It Could Happen Here Weekly 171

Who is Molly White And I'm trying to explain who Bally White is. My explanation of this is in the same way that the great twentieth century marksis theorist C.

cutting regulation with a chainsaw. But Jesus Christ.

recording started. I am deeply sorry. In order to explain who Hoavier Malay is, I have to do the single most difficult thing I've ever attend in my like not just in my like my history as a podcast, like that's obviously trivially true, like by my entire history doing theoretical work in general, which is I'm about to attempt to explain paronism in under ten minutes on four hours of sleep.

And that may seem weird because hold on, wait, shouldn't there always be like, okay, if you have an ideology, shouldn't it shouldn't that the person from like either the left right side of the political spectrum, you know, be running against an ideology and no, no, up until basically now, both the left and the right in Georgina we're both paronists.

So to get an understanding of what paranism is, we need to go back not just to who who I'm parone is, and we'll we'll we'll get to Hujuan Peron, who's like the guy this ideology is named after, and you know, the ideology is based on like this guy

returning from exile from the military coups. But we have to go back to one of the sort of foundational parts of the modern Argentinian state, and that element is the fact that Argentina has one of the most militant workers movements in the entire world and has had it for about a century. I was on Margaret's show, it could happen here, and Jesus Christ not it could happen here. Good Lord, you tell them on.

much more unhitched. But a while back I was on Margaret Show Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff to talk about the second Argentinian giant and arcosyndy closed uprising in about a span of four years, which was the giant anarchist rebellion in Patagonia in nineteen twenty one nineteen twenty two. And this is the second one because the first one was the nineteen nineteen general strike, which ends in an event called the Tragic Week where everyone sort of gets

killed by the military. But you know, the fact that there's there's two in different parts of the country, enormous and arcosndicalist uprisings in a span of about four years is a demonstration of the fact that this is one of the most billetant working classes in the world, and any political movement that is trying to hold power in this country is going to have to deal with the

fact that the Argentinian working class at any moment. Can you know, if you're a factory owner, you can wake up one day and there's a black flag flying over your factories because your workers have seized it. And the sort of culmination of this, and the reason this is even still relevant today is that like the last of what you would I guess you could call like the

classical twentieth century revolutions. So a line of uprising started with like the original formation of the workers' councils in Russia in nineteen oh five, you know, and that continues to do like the occupations of factories and Itallly you the two Red Years, and like nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen, like the anarchist parts of the Spanish Revolution, with the revolutions in Hungaria and Algeria, like you know, all like

through sixty eight, like the factor occupations in France and Italy, and like all this whole, this whole lineage of like the thing that happens when you do you revolution, as workers occupy the factories and try to seize control of the country. The last one of those ever was in Argentina.

In two thousand and one, like everywhere else in the world, this ship was gone, and then randomly in Argentina in two thousand and one, like there's a there's a giant one of these uprisings that is, you know, only really put down by a sort of left Corona's government agreeing to like tell I am have to fuck off, which was like, you know, a sort of seismic change in

the political landscape. But all of this is to say that, Okay, if you were a capitalist in Argentina and you have to deal with this, like what what do you do? And the answer is to create the most unhinged ideology the world has ever seen by uniting socialism and fascism under the sea batter of Argentinian nationalists class collaboration, which the thing that makes no sense, but you have to understand, like paroism is, oh god, protoism is simply the weirdest

ideology ever. I promise we're going to get to the fun crypto stuff, but we have to, unfortunately do this, We have to do our whole work first, and part of this is so Juan Perone, the actual guy who who is ideologies based off is an enormously popular president in like the late forties and fifties until he gets overthrown by military coup and to get a sense of

again like how weird this guy is. Like, this is a guy who when he comes into power a bunch of the most famous Nazi war criminals and like not just you know, obviously like like the famous Nazis fleet Argentina. This is the whole meme about that, right, But I mean we're talking about guys who do u stat si like guys guys who literally did the Holocaust by hand, like flee to Argentina and Drena's administration, and when a

military coup overthrows him, they flee the country. So again, like the US back military junta is less pro Nazi than this guy is. He is also personal friends with Chae Guavara and consider like the Cuban Revolution to be like part of his like revolutionary project. So a deeply

deeply weird, deeply weird guy. And the result of this is that, Okay, so you have a military dictatorship through like the fifties and the sixties, right, and like the entire time there's a tatorship, not the entire night, but most of the time this atatorship is happening, right, the entire political spectrum sort of projects all of their political energy onto we want Parone back, because Parona is remembered as like the guy who like brought workers rights to

the country and also like gave women the right to vote, and also as you remember it as like a stable nationalist right wing government by the rights like everyone on like both sides the political spectrum project all of their political aspirations into the single figure of Perome, which works because he's not in the country, is not not there, so you know, and because he's gone, you can project

anything you want onto him. And this is to a large extent the origin of modern populism, right, like the you know, modern populism is the projection of all grievances onto one guy and then having that come in take power do constant sort of semi political mobilization to like

fix your issues. And one of the interesting threads here is that like the theoretical origin of left populism is very specifically Paronism, because one of the theoreticians of like modern left populism, one of the most famous ones, is

my old nemesis, the Argentinian political philosopher and NESTL. Leclough and his wife Chantill Moffe, who were like they were like, you know, these are these people were like the the theoretical forces behind a bunch of like the European left in this sort of euro Communism era and even up until like like pot Daemos in Spain twenty eleven, like these are the people who are the theoretical force behind so much like left electoral stuff in the last like

fifty years. And it's all from Leclough, who was a left paronist. So all of all the dots are going on the pin board and while he's gone, he's this guy that like from an American perspective, it's like imagine that like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump from twenty sixteen were both the same guy, and both sides were just trying to get this one guy to come back to Argentina like fix everything. So this creates like the left

and right paronists. And when parn comes back in the seventies and like immediately gets elected president again, the right Paronis just I mean you literally starts slaughtering to left Paronis in the streets, and Parne like backs the right Paronists against the left, and you would think this would destroy left Paranism, but no, no, Left Paronism was in power in Argentina until like Malai's election like a few

years ago. It's so okay, So like why would you still be a left Paronis after Parone like had all your boys machine guns in the seventies. Part of the reason this works also is that he dies and his wife takes power and there's like another military coup, so you know, he's not like in power long enough kind of for like the disenchantment to really set in. He's just he's in power just long enough for people to

remember it as like the break between the dictatorships. And at this point I could finally attempt to go what's Paronism? They're like how many minutes of like, oh god, I think I've got over my limit of what is But okay, Paron's deal is this right?

sort of previous administrations. And under the junta, right, you know, you have like massive expansions of workers' rights and nationalizations of a bunch of sectors of the economy. You have this like strategy of national development through like import substitution. There's there's like a long strain of like feminist paranism from you know his like like him being the administration

where women got the right to vote. On the other hand, if you're a fascist, you focus on the like before the power of the Argentinian state part which means like

permanent class collaboration. And this this is the part of the deal that brings the right in is like the deal is that, okay, so you give the workers all of this stuff, and you set up these really complicated patriots networks, and you know, people have jobs and like they have a social safety that at least in theory, and the trade off is you will never ever again attempt to like occupy a factory or and like drive these parasites. You run your entire life out of power.

And the second part of that is this like this hardline, unhinged right wing like Argentinian nationalism, which is wielded against for example, like Argentinian indigenous groups. And so I promise the comparison to the to the Long Culture seventies Long

Culture Revolution. We've reached that point of it, so to understand like really what this is, right, It's an active counterinsurgency that is sort of that is waged by the state and waged by a bunch of like parts of the social sector to unfold this really dynamic and miilitant workers movement into the state in such a way that there can still be politics kind of but it won't

actually be a threat to the ruling class. And my, my sort of like closest thing to this is this very very weird period in Chinese history between like the end of the Short Culture Revolution in like nineteen sixty nine and the death of Mao in seventy six, where like the most unhinged parts of the Culture Revolution are sort of over because Mao has set off, you know, so nineteen sixty seven, like Mao sets off this uprising in Shanghai. He does this deliberately as part of his

strategy to game power of the party. The problem is that control of Shanghai is no longer in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, like like the workers take the city, and this is a disaster because they've all been reading about the Paris Commune, and I think with the Paris comunies that they had like direct elections of people.

And there's a moment I actually like I found this this moment of this transcript where Mao is talking to Joe and Lai, and Joe and Lai is like, if we let these people do direct elections, like it's going to lead to anarchism, and Mao is like, oh shit,

we have to stop this. So what happens is that he wheels together this baffling coalition of like student Red Guards and the sort of somebody some like loyal like rebel workers factions, along with a bunch of like the remaining party bureaucracy and the military, which is a coalition comprised of everyone on every side of the Cultural revolution, right, Like normally the Culture Revolution is broken down into very roughly, there are rebel factions and there are like government factions, right,

and he's he's pulled together coalition of a bunch of elements of both of them with the explicit thing of we are going to end the revolution. And in the short run, what this does is it leads to the back half of the Culture Revolution that people don't talk about very much, which is instead of like everyone dying because there are rebels running around, everyone's dying because the state is killing everyone to like bring everyone back under control. And that's what most of the people die in the

Culture Revolution are killed, putting the whole thing down. If one of trying to understand like what parenism is, right, it's this ideology of bringing together all of the different

sort of disparate political factions in a moment. Right, You're bringing together everyone from like the fascist on the right to like the socialists on the left, and you're bringing them into the banner of this one guy and the same And the reason Malo was able to do this is because, like he's Mao, right, every single like faction on every side of the Culture Revolution, whatever they're trying to do, is justifying it in the name of like, oh,

this is what Mao wants, This is what Parona is doing, right, He's drawing together the entire political spectrum in a way that he can sort of stabilize power, take it away from like the junta, and forge this permanent political collition. And this results in like like the sort of total dominance that this ideology has a Roger tim politics means that like basically every election in Argentina until like Malai takes power is an election between the left and the

right paranists. And okay, okay, I'm so sorry. This finally is the end divide attempt to explain Baronis. But we're gonna go to ads when we come back. I'm gonna actually do this interview that I've been promising. I am so sorry. Okay, we are back. Thank you so much for serve.

take this deal? And this also ties into like how this politics?

But like one of the things that people won under these governments was this mandate that one percent of all government employees had to be trans which is like unimaginable here, like like like even at the height of like you know like sort of transacceptance or whatever. Like that's there's

what like that's that's not that's not a thing. That's even like no one even like thinks to ask about that, and like yeah, like I don't know, like yeah, like I might sell my soul to Juan Perona if it meant that, like none of my trans friends ever had to sleep in an alley. Again, like I you know, but the wheels fall off of this and they put the self described and narcro capitalists in power, which is this is great and oh god, okay, and this finally

gets a the fun part of this. I said the top of this episode that like he did a meme coin, right, can you explain what that is? Because oh god, yeah.

you new dog. They're also sometimes just themed around sort of an idea or a person or you know, just sort of whatever is capturing the public attention at any given moment. And the idea is that you buy in, and all of the attention causes more people to buy in, and if you're really good at it or really lucky, you're one of the first people to buy in, and so you buy in at a low price and then you sell after everyone else has bought in and pumped

the price. Hire that's the idea. In reality, it doesn't really work that way. It's full of insider trading and market manipulation, and it's not sort of a fair game where anyone has a chance to be one of those early people. But that's sort of the shape of it at least. And so I guess that brings us to Libra, which is the name coin that.

somehow completely intertwined. And I guess we should probably mention that just before Trump took office, he launched his own meme coin, which was the Trump Token, followed very shortly after by his wife launching the Malania And they did what all good meme coins do, which is that they spiked in price based on the original interest, and then they lost everyone a bunch of money once the price came back down, because with meme coins, people lose interest

and move on to the next one. And you know, the Trump token shockingly does not have enduring value.

that never happens. Those aren't average people. Those are like deeply sophisticated trading bots or people with insider knowledge. Like everyone knows this and openly discusses it, and yet there's still this active participation in it because the idea is that like, Okay, sure it's a scam, but if you get in on the scam early enough, you can be the scammer and you can be the one who profits and you know, screw everybody else. So it's like this really deeply rotten, like cynical world.

you never hear that anymore. And now it's like, oh, I will punch you in the face and steal your wallet if I get the moment opportunity, and that is like broadly accepted throughout the crypto world.

But you know, like it's just this really deeply cynical, very explicit thing of like pitting like everyone in society against each other. Like you know, like making this argument too is like a crime thic article about this word. It's like they, you know, like he's very explicitly making this argument. They're like, well, Okay, if you're like a private sector worker and you're making no money, the reason you're making no money is because wages are too high.

In the public sector, it's because taxes are too high, and if taxes and corporations were lower, they would pay you more. It's like, yeah, no, but if it fits into this sort of like pure nihilism of like, yeah, everyone trying to grift each other, and it's i.

who launched the meme coin or the people who have the insider information.

meme coin under the hood. But the idea was that like, somehow some of the profits from this Libra token we're going to be put towards supporting Argentine entrepreneurs or something like that. There was this sort of like social benefit side to it, where which was all very vague and like they're very little detail, like you know, you never really know what these things what is actually supposed to happen.

But that was the story, is that like this is going to support Argentine entrepreneurs and it's going to funnel money to their projects and all this.

of the idea with the libri coin. But basically the team behind it had some folks who were involved in something called tech Forum Argentina, which was like a group of tech entrepreneurs with this sort of like blockchain angle to it, who had access to Malay via this sort of project that was happening in Argentina where you could like pay to come to this conference and Malay was going to be there and all this, and so they joined forces with some meme coin guys who had a

lot of experience launching other meme coin projects, including the Malania token, including the Enron token, which was literally launched by someone who purchased the trademark rights to the Enron company.

to support Argentinine entrepreneurs. Here's the contract address. Buy in, And so everyone got super excited because a president had just endorsed a meme coin, and he unfortunately was too slow to be the first president to do such a thing, with Trump beating him to that particular record.

want to briefly mention because it's extremely funny. One of my good friends, Julie point to bt which is part of the thing that's like originally, originally maybe you want to do this is that So one of the people who was like involved in like this hookup process with like the crypto people was this guy named Augustine Lahay who's like this very very famous conservative writer and he's the guy who like introduced the concept of gender ideology

to Argentina. So he's like one of and one of what lays like big things is like being a turf all the time, right, And the guy who like got all of these people into turf shit is like the guy who introduced him to this fucking crypto scamp, and he might have to sell him out in order to get out of the cryptoscamp bullshit, which is just oh god, trans people getting our revenge.

I had to do this as well, where you can't just show up as like a president and launch a meme coin and expect everything will just work, because when that many people all try to buy a token at once, you know, you need someone on the other end to actually be selling the tokens. And you know, there's all of this infrastructure behind it that goes into these launches, and so you need people to do the market making, and there's the liquidity providers, and there's all these you know,

projects under the hood that are that are involved. And it's beginning to look like a lot of those people were deeply involved in these token launches in ways that was perhaps not entirely proper. Yeah, I know, propriety around mem coin launches is maybe a lot to expect, but you know, we're there's sort of talks out how one of the co founders of a project called Mediora, which is one of these huge liquidity platforms and also a place where people are actually buying these tokens, can.

of the market maker end of things. Mediora is a little bit unusual in that they do like decentralized liquidity provision, which I'm not going to go into too much detail about because it's very mind numbing.

of money in a total scam. But it sounds legit because it's a liquidity provider and it's something that exists in like traditional finance. But yeah, so there's this Mediora project where that liquidity operation all happens, and you know, Mediora was deeply sort of involved in some of these big token launches like trump token was starting out on Mediora.

Milania started out there, this Libra token started out there, and now it seems like the co founder was like very closely connected to this Hayden guy, He even supposedly introduced the Milania team to Hayden Davis, the Kelcier guy. Sounds like, you know, according to some of the allegations out there, he was personally involved in a lot of this early insider trading that I'm sure we'll get into when it comes to Libratoken and why everything went so wrong.

And it seems like there is this sort of network of people throughout this meme coin world who are running these big platforms and who are making connections and all of that, who are personally insider trading a lot of these big token launches, so that when those people who were buying it up early and making all this money, it's like, oh, yeah, that's the guy who runs Metiora. This happens so much in the crypto world, and I

should stop being surprised every time it happens. But what happened is when the co founder of Metiora stepped down, the other co founder, who was like previously not really known, stepped up and was like, hey, I'm the other co founder, and he released this whole statement about how Ben Chow, the co founder who stepped down, was, you know, he thought he was totally innocent of all this and nothing shady was happening at Metiora et cetera. The other co

founder who just like came out of the woodwork. He runs Jupiter, which is the other it's like the ostensible Metiora competitor. It's like, oh yeah, it's all just the same people, you know, behind the scenes. And you know, some of the insiders who were sort of whistleblowing on this were saying, oh yeah, the Jupiter guys were all insider trading too. The Metiora guys are insider trading, like

they're all trading against you. So it's really exposed a lot of the rot in this sort of meme coin world, in all of this infrastructure and the fact that like oh yeah, yeah, when you're buying meme coins like you are playing in a rigged casino, which has certainly not done any favors to the meme coin reputation, but certainly also to Malays as well.

coins to do. I mean, it's unusual for them to find a president, but apparently not now, Like it was true it was unusual for them to find a present. But you know, there's this whole process with meme coins where they try to find influential people to talk about

them to drive the interest in the token. And so they will hire celebrities or people who are influential in the crypto world or you know, anyone with some degree of a platform to promote a token, and ostensibly they're supposed to disclose that they are being paid.

At the CFTC. The CFTC nominee for chair is an Andreson Horowitz, guy who is advising them on crypto policy. Like it's totally rotten now.

Melea tweets about ameme coin. The price shoots up within minutes of this thing launching, and within minutes these snipers sell off and they make millions of dollars, often in profits. And it is that selling that often causes the price to crash right back down again, causing those average people who thought that they were early to be the ones basically subsidizing the folks who make.

I didn't know anything about these guys. I don't really know what their project is. I just thought it was this, you know, cool thing that was gonna support Argentinian businesses. I you know, I renounced all affiliation with it, basically. And then he of course like blames his political opponents for trying to weaponize this against him, and you know, he goes very much shout swinging on people, being like, I can't believe you're taking advantage of this scam to come after my reputation.

had taken back into the project. But of course that video never came because Meulay had already cut his losses and was like, I don't want anything to do with this, and so now the guys who launched this token are sitting on like, ostensibly one hundred million dollars worth of tokens. I use the word ostensibly because it's crypto and the numbers aren't real, and you know, there's really not one hundred million dollars.

who put real money into this. They got totally scammed, basically taken for a ride because they thought that they might be able to make money on it because the President endorsed it, because they thought there was this, you know, some legitimate scheme behind it to go to Argentinian businesses. They lost their money and it all went to this guy Hayden Williams, who is you know, connected to Mela, who has some degree of influence with Malay, who claimed in text messages.

was not, you know, behind the token directly. And you know, this has all resulted in somewhat of a political scandal for Ula, which is both surprising that like, of all things that could have caused a political scandal for Meula, there are so many things to choose from, and this is what it was. But you know, he's now facing these these allegations that he was complicit in the fraud,

that he should be impeached. Even you know, there's some rumblings among the opposition party about trying to start some sort of impeachment proceedings against him, and it's all gone very south, very quickly for him.

don't know if it will. But also like I don't know, this is one of these, like an even bigger way than like the Trump plane crashes are like a political fucking godsend, like handed down to the opposition, and the Democrats aren't don't use it right because you know they're the Democrats, right, instead of just like doing instead of doing a thing I would do, which is starting literally free speech with fucking no cops, no kings, no crashes.

They're like they're like, no atiuty. But like this is like if you were like a Catholic opponent of this administration, like this is like fucking God like reaching a giant hand down and going, hey, have this thing to beat, have this stick to beat over the head with.

Obviously there is you know, some amount of corruption over in the Argentinian government and so you know, the degree to which they will adequately investigate themselves is somewhat.

consume it from the inside. But the thing, the thing about the way that like protos and functions is like, okay, so they've they've eaten all these social movements, but it's not quite like the US where you can just like disband it and make it go away, like you actually have to still have have the thing that social movement does.

And that means that these motherfuckers can throw a protest, like whatever else is it about the paronas, like aren't capable of putting an unbelievable number of people into the streets. And I'm really interested to see what's going to happen like this weekend and over the coming weeks, to see if we see another seventeenth giant round of protests, like also specifically about this.

about the meme coin, but by the time that was, you know, partly because it was pre inauguration and so Trump hadn't started signing all the executive orders and so it was very quickly overshadowed by the other sort of blatantly illegal things happening within the Trump administration, and so it didn't get that much traction in sort of the

longer term. So it's interesting to me to watch this play out in a different country where you know, Milay has been in office for some time now, and you know, this has gained at least some degree of a foothold, and I'll be curious to see, you know, if that endures or not. He's he's sort of trying to play it off as like, you know, oh, everyone knows crypto

is risky. He said something and he tried to do this like damage control interview on TV where he said that basically, like the people who bought this token knew they were playing Russian roulette and they got the bullet, which is a wild thing to say. Christ Yeah, that's just a nutty thing to say, but also very in

character for him. And you know, he said something in then an interview to the effect of, like, you know, only a couple thousand people lost money, what's the chances that those people were even Argentinian, Like we shouldn't even care if they were, you know, not Argentinian. And so, you know, it's it's sort of interesting to watch him try to downplay this. It's like well, yeah, of course people lost money. It's a scam, you know.

out of your pocket. And like the way he's like systematically fucking all of the people who were supposed to be his political base, and like like Trump was also doing is but like people sort of like haven't set in that this is what's happening, whereas like this rug pull thing, it's like this is like the only thing that the fucking unhinge right when crypto wrote people care about, like this is like the one thing you could possibly do to like this the wall.

to be good for crypto. He was going to cause crypto prices to go up, he was gonna to fix all these regulations that they thought were holding the industry back and all this stuff. And then when Trump came out and launched a meme coin, some of his most devoted fans among the crypto community were horrified by it, and they really responded in a way that I think a lot of people didn't expect, which is, like, I

can't believe he's doing this grifty meme coin. He's supposed to believe in crypto, not just use it to steal money from his supporters, and so like, there was actually this degree of shock that very briefly rattled the crypto world in the US as well. And so I think that's you know, sort of interesting to see, is that like, Okay, you're allowed to do scams and you know, run your government in a way that personally benefits you, as long as it's not reflecting poorly on us, and it's not

taking money from us. But as soon as it starts to make people, you know, look at scance at meme coins or the crypto world in general, or it starts to affect crypto prices, then things turn bad somewhat quickly.

Bitcoin because people just sort of lump everything together. There's sort of a step down from that, which is people who think that there are more legitimate cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin, but meme coins are not them. And so there's been all this talk recently where they're like, look at all these meme cooin scams that are getting in the news.

You know that there was like the Hawktua meme coin that totally like yeah, stole a news cycle for a minute there, and they're terrified that, you know, people are starting to think of crypto as meme coins. You know,

it's just one and the same. And they're like, people are not going to think of all these wonderful, legitimate cryptocurrencies and all of their use cases if they're thinking about hactua coin and how they ripped off a bunch of people, which like, personally, I think that the reputation is perhaps somewhat deserved, but you know, there is this belief among some people that like, oh, this is not real crypto and it's giving the rest of crypto a

bad reputation. And we're actually starting to see talk of that in some of the higher places where you know, I've been seeing reporting that people are talking about the Hawktua coin on Capitol Hill, you know, like when they're talking about shredding regulations to prevent people from running securities frauds, the opposition is like, well, do we want haktua coin everywhere?

platforms are struggling there. A couple of them just went out of business, and I think it is largely thanks to the fact that NFTs became really cringe and you know, like everyone was like, oh, those stupid monkey pictures, and that had like a really devastating impact on this entire industry that was supposed to be like the future of art or whatever. And so I think there is that

potential throughout other portions of the crypto world. I would not be shocked to see that happen to these memecoin platforms, where they sort of lose their novelty value and people just see them as big scams and there's really no point. But unfortunately, I don't think that, you know, all of crypto can be undermined by the cringe factor or you know, the sort of societal distaste for it, because I mean, there are people who have bought bitcoin early, who have

billions of dollars in crypto. In bitcoin, they are now

working in the US government. You know, they have like very strong control over very powerful institutions, and so there is this countervailing force you keep crypto alive at basically any cost, and I think we're seeing them somewhat desperate to do that, as we're seeing calls for say a bitcoin strategic reserve, which is something that keeps coming up, the idea that like the US government should personally stockpile bitcoin, which you know, they make a couple of arguments as

to why they should do that, which are not very convincing even to some of the people in the crypto world. But the sort of underlying thread through it is that if the US government holds a substantial amount of bitcoin, they won't be able to afford to let the bitcoin price collapse or to do anything that might threaten the

cryptocurrency industry. And so I think that's why we're seeing the attempts to you know, sort of work crypto into government checkbooks, into the banking system, into traditional finance, you know, people trying to get bitcoin e ETFs into you know, your pension plans and your retirement funds and things like that is really to make it so oh endemic and

so contagious. I guess to the rest of the financial world that it's almost like, you know, this this threat that they're holding against the government, which is like, all right, if you kill us, we'll kill you.

none of these fucking companies. But they all they all every like fucking like everything from like like fucking Uber to like fucking like Google and Amazon like hemorrhaged money. Uber will hemorrhage money until it eventually the bubble pops and it dies. Right, But like Amazon only really started making money, you know, Google was kind of making money, Like Amazon only started making money when they started getting

government contracts for like their cloud computing shit. Yeah, and like that like looks like the endgame, Like you know, this is this is the thing with like Elon's like fucking electric armored vehicle content is like the only thing that can keep the bubble going is just pure standing intervention.

But that also gives me a little bit of hope because I think the thing that's kept this giant bubble economy going for like over like a decade and a half now has been really really even under the original Trump administration, I mean, and the original administration kind of got bailed out by COVID to some extents, Like you know, I mean, like the the original Argentinian economic crisis was this there's this there's this huge wave of currency collapses

in twenty eighteen where it was sort of contained, like the IMF did a bailout in while I was trying to do a bailout in Argentina, and it like it kind of got contained, but it set off a black

wave uprisings. But like there's been this like really it's just taken this really careful financial management and like all of these like like like a trillion dollars of like overnight repo purchases like every day from the Treasury to like make sure there's enough liquidity in the banking industry to prevent like the kind of like two thousand and eight style collapses. And I think it it takes it's taken a really delicate hand, and you know, like I

don't think it's a good thing. But on their hand, like these guys just fire the nuke police, like while they were moving a nuke, and I wonder if they can actually keep the dance going, or if they're just gonna if they're going to fuck up their bubble economy, just blow it all up, which might yeah, maybe nuke all of these people in the process.

the financial system to be wonderful and spectacular. And the only reason that they haven't you know, actually made true on that is because of those pesky regulators that are stopping them from doing all the stuff that they want. And so they've spent years now vilifying the regulators, claiming that the industry would be so wonderful if these regulators

would just let them innovate. And now they've got the regulators, they're in a world where, you know, they basically own the regulation there, all of the enforcement cases against them are going to go away, you know, the friendliest possible regulations are going to be introduced. And now crypto doesn't have that excuse anymore, right, they can't just say that the reason we don't do anything useful is because these stupid regulators won't let us lend you bitcoin or whatever.

And so I think, you know, there is going to be this moment where people are like, okay, so do it now, you know, like do the innovation now, And it's going to expose a lot of the popsicle sticks and bubble gum that's holding up this crypto industry because they don't have that excuse anymore, which I think will be interesting. I just hope it doesn't take, like, you know, the economic collapse of an entire country to prove it.

and now Trump modeling itself back. Yeah, like slingshotting. But yeah, and and and and and and I don't know, hope, hope, hopefully the fucking rebound hits them too, and they also get the backlash to it, and we Yeah, I don't know we we don't all die when they actually set a nuke off because we've driven them out of power already.

without insurance. We cannot turn anybody away if you do not have insurance, people in rural areas where healthcare is very difficult to access and to get, undocumented folks, and really everybody in between. At the health center that I work at, we mostly treat folks on Medicaid, which is pretty typical, although you'll find in states with no Medicaid

expansion it's a lot more uninsured and less Medicaid. But we are the nation's safety net healthcare provider, and without us, there are roughly one in ten Americans would not get their healthcare.

are living at or below the federal poverty line. With the Affordable Care Act or the Acabambacare, that level raised a little bit, so you could still get Medicaid if you were at above the federal poverty line.

of those funding streams. Again historically because who knows right now, but through something called the High Amendment, it means that our funding would be at jeopardy if we provided abortion care. So there are some kind of limitations. A lot of what we do as an FQHT is providing really comprehensive, expansive care where kind of some of the few clinics that do everything that we do under one roof, But there have been some limitations, specifically abortion to that.

this is their moral decline. That this is what they use when they're constructing their kind of we will save you narrative. What does that mean for funding? And like, what does that mean more importantly for your patients of people who come to you for these different types of care.

just created a climate of fear. As my job, I want to be able to reassure patients that I am going to fight for them and do all that I can.

if they don't have access to those medications. And so I think, you know, talking about funding, talking about kind of these bigger shifts politically, you know, are sayings that unfortunately, a lot of the conversations I'm having are really coming just down to safety and safety planning and figuring out support networks and talking about creative ways to get hormones if we can't prescribe them.

country by simply making it like the heighth Amendment. If we were to perform abortion services at the place that I work, then we would lose our FED three thirty funding and we would lose our FQ designation, which would cut our rate in half, and that would devastate the business and put us out and mean that we could not care for the thousands and thousands and thousands of other people that we care for besides those kids.

We have been told that the system is up and running and that they undid what they did, and the courts stepped in, and oh, don't we have the courts still here in the United States. Isn't that a good thing? But they just kept the funding off. Whether because they're incompetent or because they're actively defying the law doesn't really matter. And as a result, federally qualified health centers all across the country have laid people off. They have closed clinics

and have entirely gone underwater in some cases. And then those people are not there to treat the community that needs them so badly. And all of these systems are grounded in their communities. So when you lose the clinic that's in LA that had to close its doors for the office that's on one side of town, the people there knew that place. It was part of their community. Part of their existence is grounded in that community and its community's needs, and.

sort of situation for us as providers to navigate. But you know, in fairness to leadership, which I disagree with for them too.

qualified health centers as well. Those eos led to later that week, on Friday, we got emails to every PI, which is principal investigator on every federal grant that we had, that said, because of those two, and there was one about DEI, which is also in executive order, you are not allowed to use any of these grant dollars in service of anything in defiance of these three executive orders. So that was the first shot we got, and it came only four days later. It's threatening, but it wasn't

specific right. It didn't specifically say we're going to do X, Y or Z, but it was here, here's a threat. The following Tuesday, dog is let loose and announces that they are freezing federal grant funding tied to anything that is in opposition to those things. If you actually looked at the excel file that they released with the actual grants. It froze everything. Like it was not just the stuff that they felt was in opposition to this, it was

like everything. We have a ton of grants that were on that list at the agency that I work at, and boy, oh boy, oh boy, was there a lot of panic going around. Wednesday rolls around, and they get a judge to come in and sort of put a halt on it. And then later that day a press secretary says, oh, we're just going to find the memo. We're still going to freeze everything, and then the judge comes back and puts a temporary straining order. So in theory, what that should have meant is that all of that

grant funding once again flows. And it did not importantly too for us, given how much Medicaid dollars we take in Medicaid portals, and all fifty states went down, so we could not get any of those dollars in service of what we were doing for twelve hours. But still it was this very concerning situation because bedicaid was not on their list of things that they were after, and yet we couldn't even access it on the state level. A few more weeks go by and there's news popping about, Hey,

you said you unfroze stuff, but it's still frozen. Another judge issued an order saying that, like, no, for real, I meet at this time unfreeze everything. I know some of the grants that we had that we couldn't access seem to have come back online, but I don't know, you know, I think it would be an impossible thing to do an accounting of like every single one that might have been turned off that might might or might

not be back on right now. But I am doubtful that at this point every single grant across the federal agency is potentially available for folks.

out our chaos. Basically every day we've gotten different messaging around whether or not appointments can be scheduled, new patients, can you know, schedule intakes, whether or not we're able to prescribe these life saving medications, and no one knows exact eactly. Gender firming care is basically healthcare. There's nothing that separates it. There's no hardline, there's no clear distinction.

It is medically indicated, evidence based care. So saying you can't do gender firming care, it literally doesn't make any sense in terms of, you know, what we do as prescribers. And on my end, I've been faced with intimidation. I've been faced with kind of whisper networks of misinformation coming from administration trying to get us to stop prescribing because they do see this type of care as a liability.

I'm still prescribing. There is no state law in the state that I am in that prevents my ability to act us to the full extent of my scope. There are also no medical indications for me to stop prescribing, and I'm ethically bound as a nurse practitioner to do what I believe is best for my patients, which is to continue to provide them with a care that they need.

then they can't. Like in very real ways, that may mean that the doors are closed and the place goes under and that no one can get care there.

anti fascist practice. That is the right medical thing to do, it is the right ethical thing to do, but it is also our chance to take an anti fascist stance against this government, because if we don't stand now for the very first group they're coming for, then the next group, which is without question trans adults and undocumented people, then those groups will fall just as quickly, and then at some point we're doing the poem the first they came for,

the socialist thing, and I just refused to be a part of that.

stay open, We're going to keep providing this care. And so I think there are models out there, and I think that there are networks of healthcare providers who are committed to continue to advocate and just continue to do this right because a lot of what we're facing right now is intimidation. It's not actual legal.

doesn't benefit you, it benefits the boss. And so if we're not talking to one another about where our lines are, who we're going to treat, whether we're going to keep doing it, or listen to them what we're being told, we're not being told that were consulting lawyers, all these other kind of things, then we're all just alone in the dark kind of you know, trying not to scream and cry about the horrors that are happening around us.

So we pulled together folks with conversation here, conversation there. Folks who before anything was going on internally, you know, made really bold statements about what they would and would not do around this kind of stuff. And now all of a sudden, there there's an internal network that's looking at well, Okay, so individually we can keep doing this care because it's the right thing to do. But as a group, if they start coming after us.

And I am optimistic that if we talk about this, we get this out there, we make sure everyone's communicating openly about it, that there's a real possibility that we can work together to prevent this from being the first of many dominoes to fall.

providers are intertwined. And I do think there is a real kind of radical bent to this type of work, which is why I think a lot of us have been so easily able to collectivize and strategize and kind of come together.

And immediately someone's like, oh, yeah, absolutely, I do. It's tested, it's a ninety nine point nine percent pure we're ready to go. So now, like I wouldn't have done that, There was no way for us to know that that was the kind of radical work that people were doing.

an academic health center. Maybe they're working, you know, in one of the many other places where you can access gender affirming care in this country, and they are feeling like alone or they're scared and they're not receiving any affirmation or help from their management, and they don't know who they can talk to among their colleagues, Like how

are people connecting? Like what are people talking about? And like how can people who are because you know, the healthcare system is fast in this country because it duplicates itself. It's the nature of American privatized healthcare. Like, how can people who want to continue providing care for patients do that? How do they organize their colleagues? How do they contact people who are already organizing, Like, let's talk through that nuts and bolts of it.

A lot of those are organizations are fighting this on a national level, and some of those are more geared toward healthcare professionals.

you doing it. Talk to your trans colleagues. They exist, they're out there, like they have very strong opinions on this, I am sure. And then talk to a lawyer. Talk to an employment lawyer, because your corporate attorneys have very different goals than you do. Their goal is simply to protect the company and its bottom line, and both they and the federal government and the sort of DOJ are spewing absolute bullshit. So don't let them flood the zone

with nonsense. Get a lawyer who can tell you what's nonsense and stand firmly in that because it is. And then when you start thinking about as an organization, as a group, as a set of employees communicating with you know, leadership about these kind of things, Know that the law

is actually not on their side, it's on yours. And let them know that they are exposing themselves to vulnerability for malpractice and for civil rights violations and any number of other things that they probably don't want to be on the hook for. This is the leverage that we've

got right now. It seems to have slowed things down a little bit internally for us that they've had to confront like a very well pointed out legal opinion that said that like they were exposing their providers to civil lawsuits if they didn't do this, and that the FDCA, the Federal Tort Claims Act, didn't protect people under these guides.

That has been really beneficial to us. The other thing I would say is like there's a real union sort of feel to a lot of this, and as we started coming together, a bunch of us realize, well, we all kind of had union conversations somewhere along the way, But corporate unions and like SEIU represents a lot of like individual sort of arms of companies, like the ones that we work at. They aren't interested in the politics of the work you do. They are interested in your benefits.

They are interested in you as a worker but they're not interested in like your relationship to the work. And so we are approaching this not necessarily as a union, but from the perspective that if we need to strike on behalf of patients and their access to care, like that's a tool in our toolbox, and we don't have to do anything more than declare it to strike to be protected under the NLRB and some of these various

different things. And we can do it for political reasons instead of for pay reasons, which means we could do it as a diverse group instead of as all the nurses, all the advanced practice providers, all of the psychologists and therapists and lcsws, where they break us apart by discipline instead of by you know what sort of managerial status you are.

be very different. Right. I want to end with like people are probably afraid of accessing care, right, Like, like people are probably afraid of going to see their providers, like understandably, like you said before, like especially kids or people under eighteen are like right in the center of the President of the United States called out a friend of mine personally by name recently. She's a trans athlete,

and like they're really coming after people. I understand that people are afraid, Like what should they know if they're concerned about their whole moned supply or they're own puberty blockers? Right now, like people are listening, what would you Maybe they don't know where their provider stands, you know, Yeah.

and doesn't exist. Your providers are spending enormous amounts of time thinking carefully about how they document, where they document, how much of a deal they want to make it, whether or not they can change the thing they're prescribing for you, and what diagnosis is for We are finding ways to sort of throw as much cover and shade and camouflage over this as we can, but you shouldn't not come get care. Your life matters. You being in the body that you were meant to have matters. Come

talk to us, come ask for help. We're here to do it, and we're not going to stop until they make us. And right now they can't make us, and so we're going to keep doing it.

your city are already going. There's certainly like clinics will have stuff on their website that indicate that they either specialize in this or they offer this as supposed to know, maybe just a general general practitioner who may not be you know, the greatest in this vein, and like this, this still happens. I've I've talked to a lot of friends recently who've spoken about having increasingly uncomfortable experiences with nurses or doctors, whether they're trying out like different clinics

or different or different providers, university providers. So it is definitely worth doing some research beforehand so you know the place you're going is going to be like with you, which is just an unfortunate reality also of being trands. But that has been the case for a long time and it only continues to be a factor when considering care.

have experienced that in some way or another. But like I was talking about before, a lot of trans healthcare kind of comes from a DIY community and there's a lot of really good community information about, you know, kind of who to trust and who you can go to in terms of finding an allied provider.

been treated. So like, you know, like some of us have been organizing for a minute, some of us have been organizing for like literally a minute, And like, how do those people access these networks? Like how can people who are not in healthcare support you and what you're doing and reach out?

and gender autonomy. I think I mentioned earlier, but Lama, if you're on the healthcare side, and you know there are also kind of if you're in an academic setting looking to wpass the World Professional Association for Transgender how kind of going to the experts in this field and really following and mirroring what they're doing.

send a follow up email. Like, make people get on the record about this so that we know where their values are. And if their values don't align with yours, take your business elsewhere. Because at the end of the day, helthcare is a business because the United States sucks, and so we have to use those dollars in the ways that we can, and it matters in a lot of ways.

I don't know that anyone will care to and I certainly don't want to present us as the people with all the answers here because we just like are figuring this as we go to But you can email us at Community Health Resistance at proton dot and maybe let's have a conversation. Maybe there's like a ton of people in the FQ world who want to do like an Amazon or a Starbucks like diy union project where we're

all working on this together. For the politics rather than the pay as the primary sort of reason for it. Let's let's let's be a red union and get something going.

become communists and doctrination centers. Rufo falsely claimed that public school teachers were brainwashing school children with something called critical race theory or CRT for short. Adherents of critical race theory argue that racism has become so intrinsically entwined in American politics, law, and culture that anti discrimination laws typically fail.

While CRT is studied in some graduate schools and law programs, it hasn't been taught at the grade school level where the outrage has been directed.

in twenty twenty one. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory, Rufo wrote, we have decodified the term, and will you codify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans?

The idea that CRT, as it's known, is infiltrating public schools has become a rallying cry for conservatives, who, like many in Louden, say it is being used to indoctrin eight children that America is a racist country.

students would always read the syllabus. But that didn't stop panic over CRT expanding to include anti LGBTQ sentiment as well, with queer students and teachers who supported them being placed squarely in the crosshairs of a well funded national hate machine dedicated to ginning up fear among local parents. Here's a clip from one speech I personally witnessed at the school board meeting of my hometown school district, grape Vine, Kullyville, from August twenty twenty two and bryce simple truths.

also a deep irony to this reaction. Prior to the advances of the Civil Rights era and beyond, schools in the United States have often been the centers of ideologically motivated education, but not the fantasy Bolshevik propaganda that outrages the right.

advanced white supremacy, female subordination, and submission to capitalism. In this episode, we're going to look at what has actually been taught in American schools over the years, with a particular focus in Texas, and how what you learn about American history depends on where you live and how Christian supremacists are successfully inserting their theology into school curriculums in much of the country, with Texas playing a leading role.

in films like Gone with the Wind. Meanwhile, school kids were taught that abolitionists who wanted to end slavery before the Civil War were terrorists who needlessly plunged the country into Civil war, and this too steeped into the public imagination of movies like Santa Fe Trail starring Van Heflin.

had nothing but praise for that nation's new dictator. The authors told the impressionable high school students the following about the world's first fascist leader.

In twenty ten, TEA Party supporters took control of the Texas State School Board, which has control over Texas school book curriculums. They felt that this reckoning with America's racist past undermined patriotism and demanded a rewrite of school lesson plans.

The company said it would revise the digital version of the text and future print versions, but it was unclear at the time when the new edition would be in students' hands.

In twenty ten, that board mandated that textbooks depict the Civil War as primarily a struggle over states' rights and not slavery, a choice that was later modified in twenty eighteen to return slavery as the primary cause, but still maintained that quote states rights and sexualism were key contributing factors.

Approved books still tell students that segregated black schools and the Jim crow Eric quote had similar buildings, buses, and teachers as white schools, maintaining a hint of these separate but equal logics that upheld segregation. One textbook included cartoon in which a space alien lands on Earth and asks if he's eligible for affirmative action programs.

of gun sales and ownership. The Texas version of the same book replaces US commentary with a quote blank white space. As The New York Times.

the founders. These particular demands were the result of intense lobbying by Texas Christian nationalist David Barton.

education from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A one time science and math teacher at a Christian academy in his hometown, Barton plunged into politics in nineteen eighty eight as a Republican activist with a penchant for homophobia. He declared that homosexuality is as evil as any deed Adolf Hitler committed, and said that the lack of cure for AIDS was God's punishment for a wicked community. Quote your sexual choice is not a God given right, he said on one occasion.

a particular Protestant denomination as the national faith. Barton also argues that Thomas Jefferson meant that the wall of separation between church and state should operate only in one direction, that the government should not interfere with a religion, but that Christians should dominate the government. As Barton said in an interview, so.

doesn't mean anything they think it does. We're not theocratic, we're not coercive. We believe in free choice. We don't believe in any of the others. And that's what we've got to get back to doing. We don't need to be ashamed at all that we're Christians and that we believe we have a Christian nation.

the Statute of Religious Freedom he authored. The First Amendment, adopted in seventeen eighty nine, also banned Congress from quote establishing a religion, and most states embraced, to varying degrees, the doctrine of church state separation.

same limits on state power. There are plaed on the federal government regarding the establishment of religion, a limitation upheld in the nineteen forty seven Supreme Court case. Ever since versus Board of Education.

speak with one mind regarding religion. Many were deists who saw God not as a deity, invested in the daily lives of humans, but as a dispassionate clockmaker who put the gears the universe together, wound it up, and let it run on its own. Their God didn't intervene in

history or perform miracle healings at spiritual revivals. When Ben Franklin proposed opening the first session the seventeen eighty seven Constitutional Convention with a prayer, the proposal was voted down, with only four approving Franklin's motion, and a gathering that as many as fifty five attended on any given day.

services in the US Capital. More reputable scholars argue that while there's evidence that Jefferson attended one service held at the Capitol building, there's no evidence that he approved them officially. What's more, Jefferson and was far from an orthodox Christian

or the sort of Christian that dominates conservativism today. He edited and published The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jeffersonian Bible, which is a condensed version of Jesus's teachings from the Bible that excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, the resurrection, the raising of the dead, and so on.

These sort of facts are the subject of Barton's twenty twenty two New York Times bestseller, ironically titled The Jefferson Lies, Exposing the Myths You Always believed about Thomas Jefferson.

had quote lost confidence in the book's details. Yet, in spite of the questions regarding its truthfulness, another evangelical publishing company eventually released a new version.

on the authors of the Constitution. Furthermore, under Barton's influence, the state of Louisiana enacted a law in June twenty twenty four which requires every public school classroom in the state to prominently display a version of the Ten Commandments for the Book of Exodus, derived from Protestant translations of the Bible. This past November, a federal court issued an injunction barring enforcement.

The Lieutenant governor says he will pass the bill during the next legislative session.

special effects. When it was released in nineteen fifty six, the movie grossed more than eighty five million dollars. The film's politically conservative subtext was unmistakable. The director Cecil B. De Mel hated the New Deal and testified to the House un American Activities Committee that communists exercised malign influence over unions, including those in Hollywood, that drove up the cost of filmmaking.

not yet emerged from McCarthyism. The historian Alan Nadel tells a revealing story of two cast members in The Ten Commandments. According to the story, during the film's production, Charlton Heston's wife became pregnant. Demill then told Heston that if his wife gave birth to a boy, the child would be cast as the baby Moses. When Heston's wife gave birth to a son, Demill sent her a telegram saying congratulations, He's got the part.

the enslaved attendant of Moses's adopted Egyptian mother. Demill thought that the audiences could tell whether a swaddled white baby was a boy or a girl, but apparently assumed they wouldn't notice a black actor playing both a king and a slave because of the racist belief that all black people look alike. Meanwhile, a movie set in ancient Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula featured an almost entirely light skinned cast,

even though Demill's mother was Jewish. The only Jewish actor to play a major role was Edward G. Robinson, who earlier became famous playing gangsters, and who won de Mill's favor, perhaps because he was a friendly witness before the House

on American Activities Committee during the Communist witch hunts. Thus, the one prominent Jewish face in The Ten Commandments was cast as a bad guy, a Hebrew named Nathan who continually tries to undermine Moses and convince the escaped slaves to return to their Egyptian masters.

and near the US Canadian border in North Dakota. Nearly one hundred and fifty such monuments were erected across the country. Momentum stalled during the Civil Rights era, to the extent that in Alabama, State Justice Roy Moore suffered ridicule when he placed without authorization, a self funded five thousand, two hundred and eighty pound monument in the rotunda of a judicial building housing State Supreme Court in two thousand and one.

The monument was ordered removed two years later, but once fringe figures like more have moved closer to the American political mainstream because of the influence of people like Barton, Lieutenant Governor Patrick and their allies.

of enslavement, imperialism, and genocide. And now once again, advocates of historical amnesia have a friend in the White House.

quote unquote patriotic education. Those like Trump, Barton and others who have clamored the loudest about schools as centers of indoctrination are now imposing their own form of propaganda, returning history classes from kindergarten to graduate schools to the days of the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties, when textbook writers praised fascist dictators for keeping unions in their place, and those willing to die to end slavery were painted as the bad guys.

into a frenzy about the phantom dangers of CRT. This is Michael Phillips and.

American Republic. It opens with a statement that the brief was quote iteratively and collectively compiled by a broad, bipartisan and decentralized network of experts who wish to remain anonymous due to concerns about being targeted. The full document is here. The table of contents is split into three main areas, one the new shape of threats to the American Republic, two understanding recent events in the context of threats to

the American Republic, and three a list of appendices. The title of the actual file when I received it was Evidence Brief for Journalists, and the introduction describes its aim as quote explaining the nature of the current political crisis to journalists who are attempting to inform the public. However, I spoke with two sources who are members of these

groups and received the document. They told me that, to their knowledge, the document was not mostly spread to journalists, but instead among networks of think tank employees and DNC staffers, people you might refer to broadly as policy wonks. One source I interviewed explained it is a thing for think tanks to frame overviews for laypeople as briefs for journalists or congress see the IPCC reports. Part of me thinks the framing for journalists is just a shortcut for this

is somewhat specialized knowledge broken down. The paper opens by acknowledging the scope of the executive power grap being perpetuated under President Trump, and that is stabilization wrought by Elon Musk and his doge team. It then notes the threat is an order of magnitude beyond just a presidential power grap It states that Musk is tied to a quote broader group of Silicon Valley tech elites, including Peter Thiel and Mark Andresen Curtis. Yarvin is labeled as a thought

leader in this group quote called the neo reactionaries. I'll stop here to note that this summary is accurate enough for mass consumption, but I have some issues with it. Musk probably would not label himself a neo reactionary, and he doesn't have much of a history with Jarvin. Peter Teeal does, but it's more a relationship of patronage than

mutual influence. It would be more accurate to say that Teal and Andreas and find Yarvin useful because of his success and spreading to a lot of young techy kids the idea that tech CEOs should run the world. Musk, I feel, has largely jumped on this bandwagon with the neo reactionaries because those tech kids are useful foot soldiers Jarvin's ideas about retiring all government employees and destroying the independent media and academia are convenient for Musk's own ambitions.

This context may be unnecessary for explaining the overall danger of the neo reactionaries and Musk to regular people. But I also think it's a mistake to credit Jarvin with more power than he holds. The document refers to him as the leader of the neo reactionary movement, and I think that gets across kind of the wrong idea about how all of this works. That said, the document does do a pretty good job of summing up the threat

that we face. Quote. The neo reactionaries have openly stated their aims to destroy the nation state and the constitutional order and replace them with a newly privately owned corporate state to be run by a CEO dictator. Citizens become subjects owned by the state state slaves in Yarvin's terms, because everything rots when it has no owner. Human beings included.

That last quote is also one of Jarvin's. From here, the document argues that Musk and his team are attempting to bring about this dystopia by taking over the quote nervous system of the state. Another Jarvin quote These would be the data and communications systems that DOSE is trying to centralize in its unaccountable hands. Next, the authors of

this docum document make a call to action. Quote the most dramatic reversals of democratic breakdown nineteen seventy seven, India twenty twenty two, Brazil twenty twenty three, Poland have been accomplished by radically large, tent cross ideological coalitions with little in common accept a desire for the continuation of a constitutional order. Evidence suggests that the present threat to American democracy is dire enough that such a broad tent approach

focused on Musk and his associates may be required. And I think this is the most interesting and hopeful part of the whole document for me. For one thing, I believe it does accurately state what's needed in the present moment, a popular front against autocracy and dictatorship. I would add to their list of relevant examples of popular fronts the original, which is France from nineteen thirty four to nineteen thirty eight.

So it's heartening to see evidence that this understanding has started to grow within D and C policy circles in the people around them. The source who sent me this document. In the first described themselves as a member of quote a few unofficial networks of climate activists who are high ranking in the government and policy think tank circles. They noted that these are normally quote very milk toast lib spaces, but quote they're being radicalized rapidly. Both sources I interviewed

for this requested anonymity. The second person I talked to with gave an explicit reason. They stated, quote I've suspected for a while a lot more things in D and C stuff was compromised than people were comfortable with. In other words, they believe the Republican Party has spies within the DNC, and people they know have made statements to

that effect. They were worried that these quote GOP moles might reveal their identity, but more so, they were worried that these moles might have planted the document itself and put false information inside it with the goal of provoking a reaction from Democrats that would be useful politically to Republicans. I do think this caveat is worthwhile it's certainly not impossible. I think the frank admission that the DNC likely has

Republican spies inside it is also really worth stating. But I should note that when it comes to the actual accuracy of this document, I don't really see much to take issue with. I've spent more time than most people studying Curtis Jarvin and the neo reactionaries. I would not describe myself as a top expert in the matter, but I do have a good base of knowledge here, and nothing that I've read in this document struck me as obviously false or incorrect, nor did the overall tone seem

hysteric or unreasonable. So I asked my sources if over the last month they'd seen more people talking about Jarvin in their daily lives within sort of the circles that they work in and around, because again, they communicate with a lot of DNC staffers and politicians. They said, respectively, No, and quote. That's kind of one of the odd things, to be frank, this guy Jarvin is being brought to big events in DC. He's been referenced by Bannon Advance.

I have heard his talking points come from Republican mouths, but he's largely not tracked. That concern comports with some of fears that I had late last year about Jarvin and the neo reactionaries. Namely, I had believed for some time that Yarvin and the people kind of aligned with him largely, a lot of these Silicon Valley folks with money had become much more influential among Trump and his

tight inner circle than was widely understood at the time. Ultimately, I wrote and researched two episodes of Behind the Bastards because I thought it was valuable to bring more attention

to the subject. I really had kind of a gut feeling that this was going to become much more relevant very soon, which is why I picked it as the topic for the episode we did with Ed Helms, who's by a pretty good margin, the biggest celebrity we've had on the show so far, and I hope that that would help kind of get we were talking about out

to a wider audience, and it did. The episodes did very well between YouTube and our downloads in the podcast were probably at something like a million listens for them at this point. Listener base is a mix of leftists and progressive liberals. Right their interests are not representative of

the Democratic Party at large. It is noteworthy and perhaps even important that influential individuals in the policy space with connections to democratic politicians and the DNC as an organization, have started a grassroots effort to spread the word about Jarvin as a threat, and that's what this document represents. It's even more noteworthy that this document is unsparing about the danger and the fact that a clock is currently

ticking over all of our heads. Here's another quote. If non governmental actors, by which we mean unelected, unratified, unvetted, untrained, unconstrained, and or unaccountable actors gain access to key digital infrastructure, they could seize control of critical functions of government in ways that will be difficult or impossible to reverse. And speaking of things that can't be reversed, my love for our sponsors.

Musk's foreign business interests and how they might compromise him. Now, I don't disagree that Musk is compromised, but I see his actions as very much consistent with those of a man seizing power for himself. I do understand why people speaking to an audience that is largely you know, when it's bipartisan, it's folks who are kind of more on the centrist side of things in the policy space, and otherwise largely lot of like Democratic Party employees and politicians.

I understand why you focus on the China and Russia of it all with them, But when it comes to both accurately stating the threat and getting a lot of people to care, I really don't think that's the right strategy to take. I think it's an issue to focus popular messaging around how this all empowers quote America's principle foreign adversaries, because most Americans don't really think that way

or particularly care about that. And beyond that, the larger issue is that the primary adversary Musk has empowered is not, in fact the Russian or Chinese governments, it's himself, and he personally, as an individual, is currently a greater threat to every citizen of the United States than any foreign government. I think that's undeniable, and I think again, it's an error not to frame it that way. The next section of the paper lays out the definition of a coup quote.

In essence, a coup is a number one rapid seizure of state power by unelected actors who acquire that power by two seizing critical government infrastructure, and three weaponizing it to neutralize legitimate government actors' efforts to stop them. The unelected actors then use this power to four remake the rules of the political game in a way that cannot easily be checked or undone through democratic processes. Now it argues convincingly that all four of these steps are underway now.

One thing I found compelling is the way at which this document recognizes the threat that cryptocurrency represents right now, and how it can and will be used by the new regime to cement their power in ways that sidestep the present legal system quote without canceling elections. For example, cryptocurrency can be used to create informal but powerful new levers of political influence. Politicians can sell personal coins to unknown buyers who vote on public policy on the basis

of their shareholder power shielded from public view. I think that's a real thing to be concerned with. I also think it's very clearly part of the goal of this project. Now, next we have a summary of the neo Reactionary Agenda, which lists some additional names among the Silicon Valley elde currently championing an overthrow of democracy. These include David Sachs, Blaji Shrinivasan, and JD.

an ultimate imperative. Land has had a huge impact on a lot of these guys, although he's not really a Jarvin like figure in he's not this kind of guy who sees himself as or I think, really wants to be a shadowy puppet master orchestrating the overthrow of democracy from behind the scenes. He's really someone stating what he believes to be kind of inevitable concepts and realities about our presentest historical moment that happened to comport with a

lot of the things that these guys believe now. The author's next layout Jarvin's concept of the Butterfly Revolution, which is based on an essay he wrote in twenty twenty two in which he laid out how a full reboot of the US government could be accomplished.

comports with the Butterfly Revolution blueprint. Now, we've all lived that in real time, so I'm not going to summarize their arguments here. So the document ends with a section on actions and rhetoric to watch. Those are listed as quote government contracts which fund many of Musk's companies at present, and the next is Greenland and Mars quote. A core tenant of neo reactionary ideology is the replacement of nation

states with network states, but states require territory. Technocracy Inc, a predecessor to the neo reactionary movement, whose one time director was Elon Musk's grandfather, proposed a North American Technate where the entire continent of North America would be united under one technocratic superstate. There is currently a Peter teelbacked network state project called Praxis in Greenland. Musk's public statements about colonizing Mars can also be read as part of

a territorial project. Lastly, it lists crypto, which the authors primarily seem to fear, as a method of deniably bribing Trump. Now, I think most of this is pretty credible. Although I feel differently about musk talk about colonizing Mars. I think that's been more about pr than anything. I do think there's a good chance he's just delusional enough to think that that's something feasible on any kind of close end time frame, that we start building persistent colonies on Mars.

I think the science suggests that if that ever happens, it won't be anytime soon, and I think he knows that. I think he's largely understands hype well and how to use it, and Mars has been an easy way for him to do that over the years. Overall, I'd say the document is fairly thorough, and it's layout of the neo reactionary ecosystem and the actual plan currently being acted to end US democracy. It includes a section that lists several of the earliest known DOGE employees, and it quotes

extensively from Jarvin and somewhat less extensively from Land. The paper's ultimate conclusion is that Musk is using this moment to turn himself into the kind of unitary, all powerful executive that Yarvin longs for. This is an executive who rules alongside a largely ceremonial president, as well as courts and a legislative system that are equally ceremonial. After laying out the bulk of the actual threat, the article promises that quote Section three articulates what Congress and other actors

can do in order to stop this threat. However, the document in its present form does not include any Section three or any comprehensive list of solutions Congress and other actors might carry out in order to stop the present assault on democracy. And perhaps there's a later version of the document that I don't have access to that includes that, perhaps this is just a statement that wasn't edited out.

I have to say and heart as I find the way in which this document talks about the threat that we're facing, and the fact that I think it's overall good that people in positions of influence and around the DNC are talking about this stuff. It's also kind of perfect that at the end they're like, hey, you know, don't worry, We've included some tips on how to defeat

these guys, and then they just don't. You know, if the situation weren't so dire, it would be a lot funnier, but unfortunately it is pretty dire.

points links to the full document which I have uploaded to scribed, and you can read the whole thing if you want. It is not been altered since I have received it. And again, yeah, I think it's worth getting out there and spreading to more people. So that's the episode. We will be back tomorrow with something else. Until then, folks, I don't know, keep an eye on this shit.

One of the reasons it has always been on the political fringe is that German parties, both centrists conservatives and the left have had a tacit agreement since the end of World War Two called the Cordon sanitaire. It's not just Germany, this is the thing that used to be present in all of Europe. And basically the gist of the cordon sanitaire is you don't form a coalition because these are parliamentary democracies, right, so usually no one party

has fifty percent or more of the vote. So you know, a party with twenty and a party with fifteen and a party with eight and they form a coalition government.

And the norm for up until now, and thankfully is still the normal we'll talk about that is that you don't coalition with AfD, which is a part of why that and kind of lingering stigma about the Nazis kept them from being a major force in German politics until you know, over the last eight or so years they have grown substantially to the point where in this recent election they doubled their support from around ten percent to

a little over twenty percent. This makes them they're not the largest single block in the German in the Reichstag, they're number two though, right they are number two, I believe, which sucks.

sixty four. So AfD is a minority in the government compared to all of the people who didn't vote for AfD, but the rate at which they're increasing is a serious problem, especially since most Germans list immigration as their primary voting concern. Right now, this most recent election had unusually high voter turnout twenty twenty one election, seventy six percent of the country or so voted. More than eighty two percent of

the country voted in this most recent election. So the fact that like you have record high turnout and AfD

doubling its support is deeply chilling. Now, it's not one hundred percent bad news because one of the other stories here is the new Left Party, well not super new, but the Left Party, which is kind of came out of East Germany's Communist Party massively increased their support too, and they actually for the first time, like very significantly increased their share of the vote, which had been under this kind of five percent threshold before and is now

at about eight point eight percent. So they went up by an amount. Actually it's not like as much as AfD went up, but like in terms of a percentage

of their prior vote, it's a similar increase. So there's another party that had significant gains in this and it's kind of a newer party called the BSW, which is you could say they do a little bit of like a Red Brown Alliance kind of thing, where there's some like left wing messaging in what they're saying with they're also like super anti immigrant and they're not, you know, it's not kind of like to the extent that the

AfD is. But when they came on to the scene, they were expected by some people to pull votes away from the AfD this selection, and that's really not what happened. And in fact, a lot of the votes they pulled were from Social Democrats and the left parties, so that was one of the you know, it's because the way the parliamentary system works, which is more rational than our system. This didn't like hand the whole election to off day again.

This is the benefit of a system like the Germans had, which is pretty explicitly set up to make it a lot harder or a right.

like the broad strokes. Now, like this is bad, although it's also not comprehensively a nightmare. One of the things that's kind of I don't know, positive may not be the right. Wait, but interesting to me is if you looked at the twenty twenty one election maps of the strongest party by constituency in the twenty twenty one election, and I've found a good article German election results explaining graphics on DW dot com. If you just google that,

you'll find it. In twenty twenty one. Off Day obviously, like the whole northeast was you know, their territory, but they also had strong inroads into the northwest parts of the country, right, you know, primarily like rural areas and the like. But like there was a there was a lot of red on that map in the northwest portion

of Germany. In the new election, that's all black, which is the CDU right, Which means while off Day's representation in the Reichstag and like number of voters increased substantially, their geographical reach has been kind of cauterized. Yeah, would be in a fair way of saying it, which is which is interesting to me, hard to say too much, Like does that mean, you know, I think some of what has happened here, because it's important both to note

that this is bad. It's bad that the Nazis doubled their share of the vote, but also it was expected to be a little worse than it was. You know, there's some evidence that after jd Vance made his speech introducing AfD, their pollings started to like freeze a little bit, and it may be the fact because a lot of older voters came in and they seem to have primarily gone with the CDU, with this sort of center right party.

So one story here is you can maybe look at it as a lot of older, more conservative Germans who are also old enough to really not like the idea of the AfD, came out and voted for, you know, the center right party in order to kind of cut off their power. The other thing, though, that's kind of a lot less optimistic, is that AfD is most popular among people under thirty who don't view it as an extremist party, which is deeply, deeply concerning.

have with younger, really young Germans is frightening. That said, there's also some evidence here that the situation in the United States has galvanized a chunk of the German voting populace to attempt to stop off Day and kind of one of the positive things that came out is prior to this election, there was a lot of talk about whether or not the CDU would choose to coalition with the AfD and thus into the Cordon Sanitaire, And to make a long story short, they're not going to do that.

They're looking to coalition with the Social Democrats, which is a good thing. You know, it doesn't mean no one will do that in the future. And unfortunately a majority of German voters suspect AfD will be in a coalition by twenty thirty, but it hasn't happened yet. And that's as good as things get right now. And that's what I got to say about Germany.

the next election as they were like expected to. And it'll be interesting to see like if this if this anti like far right United States trend continues to more countries beyond like Germany in Canada. But I'm still still eagerly, eagerly waiting for the next Canadian election.

embrace of Putin's Russia. But what also is happening right now is people like countries that had been heading in a very more authoritarian right wing direction turning around in part due to the war in Ukraine and turning away from kind of the international right wing movement, as Poland

being the best example right whereland. Polish politics have changed substantially in the last several years, and a big part of that is the war in Ukraine and a lot there are a lot of Poles who I think otherwise would have been more on board for a lot of the social conservative shit who are like, well, but all these fuckers are pro Russia and we're pulling it, like no.

investment investment. I think it's just a charge, right, You're just giving the money to the United States government, and in return you will receive a Green card plus privileges, and it will be not a green but a Gold card.

So that's a that's an interesting change to the immigration system. The other thing I want to talk about today is a United States Agency for International Development, better known as USAID. It's been a target of like the anti work right for some time because they fundamentally don't understand what Joseph Nia would have called soft power, right, their power to persuade, the power to influence outcomes around the world with things other than tanks and bonds.

quote serving US interests. The State Department then issued guidance that seemed to go beyond the executive order and cut nearly basically all USAI the expensive on the thirteenth of this month, that's February if you're listening. Later, A judges shoed a temporary restraining order. This TIERRO didn't really stop them from doing what they were doing, because it told

them to continue with existing contracts. And what the State Department claims that it's doing is implementing clauses that are already in the contract so that the contracts will have some kind of kill clause, right, and that they claim that they're implementing that, so they think they've found a fun work around. Rather than talking extensively about court battles,

I want to talk about what this means. These are cuts made by the richest man in the world that have had a direct, tangible, and devastating impact on the poorest people on the planet. In Sudan, eighty percent of emergency kitchens have been closed. That means that close to two million people will go without food. Local groups organizer

kitchens are running out of money. The way this works is that even when Rubio issued a communication talking about continuing food aid, it's unclear exactly what that means, because in this case and in other cases, USAID is sending them money in order to provision themselves locally, as opposed

to sending them food as an in kind donation. Right, whatever he communicated, these people are not getting food an as a result, the people who run these mutual aid kitchens it's a mutual aid coalition of Sudan are facing the horrible decision of having to turn people away it

or deciding who to feed, which is pretty bad. On the border between Thailand and Myanmay, a place where Robert and I have been to report, I've heard that people are having babies right now outside a lot of clinics and life support machines have been removed for it, so people who were relying on those life support machines obviously, and.

to deliver such assistance. As I mentioned before, the mutual AIDS who are in coalition was receiving financial assistant to help it provision itself, right, which is much better than the US going through all the infrastructure spending of being able to deliver that aid itself or through USAID contractors. Other contractors implementing partners of USAID are still owed money for work that they completed before January, before the stop

Work Order stopped payment to them. For work to begin again on any of these contracts, they need the contract officer to sign up on it, and it's at a lunclear exactly how many of these contract offices are still employed at USAID because of the federal employment cuts, So

essentially USAID has stopped all over the world. In addition to this, in this country, four hundred and ninety million dollars worth of US grown food, which is in the USAID pipeline to go to people who very desperately needed food, is currently at risk of spoilage according to USAID. So it's not just that people are starving, it's that we are allowing food to go bad here while people starve in other places, which is pretty bleak. I will just

really briefly hear plug the Mutual AIDS Sudan Coalition. If you'd like to help, you can direct to them directly, and it's Mutual AIDS Sudan Dorg. If you'd like to do that. It'll be in the show notes too if you're driving or whatever.

And like we've seen them continually deny court orders from judges, fine loopholes, fine workarounds, and Musk and Trump continue to just openly float like defying the order of the Court. Representative Andy Ogles introduced articles have appeachment against a specific quote unquote activist judge. This will go nowhere. They don't have nearly enough numbers to make anything like this happen.

In some related news, last week, President Trump signed in executive order stating that the president can change law erroneously, citing Article two, which only calls for the presidents to quote faithfully execute the law.

American people without presidential oversight. These agencies issue rules and regulations without the review of the democratically elected president. They also spend American tax dollars to set priorities without consulting the President. Voters and the President can now hold all federal agencies, not just cabinet departments, responsible for their decisions,

as the Constitution demands, unquote. This is absurd. This is like extreme, seemly dangerous, one of the most like blatant like attempts at power that we've seen since Dick Nixon. Like this is gonna get litigated, but this is crazy. The the fact that that we have that we have a president saying that he has the ability to interpret the law something that specifically he cannot do. That's why, that's why we have three branches of government, just like

openly openly claiming that power is like very worrying. Again, like I feel like every episode on Executive Disorder I say that, you know, I'm very worried. I'm very concerned, but that does continue to be the case.

official documentation. I will quote from the statement quote don entities will review policies for quote unquote intimate single sex spaces and take appropriate action to ensure such spaces are designated by sex and not gender identity on installations, facilities, ships, and any other infrastructure under the jurisdiction of the Department of Navy unquote. So this will force women into bathrooms

and barracks with men. It's in line with the stuff that Trump's been talking about and the stuff that he's been signing. But we are slowly getting more and more of these implementation guides getting sent around to various department and James.

them into very confined spaces together on board ships. Like this isn't like some kind of sort of minor inconvenience or whatever like this, this will put these people a demonstrable risk for assault, for bullying, which is a serious thing and an issue in lots of militaries, including the

US one. But like and many of these people, I should add, like have had that they're like post surgery, right, and not that it matters hugely, but they're people who might pass as women or men, and they're now forced to live according to their gender assigned at birth. Pretty fucked up.

implementation guides for visas. I know there's been a lot of articles in the Guardian and a few trans journalists have conflicting interpretations of a few Department of State cables regarding the issuing of visas to people who are trans Specifically, I think the main cable that we've seen allows the continued issuance of visas, but that would only match what the the the case officer or like the whoever whoever is like handling the actual these information whatever they determined

to be the assigned gender at birth to be. Yeah, that's that's how it would get issued. But I'm going to wait to report on kind of the rest of the nitty gritty details, because there is conflicting information from like from like these like policy wonks, lawyers and journalists themselves who are trying to figure out kind of what the full implications of those cables are, but we are aware of them. We've been talking about them in our chat.

Yes they are bad, but I don't necessarily want to like overblow the scope of some of these things just to like induce panic when really this is all kind of vary in line with Trump's earlier orders to only have male and female documentation that matches a signed gender at birth.

assisted reproductive technology like IVF. Now this change was directly in compliance with Trump's executive order to enforce the High Amendment, which Mia has talked about lots before on the show. And then on February fourth, they actually re established coverage for assisted reproductive technology, so probably just IVF, but abortion was not re established, so.

of the dj and the FBI. If you seek to hide in any corner of this country or planet, we will put on the world's largest man hunt, and we will find you, and we will decide your end state unquote. Agents and government employees have warned that under Patel, the Bureau will be on course to refocus efforts away from far right street fighters and accelerationists and towards the nebulous BLM Antifa. In related news, on Tuesday, a far right extremist named Joe Kent was confirmed as director of the

National counter Terrorism Center. Kent is a former Special Forces and CIA operative. He's described himself as an American first populist and has strong ties to the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. Kent has praised Joey Gibson for standing up to Antifa and Kent himself employed a proud Boy to consult on a failed congressional campaign in twenty twenty two. Kent has historically advocated that the FBI refocus their efforts

to target Antifa. And this is like all amidst a report from The Guardian suggesting that the Nazi cocelerationist group the Base, has had a decent resurgence in activity and recruitment efforts inside the United States. That's good, so not cool stuff happening, read the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I guess i'll close unless we have any other thoughts on Kent or Patel or our podcaster deputy director.