twenty four persential election
results in Wisconsin. There was a record high turnout for
this spring election, forty percent higher than the last Wisconsin
Supreme Court election, which was in twenty twenty three, which which.

Speaker 8 (02:59:30):
By the way, that was that was also a high
turner election too.

Speaker 2 (02:59:33):
Yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:59:34):
Like that that previous one. Then this one just fucking
obliterated it.

Speaker 6 (02:59:37):
Like this was like just under the results of like
what you would expect to out of like a midterm election.

Speaker 4 (02:59:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:59:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:59:43):
They shifted every single county in the state blue compared
to the twenty twenty four presidential election, and on average
by about ten to twelve points, massive, massive shifts.

Speaker 8 (02:59:54):
And this was before the tariffs, by the way. Yeah,
like this this was before the terror.

Speaker 2 (03:00:00):
No, this was pure personal dislike of Elon musk meddling
in Wisconsin politics. Well like and everything else has happened
since January, but like it does seem like Elon Musk's
personal presence was a net negative and all the money
he spent Luckily.

Speaker 6 (03:00:18):
The next day there was a Tesla sales report which
was one of the worst in the history of their company,
of fifty percent of fewer vehicles being delivered in the
first three months compared to last year, with Tesla's stock
continuing to plunge the past week, although with reports that
that Musk might exit the inner circle of the Trump administration. Yeah,

(03:00:41):
those stocks are kind of flipping back and forth as
he's expected to return to his company.

Speaker 1 (03:00:46):
Yeah, yeah, and who know, like a lot of that's
clearly the tariffs.

Speaker 6 (03:00:49):
Well yes, and then with the tariffs, this is a
whole other.

Speaker 2 (03:00:53):
Issue, real double whammy for Tesla.

Speaker 1 (03:00:55):
The reporting is that people around Trump have largely soured
on Musk. Who knows how true that is. There's always
a lot of reports from the Trump inner circle that are, like,
I don't know, it's yeah, he's always had a very
leaky yeah, but and I can see it being multi causal.
Like Musk has failed badly in Wisconsin. The kind of
suspicion right now is that Schibble or whatever his name

(03:01:17):
is was down about five points relative to other MANGA
candidates in the same election, which people are attributing largely
to Musk's intervention.

Speaker 6 (03:01:27):
Well, and like they were testing out if he was
like a stable, consistent, reliable political operator, or if what
he did in twenty twenty four was kind of like
a one off event, if he's like a one trick
tony there, and this complete, like devastating loss demonstrated that
maybe this unstable drug addict no offense to a specifically

(03:01:49):
for Elon Musk, who's railing ketemene all the time and
trying to run the entire world. Luckily, Luckily, my friends
who might indulge in kedymene don't try to run the
entire world.

Speaker 1 (03:02:00):
You say that now, but you'll you'll get older at
some point.

Speaker 4 (03:02:03):
It's it's the have midlife crisis too.

Speaker 6 (03:02:06):
But he was showed in like a very public way
to be to be like an unstable political force. And
and yeah, that's going to turn some of some of
the people in the Trump admins against him.

Speaker 1 (03:02:16):
Yep.

Speaker 6 (03:02:17):
Anyway, that's I think that's all I have to say
about this. Wisconsin, Rightisconsin, Rice, Sorry.

Speaker 1 (03:02:22):
All right, well I think that's probably an episode.

Speaker 8 (03:02:25):
Wait shit, hold on, I just I just found the
funniest fucking thing about this terriff I think I've seen
yet from fucking.

Speaker 7 (03:02:32):
Wait, locking Jack JASP, locking, locking, locking JASP.

Speaker 1 (03:02:50):
Okay, we're back.

Speaker 8 (03:02:51):
Apparently the tariffs are not broken down by country. This
is quote from this guy of the effects on Twitter.
They're not broken down by country, They're broken down by
top level inn that domain. It's why the island's populated
entirely by penguins the dot hm domain. And why the
Diego Garcia military base.

Speaker 1 (03:03:08):
Yeah yeah, yeah, like fucking McDonald's island.

Speaker 8 (03:03:10):
Yeah yeah yeah. And why why Renion Gibraltar oliced sid
when did yeah?

Speaker 1 (03:03:16):
Like yah? What love Reunion is part of France? Why
are we hitting these guys? Okay, that makes sense. That
that that is that that is what a nineteen year
old who never went to college, my god, but thinks
he's he understands all of reality would do. Okay, great
dictatorship of Chad GVT. Fucking phenomenal, My fucking god, unbelievable.

Speaker 8 (03:03:42):
Look look, okay. The note I want to close on
is that so podcaster Mike Duncan, the creator of the
Revolutions podcast, a man who has spent literally tens of
thousands of hours writing about like every revolution that's ever happened.
At the end of the original run of the series, revolutions.
He he makes this point, which is that all revolutions

(03:04:02):
work because they encounter you encounter one of the great
idiots of history, a man who is blessed with with
the the the inalienable ability to make the wrong decision
at every single time. And my god, if we can't
beat these motherfuckers, like if that shit's entirely on us,
because we have been handed one of the greatest idiots
of history that has ever existed in the history of humanity.

(03:04:24):
And our fucking job now is to turn that into
fucking a better world, to do.

Speaker 1 (03:04:29):
Something, yeah, something, Yeah, we'll see. The problem is that
there's a lot of greater idiots out there, and they
are they all do still have guns and money. One
of the great tragedies of the world is that very
very stupid people can still fire guns. We made them
too easy, folks.

Speaker 2 (03:04:46):
Yeah, I've seen I've seen that happen a couple of times. Yeah,
in the old conduct of my work.

Speaker 1 (03:04:52):
Anyway, all right, well, we reported the news. We reported
the news. Now you go out there and you know what,
find someone who lives on the Isle of McDonald near
the Arctic and kick their ass today.

Speaker 8 (03:05:05):
Fuck them up.

Speaker 1 (03:05:06):
Fuck that Island.

Speaker 2 (03:05:07):
Do trade with the penguin pay ten percent?

Speaker 1 (03:05:10):
Well yeah, send us a picture of you fighting a
penguin and we'll get to make sure you get a
hat or something.

Speaker 6 (03:05:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:05:15):
Yeah, we'll send you so much.

Speaker 5 (03:05:17):
We reported the news.

Speaker 1 (03:05:23):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 10 (03:05:29):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen Here listened directly
in episode descriptions.

Speaker 8 (03:05:46):
Thanks for listening.

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