It Could Happen Here Weekly 180

I don't remember what the good news was, so we're only getting the bad news, which is that, well, the good news and the bad news is that this the system that we all grew up on. That the economic system that has, you know, supported us our entire lives, or not supported us for our entire lives. The thing, you know, the system that encompasses everything we have ever known, is fucking dead. It is dead as shit. The economic system that existed literally at the end of last year

does not exist anymore. It is it right now in the process of dying. And the thing that is emerging has not emerged yet, which means we get to go to Gramsy quote where he says, this is the time of monsters.

It is a story of how structural forces and contingent choices, technological changes in class wears, domestic politics, and grand international maneuvers and international relations built a political and economic structure that ruled the world for half a century of American hedgem. And we are going to tell a very very abbreviated version of that story for one final time because that world the world.

And you know, this is some extent like Spain, but Spain was sort of gone, right, But like those old world empires had been what had structured everything in the world, and at the end of World War Two that suddenly wasn't the case anymore. And the product of this was that if if you look at the places in the world that had the largest remaining industrial reserves, right, you know there, I mean, there was obviously some industrial production

in Latin America, particularly Argentina. There was some like Chinese manufacturing belts that were run by Japan in China that weren't destroyed. And then there was the entire manufacturing power of the United States. And this meant that alone among countries, right, the US was in the most dominant position, like one of the most positions of great power has ever been.

And even though there technically was a second great power, right, they had an unbelievable percentage of the world's total manufacturing power. We had an unhinged percentage of the world's total gold reserves. We had I mean, I guess, like the second largest army in the world, but you know, like we were

significant the more technologically advanced than the USSR. And this had a bunch of extremely weird consequences because there was really no way for the amount of like concentrated industrial power the US had to go but down because we controlled so much of the world's wealth and so much of the world's manufacturing capacity that the only thing that could ever possibly happen was that the rest of the world would catch up and this was the thing that

was actually necessary. And this is something that was that was spurred on by the American industrial class, right because they suddenly had all of these like jeep factories you're trying to make cars out of, and they needed people to buy the cars, and the only way to do that was to rebuild Europe and to rebuild Japan in order to sort of rebuild these places as markets and

so for like a very brief time. And this is the sort of like golden age that all of these Trump people and all of these like weird dipshits like harkened back to. Was this like part time of like unmatched American power, but also it was it was a time in the world economy where you could have multiple powers industrializing at the same time without it being zero sum.

And that just was not going to last because at a certain point, and this is accelerated by things we've talked about in other episodes, like this attempt by a bunch of what we're called the non Aligned Movement or sort of the G seventy seven, you know, also like the Third World Movement, a bunch of these countries that were non alliance to like Yugoslavia, India, Pakistan, which you can immediately tell how this alliance is going to ship

because these two countries are like in the same alliance, right, like you know, this is the Chido's Yugoslavia's in this with like Saudi Arabia, these countries sort of like economic strategy was to create something that actually is in a lot of ways kind of like what Trump is trying to do, which is like using their control of resources, although again the resource of the US has now is like moneyasually took all of the fucking world's resources, right,

but using that to develop your own local industrial basis so you can have your own local manufacturing economy. And this is something that like a lot of countries pursued this, like Venezuela pursues this, like Bolivia pursues it. This is this is something that like everyone like kind of across the political spectrum is trying to do in like the

sitties and seventies and through the eighties. But the thing is it's destroyed by the second thing that's sort of a model for what these people are trying to do, which is what Reagan was able to do to the

American economy. In the sort of nineteen eighties. And what Reagan is able to do is Reagan actually does something that sounds really bizarre now, but he was actually successfully able to temporarily for about maybe like six years, six or seven years, was able to actually like dramatically ramp up American like like industrial production and like was able to do the whole sort of like we're bringing the

jobs back to the US. But the thing is, the way he did this was not the way the Trump administration is doing it.

But Reagan does this thing called the Volker shock, right, like working working hand in hand with Paul Volker's the head of the Federal Reserve, which, notably, Trump just spent a bunch of time threatening to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and then had to back off on that because all of the markets were like, this is our fucking rubicon, Like we don't give a funck about

any of the other thing. Well, I we kind of give a fuck up the other things you be doing, but like if you fire the head of the Federal reserve, like we're going ape shit. But like you know, the the FED and Reagan work together in order to do this thing, which is the jack interest rates to just like unhinged levels, causing everyone else's debt in the world to become like unbelievably unsustainable to repay. This like annihilates

boast of the world's economies. This also creates like a double dip recession where the US has like almost twenty percent unemployment.

I was threatening at the beginning of the show. By the time I am done doing this, pot like maybe not this podcast, but I finish doing it could happen here when I like die on the battlefield in fifteen years, everyone will be able to fucking explain the Plaza Chords and the reverse Plaza Chords because they're they're the central thing that got us to this alt to this fucking place, which is that Ronald Reagan goes to Japan and goes to like West Germany, and the subtext of what he's

saying is like you are American military protectorates and because you are American build or Japan by the way, it's like the great industrial power of the nineteen eighties right and through the nineties, Like they are like the defining like they are the thing that everyone thinks about China today.

Like if you want to find every argument people make about China from the entire political spectrum, like all the way from like people in the one hands going like this is they're gonna destroy American hegemony to people on the other hand being like this is what socialism is, you can find all of those same arguments people made about Japan in like the eighties but you know, what Reagan forces these countries to do is to increase the

value of their currency relative to the dollar. Right, So the dollar is suddenly worthless, and because the dollar is like worthless relative to other international currencies, it makes US

manufacturer more competitive. And this like temporarily restores American techleological production, but then they have to reverse them because that nukes the entire Japanese economy, and the Japanese economy becomes an entire thing of real estate speculation, which you know, I Gars, I know you may be too young to remember what happened the last time that we based the.

what the US does with corn. But you know, the entire canoxicism was based on being able to cheaply produce different components of goods in different countries, assemble them, and then move them across the world cheaply in order to sort of avoid the localized power of workers movements. It is based on the US running a series of bubble economies, so the tech bubble, the housing bubbles, heata, et cetera.

And it is based on the US dollar and the bond as like the fundamental aspects of the like as the world reserve currency, the fundamental thing that drives the system. And when we come back, we will talk about this literally all exploding and what it's going to do for all of you, which is not good. Yay, okay, we

are back now. One of the things that have in a lot of ways locked the system in place was that because of the way that these these manufacturing like networks are set up, right, because they're all so interlinked, because they're all dependent on like exploiting differences between production capacity and like labor costs in different countries. They are all so interconnected that if you try to pull one thread out of it and do a major change to

the system, the entire thing is at risk immediately. And this meant that there has always been an enormous structural incentive to keep things the way they were, even if everyone can also already like realize that they're kind of fucked up. And this days all the way back to

like things that most people largely have forgotten about. But like, oh, Alma, for example, ran on renegotiating NAFTA, and he never like intended to do that, but like even if he had the moment he got into power, you know, like Trump renegotiates NAFTA too, right, But he renegotiates NAFTA and it's just like the same trade deal because for a long time, right, if if you were going to run the capitalist economy

in a functional way. The only thing you could possibly do was run it the way he had already been set up, because there were so many structural factors about how this is snow production works, that this is only that this is the only way you could run it and still like have the economy not explode. But now we have finally produced a group of men so stupid that they are unconstrained by the structural limits of the economy.

And this is where we get into the lebrond of turf terrasom'er on right now, and we get into something that is very important to understand about this, which is that this shit is not about economics right in the sense that you or I were understand them. This is none of this stuff is about like we want the economy to grow. It's this is not something that like really any of the major sectors of capital want because

it is just nucleus whole thing. And this is why you've seen a split between even Elon Musk has like openly criticized the trade policy, even if he's been sort of hedging it. What we've been seeing is this widening rifted.

And we talked about this in the last executive disorder, where like different factions of the Trump administration were literally trying to like isolate Trump from like Navarro, who's the guy who wants to do all of the all of the tariff bullshit they've been, you know, like literally try to get them alone in a room so that they can they can implement their trade policy. But the actual

underlying urge here is completely ideological, right it is. It is this idea that like if you run a trade deficit with a country, or if you're if you are buying things from a country, they are ripping you off, and you always need to be selling more things than you're buying, which is just like so okay on one level, like this is just so fucking nonsense that like attempting to explain why is bullshit is kind of pointless, But we're gonna do it anyways, because someone fucking has to somewhere.

And this actually does also reveal something about the way that money has always worked under these systems. Okay, so before we get to like what this is going to do to the entire world economy, we need to talk about Garrison. Do you know what balance of payments.

a currency they can't print. This has always been the structural limit of things like modern monetary theory, which talks about how like your country's ability to like have things isn't constrained by just like the pure money supply of your country as long as you're buying things in your own currency, right. Like the purpose of money is the thing that move assets around. But inflation isn't a product.

I mean, like, yeah, okay, if you just like hammer the fucking printer button, right, Like, yeah, you can cause hyper inflation, but substantively because money is something that is a production of the government, because it is literally government debt, right, It's not a commodity in the conventional sense where you have to like figure out how much of it there is, and there's like a limited supply of it, and you have to like manage limited supply and make sure the

economy doesn't explode. You can just use the money that you have, and you can use debt like deficit spending effectively to continue to circulate goods around the economy. The problem is if you have to buy something that is not in your currency, that's where you need trade because you need to find a way so you know, I'm gonna taken example that we're gonna come back you later, which is Bolivia.

sort of combined. Right, But think about the US. This is a notable thing. Everyone uses the dollar to buy shit. There's like nothing that you can't buy with the dollar. So for the United States, none of this shit matters at all, none of the balance of payment stuff.

very very very common mode of economic collapse. But you know, none of the things that the right is talking about, like in terms of like, oh you have like the United States has like a trade deficit with China is like yeah, great, that means that we're buying things from them. Like the one good Rand Paul quote ever, was like, yes, I have a trade deficit with my grocery store, like and that's fine.

the abstract, because the concrete is like masculated. It is like it is the nation, right like this, like steel workers and people who fucking hammer coal out like this. This is what masculinity is. This is what nationalism is. This is what men are supposed to do.

part of capital against the abstract part of capital. Right where the concrete part of capital is like the nation and the worker and the factory and like the boss, right and all of these like concrete things were pitted against the like the quote unquote abstract part of capital, which is to say, like quote unquote like Jewish financiers and all of the sort of like weird collection of like modifiers that gets associated with like you know, the

rootless positive politanism, like the globalism, like all of this shit, right, And what the Nazis did was embody all of that stuff into just the figure of the Jewish person and his arguments. And this is arguing about like sort of structural anti semitism and what the Holocaust was was that

the like that was what the Nazi revolution was. That's what the liquidation of like and this is how episode describes, like liquidation of Jesus is what this is what the hall, this is what the genocide was, which their attempt to destroy the like abstract part of part of this thing by pitting it against the concrete part of this thing. And this is what these fucking people are also are also doing in their own way, right, Like.

is all part of the same ideology. They just sort of like they're doing the shit in different ways and they haven't like yeah, I don't know, like if these people are in power for like a decade, we might just get this right where they're literally doing the Holocaust again, but like we're not at that point yet, but we're at the point is where like this this kind of like under like this kind of fascist understanding of the nation and masculinity and like the concrete versus the abstract,

and like these figures can be like embodied in anti these things. And this is also what like what the like this is what the administration is doing with immigrants, right, is like passing them in that role of like the abstract, like the foreigner, they the national, the like the anti the anti national.

using tariffs as a negotiating tactic to stop ventinyls. Like they're they're bringing in even more like aspects regarding like immigration and tying it directly to like our trade wars with these with these you know, massive massive countries some of our most important trading partners.

with him can convince them, but basically anything. But you know, those people are structurally committed to like thisacivic version of masculinity. And there's a lot of portions of the right that are and that are committed to like this trade policy is like the America first American nationalist thing. But like

someone like Elon Musk isn't that committed to this. And like even a lot of the people who are like the inner circle sort of like Jarvin like tech fascist right are like okay, but hold on, like we make all of our shit in China, so like you know, and this is why, like Elon is coming against the terrorists because like, yeah, they're gonna fuck him, like because he has to import stuff and export stuff from China because that's where a bunch of his production facilities are, right,

and you know, and if once you get out of the circle of of like that kind of like tech fascist right, and the tech people are the people who are the most closely aligned with this administration, right, like an internships of like all the sexus of the capital,

tech is the most closely aligned one. But you know, you can get out into like places like fucking Walgreens and Walmart, right, and these are also like like the Waltons as a family are like traditional backers of the right for ages and ages and ages right, there've been backers of far right causes. They also don't want this because also their entire supply chains work you fucking China and work through moving a bunch of like commodities around, and the further route you go when you when you

start getting into like actual finance capital. These people are fucking terrified because they're looking at this and like, holy shit, we're about to lose all over goddebt money. And the consequence of this is that all of this stuff is shaping out in a sort of political battle in the administration over who can get Trump in the room last to try to figure out how how the economy is

going to work. But the problem is, and I have been vindicated in this In the very brief amount of time between when the episode of Friday came out and when we're recording this, there are no negotiations with China, Like they haven't started. There's no process for starting them.

is fucking dead, right. This is the sort of like free trade economy we've all grown up in that functions off of like you know, like fucking drop shipping and all this cheap production of a bunch of other countries and you know, like assemblies of a bunch of different like goods in different places, and the US is like the economic center of the world is just fucking gone. Now.

none of them. Every once in a while you'll get like, this will be bad for the economy of China, and this is this is a catastrophe because the people who are going to be most affected by this when when the fucking turf terrorists some liberation they come back into effect over the summer are the working classes Sri Lanka.

There is going to be a lot of people fucking homeless. There is going to be a lot of people who can't get fucking food. It is going to be a catastrophe. And also at the same time, the US is going to look like fucking fully automated, luxury gase based communism

compared to fucking Shri Lanka. This kind of sort of wrote American nationalism that has consumed the brains of basically this entire goddamn country on a level so deep Americans don't even fucking think about it, Like, is the reason why we fucking have all of this bullshit in the

first place. And this is why, like in like four fucking months, literally no one in the entire country social security is actually going to show up because nineteen year ol grow up doesn't understand sequel, because nobody in this fucking country gives a single shit about anyone who lives outside of the country enough to try to do a single goddamn word of analysis about how this is going to affect everyone. Because the death of the global economy will be felt here, it is going to be felt

so much fucking worse everywhere else on goddamn Earth. And I am, like, I am losing my fucking mind at the extent to which everyone is just fucking refusing to

engage with this completely. This is gonna be being unbelievably fucking angry because, like I don't know, a bunch of my family doesn't live in this country, which means I have to deal with the fact that, like everyone else who lives in another country is a human being who's exactly the same as fucking we are, and this is the thing that nobody else appears to want to fuck

deal with. I am losing my shit. Please God, stop talking about the tariffs as if they only affect the United States and aren't mostly going to be born by

everyone else. I didn't write a transition for this, but you know, I will transition out of this by again going back to the fact that all of the reason this is going to be so bad is that the global economy is based on, you know, a combination of resource extraction and a combination of logistical supply lines that all rely on there not being one hundred percent tariffs

on goods and importers to the US. And when this shit goes through, and when the rest of the tariffs go through and make it you know, the thing that's happening right now is an attempt to avoid this stuff is everyone you know, and this is something like Nintendo has been talking about right where they were, like, okay, our plan to avoid the tariffs on China is to

move a bunch of our production into Vietnam. And that was happening anyways before the tariffs because of sort of rising labor costs in China, and you know, a whole bunch of sort of factors like that, but none of that shit, none of that stuff that's like to sort of like keep the current global economy on a lifeline, is going is going to be able to function once the tariffs on basically of the country on Earth go

into effect. And there's a second problem here, which is that, Okay, so what is the new economy going to look like? These people, like the people running like the administration, right, like people like Navarro and people like Trump, and a lot of the sort of like, right, who is driving the policy thing here think that that the production that's happening everywhere else in the world will just be replaced by the US. And there was a trap that people

fall into with Chinese economics. And I do this too sometimes because it's, you know, it's a fast and easy way to think about the Chinese economy, and it's not accurates. Well, it's not like, isn't capital the whole picture of what's

going on. But the way that people think about the Chinese economy tends to be that the reason that things are made in China is because labor is cheap there, because either the culmination of exploitation and poverty, and that's true to an extent, right, But the actual sort of genius from capitalist perpective of capitalis returned to China was that, you know, from a capitalist perspective, the Chinese workforce, and this continues to be true thirty or forty years into

the transition, is highly educated and highly skilled. And the education was paid for not by capitalism, right, it was paid for by the sort of socialist system like this, This combination of things of a highly educated and an increasingly highly skilled as they've been, you know, working these jobs, means that there is an extremely high skilled migrant labor population that knows how to do a bunch of shit like circuit board assembly and like stuff with like chip assembly, right,

that is vital to making electronics. And the US does not have a couple of one hundred thousand migrant workers that you can just have and like exploit and not pay healthcare costs to to know how all of the chip manufacturing shit works. Right, There are people in the US who know how to do some of these kinds of things. But we're talking, you know, even though the US does have a manufacturing economy and it is very high tech, it is not on the scale of these things, right.

And the second, the second big reason why things are producing in China, and this is the reason why production didn't just shift all shift out of China after twenty eleven when there were huge protests there and huge riots there over sort of labor conditions, is that there was an unbelievable amount of like capital outlet, like this physical factory infrastructure that is in China that you can't easily

just move out to another country. And this is this is the basic things like the power grid functions right, and you can't really easily replicate that, and you can't just have this thing that there's all these people want to do where like the US will just suddenly, you know, have all of these factories, right and well suddenly like all these things will just like come back and miraculously like there will be all of these jobs because like who the fuck is going like we don't we literally

we don't have the technology for this. We'll not technlogy. It was like, who is going to build all of the factories? Right, Like the factories don't exist here, the like the inter technical systems for them don't exist here.

do there. But also, like I don't know, like China has like an entire network of like the ability to basically do this sort of like pop up light and media manufacturing that can like retool itself really quickly, and the US doesn't fucking have that, right, Like, we do have a bunch of manufacturing in the US, right, Like that is the thing that we have, but it was largely pushed into like the suburbs to get rid of sort of like the masses of workers that are rose

and cities like Detroit to like atomize them, right, And this is actually like also happening in China right now, weirdly, Like China has been pivoting to a service economy for a long time, but think this thing as those service economies, A lot of that shit is like also like drop shipping production, right but like, you know, there's no actual way for you know, befure like capital atl like costs

and things like that. There's no actual way to replicate the conditions in China that make it like an effective like source of global production in the US or even in like a country like India, Like there's just not the infrastructure there to do it, and there's not the sort of like migrant labor population. It's not the sort of things that you need. And what this means right now, right is that like there is not a future lined up to replace the one that we're in right now.

We literally don't know what this is going to do because no one has ever bothered planning this shit out. Because this is just like taking a sledgehammer to fucking everything, like they are trying to extract the copper wires from the house and in order to do this, they like, you know, A, because they think they think that's how the economy works, is they attract the copper wires, and b their plan to extract the copper wires is to

blow the house up with dynamite. And now, no one's ever done in environmental impact statements on what if you blow the house up with dynamite?

just a vision that literally cannot work. And so the place that I want to end as we head into the end of the economy, and as you know, I like I've been trying to grapple with what is it going to look like after this is that we just

don't know. Things in the supply chain are going to break that we have never thought about before, Like medical systems are going to start breaking down, Right, The supply chains for like like really really basic goods that we don't even think about the production process of is going to start breaking down because it relies on being able to cheaply import one very very specific kind of like I don't know, like ball bearing that's made in one

factory and suddenly cost like four hundred times as much as it did before, And we don't know what that's going to do. And this is on the one hand, absolutely horrifying, right, like this is going to mean an unbelievable amount of suffering for people across the world. But on the other hand, there is no plan, right, They don't have a fucking strategy, And that means that the future of the global economy is up in the air, and it's up to us to make it a fucking

better one. Right, It's we either drive these people from power and we and we destroy the basis of their power on such a fundamental level they can never return to power, right, Like, we just we just fucking kneecap them. We physically seize all of the fucking assets and all of the things, of the productive capacity that they have that has been allowing you to do this. We make sure they can never get it again, and we make

sure that we fucking control it. And we either do that or we all get crushed for a generation and we enter a period of just unmitigated global suffering the likes of which only a few people in the most hideously wardone parts of the world have experienced today.

capital could and The thing that they want was a world where people can move between things and like, fuck capital, what.

of Cossopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related, with the ties of kith and kin, or even the more formal ties of shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life, but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and believes that land them significance.

People are different, the Cossopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences, because there are so many human possibilities with exploring. We neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life. Whatever obligations are to others or theirs to us, they often have the rights to go their own way. So basically, we have obligations to others beyond just our immediate infiliations, and that human diversity is something

to be valued, not just tolerated. So it's not the idea of assimilating all of humanity into one singular culture or society or government. Is the idea of recognizing and embracing the diversity of humans, but recognizing our shared affinity all the same. A couple different versions of cosmopolitanism. There's some moral cosmopolitanism, or the idea that all humans have equal moral worth. There's political cosmopolitanism, the idea that global

governance or international institutions should supersede national borders. And then there's cultural costopolitanism, which is the blending in exchange of cultures through migration, trade, and shared histories. But costopolitanism fully embraced has I would say an inherent tens with power,

especially nationalism, the states, and capitalism. And while it's true that liberal cosmopolitanism relies on global institutions like the United Nations and reinforces hierarchies, anarchist cosmopolitanism envisions of world where solidarity, cooperation, and mutual aid emerge from below through free association, rather than being imposed from above. So today will be unpacking the history of cosmopolitanism, how anarchists have engaged with the topic,

and why it remains somewhat of a battleground today. Yes, the term itself comes from the Greek cosmopolitis, which means citizen of the world. The earliest articulation of this idea is often attributed to Diogenes of Sinope, who is a Synic philosopher who, when asked where he came from, simply replied,

I'm a citizen of the world. According to Martha Nusbaum, Greek stoics like Xeno of Citium, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius expanded on this idea, arguing that humanity shares a universal reason and should live in accordance with nature, not artificial divisions of state or tribe. Of course, many of these philosophers didn't have any issue with patriarchy or slavery in Greece, so there is some inconsistency in their concept of a shared humanity.

state based governance. Another Nightman thinker associated with cosmopolitanism was Dni Dederu, who criticized colonialism and argued for a cultural exchange free from that kind of domination. He also argued against monarchy, the church, and aristocratic privileges, as they were obstacles to a truly free and universal human community, which then brings us to the French Revolution, which brought these

ideas into the real world. Revolutionaries declared the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which proclaims universal rights beyond national or social status, but the revolution soon became entangled with nationalism, early under the Acabins, who suppressed descent and waged wars in the name of France. Meanwhile, the Haitian

Revolution provided a different example of liberation. In practice. Enslaved Africans, inspired by the French Revolution's rhetoric of liberty inequality, revolted against French colonial rule and established the first free Black republic. The revolutionaries, led by tous Saint Levitire argued that liberty was a universal human right, not one limited to European citizens,

and declared Haiti a refuge to all enslaved persons. But despite its radical implications, the Haitian Revolution was largely ignored or outright opposed by European powers. Their so called enlightenment only extended Europe, ignoring our racial and colonial realities. Seeing this time the emergence of nationalism, which on the one hand promoted self determination for homo pressed nations, but on the other hand, saw the nation state as a superior

form of political organization. So anarchists were among the earliest critics of nationalism. Patrons of Pradawn, for instance, rejected both the nation state and centralized cosmopolitan governance, instead advocating for federation, a frequently misunderstood concept that refers in anarchist literature to a decentralized network of freely associated individuals and groups working

in solidarity. Similarly, Mikhil Vicunen attacked nationalism as a tool of ruling elites, arguing that states use national identities of press, class struggle, and international solidarity. Bi Cunin did back national liberation movements, but he understood the danger of nationalism as

a force that often replaces foreign rulers with homegrown oppressors. Instead, Bcunen promoted an gist internationalism where workers and oppressed peoples across borders would unite against both capitalists and state powers. By contrast, the Bolsheviks would eventually developed the idea of socialism in one country, and the ever paranoid Stalin would

famously deride Jewish intellectuals as quote rootless cosmopolitans. This, of course aligned him with the rest of Europe's nationalists in their anti semitism inaccurate cricketerization of cosmopolitanism as opposed to cultural identity or sovereignty and ramid defense of national borders. Honestly, I would not be surprised if Trump or Putin used some equivalent to rule less cosmopolitanism today.

imposed by state and champion in global solidarity. Unlike Marxist internationalism, which has often relied on the centralized structures of the First, Second, or Third internationals, anarchists emphasized decentralized horizontal networks of struggle the connected workers, revolutionaries, and stateless peoples across continents. The anarchist Saint Emir Internationale, which ran from eighteen seventy two

to eighteen seventy seven, was one such network. As discussed by Lucian van der Waldt and Schmidt in Black Flame, that group explicitly rejected nationalism and state power, and throughout history anarchists worked a bridge linguistic, cultural, and national divides from multilingual anarchist newspapers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as La Protester Argentina, their Camp in Germany and The Libertaire in France, through transnational cynicalist movements like the

Industrial Workers of the World, which organized workers across race, nationality, and language in the early twentieth century, and including contemporary mutual aid networks where anarchists coordinates across borders to support refugees, disaster relief, and addigenous land struggles. Anarchist networks, contrary to popular belief often extended beyond Europe into North Africa, Asia and Latin America, where anti colonial and labor struggles intertwined

with anarchist thought. If you're curious, by the way, about the anarchist histories of Egypt or the rest of Latin America, they could check out my series on it right here on the canappen Air podcast. And if you've listened to that series, you'll know that because anarchists were constantly persecuted, exile became a defining experience which further reinforced the internationalism. Folks like Michail Bi Cunan, Pieter Kropotkin, and Erikomana Testa

moved across continents, spreading anarchist ideas and connecting struggles. Mal test in particular was basically a common San Diego. He touched multiple continents over the course of his life. So bout the late nineteenth century, anarchists like Groulph Rocker developed an alternative to both statist nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism, which sorts of balance cultural diversity with global solidarity from below.

Rocker argued that people should be free to maintain their cultural traditions without being bound to the state or nationalist identity. So liberal Costopolitanism was pushing a global order through state

led interventions, international institutions, and legal frameworks. And while this form of Costopolitanism has led to some games on people in human rights, international refugee protections, and anti genocide treaties, well, for one, we see the failures of these institutions in practice daily, and for two, they ultimately reinforced the state power that creates so much harm rather than dismantling it.

The UN and the WTO often uphold the interest of powerful states above and before the international laws and obligations. Whilst sideline and grassroots movements, while liberal Costopolitanism sits on its hands waiting for elit driven reforms to the system, anarchists engage in direct action to support migrants and other

marginalized folks without waiting for such reform. I have to give a shout out here, of course, to the No Borders network, and also a shout out to the work that you do, James on the side.

was a very global movement. The problem was not with globalization costopolitanism internationalism. It was with the nature of neoliberal capitalist globalization, which let capital move and stop people from moving.

for most people, like we were a very binational community. Unfortunately, the one way that that manifests itself is that the cost of living in San Diego compares to the average wage is vastly disparate because we have this over pressure valve where like people can't afford it here, they can live across the border where the cost of living is cheaper, and that allows people to exploit working class people in both contexts sadly.

regularitation and then trying to deport these people who have lived their whole lives in the UK.

you block people's connections other areas. One of the few direct flights outside of this hemisphere you know, to the European and African hemisphere is through a flight to the UK, and so by adding that in position, it's like it's like the world feels like it's being closed.

the tide shifts. So now there's extremely hostile global order towards something as fundamental as the movement of people.

And harder to move around the world, and despite the Internet somewhat connecting us like, our physical mobility is certainly much more limited.

to be valued, not just tolerated. That that's fantastic. Carl Levy, an anarchist scholar who wrote two pieces on cosmopolitanism that a link in the show notes, has argued that anarchism's history offers a third way between the hierarchical globalism of liberal cosmopolitanism, which relies on state driven global governance, and exclusionary nationalism, which weaponizes identity and borders, often in service

to the far right. And that third way that anarchism presents, not third way in the sense of fascism, third way in the sense of anarchist possibilities, is a kind of federated pluralism, the web of self organized groups that interact freely without a central authority. This version isn't just theoretical. We've seen it in recent history through antiglobalization protests, the occupying movement, the Square movements in Egypt, Spain and beyond,

and so flawed. They show the potential, not yet fully realized, for diverse place based struggles that remain connected through mutuality and transnational solidarity. We have to avoid this sort of abstract universalism that can be found in cosmopolitan thought. We must incorporate decolonial struggles and crown cosmopolitan practice in the

voluntary cooperation of people acted in solidarity across differences. Ultimately, the question isn't whether anarchists should engage a cosmopolitanism, because they always have. The real question is how anarchists can cultivate a cosmopolitanism that is truly liberatory when the connect struggles without eraise in difference, foster solidarity without enforcing uniformity, and builds a world where cooperation and not domination, defines

our relationships. That's what happened today. All power to all the people.

Whenever you're listening to this, I was up all day on on CBC and on Elections Dot c A checking in on all the charts and all the stats to see how this how this kind of upset election went, and oh boy, did it did it go? James? How much do you do you know about Canada and elections?

It's a first past the post system, so whoever gets the most votes in each writing they get their representatives. Since to Parliament, the party with the most representatives they take control of the government and that is who the Prime Minister is. And the next Prime Minister of Canada will be Mark Karney, who assumed the prime minister rule like last month, winning the Liberal election after Justin Trudeau

resigned in January. And before we get into some of the results, at first a little bit of an election. Kind of background. So Liberals have been in power for nearly a decade, slowly getting less and less popular as the cost of living has risen. Less election in twenty twenty one, the Liberals kept their minority government, but the leader of their party, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, continued

to decline in popularity. By the end of twenty twenty four's approval rating was just twenty two percent or net negative fifty two. Conservatives were up twenty five points in the polls. It was a near certainty that they would sweep the next election. Trudeau announced his resignation on January sixth, kind of the January sixth of Canada, if you think about it. Former banker Mark Karney won the party election

in March of twenty twenty five. Carney quickly called for an election to write off the peak of anti Trump sentiment sweeping across Canada. This was following Trump's talk of annexing Canada and the global trade war and tariffs directed at the American neighbor upstairs, next door, I don't know, yeah, downstairs south, No from America. It's a oh I see yeah, okay, yeah from yeah, got it. Understand, which is maybe a northern standpoint, but who cares.

Monday night. At this point, the Liberals are projected to win one hundred and sixty eight seats, falling barely short of the one hundred and seventy two majority. There's still, as a time of recording, still a possible path for them gaining a majority government, but it's fairly unlikely. It'll probably be a minority government. The Conservatives have one one hundred and forty four seats, the Blackabiquah twenty three, and the NDP a measly seven, with the Green Party snagging one.

Liberals also secured the largest vote share, forty three point six percent of the vote compared to the Conservatives forty one point four percent, though because of a vote efficiency basically how spread apart certain votes are. This has still led to much more seats for the Liberals than the Conservatives. Right, if you have more Conservatives voting in a district that's going to go conservative anyway, those extra votes don't necessarily

mean there's going to be more representation in Parliament. That's the vote efficiency idea.

vote early during Easter week. The full turnout is higher than it was the past few elections, but it matches pretty much to the twenty fifteen election. So to get a majority government you need one hundred and seventy two seats. This allows you to not have to worry about like no confidence votes which trigger new elections, and you don't

need to work with other parties to pass legislation. Now, this will probably be a minority government, with the Libs having to work with a small number of remaining in DP and block seats to run the government, which one could consider a good thing in terms of being pushed maybe towards some better policies rather than just like liberal supremacy. But it also in its government will be more unstable and it kind of gives the Conservatives more room to wiggle,

So it's definitely a mixed bag. As reporting first came in for Atlantic Canada, it showed that this would be a tighter race than what the Liberals were hoping for. During election night, it seemed Conservatives were on track to pick up two seats in Newfoundland, though in the end the Liberal incumbent barely kept their seat, beating the Conservative challenger by twelve votes. In Terra Nova the Peninsulas. The Libs did fare much better in Quebec, though they flipped

eleven seats. This was the best performance by Liberals in Quebec in years now. Conservatives gained some seats from the Liberals in Ontario under Doug Ford, with Conservatives flipping seats around the Toronto suburbs. One of the biggest stories of this election was just the complete NDP collapse the progressive kind of democratic socialist New Democratic Party. They're currently projected to lose seventeen of their twenty four previously held seats.

The NDP basically gave Carny this election. Jack Met Singh lost his seat. That's the leader of the NDP. He lost his seat to Wade Chung, a Liberal, and stepped down as leader on Monday night. Part of what makes this such a big setback for the NDP is that because they failed to win at least twelve seats, they actually lose official party status in Parliament. Parties have to win at least twelve seats to be recognized as an

official party in the House of Commons. Official parties get to have offices in Parliament, extra staff, They get to ask questions legislative sessions and can sit on committees. Now, the NDP did previously lose party status in nineteen ninety three, winning only nine seats in that election, but this performance was slightly worse, hitting only seven. So this is going

to be a big shake up. The NDP is going to have to be forced to rebuild, which is maybe necessary based on kind of a degree of NDP stagnation the past decade. They're kind of caught in like twenty seventeen politics in my opinion, though saying did lead them to pass some significant legislation and progressive policies do have a degree of popularity in Canada. The NDP was polling about the same as the Liberals just three months ago.

The movement that we're seeing is from NDP voters scared of Polyev and Trump, so they moved to Carney to avoid splitting the left vote, as Carney was seen as more capable of beating Polyiev than the NDP leader Sing and certainly justin Trudeau. Now, Funnily enough, some of this quote unquote STRICTGIC voting actually did end up splitting the vote in a place like b seen specifically Vancouver, which

recently has gone strongly NDP. But this year the Conservatives were able to snag three seats because enough previous NDP voters ended up going liberal in an attempt to gain a Liberal majority, but that resulted in neither the NDP nor the Liberal candidate actually individually getting enough votes to win the riding. Let's talk about vote share compared to the last twenty twenty one election, so Liberals did fairly

well this election, especially compared to previous ones. They gained over ten points compared to the last election in twenty twenty one. Conservatives also didn't do badly actually like they actually did. Okay, this certainly wasn't the result they were wanting, but they did not do bad. They gained over seven

and a half points this race. Reliable Conservative voters still voted conservative and they were able to siphon off some support from other parties, with Conservatives doing slightly better than what polling predicted, but a lot of very close races across key districts. Now where all those extra votes or vote movement is coming from is all of the third parties, the Green Party and the Black EPIQUA both dropped over

a point. The far right People's Party dropped four points and the NDP dropped eleven point six huge huge losses for the NDP. Most of those voters probably going liberal, although some may just not have voted. One of the more interesting parts about this election is that the Conservative Party leader Pierre Polliev lost his parliamentary seat. He lost to Liberal Bruce Fanjoy by about four thousand votes four

point six percent of the vote. So this is going to probably cause a bit of an upset in the Conservative Party. There might be some maternal in over whether Polyiev should continue as party leader, though he did not step down from that position during his concession speech Monday night. James, do you have do you have any thoughts here before we pivot to ads.

may have predicted probably something resembling a conservative sweep. Not to put words in your mouth.

what was happening. Essentially, the country had a combination of burnout on Justin Trudeau and the person who replaced Justin Trudeau, Mark Carney, effectively took the number one campaign it was the actual campaign slogan of the Conservatives away from him immediately after being crowned the new leader of the Liberal Party, which was ax the tax, which is what you know,

fascist Millhouse, who we call Pierre Polievro over here. That was his big campaign promise, the Conservatives were going to ax the carbon tax, and that had a lot of people excited, a lot of people didn't like Justin Trudeau. And then along comes Mark Carney and he takes both of those things away from the Conservatives. He's not Justin Trudeau and he acts the tax and so they had to kind of completely reset. And this was before the wild card of Trump shows up. Yeah, which of course

now is airing not only Canada but the world. I would say like most countries now are kind of having to completely reset how they think and want to do geopolitics into the future because of his policies.

That made a schism happen, where a de sentiment kind of really started accelerating towards less of you know, blaming Trudeau for everything, kind of like Obama that used to be a joke, like a Trudeau to actual fuck Trudeau merchandise, and the idea of you know, Trudeau being an enemy of the state and a communist dictator that was on the right side of things. On the left side of things, everyone got burnt out from Trudeau because the performative progressive

politics of his entire character. He was very vocal about standing up for a lot of issues that on one end he would you know, pretend to care about, such as indigenous rights, land backs, stuff like that, and then he would be suing the survivors of residential schools in federal court to try and prevent them from getting too

much money from the federal government. So there was a lot of Trudeau seems to performatively enjoy being perceived as someone who's enlightened and progressive and trying to steer you know, the society and a good direction where his policies are effectively exacerbating wealth and equality very rapidly, because that's effectively what you get with neoliberal centrists, right.

of that. Like general anti incumbent sentiment was growing so much last year, which which we saw levied against the Democrats in the States and certainly against the Liberals. And the way that the Liberals in Canada have kind of been able to maneuver away from that in the way that like the Democrats haven't is super interesting. It's not necessarily like replicable, especially for US politics, but it's still

as interesting, I guess. Like on the Conservative side, their leadership changed in twenty twenty two.

like great, but the Conservative Party has still been gaining popularity, at least previous to the past few months.

were starting to get very worried about. Yeah, and that he was starting to see a lot about the working class, you know, the housing crisis in the country and the fact that the Liberals are out of touch elites who only care about enriching themselves, and you know a lot obviously, you'd have a lot of the right wing kind of nebulous terms like woke ideology being tied into that kind

of stuff. But he was for a long time kind of starting to gain a lot of ground and traction as more of a moderate style conservative who was concerned with helping the working class, which is astonishing considering the man is a lifelong politician like that, that is who he is. He was making fun of people like the leader of the Social Democrats here, drug bet Singh. He was making fun of him for just working for a pension and not even caring about the people or the

working class. The man is never marched with the union. I'm talking about Pierre. He's never marched with the union. He is a you know, his voting track record is decidedly anti worker. It's decidedly exacerbating wealth in the quality. Has worked his entire life to make houses more expensive.

But marketing and branding really work, especially like you know, there's compilation clips of him saying things that are JK rallying tier in terms of both their nonsensicalness, like talking about how electricity is crafted by harnessing the power of the lightning bolts into the wire that the electrician holds up.

home depot and gets some wood. It's definitely pulling from that vein, although maybe a bit more successfully and like, at least from my perspective, it feels like the degree to which Pierre kind of hitched himself to like the Trump populist wagon the past few years, especially like with like sentiments like growing in like the Western provinces, that kind of mirrors some of the Trumpian rhetoric, that type

of stuff was getting popularity. And now because he put if not all his eggs, but some of his eggs in the Trump basket, this is like backfired in like popular opinion when it comes to his ability to succeed as like a politician and like gaining support because We've seen so much anti Trump polarization based on like the fifty first state stuff based on the tariffs, and like Carnie has been able to weaponize that pretty effectively against

against Pierre absolutely like it. Initially, like the way like popularity points shifted was like by like twenty points, which was like huge. Those have gotten closer, But.

country is decidedly rejected by the populace. Like, you know, the protests that are going on in the United States against Tesla's are going on here as well. Maybe not as large scale or perhaps as fire based, but a lot of them are occurring here, and so like that I think is also really hurting him. So there's been this really funny, strange political dance that's kind of happened in the last couple of months where everyone is trying to say Trump loves you more. It's like a circular

fine squad. Like at one point the Conservatives were trying to market themselves to saying Trump was making fun of Pierre in this clip, so look he hates Pierre more. Yeah, And then another it was like oh no, no, no, look he's talking a lot of smack about Mark Karney. He hates Mark Carney Moore, so that that has actually become a very strong dynamic of the Canadian election is who exactly does Trump like Moore? And that's not going to be good for you if it turns out you're the one.

of the Bank of England during that time period. Returned to Canada, has served as like an informal advisor to Trudeau and now is the is the leader of the Liberal Party. He's a very I don't know, he tries to like project this sense of like he's like a like like a reasonable man, which which which he you know, in some ways is like he's like he's like kind of boring. He works in banking, right, like he's he's not like overtly charismatic, but he doesn't have like the

the like youthful, like bumbling presence of like Trudeau. Like he just he seems he seems kind of basic. I don't know.

He has a yes, a very long and sordid Uh well, I mean, in some view, it depends on your worldview, right, if you were as a person who thinks that the solution going forward, especially in the face of actual manifesting fascism, is more neoliberal policies, austerity and measures, then you might be very, very excited to perhaps get your own, like honestly Joe Biden style election here, where we are once again going to be choosing centre to center right economic

policies that are going to undoubtedly exacerbate wealth and equality more. They are not going to solve the housing crisis. The housing crisis of Canada, while it is portrayed constantly as complex, really goes down to fundamentally, there are a lot of houses, but there are also a lot of houses being built

in luxury markets that most people can't afford. Speculation is not addressed, and so speculation usually gets blamed on foreign investors, which in turn kind of brings up the whole immigration fears, which are very successful. But with Carney, I mean, I don't see anything dramatic. Not only did he acts the carbon tax when he was in power initially, and that was again, I think, strategically to remove the power the

Conservatives had on that policy. He also is getting rid of the capital gains tax again is just going to be funneling more money towards the ultra wealthy in Canada. So the problem for me is that, if anything, I'm happy that Pierre it looks like he might not win. I don't know what by the time people are listening

to this, what the results are. But I also recognize that this does not solve these crises for simply putting band aids on a pause before you know, finally a Trump of our own gets elected and then yes, people after the facts start realizing, oh my god, he's doing a lot of the horrifying things that he promised he would do. He's actually trying to enact Project twenty twenty five,

all these terrible things are happening. Well, I mean, if this was an election where it looked like Pierre was going to win, I would say he is going to follow through on all the aggressive measures and more that he's promising right now, which include, you know, suspending the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to people that he deems should be worthy of receiving freedoms, specifically because, like Donald Trump, he wants to begin silencing people for their

speech in relation to protesting against Israel and their genocide of Palacidians, especially if you are an immigrant toward someone on a student visa, and these policies, you can see they're a disaster after the fact, and people I think wake up to them like Americans are right now when

they realize Trump's actually doing it. But you know, make no mistake, it doesn't require, you know, too long of the increase and we ought wealth and equality for people to look for an answer because they're not being listened to by the libs.

to really regain trust in the voters. And yeah, it's going to be tough because I think, like for the progressives in Canada, it's kind of been convenient for the Liberals to have a minority government because then they need to work with ENDPT.

good and sort of enacting progressive policies. But it's the Liberals who are also equally as good at taking credit for all the things that people have come to really like such as having dental care for the first time and having cheaper farmercare and stuff like that.

you know, a separate country. Now, this was an election that was previously about liberal stagnation and wanting change in economic policy. This was kind of leading the Conservative popular support the past two three years. And very suddenly this whole election changed and it became about who Canada trusted to oppose Trump and who Canadians wanted to be like the face of Canada in this new like global trade war and this fight against a hostile neighbor. And Trump

did not help this. On election morning, Trump released his statement basically endorsing himself as the leader of Canada.

Artificially drawn the line from a many years ago. Look how beautiful this land mass would be, free access with no border, all positives, with no negatives. It was meant to be. America can no longer subsidize Canada with hundreds of billions of dollars a year that we've been spending in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is a state man.

says like such a crazy hell Mary. And we can see this in some polling stats on Trump's Inauguration day, the Conservatives in Canada were leading forty four point eight percent in the polls, compared to the Liberals twenty one point nine percent and the NDP's seventeen point six But as Liberals searched for a new leader and as Trump

took office, the Conservative lead slowly started to slip. The President began referring to Canada as the fifty first state, called the prime minister quote unquote governor, and threatened to impose huge tariffs to stop a non existent fentanyl smuggling crisis through the Canadian US border. By April, the Conservative lead had fully flipped over to the Liberals, who rose to forty four percent in the polls, Conservatives falling to thirty seven percent and the NDP around eight point five.

And these are pretty close to the final results. This number is very accurate for liberal support. Conservatives got a little bit more than thirty six percent of the vote and NDP got a little bit less than this eight point five. This is according to data from CBC and ABAGUS. This was very much a leader's election, meaning that one of the biggest factors driving votes was who people wanted the prime minister to be and Mark Carney is much more popular despite being kind of an unknown figure, which

kind of actually helps in popularity. Carney's was so much more popular than Poliev. The past three months, Carney has steadily gained in popularity, getting forty six percent approval, whereas Polyiev has slowly declined in popularity. I talked about this a little bit with Lance, but the degree to which he's aligned himself with this like anti woke, like far right populism rhetoric really bit him in the ass these

past few months. He would have done fine against Trudeau, certainly, he was really writing auth that like anti incumbent wave, but he is not like a loved figure across Canadian politics, even among some conservatives. The two most important factors driving Canadians vote, according to Abacus, was reducing cost of living

and dealing with Donald Trump. Younger voters seem to be more focused on cost of living and changing policy around fifty seven percent of voters eighteen to twenty nine, while older voters around fifty six percent of boomers were more concerned about stopping Trump. The very first topic in the Canadian Prime minister debate was tariffs and US threats to Canadian sovereignty. This is seen as like a very real issue up there, and like hatred against the US is

genuinely growing, Like people are very upset. Canadians are very upset about what Trump and the US has been doing. It's being seen as like a genuine like intense betrayal. The by Canada movement's been gaining a lot of support with people trying to only purchase Canadian products and this has resulted in a real cultural moment in Canada united against the United States.

used to. And obviously Trump is trending that for a lot of people, and like in a very negative way. And so you and as Garrison said, like the politics of personality is becoming more important, like voting specifically for individuals who they think will have like the negotiating ability or just bravery or like whatever it is to stand up to Trump.

almost any other Western nation. He is genuinely good at his job of being like a neoliberal, like bank economy guy, and specifically with these tariffs. This is the guy that you want to handle this global trade crisis because this is like what he has done his entire life. He's never been elected to office before. He is just an

economy guy. And we saw this in like head to heead matchups with Carnie versus Polier, rating certain things like finding common ground to solve a dispute, where carne was twelve points ahead, standing up to a bully, Carney's eight points ahead, managing household expenses Carney six points ahead. Sitting beside you on a long airplane flight, Carneie six points ahead. Captaining a ship through a rough storm Carnee five points ahead.

household expenses. Carnee Carne came out. I'm gonna read a few lines from Carney's celebration acceptance speech here, and I'm just gonna read them and not play clips because he blends English and French and that's gonna be annoying. No offense to our French speakers out there. Yeah, Garrison, it's gonna be annoying to play for a podcast. It's not gonna do for quote. America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. These are not idle threats. President

Trump is trying to break us. So America can own us that will never happen. We are once again at one of those hinge moments of history. Our old relationship with the United States, relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. The system of open global trade anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect, has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades, is over.

But it is also our new reality. We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves and above all, we have to take care of each other. When I sit down with President Trump, it will be to discuss the future economic and security relationship between two sovereign nations, and it will be with our full knowledge that we have many, many other options than the United

States to build prosperity for all Canadians. We will strengthen our relations with reliable partners in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

And if the United States no longer wants to be in the forefront of the global economy, Canada will quote and yeah, this is the type of rhetoric that's going to be I think successful in Canada right now and probably in the next few decades, is Canada's going to try to take the spot that America used to used to hold as like the center of like global power, especially with climate change, with you know, crop crops slowly

slowly needed to be moved north. I think as as as global warm progresses, Canada is in a spot to be a like a new emerging like world power. And with the degree to which America is just kind of giving up that role under Trumpable, someone like Carney is very interested in in gaining that that degree of superiority. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna read a few comments from from our listeners who I asked to send over their

thoughts on the Canadian election. And yes, this is a limited sample, sask It's based on the politics of people who listen to this show. But I still think there's there's some interesting points here outlining what's happened in this election. Quote Mark Karney might not be far enough left for my tastes, but he immediately made gas cheaper a tangible

improvement for my brokeass. And with the way he's been pulling, I'm settling on voting for him to keep the Conservatives out with their stated anti woke agenda, pritesis, bigoted, not like I have much choice. I would have loved to be picking here about my vote, but I don't feel confident in the NDP or the Greens to come out on top of the cons Another person said, quote, I can't believe the country seems to be rallying around a

neoliberal central banker in the face of American fascism. But our resentment to the US seems to kind of override all other political considerations. So much of the way this election is panning out is a display of our culture's profound inability to take necessary risks. We're running scared to the serious administrator, man in the blind hope things will be safe and normal again. When he fails, will take

a late and stupid risk again unquote. And this is something I've seen other people express, is like with this kind of Obama esque, you know, serious man in charge, this like return of neoliberalism. Will this just set the stage for, like the material conditions for someone like Trump to emerge in the next ten years. This is a fear that I've seen people express. I don't think it is an inevitability, because this is not America in twenty

twelve or twenty sixteen. This is Canada in twenty twenty five. The world is different, but I can understand this fear. Lastly, i'll read from one other comment or from Blue Sky quote. I understand the drive to keep the Conservative Party out of office, but I'm also terrified of what the Liberal Party will do to this country if they can keep campaigning on that very basis in perpetuity. It's good that

we will probably avoid the worst. It's terrible that progress is on hold until the Conservative Party is no longer a contender, which could take decades. I also do not expect the Liberal Party to meaningfully change the conditions that are pushing voters towards reactionary politics. To be again with

unquote so kind of a similar sentiment there. I think that the role for progressives in Canada right now is either to rebuild the NDP or infiltrate the Liberals, probably rebuilding NDP in most cases, because they are going to have to have new leadership and seriously reevaluate their strategies going forward. James any notes here. I guess, yeah, I.

in Gaza, right. And this fear that a lot of other nations in the global north right, like these neoliberal economies are feeling, is going to lead to lots of that like, yeah, we need a serious man, we needed, we need a statesman's stand up to Trump, and that's going to reinforce a one of that neoliberal orthodoxy and that's going to make it very hard to make any meaningful progress to electoral politics in those countries for the next few years, which sucks.

it still was a rejection of Trump's style politics. Most Canadians do not want Canada to go the way of America. There's there's been a subset of Canadians, especially in Alberta and and and Saskatchewan, who have been trying to push for this like mega style like Canada first rhetoric and and this was denied. I think you were seeing more support for Conservatives under Doug Ford with this more like moderate conservatism. I think that's something to like watch out

for more. But like this, this Trump style of politics was was rejected across the country. Yeah, and and and Carney was able to figure out a way to make people trust him to be a genuine like combatant against against Trump and and usher and a new a new golden age of neoliberal trade in the face of Trump's Trump's chaotic and and anti market sentiments.

politicians who are going to throw trans people under the bus, and like that that will be like a deciding factor in their support.

You know, it could have been worse.

and poliv losing his seat. I think is is is at least, at the very least a nice cherry on top for this for this election.

This is not that kind of thing. This is a treatise on how revolutions do, can and should work, written by people who have a deep bed of knowledge, including a degree of on the ground knowledge of what some of this looks like. And it is an immensely important piece of media to be getting out right now. And we'll start by saying Disney evil, bad corporation. I'm not saying pay them for Disney plus Torrents exist.

listen along with us. If you're not, if you're a crazy person who's not going to do that will summarize season one for you, which is that there's this guy who grew up on a planet that was destroyed by

the Empire. He essentially like lived as a hunter gatherer until you know, the war came to him and he was forced out of his home and grows up very angry, is taken in by some people who are kind of like petty criminals and petty almost petty rebels, you know, but not in the rebel alliance sense, just and that well, we're going to commit some crimes around the edges and

try to get by. And the show is about this guy getting inducted into a revolutionary organization run by a man named Luthen that that is simultaneously very centralized around him and also very decentralized, and that it's primarily him arming and getting information and attempting to direct cells that are themselves autonomous and often in conflict with each other, which is very realistic to how things like this start. On a historical level, everything that's happening in and Or

is based in real history. Tony Gilroy, who is the showrunner, has stated that the kind of bank robbing years of Joseph Stalin were one influence behind this, But there are a lot you can see, and in fact there's a little bit of Portland at the end of season one. There's a number of things that have influenced this show, a lot of moments in history the IRA.

planet and they're nervous about potential inspection. So I guess specifically, do you have anything we want to talk about on this first episode.

all they make. There's these spiders there that make a nice kind of silk. That's what the planet does. And it's got this population of people who are used to being given a lot of autonomy because they make very this nice, this like luxury product that all they're rich people like, right, So that the folks running there are public and in the early years when there was still more the public, the Empire was still more on their

republican side. Still people didn't want to talk with them too much because they make a luxury good.

this planet. The meeting itself in this part of the episode is based off of the Vonse Conference, which was a conference held in nineteen forty two by Reinhart Heidrich and kind of managed by Adolf Eichman to plan the holocaust. This is where they actually sat down and talked about how are we going to build death camps, how are the death camps going to operate, how will we evacuate people to the death camps? All of that right, there was a meeting. A bunch of guys showed up. There

are minutes of the meeting. Tony has stated, if you've watched there's a great TV movie it's like twenty years old at this point, called Conspiracy. It stars Kenneth Brannaw as Reinhardt Heidrich, who is the architect who was like the guy running the Holocaust. Initially it's stars Stanley Tucci as Adolph Eichmann, an incredible iikman by the way, and this scene is deeply influenced by that movie. Right, There was another German movie also that, like the movie with

Brannaw was based off of. But but Tony Gilroy has said that that movie was an influence and that this is based on the Bonse conference, and there's a couple of lines that are almost word for word. One of the big differences is there's a point at which they bring in a couple of PR agents who are outside of the empire. That's like an outside PR corporation and arm. Yeah. Well, I think they're an outside contractor who does marketing normally and is doing propaganda if I'm remembering right.

the wrong thing at the right time. So about like like like astroturfing some kind of insurgency that can actually in the end service the Empire's interests, and like this is what she's talking about for her project being is actually like helping to influence the way that the resistance operates on the planet instead of just just focusing on like public opinion and propaganda and like military might.

well shot, it's very well done. There's a lot of understanding of like just history in it that I appreciated as a Holocaust nerd. That's a bad way to frame it.

their leaders dead, a bunch of their comrades died. One of the things that happens is in this is that this is when the this is when social movements evolve into infighting, you know, and this this is what was happening inside of like the American Left roughly from twenty twenty one to twenty twenty four was you got you got this giant, really vicious cycle of infighting, because this is this is what happens when there's no longer grow

threat to hold. They'veyone together, and people have this tendency to because they've just lost. Right, everyone's trying to process the emotions of their defeat, of like the really serious psychological damage that they've suffered. Like in these battles, people lash out at each other because it's easier than trying

to fight an enemy that has just defeated you. And you know, there's a complicating factor in this, which is that, like you know, these are also the periods when like rapists tend to get ran out right and when like abusers in the scene tend to get ran out. But on the other hand, yeah, it turns into these really really nasty sort of sometimes just sectarians. Sometimes they're just sort of like, you.

wrong with you people? All of you guys are clowns.

you know, they haven't been to this before. It's really traumatic, and they're doing all this like completely incomprehensible bullshit, which is also like on the outside, if you look into this as someone who's not part of one of these scenes and you're seeing all this drama, it's just like what the fuck is wrong with you? People? Like why are you doing this? And the fact that you're getting all of this like you know, fucking Disney show is fascinating.

to you, and he like grabs me. He's like, no, this is what it's all about, is the moment of connection between us where we both after all of like this being frightened and alone in the dark, were together and we know that we're doing something. This is what every this is, This is everything.

writing stuff. It's like I have given this speech to people, yeah, like dozens and dozens of times, like this is the thing that if you do this work, Like you have literally given this speech to a new person about like yeah, yeah, like this is the reason where and like it's just fucking I'm just like that mind is blown that this shit is just like appearing in mass media where people who aren't from these movements are just like encountering this.

is like massive. As you walk around like modern mathma's like Senate estate or whatever for this for this Tradcath wedding that we'll talk more about in the next episode. Yeah, just like, really really like excellent craftsmanship going into this.

scheme falls apart. They might have been rated out by one of the top guys running the silo, and imperial officers arrest and interrogate people for not having proper work visas.

an artifact, like a dealer. But she tells Luthen that the guy that that they were working with to to help Man Mathma secretly fund the rebellion is showing some erratic behavior and and and may and may need to be like, you know, bribed to keep quiet. Luthen, being smart and serious, knows that no, no, no, no no, you cannot simply bribe this man into silence. This man needs to get taken out right now. You need to close this.

Bix kills him, and eventually and Or arrives with a tie. Avenger takes out this this Imperial battalion and Bix and and Or and the kid are able to escape, and Brasso unfortunately dies in a in a high speed speeder chase.

does a fight and she kills them. Right, But this was also very very jarring to a lot of people because people are very and this is a Star Wars thing too, they are very used to seeing fascism depicted through its own self perception.

saw this last season right with with Dedra. Who is her thing is that she is, you know, of the very common amerror an archetype of the cop who breaks all the rules to get the job done. And then you know, and then like that that's how she first is first introduced, and then you see what that actually looks like in public, which is, you know, she is just straight up torturing bis with like the screams of an entire the death room of an entire species.

like petty losers doing this fucking shit. And then you know, I mean the other thing about about the sort of patriarchy side is that you see this on the other side with with mon Mathma's like, you know, her sort of like money cleaner, who's who's what her old friend take Coleman like like literally is is demanding that like Ma Mathma have sex with him in order for him

to keep keep doing this money washing shit. And this is also something you see in bits all the time, which is like guys with resources using their access to resources to force themselves on women, like in the movements and this, and you know, and there's there's like a third dynamic here with with take Homa, which is like another thing you see all the time in movements is guy going through a divorce who goes completely off the fucking rails and starts doing shit that dangers everyone and

you know, starts doing sort of like weird predatory shit, and I think, I don't know, there just hasn't been much analysis of like, yeah, this is these are all ways things like if you have been in movements, you have experienced patriarchy in all of these ways, you have experienced cops doing shit to you, you have experienced stuff from inside the movement.

They're doing ice raids and star wars. Yeah, and the heroes are the people who like and or coming back with a tie fighter blowing them up right, like you know, yeah, Also I do want to someone landa know, I do want to point out that like this show also quietly has had like the most realistic lesbian relationship in all of Star.

One is that, okay, so on the very nonsubtle level, like they are cutting back and forth between everyone dancing to this like sort of tech upbeat techno thing, like they're cutting back and forth between like mon Mothma dancing at this wedding, and like the ice raid that's happening, which is like, you know, this is the level of political subtlety that you need to be working on with

the American people. You have to just be like I'm hammering you over the head with the point which is like all of you motherfuckers are going to brunch and like, yeah, the ice rays are happening.

power is like flaunted and exchanged. Yes, they are still bad. But if you are like an aspiring rebel, yeah you can use these places to your advantage. But no, there absolutely still is. This is this juxtaposition of yeah, this like you know, riotous party with with like this horrific ice raid and yeah, like the material conditions in these

people's lives is very different. Even even if man Mathma's doing good stuff still as like an Imperial senator, her everyday life is very different to complete someone who's having to hide from like ice agents.

these sort of like fancy wedding things. And this the way that it is lit is the same way that they're lighting all of the like like the stark white imperial corridors, and there's this very you know, and so like like it's working on like all of these sort of like levels of like like visual metaphor of of all of this, just like oh yeah, this is also imperial space, right, and everyone here is operating either like regardless of what side they're on, they're operating like in

imperial terrain in this sort of like thing. As Asma Motha also was just dealing with like her kid becoming a tradcath and like trying to talk her kid out of being a tradcath or a kid FU share at her for being like, hey, maybe you shouldn't do this like weird marriage thing when you're like.

one the like one hour of Mathmaed dancing. Yeah, And there was like a fascinating reaction to this of like like cause on the one hand, there's always people like who I know, Victoria Zeller, who's a trans writer, who I follow, who up probably we're talking to on the show at some point soon I had this thing, but like oh yeah, like there are also there's just gonna be weddings that are like based on this Chandulaine wedding thing, and like in like two or three years, we're gonna

be seeing this And there's just interesting dynamic where like on the one hand you have the people who were just completely focused on the aesthetic, and then the other hand you have the people who were like, oh yeah, I like this is this is fucking me getting just absolutely fucked up as like all of the fucking horrors play out around us and having to like deal with and fight all the fucking horrors, while like all of the people around me are just like kind of just completely checked out.

I will dictate when Cyril can see you, how I will dictate how your relationship with your son is going to go, because like Cyril is like my like pet, like I run everything and things will go according to my wishes.

think this will become increasingly clear. She's not thrilled that Cyril's going to get involved in this shit because it's dangerous what I thought they were kind of showing we've been seeing her like abuse him. I don't think we've seen her be mean to him other than like initially when that before they were dating, she didn't take him seriously until she saved her life.

a panic attack in the middle of their dinner. And that's when she and that's when she says look, bitch, this is how shit's and she's being a good girlfriend in that moment, she's getting his mom off his back.

tells them when their ideas suck. He does not spare their feelings, but he's he rewards initiative and he's willing to like be proven wrong or argued with like when people are forceful against him and make a good point, He's like, all right, well let's try it. And I love showcasing that in the same way that like, if you talk to people who worked for like work for companies like Raytheon, they'll be like, yeah, it was a nightmare evil that we were making, and like a very

healthy working environment. And that is often the case with some of the most evil organizations on the planet, Like people who are very good at managing people often wind up like That's what makes fascist systems so dangerous. It's not that everyone in this is incompetent. It's that there are sometimes people who are very good organizers and very competent leaders who wind up in these systems, and that's part of what allows the evil to happen.

with each other. Yes, and it's very hard forget them to coordinate. And and Or is the story of watching these like many different cells slowly start to figure out that maybe it would make more sense if we work together instead of just doing random small crimes and like hits on individual planets or imperial processing plants. The ability to see these cells come together is what makes I

think and Or so special. And And for the rest of the season, We're going to move forward a year at a time all the way up to the beginning of rogue where then we do have the like the completed rebel alliance. So I am I'm excited to watch that development.

in in twenty sixteen. So she's I wanted to say, I wanted to say she hasn't been doing this very long, but no, that's literally like nine years, eight or nine years, so she's been doing this a spell. She's sixty five years old. And on March twelfth, there was a fellow Flora's Ruiz is his last name, He's thirty years old, who was arrested after basically there was a confrontation between him and his roommates for him playing loud music. He was confronted for this on March twelfth, and he allegedly

fought with a male roommate in the kitchen. A woman I'm not sure if she was a roommate or just there, tried to break them up. Two women eventually did. One of them got elbowed in the arm, allegedly by Flores Ruiz. One of them was struck while trying to break them up. It is unclear to the degree to which I'm hearing a lot of people like I went to the centrist subreddit to season they're like, well, a serial abuser of women.

That's not really what he's being accused of. There's like a fight between him and another guy, and it got chaotic. One person elbowed in the arm. I'm sorry, I don't consider that serious domestic abuse unless it's part of a pattern. If it's literally he was fighting a guy and other people swarmed in and some of them one of them got elbowed. I don't know about this woman that he's

alleged of striking. To what degree did he haul off and punch he or was it again, there was this chaotic struggle and several people got struck in the middle of it. Right, this isn't like great, but this is certainly not. The evidence that has been provided by the state here in this case is not that this is a serial domestic abuser of women. It's a guy who was involved in a chaotic fight with a roommate and a couple of other people. Right, So he's being charged

with misdemeanor domestic battery as a result of this. He faces up to nine months in prison and a ten thousand dollars fine on each count if convicted, and he has not been convicted and is innocent until proven guilty. So he went up in front of Judge Dugan literally a few days ago when we record this, and while she was in the midst of like having this like court meeting. Basically, I think this was kind of like a pre trial deal right where they're where they're kind

of like setting the ground rules of things. She finds out that Ice is in the courthouse and that they are looking for Flores Ruiz, and so she gets really angry because based on what Wisconsin has stated, like the actual like law in the state, they are not supposed to be interfering in actual court proceedings. And part of the reason why is that the courts don't want people to be dissuaded from dealing with their state level court

issues by the fact that Ice might pick them up. Right, It will stop people, It will make people go on the run. It makes it very difficult to enforce law and order.

her as having a confrontational, angry demeanor. She basically keeps saying, show me a fucking warrant, right, And they don't have a quote unquote real warrant, right, They do not have a criminal arrest warrant. They have an administrative warrant, which, based on the actual law, they do not. She does not have to let them in, right, That is not the way these things fucking work right into the courtroom to like interrupt the proceedings. On the strength of this warrant.

She tells them to speak with the chief judge, and she leads them away from the courtroom. Right. Once she sends them to the chief Judge's office, this is where the thing that may in fact be criminal behavior comes in. Dugan goes back into the courtroom and says something along the lines of weight, come with me, and then takes Flora's Ruiz and his lawyer through the jury door into a non public area of the courthouse. Right, this is not normal behavior. And Ice is alleging that this is

interfering with the duties of federal agents. Right, that she's basically hiding an undocumented immigrant who is being actively tracked by Ice, right, and that that is a federal crime. And so that is the situation. Right when it was found out that this was happening, the FBI and ICE arrested her. She has since bailed out. She is facing several federal charges, and it's, you know, kind of unclear

where this case is going to go. In terms of her initial behavior, she was absolutely legally in the right that administrative warrant did not give Ice the right to interrupt the court proceedings. She led them to the chief judge that was all entirely within the law. We're going to learn how the law adjudicates what she did afterwards, right, taking these people through, because it's not illegal to lead people through a backdoor. It's not a crime to tell

people to leave this way. But what may be adjudicated as a crime is that by doing this, she was helping to aid in a bet the escape of a fugitive. Right, And that is the argument that the federal government is making here.

And that's why they've been going to these courtses. They have been looking, they've been shopping for a situation like this, right, And part because one of the first things that happened is the Wisconsin Supreme Court suspended Judge Dugan right because She's been charged with two federal counts, and this is

a normal thing. If a judge gets accused of federal crimes, you would, in normal terms, want them to be suspended because those crimes are probably something like they were selling children to a child prison, which is a thing that happened to Trump. Pardon the judges responsible, right, you would want those people not trying cases while this was going on.

But what's going to be done here, and what's already being done here, is that judges that are friendly to and sympathetic to undocumented people and who are not gigantic pieces of shit. And Judge Dugan comes out of a public defense background. This is somebody who defended people like the defendant in this case in her previous life as a lawyer, and I think acted with tremendous courage in

this situation to try to protect somebody. They are going after her because number one, they want to chill other judges from doing this, and number two, they can keep her off the bench right and assume she will be replaced with somebody worse, or that they will just clog up the system, either way of which works in their favor. So it will be unclear how things are going to work out in this case. I can't tell you legally

what's going to happen. That could go either way. I can tell you, and I think this is a very important point. It's a point Jared Yate Sexton, who's a scholar on fascism, made online about this particular case, is we shouldn't give a shit if she broke the law. She did the right thing. These people are doing the wrong thing and they need to be stopped right And that is my overall stance. What she did was heroic and we should support her and fuck these people. I

don't know, yeah, yep, yep. I don't have a complicated take on this.

those are on his papers. They check his papers. They work for these three guys, work for them for a while and develop a close relationship with the Canos to the point that they refer to them as the boys. And when they get kicked out of their apartment, they let them live with them, I think for free or at least for a nominal fee. And as they describe it,

they came to consider them part of the family. And there's like photo evidence of that, including photo evidence of them like going to the gun range together as like a family day at the gun range and shooting, and like this guy Artago Lopez like posts pictures of these people and these like family outings on his Facebook, Like

they really do seem to have all been very close. Yeah, earlier this year, Ice comes for these guys, the boys, these three dudes who are living on their property, in a small guest house on the Canos property, and they allege or Tega Ortiz to have been a member of trind Agua. And it's based on and I hate most of the reporting on this because it's all just like the alleged alleged gang member alleged trind to Agua member.

And you look at it, well, well, he has tattoos, and there's pictures of him with guns, pictures him with guns that are legally owned by Americans at a gun range.

anything illegal. At this point. Now, yeah, here's where things get problematic. At this point, the boys are being you know, the government is treating them as people who are here I legally, and they are trying to kick them out and they are accusing them, these three guys of being evolved in Trindagua. At this point, Nancy Kno provides them with legal assistance in complying with the procedures of their

pending immigration cases, right, which shouldn't be illegal. She's literally helping them abide by the law.

grayer area. Tries to help Ortago Lopez delete his Facebook account, and I don't actually think there's any evidence of him doing anything illegal on there. I think it's just they knew the photos he'd posted of him not breaking any laws would be used as an argument that he had I think that that's defensible in court, although they will allege that it's destruction of the evidence, they may win on that breaking the phone is. You know, that's going to be a tough one for them. That's just going

to be a tough one for them. Now the knos are currently being charged and they have been released. They can't leave the county. There was the prosecutors were attempting to have them separated so that they couldn't talk about the case. But thank god the judge ruling was like, they're married, they have a constitutional right to be together. You don't get to do that. But obviously they have to like hand in their passports any guns they'd had,

which they seem to have already done. The good news is that these are rich people, right, Like the judge even makes a comment that, like, these are the wealthiest people I've ever had in my courtroom, So they have the resources to fight this. And again fucking politics making strange bedfellows.

I think what they did was out of love and brave. Anyway, That's what I gotta say.

I will go through them one by one. Starting off with an attempt to possibly repeal large sections of the Civil Rights Act, Trump side in order to quote eliminate the use of disparate impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible. Disparate impact is a legal theory that seeks to address discriminatory policies that, on their face may appear neutral but actually continue decades old discrimination and segregation.

This order from Trump provokes presidential approval for Title six antidiscrimination regulations from the sixties and seventies, and orders all agencies to quote deprioritize enforcement of all statutes and regulations to the extent that they include disparate impact liability. The order calls for the Attorney General to quote initiate appropriate action to repeal or amend the implementing regulations for Title

six the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four. Cabinet members were also instructed to review all pending investigations, civil suits, consent judgments, permanent injunctions, and government positions rely on spared impact theory. That includes Titles seven and eight of the Civil Rights Act, which protects equal employment and fair housing. This is kind of part of a larger attack on civil rights in general, like obviously the past few months,

who've seen this with like DEI stuff. But last week the DOJ essentially closed its existing civil Rights office, resigned a dozen senior career attorneys, curbed investigations into police misconduct and violations of voting and disability rights. Plus, the Education at Discrimination Division is now being directed to protect women's sports, and the Immigrant and Employee Rights Division was told to investigate companies that quote unlawfully discriminate against US workers in

favor of foreign visa workers unquote. So that's how they think they're going to be defending civil rights is by keeping trans girls out of sports and going after foreign visa workers. Basically, they're trying to turn federal civil rights infrastructure against those whom they were meant to to protect in the first place. The next order kind of outlies

something I'm calling cop Nation. It's called quote strengthening and unleashing America's law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent civilians. This is kind of like a proto martial law order. It's what you would do beforehand to strengthen police, but not actually like declare martial law. It's setting kind of the path towards that, or at the very least like strengthening law enforcement to the degree to which it like butts up against what martial law would be.

to enforce the law. So this tries to make it harder for police to be held accountable for a civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending qualified immunity to the criminal realm. According to Business Insider, quote, following previous executive orders targeting a number of elite firms, nine law firms have agreed to deals with the President and collectively agreed to provide nine hundred and forty million in pro bono legal services

to support the President's policies. This order also calls to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training, and strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as to quote seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers, promote investment in the security capacity of prisons, and increase the investment in and collection, distribution and uniformity of crime data

across jurisdictions. The Attorney General is directed to review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on to local or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the performance

of law enforcement functions. And then, finally, quote, Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement.

And shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime unquote, so moving more national security resources over to state and local law enforcement, and directs the ag to go after state and local officials that struckt criminal law by quote, prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties necessary for public safety or unlawfully engage in

discrimination or civil rights violations under the guise of DEI do you want to discuss anything with this you know, anti ACAB executive order here and what it might actually like do in reality besides you know, expanding like legal protections for cops.

they're expecting giant they're expecting giant protests this summer. Yeah, and they want to be able to use military assets here. And what they're doing with this, the Secretary of Defense is developing a plan to use military assets like presumably against protesters either that or you know what I mean, Like cercific thing here is like used to prevent crime, which is just like the deployment of the US military against like US Right, that's I think a pretty cut

in dry. They are developing the apparatus through which they are going to attempt to deploy the army against the US citizens in the US.

like local jurisdiction you are like under. And if if the local jurisdictions start to like restrict your ability to like to to to do violence, restrict your ability to do your job, we are going to help you to make sure that you have the legal and like physical capacity to continue your job as you see fit.

law and federal funds. Those districts will be suspended or terminated, and if those districts remain sanctuary districts after officials have been notified of their status, then necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures shall be pursued to quote end these violations.

Section one of this order lists several federal criminal laws that they say are being violated by these sanctuary districts, including quote obstruction of justice on lawfully harboring or hiring illegal aliens, conspiracy against the United States, and conspiracy to

impede federal law enforcement. Assisting aliens in violating federal immigration law could also violate the Racketeer, Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act unquote, So they're even rapid and rico here for state and local officials who are trying to protect immigrants in their communities. There's a few other executive orders I want to mention, including one that requires professional truck drivers

speak English. I think this is actually just to mask the consequences of like the tariffs, with the.

advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American youth. And I'm actually going to play a video here of Trump's signing this order.

smart about AI, mister President. He's like, yes, I am. As he signs his name. The actual text disorder is really freaky. Quote. By fostering AI competency, we will equip our students with the foundational knowledge and skills necessary to

adapt and thrive in an increasing digital society. Early learning and exposure to AI concepts not only demestifies this powerful technology but also sparks curiosity and creativity, preparing students to become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future. To achieve this vision, we must also invest in our educators and equip them with the tools and knowledge to not only train students about AI, but also to utilize

AI in their classrooms to improve educational outcomes. Unquote James, how do you feel about that at a as a as an educator yourself.

and more use of AI. It's from people who I think, like the folks who are coming through my classroom now, like many of their like high school years when they should have been getting good solid like writing tuition work during COVID lockdowns, right and so like. I'm not entirely blaming like the folks coming through my class here, but it is it's a fuck situation. That's only getting worse.

And I guess we'll we'll see how this goes. But like this, this genuinely could have a very damaging impact on and it already has had a damaging impact on the US education system.

prohibited contributions to political candidates and committees quote. Actlue has been the target of conspiracy theories for years, starting with James o'keef and Elon Musk has recently targeted Act Blue with with bizarre theories on how Act Blue functions and is used to funnel money to like Antifa, and and you know, George Soros money get getting moved over to

all of these you know, Tesla Vandal's crazy stuff. But specifically, Trump is calling the Attorney General and Treasury Secretary to quote investigate allegations regarding the unlawful use of online fundraising platforms to make straw or dummy contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees, and to take appropriate action

to enforce the law unquote. I think this whole thing beyond trying to you know, harm the Democrats' ability to like win elections in the future as a form of collection meddling is also just like a spig smoke screen away from a CNN investigation last year into deceptive practices used by political fundraising platforms Win Red and Act Blue, which found that the Republican platform had more than seven times the fraud complaints sent to the FCC than Act

Blue during the period of twenty twenty two to twenty twenty four, with the fundraising platform targeting aging seniors who thought they were personal friends of the Trump family with propaganda and emails that trick them into signing up for recurring donations. And what they thought was a personal correspondence to President Trump. It's a really worrying investigation. It'll be

linked below. And like, you know, meanwhile, you have Elon Musk literally offering people millions of dollars to like get people to sign up to vote and sign petitions. And and yet they're gonna try to try to investigate, you know, fraud in Democrat and grassroots fundraising, which I'm sure there is a little bit of, but according to this investigation by CNN, so much more fraud on the on the

on the Republican fundraising platform. You know, there is actually one Democrat who we can verifiably claim did a bunch of weird fundraising ship and did straw donations from foreign donors. And it is Eric Adams, who is Trump's favorite Democrat. Trump is personally keeping out of prison. Oh gotastic. Anyway, that is the that's the flurry. We're gonna go one more break and then come back to close out on some immigration and tariff updates.

get rid of the Biden quote overhang. This will take a while, has nothing to do with the tariffs all caps, only that he left us with bad numbers. But when the boom begins, it will be like no other.

been expanding. We are probably already in the recession. And the other thing there's think that's very important to note here, right is you're seeing a lot of reporting about this being a contraction, and a lot of the reporting we'll talk about how like, yeah, this is because people are like rushing to do their all their imports right now before the tariff's hit. The thing is, right, this economic contraction is like before the actual substantive impact of the

tariff's hit. So this is just the beginning of like the rolling economic collapse, and all of these turf tariffs

are going to generate. There's been a little bit of movement in the sense that like, Okay, so when I last talked about sort of the declines in like shipping from China or just shipping in general, it was mostly like sort of I don't know what you'd call them, chipping industry, trade press this has hit like the mainstream press now that you know, and some of these indicators are doing sixty percent import drops from China, and it looks like China is maybe kind of starting the preliminary

things to figure out how to figure out negotiations, and that they've been the Chinese government has been going behind the scenes and talking to a bunch of like high profile American companies and has been like quietly repealing some of their one hundred and twenty five percent retaliatory tariffs in the US on like very specific goods. We'll see what happens there. There hasn't been more movement than that.

What is also very interesting is that so okay, so like obviously like a bunch of prices are just increasing already in places like like Temu and like Sian And Amazon was going to have like a counter that showed how much additional money you were spending because of the tariffs, and they announced they were going to do this, and then President Trump like got on the phone with Jeff Bezos and yelled at him, and then Jeff Bezos said

he wasn't gonna do it. But this is also an interesting thing because we're actually starting to see cracks between Trump and like people like bezis, like the tech people can really have been his like closest basis support right for this whole the entire project in terms of like sect like large scale sectors of capital, it's been these

people who've been backing him. And I think as as the stuff continues, we're going to continue to see rifts between them and the Trump administration over shit like this, because you know, like people get really really is something we've talked about a lot in episodes we've done on pricing and inflation, is that people get really pissed off and prices go up, and that's a way to like, you know, this is a problem for these companies because this is the way you lose sort of brand loyalty,

and that's like how everything goes to shit. And Trump has to is doing all these deflections to be like it's not actually the terrorifts that are doing this because people are gonna be really pissed about this and yeah, I don't know, welcome, Welcome to quarter one of the recession. This is going to be the best quarter of the economy for a long time.

the First Amendment for people who are not citizens. In the Brego Garcia case, both sides agreed to a seven day pause in the discovery process after the passing of sealed motions. Then on Tuesday, Tuesday this week, the DOJ filed another sealed motion. We can speculate, and you will see people speculating if you go into the blue skuy or Twitter or whatever. I don't think it's beneficial to do that in this case. Right, what we should be focusing is that a man is in a prison camp

who did nothing wrong. It doesn't matter that justice system is continuing to fail him, because he is still there and so are hundreds of other people. The experimental quote National Defense area in New Mexico. So we spoke last week about the Roosevelt Reservation, right, and they are starting this militarization of the Roosevelt Reservation with an area in New Mexico. And we've seen the first charges that are

filed against migrants. According to Washington Post, at least twenty eight people have been charged or added to their charges a penalty for violation of security regulations in addition to the mad charges entry without inspection.

So that's great, and so it does seem that they are using this. As we talked about a week or so ago as a way to quickly charge and then deport people who are entering the United States between ports of entry.

extremely quickly. Right And this was upheld by the Tenth Circuit, so that's in place there. It'll be interesting to see how many of them are able to bring. Still, bringing a habeas challenge is complicated. It could be expensive and require a lot of legal time, and I know most lawyers who work in immigration are overwhelmed.

Central Valley. Right, people are thinking, oh, the Central Valley is a very long way from El Centro, what are they doing up there. I've included a map of border Patrol sectors in the sources today so people can see. But although the l Center sector only spans seventy one miles of linear border, it goes a lot further north. So that's what they were doing out there. The judge in this case, who is US District Court Judge Jennifer Thurston, quote, you just can't walk up to people with brown skin

and say give me your papers. There's a very good reporting on this in cow Matters, which I have also linked in the sources today. Notably, I looked through the order today, the core order, and one of the things we get is kind of a vision into how border

patrol is expediting these deportations. Right, So I'm going to quote from the order here, quote, once Border Patrol agents transported the people they're rested to the El Centro station, they would quote extract voluntary departure agreements from as many people as possible without explaining the consequences.

You're signing one of those little pad screens, and you might be given an iPad to read the document on, but you don't get a chance to look and flick through the document and then sign it left, sign a physical copy of the document.

including recently outside a home depot in Pomona. So this is CBP not ICE, right for people are familiar with that distinction. But at least in the Eastern district, they can't be stopping people now without warrants, So that's a good thing from the courts. I guess those are I know, we've got a long episode today. Those are the most

important immigration things that I've come up with this. I'm sure something will happen between us recording this coming out, but yeah, that's what I've got for you.