It Could Happen Here Weekly 202

Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Recording in progress. Okay, check this out now. I have always been amazed by when I take a second to actually tap into like my actual network of just friends.

You know, you have friends in categories.

You have to say it like it's just like this, yeah, you always like you just don't really picture those things colliding or when like your friends like meet each other and turns out they know each other.

It's the weirdest thing anyway for me and my like.

Podcast activists, you know activism world, you know a lot of times overlast with the hip hop world because you know, we believe with a lot of same stuff. But like this one like really happened where I was just like in my own network somebody I've known for a while who I'm just now learning your name is Tristan.

Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know your name was Jason. Yeah, exactly.

You know what I'm saying. That's how wrap works. So introduce yourself however you want to be introduced. Yeah, you know, and then let's let's get into it.

Hey, everybody, I'm a Tangent Wiggy aka Tristan Hacker. I got a lot of other names too, but I'll keep it to those for now. And I'm from sam Barnardino and I'm an artist in the community with the with propaganda as well as a state employee. I paid disability claims for the state of California. And in my role as a state employee, I am a union rep. And I'm an elected member of my union's executive board. So I represent state employees from Ontario Region, the Sam Bonardino

Words.

So this is like we're this is frontline energy, okay, which I love about it because it's like like you said,

Yeah, I appreciate that word. So first of all, tell them what the union is.

Which union were talking about?

Yeah, S isn't sam e is in everybody I is an incredible you as in Union Service Employees International Union, but one thousand, right, So s EIU is one of the biggest international unions in the world. And and everyone out there has probably seen the purple purple SEIU stuff on all kinds of stuff, from nurses to state workers to in home support services workers and home care nurses.

And there's a.

Lot of different people that are under SEIU. More broadly, state employees in California are SEIU one thousand, So we're Local one thousand, and that's the broader union that I'm a.

Part of all of Cali.

Okay, you know, all all hundred thousands state employees that are represented.

Damn.

Okay, and but I am elected to the executive board of DLC seven O four, which is the Inland Empire, well the Ontario Samarrardino part of the Inland Empire's chapter.

Where Ontario Samarandino. Okay, this is going to be very Cali specific. Like obviously this everybody here who listens ain't from here. So like I've I've cracked many LA and I E jokes and just like you know throughout throughout our time.

You know what I'm saying.

I like to say that I have an IE passport stamped like I have my.

I worked in Pomona. See I didn't, I never lived there.

Okay, but you mean what I'm saying.

So my strong connection to Pomona as far as I've seen I've seen you.

You absolutely That's what I mean. Like I'm a naturalized citizen. I got a green card. I got an I E Green card because like I worked at Pomona. You know, foundation was in Pomona. My condemn Lights was in Pomona.

So yeah, so I.

Ended up just kind of like spending a lot of time there.

And then for high school, I got I got busted to the Inland Empire, so I got bussed. I went to school out of district because my parents split up. It's a long story, but anyway.

It happens a lot. Yeah.

So that being said, like I have a lot of love for the Inland Empire and spent a lot of time there, you know what I'm saying. So that's what I was like, I got, I got a visa, I got a I E visa.

Yeah absolutely, yeah.

But that being said, what would you say, I mean, if it's kind of like I'm kind of springing this one on you, but like what would you say would be something that's like unique, a unique thing that someone from where you guys are at, like a service worker where you guys are at, it might be a unique issue that's specific to them that wouldn't be somewhere else.

I'll do two because I feel like I need two to kind of to answer it. Well.

One is that the Inland Empire in Highland, which is a city kind of a little connected city to Sam Maerdino, Highland has patent state hospital which is basically Arkham Asylum. You know, it's basically Arkham Asylum from the Batman comics, which is it's a hospital for the criminally insane. Okay, yeah, you know it's like like in other words, like you've committed crimes, but you have mental health issues. Yeah, so you're not in the regular prison, but you're not in

We're going to pay you because you're a worker and you need our services.

Facts, And like, I love that you said that, because when they talk about like how the undocumented don't pay taxes, I'm like, yes they.

Do, Yes, they do, Yes, they do, Yes, they pay a lot.

Yeah, if you can think of just off the head, Like obviously over the years, the negotiations, different things that have come up varied over time. We'll get to the ice raids, because that's obviously where everything got super ratchet up, ratcheted up, But like what was some of the most like I don't like, I don't know how would I phrase this where you were like, this is the most reasonable request we can ask for, Like this is just like I don't this is so I don't understand why

So have you ever heard, you ebably heard the phrase every crisis is an opportunity? Right, Yes, you've heard people say that, right. So, my union and other unions have been pushing for telework. You know, in my entire twenty years with the state, I'll be seventeen years veteran with the state as of December, right, Wow.

The entire time we wanted telework.

It took the quarantine crisis of twenty twenty twenty twenty one to actually get the state to agree to mass implement telework, and so that was like, that's a crisis that we made an opportunity.

That's like, hey, we needed telework.

So many people are also caring for their kids, are also caring for their elderly people in their home, caring for a new baby, or you know, take you know, just at the house so that contractors could come fixed their plumbing. You know. It's like like tell of work has been something that we thought was very reasonable for a long time, that it took it took until the

Have done that's dope, man.

You know, obviously coming out of the pandemic and recently like a lot of companies are like, hey, you guys can come back to the office and people are like absolutely not, Wow, Like why take it away?

Are you taking away unless you got it?

Yeah?

Yeah, why would we do that.

I know my own Like my wife, you know, she pre pandemic at the spot she was working. As she was working at a nonprofit. You know, she was like, Okay, I was touring so much, and she was just like, dude, like you want me in this office at a certain time. It's stressed on the whole family to get my daughter to school. It's you know, just breaking her neck to figure stuff out. She's like, I'm done with the stuff that can be done at a desk within an hour.

Tell you you're paying for lights, you're paying for.

You're paying for audi.

There's no reason, like I don't have to be here, you know.

And so she pushed.

She was just like, you know, looked up her own rights, you know, figured it out and you know, without telling her business. She uh, she actually helped the staff unionize there, Like you know what I'm saying. She was like, look, man, it's ridiculous. You know what I'm saying.

You got a real one, Yeah, don't don't don't google it anyway.

So yeah, so something that you had to you know, you said, you actually go to the state, you you interact with Gavin Newsom, you know, which is the whole thing. Sure we have our opinions on mister Newsom, Sure you know, and like how allied are you as an ally? Like you say, and you know if you were complicated. We can't always agree on the same things, you know what I'm saying, Like, but like that's correct. There's been there have been times where it's been like, hey, you know what, Sue.

He's doing something dope, and then other times when he's not, yeah.

Doing something dope. The other times it's like, bro, who are you?

Yeah, right, like what is happening right now?

So so obviously you know when you go up there, you're you're not interacting with him, You're interacting with his team, right.

Yeah.

The one time I actually met him, I went to the California Democratic Party convention and shoot some twelve in San Diego, and I just went with a friend, just showed up.

I was not a delegate. I was a union riff already, but I had no official role.

I just showed up and walked around the San Diego Hilton, which is also where they founded San Diego Comic Con yeah, and uh.

And I got to meet a lot of.

Officials, including some inland ones, including some really famous people like Nancy Pelosi's daughter. But I went up to I went up to at the time Lieutenant governor knew him and basically thanked him because he had just voted against the tuition hype for the Cal States and UC.

And I was and I went to cal say Samary.

Know, I have my master's in poetry by MFA and poetry from Cal say Samardino. And so I was still a student at the time, and he had just voted against a tuition increase.

So there's a picture of me meeting him from that from that time. That's all. That's great.

Yeah, so that and he had just done something good and he and he said humble things about it when I thanked him for it. So my one personal interaction with him was good. But since then, when in the capacity of the union, I deal with his bargaining team, like my our bargaining team deals with his bargaining team Instacramento.

Were okay, so give me one something that's been like that were what they were asking for. Yeah, it was like this is completely unreasonable, guys, Like what are you talking.

So every three years, every three years, our state employee contract goes up, uh huh, right, And so around the two year mark, we start gearing up negotiations, you know, and the state Newsome has the power to summon us for negotiation, and we have the power to summon his.

Team for negotiation.

Right, So at that two year mark we start negotiating. So in twenty twenty two, we started negotiating about the twenty twenty three expiring, you know, so that by the end of twenty three we could have a new contract.

When your state employee, it's difficult.

It's hard to strike, right, Like, you have to have an extremely high threshold to strike. Like if you're a a a private company in you're union, it's a lot easier to strike. You guys all want to strike, you strike Like episode of the Simpsons, temer became the union. They're just like devil plan, you know, and they started

Why are you trying to go help their kids?

Yeah, you know, it.

Was like, why you're not negotiating with us, but you're on TV talking about I want to help Harrison Ford and I want to help, you know, I want to

And then they're doing a bad thing here they're distracting you. You know, it's like a good things right.

So, like Newsome at times might be capitulating to Trump on something federally, but then he does something good state domestically in the state.

To kind of keep his rep up. Or the reverse.

Maybe he's fighting with Trump on something and that's good, but he's doing some wax shit like slow walking our contracts. Yeah, we're not Hollywood actors, right, so when our contract goes up, you didn't get the news about it, like with the Screen Actors Guild, because that's slapping your Hulu, that's stopping your Disney.

Plus, you know you hear all about that.

When our contract expires, you don't hear about it unless you're on disability.

Unless you're on one of our programs and then.

You can't go to the office because because we're understaffed or because something's going wrong with us. Right, So twenty twenty three was a pissed off time for us because he's offering us peanuts. He is offering to help everybody else. Let me help that actors, let me help the screenwriters. Let me fight Ron DeSantis. Let me go go to Washington and have federal fights. Meanwhile, we're our contract expired. And when our contract expired, there's things we lose. There's

Us in a bind.

So I organized a work site picket at my office in San Bernardino one hundred and two degree weather.

We can't strike, but we can picket.

Wow.

Okay, see I didn't know that.

You know.

So that's part of being a union rep is like what are my tools?

You know?

Like what are my tools?

Like you know your arsenal, know your weaponry? Right, And so I organized a picket. We had signs me and and I'm just I tear up and I think about this because I had coworkers, but I didn't think we're going to march in the heat with me.

I thought it might have been me by myself. You know.

I was one of only one or two union reps in my office at the time. Now we have four because I've been recruiting, you know, and I have good people in my office, you know.

But at the time, I was one of the only union reps.

There's people who I knew had legitis get the system about the union. I didn't expect it. But every single lunch, not just my lunch, at every lunch, we had people picketing in front of my office with signs. People were honking in support of us. Within a month or two, we got an eight percent raise on that next negotiation.

Let's go, you know.

And so you know, when we fight, we went. When we unite, we win, you know, like you don't. We're not fighting for nothing. And and and that was a duor die moment for me as a union organizer. Because I hadn't had many real fights yet, and I had I couldn't really point to my co workers and say, hey, we did this and got this.

We did this and got this.

So the fact that I got my co workers to march in one hundred two degree whether with me instead of just sitting in the air condition having lunch, and that we won that.

A few weeks later, they said, you're gonna get a eight percent rais.

Now that's hard, you know, Like I was like, yes, like proof of concept.

I have proof of concept. I'm not just wasting my co workers time.

I could tell you there's a tangible result to when we organized together.

See, that's these are the type of like wins we need to hear. Yes, we've been, we've been taking them mails like yes, sir speaking to l so, y'all's y'all's s CiU one thousand.

You know David ware though, right, that's his.

Name, m hm.

David Wareth is from one of the California s CiU branches. He's tightly connected to our union. But he's not one.

He's not one thousand, okay where, but he is CiU so he is part of us.

Yeah.

So when Ice, you know, invaded our streets, yes, he was outside, you know, doing what he had to do. I know SCIU set up the thing at Alvera Street. Yeah, they set up a location there for like to educate. It was just such a beautiful thing. But the first thing that got me out. The house was the rally for when he was detained, So like, man, tell me what was going on, and as much as you can behind closed doors. So most of the listeners here know this story because this show is like pretty tapped in.

But yeah, right, So what I would say is this to me an opportunity to talk about like the cultural differences with Inland and la right, because the Union is very progressive, right, but the Inland is a much more conservative area, right. And compared to Los Angeles, compared to San Francisco, compared to you know, it's not as big of a city.

It's more impoverished.

Yeah, you know, there's a lot of you know, even just the geography of it, right, people grew up in the city, like my mom grew up aroundhere.

You're trying about day and a monthday.

I was born in a Monthay, But there was a suburban exodus in the late eighties of like people who wanted to go from that east of late six to six area to raise their kids in the Inland because that was the more conservative suburbs.

Right.

So for me, every time something like that happens with something like a David Watar or something in one of the bigger cities happens, and we're fighting with the right wing about things. It's a matter of me educating my inland people about why we care.

And while we're all come okay, you know, and then there's.

Always some people and I got to respect us as a union organizer. I really have to be able to talk with my more conservative members because there are people in the union that are not super progressive warriors like me. They're just workers who want to be represented.

Right.

I was gonna say, that's actually a good point to hammer down because like last year, one of the shows on our network covered a union strike at a I want to say, it was like a metal plant in Alabama, like in the sticks of Alabama.

These are good old boys from the South.

But one thing we can agree on me is like pay me what I'm worth, Like YO say, Like, it just.

Seems pretty simple to me.

I don't understand how you've got to be a progressive to want to be paid what you worth, you know, So, sir, so, I think that that's a good point to say that, Like, even in a rather conservative place, all of us want to go home and eat, you know, and earn the wages that I that I should be pay me what I'm worth. It just it seemed that simple, exactly.

And so so that's a tension that happens, right, and this is kind this is probably a discussion that happens among a lot of progressive groups in general. That like, there's people who want you to focus on your on your issue, but there's also people who recognize that we're part of an interconnected society where it's like if the immigrants are being harmed, then the laborers are being harmed, if the artists are being harmed, then the nurses are being harmed, if the teachers, you know.

So there's always that divide.

But in the Inland, which is a more conservative area, there's especially that divide between people who are like, I don't want my union fighting about immigration and ice. I don't want my union fighting about the environment. Wow, I don't want the union fighting about LGBT. I just want the union to fight for my rais. I want the union to fight for my telework and that's all I

So that's kind of how I see that.

Yeah, did you feel like it landed?

Well, it always does with some and it doesn't with some. You know, I'll be honest with you.

There are people who just left the union after the Charlie Kirk killing.

Oh wow.

In my opinion, they're going to really weird logic jumps when they're like, well, the union endors Kamala, and Kamala has supporters that are happy about Charlie Kirk dines in the union.

Yeah, I'm like, uh so you don't want that raise.

You really ran string in that joint.

You know.

That is definitely the all way sunny in Philadelphia meme of just you like tieing these strings together like brouh.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah, right, And so, to be honest, there's been some of that.

You know, I'll say this that Charlie Kirk gave us more of that than that immigration stuff. But there's always those few whispers from a few people who are like they're just not down with the broader cause.

Those of us who are in the leadership of the union.

I think we have solidarity, you know, we have solidarity not just with other states workers, but with anyone who's in any SAU Yeah, with Team Stirts, for anyone who's in any union, and with Californians, anyone who is somebody who is in.

A vulnerable group, you know.

And so there's just always that difference of opinion. I would say, over let's say sixty percent hits in a good way and in my area, because it's so conservative, let's say forty percent.

It doesn't, you know in some way you work on. That's interesting.

Okay.

My last two questions would be this, like I'll give them both, Like, so, what are y'all currently kind of like pushing for. I'm assuming it has a lot to do with immigration and ice rays and stuff, but also in what ways can we as just a broader community help Well, how.

Do I put this?

So I work in downtown samur Dino, Okay, and my disability office is next to the Mexican Consulate.

Let's go.

First of all, we need to paint a picture of Sam Bernardino. I really feel like, yeah, for those that don't know California, the nature of what Sam Bernardino is is a part of this story that you might be missing? First of all, like, Okay, all that you pictured, everything that everybody else pictures around what you thought Compton was in the nineties, all the pictures.

That you think.

YO said that, you go, oh, it's really Sam Bernardino, Like YO say, yeah, So, I mean, I'm trying to say this in a way that's a descriptive and not derogatory, because obviously, like it's always KLi love for me and you know, I'll of course, but there is a certain there's a certain part of Sam Bernardino that feels like like just a spirit of like we just gave up

It's eerie.

It just feels like when people talk about the Forgotten Man, the Forgotten America.

I'm like San Bernardino, like, yes, Winne gave up on.

Yeah.

It has recently gone from two hundred and thirty thousand people to only two hundred thousand people. But also probably because a lot of people that left were the most impoverised people. Our poverty rate went from let's say, in the post Bush Too recession, like twenty ten, we had a thirty percent poverty rate. We were the most impopulous city in the state. We've gotten down to like seventeen percent poverty, which is still bad. Yeah, you know, that's

It's like the air quality is some of the worst in the state. Yeah, you know, we we have real problems. You know, we got real problems.

And in downtown downtown smer do you know, is a lot of where the problems are. We want to get it, like downtown Redlands and downtown Riverside and some of the other NICs of downtowns.

But it's just not there yet.

And there are people absolutely working on that and like there are a couple of alleyways in the city that sounds so it sounds so humble, But we have a couple of alleyways in the city that got five hundred thousand dollars grants recently to kind of make them an ARC's alleyway to kind of look like something more like the Claremont Village.

Let's go, you know.

And so yeah, you know, and so we are always working on it.

And I will always you know, as somebody who founded co founded the Inland Empire Music Award Show and other platforms that I put on not just my art, but I helped put on other artists in the Inland. I will always tell you about the amazing tacology could get in my city, the amazing small businesses you could support my city, the amazing art community, yeah, put on by by my ogs like Judah one of Pomona, like Noah James of the Inland and Lisa j and many.

Others you know who helped build a really.

Beautiful ecosystem like there's there's please come to summer, you know and hit me up and I'll take you to save beautiful sports of it, you know.

But yes, it's it's rough to your point.

I know, I want you to get to the next thing.

But to your point, that was the same as that picture of content to where it's like yes, like in the sense that like we know it's dangerous, we know there's poverty, we know there's that, but there's beauty here, dope stuff you know, and let me come like and again like just the hood rules where it's like, well you and me like, oh, you're good.

You know what I'm saying, Like, you know.

And some of them may yeah, like we can, we can definitely shine lights. Like I said, Like, you know, I've talked about Noah James on this show.

You know what I'm saying. I've talked about Judo one.

You know that I talked about since here C four like the people that like I came, I came up with, you know what I'm saying.

Yeah, the Inland Empire.

A lot of the stuff that the nation attributes to LA is really ie.

You know what I'm saying, Yes, sir, And we know, like we know because they're not lying about it.

We know that matter of fact, nobody has pride about I he got pride boy.

Like they're like no, no, no, no, we are to Inland.

And I love that about y'all.

Anyway, I'm wearing my Jaden Daniels check it out.

Yup, yup, yop yup.

You know, yeah, because the I he got a hide, I gotta hides.

So yeah, okay, So anyway, so your office is next to the Mexican Consulate.

Mexican Consulate, right, and so I've actually spent my you know, I've been at this office in Samuray, you know, since twenty fourteen, and five years before that I worked in the Riverside office.

But I've been in my office in Chemuary No.

Twenty fourteen, and I have gone to so many I've infiltrated so many right wing protests that are in front of the Mexican Consulate.

Yes, and like and like, so I'll go hang out with them. They're like, oh, what do you guys, what are you guys doing?

And then I'll like take their markers, I'll take their posters and I'll just kind.

Of be like, oh, yeah, maybe you have a point there.

And then I'm like I'm in my office and then my secretary is, you know, the secretary of my office.

Is like, oh, where did you get these markers? Loot.

I got you some mark because it's you know, and so I'll infiltrate right wing protests. But but on the flip side, lately, you know, Ice knows they could come to my corner. And my corner in downtown has the Chase Bank, the Wells Fargo Bank, the Mexican Consulate, the Disability Office, the old city Hall building, like it's like the hub. It's one of the downtown hubs of the city. And Ice has been coming in snatching people up in front.

Of my office. It happened.

It's happened twice at least in the last month. And one of the days that it happened, I was in the office. I called my congressman, I called the mayor. I got all the local authorities involved. By the end of the day, the horse mounted unit of my city's police was like patrolling to make sure Ice wasn't messing with us. And tell you, homie, what a weird place this is. I've never been so happy to see the regular cops right right right.

You know what is this?

What is this?

Timeline?

Are you doing to me? What are you doing to me?

We're like, I'm I'm in seven eleven six in the morning, getting my getting my coffee, and I see regular cops. I'm like, thank you sir for at least showing a warrant. Yeah, yeah, exact, rest me, yeah exactly, you know, because Ice is doing none of that. None of that. They're not doing warrants to do it. They took I want to cry.

They did.

They pushed a wife out of the way. She's like, what are you doing. They took the husband, tossed him in the band and drove off. It all happened so fast that no one was able to film it. Damn you No, in this era, no one was able to film it.

And they know that. How that they're doing it that fast.

That's the trick. Yeah, that's the trick. That's what we've been telling.

Like a lot of people have asked me, just friends from out of town, like dude, has it has it toned down? And I was like, no, it just went underground. It's like they just they're a lot more sneaky now, Like it's not this big.

Display of power.

It's more the sniper guerrilla warfare to where like you said, you just getting your gas, I usally how your pumping gas? And then somebody just and it's so fast I can't film it, you know what I'm saying. Yes, And the hard part for me is like is to your point to where it's like since you know, identifying yourself, like you might not even be an ice agent.

And that's a thing that happened.

That's the thing that there are people who impersonate law enforcement officers and go harassed people just on a racist basis. Yeah, you know, and and and it's arguable that the Trump administration is empowering people like that.

M man. Yeah, so so yeah, it absolutely is happening.

To be honest, my union, Uh, we're going to always support the actions that are fighting back against it. But the but the only things that we really have jurisdiction to actually fight.

H is the labor related word, you know.

And so you know, we we actually just got telework extended in exchange for delaying our rais you know, because the states really broke right now for a lot of reasons. Yeah, we delayed for two years a raise that we were about to get in July, so there were already a couple of months past not having that raise. But in exchange,

Support the broader community. And even though it's my union.

For example, on Wednesdays we have a lot of our meetings, we're doing a phone banking for Prop fifty right, which is the whole redistrict, which gives us the power to take some seats away from the Republicans. I know there's a lot of there's a debate to be had there, but ultimately it's us trying to take keep some power

Hit me up.

Hit up anybody you know in the Inland Empire chapter of SEIU, and we can bring you to a phone bank in Ontario and we'll get pizza or barbecue or whatever, and we.

Could phone bank against these dang Republicans. Yeah, man, Man Tangent, I appreciate this, man, I appreciate you.

Man.

I've wanted to have wanted you to have me on I. I love your show and I love you man. I think you're such a cool dude.

I think wise.

I think that you're engaging in the community in a cool way. You're an artists I respect a lot, and not just me. I mean people friends like Sincere, like explain to me why you're significant to them and why you're an influence and.

Stuff like that. So I appreciate even being on your radar. Brother, Man, stop it, stop it some more.

I'm just kidding. My wife says that, okay, so perfect.

Well, then tell us how people need to hear your music, how they can get in touch with you, how they can follow you.

Give me all the links.

Oh yeah, yeah yeah, So T A n J I n T is Tangent.

You know you can find me on everything on Twitter, Instagram, you know Facebook, what was it The Inland Empire Music Award show that I'm a co director and co founder of. Is that it's only Empire dot com. That's its only Empire dot com. And also I want to encourage Inland Empire artists. You know, you still have from now to the end of September to submit to the award show.

And we've been doing it for three years. We partner with nonprofits and businesses.

We throw a dope ass it's pretty gala, you know, award show at a little art center in downtown sammer Deane with the Garcia Center for the Arts. Or We give away real trophies and real awards and we have red carpet media and performances. It's like it's like the Grammys for the Inland Empire. So you know, please get involved in It's only Empire dot com. That's only Empire now.

Fam Likely. West Coast Avengers is.

My first group, the more nerd core Inland Empire stuff, and we got an album that came out just under a year ago.

Now the Harvest. So I'm everywhere. You can catch everything all over the place. Yeah, yeah, tangent.

Wiggle, thank you so much, my brother, Hey, thank you man much love.

Welcome in to that and here a podcast about why everything feels absolutely awful and also deeply unhinged. I'm your host Vi A long and oh boy, thing feel bad. I don't know. This is my bost This is my most Robert a while with me to talk about why everything sort of feels like this and the disconnect between the fact that like everyone actually hates Trump and the way that's being not covered and reflected in everything that

I'm very busy, I.

Think it says bricklayer.

That's right.

Yeah, who also has a new book called The Extended Universe out April fourteenth next year that is about the way that Disney sort of took over the world through the deployment, expansion and usage of the violence of the copyright regime, a thing that is suddenly very relevant again in our weird Jimmy Kimmel hours, So we'll be talking some more about that and about Disney's long history of fascist bullshit towards the end.

Of the Yeah.

Yeah, well it's it's it's a pleasure to be hearing me at thanks, and yeah, we are all Jimmy's Kimmel, you know, in this moment, I think, oh.

God, oh no, Jimmy's Kimble.

Oh that's that.

Okay. So I think that the place I wanted to start is with this like question of like, why does it feel like this? Yeah, And I think part of the reason it feels like that is that Trump's approval rating is really low, Like people don't actually like him. It's like forty one's reading is forty one percent. It's down like a point in September, even with all the

Yeah exactly.

Yeah, There's been a few things I think are interesting about this. There there are signs that this is actually really really there's something substantive happening here. One of them was a special election that I think people have paid attention to for about two days and then forgot about, which was a special election in Iowa which prevented the GOP from getting a two third supermajority in the state legislature.

Yeah, unhinged.

They're doing like all elections like this like that. It's it's being ridiculous. Like again this this is like this is again like voting for people who are like not popular, but it's like literally any alternative people are like, holy shit. Western Iowa is like nah fuck this, this fucking sucks ass.

Like it's yeah.

A thing that you know, I've been following a bit is that farmers are freaking out. Yeah, soybean soybean crops and corn crops are gonna be rotting in the fields. You know, I think soybeans, so soy in particular, something like fifty percent of the US soy crop is traditionally export. And by traditionally I mean every year exported to China. This year China is not buying any American soybeans yep. So literally half of the market is going to die.

Yeah. American farmers are like the most bailed out class of people who are not like major corporations in the entire world, and it's not working. Like they keep being like, oh it's okay, we'll just like give you a bunch of money, and it's not enough because China has decided not to buy any of this, so I mean crop. But it's like okay, yeah, And this is something we talked about like at the beginning of the administration, which is that like this administration has been going through and

Yeah, exactly.

I think there's actually an interesting sort of parallel here with tech stocks and with like the economy in general that has been sort of you know, on the ground for most of us has felt like it's been in recession since twenty twenty. Yeah, right, you know of different sizes and localities, but it's felt bad for a while.

Now it's really bad.

No one can get a job, yep, right, Like things are really like, prices are going.

Up, up up.

Everyone feels bad, and yet the stock market is still achieving highs. And I think there's sort of a generalized equivalent strategy of like make it look like things are normal and good, and like that will actually just support things materially, and like, yep, I mean maybe it will forever.

Maybe the bottom will never fall out. I don't know. I don't think that's I think that's not bad bad, but like, okay.

Yeah, well but and I think the interesting part of this too is if you look at what's going on with the economy, and it's also word noting, right, Like, the economy nominally in sort of econometric terms, looks fine. They're not fine, but it looks sort of okay, right, the stock market is still growing. There's technically like economic growth. But comma, we both saw this chart a couple of

We are actually living through the famous old tweet the drill Is it drill about the candles? Someone out fixed my economy living in the candles street. The whole economy is candles.

Yeah.

Yeah, And this is thing that our colleague at this run argues that there's just there is not enough money in the world to just continuously bail these companies out. Yeah, Like there just isn't right the cash flow of these companies. It's like they've managed to achieve a cash flow rate that like can't be replaced by government contracts, which is

Yeah no, and I think you know you you went exactly where you know, hitked about going, but we're gonna go. Which is that like part of what is so crazy making about this current moment is precisely that disconnect between sort of the on the ground experience that everyone's been

No.

One of the charts I really am obsessed with is a chart from like Bloomberg, which is like a small business owner confidence from like twenty ten to twenty twenty five, and like if you look like from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty, which is the first Trump term, it goes up like five hundred percent, right.

She's just goes up.

It just just as huge.

It's the highest that's been by huge margin, and it just drops again in twenty twenty. So it finally made me understand why so many Libs were like so committed to the vibe session analysis, because there was a massive vibe inflation under the first Trump administration. So the reason people felt like the economy was good was because small

You know, if you don't run the numbers, you're likely to believe it.

You know, like if if everyone around you is saying that, like, there's no reason to doubt it, unless I mean, you know, you don't you don't really believe your boss at the time, but you know what I'm saying, Like it just has it has an effect of making everyone feel.

Like things are better.

That chart started to creep up again after Trump's election November twenty twenty four, before Liberation Day, but on the announcement of the Liberation Day, traffs tanks.

So that's gone.

Yeah, it's gone. Yeah. And I think that's a really vital sort of component of what's happening. Is like, you know, we talk a lot about how so there's sort of these like self contained like reality tunnels that people are

Grift bulls, supplements, stacks, Yeah exactly, Yeah, Like you know, it's another reality Tonnel mea.

Oh these products and services, dammit, that was a better one than I was. I was gonna do. You know what else is a scam, But these products and services that support this podcast. We are so back. We have never been more back. I want to kind of also talk about what's been happening structurally with the media as this has been going on, which is that Trump and his party has staged a pretty successful takeover of a

And they you know, they cracked their knuckles and warmed up under COVID, right like this this is also contiguous in a way, and yeah, yeah, no, I think that that's exactly right. And I think part of what we saw in the last week, I mean, I know we're going to talk about this a bit that like the last week when we're recording this, which was the week of the Charlie Kirk memorializing when everyone pretended that ventilating a Nazi was like the greatest tragedy that had the

They had that Charlie Kirk documentary.

They were like, we're gonna film it on you know, on Sinclair, all the places where we would be showing Jimmy Kimmel.

They just canceled it. They put it on YouTube.

Yeah, twenty six thousand views. This means I am very very proud of this. More people listen to me complaining about the way that everything everywhere, all at once, was spreading the porschwise patriarchal ideology of the family. More people listen to me talk about that on this show that watched the stupid fucking Charlie gud worry.

Sorry to that man, but people do not care, Like people.

Don't care about that guy and and it didn't And also as you said the opening, his poles have gone down. People are like shut up about this, like they don't care. It doesn't work like this, like poles aren't everything. But like I think this disconnect. It's so hard is that if you are mostly getting your information from a media environment, which all of us do, Like that's how most of us get all of our information. That's this is not

Okay, I didn't talk about this for a second because this is so fucking un hite. What Okay, so his like surgeon or whatever was like, oh yeah he was. He started his surgeon wrote a thing about like this bone that doesn't exist, yeah that he was like, oh yeah, he had this really thick bone there that stopped the bullet. And this got like picked up by like Fox News, who's that running a story about this magical iron bone in Charlie Kirk's neck that like God put there or something to save I just.

It's it's so I can read the headline for you. Hang on, I've got it here.

Oh god, this is Fox News on x There's a picture of Charlie Kirk that says surgeon says, Charlie Kirk's body stopped bullet in quote absolute miracle that saved others, TPUSA says, and then quote man of steel, Charlie Kirk's body stopped a bullet that would typically quote just go through everything and it was quote an absolute miracle. Nobody else was killed his surgeon. Tod's turning point, us, So that's weird behavior that people don't like.

That's not yeah.

No, So I think like basically they have this capacity to do this like really really intense, unified message across the entire spectrum of the media, and we're seeing it again right now with like NPR publishing basically does tile it all actually cause autism, so the science.

Isn't out yet, you know, or whatever like as their headline, you know.

Yeah, So like obviously, like that's scary if you're used to a reality which is shaped largely by the media, and and Trump has gotten into office twice based on a media reality shaping effect.

The media has been the.

Main tool, both social and mainstream, for putting him into power. So it's understandable to take it seriously because it does need to be taken seriously.

But there's other stuff going on.

Well, And like the funniest version of this was just how fast Disney caved on bringing Jimmy Kimmel back, yes, which was like sub one week.

Yeah, no, it was sub one week.

And you know, to me, that says that actually the boycott spread real fast and real far. Like there was a Disney adult on TikTok right who was sort of like giving people instructions on how to cancel their Disney World vacations and was like canceling his Disney World wedding, you know, and like this was like all happening really really fast. People were really mad. And you know, yeah,

They hate this.

Yeah, and people don't actually want this in dipshit to just literally and you know, and he's trying to do this again, right, he's apparently trying to sue Disney, like they don't want the fucking orange guy to be able to just straight up say what is legal to say on TV. Yeah, which is the thing that he is attempting to do right now.

And the other thing about it that I think is really important and relevant is that a better dictatorship doesn't go to the press and fire this man. They pull strings behind this. They get him to retract like on his show in a way that causes no attention, and the people who follow Kimmel see it enough to understand that power has been pulled behind the strings, but they probably don't really think much about it.

Right.

That is how like real, really smooth smooth repression of a free press into a bot press involves a lot of strings being pulled behind the scenes, and in fact, it has been happening for twenty years in America. There has been a lot of that going on. Part of what's so obscene about this whole situation in a certain way is that Trump just needs to do less. Things have been set up for fascism for a while.

He just needs to do less. And he can't help himself. They can't help themselves because they're you know, because they need it to be in this sort of public mode. And also he's lost his you know, his juice.

But yeah, yeah, well and it's also just like, I mean, this is so partially Trump is just like pathologically obsessed with late night comedy, right because he's a TV guy and so he's just mad on Red and maden nude online. Except like the previous version of it were like you were just like throwing shit at your television set in like nineteen fifty five, which is a real really terrified

Yeah, but they don't, so vote for them.

We are back, So you know, I think it's worth noting that, Like yeah, no, like like the immediate financial pressure of you know, just just the collision of weight hold on like the people who buy things, which is most people admittedly, like Disney adults are a very narrow subset of people, but like the speed and rapidity of which reality, which is people don't like this guy hit the like sort of you know, just just like just like sort of smashed through this like tunnel of the

Hey, yeah, I mean, part of what's been so funny about this week for me personally, and that's what really matters obviously, is that is that is that, like you know, when we went into this administration and we started seeing what they were doing, I was like, I can't believe I'm writing a book about free trade and law fair right, like warfare by law, like you know, like sort of this massive corporate legal apparatus that has been supported by

Talking about something else.

Say fast fashion companies, they actually own very very read little materially, so their offices are leased. Mostly their factories are contracted. You know, everyone who makes the sewing is contracted. They might own their stores, but they probably lease their stores. Right, They like have very few direct employees other than like store level if they don't franchise, but they might even franchise. They might not even employ the store level people, but

Really, this has always been the dream of reproduction of capital, which is to have a company with no assets that makes money exactly, and they're so close, they're so cleanly.

Close, and all this stuff is destroying it.

So I was like, well, great, now I've written this whole book about how Disney you know, is actually really like a state actor, and like they have they have like a sovereign territory in Florida that people talk about a little bit called the Reedy Creek Improvement District you may or may not know about.

People talked about Celebration Florida a bit.

When that happened in the two thousands, which is like a weird creepy company town that they run. They actually own a huge section of It's like two counties it's larger than the size of Manhattan in central Florida. Jesus Christ, what the conflict with the Santis over that don't say gay bill, which people you know, interpreted largely through the lens of the you know, horrifyingly reactionary politics.

Who's pushing, which is understandable.

Is also a conflict over sovereignty in Florida because they don't pay taxes in the same way, they make their own laws, they have their own police force.

So basically, Jesus Christ.

Is they made the first networks.

They did it, they did it, and they've been doing it for thirty years. That probably sixty sixty nine is when they get the deal for READI creat They've had it for a long a long time. People don't love to talk about this for some reason. I think it's

Really, people are.

Like, why are you doing that over Jimmy Kimmel, Like that's weird, You're a creepy Yeah. But then also he's also destroying legitimacy of everyone. It's pulling everything down around him. It's a family annihilation, right, He's so angry about twenty twenty and like being tried that he's just going to rip everything down around him.

Wow.

I just said a lot of different things, but all of which is to say, like, what's so interesting about like the Trump regime in some ways and the relationship to Disney is that Disney has for so long built this image of America that has managed to persist like across and against you know, a century of increasingly violent, ineffective and visible imperialism like in Korea and Vietnam and then Iraq and Afghanistan. It was so crucial to the

Right yeah. So if you look at the history of.

Like Disney in general, Hollywood, and intellectual property management in general, what you can see is the way that we have that this this media apparatus has been built. When I say media apparatus, I think people tend to think, you know, when you talk about images or the spectacle or whatever, they just think about.

Stuff on TV.

But like, no, it's also all the products that circulate through society. And it's like the way that you get paid for your job with you know, like the idea of clout is like actually part of that, Like it does function as a form of payment, right, Like it's not like people make fun of that, like oh good, but like then everyone acts as though it's real, right, and when everyone acts though.

It's real, it's real. It's a social relation.

So the entire spectacular economy, which is built entirely on images that rely only on being forced through a sort of massive group thing from the top of the economy and the political class, was built by these corporations, but it was built explicitly to you know, reap as much wealth as possible for their shareholders.

Yeah, yeah, have to make money. Yeah.

Trump is too perfect a product of that, and this regime is too perfect a product of that. And now it's all it's all you know, it is its own grave digger.

You know.

Yeah. The port has a line about like the way that the spectacle sort of like intrudes into and like becomes reality. And like if Disney is sort of like the stage manager of this, right, Like Trump just is the thing like come to life and powering through it, and she doesn't because he is the image and not the thing that creates the image. He has different interests, yes, than the people who create the image. Who are you know,

Exactly.

It's worth remembering that, you know, although the damage he's doing is extremely real. Yeah, he genuinely is fighting over the election and over like Komi, Like he is like he really believes these things. This is a regime that believes the things that for example, Carl Rove would teach people to say to get away with doing what they

They were around him.

So they would just they would just close up the puncture, they would close up the susture. They'd work really really hard, right. So what I mean by that is like Trump would say something absolutely unhinged, and the New York Times would be like the controversial statement from President Trump, right, which like completely normalizes it, and like everyone would sort of pretend that he hadn't just said the most unhinged lunatication.

Yeah, that he was speaking of four seasons total landscage.

Yeah, right, like just like shit would happen exactly and everyone would sort of try it would normalize it. And that normalization repaired the fabric of the spectacle. And it made Trump's fans really happy because you get to watch August institutions such as the Washington Post going over backwards to make an obvious, obscene lie seem like a reasonable claim. Right, So they were humiliated in fixing the spectacle behind him

They have been purged.

They have all been purged and controlled, and now they all just repeat what he says. And what ends up happening is that the spectacle just remains torn and people see through it like it's just not working anymore. And I think what's scary is that it still feels like they're repairing the spectacle around his claims because the entire media is speaking as one, and the Democrats are speaking as one, and the Republicans are speaking as one, and

Yeah, yeah, And I think it's also we're saying, like the way that we're talking about this in terms of his and popularity and reality, and you know, in terms of why it feels like this, it doesn't mean that there's not horrible shit happening constantly, right, And that's the other part of his ability to sort of eliminate that, the legitimization part of the spectacle was that like that it was to some extent restraining him, right, Like, that's the reason why there wasn't just like there were a

And I think that's like, I think that's really important and a thing that I think happens sometimes when I sort of make this analysis with my friends. I think they think that I'm saying that like fascism isn't here, or that like this isn't a fascist regime, or that like they don't want to like.

Do Nazism like they very clearly do.

Yeah.

My analysis has been like since February.

I mean part of what's happened is in February, when the dose stuff was going on, I was like, well, the American Republic is over, like we'll never be able to go back, Like now what do we do? So I think like a lot of the disjuncture and the confusion and the craziness feeling that people are having is because people are coming to those realizations on separate timelines.

Learn a third one, pick one, literally pick one, fucking anyone that's got the maid too. There are so many like you have you are.

Spoiled for exactly.

Yeah, yeah, you can do. You could do if you know, pick a decade.

You know, you like the seventies, go for swat though in Indonesia, you like the eighties Brazilian military dictatorship, no problem, Like, or you could do Korea in the eighties. You've got lots of choices. Oh, the fifties, go for Greece, no problem, don't.

Worry about it.

The reason that I bring all that up is just to say that, like, things are really bad and if we don't, you know, throw down, this will successfully build an authoritarian fascist state eventually, just by the sheer inertia of the power that they have available on the time that they can wait. But as you're saying, and as I've been sort of seeing, also, there's tremendous amounts of resistance.

And people talk about that as being terrifying, and it is terrifying.

The desire they have to do really brutal ice raids and to use every resource available in them is scary. But also if they don't have the FBI's eyes on the ball.

Which they clearly don't anymore.

They have redirected the FBI, they are not nearly as cognizant of what's going on in terms of distance as they were even six months ago.

No, like if you look at the guy who shot Charlie Kirk, right, this is like Carly Kirk is like their guy. Right that the FBI is so stripped down right now that with a full court press, the only reason they caught that guy was because he didn't understand that discord wasn't private, and he like dropped his gun and didn't pick it.

Up again, and his dad recognized it.

Right, And if he had done those two things, they wouldn't have found him, Like they didn't catch him. He turned himself in, right, And that's again someone assassinated like their guy and they couldn't find him. Like this repressive apparatus it is really really scary and very good at doing the thing that it's focused on doing right now, which is like dragging immigrant families from their homes at like five in the morning by blowing their fucking doors

Right, you know, it's worth knowing that the RSS, which is his brown shirts, like has four.

Million people in it.

Yeah, yeah, right, Like, I mean you know it has million.

They have millions of brown Shirts, right, Like Ice is having trouble hiring twelve thousand extra agents in a continent

Yep.

There is ultimately a material limit to what you can do. You can't just speak reality into existence for that long.

Yeah, And that's the thing, right, if it was possible, did you speak reality into existence, we would all be living on a neo conservatism, right, there would be like a pure, well functioning oil extracting American client state in a rock right now. And I don't know what the fuck they would have done with a guinnessent, but like if, if, if you could just do the thing. And I talked

Like it's yeah, they're absolutely like unhinged. They're horrible and thank god they are so unpopular and so bad at this. Yeah, because if they were just a little bit better at this, I think it's very clear what they want.

We're different. We're screwed. Yeah, like we go we go under like four months, but that hasn't happened because they're not good at this and they're tearing apart the very institutional apparattus like Disney, like they're tearing apart the very institutional apparattus is that were designed to like propagate them.

And Disney was gun shy because of the fight with the fight with Santas didn't go that well for them, Yeah, surprisingly, you know, like they had some trouble with that, and so they were gun shy, like going into the administration, like they were very quiet, like they were not rocking the boat.

They were making lots of statements about how like, you know, we.

Support it, Like he didn't have to goad them into taking a position in the culture war, Like they were just very glad that they weren't fighting off Da Santis anymore, and that they weren't fighting off you know the Daily Wire, you know, claiming that they were you know, whatever the

There's no reason trum should spped that. They is what they thought.

No, It's like they were implementing like a lot of the culture wars they wanted in terms of like Okay, we're going back to white people. We're never having another non white character again, like eat shit.

Like they canceled they they're canceling TV shows with just like quick your character is Like they're just they're just doing stuff like that. They're they're doing everything that the regime wants. But as you mentioned, he's just sitting there watching TV and like like throwing his remote around and like unfortunately his remote like dictates US policy.

M I think that's an important note to close on because like his remote dictates US policy to the extent that everyone pretends that it does. And one of the things that can start happening in the in the end stages of these kind of regimes, is that like the levers of power become unglued from the mechanisms of the state.

Yeah.

Right, So he just like declared that antifas like a domestic terrorist organization. Right, We're gonna be talking about that later this week, possibly earlier this week. Got to know when this episode's coming out. But that doesn't do anything in and of itself. He's just like waving a magic

And as we saw, as you're already talking about the Charlie Kirk Special doesn't go up, right, they say like the yeah, the COVID vaccines are like, we're going to restrict them. And most of the pharmacies are just like just check a box saying you need it, like you know, like not in every state. But again, like these massive institutions, they can't really get them in line, So why are you letting them get you in line?

Yeah?

And remember, you know, like they had better control of their institutional apparatuses in twenty twenty and the outcome of that was there was a giant uprising and they put the president in a bunker or a thing that he's still mad about to this day. Right, even when it looks like they have total control, they don't. And I don't know if he's gonna like end up in a Hitler bunker. But look, as of right now, as it stands, the record of Trump administration's ending with Trump hiding in

Oh, you can go to Haymarket and that's who's putting it out and they have a list of links. You can also go to my blue Sky account vickyacab dot b Sky dot social and you can find a link there.

Yeah, And where can people find you in your work?

Car Shiny things dot com. It's the Collective Anarchist Writers or any other acronym you like.

C AW. That's where I'm working the most regularly.

Now, good crowth, heming. That's great, that's great.

It's Corvid based.

Yeah, we love a Corvid based economy.

Thanks so much for having me Amiya, Yeah, thanks for coming on.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. It's me James today, and I'm very lucky to be joined by a couple of people who I am about to introduce to discuss the very important topic of does Tyler and O'll give your baby autism? I think we probably already know the answer, but nonetheless we have half an hour to talk about it. So you were here doctor Carve Hodeth laughing, that's uh me, that's cave. Yeah. Many of you will know him, but he's a medical doctor and host of the House of

Fucked it up? Them fighting words, James, them fighting.

Yeah, no, I know, yeah, this is yes. Like when people call me a sociologists, I understand, or even worse, an anthropologist.

It's a pleasure to be here and no worries. Tyler is Canadian, so to see him correct somebody on something makes me happy. I'm very sorry, yeah, but that's why we get him on.

He's very sorry, he's very sorry about that. I love Tyler very much. He comes on my show not infrequently. And one really pleasant thing that's happened, one little bright spot in the last I don't know five years of terror that have been happening medically is seeing Tyler gradually over time become grumpier and more willing to fight.

That's the only bright spot I've had. Thank you Tyler for that.

Yeah, I imagine that's the side effect of your consumption of a seat to metaphana may Yeah.

Got a cut back, bro got cut back? Yeah?

All right. For those not familiar, where are we talking about?

Thailan All?

Might be the name you're familiar if you, especially of your American people, like to use brand names a little more. I still find that very confusing, and I've lived here for a better part of two decades. But why are we talking about tail and all?

Tyler?

Do you want to introduce this concept? Sure so, Yeah. Talent All goes by Paracenamol in UK and other places in the world. It's a ceta minifin here, so it really is not talking about talent although the shorthand that the political people who've been talking about it have specifically called out the brand Talentol, which is bizarre. But this stems from both a mission that RFK Junior when he took over as the HHS sort of had, which was to find the cause of autism, which is his political

You know?

And we kind of do it backwards. It kind of makes sense because you couldn't really do an RCAT on pregnant women to start with if you didn't know any reason for the for the drug. So it's one of those sort of loopholes. And so this natural conversation has resulted in science that points in a number of directions. Does the seed of Menifhite cause autism? Can't be answered by the current science because it's all cohort data, it's

I think that there are a lot of things that Maha and RFK Junior talk about there are just insane and you can dismiss out of hand. This is a topic that is not complete rubbish. It is something that has a little bit of nuance and we can talk about as Tyler was just mentioning, there is some evidence that there might be a small relationship, but the real key is determining if it's a causal relationship or just correlative. Are they just related for some reason or another, or

The sort of twenty twenty five update is and I think this might have I think, as that we learn more about it, this might have been something that was either solicited or developed in tandem with RFK and his goals. But there was a publication in twenty twenty five by I think the Harvard Dean of Medicine, who has been a plaintiff's witness for attorneys battling talentol in developing autism. So there is a bit of a financial conflict of interest there.

Right, Yeah.

Baccarelli, Yeah, doctor Buccarelli, who published a study called a Navigation Review, and it's basically a science y version of let me tell a story, and here's the evidence that supports it. Basically, what they did is they took the number of studies, they counted the number that pointed towards talinol as a factor, and they counted against it, and they found about twenty something in total. The majority of them found a link to talent al and autism, and

Right, yeah, in terms of someone's playing games with evidence when they've already decided what the completion would it be. Yeah, let's talk about this fascination with autism that exists in the MAHA. Right, make America healthy again. For those who are not familiar what's happening here, people are probably diagnosed with autism at a higher rate now than they were when these people were young. Right, that is not however, well,

Sure, I mean I'll jump in first. So there's a number of ways to test whether or not the rate is truly increasing. So the first thing to say is, over the world, we've seen a gradual increase in the global population that has autism from about zero point eight percent of the population to about two percent of the population. That's what's happened over the past twenty five years of

I do think that the diagnostic criteria has expanded and that's part of why we see more.

But yeah, I think the.

Two things we know that are related are some genetic predisposition if there's people in the family that have it, and the older age of patients as we get older, I'm an older father myself. You know, you see more with older patients, and that's more common now than it's ever been before.

So these are all a part of it.

Once you take a look, for example, going back to that Swedish study in twenty twenty four that was so good, that sibling study looks at the genetics of it, and once you count for the genetics of it, you start to be able to say, Okay, maybe this's other stuff like tile mall isn't important?

Yeah?

Yeah, is there a gender element to this as well?

Yeah?

I may have misremembered here. My understanding is that women FEN people tended to be diagnosed at a lower rate until relatively recently.

Yeah, so not only is there a gender component, but I do think that the biological sex of the child has an impact on the genetic expression, because it seems like the transmission to males is higher than the transmission to females. So there might be something buffering about that extra X chromosome. You know, we have this shrimpy little Y chromosome that makes us all degenerates. You only have one Y chromosome? Sorry, are you a superman?

I have two whys caves y why you know, Harry, my ears are so.

There are a number of disorders that the extra X chromosome is protective for, and I do wonder if that's the case for autism. But what's also true is we have stereotypes about what girls should be and what boys should be, and that leads to boys being diagnosed with autism more frequently than girls. So the girl that's quiet and awkward and anxious is labeled as an anxious kid a lot more quickly than when you see that in a boy that the parents think autism or the clinician

Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that, because that's one of the worst things about In a sense, one of the most damaging things about is where people who are living happy, healthy and fulfilled lives are being like slandered or pathologized to rided by the government of this country

That's what really bothers me, is like we're always trying to find ways to blame mothers. This is yeah, this is a mantle and I apologize for that. Listener, Please don't at me for that. Yeah, but part of what

Is just nuts? Yeah, And to piggyback on that, you know, like it's really normal. It was normal advice in twenty twenty four for us to say, yeah, you can use talent all, but try to use it sparingly. We're not really sure use it when you need it though, because we do know that pain and fever and these types of things are bad for the baby, right, you know, So this this kind of way in which it's now

Please?

This administration has done something. Trump in general has done something that has blown my mind, which is somehow, time and time again, I find myself the FAI people and things that I would never want to defend. Like, first of on watching Jimmy Kimmel, I don't know how that happened. Yes, I blame Trump for that. Second, like, tylanol is a

Right.

Yeah, Personally, I'm a champion of all talanol should be like the UK, it should be in individually wrapped pieces because there is evidence that that reduces the rate of intentional overdose and even ic overdoses that cause liver failure. So yeah, take away freedoms and right this is the medical freedom crowd. It's amazing.

Yeah, we should take an advertising break and then come back. So we'll do that.

Oh god, that would be fantastic if I could take it now advertising. I could use an ad right now.

So bad.

It's going to be for fucking lemon pepper water, which is the only pain treatment you.

Should be taking. Bark to put between your teeth.

For sure.

Go get some leaves and fucking eat them. What can get wrong? All right, we're back. Thank you for that message from Leaf Pain Relief.

Hit the spot.

It's good. Don't eat leaves. I saw someone posing with a they were taking their graduation pictures. Very nice setting. I'm not going to say the flower, I guess just in case, you can call it quite remarkable hallucinations and it is not a good idea to be like half in it. It's a nice looking flower. If you didn't know, you might have.

Well, now I want to know what the hell you're talking about. You're going to tell me later.

I'm assuming lived in California. Your whole life.

How do you not know this?

Yeah, I'll text you afterwards.

The dandelions?

Is it d I've been told not to.

It reminds me though there was a TikTok video of there's been a few of women proudly being pregnant and ingesting talanol. And to be clear, that's an insane response to this problem, like please don't take talanol. As a point, as k was saying before the break, right, helenol does deplete the glutathione in your body, and it is toxic to your liver. If you're a deliver, doesn't have the

And most pregnant women who want to keep the baby are very judicious to begin with, not just like downing shit willy nilly, you know what I mean, Like they're like, oh God, this is really bad, I bear take something. It talan all, by the way, sucks, you know, as a pain medicine. You know it's not gonna it's like the thing you take when they won't give you anything else is not a great one. So to take it from them without a good reason, without a proposed mechanism.

Yeah. I think something you mentioned earlier, like when like you said, you're back to to a corner where you're defending like a big farmer and tynel specifically, is the one thing that they've tried to do is like inhabit nuance and then disingenuously use it absolutely.

Yes, yes, that's the entire anti vaccines.

Yeah, yeah, right, and then it leads to people responding in a way that it raises nuance entirely. I understand where we get that response, but like it's it's not the correct response, right, Yeah. People want you to be like this is one hundred percent safe. Right. They want you to say this is actually the perfect medication and it's fine and you should have it for breakfast.

And the HHS tweeted out statement that Talanold did in twenty seventeen basically saying we don't recommend talent All and pregnancy. But no drug maker recommends any medication. They all say, specifically, talk to your doctor about this medication. They're not allowed

Right, that's exactly right. And tile Mall, the makers of it.

By the way, I am curious about the fact that Johnson Johnson spun Off can view. I wonder if they knew this was coming and that's why they did it the same way that DuPont spun Off.

It was only three years ago that they did that, but you didn't know.

Like DuPont spun Off, the company in charge of all their pfasts they're Forever chemicals, because they knew it was coming down the pipeline.

I wonder if that was the same reason here. Tal Mall did this. Well, they put band Aid and nutrigena in the same group, so I think it was more just to consolidate home stuff. Interesting.

Yeah, got a press conference coming next week about banding.

It's can sick cause anxiety.

Anyways, It's very interesting to me that this is happening at all. Really, I mean, what I thought was interesting about the press conference, and I wonder if you guys picked up on this too, was you know, I was wondering, why is this pivot happening? How can RFK Junior be happy about this? He can't be happy about leaving his

My theory is the link with fevers. If I'm being really conspiratorial, I would say that they're going to try and link vaccine induced fever to autism, and they're going to say, oh, we thought it was the title and all, but it turns out to be the vaccines. It's the fever, and the fever is caused by the vaccinees. Yeah.

Yeah.

My theory is gender. I think that telling pregnant people to suck it up is when you've got you know, your dude's all standing on the podium there right, Like the majority're pregnant people are going to be women. It's something that men have been doing to women for millennia, Like it's a safer bet then yeah, your kid might die, but you know, you never know.

Yeah, yeah, which actually is you know that brings up another thing I think we should talk about, which is what Trump kept saying. Trump kept saying don't take it, but what's the worst that happens? Nothing bad will come of it, So it invokes this precautionary principle, which is like, you know, why not avoid the talent all, what's the worst that can happen? And that doesn't work here, No, because we know that people are taking this for a fever.

They just can't.

Yeah, So I.

Disapprove of the Canadian and englishmen referring to the hospital as hospital. They need you guys to refer to it as of the hospital.

I've forgotten about that. Yeah, always for the definite article.

Yeah, taking it to a hospital, Thank you guys.

But yeah, I think you're right, Like there is no like no harm option here, right, Like that is a damage is done when people don't take this, right.

I just imagine this poor mom you know at home, you know, doesn't have great healthcare but does have a bottle of talentol and is battling a sorry I'll americanize this, like one hundred and four degree fever. Thank you don't make me do mad? Yeah, you're going to make me do mad, you know, And and you know it's it's around that one hundred and three hundred and four mark where we actually get really worried about the person's brain.

Because people are listening to this guy. First of all, again the hospital. Second, they're going to listen to this guy.

It's insane.

People are really going to take this advice. And I could see, you know, especially the more Trump following people saying you will never give me talinl not in this hospital, right And so so it does sound silly that not taking talanol could kill you. But if you're so scared of talinal because it causes autism, that you don't take it when it's recommended to you by where it's prescribed

Geez, yeah, maybe like we can finish up by explaining to people, like, you know, if you're talking to someone in your family, right, someone who maybe isn't a listener sadly to either of our podcasts. I know this isn't directly the area either of you specialized in, but from what I understand, pregnant people like the way that drugs

Sure? So there's a classification system and it's technical, but it's exactly like that. There are very few medications that are like totally fine. These are medications that are given during pregnancy that have been well studied in pregnancy. But for the most part, pretty much everything else in my world of psychiatry, you know, SSRIs and antipsychotics and benzodazepines and whatnot, they all have the same classification, which is

There are certain medications where we are going to say you, absolutetion, take these during pregnancy.

Yeah, and you should.

Discuss that with your obstrician. You to talk that over with your.

Gynecologist and your primary care doctor. You should talk it over with your medical team. That's great, but every medication has some small amount of risk, some larger than others.

Because Trump, whether or not they love.

Him or not, this is well out of his range of understanding, and he is getting It's like a game of telephone. He's getting a version of the medical information transmit to him by RFK Junior, who is getting a weird version of it from his belief system. And it's being supported by people who are there solely just just there to do the back and call of Trump at this point, and that's super dangerous. And so if they can keep an open mind about it, talking over with

Yeah, real quick, because like for reasons that if you related to the way that we do healthcare in the United States, people sometimes are retident to talk to their doctor, unable to talk to a doctor, reliable sources of medical information. That is the shit that you find on Google. Give us a a five minute primer.

Yeah. So you know, in almost every jurisdiction there is an official health agency that you can go to their website and get good health data. So in BC we have Health Length BC and there's a number that you can call to speak to a nurse. In America, you have great I would say it used to be great. Like Cleveland Clinic used to be really great, but they got a little hokey. I would still say, you know, there are some really good American places that you can go.

Yeah, Be wary of anyone that has something in their Instagram there to talk their wellness post that uses the words detox. Be wary about ancient remedies. Be wary about anyone that is selling something like doctor Oz, who, by the way, sells a version of the full linic acid or the lukovorin that they're talking about here, So be wary about that.

We don't sell shit.

Be wary about people like doctor Baccarelli, the dean of Harvard Epidemiology, who, by the way, I've heard is a good doctor from the friends I have in Harvard, they say he's not a bad guy. But be wary about the fact anytime you see someone's making one hundred and fifty thousand dollars off of court trial to sue tailanol and has a vested interest in these things, so you should be wary about those things. That's definitely something to

Beautiful. That was all a long play to get to listen to Kave's podcast, But.

I'm in it for the long con. I'm in it for the long con, buddy.

Yeah, thank you for helping us clear that up a bit. I think it's a real rough time for healthcare in general, and especially people with autism, like like well nero divergent people. It really fucking sucks to see the entire federal government bad mouthing people. So, yeah, we are thinking of you.

Very similar to the issue with trans kids. Like I'm a Canadian, you know, and we have right next door to my province, Alberta, which is very much taking the route of Florida and other things with respect to trans policies, and it's just got to suck to be a trans kid in Florida right now. It's got to suck to be a trans kid anywhere in America right now, knowing what's coming down the pipeline, and it'll be the same for people with autism and families with autistic kids.

Yeah, yep.

I could conservatively complain about this for another three hours.

Yeah yeah, yeah.

We didn't even talk about hepatitis B. By the way, we didn't talk about hepatities people. We can talk about this on the point. There's just so much. There's so much, and it's so terrible, and you're absolutely right, it's really like for that community right now.

By the way, I wanted to debunk something because it's been said multiple times.

Yeah, yeah, I get it.

RFK and a whole bunch of people have said, I didn't know anybody autistic when I was you know, when I was a kid or whatever. I've never met someone autistic my age. Donald Triplett was the very first person diagnosed with autism in nineteen forty three, I believe nineteen forty three. He just died last year. I think he was something like eighty ninety years old. Okay, autistic people are old too. This idea that there aren't old autio

Yeah. And if you conduct yourself as Rskade does, but being a piece of shit to neurodivergent people, then even people who who have been diagnosed, I'm just going to be like, hey man, yeah, I wanted to talk to you about more because you're being a turd to them, and like you're being unkind. Yeah, Like what do you expect?

Yeah, I mean yeah, Tyler grand In is like how old is she now, like in her seventies. I mean, it's it's absurd to think that this is a totally new thing.

I mean it it also tells me that he was probably a bit sheltered and it probably didn't meet enough people.

Wow, Kennedy sheltered.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah, he's had a different experience of life than any of us. It's fair to say.

I got through the whole podcast without making a Tyler and All pun. I'm very proud of that. I usually do pretty much every time, and it kisses my wife off so much. I'm really proud of you, man. I showed a lot of growth.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. I was gonna make one, but I thought I didn't want to want to offend. Yeah, thank you very much. Where can people find both of you on the internet if they'd like to, oh, you know, in person?

Don't find that as You can listen to my podcast, The House of Pod. Anywhere you listen to podcasts, you'll hear people like James, you'll hear people like Tyler. Last time Tyler was on was actually for episode two eighty four. We did an episode on Adult ADHD with author Rex King. She's Brad so that's a good episode to listen to. And you can find me on Blue Sky at CAVEMD.

Yeah, and I'm I am still on Twitter Tyler Black thirty two. I'm slugging it out. It is a lot of hate and a lot of death threats now, especially as I've I've been on a few trans podcasts, I've been on quite a few medical anti vacs and vaccine podcasts, So you know, I'll pop up from time to time on a podcast or something. But I'm not really have

Yeah, if we do. This has set us back many years. This has set us back many many years.

Yeah, it's pretty bleak.

Well that was fun.

Let's send on that hopeful note. Yeah, all right, hey everyone, it's James here. We promised that we would get you something on the changes or lack thereof after Donald Trump's series of executive orders targeting certain groups, and we reached out to a lawyer, Moe, who is a fantastic lawyer, and we asked he into you them. They said they had just done an interview with Final Store Radio, which is an excellent show, and they suggested that I take

Could you please introduce yourself for the audience with any name, pronouns, location, or other contexts that would help us understand who you are.

Good morning. I'm Moura Meltzer Cohen. Everybody calls me MO. My pronouns are they are MO. I'm an abolitionist, an educator, and an attorney in New York. Primarily I represent people who are arrested in the course of justice struggles and do advocacy for incarcerated people and movements.

So we're here to talk about the recent White House statements following the assass I mean, I mean following the reelection of Trump, but more recently the assassination of Charles Kirk that Antifa is domestic terrorist organization.

Can you talk about what.

Legally changed with the executive order of September twenty second of this year or yesterday ism when we're recording this National Presidential Security Memo number seven titled countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. Again, it came out on September twenty fifth, What changed with those?

Well, Before I answer that question, the first thing I want to say is nothing that I say on this program is legal advice. This is information. If you want legal advice, I vigorously encourage you to have a privileged conversation with a human attorney who is admitted to practice in your jurisdiction. As to your overall question, what changed legally is essentially nothing. I think the top level takeaway

Just to sort of throw this back your way, So there was when you were responding to that, it made me think of there's a veteran who lost a bunch of his property during the Helene hurricane that is, you know,

No, there is.

A Supreme Court decision. It's called Texas v. Johnson, and it is still law. And in fact, after Texas v. Johnson, Congress actually tried to make a federal statute criminalizing burning the American flag and it was found on constitutional It is astonishing and illuminating that that man was arrested for burning an American flag, which is absolutely constitutionally protected conduct. I will say, I'm not sure what he was at actually.

Charged with, right if he was charged with, you know, creating a fire hazard, I suppose that apart from the fact that it's clearly First Amendment retaliation.

I suppose that you could be criminally charged with creating a fire hazard in a public place or something like that, but no flag burning remains protected regardless of what the President or Congress says about it. It would take either an amendment to the Constitution or a very serious change in Supreme Court jurisprudence to make flag burning illegal.

Okay, Yeah, so this is the distinction I'd love for us to get back to in a moment between like legality versus what, you know, the sort of like box that that powers decide to put a thing into. Like I know, I've I've definitely been totained, not for being an annoyance to the cops, but within my legal rights. But they'll say, ah, but your shoes untied on a Tuesday whatever, and then waste my time.

Let's talk about that. And because I do want to talk with more specificity about these specific executive orders and statements, and also about what legal mechanisms do exist that are and can be and have long been used to surveil

Okay, but yeah, but recognizing that that distinction, you know, cops are going to cop, investigators are going to investigate, and those processes are disruptive for people whose lives they're affecting. They can affect your job prospects, they can affect your housing stability. They can affect whether or not some unhinged person decides to attack you because they've heard some conspiracy

With the terrorism enhancement, well.

I mean that is also called comfort. I'm really not trying to be dismissive. I think it's important to recognize what these distinctions are and the primarily because I want people to understand what exactly we need to be prepared for and what we need to be worried about, and what tools we have and what tools are effective at resisting what's coming down the pike. And in order to do that, we need to know what's coming down the pipe. We need to know who actually has power in this situation.

I think, yeah, I think that's an important distinction. I think that like sometimes people in the center and even sometimes people on the left will look in particular things that Trump administrations do because they are obfuscatory, they're like confusing, and they're bombastic, and there's a part of us that we'll say like, no, but that's that's not what's actually happening, that's not what actually was the motivation for that person, or like that person voted you know, Republican in the

With right absolutely, And I think it is important to point out. Right now, we're seeing a lot of people pointing out the hypocrisy and the sort of the fact that these rationales are really untethered from factual reality. And I suppose that's true and important to note, but pointing out the hypocrisy is not going to be particularly useful.

There was a German jurist I guess who became the highest jurist during the Nazi regime in Germany, but continued writing theory like was writing it before as a member of the Conservative Revolution that they called it, and then afterwards he survived the war and continued living in Germany writing Carl Schmidt, who talked a lot about like the limits of liberal approaches towards legality and liberal governance, with a belief that like it makes sense to push it

Well, look, I'll say this for Carl Schmidt as opposed to the Heritage Foundation, he was at least intellectually honest.

Yeah, I think that we are in this moment where they're trying to normalize what we Schmidt would have called like a state of exception, where they're sort of unbridled executive power and the sort of suspension of any constraints on state power.

Right. And it's funny because I've been in conversations over the last months where I'm talking with a bunch of my friends, none of whom are particularly enamored of the current legal regime, and we're talking about how dangerous it is that the administration is dispensing with the rule of law, you know, And it's sort of amusing for a bunch of anarchists to be like, oh, no, the rule of

Kind of shifting a bit like let's get into some of the implications of this. So if it hasn't changed law, but we recognize that practices and culture are being shifted. I've heard of a bunch of people getting fired and getting docsing attention. There's a website now I think called like who Killed Charlie Kirk? Are the people who killed Charlie Kirk or something like that, and maybe an app. It's kind of like the post Charlie Kirk assassination version

I mean police have always been coming after people for sharing memes. I would say, I get calls at least every month from people who have been visited by federal agents because they said something on the Internet that was upsetting to somebody else and then they reported it, and the FBI is just following up on a tip. But that said, this doesn't vitiate the First Amendment. Let me say that in human.

Language, thank you.

This does not undermine the First Amendment. The First Amendment still exists, and all of the legal framework around having the right to say things as long as those things are not true threats, that still exists. So it is not unusual for people to be targeted or monitored or visited by law enforcement, but typically that stuff doesn't actually

Home, which could be deadly right, This is.

Very dangerous and interestingly to me anyway, there are these specific behaviors that are identified and condemned in those statements, and those specific behaviors are largely tool of the right. People on the left are not notably interested in sending

Yeah, I mean, I guess to me, And this is the speculation outside of like legal advice or any not that we're giving legal advice, but outside of like the legal.

Framework, definitely not giving legal advice.

I mean it kind of points to a thing that already this hypocrisy or this difference between what it's called when one party does it versus what it's called when another party does it, like outside of the fact that the government gets to do what it was wants to until the government stops itself from doing a thing. I mean, it feels like it's a part of the creation of

Yeah, very much. And you know what is changing a little bit, although all of these threads have been present, is that this administration is rationalizing this particular kind of targeting with respect to in particular Palestine, solidarity movements, gender

Yeah, it seems about pushing boundaries and experimenting. There's a lot of people that have talked and not to get too far down the road with this, but like with the like attempt to normalize sending national guard or sending active military to different states, or federalizing national guards to be present from different states in these places, almost like if it's constant and like overlapping enough, then eventually just military being on the streets generally rousing houseless folks is

Man, I'm in New York. There's military people in all price like that got very normalized post nine to eleven in certain places. And so you know, again this is not to say that it's okay, but it isn't new.

So to get back to antifa, Sure, Antifa, Antifa. How is the administration identifying Antifa and the left and what are they actually dismantling and attacking. I'm thinking like he loves talking about bilfunds or like lgbt QIA, youth advocacy organizations, secularist groups, like yeah, what's going on?

Yeah, well this is this is where things get really fun. Most of the groups that are actually being targeted are not remotely related to antifa. George Soros is not antifa, the various legal defense funds are not Antifa. Antifa is the rationale, but not the reality. So one of the interesting issues here is that a significant group of the people who really need to be very worried are people who work in the nonprofit sector, in extremely normal and

And what we're.

Seeing instead is the universities declining to challenge these allegations, settling out of court, paying large amounts of money to the allegedly aggrieved parties, and capitulating in ways that are unnecessary unwarranted, not legally justified, irrational, and seed more ground, not just more ground than is legally called for, but more ground than is even being asked for in these cases.

I think we also sort of saw this in the early days of the administration with legal firms that had brought challenges to the administration in the past backing down or refusing to offering their fealty or whatever to the administration. And we're seeing it now also with some of these large media corporations silencing some of their pundits or whatever, or in some cases, I mean it's clearly quid pro quo because they've got, you know, a merger that's being discussed by the FCC at the moment.

Well, what we've seen, though, we have seen a lot of that sort of craven capitulation. But what we've also seen is when we fight, we win. Now, I'm not

With all the.

Money we have, right like, we're all handing around the same staff of twenty singles to each other. But hey, you know wirefraud. What I can say is that you know, something like a bail fund, and you know, community support

Right.

I don't know if you remember, but Steve Bannon was actually prosecuted for wire fraud because he was raising money to do something.

Build the wall.

Build the wall.

He was raising money to build the wall, but not using it for that purpose, which is wire fraud.

Right.

So if you run a bail fund, presumably you already know that you have to be very careful about how you raise that money and how you monitor and track and use that money. So most of the people, I would say, the overwhelming majority of people who are sort of going to be subject to this kind of monitoring A have already been subject to it, and b haven't actually done anything unlawful. And you know that doesn't mean

I mean, what whether or not this like pans out in the courts, right is one thing. But I know that like, say, for the library case that happened here where people were arrested because some people were filming in this like Palestine related workshop in a public library and they were asked to stop filming, and then a scuffle broke out and a phone got knocked to the ground

Right.

Absolutely, And I'm glad you pointed that out, because I certainly do not want to suggest that politically motivated prosecutions don't happen. They absolutely happen. These reset statements don't change the way in which they happen, right, And there are ways of targeting people for prosecution based on their politics, and those have those are again not new. I think the point that I'm trying to make is that I

So is the RICO sixty one Atlanta case a model for what we see moving forward at a federal level in relation to these domestic terrorism charges, conspiracy, racketeering, the focus on bail funds, and other abolitionist infrastructure, civil liberties organizations like Section H of that September twenty fifth statement refers to the Attorney General pursuing quote, politically motivated terrorist acts such as organizing docs and campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault,

So, first of all, I do think that that's very likely that they will try. I think this is signaling a real interest in that. I don't think that's particularly new, but I think that it's clearly being prioritized. So let's talk about Rico Rigo. Let's talk about Rigo Briefly, RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and it was enacted in I think nineteen seventy to go after the mob. Right, it was to go after crime families.

But sort of more to.

The point in this context, I do want to note that Georgia's RICO statute is different from the federal RICO statute, and it's actually even worse than the federal RICO statute, and it still couldn't be effectively used in this way. And also federal RICO has often failed. Right, Efforts to use federal RICO in a politically motivated way have also failed. So if you look up like the Ohio seven, which was a fairly early effort to bring a politically motivated

So you mentioned this like FBI designation earlier, it had been for a while, I think under I thought this came up under Obama, but maybe it came up under Biden for the prosecution of January sixth, But anti government extremists, which included militia movements and also anarchists, it's been shifted to far left extremists. In the verbiage of the boj

But now this is.

Being turned around and reframed as therefore, if people need this stuff and they're making this argument, therefore they have some sort of mental deficiency or some sort of issue which is being used in order to challenge people's right to keep in bear arms under the Second Amendments, or saying that people are like because of their transnits being motivated towards this attacks like I don't know if you have anything to again, not exactly like not exactly a

Well, I mean, I guess when it comes down to it. Just to be very clear, the DSM makes it very clear that for that being trans is not a mental illness, that gender dysph you is distress caused by discrepancy between the assigned gender and your actual gender, which would exist if any CIS person were being treated as a gender that they didn't identify with right, that would be a distress that would arise for any person. I think that there are real problems with the sort of clinicsization or

So this term has been coming up a lot of you know, with Trump or the administration talking about domestic terrorists, there's been a lot of pushback back from the legal community or from civil libertarians saying, what the hell are you talking about? Can you talk about, like what it means to be called domestic terrorists? What changes that makes in like how the law approaches he or how you can be convicted.

Yeah, gladly. So at this point, what it means to be called a domestic terrorist is actually nothing. There is no legal procedure for designating a domestic terrorist group or for designating a domestic group a terrorist organization. And given the current law on the matter, even with this Supreme Court, I think it would be very, very difficult to change the law in the way it would have to be changed in order to make that designation. There are ways

So, but there's no legal.

Mechanism for designating a domestic terrorist group. That's not a thing. So this is a place where the government could simply dispense with the law. But I do not think this is a place where the government can use the law to create a category of domestic terrorist organizations. And just to like explain FTOS a little bit, there is a category of organization that are designated by the State Department as quote, foreign terrorist organizations ftos are designated by the

I was when you were saying that that had me thinking a little bit about the Holy Land five case. I was trying to remember that example. I guess like

Right.

The difference is the difference between criminalizing conduct or defining conduct as being terroristic, and criminalizing a group. The First Amendment protects freedom of belief, association, and expression, and that means that however much we might be targeted for our beliefs, associations, and expression. We cannot be prosecuted criminally for anything besides our conduct, our actions, And so there can be terrorist offenses and enhancements for sentencing on the basis of conduct

I guess I have note as I understand the terrorism enhancements that the prosecutors are pursuing in the Luis gim Angioni case have been dropped. Is a thing that I heard, yes, which I mean at the same time, this is referenced in one of those documents that came from the White House as being a terroristic act.

So yes, what are.

The courts know?

Okay, thank you? For making that distinction more clear.

All right, So, how might those of us on the left or in justice movements, as you stated it, conceive of the state's view of us. How do we rally support for our identities and positions? What are some good practices understanding, like, having had this conversation, the terrain on which we're operating.

Absolutely so, I guess what I would say about best practices is understand whether you are at risk, even if you're somebody who has not traditionally been at risk, even if you're someone who has lived your whole life believing that the system works and that this particular administration is

I think that would be a great place to tie up. Thank you so much for having this conversation and for the insights that you've shared, and for the work that you do.

Mo. You're very welcome. It's always a pleasure.

Happy g October everybody.

Oh, shut the fuck up, we can't.

This is that could happen here?

Executive Disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm garouson Davis Today, joint by me along Jamestown and Robert Evans. This episode recovering the week of September twenty first to October first, and what a week it was. Yeah, it does not feel like it should be October but

That's right, everyone, we did it. We defeated the state using the power of the state.

State.

Yeah. In many such cases, as the government shut down, Trump is threatening mass layoffs, and Republicans are framing this whole shut down as being caused by Democrats who are trying to defend healthcare for quote unquote illegals, which isn't real. Undocumented immigrants do not get federal health care. That's not even what the Democrats are fighting for. Would be cool if they were, would be cool if the theory of this country you could just get health care, that sounds nice.

If that counterproposal was enacted, is illegal aliens would be paid for American taxpayers hard earned dollars would be paying for benefits for illegal aliens.

Again, we're not doing that, but it's.

Against federal law for people who are here illegally.

To get yes.

And that's why our reforms are so important to enforce all that. What the important thing to remember is what's.

Happened the Democratic proposal that people who are here illegally.

Again, because they don't have the level of specification that we had in our bill, it will unwind that and all those things that the CBO just verified will be reversed.

We can't afford to do that.

But that you're making right, No, that is a red herring in this in this debate.

So what the Democrats are actually doing right now is they're trying to extend the current currently enacted federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, which keeps millions of people able to access healthcare. And Democrats are also trying to reverse some of the federal health care cuts, including to Medicaid, which happened under the One Big, Beautiful Bill earlier this year.

It's a bad faith representation, as it always is. Like people can go all the way back to the episode that I made with Robert Sophie last year about what Trump might do to learn more about the public charge rule and how that pertains to people who are not US citizens. I don't think we really have the time noise as the place to go over that here. But there is not, and there has never been a massive

So we'll see how long this government shut down last. The last one started on twenty eighteen, lasted thirty five days. If this shutdown is still happening next week, I'm sure we will include some details about government services being affected. But this could resolve in a few days, a few hours, or in a few weeks.

We do not know.

But luckily, not all is depressing and dark in this country. There still is a ray of hope. And that ray of hope is named Jimmy Kimball, who was thankfully back on the air. I know we've all been watching. We've all been watching this certainly, and next our En Sinclair have ceased preempting his show. That's back on air across the country. Free speech is hashtag. So back in America, provert, Do you want to talk about the Disney plus Voika?

Yes, So we've gotten some data finally on the damaged on to Disney's result of the boycott. After they fired Monsieur.

Kimmel suspended, suspended, Monsieur kim.

Il suspended, suspended, they were definitely going to fire They wanted to fire his They definitely wanted to fire him, and you know, there was a lot of posting online about there was a lot of posting, a lot of posting about people canceling their accounts and people being like wow, and it's I always it's always very frustrated to me because like people get very excited and it's impossible to tell with the moment, is this actually anything?

Right?

Yees?

Sixteen thousand people shared this thing about how the website for Disney was down, but that doesn't mean anything other than like someone saw the website down and a bunch of people shared and posted it. So it was very difficult to tell, like, is there actually any follow through on this is Disney's bottom line being hurt? And thankfully, I'm very happy to say that it does look like Disney suffered a substantial financial setback as a result of

Yeah, And I think the most important thing here for all of us, and this is the thing I talked about. We did an episode about this. This is actually before kim Old I've reinstated by Sinclair. But one of the really important things here is that everyone fucking hates this government.

Like comrade Kimmel has joined the fight.

Yeah.

Yeah, there are more of us than there are of them, and there always have been, and.

By more of us, Mia is referring to herself and Jimmy Kimmel as a coherent political class.

Just for the record, there no.

The only two members of the coherent political class.

But that's good news.

Just the state which holds me up to Kimmel and.

Entirety of the fourth Estate. But I don't know, there's a little bit of good news for you. A bunch of people got really pissed at something blatantly anti First Amendment, anti democratic, massive overreach of the state, thought crime, nonsense, and the company suffered such dramatic within like literally in the space of a week. That's three hundred and thirty million or so million dollars a year that Disney lost that even Disney can't ignore that kind of money.

Oh looks like regular people.

Yeah, yeah, like people who subscribe to Disney bluss.

Yeah, an army of ordinary liberals, the actual like silent majority in this country. Yeah said no Disney, Like.

Well, that's gross and scary. I'm not paying Disney anymore. Yeah, and it's good that they did that.

Currently, the rights trying to manufacture a counter boycott against Netflix for having children's shows with non binary characters, mostly using clips the children's shows that are like two or three years old, clips that Limbs of Talk Talk has

Have fun.

Yeah.

In other news, the Department of War. This actually happened last month. On September fifth, Trump signed an executive order approving the name the Department of War as a secondary title for the Department of Defense to use an official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non statutory documents within the Executive Branch, while the administration also works on changing the

Yeah, you know, he pushed hard for this one.

Defense dot gov now redirects to War dot gov and they're just referring to this in all public appearances as the War Department, something that we've talked about on the show before of them wanting to do and they're going to continue to push this and using this kind of war framing for domestic operations.

Yeah, not just international deployments.

This was its historical name right like way way before it was a DoD Yeah. Yeah, it was, so just to be clear for people, that doesn't mean that it's like a good reason to change it back.

Trump truthed last week quote at the request of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Christ you know, I'm directing Secretary of War Pete Hagsath to provide all necessary troops to protect war ravaged Portland and any of our ice facilities under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists. I'm also authorizing full force if necessary. Thank you for your attention in this matter. War ravaged Portland. How's it hanging out there for our Portland correspondence.

It's fine. It's kind of rainy. I had a nice tapas dinner on Sunday. It was pretty good.

The crows are really nice.

What it does, does someone want to mention, like the nature of the anti ICE protests happening in like one square block in like the south water front of downtown Portland.

Yeah, it's in the South water front McAdam is what people here call it, the neighborhood where the ICE auxiliary facility is. And there have been protests off and on pretty much since Trump took office. Usually on like a good night you get maybe one hundred and fifty two hundred people. There were some nights kind of around where things blew up in LA that there were more like five or six hundred people out for a couple of days.

Right, Yeah, we'll talk more about why Trump thinks there's this apocalypse now scenario happening in Portland. But yeah, so far the protests have been relatively mild.

Yes, Yeah, the vibe is very much like the classic Portland thing of people with like holding doughnuts on fishing lines out in front of the cops. Right, it's like that, not like molotovs.

The response has been crazy, Like there's a video going around that's a bunch of federal agents. I think they're fps rolling in up from a van from outside of the ice facility and arresting somebody who again probably crossed a line or through something generally is why people have been getting arrested. So that the response has been nonsense. That that video is from recently, and I'm seeing it

We have not seen the Oregon National Guard presence that is being promised now this has just been DHS officers.

I can confirm, just based on some information that's come my way, that there do seem to be an increased number of DHS Blackhawks flying with their transponders off. Yes, there's a couple of reasons they can do that. Some of them is for if they are transporting like high value quote unquote deportees, right, people who are being deported for some sort of serious crime. Some of it is if they are feel like they are under threat and

And I think the place where that has happened is Chicago, and we will get to that later.

Yeah. Yeah. Well.

Trump has continued to talk about deploying quote unquote troops to US cities, including at a meeting of top brass on Tuesday, September thirtieth, where Pete hag Seth basically ranted to top of generals and admirals about no more wokeness in the military, but Trump also spoke telling top military officials to prepare to deploy military to liberal run city, calling it a quote war from within. Let's play the clip.

But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places, and we're going to straighten them out. It will be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too, It's a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can't let these people.

In the two separate issues they have that he conflated, right, protests in cities and people crossing the border.

Yeah, and that's the way Trump's been talking about this for a while. I mean, same thing with like DC right, combining this like crime issue with undocumented immigration, and also with protests against ICE operations targeting undocumented immigrants, all kind of bundled together into this into this war from within.

Yeah.

I mean the ration issue, right, is one that gives him a much broaderly way and the powers the constitutionally available to him as the executive than policing with the military, which is on the facefoot of thing that shouldn't happen in the United States. It makes sense from a tactical perspective for them to conflate those two things together, I will say, even if it's not particularly real.

During this televised meeting, Trump told military leaders quote, last month, I signing an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room talking to the generals, because it's the enemy from within, and we will have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control once you're involved.

Unquote.

They're directly addressing admirals and generals about them having to help form a quick reaction for us to quell civil disturbance, which won't get out of control once they're involved, calling it again the enemy from within, align that Trump used a lot during the tail end of his presidential campaign in twenty twenty four.

Yeah, which is just it's every single element.

If it is just fascist, it's it's pretty it's pretty blanket authoritarian stuff. Like there's no like sugarcoating it here. Oh yeah, Yeah, they don't need to use coded phrases, right, they just say this stuff.

Yeah, No, they're just yeah, they're just this is this is just fascist, Like they're just trying to do it.

Yeah, they're just saying the thing.

In the meeting, he explicitly labeled these dangerous cities as a training ground for our military National Guard.

But I want to salute every service member who has helped us carry out this critical mission. It's really a very important mission. And I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard. But military because we're going into Chicago version. That's a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor stupid.

And I think it's worth noting both the mayor of Chicago and the governor Prits have been very unhappy about this. Like as much as Pritzker has kind of not been doing anything about like CPD aiding ice in raids, he is absolutely not budging at all about not putting National Guard troops in. So if they're very serious about following this through, we're going to see some kind of large scale confrontation.

Yep.

And Pritzker is not the kind of like knock needs Uh, Gavin Newsom type governor.

Yeah, he's not Gavin Newson.

He's not simply just going to let Trump do this. And yeah, that's going to be a major source of confrontation assuming this, assuming this specific like we're going to send the National Guard in the Chicago stuff like happens soon.

Trump also talked about talking with Tina Kotec, governor of Oregon, about deploying Oregon National Gardener, and her pushing back against that, but ostensibly acquiescing in some way because there's been an announcement from the organ National Guard that they will be deploying and people in Oregon probably aren't gonna be happy about it, they won't understand the mission. But during this meeting, Trump did talk about his phone calls with the Oregon governor.

Portland, Oregon, where it looks like a war zone, and I get a call from the liberal governor, sir, please don't come in. We don't need you. I said, well, unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like World War two. Your place is burning down. I mean, you must be kidding, sir. We have it under control. I said, you don't have it under control, Governor. But I'll check it and I'll call you back. I called it back. I said, this place is a nightmare. Probably it's certainly not the biggest,

And I think because there's a fifty thousand dollars sign up.

Well, unless they're play false tapes, so the tapes aren't necessarily false. But if you're watching Fox News twenty four to seven, what Fox News is doing is they're playing a lot of clips not from the Year of Our Lord twenty twenty five, but in fact from twenty twenty when Trump's last federal invasion of Portland happened, where he deployed Bortac, which looked much more like a war scene.

So, yeah, there's information that Trump got corrected. Internally, I don't know that I think that that's going to mean anything, but yeah, six year old footage, five year old footage being used to justify military deployments about you'd expect.

Really literally, yesterday I saw footage circulating on x the Everything app of someone throwing a Molotov cocktail into a street.

Yeah, I remember that Molotov. I remember that molo, that malotav getting thrown half a decade ago.

It only hit another protester whose feet got very badly burned. Yes, And that's the type of footage circulating that makes it look like, you know, once again, Portland's burning down, Portland's always burning down, using like one or two select clips from yeah, half a decade ago.

Again, no buildings actually burnt down.

Yeah, they've created a reality around what happened important in twenty twenty that you will never change with facts or evidence. Right, Like to people who watch Fox News. Portland was burned to the ground in twenty twenty.

And on the worst nights in Portland, we could go three blocks and get food from a food cart.

Yeah, we got a lot of great Chinese food.

That stuff.

We've got great Chinese food, schwarma, you know in La.

When the city was whatever under siege. I went to Buffalo Wild Wings and pretty pretty normal Buffalo Wild Wings at two am on a Wednesday scene.

That's a war zone. That's a war zone.

I had my plague carrier on. I was ready to go.

Here's some ads.

We'll be back to talk about Chicago. But enjoy these possibly Buffalo Wild Wings sponsored ads.

I doubt it. No vegan food. All right, we are back, sweet, and it's good to be back. I want to talk very briefly about Pete egsass sec war as he is calling himself now right in the little speech he gave Pete Pegs he's he's working on his physical fitness for sure, his bod that he put a big emphasis on physical fitness in his speech, along with grooming standards and other shit.

Male standards.

Yes, everybody has to attain the male standard for the various role of their combat roles that if they want to do that, right, So that would mean, you know, the Army Physical Fitness test, right, whatever the male standard quote unquote was would be everyone's standard. I don't want to go deep into hegseth career that would be that would be another episode, possibly of another show. But I do want to talk about the stuff. Did you notice

And Milly also said no to Trump when he wanted to deploy for and he was also working behind the scenes. He's admitted now with Pelosi being like, we need to have a plan if he tries to use the nukes after the election.

Yeah, Milly was doing everything he could to mitigate what he saw as a massive danger of Trump responding in a completely disproportionate.

Way, a legitimate national security and danger.

Yeah, yes, yeah, like, yeah, someone whose job is protecting the United States like that, that's some reasonable concern. Was a reasonable concern at that time. Obviously, the Trump administration does not want people like that in command anymore, and

I think you mean war fighters, James, which is Haig Seth's preferred term for soldiers.

Yes, fuck me. Yeah, Well, because it's gender neutrals start that.

They've been doing that for a while.

But yeah, it's on the MRIs, it's been on the Emeris for a while. But yes, Haig Seth does like the phrase war fighters. His stuff was, like I said, not something you would expect from someone who I think he was an O four in the national card, right. I don't think any of that is particularly new. He issued a number of directives. One thing I did want to talk about was this change in grooming standards. So the War Department has issued a new directive on shaving profiles.

Right.

Previously, those soldiers may have had a like a waiver which they could show to their officers, and their officer said, hey, soldier, why haven't you shaved? Soldier, sailor, emon, Space Force guardian, whatever, why haven't you shaved? They could say, well, I'm on the shaving profile because of this condition that I have. Now you will only have a year and then you

Right, people have spent decades losing wars. Yeah yeah, decades of period of time.

Yeah yeah, I mean centuries between them, right, But explaining how warfare works to people who have vastly more experience in it than him, yes, and basically telling them it's not a myth that we haven't seen from fascist states before. Right, the soldiers were fine, but they were betrayed by the politicians in the generals. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is nothing new. Yeah, but it was still kind of remarkable to see Heigfast delivering it to the generals.

And specifically, both he and Trump made statements about if the generals and animals do not like what Trump and Heksa were saying, they should just resign, they should just leave.

I've never walked into a room so silent before. This is very don't laugh, don't life if you're not allowed to do that, you know what, Just have a good time, and if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose, okay, because we're all on the same team.

Part of this is because Trump just wants more loyalists in the upper grass of the military, like that's part of this process. That's why he doesn't want millies. He doesn't want people that will deny him. He wants just a complete loyalist government, and that includes the military.

Yeah.

And if that means that we're going to have a whole bunch of generals and animals resigned because of hig Seth and Trump's anti woke granting, then that's a desirable outcome for the administration at this point.

Yeah.

Speaking of war Chicago, Yeah.

I mean the scenes that I have seen the most frequently described as war or looking like a war this week, have come out of Chicago, where on Tuesday the thirtieth, there was one of the most brutal raids that we've

Yeah, pretty common for people to mistake those two.

Yeah.

Yeah, and these are just you know, these are just regular people who suddenly at one in the morning, a bunch of explosions start going off. There's a whole bunch of pictures that you can see in various articles about this of doors torn off their hinges. The agents did a I think this is a classic Chicago police tactic, but you know, they just went through and just started grabbing everyone's stuff and tearing through it and throwing it onto the ground. There were black Hawk kilicops optors like

Yeah.

It's also worth mentioning that Independent book Club Chicago, which is one of the very sort of prominent independent local media outlets. There obtained a picture from a neighbor who was like next to the raid that show Chicago Police Department on the scene, which they are there expressly forbidden like by state law from assisting in immigration enforcement. It is worth reading this article in order to see this

Yeah, So talking of intensification of federal activity, I guess according to a notice posted in the Federal Register, DHS is going to use the Cultural, Environmental and Historical Protection Waiver that we reported about that came out this spring to fall through wall construction in the San Diego sector. I am guessing that in part we will see this used to wave one of the one of the acts that is where it's the Native American Graves Protection and

Right.

This comes on the same week as Secretary of War headthst restored medals of honor to soldiers at Wounded Knee. If people are not familiar, this is the episode where I do a history of things sort of happened at Wounded Ney Creek. But this was the largest mass shooting in US history.

This was just a slaughter.

Yeah, hundreds of unarmed Lacachas. Civilians were murdered by the United States military in the battle.

This was just a massacre.

There were significant casualties for the US military, most of them were caused by the US military, a friendly fire and a completely disorganized slaughter of civilians. There was a standoff at Wounded Ney later in the nineteen seventies in which two Indigenous people died one went missing. You can read Mary brave Bird's book about that if you want

Really, and even just like the regular FBI investigative capacity, it has been shifted massive large extents towards just immigration enforcement. So they're not they're actually just not going after as much like actual crime.

Yeah.

I think some agencies, like the Bureau of Alcohol to Back of Firearms and Explosive for example, I think have the majority of their agents tasked to immigration raids right now. The FBI one agent described what he had been tasked with as quote photo op bullshit, which was taking photos of their teams on and before raids for use by the ADF and the White House in social media posts. So they do appear to have I've lost the support

Said that there was fifty do dollars in cash, but.

For what Just wait, wait, wait, wait wait another Obama era I stuffer. Julian Calderas, who agents undercover agents had contacted as part of a separate investigation, repeatedly suggested to the agents that they may wish to bribe Homan in order to obtain government contracts. Cayl Deris repeatedly suggested this to the undercover agents, so much so that they diverted

This is like the level of normalized corruption which exists in every level of this administration is like remember when they just could not stop talking about Hunter hide In. It's like every all the time. And meanwhile you have like, like you know, like all of like Jared Kushner's dealings with like Saudi. Is the Tomhoman getting fifty thousand dollars in cash, Yeah, like undercover and he's just posing us

So it's Keystone cop shit. We don't know if he's given the cash back.

Oh that cash is oh god, so much cocaine. Like I could either confirm her today it was spent on cocaine. Yeah, a wild instance of corruption. Oh God.

Finally, I want to talk about Venezuela. In Venezuela, it seems that Stephen Miller has been taking the lead on strikes on a leged drug smugglers. According to a Guardian piece, the strikes have been authorized by the Homeland Security count. Sure, that's a body that Miller leaves, which has massively grown and influence since the Trump administration. It seems like most people in the administration were pretty much kept in the dark about this until very shortly before the strike took place.

All right, br back for our final story this episode, We're going to talk about the National Security Presidential Memorandums number seven, titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which was signed by President Donald Trump on Thursday, September twenty fifth. This relates in many ways to the Antifa Domestic Terrorism Executive Order from last week, but this memo is a lot more clear in outlining actual policy changes

Now.

Section one asserts that there's been an increase in political violence in recent years, with assassinations and quote unquote riots in Los Angeles and Portland, which have resulted into more than one thousand percent increase in attacks against ice officers

Quote.

We've spoken about the statistic about attacks and ice officers before and how that's very misleading.

Yeah, I mean an ICE officer is attacked when of ice officer's fist encounters the face of a child, Right, that's.

Yeah, Latino grandmother, Yes, uh, Latina grandmother in that case.

Well, and a lot of this talking about, you know, riots is not organized events or us at an incidents. What they describe here is this like a culmination of the sophisticated campaign. This is just describing like the process of like what protesting is, right, trying to direct or change policy outcomes, which comes up a lot in these like domestic terrorism laws, which when over applied to just nonviolent acts of speech, just start infringing upon very standard First Amendment activity.

It's one of the five fundamental freedoms of the First Amendment. Right like the right to assemble the it was several of them, actually, the right to assemble, the right to speak, the right to petition the government like these are fundamental.

The right to twitch stream at a riot as a free member of the press.

Yeah, definitely, that's not a right that I choose to exercise, but I guess it is one that exists. But you and I have you were important and I was in Los Angeles. Like the idea that these cities were fundamentally like damaged by these protests, it's just not true.

Well, and they're not just talking about damage from riots, they're also talking about, you know, effects on individual citizens. This memo describes how these you know, organized campaigns start by quote isolating and dehumanizing specific targets to justify murder or other violent action unquote, claiming that this process happens across quote anonymous chat forums, in person meetings, the social media,

I mean, this is what the Right has done to like exp especially migrants and trand people right for for a very long time. Anonymous chat forums And do they mean a Reddit credits telegram maybe, yeah, I know, I know that some subreddits have been closed since the issuing of this memorandum, which I'm wondering if it is related.

Not explicitly, but like I think this memos would be in this section like referring to things I can't to ice watch, Okay, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense as well as you know standard like you know, anti fasted action against like legitimate neo Nazis, which yeah, the Right is not against a doxing as a practice, as we have seen a few weeks with the state sponsored organized doxing harassment campaigns against people for their comments about the death of Charlie Kirk.

Yeah.

The memo goes on to list a collection of quote common recurrent motivations and indica or indicators that unite this pattern of violence and terroristic activities under the umbrella of

Yeah, I mean that the hypocrisy is the point, and it's sometimes not worth it. It's not a point, but it's not particularly you know, it doesn't change anything I'm pointing out, But I will just point out that like the idea that border control is a foundational American principle is not true. That it was not until the Chinese Exclusion Act that the United States began to exclude anyone from coming here, and that was in the nineteenth century.

One thing I will say regarding like this section, some reporting around this memo is framing things like you know, anti capitalism or anti Christianity is now that is going to be used as evidence that you are a terrorist. That is not the explicit way is written about in this memo. These are indicators which if some investigator sees on a Twitter account or a blue Sky account, could then cause them to investigate further into this person or group.

And this does rely on action.

Now, the memo does go on to talk about trying to prevent crime before it happens. I think this would be more in the way of how the FBI tries to set up like sting operations or catch people who are planning a violent act before they actually do it, as we've even seen the past few weeks with people being arrested for planning retaliation attacks following the death of Charlie Kirk.

This has happened now.

The memo calls for a new national law enforcement strategy to quote investigate all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence, so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before

Yeah.

I mean, in theory, the role of the effectially federal law enforcement has always been to investigate people who were planning violent or terroristic acts. The difference here is that this is being specifically framed around a certain group, and this probably will lead to more attempts by their more surveillance on people within exactly groups.

Right now, this is very worrying in terms of like surveillance, suppressing speech, chilling speech, because what they're qualifying as violent or terroristic acts is just ordinary protest activity first, mental protest activity, non government organizations that support progressive causes or values. That's the real concern here.

It's worth stating here that in Los Angeles, for example, a number of grandeuries did not return indictment of people who were accused of quite serious crimes that the grand jury did not think it was reasonable to indict them

In terms of like implementation, the memo says, quote, law enforcement will disband and uproot networks, entities and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society unquote networks, entities organizations. These refer to like established organizations like actual like formed groups that have political activity.

Now.

Section two lines how the National Joint Terrorism Task Force will quote unquote coordinate and supervise a new comprehensive national strategy and orders the local Joint Terrorism Task Force around the country to quote investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, conspiracy against rights, or the violent deprivation

I think the right has had a fascination with sorrows for a long time. Right, They've been looking for a reason to either exclude sorrows from participation in US politics and just to be like obviously I think most people realize this, but that that fascination is rooted deeply in antisemitism. George Soros is a Holocaust survivor, and there has been like an attempt to find reasons to exclude sorrows from from US political activity for some time. I think it's reasonable to see this in that trend.

This sort of like big organizations foreign organizations is also mentioned in this memo and saying the investigation will include NGOs and American citizens with foreign ties that could be in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act or quote money laundering by funding, creating, or supporting entities that engage

Unquote.

This is a worrying list of things that are not domestic terrorism that they're going to try to claim our domestic terrorism trespass. Yeah, like trespassing is now domestic terrorism. That's not a great thing for the Attorney General to be issuing guidance on. Yeah, civil disorder is a very broad and somewhat nebulous term, right, Like, are they gonna call the organized doxing campaigns that the right is doing

I think the goal here, like some of these are reason even a statue, right, Like, I'm not aware of a broad federal doxing statute aside from certain specific instances where it might be a crime to reveal someone's address.

Violent intimidation of probably like federal law enforcement would be one thing that they go after.

Yeah, federal law enforcement people with protective orders, that kind of thing, right, And yeah, there are probably ways of doing that, But I think a lot of this is intended to have a chilling effect on speech and organizing.

Absolutely, the Treasury Secretary will work with ETERN in general to quote identify and disrupt financial networks that funded domestic terrorism and political activity, and shall deploy investigative tools examine financial flows and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit

Ironically, this is something that the right shares with the authoritarian left. Actually, the idea that people can't act independently unless there is a large, well funded actor motivating them to act is something that because the authoritarian right and the authoritarian left agree on some things, and one of them is that like people can't take the initiative to act right, that there has to be some kind of vanguard in the case of the authoritarian left, or nefarious

I mean yeah, and I was talking specifically here in terms of like regular people on the ground attending protests. There's like big, big groups like you know often like you know, communist line groups that may be receiving funding possibly from foreign sources. Yeah, yeah, yeah for real, But I do not believe that is what this order is, at least this section is actually wanting to go after. That might be what they in the end actually end up targeting, end up sweeping up because it's the only

Like, yeah, as you say, it might be large as some policy law center, the ACLU, Open Society Foundation, build.

Gate Network for Strong Community.

Yes, like some of these organizations might be what they're trying to drag a net over here.

Or nonprofits.

The next section instructs the IRS to quote take action to ensure that no tax exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism unquote, and calls for the IRS to refer suspect organizations and their employees to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.

It's probably worth the context here that there was this is after a twenty ten congressional investigation that found out that the IRS had gone after some tea party groups. Right, do you remember the Tea Party? Garrison? You or seven at that time?

I remember the Tea Party?

Yeah, yeah, So the feeling here Biden, if you remember, Garrison also hired a number of new IRS agents. There was a conspiracy theory that these were to provide some kind of armed, massive, armed element to the IRS that was going around in the Biden administration. I'm sure the IRS had an armed element, right. There is not a federal investigative agency that doesn't, like the Postal Service has

One of the more interesting sections that I've highlighted of the memo instructs investigators to quote question individuals engaged in political violence or lawlessness regarding the entity or individual organizing such actions and any related financial sponsorship prior to perfect communication or initiation of a plea agreement unquote. That's directing like the interrogations of people arrested at protests, like specifically

Against the United States?

Quote So could the government use these indicators to then find groups to target, to stick some of these crimes onto groups or organizations. Absolutely, that's probably what they're gonna do. But these these are the things to like be aware of, and they're gonna try to, you know, slap these on people who are just arrested at protests, people who work for NGOs, people who work for legal support networks, maybe migrant assistance networks like that's that's gonna be the target

Yeah, the panic that those two cases created. I think we were still pre trial in the Atlantic case.

Right, the trials in progress.

Yeah, yeah, sorry pre uh, I guess the conclusion of that trial.

But the current indication is that most of these record chargers are not going to stick.

Yes, and most of the conspiracy charges in San Diego did not, right, and most of those people ended up not being convicted of all the things they were accused of. I do see the major fraud against the United States, and I think that's probably going to use against NGOs. I do also wonder they have spoken before about the Payroll Protection Plan and looking at PPP fraud.

Yeah, I mean financial crimes are always are always really scary, right, like.

Yeah, yeah, like a lot of nonprofits, you know, like people undoubtedly given a scaled of the PPP people abused it. I think nonprofits would be a lot more buttoned up than almost anyone else in that regard, you know, these aspectly these big liberal nonprofits. But that is an area which I'm sure that the trumpires will be looking at.

Yeah, and they might even try to slap these on people making jokes or quote unquote threats online right solicitation to commit a crime of violence.

Yeah, yeah, Yeah, people shouldn't be saying stupid chill on social media.

Right now, which which is absolutely like a chilling speech, right that is, that's excting speech.

That is a bad thing.

But you don't want to give these people extra ammunition to use against yourself right now.

Fighting words are not always like First Amendment speech right now now, Like I'm no expect in where that starts and where that ends. But yeah, yeah, like in terms of not doing stupid things, like this is not a time to do stupid things on your posting websit of choice.

Section two closes by calling for investigators in federal police to quote adopt strategies similar to those used to address a violent crime and organized crime to disrupt and dismantle entire networks of criminal activity unquote. So yeah, especially with all this financial stuff, money laundering, rico, conspiracy charges, they're basically using or they want to use like tactics to

It's really what briefly want to raise the example of the flag burning. Right, So Donald Trump signed an executive order ordering the Justice Department to investigate flag burning earlier this year. I can't quite remember when. Subsequently, someone called jan Carey of North Carolina was arrested after they burned

They can't change the law with executive orders or presidential memorandums. What they can do is direct how the law will be in four or policy guidelines, right, and that's what this is affecting right now. All of these branches like the DHS, Justice Department, Federal Police are going to be following the policy guidelines and outlines established in this memo to then try to enforce the laws that we have and some of which they will probably find ways to do it and sometimes they won't.

Yeah, we have a very broad range of statutes criminalizing a very large range of things, and someone will find some way in there to criminalize someone for something that might seem on the face of it to be not nefarious. But that doesn't mean that we have executive legiative fusion. We don't write yourself too prior to the government, and that is important to remember too.

No, no laws have been changed criminalizing anti americanism, right, Yeah, that is that it is an important thing to keep in mind. That does not mean that this order is not going to chill speech, suppress free speech, or be.

Used to criminally target people.

Yeah, criminal prosecutions can ruin the lives of people for years and years, regardless of the actual outcome, right, even if they get off on the charges. And totally we want to be clear that we're not like minimizing the effects of this, but we do want to actually break down what like the threat model is specifically for like NGO's legal organizations that help protesters or migrants, LGBTQ organizations, Right, these are probably going to be the first targets of

Yeah, so for the fun raise this week, something slightly different. I wanted to read of this go fundme for the emergency Circus. They are traveling south of the US border. I believe they're going to migrant shelters in Tijuana to hold circus acts circus performances for kids. I have obviously, obviously, but I've spent a decent amount of my life in refugee camps and migrant shelters and they can be pretty hard places for kids, and it's something that I think

Before we close the episode, I will tease an episode for next week. There was a shooting at a Mormon church on Sunday, which the right briefly tried to turn into like this culture war narrative on attacks on Christianity, and then once information about the shooter became more clear,

We reported the news, We reported the news.

Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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