Cool Zone Media Welcome, there could happen here. We decided every week you were going to do in episode called Executive Disorders White House Weekly, where we report the news, and today we are going to start that episode. We have the entire full time team here. We have Mio Wong, Garrison Davis, Robert Evans, James Stout, and I am the voice in your ear, Sophie Lichterman.
Yeah, and you should know we'll be making a number of references to a show you haven't watched, called The News Rooms. So many we didn't just pretend we didn't.
Yeah, anyways, let's do the episode now go.
Yeah.
So this episode's also going to be a little bit different because the idea is to cover each week of stuff that's happening visa via the White House. And it's been two weeks since since Inauguration Day, and we are recording usually on Wednesdays, so the you know, a day or two there that we will record the week after. But we have a whole bunch of stuff today because we are covering essentially two weeks. All start with some
of the transgender executive orders that happened last week. There was an order defining two sexes assigned at conception, which made plenty of biologists scratch their heads. A lot of this is just going to impact the ability to change your gender marker on federal documents for the next four years, you know, passports also removing the ex gender marker from federal documents. There's also a new directive that Pride flags
are not to be flown on federal buildings. Also a separate one I don't think we have included here in the research doc but how brutalist and modernist architecture is now not allowed to be used on new federal buildings. You have to use Greek or Roman inspired architecture because they project power. So all of those, like Greek have what our statue Twitter accounts have a complete cultural victory.
Now, uh great, I am going to agitate to replace the Oregon State capital with just a statue of a Roman orgy. You know, we don't even need place for the legislators. Just look at the statue and you'll know what to do.
This actually is like bad, you know, very very nineteen thirties, you.
Know, yeah, yeah, famously no other regimes have hawken back to Clauds Calera well.
And specifically is like calling like you know, modern architecture, brutalist architecture, as you know, is like weak or bad or things that get restricted.
Yeah.
On a more somber note, part of this two sex that conception thing also means that a whole bunch of trans women are now being sent to men's prisons. And like a lot of this stuff is stuff that we knew was going to happen, and it did happen quite immediately.
Yeah, and this is just the start.
I guess we'll throw over to MIA for some more executive action done on the WOKA gender ideology angle.
Yeah, but by the time we're finished recording this, there might be another anti trans executive order. We'll get to
that end. But the big ones for right now is that Trump is trying to do a and this is something we talked about in our in our last episode about what's gonna look like with trans people, but a federal funding ban for trans healthcare, which means for for youth trans healthcare, which means any provider that like gets federal funding and this and this includes things like taking Medicare and Medicaid right those like hospitals can't do any kind of gender for a main care for youth.
Part of what's sort of terrifying.
I mean, there's a lot of terrible stuff about this, but they've they've defined a kid as age nineteen.
Or under the age of nineteen.
Yeah, under the age of nineteen. Yeah.
Obviously, like that gives you know, worries for stuff that we've been talking about for years for how they might try to start bumping up the age for these for these HRT bands. This also could be them not really realizing what they're doing to some extent, because this could also just be copying I believe in Alabama or Arkansas ban and that was like the highest age used in any of these like state healthcare bans. They could just be copying that over because it is the highest one.
And like I'm not sure how much they've like thought about, you know, their capacity to start like you know, arbitrarily raising that number.
I mean, part of what I think is happening, and I think this because this was definitely at play in the Alabama ban is this is, in addition to being an attack on trans people, part of a broader set of messaging towards the Parents' Ranks movement, which very much does not consider eighteen year olds to be adults.
Totally, totally, yeah. And on that note, one of the things they're trying to do is target states that have like transanctuary laws by trying to like get parents who take their kids to save states like charged on kidnapping charges and so forth, noting supposedly later today there's going to be one about using the Charney General's Office to work with the charity generals in states who prosecute teachers
to use gender firming pronouns as like sexual users. And I want to point out like these executive orders specifically, like the second raft of them that I've been talking about, Like these are all unbelievably legal, right, yeah, Like these are probably not going to get implemented immediately because there's immediately going to go to the courts, Like the Supreme Court will probably give them some of it. But like you can't just like declare something a crime and have
the Attorney General prosecute people for it. Like that specific thing is genuinely so ridiculous that it might not survive the Supreme Court. It's nonsense. But things that aren't nonsense, and this is something you genuinely can do that's very dangerous. Is he's trying to get and this is from per Aaron Reid. He's a trans journalist, does pretty good work
on this stuff. The federal government has been instructed to not follow w PATH guidelines or WPATH is this sort of organization that sets the guidelines for like trends healthcare and this. We don't know what this is going to do. There is a chance that this could endanger private like Healthcare covering it because they follow the government using WPATH. So that's extremely extremely bad. But again, and this is going to be a running theme in the next section
of this. A lot of this is stuff that he shouldn't need Congress for and he's just trying to do it because he thinks that he can and he doesn't give a shit.
Well, and it's just signaling to the base even if it gets stopped, like he's I think, I don't think he cares if decent chunks that it gets stopped.
He tried to do the thing. Yeah, I agree with Robert.
Yeah, he can now shift the blame to someone else. Look, man, I did the executive order, which honestly is what Biden should have done on some stuff, right, fuck it? Ye make the statement, you know.
Yeah, yeah, so speaking of fuck it, let's get into this whole, this whole freezing the entire federal government thing. We're gonna do a more detailed episode about this next week.
But maybe the.
Most unhanged thing that he's done so far than the birthright stuff, he did an executive order that's telling everyone they can't fund DEI. Yeah, early this week, the US Office of Personnel Management sent out this memo to everyone telling them that, like all grant programs are frozen until they submit a like they submitted a description of like what the grant program is and why it's not DEI and so like think things that were like fucked by this, right.
I have a few of these programs and they were the grants they were shutting down. Here, the Nicholas and Zachary Burt Memorial carbon Monoxide Poisoning Program, WHOA, the National School Lunch Program, Special Milk Program for children, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, infants, and children, the do d's Basic and Applied Scientific Research Grants DEI DI.
It's even got a D right in there.
That's right, like one of these and this is a very serious one at least for these people holding onto power was the National Guard's military operation and maintenance samously low, which like it's like it's like eight billion dollars of money to the National Guard.
Hey, critical support. He got one thing right.
The way that you can tell that none of these people, and the thing is a sign of is that none of these people have any idea what's going on inside of the state. They don't understand what it is. They don't understand what it does. And I can prove this for a fact because one of the programs that they froze was a program that gives money to police to do patrols outside of a nuclear weapons assembly plan. Joey, they defunded the nuke police, Like.
Check the Signal Loop gang.
I think I got a plan based on that we're gonna become the first nuclear armed podcasting network.
So so like I think I think people have this conception that, like, you know, they're operating according to a plan. These are all sort of strategic like strokes and masters strokes, and like no, they're just they're just lashing out right, They're driven by pure anger and they're trying to do this purge of the government of anything woke or whatever, like anything that's like vaguely involves non white people or just like anyone who's not assists white dude they're trying
to get rid of. Yeah, and this memo was immediately challenged in court because it's also this is also hideously illegal. The president doesn't control the purse strings. That's like, you know, in the Constitution, it says that Congress controls this. So where we're at now is that the memo has been withdrawn, but there's there's a bunch of really conflicting information where like Trump spokespeople are saying that they're still going to go through with the executive orders.
They're probably gonna try to rewrite it. They might make it more targeted against you know, woke whatever that means. Yeah, it may not be as like broad as this as this initial memo, but they're certainly going to try again.
But the problem that they have is that there's there are literally so many of these grants and the read the reason they did it this way in the first place was because they just they just they found a list of grants, they copied all of them, and they were like, okay, departments, you have to go figure this out, and we're freezing your stuff until you do that.
Even Medicaid was frozen for a few hours yesterday.
Yeah.
Right, Like, they effectively nuked most of the capacity of the federal governments, and it's going to take a lot of effort for them to sort through which of these things they could afford to turn off so that they don't end up like turning off the nuke police.
Right, Yeah, critical support to abolishing the nuclear security.
Yeah, they did what Biden couldn't do.
Yeah, let's go on a quick ad break and then we will return to report more of the news. All right, we are back. I guess I will turn over to our Immigration and Border correspondent, James Stout.
That's me.
Yes, please report the news.
I'm ready to report the news. I have never been more ready. Okay, this is going to be a long run because there was a raft of executive orders about the border in the flurry flurry Yeah, sound the word we're allowed to use a flurry Okay, we can use a murder like crows, you know the connective down for crows.
I mean this is going to result in a murder. Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so let's start with a couple of the big ones, right. The first one was essentially revoking the right to asylum to anyone quote engaged in the invasion across the southern border end quote. I want to highlight this invasion language because obviously, like I'd adventure to say, I've spent more time at the southern border of the United States sent anyone in the executive branch, and most people reporting on it too. The idea of an invasion is laughable. I've
been at the border twice since Trump was inaugurated. It's extremely quiet. I've never seen things more quiet. The only remarkable thing I saw was a pig of Vietnamese pop Belied Big, which some people have released, which now lives there. I think it's being rehomed because of some other stuff that we will talk about later. But this invasion language is important because it's used as a justification for some of the things that the executive Branch is doing which
would otherwise seem to be outside of its authority. It's getting the national security encounter terrorism treatment, and anyone who's followed US politics for the last twenty years will understand that that means an effective waiver for all of your constitutional rights. And my have always been people who don't have rights, and this is just something that we're now seeing like further pushed.
So let's go through some of these orders.
Aside from the effective asylum ban, he directed the United States Northern Command to quote unquote seal the border. This has resulted in a deployment of about sixteen hundred United States troops. Most of them are military police or engineers. We've got marines, and we've got army in San Diego Sectory its first marines out of Pendleton. They're the ones
that I've seen locally. He has directed various government departments and the Attorney General to begin quote identifying countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial full suspension on the omission of nationals from those countries. This is effectively the travel ban that we saw in the first Trap administration, or a version of that. Right, it's a visa revocation or a travel ban for people from certain countries. We
can guess what those countries will be. At last time, they were for the most part, majority Muslim countries, right.
And we might well see that again.
They have attempted to rescind birthright citizenship for children of undocumented families.
Right.
This is one if people go back to our like what can Trump do for mass deportations podcasts that Robert Sophie and I did sometime in November, I think you'll get more information there on what is and what is not possible than we have time to go into today. But you're seeing a lot of the things that we
talked about there coming into reality now. I guess specifically, the attempt to resin birthright citizenship relies on the idea that they are not quote unquote under the jurisdiction thereof of the United States, which which is how the fourteenth
Amendment is phrased. Generally, it is understood that people who are not considered to be under the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore don't get citizenship when they're born here are the children of diplomats because they have some diplomatic community, right, so they're not necessarily governed by United States laws in all areas, and that is why children of diplomats don't get citizenship people when they're born here.
The Trump administration is arguing that applies to children of undocumented people as well. There are five court cases challenging that already so that they've got an upp battle in the courts there. He has attempted to restart the Migrant Protection Protocol MPP, better known as Remain in Mexico.
Right.
The Migrant Protection Protocol requires migrants to wait in Mexico whether immigration cases are processed. In practice, it puts them in a lot of danger.
Right.
Some of them are fleeing Mexico. Others are fleeing groups or states that can reach them in Mexico, so it leaves them in an unsafe place. The other thing he did while Trump was still in the inaugural ceremonies literally minutes after taking office, was canceling CBP one CBP one. There is a lot of misinformation about what CBP one is. CBP one is an application that allowed migrants to make an appointment and they had to be either in southern
border states of Mexico or north of Mexico's city. They could then make an appointment to approach a United States port of entry, those that are places where you can enter across the land border and make their case for their asylum right, do their first asylum interview.
Like this is like following the law, like this is like the process.
Yeah, making a CBP one appointment is quote unquote the right way exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You have a legal right to enter between ports of entry and still make an asylum claim, which is what we saw in their outdoor attention situation, right, But doing it via CBP one is like the belt embraces correct way to do it. People who had appointments at noon Pacific on the day Trump was inaugurated, sow those appointments counseled. They can't make appointments anymore CBP one, it's gone. Those people who have waited an average of nine months in
dangerous places have wasted their time. They now don't have a pathway to asylum in this country. If you go back to my episodes on the Daddi and Gap, you will hear some of those people.
Right. Those people are now stuck in Mexico without really any legal means to enter the United States and c asylum.
Trump has directed ICE to increase detention capacity. We spoke about this in our previous podcast. Don't like the amount of detention beds they would need to hit. The thirteen million deportations they talked about is immense, but one of the things they are doing is starting to house it's people whose countries won't accept them for deportation, right, which is a thing that has happened. The United States has begun using military aircraft for deportations in the last two weeks.
I want to stress that this isn't a capacity issue. Biden deported eight thousand people in a month in the September to October of twenty twenty one. Trump is aiming to hit five thousand. Biden did it all with contractor flights. Trump is doing a lower number and using air force flights.
This is not because he can't get the contractors. It's purely an aesthetic choice, and it's an aesthetic choice which has roughfled enough feathers in South and Central America that you have Honduras saying that they're going to revote the US mission to have a military base in Hondolas as a mistreat migrants. We had Columbia briefly refusing US military flights with deportees, Mexico doing the same.
Briefly entering a trade war with Columbia. Yeah, yes, which lasted about two hours.
The one hour trade war at about the same length as the Civil War in Western Yugoslavia.
Yeah, the trade war with Columbia was averted when Columbia sent its own military plane to get these deportees.
Yeah, Columbia caved immediately.
Yeah, then they will continue to accept US deportees as they have done for a long time. Right again, if you listen to my Darien series, you'll hear of some Colombian people being deported. We're now getting into things that are like more. These are orders that we haven't seen realized yet. One of them is he is. He has talked about having the Attorney General remove as far as possible federal funding from so called sanctuary jurisdictions.
Right.
These are normally places where local law enforcement were cooperates with federal immigration enforcement. ICE makes a majority of its detentions from people who are already detained.
People who are like arrested by police, yes.
Exactly for whatever. Then those police notify ICE and ICE come get them. We've seen a lot more of door to door ICE raids in the last two weeks, and they've been ramping up even really really this week. But ever since Trump was inaugurated, we've seen ICE attempting to enter people's homes. Often they just have a warrant issued by themselves rather than they judicial warrant. So we've seen people refusing to let them into their homes. We've also
seen the removal of the quote unquote sensitive places doctrine. Yeah, sensitive places had previously been understood to be schools, churches, and hospitals. Now ICE is conducting quote unquote enforcement operations in those places. Those are actually places like the sensitive places doctrine have been in place for a long time. This wasn't like a Biden thing. This was This has been a long term thing. So ICE is now and we've seen immigration actions conducted at like a church in Atlanta,
for instance. We've seen I think they were actually Secret Service agents who identified themselves as an ICE agent, sort of school in Chicago because a childhood posted an anti Trump video. And then I guess. The last thing that we are seeing is this designation of organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations. This is an interesting one. We haven't really seen any action on this yet, but it's one of his executive orders.
In day one in his.
First administration, he designated Iran Kuld Force as a foreign terrorist organization and then proceeded to kill their leader. Right, So this FDO designation opens up the possibility of a lot of like covert activity I'm talking like the CIA and like Tier I special forces units. It also allows him to bring about economic sanctions on any one material
really supporting these organized crime organizations. In practice, that would encompass huge swaths of the Mexican economy, right, because there are people in agriculture, people in business who are paying protection or they're being extorted to pay money, right, And so in theory, those people are now materially belefating a tent terrorist organization and they could be sanctioned as well.
We will have to see how this plays out, I guess, and that there's still the directive was to look into and then name these groups.
Well, and it's something that heg Seth has previously been in favor of and he has now been confirmed.
Yes, yeah, Hegzeth has talked about using special forces in Mexico.
Oh yes, and this was Agenda forty seven stuff. They've been talking about this for a while.
Yeah, yeah, it's also in our Agenda forty seven episodes. If people want to go back, there a direct action rate in Mexico.
Drone warfare in Mexico.
Obviously doing this without the permission of the Mexican government would be an act of war, right like killing foreign nationals without the permission of their government. Conducting direct action raids bombing another country like that, that is an act of war. The US has had an fid FED Foreign Internal Defense Mission right where it trains advisors and assists Mexican law enforcement and military for a long time. The guys who arrested El Chappa, for instance, were trained I
think by Mars Sock. But this has been happening for a long time. But to go from that to unsanctioned direct action would be a huge, a huge step up. The only really analogous, directly analogous thing I can think of is Clinton with a planned Columbia designating FARC as a foreign terrorist organization, But that was very much with the cooperation and support of the Colombian government. We're seeing a much more adversarial relationship between the United States and
Mexico right now. The last thing I want to mention is that this deployment, I've spoken about it, but they are about sixteen hundred troops deployed right now. Biden deployed fifteen hundred troops in the summer of twenty twenty three. This is not a vastly different number that they are doing different things. They seem to be chucking razor wire on top of the wall and being photographed there two major jobs at the moment. We will see how that
plays out. Also, with reference to military, Trump immediately canceled the refugee resettlement program. This left people all over the world stranded, including Afghans, many of whom worked for the United States or family members of US service people. Their refugee resettlement program, people don't come to the southern border. They go do all their background things and then fly into the United States to different status to entering and
claiming asylum. Those people, many of whom had booked flights, found their flights were canceled.
They're now stranded.
Lots of them were stranded in Pakistan and facing immigration enforcement there in the case of the Afghans. So yeah, that is a speed run of all the terrible Trump immigration executive orders. We'll be reporting on this pretty extensively, so you can keep coming back for more. But another thing that we have more of right now is advertisements.
Okay, we are back. I have a few other notes. I want to add for the woke front that I'm reporting on right now, I think it's been a lot of conflation between you know, like DEI and like what we would consider like affirmative action. DEI refers to like these specific like corporate training policies and diversity initiatives, which is, you know, separate from long standing affirmative action policies, which has been used both in the corporate world and in
like the government for like decades at this point. And what a whole bunch of this DEI rollback type stuff is essentially doing is just openly discriminating against people who are not like straight white men. It's like, if you are a straight white man, we cannot hire you because that would mean we are doing DEI. And like, this is what a lot of the stuff that we're seeing
kind of looks like. There was a mass email to federal agencies about DEI and calls to report DEI policy in their department if they're going by like other names, right, So that would be stuff like affirmative action, right, if there's anything that that is about, you know, trying to trying to increase the diversity in your workforce or any quote unquote woke topics, including you know, gender ideology, anything
anything that seems vaguely woke. You're supposed to now report to make sure that gets removed because that's not part of the new federal government. I believe someone from the NSA did leave a tip on that email line reporting
reporting DEI masquerading as as another name. Similar to this, there was a memo or an email that was leaked to Ken Klippenstein from the Defense Intelligence Agency which basically said that they're not going to be observing any any woke holidays, including Martin Luther King Junior's Birthday, Black History Month, Women's History Months, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, June teenth, Women's Equality Day,
National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National American Indian Heritage Month, with a small asterisk saying that the pause on observing these will not affect the federal holidays, which would be MLK and Juneteenth, although who knows, they might try to even remove some of those as being federal holidays.
I did wonder that like at some point, you're gonna like you're gonna lose people when you take away their days off work.
I get, like that's right, right, So, like I think they might leave those like actual federal holidays in but you're not allowed to observe any of these, any of these other awareness months or or you know, Pride Month, Black History months, like you're not allowed to acknowledge that at all in these federal agencies now, at least for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Support for most of Trump's executive
orders does fluctuate. According to a poll from Reuters, the support for closing all DEI offices is actually pretty split. Fifty one percent oppose the closing of these offices. According to their poll, Forty four percent are in fame and it's very segmented. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America pretty disliked, with seventy percent being in opposition.
Look, the one thing people hate most is changing names.
Having the names been change.
Yeah, nobody likes that. Yeah.
Yeah, he did Denali as well. Right, Yeah, I guess that was changed more recently. But the Gulf of Mexico has been the Gulf of Mexico for longer than it's America has existed as a country the United States, right.
I mean, Denali has been Denali for longer than America has existed.
It's just right, right, right, But.
There was a period where we called it McKinley. No one's ever called it the Gulf of America.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm not saying the Denali thing's right. I'm just saying, like that's all a much harder.
So yes, yeah, yeah, you're not going to get much buying on that. Yeah.
Pardening J six protesters, new tariffs or taxes on Canadian goods, and ending birthright citizenship are all around sixty to thirty sixty opposed thirty percent in favor. Trump. During his first we did see a record high approval rating that is slowly I think gone down, but I don't know, it's hard to gauge the level of like general enthusiasm for
his actions right now. And there's I think part of like the general strategy that we're seeing is there's just so much happening every single day that you can't even keep track of it all, let alone like internalize it. Like he's he is trying to sign as many of these orders every day so that both the courts, all of these like NGOs advocacy groups are always working, and we're never sure what is real, right, We're never sure what's going to stick around all of these memos about
funding and grants. It's just so exhausting. And that's like part of the design is that this just feels like a constant stream of nonsense that we maybe have to deal with, maybe we won't. One of the more odd things is Trump openly embracing manifest destiny language, which I guess isn't actually odd, that's actually makes sense. It's just one of those things that it feels very rubicon esque. But he does have this new distinct focus on territorial expansion.
During his inaugural address, he praised quote unquote our American ancestors for having quote won the wild West. Now, apparently the call about Greenland to Denmark did not go very well. Denmark did not realize how serious Trump was and was apparently quite angry during that phone call, and you know, seemingly upset that Denmark is not going to easily hand
over Greenland. He seems to be pivoting more towards retaking Panama. Yeah, which is which is something that he also mentioned in his inaugural address.
Let me tell you Panamanians not stoked.
I've been receiving communications from Panama where it was his step down, but they are burning American flags.
The quote from the inaugural address is quote the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation when that increases our wealth and carries our flag into new beautiful horizons, and we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars.
Wow.
Yeah, I don't know, what, what do you have to do.
That's not a good thing.
I think that's bad, Like obviously, that's you know, not great, not ideal. You know, invading Panama not ideal. Going to war with Greenland slightly more funny because it's cold. I think specifically he's focused on, like why that he believes the US has a vested interest in Greenland? Isn't just picking out a spot on the map. I think this also could be like related to trying to prepare for climate change. Having territory in the Arctic is going to
become an increasingly valuable commodity to have. And and I think there is a part of this that could be legitimately on on that side, because I mean, I don't know, maybe Trump should just get really into Alaska.
Well, he did deregulate drilling in Alaska, drill baby drill. I will be up there later this year talking to people in Alaska about drill baby drill.
Very excited for.
That, but I don't know. I think it's also generally not super useful to make huge generalizing statements about what this type of stuff Trump is doing right now and how it will reflect on his entire presidency. People have been been doing this kind of about Trump's flip flopping opinions on TikTok, you know, being very into like, you know, saving TikTok and then then calling it worthless, but then going back to actually making sure that Microsoft buys it
or something. And you know, people are very easy or quick to like jump onto these sorts of things. Trump's flip flopping tendencies maybe not sinking every single easy bucket and acting like these would be emblematic of his entire presidency, and like that's not the case. That that that does not actually mean that Trump just says things even though he's gonna call TikTok worthless, does not mean that he's going to not do that easy lay up. We're all aware of how much he just says what is on
his mind, yep. And I think these sorts of things do not necessarily mean that he's going to like plummet to being the most unpopular president ever because he, you know, refuses to use the right messaging around TikTok or something. The other economic situations he might walk us into would be you know, much much more affecting to his general popularity.
Yeah, he's he is doing again. I talked about this a lot. Why fascists succeed is that they try, like they're constantly reaching for stuff, and oftentimes like they overreach, but nobody pushes back so they get the thing, right. That's what he's doing here. Do I think that he's willing at this point to commit to a full scale military invasion and armed occupation of Panama, a thing that could be a real problem for his presidency?
Yeah?
Right, Like US troops dying in meaningful numbers in attacks in a country that we had no fucking beef with before. That could be a real fucking problem for a guy who ran on the things that he ran on. But maybe he gets a bunch of concessions for nothing. It's
the same thing with Greenland. You make the push, you try to scare Denmark, you try to scare Greenland, and you see if they'll accept something, and then you you walk away, maybe with a coup, and you do it fucking widely enough you might get something.
Right, Like, that's that's it.
He's he's testing his limits because that's what they do.
Yeah, I mean, look at Columbia, right, he immediately went to like eleven on the retaliation scale and effectively received concessions.
Yeah.
So I think, you know, similar to how you know it was annoying in the first like resistlib era, to take every single crazy statement Trump says seriously, or like, you know, do this performative outrage over every single thing he does. I think it's also useless to do fast mimetic reactions that form generalizing statements about you know, how how something that Trump is doing is emblematic for the rest of his term and now he's like doomed to failure.
I think those statements are actually pretty useless and at the very least are not helpful. Right now, let's close by talking about Guantanamo. I guess Robert and James, I'll have I'll have you taken.
Yeah.
So, Trump has signed an executive order saying that they're going to create a facility capable of storing thirty thousand migrants in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. First, we should probably just talk about how realistic this is. If you ever looked at a topographical map of Guantanamo Bay, it's quite a large, Like the US concession in Cuba, is a sizable degree
of land. But it's not easy land to build things on, right like it is that it's rugged terrain, you would say, So making a camp like this is almost certainly going to be extremely expensive, and at least under kind of the way things currently work, it will probably take a good amount of time to get set up.
Like.
This is not a quick thing. This is not an overnight thing. And one thing I want to remind people of is that they have already have expanded a number of camps and facilities in the US to deal with all the migrants they are taking in. So this is not the start. If you want to call this, and I think it's fair to call this a plan to start a concentration camp system, that system began early, and
in fact it started before Trump took office. A decent junk of it was anticipating him coming into office, But.
This is not the first camp, right, Yeah, and like Biden did significant legwork for detension that is cool and unusual, Yes, with his legal defense and his establishment of outdoor detention for migrants since the end of Title forty two in May of twenty three. And I think, like we have to acknowledge that, I know people are very much into the like, don't criticize the Dems right now, Like if they don't change, if taking a fat l in what should have been one of the easiest elections of the
century doesn't change them, then nothing will. And like we have to acknowledge that we are going to concentration camps quicker. I mean there were foreign outlets that called the outdoor detention sites in Hakumba concentration camps, right because they'd sure as hell look like one.
And they are. This is a big personal frustration to me. I'm seeing a ton of people going online and comparing this to the Nazi concent camp hereafter referred to as the KZ system.
Right.
There's one post I came across on Twitter where a person whom I'm not going to name, just to not cause a bunch of bullshit for them. Time from taking office to opening a massed attention camp. Mussolini eight years, ll Gala and others, Libya Hitler fifty one days. Docau Germany Trump nine days. That's fucking horseshit. Yes, Docou took longer to establish. Docou was not the first concentration camp.
The concentration camp system in Germany under the Nazis started as soon as the Nazis took power with a series of what were called wild concentration camps, and this was involved a huge number of people, largely political enemies of the regime, members of the opposition party, being taken into custody, beaten, tortured,
and stored in a series of airsats facilities. Two hundred thousand people were taken into custody under the wild concentration camp system in nineteen thirty three, the first year that Germans were in power. These are not comparable systems. That does not mean that I don't believe what Trump is doing is a concentration camp. It is a concentration camp
made in the model of the American system. This is part of the American history of concentration camps, which goes back something like two hundred years right to the I mean we were one of the first countries.
To employ concentration camps.
The concentration camp as a concept began with what we're called reconcentrados in Cuba at the behest of a Spanish general fighting an insurgency. There were US officers embedded there. They came back and those tactics were adapted for our wars with Native American tribes on the frontiers and the planes. General Sherman was one of the very first Americans to carry out concentration camps. And what we are seeing here is part of America's tradition with concentration camps. It is
not part of the German tradition with concentration camps. And you're going to be mistaken about like how this is going to proceed and what the dangers are, because I do not think the dangers at this point are that we build a death factory capable of incinerating a million people in less than a year. That's not the threat.
The threat is huge numbers of people are taken into custody and stored in places that are not safe, that do not have good hygiene, that do not have good food standards, and a significant number of those people will die or suffer permanent physical injury, but it won't look like Auschwitz. And if that's what people are expecting, they'll be like, well, maybe this isn't that band, Maybe this
isn't a concentration camp after all. So it's important to get things right, both for that reason and because it's also disrespectful to the people who died during the fucking Holocaust to be like, yeah, Trump's a lot worse than Hitler right now, Like.
No, no, stop that.
Yeah, Like we have you can trace online from like Bosquier Rodondo, right, but they sent a Navajo people.
Right, Boss Gredondo is a great thing to bring.
Yeah, yes, And you can trace a direct line from that to the outdoor detention comps we started twenty twenty three, where people were forced to remain in one place without food, water, or shelter, and people died as a result of that last year two years ago, and like that from there to Guantanamo Bay.
It is not a massive leap.
And yeah, just being like we don't have Auschwitz, it's just asinine. Like if you can't acknowledge that America has a long history of doing this, and you know, really you need to examine your own preconceptions before like speaking for others.
Yep, all right, is that this episode for this week? Everyone?
I think that's the episode. I think we're done.
We reported the news.
Thanks, we reported the news.
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