Calzon Media.
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Welcome, dick it up and hear a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again.
I am your host Mia Wong with me is James Stout. Hi?
Mary, happy to be here again?
Yeah, I am.
I don't know.
I have mixed emotions about this one. So today we are talking about how the American state, particularly the sort of neoliberal American state of the last about fifty years, created Elon Musk and how it is destroying itself. And we'll start with the fun part of this, which is that Tesla stock is down twenty five percent in the last month. Yay, it's extremely funny. The protests are working. People are like lighting them on cars on fire literally all over the world, Like there was just a big
ration in France the day we're recording this. The pressure is working, he's having a bad time. Twenty five percent is just the start we can get the other seventy five percent.
Yeah, I mean, and like for people who like I guess, I don't know, the value of Tesla stock is directly tied to Elon Musk's net worth. Like, obviously he's diversified, he doesn't have all of his wealth and netstocks. But like when Tesla stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer.
Yep, it's great, it's great. We love we love making Elon Musk poorer.
Yeah, it's the one line we like to see.
However, Comma, So we've talked a lot on this show about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the American state and about all of the people who he is harming in the lives. Is showing the people who are dead because of his actions, and I think it's worth actually getting into how he was produced and how
it came to be that. You know, at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, Mark famously wrote to the boorscheoise Z produced their own grave diggers, and you know, his his promised like inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and like this specific state, seems to have produced their own grave diggers, partially in the form of Trump, but partially in the form of
Elon Musk. And it's worth actually going into the story of how specifically this happens, and also, I think what neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of I think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines of the story of the extent to which you know, Tesla and space Ax were built by American subsidies, but it's worth going into some of the more structural elements of how this happened.
Why.
So, one of the problems that we have here, and I say we have here because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates.
Yeah, there's a lot of things he doesn't understand.
Yeah.
Yeah, and unfortunately he has inherited like the greatest of all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to be when neoliberalism is what is sort of weird libertarians and whatever you call his sort of ideology you know, is supposed to be and you know, like he is just sort of a fascist. But on the other hand, he's a product of this wing of that movement that was created out of out of the neoliberal thing about like, ah,
you must like decrease the size of the state. You gotta, you gotta eliminate all regulations you have to you know, you keep keep decreasing the size of the state. Keep fire like you know, fire all government employees, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, and again this is I think largely
what a lot of people think neoliberalism is, right. They think it's like, okay, neoliberalisms where the state gets smaller, And this has always been a fucking joke, Like to this entire ideoliberal period, the size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing, and this has always allowed a kind of like controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to you know, when two thousand and eight happens, right, Yeah, the economy, entire economy collapses, and then out of the woodwork come all
of these like Rand Paulls of like quote unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and like all of these sort of fascist perilitaries. But you know, they can come out of the woodwork and say, oh, the reason that the two thousand and eight collapse happened was because there is too much government regulation. And this is like sort of what bitcoin is, right, It's like, ah, the evils of capitalism are happening because like.
Not enough capitalism.
Yeah, well it's because like the but like cecifically, like the evil and s trench interests have taken over the state and you don't have the power to access to things that they do, which is obviously you know, like it is obviously true that these people have control of the state and you don't. But this sort of controlled opposition of if you put us in power, will eliminate parts of the state, will get rid of all this regulation that you can suddenly be in power. This has
always been a controlled opposition thing, you know. And this is disappears in the form of sort of libertarianism or like on the most extreme mentioned arco capitalism. Yeah, and this is something that the Montpellier society, which is like the people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all like
their academics come from, they slow of conferences. They've always had a problem with this where there's always been a branch of an archer capital there who think the only thing that the state should do is enforced contracts or just that it shouldn't exist and everything should just do Yeah, and the neoliberals are like, Okay, that you guys are
fucking ridiculous. And the reason they think this is that the actual thing that these people believe and this is this is something that if you read more highek than just like the Road to served him right, that's like the stuff for public consumption. If you read the stuff that you ask for public consumption, if you read sort of like rope Key, and you read all of the sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF, and you know, you go through all the different schools. What
they actually believe. Contrary the things that they say were like, oh, markets naturally emerge and the state just like exist to control them. What they believe is that you have to use the states specifically to create markets, and you have to use the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until they become sort of like good neoliberal market subjects you go to work, go home, buy things, and
do nothing else. And the product of this is the nineteen eighties, right, is the replacement of the welfare state, which is the sort of carrets of this system with just the pure stick of the police baton and the prison system.
Yeah, it's the end of like the post Second World War welfare state order, right that we saw certainly in the US but mostly in the Europe.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, But and this is very important, this never actually decreased the size of the state because what the state, you know, what it was was it was a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from like the state giving you things towards the states, you know, like beating you over the head with a hammer, and also insofar as it gives you things, making you go through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort of like scant welfare policies still exist.
Yeah, the states surveying you both for violence reasons and for withdrawing your benefits reasons.
Yeah, And this and this is always something that all of these people have supported. Right now, The other important part for our purposes is is the thing I said earlier about the state creating markets, and that's that's kind of like an abstract thing, right, there are sort of historical examples you can go through to look at what this looks like in a place where there aren't markets.
But this is something that's very important because a huge amount of what Tesla is is a direct result of you know, pure neoliberalism and action, which is the state stepping in to create a market as its way of doing regulation and with the way to interact with the world. And so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now, selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits. In twenty twenty four the selling of carbon credits was forty
three percent of Tesla's net income. Forty three percent.
Yeah, so we should explain what a carbon credit is if people I'm.
Familiar, Yeah, actually has numbers on this. Their numbers are that since twenty fourteen, thirty four percent of the total profits of Tesla are from selling these carbon credits. So the way the system works is that the EPA sets
standards for how much this is. Like you know, I read the ACXIO this thing too, but like the EPA set standards for how much like CO two per mile, all of the cars and trucks combined that a car company makes can can admit and you know, instead of doing the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just going to be like a firm cap on these emissions, they're like no, no, no, you know this this is what
I say when I say they create a market. So if what happens if you go over the cap, isn't that like you know, like people get hauled off the jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to buy someone else's carbon credits, and if you're below the cap, it gives you credits you can sell to other companies. So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right, their cars produced like zero basically like.
They don't have any fossil fuel use at all within their line.
Yeah. Yeah, Now obviously like whereas you know, you can ask a question where is that electricity coming from? But you know, like, but that's that's what doesn't get factored into it, which is part of the sort of problem with trying to use the state like this to solve right.
It doesn't look at life cyclists. Yeah, yeah, it just looks at driving the car missions.
You know, this is this is the problem with trying to use a regulatory state like this to solve the problem with climate change by creating a market. And so Tesla makes and again this is this last year, this was forty three percent of its NEAT income came not from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits. So what they're doing is making it so that other companies can produce more cars that are less fuel efficients, can produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids.
It's why you couldn't get a plug in hybrid EV pickup truck, Like I think they may be plug in hybrid Mavericks now, but like the reason that no US manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck like the that form fifty lightning that they have now is because they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead.
Yeah, and this is a fucking disaster for climate policy because instead of having all of the car companies just like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one car company that makes electric cars, and then all the rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like
sto Tuper like Biles et cetera et cetera. And the secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now, is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort of in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of what a market is, right with the explain it. So it's like, ah, there's all this, there's gonna be all this like competition in the market. The competition is going
to create the best product. And what actually happens, and the neoliberals in their private doctor understand this is that when the state creates a market like this, what is doing is handing like a person, like a single individual, a giant monopoly. And that's what happens. And that monopoly is one Elon Musk, Yeah, who has now been handed the title of the richest man in human history by the state's regulatory apparatus.
Because they've given him basically complete control every I mean, there are other ev only companies, but they're minute, right, Rivan or something like that, And he's got this scarce resource that the entire automotive industry now needs.
Yeah, And again this is you know, going back to the market creation part of this. None of this shit existed, right, Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever produce by itself or whatever. Like this is a direct neilerbal intervention into the market, which is what neolibililism is, right, It's it's the nailerble state coming into great markets and the product of it is Elon Musk.
Yeah, it's a monopoly.
Yeah.
And when we come back from ADS, well, we'll go into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon Musk and not all of these other companies that became the sort of single guy and how and how else he's benefited from the state. We are back, so the other aspect, you know. So, so we've gone into how how how Tesla is built on on these on this carbon credit trading. The other aspect of it is that Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts.
The Washington Post in probably the last like expose they're ever going to do like this now that Bezos has been like weird free market capitalists like tried to go through and find all of the money in government contracts that they've gotten.
They totaled it.
Well, I think I think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that, but they totaled it at thirty eight billion dollars, and that's just the ones that are unclassified, which is very important because a bunch of what SpaceX does SpaceX is, you know, most other company is a bunch of a bunch of contracts for classified like the deployment of Spice satellites. So it's definitely way
more than that, right, Yeah. But this comes to the other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies, like in general, do not make money, right They hemorrhage money for basically their entire existence until they can find a bunch of government contracts that can make them money. And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating shit after two thousand and eight, and you know, WAPA talks about this.
They got a.
Four hundred and sixty five million dollars low interest loan for the Department of Energy in twenty ten that basically saved the company from the brink of collapse.
Good thing, there's nothing else to spend the money on in twenty ten. No one else needed low interest low into a I think it was fine.
No, No, there was no attempt to build like a giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed.
Yep, you know, nothing else was happening. I wasn't living in my car at that time. It was fine. Yeah, thank you Obama.
And so and so.
As this goes on, right, the goal of you as a tech company, there's two things you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire on your pile of money. Or if you're a larger tech company, you were trying to amass enough US contracts, like US government contracts, to like get you to sort
of stability. And this is what happens with SpaceX. SpaceX now has gotten eighteen billion dollars of contracts with NASA, And this is sort of a part of like, I mean, NASA has always used government contractors, but like this is different, Like this is just straight up there using Tesla's rockets
to do things. And this is also part of why like Tesla and Boeing fucking this up, as part of why a bunch of astronauts are fucking stranded on the space station right now, because these things do not work. But there's there's been an enormous amount of money here.
And the other thing, you know, this is one of the other sort of like great neo liberal things, is that a lot of the a lot of the factories that Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones that are in the US, are there because they get unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and taxi centers from from from local states themselves. All of this brings us to, you know, one of the other really core aspects of sort of the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling
in terms of selling cars. By the way, we should also mention this is some thing Axios talks about that like if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, this company would literally never make money.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this has been the case. I write about this like I think two years ago. Yeah, I remember writing about this before. Eat the Musk have gone full fucking evil villain, I guess. But that's what they are. They're a cobbon credit company that makes cars.
Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by a seven five hundred dollars tax credit for electric cars.
Oh yeah, I got some tax credit information on electric cars. It's now the time. Yeah, yeah.
Can you want to talk about the other one that's driving these unhinged.
Sales, Yes, I do, because I have been driving around San Diego and I have seen an obscene number of cyber trucks wrapped in people's business livery, and it occurs to me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck, nor the people who need a pickup truck for work by cyber trucks because they suck at being trucks. And so I did some digging and I discovered that the IRS has a special tax deduction for vehicles which are
rated over six pounds gross vehicle weight. The gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not like the mass of the vehicle if you drove it like off the dealer lot onto a scale, that's the maximum operating weight of the vehicle as specified by the manufacturer. So it's your tesla with I mean, they are very funny videos of guy cycloading one bag of composts into the back of the Tesla and being it's a great truck for truck stuff.
The other really funny one is when when they try to attach like a winch to it and try to use it to pull the pull heavy things in the back of the truck comes off because it's just like made of like.
It's like like glue, like a unibody. Yeah, it might not be a body on frame, like, it might not be a proper truck. I actually don't know now how stually I will look into that afterwards. I bet it's I bet most of the electric or like high minage pickup trucks are not. So yeah, not a good truck actually,
under it's called Section one seventy nine. Under Section one seventy nine, a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating over six thousand pounds, you can deduct up to thirty one thousand in the first year rather than deducting the
depreciation of the capital good over time. Right, So instead of instead of deducting the depreciation of your vehicle that you purchase your business over time and not paying tax on that amount, you can not pay tax on thirty one thousand in the first year of your vehicle if it's over six thousand pounds.
Right.
There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've got a may bark or something really fucking heavy, so that would even cover the Model X, right, the Tesla Model X have the GBWR above that. With a truck, there are exemptions for work vehicles and they have to have a separate cargo compartment that is not the driver's compartment, that is six feet or more in length. So the
cyber truck just happened to have a six foot bed. Yeah, so you can deduct one hundred percent of value in the first year from what I understand for these vehicles which have a six foot bed. At least this was the case when I was looking. I became aware of the exact nature of this when I went on the Cyber Truck Owners Club forum and looked what tax deduct peoples were doing, right, and then I worked back from there, and it does seem that people are doing this. I
think it might be changing. So you can only deduct a certain percentage soon. It will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you tax advice, nor am I qualified to do so. Accountant, This is not this is not accounting advice. On top of that, Mia mentioned the IRS Commercial Clean Vehicle credit. Right, that's a credit, not a deduction, So the deduction would discount the amount of your income that you pay tax on versus the credit,
which is just great credit. So potentially the person could deduct the cost of the cyber truck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking cyber truck ruck to prove it's a business vehicle, and then if you're wrapping it. From what I understand, like these deductions somewhat depend on the
percentage of the vehicle's use that is business. I guess this could be like the equivalent of fringes on the flag tax theory, people claiming that when they're driving their their cyber truck to go to Whole Foods but it's wrapped, they're advertising a business, so it's a business use. I don't understand how viable that is as a claim, but well, you know, but.
Part of this is, like it's very easy, like especially right now when the irs is being gutted, Like it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit.
And people are not getting all it did.
Yeah.
Yeah, so they can take a seven thy five hundred commercial vehicle clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much, and like you would struggle to persuade me that that is not why a lot of people are buying cyber trucks right, Like it's got the weight rating, it's got the bed size. Like it's a lot of people who
wouldn't necessarily like not all trucks have six footbeds. Now, I will never buy a new drug because I can't find a truck that has like a decent seating arrangement and larger than six foot bed and four by four and doesn't cost more than I earn in a year. But like it's quite a like niche overlap of trucks
that apply. And like for a truck with a six foot bed and a six thousand pound gross vehicle weight rating, the cyber truck's pretty small and it fits kind of with people who don't actually need a work truck that can none the less take advantage of the work truck tax deduction. So once again, thank you government for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the roads today.
Yeah, and it's worth noting. So like like Tesla, well, you know, you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is like one of the like best selling car manufacturers, right, and part of it is from this but also you know, and this is this is the other aspect of this.
It's worth noting there's a very good Bloomberg article out today by Amanda Mold that talks about how fifty percent of all American consumer spending is now by people who in the top ten percent of the income bracket, so people make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year or more, and that means increasingly that everything in the United States reflects the you know, the sort of like cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes who all also want to buy this for their sort of
like like cultural grudges and you know, to like to own the libs and like show how like much of a fucking man they are. Yeah, and you know, and and and so you already you have that initial incentive, and then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that like, definitely this is like designed with a shit in mind.
Yeah, without a doubt, and it becomes, like you say, it becomes like a status good, and it becomes like a culture war signifier.
Yeah.
In addition to all those things, I guess people also like I've noticed that there's been a lot of backlash against people who own tesla's. If you go on the day we're recording, the top article on the front page of Reddit. On the third article Reddit, the top post is someone who's been putting pictures that say sell your car, and it's got a picture of Musk Zeke hyling on people's teslas in Boston. Ye shout out to that person.
Yeah, okay, So we're going to take a break and when we come back, we're going to sort of finish this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going. We are back now, I think this all. I think if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard of most of this. I actually, okay, you've heard of most of what I've said to some extent. I don't think you've heard what James has said before, because I've
seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here is that Elon Musk, on a fundamental level, is also a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all been living in for decades now. It's a product of an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Knesianism. So regular knesianism, right, is about you know, having the government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation.
Also you know, also like the military too, right, Like, let's not sort of like chigarcoat it, but it's about using a bunch of state money to like make there be jobs and using this to sort of I don't know though the way they call it is like countercyclical spending, but it's like they want to use the state to spend money to make there be jobs and to put money into the economy and to put goods into the
economy to counteract economic downturns. Asset Knesianism is still the state spending a bunch of resources, right, But it's the state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms of incentives entries of sort of tax structures, and specifically also very much in terms of the federal reserves interest rates, specifically to increase the price of stocks. And also you know, and you know the reason he calls it assets, right, because it's not just stocks, right, it's also things like
real estates. It's to increase the value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you think it's going to be worth more later. I have talked about this a lot on this show. This has been the fundamental the global economic strategy of most of the world's economies ever since sort of Japan kind of pioneered it in the eighties. As after the US sort of like kneecapped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy through the Plaza Accords.
And by the end of this fucking administration, everyone who listened to the show will be able to explain what the Plazative Cords and the River's Plasai Accords are from.
We stop it won't happen here after that because you'll understand and you'll stop it.
Yeah, you'll know, you'll know, you'll know the origin of the economy. Yes, so yeah again, the Plaza Cords, the US forces all of these countries to increase to value if their currency is relative to the dollar. This makes American manufacturing more competitive in nukes, all of their manufacturing. These countries need to find another place to you know, develop their economy, right, and the thing that the solution Japan comes to is real estate speculation, this blows up,
This blows up. In the nineties, this is this is a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse stuff is from this, and then the US is forced to do the reverse Plasea Cords in the nineties is Bill Clinton and you know, sort of annihilate American and manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the rest, like proper Japanese manufactory to keep their economy from completely employing. Japan's a number two economy in the world at that point. But again this means that the US has now been
doing this. There's the famous things called the Greenspan puts, where like to try to stop a market collapse that was obviously coming with a tech bubble bleuw up. Green Span kept cutting the interest rates over and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing. It just making it bigger, and then eventually it blew up. This is what two thousand and eight is was, you know, we did a whole bubble. I mean there's another bubble and
collapse between there. But like you know, and this is what we've been doing for the last two decades, Like since two and eight, we've been creating this giant tech bubble, and this tech bubble shit, and this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part of the value of Tesla stock is just you know, people who've been given a whole a whole bunch of access to cheap credit and by and by people, I mean like not really you and me, like a bunch of unbelievably rich people
have access to like incredibly cheap loans, and they use that money to buy Tesla stock. This is the sort of cyclical thing that just continues to increases the value of the company. And it's not just sort of like banks and investors. A lot of money that goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension funds. Yeah, from a bunch of bunch of of a whole bunch of different countries, and also like a huge number of American states, Like your teacher's pensions are all tied up in this
because pension reform. But the way that we sort of like lost the pension as a normal thing was that it was you know, it was converted to four one case, and the people who still have like regular state pensions, all of that money is now sort of invested in the stock market and it puts billions of dollars into Tesla every year. And so this is also another aspect.
This is this is the brought structural level on which on which US macroeconomic policy was designed to create a bunch of companies like Tesla and then US sort of like micro policy, the microcreation of markets to tax credits and you know all of these government contracts that they've been given to do like everything from like fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit, right, and like the US is like contract he got started. Like now, I mean like all of this stuff, right,
is is literally how Elon Musk was created. Yeah, but there is a third.
Even deeper level in which you know, we can look at at how how these cars are actually produced and how these rockets are actually produced, and they're produced by just incredible the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers. And I think people tend to think about, you know, Tesla workers in the US, but there's Tesla workers all
over the world. There's a huge gigafactory in shing John, you know, there's factories all over China, and you know, these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit they work in unbelievably dangerous conditions, and at the end of the day they get a very small amount of money so that the richest man in the world can get fucking richer every day.
Yeah, and that's before we consider like ingredient parts to Tesla's right, you know that we we just addressed, for instance, in our episode on Congo. Yeah, there are parts of your test Geotesla that come out of this country where there has been a war for as long as most of us has been alive. Really very little effort has gone into improving conditions for people there. Certainly for workers.
They're doing jobs that are essential to like our economy and to like Mia and my four for a one k line going up comes from exploiting workers in Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world.
Yeah, and you know this is something there's something our standard of living is based off of. But at the end of the day, right Eon Musks, all of Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the States monopoly on violent is used to stop all of these people from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in order to stop these people from taking back the fucking value
that they create. Now, Unfortunately, all of this sort of neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last fifty years, right, this attempts to sort of like depoliticize everything and have everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this sort of like non politics where you're voting for two parties that are like literally even more the same than they are.
Now.
This attempt to do things like solve climate change to these to these promotion of carbon markets and create the sort of like stable like capitalist sogeniminy forever has ultimately been self defeating. It's why all attempts to regulate capital inevitably fail, because the functioning of the capitalist system, and particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism has worked, has concentrated like the most wealth ever held by a single human being into the hands of one
guy who was a Nazi. And then these people use their wealth to cubate political power and seize control of the state, dismantling the systems that were meant to regulate them. And you can't solve this problem with regulation because again, eventually they will simply accumulate enough power, retake power, and eliminate their regulations. You can't even solve this problem just
by killing them. I see people talk about like the killing of billionaires in China as like an example of this, and like a that's all political faction, lane fighting stuff, and they'll execute people specifically to sort of appease like the Chinese workers, so that they never have to fucking watch the pla get right out of Shanghai again. But the thing is, even if somehow you use the state to just kill them, right, it doesn't work, because capitalism
will just produce more of these people. If you actually want to stop this, if you want to stop this elon Musk from destroying the entire country and quite possibly ending all life on earth by fucking with America's nuclear weapons, and so they're simply not enough safety mechanisms to stop someone from accidentally setting one off. You were going to have to destroy them completely. The permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch, the power of the billionaire,
the power of the dictator, must be broken. This tiny group of men cannot as a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals, supply chains to produce everything we need to survive. It must belong to us. We create their wealth. The only way to save this world is to take it back. If we want to save democracy, the only way to do it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon
Musk rules as a tyrant. Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast that is lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too. They must cease to rule, They must cease to exist not as individuals but as a class. And the only way to do that is by giving control of their power, and their property and their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of it in the first place. That is the tax that
we have in front of us. The challenge that we face is that we face effectively the entire might of the American state, which is the one of the most powerful apparatus of repression that has ever been built. Our advantage is that that apparatus of repression is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are and
I cannot emphasize this enough. Maybe the two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan's after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the Revolutions Podcast, concluded to be the great idiots of history who either their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision
at every single moment are what makes revolutions possible. And if these people are not the great idiots of history that allow us to bring them down and stop them from destroying everything that has ever been in this world that is good, then nothing else is.
Yeah.
We have the one great stroke of a good foiltime we have, right, is that that the old Paris been concentrated in the hands of complete idiots who are addicted to diet coke and being mad at that.
You'll yep, And they you know, we have already seen. They don't understand how this apparatus works.
Right.
They fired the nuke police by accident.
Yeah, so it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of the means of coercive violence. Yeah, when we start to make you spoke about controlled opposition, right, and the idea that like the great debate of our time is how much state regulation we should have and how much unfettered anarcha capitalism we should have. They are drinking the kool
aid that got them in power. That is the one thing going in our favor right now, that they are dismantling the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe the myth that if the state didn't exist, they could be even more wealthy and even more tyrannical.
Yeah, and well, and the second advantage that we have is that they have been they have said about systematically alienating every single group of people who they would need as their political base. They are pissing off the military, they are pissing off the intelligence services. They are going through, and they are like systematically pissing off the farm states. You know, like the farmers obviously do not have that like don't fucking matter, but they're picking They're pissing off
the agro businesses. They are individually going through and pissing off a whole bunch of the of the of the country. Scientific resources. They're going through, They're like fucking with the Social Security administration. They're individually going through and pissing off every single group of people on earth who matter, and people who like us under this system aren't supposed to
matter until we fucking do something about it. And you know, the other big thing that we have right now is that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by by actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do, and by pulling apart his base of support, and by putting together coalitions of some of these people
and not all of them, some of them. Some of them you just need to divide and conquer by getting them out from backing him, right, Like the whole thing with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was that but people just mostly stayed home and that was how they won. Like that's that is largely what we need.
We need these people to stay home. But these people can and will if we have anything to say about it, be fucking we'sriven home and hopefully we can bury both the grave diggers and the people whose graves they were digging in the same spot in the dust bit of history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again.
Welcome to it could happen here to show that things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis and I'm joined today by a special guest host, Richard's Todd. Welcome back to the show.
Ah, thank you, so much for having me. I am completely excited to be here. I am a listener of the show, so it feels like getting to be on a show that I actually freak out too often.
And I'm very excited for you to be here because you have a special report on one of the people who I've been cyberstalking for you, and I'm very excited to hear the details of what she's been up to these past few weeks. I kind of know the rough overview because again because of my cybers talking, but I've not done a deep dive the way you have, So I'm very excited to hear an update on this on this character.
So it sounds like we are in a similar place when it comes to this person, and this person is none other than Candice Owens. First of all, what are your thoughts on her? Because I am low key fascinated with her. I follow her on social media, I watch her videos like I am.
Like weirdly captivated by her.
I mean, I've I've covered her mostly through her involvement
with Daily Wire. I've talked a little bit about kind of how that'll fell apart, you know, like a year and a half ago or so, I've talked a little bit about her involvement in Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk, and she's just kind of been one of like these like randomly, you know, like like orbiters, like the online like right wing content sphere for like I don't know, the past six years at least, and I typically focused more on like you know, like the Ben Shapiro's, the
Matt Walsh's, you know, back in the day, the Stephen Crowders and stuff. But Candas was always just like around and like she definitely like went after a different demographic than what like my usual focuses, right Like I'm focused on like what's going on with straight white men, like why why are they like this? And who who is targeting them? And you know, and that's you know, that's like the Matt Walsh, like Stephen Crowder kind of angle. Like Candas Owens has like a kind of a broader
net that she targets with her content. So like she's always kind of come up as like a side character. I don't think I've ever done like a distinct focus on her before besides just you know whatever kind of crazy post or like you know, anti trans or like very like weird like racist rank that she goes on like every once in a while.
Yes, so there is so much to talk about when it comes to Candace Owens. I'm sort of like you, like I sort of saw her as a side character, but only recently have I realized, like, oh, people in my life life are listening to Candace Owens and citing Candace Owens and they have no idea any about her, anything about her backstory.
Yeah, all the stuff that you that you were just talking about.
She's like reinvented herself like multiple times. And you know, some people who mainly come at this from like the anti fascist research perspective might not be aware of her like latest rebrand, which is what I'm excited to hear about today. Yes, I just remembered how she had that whole event with Kanye when she did her like BLM documentary that was a whole other Candace era. Yeah, so much, My god.
I have to say I was like low key embarrassed for her because like during her Kanye West era, she was like, Kanye West designed the katore outfits for my Blexit movement, and Kanye West was like, no, I fucking didn't, And like I was like, Oh, they're so embarrassing that you like that, you like publicly aligned yourself with Kanye West, only for him to basically like diss you publicly right after Yeah.
And then come out as like an explicit neo Nazi like two weeks later.
Yes, yes, uh, Candace girl.
So I want to talk about her, like, I don't want to spend too much time on her background, but there are some pieces that I think like are good for understanding kind of who she is, this chameleon figure that she's been totally if there is not like a behind the bastard's on her, do you know, if there is, there should be If there's not.
Not yet, Like similarly on bastards, she's been one of these like recurring characters, Oh my god, but she has not had a distinct focus.
Robert Evans, get on it, because we need the Candace Owens behind the bastard. So Candace grew up in Stanford, Connecticut. While she was a student there, she went through this horrible sounding racial harassment. A classmate left her like this
racist death threat on her voicemail. That turned into like a pretty serious local scandal because it turned out the student who made that threat via voicemail, did so in a car with a group of students that included the sun of the then mayor and then future Democratic Governor
of Connecticut, Daniel Malloy. So she got tons of support from the local chapter of the NAACP, and her family ended up suing the Stamford Board of Education in federal court for failing to protect her rights, resulting in a thirty seven thousand, five hundred dollars settlement. She went on to study journalism at University of Rhode Island before dropping out.
This is like the early two thousands.
Yes, this was like young, like baby Candace, high school Candace before she was the Candace Owen that we know today. Yeah, so I sort of like almost see a little bit of myself and where she got her start. Like me, She was an early adopter of using the Internet to talk about things like race and politics.
Like me.
That also seemed to sort of manifest in a lot of like low hanging fruit shit posts on the early days of blogging. Like in twenty fifteen, she was writing blogs making fun of Trump's penis size.
Sure, many such cases.
Yes, many such cases.
So in twenty fifteen, Owens is running a blog called Degree one eighty, where she wrote pieces criticizing conservative Republicans, writing about the quote that shit crazy antics of the Republican tea Party. The good news is they will eventually die off peacefully and in their sleep, we hope, and then we can get right on with the obvious social change that needs to happen immediately, she wrote on her blog.
So back then she was really someone who had like a progressive point of view and was doing a lot of public writing about what she was seeing and experiencing in politics at the time.
Yeah, no, this is something that I guess some people might not know if they've only like become aware of her through daily wires. Yeah, like in the pre twenty sixteen like BuzzFeed internet kind of sphere. She was just like one of like these people who would yeah, have like like you know, progressive like ish takes, criticize embarrassing
like politicians, and like overtly racist stuff happening. And then the degree to which this this like heel turn happens is like one of the most stark examples I've seen in like a cop I don't know, I'm trying to think of it. If there's like any like exact parallel. I don't know, like there's like certainly some like detransition like a grifters. There used to be like ex gay influencers or you know this like like proto influencers kind of before influencers were a thing like x gay speakers.
But yeah, the switch around on Candace from these blog posts is so concentrated.
So in her own words, she describes it as happening overnight.
There you go.
Yeah, how it happened is like fascinating to me.
So in twenty sixteen, when Gamergate was in full swing, Owen's launched a Kickstarter for a project called Social Autopsy, which she described as a way to catalog the abuses of trolls and cyberbullies. Fun fact that Kickstarter is still up today, it is such a weird time capsule of a different time. There's like a video of her speaking earnestly about the need to like have the Internet be a like.
Safer, more equitable landscape.
It is nuts, Like people shall go listen to her speaking about this project. So the plan for this project was essentially that she would create a way to de anonymize online commentators and then connect them with like their
real names and their real life employers. And what's so funny is that, like that is the very same argument that a lot of people use, people who like want to restrict the open Internet still use today that like problems on the Internet, online harassment and abuse would all be improved if only everybody had to use their government
idea and government names to access the Internet. And so like, it's very funny that that idea it was bad then, and it didn't really die, it was just recycled into today.
Yeah, I mean, like there's a version of this that happens, or at least it kind of used to happen more in regards to like anti fascist research, where like you're like identify specific like extremely racist accounts or like explicit neo Nazis and contact their employer in in an attempt to get to get them fired so they can focus on getting a new job and supporting themselves rather than doing racism online and in person, especially if he's like, you know, a member of like a group, whether that
be you know, the Proud Boys back in the day or many many other groups Patriot Prayer now, Patriot Front, that sort of thing. It's funny how hated this tactic is soon to be by people like Candice and the Daily Wire people. But here she's advocating it herself exactly, and they just like post Anita Sarkisian kind of content like world.
Yeah, so pretty much everybody thought this was a bad idea, including video game developer Zoe Quinn, who folks might remember was kind of at the center of Gamergate and was like viciously attacked. Owens was subsequently harassed and docs, and she blamed Zoe Quinn and other feminists for this and said so publicly as you can probably guess, like people
like Milo Gyanopolis loved this. People who were promoters of Gamergate really hyped up Owens's claims that like, yes, feminists were actually the ones doing all the online harassing.
Okay, I can see this is going.
So this event is what Owen's credits with her turn from progressive to quote becoming a red pilled radical. She says, I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls. She starts promoting right wing viewpoints on her YouTube channel, calling herself quote red pill black, which I gotta say is like pretty good branding, Like, I'm not mad at the branding there.
I was like, Okay, black woman talking about like right wing stuff, red pill.
Black I get it. I get it.
Yeah, I'm interested to see how much the checkbook was a consideration here. Oh yes, how much your kickstarter god versus how much she realized she could get if she jumped on the other side of the content churn.
Well, she almost instantly gets noticed by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Points USA Right, and he hires her almost immediately. She starts cranking out these videos that really perform quite well, that her videos really go viral. Video where she's doing things like dismissing the twenty seventeen white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Alex Jones gets her to co host some of his info War shows. She's doing stints
on Fox News as a paid commentator. Like business is booming for Candace Owens from this.
Turn Yeah, this is around when I became aware of her.
Yes, in twenty twenty one, she joins up with The Daily Wire. There was so much fanfare around them hiring Candace like it was a big deal. She moved to Nashville, fun fact, there was even a House joint resolution House Joint Resolution three fifty, a resolution in the Tennessee government to congratulate Candace Owens on relocating to Tennessee and for
her work at Daily Wire. That reads whereas miss Owens has earned the admiration and respect of millions of Americans through her activism in support of President Trump as a black woman and her perceptive criticism of creeping socialism and leftist political tyranny.
Very cool stuff.
Yeah, imagine it being like a joint resolution in your local government when you move someplace.
Yeah, the governor of Tennessee was like super excited when the Daily Wire relocated their headquarters to Tennessee and brought in all these people. Like there was there was like
so many like private dinners meetings. There was like a like a number of resolutions welcoming the Daily Wire to Tennessee in this like twenty twenty one period as they were just starting to like launch their own like streaming service website, which is why they recruited Candice is because they were looking for content creators to fill out their slate.
So you would think that this should be like a match made in heaven, right, smooth sailing. They need insidiary content creators. She's an insidiary content creator. Should be a match made in heaven. Perfect Not quite, because things end in like this really messy public fallout just a few years later. So I know that you've done episodes on this from my perspective, and I would love to know
what you think. It's not one hundred percent clear what went down, but the public friction between Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, one of the founders of Daily Wire, it seemed to be like related to reactions around the situation in Gaza.
Yeah, totally so.
Ben Shapiro is Jewish and Owens, as we.
Said, has said and done like a lot of anti Semitic stuff, like a lot and.
Like actual anti Semitic stuff like that people use that as a way to like shut down like very very admirable like like like Propelstinian like activism. No, like Candas owns just is anti semitic and this it's like the same thing with like Jackson Hinkele, and she made it like an escalating series of anti semitic claims after October seventh, which which slowly kind of like broke with the company and ben like more and more and more of an
over series of a few months. Yes, and it's it's it's funny because like it also kind of mirrors this like online fight she had with Stephen Crowder like a year or so prior when Daily Wire trying to recruit him, and then she got informed about like how like abusive he was to his wife, and then she went on like a media blitz like against him as like as
he was in negotiations like with the Daily Wire. She's like very willing to like stir shit up, like even if it like goes against her own interests or the interests of like whatever company she works for, Like she is, she is absolutely willing to like make like some kind of like chaotic spectacle regardless of her own like you know, financial security.
I guess yes, like she I'm so glad that you mentioned that she is not afraid to get down and dirty in public. And I do think, like, you know, as a black woman who works with a lot of white men, I would imagine that she's probably thinking, like, I have to have some kind of decorum. I don't want anyone to say that I'm being a crazy black woman or whatever.
She it's it seems like.
She has no such qualms, Like she is like I will, I will make this a public, messy fight, and I am not afraid to make a genuine spectacle of myself. Yeah, and so it is really important to note that, like as you said, she wasn't just like criticizing the Israeli state. She was like getting into like blood liable and like deep conspiracy theories.
Yeah, no, it was. There was some really nasty posts.
Yeah, Like one of the things that she said, She's claimed that Judaism was quote a pedophile centric religion that believes in demons and child sacrifice, and that she was waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power, like.
Stuff like that.
Not great, not good, not good.
So, as you said, like this starts to become like a public feud toward her employer. She wrote on Twitter, no one can serve two masters and ended her post writing you cannot serve both God and money, which Ben Shapiro, her boss, tweets like quote tweeted, oh my God, Like Candice, if you feel that taking money from the Daily Wire somehow that comes between you and God, by all means quit, Like messy is there It's crazy.
That instead of having like a company meeting, they were just doing this on Twitter.
Oh my god, and my messy ass was eating it up. I was like, keep fighting, let him fight.
Oh yeah, no, absolutely, I'm totally willing to like watch this, watch this go down. I do not want to get involved, right right right.
Owens like went on took her Carlson Show and said that Ben Shapiro was quote acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged for weeks now. She said that Shapiro quote crossed a certain line. When you come for scripture and read yourself into it, I will not tolerate it.
Very cool.
Yeah, So, at one point, Owens tweets that she wants Ben Shapiro to have a public like debate with her, moderated by podcaster Patrick Bett Davide. Ben Shapiro was having none of this, he tweets, Candice, I can see why you'd want to hide behind a moderator, particularly one who said we should rename our company quote daily Jewish Wire just yesterday.
No Jesus one on one Monday at.
Five, we can sit down and have a healthy debate like adults, and we'll live stream it on x and YouTube. Take it or leave it as to the true reason why you didn't respond to my offer to sit down with you and discuss these issues publicly or privately back in February. I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Like, this is employer employee going at it on Twitter.
I can't believe I'm taking Ben Shapiro's side here, not just because he's Ben Shapiro, but also because he's an employer. But it's a really it's a really tough situation here.
Yeah, I feel the same way, because, like it's just not a great look to have somebody that you just hired to all this fanfare coming at you like this on Twitter, like and I think, I mean, this is just my opinion, so like take that for what it's worth, just as somebody who has worked in media and been
around the block. The reason why I'm not comfortable saying like their feud was entirely based on Owens's anti Semitic comments and behavior is that she just went so hard and so public that something to me, I almost wonder if there was like a contract dispute here that like she was like, oh, I can make more money on my own totally gotta get out of this contract or something, because like it just doesn't smell right.
I mean, yeah, if she had like an inclination that she could afford to lose his job because you might make more money on her own, then yeah, absolutely that that would allow her to push this further than what she might otherwise might Like there's been a lot of a lot of discussion in the right wing contents fear about like the Daily Wire's fairly restrictive contracts despite still getting paid like tens of millions of dollars, there is
like restrictions on like what happens when you lose monetization because the Daily Wires like a company trying to make a profit. So totally, I think there could absolutely be other financial stuff going on here. I think it's more like an interlocking series of issues rather than just one thing or another.
Yes, So, after Rabbi Schmooley Boteach criticized Owens for her defenses of Kanye West, Owens liked to tweet asking Bouteach if he was quote drunk on Christian blood again, And I guess that was the final straw. A few days later, Daily Wire and Candace Owens ended their relationship with Owen's tweeting the rumors are true, I am finally free. Okay, So that's what happened with her and Daily Wire. So
where is she now? Well, this is where the story gets interesting because I had not heard from Candice Owens in a minute, and my reintroduction to her appened recently, and what I was trying to make sense of the dispute between two Hollywood A listers, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.
So the issue between Blake and Justin it's a little bit complicated and ongoing, but it's actually a pretty interesting story that includes a lot of things that I enjoy, like how celebrities use media and how social media platforms can be weaponized for or against specific people. Email correspondence where people make themselves look terrible in writing because they do not expect those emails to be in a deposition later.
Like that is my favorite thing in the world, Like, please continue to put your wrongdoing in writing so that my nosey ask and read it later and be like, ooh, messy. So I do encourage like folks to read up on it because it does go beyond just like two celebrities having a feud, but you don't really need to know the specifics for our purposes. The quick and dirty version is that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were in a movie adaptation of the very popular novel by Colleen Hoover
called It Starts with Us. In December, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and starting a smear campaign against her. Baldoni strongly denies that and has sued her. In response, both camps have released information like emails, text messages, and video that attempting to make the other look bad. So it has kind of turned into one of those ink blot tests that changes
depending on whose version you buy. Version one is that Blake Lively was being sexually harassed on set by a fake feminist ally who is actually an abusive man, or version two that Blake Lively is an egomaniac who was using her star power and a list celebrity network like her husband Ryan Reynolds from Deadpool to control the narrative around her being a nightmare on set and steamrolling everybody
on this project. Cool, yes, and so it's what's interesting about this to me is that it's one of those stories where algorithmically it depends on what silo or what pocket of the Internet you're at sure to determine, like what version of this story you're getting, like much like Johnny Depp's deformation lawsuits.
Sounds too much like the Johnny Depp thing.
Yeah, exactly, exactly, and so like, for whatever reason, TikTok thinks I hate Blake Lively and want to pour over every nuance of how she is a fraud right like, but someone else's TikTok might be like, no, Blake Lively, we should.
Be supporting her.
Like. It's one of those situations where just depending on where you are on the Internet, you might get a very different impression of the public sentiment, leaning one way or another.
Yeah, yeah, this is all the types of things I try to avoid learning about at almost all costs. So, yes, I do not like you, you know.
So I was trying to get to the bottom of it because I kept hearing about it, like everyone was talking about it. So I'm talking to my cousins, who I would lovingly describe as normies and that they are not super online. It's like they're not like you and me, They're not like deep into the depths of extremism or anything like that.
No, they're not watching like the Daily Wire for fun Slash four works.
Yes, yeah, and my cousins are like, oh my god, there is this black girl journalist who has been following everything and breaking it down. She has all the tea will tag you. That journalist was Candace Owens. Okay, so all right, you know, Candace has been making so many videos off of this and like her coverage, if you
coverage in quotes, has really taken off online. As The Cut put it in a piece called Candace Owens has gone mainstream, they write the right wing commentators coverage of the Blake Lively Justin Baldonnie case has reached millions of viewers. Owens podcast was hours and hours of analysis of the case, deep dives into court filings, tabloid news stories, even Ryan Reynolds'
recent snl Fiftheist Anniversary Space Secal appearance. One listener said, she's really been able to go in and pinpoint discrepancies and some of the things Blake Lively said, rather than us having to go through it on our own.
Ah. Of course, it's the woman who's lying about being sexually harassed of course.
One listener of her podcast says she recognizes that Owen seems to have a pro Buldani bias, but she doesn't care because, quote, she's urging us to look past the fact that this is not a feminist issue at all, that it's about getting justice for whoever is being wronged here, she's uniting the left and the right.
The right wing Women's.
Magazine also published a headline about this, saying how Candice Owens is uniting conservatives and liberal with her it ends with US coverage. So her coverage of this dispute has really allowed her to attract.
A lot more viewers beyond her like normal right.
Wing extremist base, which has generally been like a lot of white men like that who was really listening to her content before when she was with Dailey Wier. Now she has really branched out. So like normy, like my cousins who have no idea who Owens is, have no idea her background, her past, the work that she has done, and just think like, oh, she's a normal entertainment journalist, like digging and getting the dirt.
I know she's doing this like on her podcast, I assume YouTube as well. She also just like trying to like flood TikTok, trying to flood like Instagram reachs. Is this kind of part of how she's trying to like expand her reach.
It is like she's everywhere, and then she has her longer form podcast than YouTube. But then clips of her like you know, breaking down the top lies or top inaccuracies and things that Blake Lively has said. Those go super viral on social media. The short clips yeah okay, and all of this has been just gangbusters for her growth and engagement.
Here's how The Cut put it.
Since Owen started covering the Lively Baldani case, her YouTube channel has exploded in popularity, allowing her to attract a much larger fan base than the audience of hardcore conservatives she is amassed over the years. Each episode about Lively racks up at least one point five million views. In the past month alone, Owens has i asked more than four hundred and fifty thousand new subscribers on YouTube, and her total video views have quadrupled since this time last year.
This is according to data from the platform's social blade oh No. Over the past three months, her audience on YouTube has almost started skewing sixty five percent female according to data provided by a spokesperson, a market shift from her past fan base. So yeah, she's exploding in popularity. She's everywhere, and now she's attracting like normy women who are just coming in for the celebrity dispute.
Yeah, that's probably not gonna end well.
Huh, well, I don't think it will end well.
You know, I was like racking my brain trying to figure out, like, why has this story taken off so much for Owens? And there are a couple of reasons. I think this is like working for her. One, I hate to say it, but she is actually genuinely interesting to listen to. You know, when she was a progressive voice online, she definitely was somebody who had a point of view when a clear voice and a perspective, and that really that really comes through when she's breaking down
Blake Lively in these videos. She has a way of speaking that really makes you pay attention and signals to the listener like this person is really breaking it down. It's the same reason why on TikTok or social media when someone is like story time or like I'm about to tell you all the details of something. Those videos always perform very well on social media, and I think that Owens is is just very good at knowing how to hold somebody's attention online, Like I have to say it.
Sure, I mean she's been doing the content churn for almost a decade now, Like, yeah, you you do get good at it on like a technical proficiency level.
Yes.
Also, you know, we just love good old fashioned misogyny. And if that misogyny can be laced with like a conspiracy theory, oh yeah, I think.
That's it's even better.
So, like I think that part of this is just like social media platforms are always going to amplify misogyny. I would argue that things like misogyny, transphobia, massage noire, or racism, all of that is like baked into the experience of showing up online as a feature, not a bug. And I think that Omens takes it even further because she is breaking it down like she's uncovering some conspiracy.
Like it's not just let's talk about about Blake Lively, it's I'm uncovering the web of lies and I'm gonna I'm gonna expose Blake Lively's dark truth, right, and so like, of course that's gonna take off.
And she does gain this element of authority because she's a woman talking about this. It makes men feel better about being misogynistic because a woman's telling them it's okay to I mean, this is this is the same thing that she was able to weaponize for all of her, like like yo, anti black lives matter stuff for all
of her, like like racism isn't real things. She tries to use it to her advantage, mostly to make like white members of her audience like feel good about their own racism because a black woman told them it's actually okay and like that. That's been like a big part of her career the past few years exactly that.
And I think like she really understands that the inviting power of taking what you might think of as like a contrarian stance on something like yeah, totally, like after the Me Too movement, how many women got engagement by taking a contrarian stance, right, Like, I think going against the conventional attitude that says like, oh, we have to automatically support the woman in this in this dispute probably makes people tuning into omens's breakdowns feel like they're like
free thinkers who are going against the grain, you know, by taking an unpopular opinion, which I do think connects to her more odious stances on things like trans people and women and Jewish people.
Yeah.
No, I mean, like you see the same thing with like you know, like the gays against Groomer's thing, right wing trans influencers, detrans influencers. It's the same, like gambit. And certainly I think, like, yeah, like your identification of her as like a professional contrarian is like very very key to her success exactly.
I also think like part of the reason why people are attracted to conspiracy theories is that it allows for like fantasy world building, and I think I really see the ways that she injects that into her coverage, even the word coverage I put that in worlds because like she is like a wild person. To her coverage is like also wild. She does not adhere to, as she puts it, quote, a traditional style of reporting.
You know, I'll take her word for that one, you know what, I'll.
Believe her on that that single point.
Yeah, I believe her.
I believe that, you know, she amplifies rumors and even once she read a letter that she said that she got from Blake Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds, his acting coach when he was twelve, and to Kenneth Owens, his acting coach said that Ryan Reynolds was an obnoxious kid.
You know what, I also believe it.
I oh, I have no trouble believing that. But like her coverage, it includes like side.
Characters, Yeah, things that have this whatsoever? I mean, yeah, I feel like this, this focus on like this like conspiratorial ben is like the same. She's using the same tactics she did for her Black Lives Matter documentary for like most of our political work, like it, it's she's using the same tactics over and over again. And eventually she like reaches this like stress point or this like threshold where she cannot see a path forward or she can't see a way to surpass it, and then she
does a pivot. This happened with her progressive blog, this happened even at the Daily Wire. She does not she doesn't work with Turning Point USA anymore. And like this, this new pivot is learning. Hey, it's sup super lucrative
to be like a tabloid entertainment quote unquote journalist. Very easy, super lucrative, and all of the tactics you learned on the right wing media sphere work great here, Like all of this, like conspiratorial thinking really uh, a disregard for like like facts and evidence works perfect for this sort of like rumor based reporting, and it spreads like crazy, And yeah, it spreads across political lines. You don't, you aren't just targeting the mega people or like the far right.
This this can be so much more broad to like the giant audience of like you know, quote unquote like a political people go to these platforms for a form of like of like escapism and entertainment rather than just hearing about politics yet again, because that's you know, very very tiring.
Yeah, and I think in my mind, all of it is sort of sort of connected. Like Ben Shapiro, nobody cared more about celebrities or talked more about celebrities than Ben Shapiro. He would love to be like I don't care what Hollywood is doing, but he was obsessed with like Beyonce and Meg thee Stallion, Like it was just
like a negative obsession. Like yeah, you know, anti fandom is still fandom when you make video after video about how much you don't like Meg thea stallion in a kind of way, you are a fan, just in the opposite direction. And so I think that Candice Owens really took that and learned how to perfect it because she is much I think that she is much better at this than Ben Shapiro is.
Like the evidence being that, like.
Her YouTube channel is exploding with people who probably would never watch any any of Ben Schipper here, I was content.
The big bummer for me is that the Daily Wires first film, Lady Ballers left us on a cliffhanger with with Candas Owans and Matt Walsh sitting in a car talking about how Matt Walsh planned this entire like plot of the film as like as like some kind of scheme or like social experiment, and you know, it was implied there would be more. You know, it was like a you know, like Avengers Nick Fury type post credit scene.
And now we're never gonna learn what Candae OANs and Matt Walsh get up to now because she's left the company. She's now doing her own thing. So now we just had this dangling plot thread that's just gonna bug me forever, Like what does the Candae Owan's character at the end of Lady Ballers Do next. I'm gonna be thinking about this for like years.
America deserves closure. We deserve to know. Just putting that out there, I think we do deserve closure.
I just think my closure is gonna be a little bit different.
I am. I'm very fine having all of these plot threads wrapped up quite quickly, but I do not see that in the cards immediately.
So in terms of where she's at now, like you know, my question is like, has Owens has this kind of like mainstream audience that she's been able to amass. Has she changed her views she is she trying to do a rebrand or a pivot. In an interview, she said, in terms of my perspective, I haven't changed anything. I've been anti METO since long before it was cool.
Sure, I mean that can be true. It's also true that she is getting better at propaganda and widening her footprint. Which, yeah, then once her audience gets bigger, she might be able to slip in more things that I would find on Savory to a larger audience over time, But she also might be content to keep growing that and be slightly less off putting in the meantime, but no, like there's also just a huge audience for like the anti woke backlash,
antiemetwo stuff right now. Like that's kind of that's kind of like the new mainstream frankly, so I am certain that she's going to try to continue to like flex that and grow that in the in the next few months years.
Yeah, so I agree with you.
I believe Owens when she says that, like her stances have not changed much easy to be like, Oh, well, she's pivoting to go mainstream now that she has these like women in her audience who are interested in celebrity. And you can, honestly, you can sort of see some
of this in changes to her physical appearance. Like she was sort of known for having very severe hair, the joke being that she had alienated herself so much from her fellow black people, but like, no black person was going to do her hair, and that's why it looks that way. But lately you've really seen this like softening. She's kind of going for like a softer public look.
She is pivoting to different kinds of programming. She's branched out into doing a book club for paying subscribers and some kind of a fitness program.
That makes sense. Yeah, totally, like the health Guru fitness entertainment bubble. Yeah that's huge.
That's such a good grift. She's gonna make so much money.
Yeah, yeah, she is.
But I really agree with you, gaire that, like, I think that these new followers are certainly going to be walked down a pipeline that includes for extremist attitude just using celebrity scandal as a hook, because, like as you said, celebrity scandals and celebrity stories are just considered fluff for
a lot of people. So like, people who care about extremist content and ideology are maybe not seeing that as a space that they need to pay too close of attention to about these stories that you might see on the cover of an US weekly. But these stories actually can be used to tap into extremist ideologies and unleash them in a whole new audience.
I'm like, yeah, like.
You were saying, if you are just like watching a podcast because you're want to be entertained about a story about two celebrities, you might not have your like bullshit detector up to be like, wait, is this extremist content, because it's it's seen and treated as a less charge space. And so you know that line of thinking that says that you know, this is just fluff, It doesn't really
matter what happens in celebrity news is not incorrect. It is dangerous because it lends itself to people being more susceptible to to it when extremist content is slipped in without even really realizing it.
I mean, and like that relates even to like the originator of this gamer git stuff and the whole like anti woke like media fandom content sphere right where so much of like the anti book backlash has been built on people complaining that Star Wars is too woke. Now there's too many women in movies, there's too many black
people in commercials. Where do all the white people go, There's too many gay people in TV, there's too many trans people in TV, and like that is it is definitely focused on by the rest of the Daily Wire goons, and you can very easily pivot back to that sort of cultural commentary after you're done talking about Blake Lively, like this is this is a very small jump where you're still talking about the entertainment industry, but with this like anti woke framing like, you know, why is all
these minorities here? Why are they pushing transgenderism on kids? You know, whether that be talking about you know, transactors in the business, whether you be talking about you know, like female lead or like diversity casting, like all all that kind of stuff that especially Candice can use her like contrarian position to speak on authority about talking about why are you recasting these legacy characters to be people of color? Or why is a woman the lead of
this thing when it should be actually a man? You know, just like very very basic stuff that's been a part of like the YouTube slop for a decade now, but it's still like still takes in a lot of a lot of clicks and it is it is a lot of like the Daily Wire and like right wing content still still does. It's all this like weird like culture warst stuff. It's very very tightened with Hollywood. Like you were saying about how like Ben Shapiro claims, you know,
like hate Hollywood. He's trying to build his own alternative to it, but he can't stop talking about it, like he can't stop complaining about Disney's snow White. And I can see Candice doing like the exact same thing, but now with like an honestly like a bigger, a bigger, more like a political audience that's much more malleable and can be shaped around these like larger cultural trends. When you think about this like perception of this backlash against wokeness, I.
Absolutely think that's what we're gonna see.
And I can tell you we can finish by I can tell you about her next big pet issue, which is going to be yes.
Championing Harvey Weinstein.
Who she is no, no, no, So She's been interviewing him since twenty twenty two, according to The Hollywood Reporter. She explains, while he is quote an immoral man, he is also a justice system.
A victim, sure victim, And she says.
I've always had faith in our court system, and now it's beginning to change. Now I'm beginning to wonder if our courtrooms have been politicized. And the thing that's made her think this is Harvey Weinstein.
It's wild. I mean, like Ben Shapiro is starting his own campaign to free Derek Chauvin. I think there's gonna be a lot of pressure on the courts right now. I mean, you're seeing that from like Elon and Trump as well. I think undermining the authority of the court, I think is actually kind of part of this larger concerted issue amongst the entirety of the right right now, because this is like their biggest remaining roadblock to achieving
their right wing utopia is the court system. And I you know, this may not be intentional on every person's part, like Ben Shapiro, candastones aren't aren't like intentionally collaborating on this, but they may be copying each other's trends. And if they're seeing this this wider push across a large amount of like the right wing content people to put pressure on various aspects of the courts, including by using like high profile cases like Harvey Weinstein or Derek Shouvin's, that's
not a great sign. And I can I can definitely see them trying to trying to do that in conjunction.
I guess yeah.
I think we're going to see a lot more of it. Candice has a series coming out called Harvey Speaks that apparently tells his side of the story. Look out for that, And I think that's the thing, like I think with her content, like when asked why it was she thought that her Blake Lively stuff was really taking off. She says that she believes her new fans on the left quote have just kind of gotten wise to the fact
that maybe women lie just like men. And so I just implore folks that, like, even if you think that you're just like retaking in this content because you're following fluffy celebrity news or whatever, it is so easy to go from maybe women lie to maybe women can't be trusted, or maybe women shouldn't work and have jobs, a stance at Candace herself that's actually advocated for despite very obviously
being a working woman. And so I don't think we should trust Candace Owens even if she does this rebrand, Like, don't let her rebrand herself as like just a celebrity investigative journalist. Like she put all of these odious views out into the worlds, and I don't want her to be able to like soften it or you know, soften what it is that she advocates for, what it is that she believes in, if that is truly what she's trying to do to just sort of like a mass
a more mainstream audience. So don't fall for it if you're if you're getting tagged in Candace Owens videos, just know what she actually is about.
I mean, yeah, I think I think for our audience, it's it's more likely that you'll have like family members who are going to be finding this stuff, and you should find a list of sources. Maybe this this episode included, but probably you know, you can find some articles as well that theyk of some background on Candace's history and and and previous beliefs. Can pick and choose some of
her most like outrageous claims. So when your aunt sends you a video about how Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are kidnapping children or something, you can you can maybe inform Aunt Judy that maybe you shouldn't listen to everything this Candice Owen's character is saying.
Yeah, this Candace Owens might not be on the money, might not be on the level.
No, yeah, inform an Auntie today, Yes that's right, and.
Uh, that's all I got. That's it. I don't know how you usually end these episodes.
Usually by getting sad, but I don't know. This has been an interesting dive into the life of a woman with many, many careers, many a chameleon many personalities, A chameleon, a chameleon of contrarianism.
Oh I like that.
If I ever write a book about her, that'll be the title.
Jesus Christ. Oh what a nightmare that would be. Man scary bridget Where can people find you online?
You can find me on my podcast. There are our girls on the internet on this network. iHeartRadio. I mean you can find me on Instagram at bridget Ran DC or on Blue Sky at bridget Time.
Well, thank you so much, good luck in d C. Thanks for holding holding the line out there as Elon puts a kildozer through your entire city.
We're doing our best.
I would would love to talk again about a DC update. Maybe maybe next time you come on the show. Oh my god, yes, please, there we go. Well we will talk then, goodbye everybody.
It could happen here.
I'm Garrison Davis, still banned from one of the top fifteen highest endowment universities in the country, but I am not banned from this podcast. Today I'm joined by Robert Evans and James Stout to discuss the very troubling news of students having their visas and or green cards revoked by US customs in relation to anti genocide protests. James, this is something that you've been putting together a piece on for a while.
Repeatedly trying to warn people of Cassandra like to no avail.
Yes, yes, I do feel like we kind of saw this one coming a little bit, but that doesn't mean it's not bad. And specifically the case we're talking about today, I think is particularly egregious because it doesn't actually involve
someone's student visa. Right. So I've been working for a while on people who actually, under the Biden administration were potentially facing deportation, right, But the material difference between that and now is that those people were facing deportation because the university removed their visas or the university removed them from the university, and therefore their visa was no longer valid.
In this case, it seems that the order came directly from the State Department to deport a guy whose name is Mahoud Khalil. So Khalil was a prominent activist in the encampment Columbia, Right, But what's notable is that and the events here, as best we can tell, went down like this, referencing an ap article here that will link
in the show notes. ICE agents came to his front door, which is on university property, and told him that they were revoking his student visa and therefore he was being deported. He then informed them that he didn't have a student visa, that he was a legal permanent resident right colloquially referred to as a Green card holder. They then told him or his lawyer. At some point, he got his lawyer on the phone and was communicating with them through his lawyer.
They then told the lawyer that they were revoking the green card, and at some point it's reported that they attempted to detain his wife, who is a US citizen, which of course is not a thing that ICE can do. So the difference between a legal permanent resident and a student visa is like the place I want to start this because they are materially very different. Right. Student visas are pretty fragile. People lose their student visas for lots
of things all the time. A green card is a much higher barrier, and the revocation of his green card. We spoke a lot before this episode about like exactly kind of where this comes from. In Trump's missmatch of executive orders and speeches, right, because after he was detained, we saw Trump truthing about specifically using the word green card.
We also saw Marco Rubio tweeting about removing green cards, right, Rubio being a secretive of State, normally the green card wouldn't be a state department thing.
Now, it seems.
The most likely course of events as far as we can tell from what we know right now today's the tenth of March, is that Ice came thinking he had a student visa. It's not particularly uncommon for ice raids to not have all the information on someone. From what I understand, I mean, this is just a police thing.
Yes, it's not just like the caps who are doing raids reoff and don't have all or accurate information.
Yeah, Ice in particularly very often don't have a judicial warrant. They have a warrant that they made they assign themselves, which is a different thing. They're supposed to require warrant to get onto Columbia University campus, but as of now, I don't believe Columbia have clarified that they did have, and I think the apology also allowed for them to allow Ice onto campus in like exigent circumstances. So we'll have to see what exactly that warrant was for why
exactly Columbia allowed them onto campus. So it seems like they came a temperature evoke this guy student visa, realized you didn't have a student visa, detained him anyway, and then kind of expos facto, the these tweets and statements came out. But Garrison, you found some stuff in. I mean, Trump has made previous statements that are kind of unclear, right, he uses the word aliens a lot.
Yeah, So we've been trying to kind of figure out the exact details of like what is going on, what justification they have for doing this, and how we can like extrapolate this out to larger trends because deporting like
legal residents for college protests is pretty insane. And also the rhetoric coming out of the White House and like the White House like social media accounts around this incident is like extremely worrying, Like the way they're basically putting up like wanted posters for protesters and in general, the way that the White House account has been doing this like own the Libs, like mimetic nationalism that the past
few weeks has been has been really upsetting. And this has continued around this issue, and I think it is worth focusing on this as like a specific escalation because you had people like mamad U Tall, who I think Cornell tried to revoke their student visa and then he's in some way negotiated back into that to stay on. The interim provost John Ceciliano eventually ruled in Tall's favor so he did not end up getting deported last year. And now this new development in relationship to the Columbia
protests is a significant escalation. Yeah, because not only is this not just like the university revoking n F one, which they do have the you know, authority to, this is like coming directly from the Trump administration where they are going after specific students without the involvement of the university, and students who may be legal permanent residents.
Yeah. Garrison found a fact sheet on white House dot gov where Trump is quoted as saying, quote to all resident aliens who joined in the pro Jahadist protests, we put you on notice. Come twenty twenty five, we will find you and we will deport you.
And that would seem to include the legal permanent residence. Yes, yeah, right, like resident alien is a tax status. But again, like, I think it's quite possible that the vagueness in the language is deliberate, not necessarily from Trump, but there are other people within the Trump cabinet who might seek to use that vagueness for things like this, right, like who might see that as a benefit.
Yeah, well, and you've seen that with other things, like with like with Rubio's State Department directives on trans people right now, where they keep the language intentionally vague. They leave the enforcement up to like individual actors, and then they can eventually like figure out the logistics like in court once people be like, oh no, this is illegal, So like, yeah, it is vague because they want to
test the actual like full authority of their power. But I think the specific like fact sheet, which is like a sister article towards this executive order, says like James was saying, to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro gihattist protests, we put you on notice. Come twenty twenty five, we will find you and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses which have been
infested with radicalism like never before. So there you have him saying both resident aliens, which we can infer probably refers to Green cardholders, as well as student visas. So these are two separate things that he a specifically named as going after. And now you see more direction from
Rubio after this arrest that happened on Monday. You see more direction from Rubio and the State Department in like specifically naming legal permanent residents as targets for removal and targets for ice actions, which is not something that is extremely common.
Yeah, where I've seen it before was like in cases of material support for terrorism, which but that has quite a high bar of proof, right that's like a listed organization proving a material ie financial or physical support, right like in kind donations like I've written about a guy who is providing material aid to the Islamic State called Siki Remy's HODGEI sending stuff from bass pro actually like
thermal scopes and hunting scopes and things like that. But that has a much higher bar than this, which we will see you because we have a legal permanent resident here and they're seeking to revoke that. I imagine we will see a court case and we will see exactly the justification for revoking his green in that court case. That will be some time in the future.
Let's go on a quick break and we will come back to discuss some more of the details on what Mark Rubio is actually saying and where this could all end up. Okay, we are back. I would like to talk about specifically some of the rhetoric that Rubio has been using since this arrest and a little bit of what he was saying before. Like we were saying before the break, some of this kind of vague language can
kind of be used to their advantage. And this is certainly like riffing off of very vague language that Trump would do on the campaign trail, right where he would talk about wanting to jail or deport protesters, like in general, regardless if they're student visa holders, green card holders, or just US citizens. Right like Trump has made statements about wanting to do all of that, and campaigns like off the cuff statements and the actual like government policy are
two different things. And right now, like they're trying to figure out where the line between that is, like how much of this rhetoric can be turned into government policy. And we mentioned like the fact sheet from the executive order that I believe was signed in January, which is
you know, to quote unquote combat anti Semitism. And then like last week, so before this arrest happened, we had a post from the Secretary Mark Rubio Twitter account official quote, those who support designated terrorist organizations, including HAMAS, threaten our national security. The United States has zero tolerance for foreign
visitors who support terrorists. Violators of US law, including international students, face visa denial or revocation and deportation unquote, So that one specifically focuses, I would say, pretty pretty firmly on
people who have student visas. Right, he names like visitors, And then after the arrest happened, he posted a different statement on his own personal account, quote, we will be revoking the visas and or green cards of HAMAS supporters in America so that they can be deported unquote, sharing
an ap article. And then the Homeland Security DHS gov account posted on March nine, twenty twenty five, and supported President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti semitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arrested Mahmud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to hamas a designated terrorist organization ICE in the Department of State are committed to enforcing President
Trump's executive orders and protecting US national security unquote. And there's now been a flurry of posts from both the White House account and DTS accounts basically posting like a picture of this person saying that he's aligned with hamas in celebration, almost like styled after a wanted poster, but
instead of just reads like arrested. And that is like the that's the rhetoric that like they're using right now on their official accounts, something that like James I think noted, it's it's important to like think about if ICE was just freestyling this action or if there was a directive beforehand to go after green cards specifically, right, And it seems like at least for the people like doing the raid, they did not care nor did they like, no, they
weren't informed. They just were told to go after this person from someone higher up, right, and that that very well could be Rubio. I mean a lot of DHS is being ran by Steven Miller right now. A lot of this feels very Miller esque.
Yeah, we got an update as of the time of recording. I've just discovered that Mahud Khalil's lawyers filed the lawsuit challenging gives attention and a judge in New York City, federal judge obviously or that Khalil shouldn't be deported while that court then considered his case.
Yes, I was going to bring that up so that also, like.
His case will we considered in New York City, which is for me, good for him, as opposed to a more conservative jurisdiction elsewhere.
Right, totally like this happening in Texas, Like in all of those districts where Elon Musk is trying to set up his corporations, because there's friendly judges, this would be handled quite differently, right.
Yeah, this is something migrants I speak to are at least aware of sometimes that they don't want to enter into Texas because the Fifth Circuit is seen as less favorable to them, and they'd say the ninth circuit where they would be avanted in California. I'm sort of surprised if it is a Miller joint that it isn't someone like U T. Austin or somewhere like that.
Now they're going directly after this individual in part because he's somebody that a lot of folks who might otherwise be like up in arms about a move like this, would say because of some of his connections and some of the things he said in the past. Well he's
you know, supported groups that are really bad. Like I think they're really trying to find the first case is they want someone that they can have a lot of like liberals off from being too scared to support because he said some things that like they don't want to have attached to them, Like that's that's how they're and they're going to keep pushing that further and further each time.
You find some folks who you can scare off a lot of maybe what you might call like their otherwise natural support base because you can point out this thing or that thing they did that was that was not great acou types like when I'm not I'm not insulting or is trying to say bad things about this guy, I'm just saying, like that's that's the tactic here, right, just to try to paint this guy is like, well this guy did this bow you do really want to support that, which is why you have to take an
incredibly firm stance that no, the government doesn't get to do this, The State department doesn't get to do this.
Yeah, regardless of of any things that this person may.
Have said, the First Amendment is for everyone. I don't care what he said, you know, so, Like, it's also worth noting that Colombia, specifically the Intercept is reported on this that there is a WhatsApp group called Columbia Alumnife Israel, and they have been explicitly trying to identify the students and to call for like prosecution and I guess persecution if students like And I think the Columbia encampment was particularly objectionable to a lot of people, and that was
kind of the one that got a lot of the national focus in the reporting, right, So it's understandable that that's where they went for this.
Yeah, it's it's high visibility. And I think it's also very likely that they're just looking to have a test case for this to see if they can create legal precedent for removing people's green cards for you know, anti genocide protests, right, And the specific details of that will become more and more or less important based on like the results of the case, as long as they can create that precedent, right, and specifically like the president for
revoking a green card, something that's pretty substantial. Yeah, they want something that's like, you know, in their mind, like the most favorable towards their outcome. So I mean that's part of what they're trying to do with this specific case, and it is it is very much in line with with Trump's campaign rhetoric and versions of what Trump has said before. And now you're seeing someone like Rubio, someone who's you know a little bit more policy minded, taking steps towards this outcome.
Yeah, which I think is like the other thing they didn't get to do, I guess is that they weren't able to like deport the guy at hyper speed, which they have been doing with some people. Yeah, he was detained in New York and then moved to Louisiana, and people were very upset about this, rightly, because it's removing him from easy access to his lawyer and to his family and to his eight month pregnant wife. Right, that's all things that should have be done. It's also something
that a Biden administration did routinely. We have other episodes on this actually, especially in San Diego, where we have some funding that allows people who are detained access to legal assistance. It has been very common for those migrants to be then moved to Texas. I've seen it with migrants I've met at the border and I've looked for them in the ICE Immigrant Detention Locator and They've been moved to Texas. It's not uncommon at all. So it's bad that it happened. It was bad that it happened
under Biden. It's still bad that it's happening now. We should have let it happen. Then we should support it when it happens now.
And I think before we go and break again, I do want to kind of close this section by by talking about how like they don't necessarily need an executive order specifically allowing Trump to do this like like or like Trump doesn't need to make an executive order like explicitly for this based on like immigration deportation law, like there will be an argument made in like in court that that they they have justification for this action already.
This is something that I've already been through when I immigrated to the country and like did like my citizenship interview, right, like if you if you have discussed in the past, you know, something that can be construed as support for a terrorist organization, that does disqualify you from US citizenship. And right, so there's gonna be a lot of arguments like around like specifically these terrorism statutes that will make
someone like this a subject for removal. Yeah, and like that that's gonna be like the angle in which they they go about this, And I think that's like worth keeping in mind.
I also think it's worth because I I don't want to make this because a lot of people online have this shouldn't be our immediate primary concern. Our immediately primary concern should be mood and the other people like him
who are in situations like him be targeted. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that, like if they get away with this, at some point that we'll start saying like look to support palast the government describes like or any support for any group that the government considers a terrorist. It doesn't matter if you were born here as a citizen. You know, we can start like that that is a potential in state of this, which is again not should not be on your front burner. It
should be the people being targeted right now. But also an awareness of like this is part of why you have to draw such a hard line. Like if if the situation was reversed and this where a democratic administration coming after an anti vaccine student activist who is a permanent legal resident, it would be wrong for them to disappear them, right, Like that has to be like where the line is drawn.
Yeah, yeah, the state should not have this ability, Like we should not let them get away with this, and we should put as much support and legal support into preventing this from happening. I really can't say which way this will go, Like immigration law is the one of the most like headache conducing things I've ever had to go through in my entire life.
Ah, Like he will be spending a lot of money on immigration lawyers now.
Also be really clear, I'm not equateing support for Palestine to being anti vax I'm just saying, like, if you know, if this was like a shitty guy, right, it would still be wrong.
People, if it's something that we like to like laugh at for getting measles in Texas, disappearing people bad if you thought Russia was doing anti fascism in Ukraine, it would still be important, right, right, you know, to to do this, And should we take a break and come back and discuss some.
More, Yes, yes, I wanted to give a little bit of background here some other stuff that I've been looking into. So in the fifth of February, Attorney General Pam Bondai
issued a series of memos. One of these was establishing a quote October seventh task for so I'm going to quote from it here to prioritize seeking justice for victims of October seventh, twenty twenty three terrorist attack in Israel, addressing the ongoing threat post by her Mass and its affiliates, and combating anti Semitic acts of terrorism and civil rights violations in the homeland. It then lifts several action items
for the FBI. Right among them is investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, anti Semitic civil rights violations, and other federal crimes committed by her Mass supporters in the United States, including on college campuses. The final point is quote supporting efforts by the Israeli government Department of Defense and Department of Treasury to pursue non criminal responses to the October
seventh attack and other terrorist activities by her mass. There's a couple of things that are can Obviously, the non criminal responses could include deportation, right like the person is not being accused of a crime, but none less have their visa evoked. Also that the idea of cooperating with a foreign government, a government which is currently committing a genocide, potentially against US citizens or US residence, is quite concerning.
It's especially concerning when we talk about that Trump executive order that we've already discussed. Right. One of the parts of that Trump executive order that I noticed that I haven't seen any reporting on was the quote infantry and analysis of all the Title six complaints sort administrative actions including in K through twelve education related to anti Semitism pending or resolved after October seventh, twenty twenty three.
Can you explain what Title six is?
Yeah, I can in Garrison, and I would love to so. Title six is part of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four. Right, it prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. Yes, it applies to federally funded programs, activities, or institutions which receive federal funding. Right, which were almost every institution of education in this country, apart from some religious private schools. I guess maybe they still get some
federal funding. There have been a number of Title six cases filed for anti Semitic discrimination and anti Palastinio or anti Arab or Islamophobic discrimination since October seventh to twenty twenty three. The ones filed for Islamophobic discrimination don't seem to be covered by this, but the other ones do. The Biden administration kind of rushed to finish up and resolve some of these in the last few weeks of his tenure, and normally the results were pretty ineffectual. It
was like some more trainings, the review of policies. Anyone who's who's been an educator at one of these institutions will have already been very familiar with the sort of anti discrimination training video that you have to watch, and they were suggesting that you watch more of those videos. I'm not really convinced that that is the way we deal with hatred, but that's why they recommended. The Emory one.
I thought was interesting because they told Emory that it had to commit to a quote equitable hand of protests after its campus police were so violent towards anti genocide protesters. A lot of the other cases are still pending, but it seems like the Trump administration is going to go back and review all of them anyway. It does seem like whether it's spread organically or whether it's some kind
of campaign to file Title six complaints. A lot of Title six complaints were filed after October seventh, and during this time when we saw like campus protests, when we saw support by some faculty for those campus protests, right, and we saw some faculty who may or may not have supported the protest but felt very strongly about the right of students to have freedom of speech on campus. And I'm sure they would have been kind of wrapped up in this big drag net too. That this potentially
raises the specter of like at least career threatening. And again, lots of faculty are not US citizens, right. They might be permanent residents, they might be married to citizens, they might be here on a visa. There are a number of different immigration statuses that they could have that are not US citizen that they could pretendally lose.
So what is Trump trying to do about these cases which could be pending or have already been resolved.
Yeah, well, what they said is they want to familiarize institutions with the grounds for inadmissibility, so that that's not
allowing someone to enter the United States. Right, and read out the section of the United States Code that a section of the United States Code quote so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds, and for ensuring that such report about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and comma, if warranted, comma actions to remove such aliens. So it's in there, right, This
is in Trump's late January executive order. Yeah, this is the legal argument that they're making there, and they're asking universities to do some of that legwork for them. It seems I imagine that this is the same section of the United States Code that we'll see us with reference to, but it refers to like excludable or inadmissible aliens, which is people coming into the country. But I guess they could make an argument that like he disguised his inadmissible status or became inadmissible.
Sure, I mean, there's these two sections, right, There's this one that revolves around who can be like admitted, who can be accepted. There's that one section which is a section one two two seven sub section A four a dash C, which is the section specifically on deportation as relating to like supporting quote unquote terrorist activities. So I think they will try to use these both like in conjunction.
And I think it's also important to not doubt here the use of the word like aliens as opposed to the word that like Rubio was using previously, which is like visitors, right, Like visitors, I would say, probably applies more to like student visa holders, yeah, non residents versus aliens. Aliens can be anyone, right, like aliens, you can be
visa holders, can be Green card holders, right. And so at least in like the official wording here, these are the word I think aliens is important as opposed to like Rubio's like you know posts on x dot com. Yeah, which now become official policy because we're in the hell world.
Yep.
Yeah, that refers to like just like you know, visitors to this country.
Yeah.
The right has used aliens for a long time, right, because it differentiates them from people.
Yeah, it's like it's very basic like dehumanization like this.
Yeah, right, in this case, it's I think it's important. It's pivotal, so like we have a sense of what will happen there. And maybe I could just finish up by saying, if you are faculty or a student, if you're encountering this, you can reach out to us using our encrypted email. So if you'd like to reach out to us, it's cool zone tips at proton dot me.
It's only encrypted if it's encrypted from the sender as well as a recipient, so that would mean using a proton or other encrypted email to reach out rather than using an unencrypted email. If you'd like to reach out again,
cool zone tips at proton me. Obviously, this is something we're going to continue taking an interest in, and obviously it's something that we can't report the entirety of now because we're still waiting on the court case, but we are very interested in learning more about it, so please feel free to reach out.
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah.
Well, and it's something that Trump is also saying they will be taking a continued interest in. He is promising that this is the first arrest of quote unquote many to come, so as they could do to focus on this we will as well. James, did you have anything else you wanted to say, like re lawyers.
Yes, So, as I mentioned before, right, people under by administration had been moved away from their lawyers. This is very common. It seems that now people are being moved away from their lawyers and having teleconference request denied. I let's say, Garrison, you're a lawyer and you have a
client detained to San Diego. They moved to Texas, and now you can't tele conference in for a ten minute hearing, so you would have to fly right for that ten minute heref which is going to make it impossible both in time down to financial terms. What I'm understanding. I'm still digging into this a little bit more, but that's what I'm hearing. So this is going to be an ongoing thing. I guess if you're an immigration lawyer in one of the places people are being sent to, like Texas,
you can help. But you probably already know that, and you're probably already doing that, and you're probably already very very overworked. Do you work asylum cases? So yeah, I think now is the time for groups like the ACLU to step up or shut up, and we'll see well.
In the ACOU has come out against Mamod's arrest. Okay, good. The ADL obviously totally for it. Shocked at the ADL, an organization formed to help avoid another Holocaust, does not see any potential danger in a state redefining citizenship in order to disappear as political enemies. So we love the ADL here, folks. But the ACLU did. I mean, we'll see if they do anything, but they did, like make a statement.
Yeah, they've been very good. I should say, the ACLU has been pursuing a lot of litigation. It's Trump administration.
This is the sort of thing they're pretty consistently.
Yes, especially at a national level, they've been very good at this. And so yeah, you know, shout out to them. I guess, I don't know. We don't need to shout it out. It's their job. Yeah, they get millions of dollars, Like this is literally why why you're there?
Do a good job or else you'd better.
Do something else too, like yeah, yeah, you'd better show up.
Yeah, don't donate to the ad L. I guess if you were thinking of doing that after listening to.
This podcast, Oh my god, you guys, it could happen here, meaning our podcast, it could, it is, It's happened.
Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast it is happening here?
Yeah?
Uh huh, that's that's a fun joke that I only hear forty seven times a day. And the whole point of the podcast was, well, initially I was a crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen, and now it's a bunch of that stuff happened, and even more of it looks very likely. And so now I just feel bad all the time.
It's going to be called I fucking called it. I fucking told you, bro, I said this was going to happen.
Why don't you redad the podcast? I just feel bad all the time?
Yeah, why don't you rename the podcast? Robert should have bought more stock and ammunition companies than he did. And DGI jeez, should I have bought stock and DGI?
Yeah, I'm gonna buy her a little DGI drone.
Yeah, there we go. A lot of people are going to be buying little DGI drones here very soon, James.
I should point out that I'm buying one. It's not capable of carrying a payload.
It's definitely a s for investments to pull out your furrow one k. Now, when the market's crashing, use that money by drones. Those drones will be worth a lot more in five years.
Or what is that?
That is?
That is a sound of a sound investment, a box of bullets.
It's like how boomers used to like invest in like silver or gold as like a stable current. No, we're investing in DGI, like physical DG hydrones.
We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder.
Yeah, you gotta get it in a bottle. Rubbed it in a box. It can get light struck or get moist. You want to get it in a special black black bottle.
James, I keep all of my gunpowder. And uh, you know how like people used to take cocaine by wrapping it in toilet paper and swallowing it.
No?
Sure, okay, Well did you say somebody.
Speaking of toilet paper? Nate Silver has a newsletter and it would be useful as toilet paper more so than it is as a newsletter.
Sorry, I just got like PTSD flashbacks from twenty twenty four whend you said that it's okay.
Normally my rule of thumb is every election, usually starting in like December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or four times in a bucket, and then head over to Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls. And I do this. I hate that I keep having I have regularly on election the years people were like but.
He was always wrong.
It's like, no, he's reasonably good on polls. He's usually if you read what he's saying about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close to that. So I read him during elections and I hate it because he's never been right about anything else. But he's he's a gambler. He's a degenerate, filthy gambler. And so when we're talking about degenerate, filthy gambler stuff, and by god, election polls are the most degenerate type of gambling that exists worth reading.
And then after the election, no matter how well or badly it goes, I ignore him again for four years. And I didn't get to do that this year because on February twenty fifth, twenty twenty five, Nate wrote a column called Elon Musk and spiky intelligence.
Spiky intelligence. Am I hearing that right?
Spiky intelligence? Yes? And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm sure he used some AI, like he must have used some AI like video software to do that, just like shows you a kind of spiky star looking thing and then like a blob with rounded edges. I can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver thought that, like we needed this illustrated.
I have to see this.
Yeah, yeah, I would like it to be shared.
Look at this? Why did you, like, oh promise of AI we couldn't yes, wow, yeah yeah, it just it looks like maybe an amoeba if you looks like an amoeba, and then like a poorly drawn star.
Is it's to keep this is? This is an actual thing.
This sifts you wait, this is a thing.
This is This is Boba and Kiki with a weird like digital fuzz over the.
Fucker Boba and Kiki.
Yeah, okay, Garrison, Yeah.
It's a it's like a social experiment to like ask people what like the emotional correspondence of each of these shapes are, like.
Which was oh, it's like a then sure?
Like like which one looks which one looks nicer, which one looks meaner, you know that sort of thing. I'm a Kiki type, like like I I am a Kiky in terms in terms of my behavior, I am Garrison.
Now that you bring up Rorshak, all I can think of is how cool it would be if Rorshak from The Watchman showed up in Nate Silver's house and did his thing.
Unfortunately, I think Rorshak and Night Silver might get friends.
Actually yeah, no, no, Nate would. But after them getting along for like forty five minutes, Nate would take him to an illegal card game, and Rorshak would murder everybody in the room because they were gambling without a license.
So I'm assuming Theate's going to try to argue that that Musk's intelligence is akin to the kiki drug here as opposed to like the empathetic right there.
Actually, yes, there is a little bit of that in there. He does not mention this Kiki and Boba thing. I don't know if that's because I'm supposed to just infer it from the image or if he's Okay, we'll get your opinion on it is. Is he ripping these people off because this doesn't count as enough for him to be crediting them if this is the underpinning of his stupid idea, which he credits to his stupid book that he came up with later. But I'm just going to start reading
the stupid column. Well hit us with the second paragraph, because that fuck Kevin gotten paragraph one JAKA.
That radicalized me immediately.
There's been a debate raging on Twitter. Noah Smith can run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the platform's owner, Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest and then there's a little ie in parentheses because we need that Elon is obviously pretty bright, and then the two eyes in parentheses. This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment. Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things. Okay, you'd think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves
Elon and intelligence, well it was. Elon has run founded or co founded Tesla, SpaceX, open Ai, neuralink Xai, PayPal, and more recently Twitter. He's also managed to steer himself into a position where he's now the de facto chief of staff to the President of the United States. I do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects. Some of these were long shot bets, and Walter Isaacson's biography of must documents he thought he'd be ruined if
there had been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success of some of these enterprises might also be debated. Twitter was a candy play for cultural and political influence, but it probably And he doesn't bring up in this whole thing where he's talking about like all his successful companies, not a word about the boring company, not a word about hyper loop.
Right, Well, any of the failed on his.
Record does seem better if you ignore the two massively publicized and invest did absolute failures.
Yes, well, and last week, I know there was a space X lunch. I'm sure it went well. I'm sure it didn't fling debris all over lower.
I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft, also crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co founded open ai, but not in a way that mattered. He just shot down money in there and then get kind of edged out. Sure, Yes, and is actively in a conflict with everybody who did make open ai as prominent as it is. Again, Natela has to leave a lot out in order to start making this case.
But so he's going to argue that, you know, we're going to see how how well this co presidency goes. But he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all of this stuff done. R.
Yeah.
And he's also saying, well, like maybe Twitter won't be profitable, but we'll see how you know, he could probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff. Not a word from Nate about like, yeah, but he's just like that, just breaking the law. So why are why are we Why aren't we including in our canny businessman guys that get rich selling like shitloads of heroin for the cartels, Because yes, if you are breaking the loss, sometimes that goes well for you financially.
Well, Walter White, they've done some bad things.
Yeah, but but you can't deny he was a brilliant method cook. But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is. Fourteen hundred. According to Isaacson, he's clearly some sort of outlier in many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably
even a genius. And yet when my first off, it becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider a fourteen hundred to be an impressive SAT score and would normally be judgmental of someone who had an SAT score of fourteen hundred if it weren't for all of Elon's other genius accomplishments. And yet, when my partner and I were heading to dinner the other day and we saw some tweet that Elon sent I forget which one because he tweets so much, we were both like, man, he's
such a dumbass. Yes, someone can be both a genius and a dumbass. Welcome to what I call spikey intelligence.
Here we go.
This gets to like the core or what's annoying about Nate is his need to He's one of these guys. You know, you know what it is. He's an intellectual enclosurist right where he's not confident to be like everyone is very aware of the fact that no one is good at everything, and that people have holes in their competence, and that there are like brilliant surgeons who are bad fathers or whatever, because there are different kinds of intelligence.
This is like a broadly common understanding. Nate has to give it a name so that he can sell his books. So he gives it the names. It's like an intellectual. Now it's my idea. I'm the one who came up with the concept that smart people can be dumbasses. Stop it, Nate, it's annoying.
Capital ask Capital I rights to trademark spike intelligence.
Yeah, yeah, Now he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original, and then links to somebody without really like crediting them. Interestingly, many of the instances online refer to people of the on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he has Asperger syndrome. But the concept is simple. All intelligence is a multi dimensional phenomenon. The scientific consensus is that there's also something known as a G factor, sometimes also
called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and verbal skills and the gire are correlated. The correlations are loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of
different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's just going into like he talks about like the absent minded professor, Like it's all just these these very common ideas that like, yeah, people are usually bad at more things than they're good at, right, Like it's there's no need to explain how elon Musk has been successful at certain things, but Nate does and he has to keep going back to. Like he makes a comment later and here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He
doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that, Like, well, if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves, which ignores the fact that, like he's not making any of these decisions, Like he bought a company that already had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket
engineers to design rockets. Elon is arguably good at hiring in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man, right, Like that's the actual brilliance that Elon has is he was very very good at hyping people up and getting people to believe in him until he was too big to fail. Like that's the one thing he actually did.
But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of, among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is, who is a guy who was really good at one narrow thing and now has a career writing about everything, and he can't that's like a dangerous thing for Nate to think too hard about.
Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very soft and soothing ads.
Yeah we're back.
I want to talk a little bit about the danger of being a guy who gets famous for being really good at one thing and then gets a job talking about everything, because I've had a version of that experience, and let me tell you, you're not ever going to be competent to discuss all of the things that you can
make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No one ever has been and no one ever will be, which is why what you ought to do is the thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on a bunch of people to like, run a website with you right where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately, it turns out five thirty eight was a bad business venture.
It got massively overvalued, a company spent a shitload more money on it that it was capable of making, and now everyone's gotten laid off and Nate left years ago to do his sub stack. You know, it's a tragic case in the problem of like hubris and the fact that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't run an entire media enterprise. But Nate doesn't like thinking
about that. It isn't like thinking about the fact that maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at was being the guy from the Music Man, because I think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period of time, right, he still clearly does. Yes, Yeah, there's been this thing lately where a lot of folks on the left have been like the Oh, you couldn't always tell that he was a con man, You couldn't always tell that he was this bad, like he was always
the worst. I was like, no, Like back in twenty fourteen fifteen, when I was writing about the billionaires and rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie Diamond because he had helped create the two thousand and eight financial collapse and he seen it. He just seemed obviously much worse than this guy who up to that point was pretty much just making cars and rockets. You know,
you have two companies doing that. Musk was not top of most people's radars for very good reason, which gets to like, there's this thing that's been created because of some of like the sinister beliefs that his grandfather had and his like family background which has a lot of white supremacy in it, to that that this has been Elon's sort of like grand plan from the beginning, and that it's all come together for him, like as if he's he's, you know, a Marvel or a James Bond
villain who's been executing this like thirty year plan to get where he is.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I.
Think when you look at his cognition, like he's not the same man he was ten years ago. He's not the same guy he was when he started dating Grimes. And I'm saying he was a good man before then. I don't think he particularly ever was, but he's clearly his brain has degraded in part due to contact through Twitter.
And well yeah, and you can like measure this through his posting as well, like yeah, like that the types of posts he would make in twenty seventeen are like completely opposite to the way that that he would talk about certain social issues. Now, oh yeah, he's not like meming about like anarcho syndicalism.
Yeah, to a few of those things. But I want to read another quote from Nate's article, because he's going to talk about his book On the Edge, which quote describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call the River. These people who occupy a range of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital, are bright, but in spikey ways. In Baron Cohen's dacotomy, they lean
heavily towards the systematic side of the equation. They're good at abstract analytic reasoning, but they may lack other forms of intelligence like empathy, judgment, and self awareness. They also have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence. For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrariant. And again, what you are talking about all of these people number one, When he says AI research, he's not talking about people
who are doing like the gut level coding. He's talking about Sam Altman, right, ye, poker, venture capital. This is all gambling. You're all talking about gamblers. The River is just gamblers, Nate. It's people like you who put money on bets, and they are contrarian and competitive because that's
how gamblers are. That's the intelligence, that's the river. Like he's thinking about it as like the specific chunk of intellectuals who have You know, there's some dangers, but they have great potential to make the world Brilliant're like, no, no, no, no, these are just people who like wind up shooting themselves outside of a sports betting facility.
Like that's the river, mate, I have been turning into a monster during our friend poker nights recently.
It's it's tough garrison.
By the way, I've been meaning to talk to you about wearing the full data makeup, because you know your skin can't breathe. If you coat your whole body, you're only supposed to put that on your face.
I don't do that every time I play. Get a gold finger yourself, gar, I don't put on the data makeup every time I play poker, just that one time. Actually, no, I've done that twice nowt never minds.
Okay, okay, it's becoming I also have the little hats.
I ordered a twelve pack of like of like the little like poker visors to complete the outface.
She did, of course she did.
Yeah, it would be rude, not too for better or worse.
This typology the river is associated with high achievement in certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is also associated with high variance. Makman free built FTX into a company that investors valued at thirty two billion before the House of cards collapsed again because he was a gambler. Yeah, and again Nate can't just accept oh, he was never
actually very smart. He just got really lucky for a while and then gave it and then gambled it all away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought. Nate says, I interviewed SBF several times for the book, and I can tell you that he very much falls into the genius but dumbass category. How about just dumbassy, lucky dumbass.
It's not hard.
What's the genius? Where did he prove that?
I mean, he proved that by fooling Nate silver a man who probably yeah, value his own intelligence like a great deal.
Yeah, I mean that's the whole thing, right, Nate Silva kan and like it would be ego death to admit that there were just some lucky, dumb white dudes.
Yeah.
If a guy had won like one of the lotteries, was like a billion and a half dollars, right, got crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks because he just kept putting half a million dollars at a time on twenty one black at a roulette table in Vegas, and I would be like, well, obviously he's a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How else could he have made the money in the first place? And I was like, no, he got lucky, and then he gambled it all away because he's he doesn't have
good judgment. Yeah, So it's important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence, namely, neither there are worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story. And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless
statement because that's true of every human being ever born. Yeah, but clearly Nate doesn't feel that way, because only I think the undercurrent here is that only people like this It's mind are worth talking about because only gamblers bring the world forward, right.
Yeah, no one else to serve empathy?
Yeah, yes, like you're just addicted to putting money on sports games and elections, Nate Silver. Anyway, So here's the two things he wants to warn us up or wants people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent, in several ways, but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just
because he isn't in others. And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does. It's not high school. Nobody cares about SSAT skills.
Elon's what like like like fifty, like fifty five or something like what are we doing?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are a middle aged man. I don't even know what my SAT score was.
I'm gonna say like, I never took our SAT, but I spent more than a decade in full time education, and anyone who ever told me that SAT schools I immediately hated and never took them.
Seriously.
I've been almost twenty years asking people questions for a living, and I've never asked anyone there A sorry, Garrison.
Although SAT might not be like a stable metric for evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method.
Absolutely not Garrison, just how much well he doesn't.
He doesn't have an alternative method and seeing what you might quote an infographic because the next section of the article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence.
So first he admits he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to talk to him. Because even I have to say, Elon does have better shit to do than talk to Nate Silver, because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree, and that is a better use of his time than
talking to Nate Silver. So since he can't actually talk to Musk, he's going to model and extrapolate from quote many other Silicon Valley big wigs I have met, okay helping him in the This is the fact that quote Musk maintains an extremely public profile. He's turned X into a running diary of his innermost thoughts, and in addition to that, the biographies of the guy one more caveat. Here I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory of
Elon's career, not just his recent antics. So we go down here and the next segment is dimensions were Musk has exceptionally high or genius level intelligence. So finally Nate's going to prove it, and I'm gonna I'm going to show you guys, how he how he chooses to do that, what the evidence he gives us here is, and I think this is.
Something that we should reveal to the audience after these ads.
Good point here, all right, we're back. So let's look at what Nate shows as is the chief dimension where Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence. I'm just reading that first line, man, So the first words under this are cognitive load capacity in overall horsepower slash ram.
He's always on, I mean literally look at how often he's tweeting, and then a huge graph that shows the density of tweets posted and win which has been used by other people to prove that since sometime in late twenty twenty two, he's almost never gotten more than about three hours without posting a tweet, Like it's just a solid red after he buys the site. This like graph of like when he makes his post, he's never offline. Now he's not sleeping.
So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty four showing the time of day and when a post is posted, represented by small red dots and yes, at around twenty twenty two, the thickness of the red increases dramatically. It's almost just a straight red like the period of where he must be sleeping in this, Yeah, is very concerning.
No, he sometimes sleeps from about six to nine a as far as we can tell, but not regularly or often.
It's like a streak at twenty twenty three where he just isn't sleepy, he's not sleeping.
And again he's on drugs. People. I think they're probably prescripted. I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed. When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you want to do recreationally prescribed.
Right.
But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that to judge drug users. I say that as someone who had a drug problem, like this is drug user behavior. And specifically Silver he's using the sobriety as possible. Sorry, and specifically Silver is using this as an evidence of MUCKs intelligence. Yeah, it's not.
He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he must be like a special type of person.
He's railing adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day, every day. That's what this is a sign of, and no one is allowed to take his phone away anyway. Here's how Nate explains why this is smart. In NBA term, we say this as a player with an exceptionally high motor, and this is undoubtedly a valuable trait as the world becomes more complex. Lack's fall. I was simultaneously doing an extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to
build up Silver bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work. Even if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would only have been sustainable for a short burst. But Elon is taking on I don't know, approximately a thousand times more stress than that, and has done so for years. No, he's not. He just tweets he has a massive number one. All of the businesses are being run by people who
are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to sit in meetings and say yes or no, toe stuff and occasionally tells him to do something crazy that causes issues. Right, and they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now than it gained after the election, and SpaceX just had a giant rocket explode again. The boring company has not done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas, and the hyper loop is nothing right like this. This
is just full of shit, Nate. Like what you have just described, running an election model that's functional, going on a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing. Oh yeah, more actual effort work.
Risk is mostly like sitting in an occasional meeting doing drugs and injecting random women with his sperm yes and sending tweets.
He doesn't do the injecting.
I think, oh, god, Garrison, that comes up to no no, oh, and it's crazy how it does. Right before he posts the graph of how much Elon tweets.
Okay, good there it is, okay, okay.
Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains. Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating, especially if Muska ostracizes people who might keep him grounded more sympathetically. He's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities, doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which would be stressful on their own, while still managing to
father thirteen children. I'm tweeting hundreds of times per week. Again, equivalent efforts tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering thirteen children. He's not a father to them, No, he just he contributed by it.
He didn't even have sex y.
Yeah, it's neually the lowest possible effort way to have a child.
Wait, Like, I'm gonna guess most of the people with penises listening to this come like, that's not a big effort. You wouldn't include that. It's like, what did I get done this week? Well, in addition to working forty hours, I jacked off.
That's a little transphobic.
This is a joke.
Anyway, continue it said.
I'm just saying it doesn't count as work, you know, yeah from us, unless you're a sex worker, than it does. Okay, Like especially I know a lot of male porn stars. That's that is a difficult part of the job. That's why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that kill their hearts.
I would like to get into more of Silver's like justification for why why he associates this this high tweet load with like intelligence.
Well, because it shows rapid cognition in thin slicing ability.
Okay, hmm right, yeah, sure sure.
Indeed, in a capitalist system with a significant premium, I'm being first to market. Making decent judgments fast is often more important than making better judgments slowly. Canonically, vcs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders, as though on Shark Tank, relying on well known gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble, as it has for Elon. What is shark Tank's success rate? Yeah, I bet there's a quick answer to that. Yeah, and that's consinuering.
The air has built in free television advertising for any product means.
It's than fifty percent of the they're successfully closed. God, yeah, so I died out. All this tweeting also shows abstract problem solving capability. This is related to the idea of creativity, though in Musk's case it seemingly doesn't manifest itself an artistic prowesslyevingly.
You know what, I'll give it to day. There, I'll give it today.
I don't disagree with you there. And then, of course, instrumental rationality philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types of rationality. Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ens, basically figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want. For this category, I think you have to point towards the scoreboard, must have some unparalleled accomplishments, and isn't about
to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole, not one for nice guys.
Now.
And again, if Musk's actual goal is his stated goal getting to Mars, then backing the political party that is actively doing as much damage to the bio fear as possible, ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind of off world civilization likely, I would argue is a stupid decision. But he doesn't actually want us to get to Mars, right, He just wants to be in charge of everything.
No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference. That's that's really it, yesh.
It is yes, yes, yes, and he has been very successful at that. But again it's the successive brute force. It's the same way as like if you hire a thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps of a guy who annoys you. Like you could say, like, I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who annoy me. But really, you just have a lot of dudes who can beat people up for you. Like is that intelligence? Or did you just have enough money to hire thugs?
Or are you just a mob boss?
Right? Are you just a mob boss? And a mob boss? No one is allowed to attack because it's going to be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon, you know. Anyway, we need ghost dog.
It's pretty it's pretty upsetting because you know, a few weeks ago, I was having a little bit of a resist Live moment and I actually ashed my clothes cigarette on a parked Tesla. Felt pretty cool about it. But now I guess I can't even do that. It's too dangerous.
Now, No, you can't.
I could face substantial charges.
You might want to text resist to a certain five digit number or something. That's probably the best way to solve this garrison.
I just text resist to every single person in my phone book every day. I mean, it takes about seven hours. I have fallen behind on work.
You know, it's the only thing we can do to five FasTIS.
The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep deprivation and drug problem apparently, or at least that is how you show for it. It's funny because I saw Brian Johnson, the billionaire who's eating his son's blood or now plasma. Oh we had a dead guy posted his only self study on like the damaging effects of sleep deprivation, and I'm pretty sure Musklake retweeted it with like with like an emoti or something like, yeah, dude, You're brain is completely sure.
Now you you are you are fried. You are the most cooked a ban has ever been.
It's an interesting study, like there there is legitimately interesting things to look at Elo Musk's brain.
Well yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data put together like exhaustively by researchers studying how not just sleep deprivation but like wealth and power impact the brain. And like all of it makes a strong case that Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to his brain than like a career one of those career WWE wrestlers who like kills their whole family and then shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their brain later.
Yeah, I mean, well before before we close, I do want to say before any psychologists or sociologists or like linguists get mad at me. Yes, I know boba and kiki is is is? This is a shape language like correlation test I myself as well as Nate here, I have kind of expanded it's it's it's usage to like projecting even more like human or like like emotional qualities onto these shapes or onto these specific words. So please, sociologists leave me alone, do not do not do that message me like.
Your favorite French don't call.
I'm afraid it's already too late. I think I already hear like twelve different reddators typing. But yes, I think Nate's just using that image there as like a metaphor to like show how, you know, aggressive or manipulative Musk's own intelligences as symbolized by by a kiki as opposed to you know, maybe like maybe like a Bill Gates, which might be more of like a boba intelligence type. Okay, a little softer, a little bit more philanthropy.
You know, I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist and zizion literature for two straight weeks, about a quarter of a million words by my last count. Garrison I don't have an enemy to do this again. I'm going to get back to my Hitler books, you know, where things make sense, where the world's safe.
Yeah, I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War, which is my comparative happy place.
Ah, the Syrian Civil War.
Yeah, it's a really great world. I do wonder if he's trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing by using that little filter that he used over the boom BERANKI no.
Because it would be if it's actually not fair use now as opposed to if he just mentioned that thing.
He doesn't, Yeah, because he doesn't talk about them.
Then it is fair use, right, and he could use like a little clip of it is and illustrate the point.
Yeah, like I did with Manu Chow.
Anyway, this is all I want to say again about Nate silver until twenty twenty eight. And if you know what the upside if democracy really does die is, we'll never have to talk about him again.
If Trumpet must really take over fully into a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silvan.
Nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin T shirt. They'll be doing a.
Sod numbers and he will still be analyzing that data. They straight regime capture of Nate SILVERA.
Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten one hundred and four percent of the vote.
But there's a spiky percentages.
There's a spikey percentages.
Why can't Nate Silver just like run like Trump's casino or something? Right, this is just like just like put him away.
I understand if Nate because Nate's rich, he doesn't need to do the other stuff. And if he was like just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well, that's what he loves.
Right.
If I had Nate's Silver money, I'd probably just write novels for the rest of my life because that's what I like to do. I don't understand why he keeps writing about politics. He's not good at it, and he can't like it. He needs to feel special.
He wants to feel like a special boy who knows the answers that no one else does.
All right, Well, anyway, this is us making fun of Nate Silver, so you don't Well, you can still make fun of him, but you don't have to read him. We did that for you. Good night.
This is It could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of the world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans. This episode recovering the week of March five to March twelve. Trump films a Tesla commercial, RFK Junior eats beef tallow French fries at Steak and Shake, and Sam Sedter commits a mass casualty event on YouTube. How's everyone doing today?
I'm very happy to join you for ED this week. Huge fan of ED, just like just big big ED guy, So yeah, psyched to be here. I feel like we should mention up top.
There's also a bunch of unhinged tariff news and the most like electing fucking Caliguli's horse to the Senate thing I've seen in a long time, So stay tuned for that.
Lots of good stuff.
Yes, we will get to it.
First, I would like to give a little bit of an update on a story that we talked about a few days ago, the detention and the revocation of a green card for a Palestinian activist Mamood Khalil. As of Wednesday, his lawyers have still been unable to even contact their client. There was a large rally outside the First Court conference in New York this Wednesday. So we talked about this a few days ago for some background, an episode with
James Robert and myself. Robert, do you want to like briefly summarize the situation, and then I'll play a clip from one of his lawyers.
The situation is that this guy got taken into custody. My understanding is it was at an apartment that he lived in with his wife. He was a US citizen. He became aware, it looks like at least about twenty four hours before probably became aware that he was being It's a little clear if he was just like being surveilled or there was something else that tipped them off. But he contacted the school asking for help, convinced that Ice was coming for him about a day before they
did when they entered the house. My understanding is based on the claims being made by his wife that they did not like, they didn't like produce a warrant or anything.
He's still not charged with any crime.
No, he's not been charged with any crime. They just took him and turned off the phone when they were on the phone to their lawyers, if I'm remembering correctly. Correct, So it's like none of this is the way this should have gone, Like if this was an arrest, no.
He was just like black bagged from campus.
But it's not an arrest again, and they've been very clear about this that, like they have specifically stated not accusing him of like breaking the law, right, Like, that's not what's going on.
Here, correct, And we will get to some of that later. I'm going to play a clip from a press conference outside court that happened on Wednesday, March twelfth.
This is one of his lawyers, Mister Khalil's detention has nothing to do with security.
It is only about repression.
The United States government has taken the position that it can arrest, detain, and seek to deport a lawful, permanent resident exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism, in this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and an end to the genocide in Gaza. The government takes the position that because the Secretary of State finds his descent unacceptable, contrary to US foreign policy, he can be deported.
As Romsey suggested, it's largely unprecedented save for ugly historical precedents, including the Red Scare and McCarthyism.
That's what we're talking about.
We're also talking about a period of repression that the Center for Constitutional Rights knows well following nine to eleven, when we were in the courts trying to get people out of secret detention. One thing that's different now is the legal infrastructure is so much stronger, and everyone out here on the streets knows that we cannot hide in
the face of this amount of repression. We will be fighting in the courts and fighting in the streets to bring Mahmoud home and prevent this level of repression from spreading.
To many others, as the administration has threatened to do.
Was on Wednesday. For now, a Khalil will be remaining in ICED attention in Louisiana, and ICE director Tom Homan said Wednesday that quote, free speech has its limitations. Unquote Yeah.
I have found some stuff today of people on the right attacking the judge who put out a I guess called a stay on this in part because the judge is Jewish, so it's nice to see the anti Semitism being used in that way as well in this instance. Just fascinating. We're really breaking new ground in all of this.
A White House official did tell friend of the pod the Free Press not necessarily our favorite publication, but they do have an exclusive quote here that the basis for targeting Khalil is being used as a blueprint for investigations against other students, saying Khalil is quote a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States unquote. Said the official that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest, saying, quote, the allegation here
is not that he was breaking the law. So we have this official like openly say, like, he's not charged with the crime. We're just wanting to see if we can do this. Can we deport a legal permanent resident for saying something that we don't like?
Yeah, And I think that there's been a lot of comparisons to this to direct Macarthyism. I think that's accurate to some extent. I think the most direct comparison to this is not Macarthyism. It's the Palmer Raids, yep, which I think people tend to be way less familiar with. That was the first Red Scare, which was largely targeted at the industrial workers of the world for their opposition to World War One, and they did basically the same shit.
A lot of people would give anti war speeches and then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort of like leftists would get fucking deported for it. So yeah, that was a absolutely terrifying period of repression. If the line is not drawn here, and it should have been drawn like two hundred miles back from here, but if isn't drawn here, this is.
Going to continue.
This is going to continue to get worse.
And I mean all of this is in relation to Trump's executive order, you know about quote unquote anti Semitism. Meanwhile, today in the Oval Office he said something incredibly anti Semitic and also anti Arab somehow, like in this same statement saying, quote, Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I'm concerned, he's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish,
He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian unquote, which is just an unbelievably anti Semitic and anti Arab statement all at once, like removing someone's Jewishness because of how they act or things they've said, or things they believe in.
Yeah, and it's one of those things. Again, Like it's worth like covering this as it develops. There's not much to say other than like this is incredibly illegal and has to be opposed immediately and vigorously.
Like yeah, yeah, no, it's really bad. And of course you're not gonna have the ADL coming out against Trump.
HEO, the acl you did, which I should note because I heard some people saying they did not expect the ACLU too they have. But yeah, the ADL is fully in the camp of Lockgin, who won up who's ever protested Israel.
And they're not going to call Trump Andie Semitic for making a statement like this, Yeah, because their interests are fairly aligned at this point. Read what's happening in Gaza. So I think now we're going to play a special report from James, who can't be on the recording here today, but he does have a report on deportations in Panama. So James take it away.
So something that we've seen in the last week is that the people who the US government has deported to Panama, who it can't deport to their home countries, have in some cases been released by the Panamanian government and given a thirty day visa or thirty days to essentially exit Panama,
and they're not really been given any support. So they're in some cases like just sleeping on the streets in Panama City, right just wandering around trying to work out how to get home and trying to work out like what they should do next. Obviously, these people who have fled places like Afghanistan, Iran right where they can't go back to they would face persecution just for the act of having tried to lead, and they weren't already facing
persecution before, which many of them were. That that's why they fled. So they've just kind of kicked it down the road a little bit and we'll see where this leads. But it's another piece of evidence that this wasn't hugely well planned, that the Trump administration just wanted to get these deportation numbers up at almost any cost.
Right, We're gonna go on a break and come back to talk about the Department of Education and Tariff talk with mi A Walng.
Wow.
Well we're are back, and you know it's everyone's favorite time of the podcast talking about tariffs. And before we get to Mia, I want to bring on a musical guest to set this section of the program up.
Lock Locking jazz, Rocky jazz bot sorry lot locking jazz bo.
Locky jazz bob ah. Yeah, Oh my gosh. That was worth the rest of our year's budget. Now everyone will be getting paid for the rest of the year in Denny's coupons. That's all we have left after paying for this. But I think we can all agree worth it.
Do you want to explain what that is because I still don't really have a clue what exactly that opening theme song is for tariff talk.
Well, there was a great band called The Clash once and they wrote one song that wasn't very good, and in it somebody says something that didn't sound very much like the word tariff, but if you mispronounce the word tariff, it fit in. And that's where forty two thousand dollars of our operating budget this year went. Anyway, Mia, let's talk about tariff's.
Yeah, now that I've they've gotten one of the two things I've ever wanted in life, play on music. So since last week this has been an entire roller coaster because right after we finished recording, in like the next two days, everyone went, oh, the tariffs aren't going to be that bad, because a lot of the tariffs that were hit with Trump sort of general twenty five percent Canada Mexico tariff got wave after Trump agreed not to apply them to goods covered by the USMCA free trade agreements.
But then everyone remembered that the twenty five percent steel in a lune of tariff was still going into effect, and so that went into effect this week. Now, there was also a brief, incredible moment of panic where Trump was talking about doubling them to fifty percents. He backs off of this in exchange for Ontario's dug Ford stopping a like twenty five percent increase in electricity prices. However, come the trade war is one hundred percent still on.
Canada is doing a whole like sort of slate of reciprocal tariffs specifically on steel and also terriffs and taxes on a whole suite of other US goods. I'm just gonna read this from the Associated Press because this is no longer the trade war here is no longer limited to the US, Canada, China, and to some extp Mexico. For Mexico's really hasn't been responding in the same way as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs, or at least the sort of main focuses of these tariffs.
But this week the EU officially joined the phrase. So here's from the AP quote across the Atlantic, the European Union will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon, and motorcycles.
Bourbon again.
Yeah, yeah, Bourbon twice.
Yeah, Bourbon twice.
It's twice as important as the other thing.
Yes, peanut butter and jeans. Actually you say this, There was a whole like part of the whole speech that was not a joke. Maya people the EU would like this. This was this was part of the thing. Was yeah, like, we're hoping to restore the profitability of the American spirits markets with the US backs down.
It was also the only American product that Trudeau can named during his big.
Very funny, let's be honest, outside of music, this name has produced one thing of value to the world, and it's Bourbon.
Pretty reasonable. It's also very funny that it was like Bourbon was like our what attempts number was it at making whiskey before we finally got one that was like exportable.
Terrible, I mean yeah, it took it took generations. Look, you know, Rome wasn't built in the day, and bourbon is the ream of liquors produced in Kentucky.
Yeah. Well, and speaking of it being produced in Kentucky, this is actually deliberately Okay, well, all right, so the EU in theory, the line that they're saying is that these are deliberately designed to like target things that are made in Red States. They also did do soybean tariffs too, though, which is, you know, like you're dropping a new kin Illinois here. Okay, So, the EU as and post reciprocal
tariffs on twenty eight billion dollars of US goods. Also on Tuesday, China's tariffs went into effect, which means the agricultural terrifts that we talked about last week, and notably I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such a critical part of the system of American agriculture as the crop that you rotate out with coren to sort of like preserve soil integrity. The Chinese tariffs are now
in effect, it's mostly on agricultural goods. Yeah, and this has I think in ways that are pretty predictable, at least to me. This has caused a lot of panic in the markets. There's been some sort of rallying as like more information comes in, but there's stuff that I did not predict, which is so okay. Goldman Sachs has
downgraded its projection for us GDP growth. Their chief economist is talking about how he thinks we're going to get stagflation again, which is sort of While cyclation was the thing in the seventies that was, you know, like you have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time, this is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state and allowed to write take power in the first place.
That's funny because when I google stag inflation, I get very different results. That could just be my own No.
That's that's stagfilation, Garrison, two very different things.
Oh sorry, yeah, I think think, I think I'm anyway, the things I.
Have to deal with on this job, they never warned me every single time. It's true, it's true, it's true.
This is this.
This makes up for a lot if you ever get to fight the undertaker. You have a song to go on too.
It's true. So okay now now, so it's sort of more surprisingly And this is something I have literally never seen before with the US. Both City Bank, while City which is the over the City Bank like changed his name to City or something. But City Bank and ubs the giants Swiss Bank downgraded the status of all US equities. I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. They are also boosting the status of Chinese and EU equity.
So this is basically like this doesn't have like a technical official effect, but this is like this is basically their their evaluation of what countries like stocks basically you should purchase right And this is also sort of applies to bonds, So is that bad? This is like I assume that the US would get its actual credit rating devalued before this happens. I've never this is this is unreal.
Like the argument that they are making here is that it is because of the instability in the US, like because because of the tariffs and because of everything that's going on, that like you should just fucking pull your money out of the out of the US and American companies and put it somewhere else, and they're they're specifically boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities, which is astonishing because again one of one of the one of the countries again who's whose equity status that they are
boosting is China. China's economy is a fucking disaster right now. They're dealing with like their fucking housing bubble going under. They've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer based economy for years and years and years and years, and it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough to actually like fuel an economy consumer spending. Like they're you know, they're they're about to take giant damage from
the trade war. And also they like you know, like it was only like three years ago the CCP faced their first like nationwide mass protests like since Tianamen, right, and these guys like and again these these are the financial analysts of City Bank and ubs have looked at that and went, you are better off putting your money
there than you are putting it in the US. I mean, at this point, I think Trump's tariffs have wiped out I'm reading four trillion from the US stock market just in this past month.
Now now trillion.
Is that? Okay?
So for example, I have thirty two dollars right now in my pocket. Is it more than that? I think it's a little bit more, Okay, Okay, okay, so it is enough to buy two different servings of pizza. Okay, this is I'm trying to put this into terms I can understand, Thank you.
It is.
Imagine imagine one burger, right.
And a burger in Portland does cost thirty two dollars?
So yes, yes, Now now imagine I thought you're gonna say, does cost four trillion dollars?
I mean probably tomorrow, right, like kudos. I don't know if any plagues.
That we're doing adding levity because this is it legitimately kind of frightening.
No, like this is I have never seen the financial press like yes, like the only times I've ever seen the financial press react to something like this is like they were kind of acting like this about the possibility of Jeremy Corbin like taking power in the UK, like they are like I watched a guy on CNBC, right, this is not like like this is this is not MSNBC.
This is not even like CNN. This is CNBC literally go on air and call what Trump is doing quote insane and start talking about how this is and this is I think what these people are worried about is they're you know, the thing that they're seeing that's starting right now, and it's starting with these sort of these downgrades US equities is capital flight, which is straight up a butt like international capital taking their money from the US and fucking literally moving out of the country and
moving at somewhere else because the US is so unstable. This is like, I don't know if anyone knows what mass capital flight from the US would do, because I've never seen anything like this. So part of what's going on right and part of the reason the markets have kind of recovered in the last few days after the tanking they did Monday is that, like the inflation data
came out and it wasn't that bad. But the thing is, all of the inflation data we're getting right now and all of the economic indicators we're getting right now, it's going to take a little bit of time for the actual effects of these tariffs to set in, right Like these are these are things that like you know, it's going to take It's going to take like six months, maybe a year before we fully see the impacts of that, and but and when we do, it is going to
fucking lawsmoking creator into the economy. And the worst part of it about this is this isn't even the most unhinged part of this. The most unhinged part of this is how the Republicans have been reacting to all of
this in Congress. So one of the few things the Democrats have been trying to do, and I say one of the few because like the response has been downright collaborationists, but they've been trying to force Republicans to take a vote on the tariffs because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular, and they're particularly unbelievably unpopular among like the capital owning class,
who you know, actually matter. So what they've been trying to do is that Trump did these tariffs by declaring a state of emergency, and the Democrats wanted to use the National Emergencies Act to force to vote in the tariffs. I'm just going to read this in the New York Times.
The National Emergency Law lays out a fast track process for Congress to consider a resolution ending a presidential emergency, requiring committee consideration within fifteen calendar days after one is introduced and a floor vote within three days after that.
But the language the House Republicans inserted into their measure on Tuesday declare that quote, each day for the remainder of the one hundred and nineteenth Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that Trump declared on February first. So the point we are at right now is is, in order to preserve a bunch of tariffs which are effectively about to fucking obliterate the entire world economy, Congress has declared that days don't pass.
This is fucking this is completely unhinged. This is fucking like caligulous horse in the Senate ship like they again, they are literally, they've literally declared that calendar days passing are not actually calendar days, so that Trump can just keep doing tariffs shit and rule by fiat like the Israelites.
They have stopped time in order to win the battle.
It's it's genuinely astonishing. And the extent to which this has kind of just been swept under the rug. The Republicans have been, you know, doing this kind of quietly, right, and and and the fact that like the fact that Democrats are not literally on TV every single second of every day going that the Republicans are voting to stop time so that Trump can destroy the economy is astonishing.
It's this real like sort of admission by the Republican Congress that like they're seating authority over policy like to Trump completely right, Like the government now is Trump ruling by sort of fiat and people attempting to sort of like run circles around him in courts, which is not you know, working enormously Well, yeah, I we'll see and and you know, and this, this, this is starting to have effects on like investor confidence like in the US
as a political entity and the US is an economic entity, which is unprecedented. The other thing I think it's worth noting is that these people like Elin Mus, Donald Trump the people around them have been saying for a long time that the plan is to cause a recession and then after the recession things are going to get better, and the financial pressures hasn't believed them. And this right now is the period in which they're starting to realize
that they were serious about this. And I don't know what the political ramifications of that are going to be, because these are people who actually matter in the political system. And I think we'll see the ramlications of this play out and then the sort of coming weeks and months. But this is a fucking cliff that we've hit, and we're now like Wiley Coyote, like running off the side and trying not to look down.
But on the upside, we have a great new song for everybody. So woo, who's to say if any of this has been bad?
All right, we are back speaking of running circles around the courts. We do have a small update REUSA side. Last week, in a five to four vote, the Supreme Court denied an appeal from the Trump administration in a case regarding Trump's attempted federal funds freeze and the shuddering of USAID. This was a case filed by the AIDS
Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council. The White House is now required to pay foreign aid contractors for work that has already been completed, and further details will be worked out back in the district court. And it's still unclear, you know, if the Trump administration is going to abide by the court's ruling and resume all required payments. But this is the first move from the Supreme Court
regarding you know, Trump's actions the past few months. This has also not stopped Trump from trying to slowly close other entire government agencies. This very week, the Education Department laid off nearly half of its workforce, over one thousand
and three hundred employees. A late Tuesday night, Education Secretary Linda McMahon went onto Fox News to say that this reduction force is only the first step towards abolishing the entire Education Department, saying, quote, this was the president's mandate. His directive to me clearly is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work
with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is a bureaucratic bloat unquote.
Yeah, and I mean, like, you know, we've talked about on the show for a long time, how eliminating Department of Education eventually destroying public education has been a long running goal. Oh yeah, of the most absolutely unhinged of these people who are the people now in charge, And yeah, they've decided to just like individually fuck every child in the US.
It's incredible. Well, and so far, the way that they're trying to close up the Department of Education is kind of in a more selective manner because they're still keeping certain parts of the department active.
Yeah.
On March tenth, the Education Department announced that they were launching investigations into sixty universities for quote Title six violations relating to anti Semitic harassment and discrimination unquote. And this is in relation to anti genocide protests on campus. And this comes after Trump announced the immediate cancelation of four hundred million dollars in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University.
The Education Department is threatening that these other fifty nine universities may lose their funding if they do not quote enforce Title six of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin. National origin includes shared Jewish ancestry unquote. I don't know how to say here.
You get to see all the threads of this admin coming together, right, which is that you know, these people are also attempting to effect if we destroy like the secondary education system in this country too, for reasons that are sort of unclear to me.
I don't know.
But what we're seeing here, right is the ways that the Democrats sort of like falling into lockscept with Republicans on back of the genocide in Israel has sort of led to this thing where the Republicans are using this to just straight up obliterate like all of the US is like political, economic, and social institutions.
Well and specifically with this like investigation, they are they are trying to get all these universities to cooperate in efforts to selectively remove students who have protested against the
genocide in Gaza. Right, this is this is the you know, the same attack on free speech and free expression that they're doing against Khalil, Like this is this is the same exact purpose, and now they're trying to get more and more universities to be complicit in like the selective removal of people in this country who choose to express their First Amendment rights regardless of whether they're a citizen, a green card, or on a student visa. So this is this is all deeply, deeply worrying.
Robert.
You have a small segment you want to discuss before we start to close out.
Yeah, just a little bit at the end here. So in the subredit for the five ZHO five oh one protest campaign, which is an attempt to do protests in all fifty states simultaneously, right, I think their next day
of action is coming up in April. I'm not giving an opinion on the overall thing, but in the subreddit, somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard soldier given kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would respond to orders to carry out violence against US citizens, And I just wanted to chat about this book because it's it's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly.
My opinion is that one of the likely ways things come to a head, probably as early as this summer, is that there is mass protests in DC and the Insurrection Act it gets used, and you know, the Guard at least are brought in to attempt to crack down. I mean, obviously Trump has done a version of this before, and Trump and his State attorney have both discussed using the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests. I think they see DC as the place they want to do that.
So it's interesting to me to see a post like this. This is not a thing where like I've been able to verify this guy. Yet there's a couple of points that make me that is probably is a National guardsman. For one thing, there's a lot of them right like, this is not like a National guardsman. Where'd you find one? There's a ton of fucking dudes in the National Guard.
For the other thing, everything he says is consistent with things that I have seen and talked to other people who are in and we're in the Guard about There's one little bit where he advises people on like stop the bleed gear, and he gives good advice. He says, only buy from NAAR and North American Rescue. It's the
same advice we would have given. He cites DoD Directive thirteen forty four to ten, which is why he believes he's he's well within his rights to make a post like this, And in essence, what he's saying is that it is his belief that most of the military chain of command from NCOs up to officers would not be down with following the legal orders to fire on US citizens, but the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon, would get over whatever issues they have with that very quickly, right.
That's the gist of it is that I think, you know, within sort of the officer class and the NCO class, there are a lot of resistance to the idea of the military being used for domestic policing. That is less clear with kind of the enlisted class. Who are you know, a significant chuck of them are very much down for Trump. But whatever sort of divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would
fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon. And I think this is probably like assuming this is accurate, and I don't really see a reason to doubt it. There's nothing he's saying here that's crazy. I think this is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind that like, when you're looking at the military, it's not the police. Like, if I have to have agents armed agents of the state cracking down on a protest, I'm less worried about people being killed if it's the National
Guard in general. But that situation can change very very rapidly if like the situation becomes an active firefight. And I do think like that's the thing we have to consider right now, is the possibility that we have us soldiers, whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in shooting at American protesters. Like that's that's in the cards as early as this summer. And it's not a fun
the thing to think about. But I'm seeing more and more, not just posts like this, but I'm having more and more conversations with people who are in the military or who were are in the National Guard about their concerns about what they might be called upon to do. Some of this has to do with the border, but like it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military to worry about how they are going to be used
in the immediate future. We're not talking about years. We're talking about this summer, right is when there's a very good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head. So these are things you should be thinking about. If
you're listening and you are in the military. These are things that you should be thinking about because the people who are in charge of our government right now have made a lot of statements about how they want to use the military to deal with protests, and the idea that that's going to happen very soon is not not fringe or crazy.
Well, and although these people might have you know, slightly more disciplined when it comes to actual firearms. There is also incidents like in twenty twenty yep where the Kentucky Army National Guard killed someone via the misuse of crowd control absolutely munitions. I think that is this is also worth stating. Even if you know, like a kent State situation maybe is not not as likely in like the
modern day, there's certainly other other ways to cause grievous harm. Yes, in these sorts of like protest environments and when we've seen and.
I mean even in Portland, when we have seen which you witnessed personally, unfortunately, Garrison, the worst injuries to crowd control devices are usually people in our case it was federal agents, but who are utilizing crowd control weapons and have not trained on them. Yeah, because they're not. There's certain ways you're supposed to and not supposed to use them, and these guys are just Hey, you know how to use a gun. You must know how to use the robotal thing.
You know. No, if you use like less lethals the way you would use you know, a regular firearm, that actually leads to like much more like possible lethal consequences or like life changing consequences. Yeah, which you know, police are more familiar with the regular use of crowd control munitions that necessarily you know, like bore attack or or like state national guards. It's something that's also you know,
worth keeping in mind. Let's close by my least favorite segment, Stinky Musk, which I still has a really bad name. On Monday, a Central judge ruled that Musk's DOGE should be the subject to comply with Foyer requests and public disclosures of information required of government agencies, with the judge ordering the release of email correspondence between Musk's team and the Office of Management and Budget and was ordered to quote begin producing documents on a rolling basis as soon
as practicable unquote now. Despite Musk's claims of quote unquote maximum transparency, last month, the Trump administration tried to shield DOGE from public records requests by labeling the agency's documents as quote unquote presidential records, which carries special protections. This
specific case is super interesting. The judge of federal judge by the name of Cooper also critiqued the way that the Trump admin tried to litigate this case, quoting from political quote the lawyers offered virtually nothing in the way
of evidence about doge's operations or management. Indeed, the court wonders whether this decision was strategic, Cooper said, noting that the Trump administration lawyers had taken competing positions, including that DOGE qualifies as an agency under some sections of law but not others when it suits it. Thus, DOGE becomes, on the defendant's view, a Goldilock's entity, Cooper wrote, not an agency when it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient.
And I do like Cooper's analysis here of how DOGE is very selectively an agency only when it causes, you know, benefit to Trump or Musk. And finally, we have one other Musk story to close out. This episode admits Tesla's plummeting stock price, protests outside Tesla dealerships, and reports of vandalism of dealerships across the country. Trump has essentially started
doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway. Upon climbing in a red car that he's not allowed to operate, Trump remarked, Wow, everything is computer So this was a
very odd and kind of embarrassing show of favoritism. Where Musk brought out like a number of different Tesla models, and Trump got to unquote, you know, pick the one that he wanted to buy, as he just like sat in on this like televised advertisement for Tesla as his you know, company is losing a shocking amount of money in the in these talk market.
Yeah, and there, I mean there, there's literally there's literally a picture of him with like the notes that he has. There's like in a in like really really like a.
Tesla sales note like bullet point of like how much certain models are, what their different features are, which ones have self driving features included, which ones you have to pay extra for?
Yeah.
No, he's he's literally carrying like a Tesla sales pitch as he does this televised appearance boosting his new best friends and co president's company. Trump said on True Social the radical left lunatics are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers and Elon's baby, in order to attack and do harm to Elon and everything he stands for. Unquote. So now not only has Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, which which is, you know,
its own form of unhinged. But on Tuesday, Trump announced that vandalism of Tesla's will be labeled as domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will quote unquote go through hell. A White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Tesla's by radical leftist activists are nothing short of domestic terror unquote, So that.
Would be fun to see how that blaze out.
I feel like we're we genuinely are not that far off from just like Trump trying to hand down legal mandate saying you must buy a Tesla like this. This is the this is the kind of shit that we're in now.
Now, this is one of the most like bizarre things I've ever seen. If if Biden or any Democratic president did anything similar to this, you would have like thralls of people screaming for his impeachment, similar to like the
erg Adams thing. It's like one of the most blatant open displays of corruption I've ever seen, where president is using his office to boost like the personal financial interests of one of his top advisors who's also like running government agencies essentially and doing massive, massive cuts to prohibit their ability to like investigate his own businesses while also taking massive amounts of government money to keep businesses like
Tesla and SpaceX operable. So this has been a pretty pretty silly thing to watch unfold the past few days, and now Tesla shares have risen four percent after Trump's support for Musk and Tesla.
Great, well, I think that's gonna do it here at us with the ed to play us out, We're gonna refer back to our friend the Narcissist Cookbook who put together our lovely new tariff theme song that you're gonna hear every week until tariffs aren't a thing anymore.
We reported the news.
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Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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