Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #13

Department will start collecting on defaulted student loans. Beanie clad Tim Poole joins the White House press pool, and hippie Facebook moms rejoice with artificial food dies being banned across America. How are we doing, everybody?

thing was really wild. Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt gave a give a glowing introduction to Tim Poole's addition to the press room, and Tim's first question to the administration was was asking why news media just lies so much about Trump. Fantastic journalism here from comrade Tim, really probing question. Let's pivot towards RFK and the concerning registry that has been discussed, which is a word you never like to hear. Whenever someone brings up the concept of a registry, it's usually.

these are all tied together, right. I have some frustrations with kind of how it's been taken on social media that I think are not causing people to worry when they don't need to worry, but look at maybe sort of the wrong area to see the immediate threat coming from. So first I'm going to start with like what has been said, and before we get to the registry, we have to go back to what he was talking about on the campaign trail because prior and this is prior

to him endorsing Donald Trump. When our FK Junior was like an individual like running for president on his own under his independent campaign, he started talking about wellness farms, right, and these were specifically in the language that he use, places that people who were addicted to psychiatric medication antidepressants he named specifically antidepressants and stimulants as well as people with opiate addictions, right, and he has since talked about

other drug addictions as well. Could go to spend three or four years working on a farm. He always frames it as also like learning skills. So it's this mix of I want people to be able to work in this in you know, lovely bucolic, you know agrarian setting where they'll gain working skills. And then there's also pepperedin these very frightening phrases like they need to be reparented right now. In addition to this, he's not just that this is all focused on Americans who are taking medications

that he thinks are over over prescribed or purely unnecessary. Right, that's always the way, Like psychiatric medication. He almost has a scientologist attitude towards it that like this is all essentially unnecessary and obviously you know, all of this stuff comes out of their elements of this that were true at one point. For example, back in the nineties, like

Riddlin was wildly over prescribed to kids. But the way in which he's translated this now is that basically everyone on a stimulant, everyone on an antidepressant is on it unnecessarily. And in a podcast in twenty twenty four, he went further by kind of tying a lot of this to race, specifically stating quote, every black kid is now just standard put on adderall on SSRIs benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a

chance to go somewhere and get reparented. So that's all deeply concerning.

That's what he's said, right, Okay, Now, perfectly reasonable when a guy in an administration like this is talking about putting up camps to be like, well, I don't know if I believe him, but it's not accurate that he said he wants to arrest millions of people and force them onto camps. He just has not said that, right, Yeah, yeah, And I think it behooves us to be honest about what he said. I think it also who's to talk about, like where this idea comes from, right, and what he's

looking back to. And again, a lot of the issue here is not necessarily what RFK might do, but the fact that he might not be there forever, and if he starts establishing this this kind of kind of program that starts in an attempt to be something that is more, you can choose to be on these camps or not. There's certainly willingness within the Republican Party to force people

into different kinds of quote unquote treatment like this. And one thing I think that particularly is the way in which the right has liked to shift blame for gun violence and mass shootings off of the availability of firearms and onto people who are on psychiatric medication right, And this is an area in which I could see someone taking over from RFK or pushing past the things he specifically has stated he wants to do, because I think he does come out of a more quack medicine goal here,

putting people forcibly in camps and colonies like this, I.

he is specifically calling back to. Quote beginning of the eighteen nineties and continuing through the first decades of the twentieth century, epileptic and feeble minded colonies sprung up around the US. The initial purpose of these colonies was to remove patients from overcrowded, badly run asylums and poorhouses in favor of farm life, where they would have access to

the outdoors. Under the colony model, patients generally lived in cottages designed to be more homelike than institutional Patients were also given jobs, and many were expected to work on colony farms, where they grew their own food. Doctor William Sprattling, the medical suit superintendent of the Craig Colony for Epileptics in New York, declared that the farm model meant nature, the great restorer, will have an opportunity to do her best.

It didn't work. Supporters of the colony model argued that with time, clean air, sunshine, and a restricted diet, physical labor could heal patients, but that didn't happen. Data from the Craig Colony, one of the America's first epileptic colonies, illustrates this point. During the nineteen forties, thanks to funding and staff limitations because of World War II, conditions in

North America's institutions were particularly grim. The institutions nineteen forty three to nineteen forty four annual report to the State Commission of Mental hygiene shows that less than one percent of patients were discharged is cured that year. During that same period, over two hundred patients attempted to leave the colony without permission, and five percent of the total patient

population died. And so I mean, that's reason enough to be deeply worried, right, the fact that without saying like RFK wants to do what the Nazis did, RFK wants to do what the America already did, and it killed a huge number of the people who were interned in those camps. And I guess the thing I keep bringing up is that when I think about what the threat model is more than fucking Auschwitz for people who want our NSSRIS, it's a Judge Rotenberg Center on every corner.

It's camps like these where costs are going to be cut and there's not going to be good access for any kind of independent monitors to make sure health and safety are being followed. It's not that people are going to be shoveled into ovens. It's that as a result of this system being incompetently applied to the most vulnerable. And I'm not even talking about my worry at the moment, being that everyone on an SSR will be forced in

it's going to be poor kids. And RFK has already talked about that, right, Like, that's why he's focusing on the black kids, right, that's who they're going for. We've had some people post up in the subreddit being like, I know I'm going to go to a camp because I have autism, or I know I've alway to go to a camp because i have ADHD. And I'm telling you, I'm not saying don't be scared of fascism. I'm saying this is where to fight right now. It's not RFK wants to send every adult on an SSRI into a

death camp. It's that they're going to try and be putting these kids instead of you know, the different juvenile programs that exist, instead of any kind of functional medical program, They're going to force them into facilities like this. And it's going to become easier for facilities like the Judge Rotenberg Center, which horribly abuses and tortures autistic kids, to spread and to get state and federal funding. Like and that's the threat, right, It's an extension of what we're

doing and what we've done. It's not a carbon copy of what the Nazis are doing or did speaking of the Nazis, and we're back. So a couple of things happen in quick succession that is responsible in part for like why people are so freaked out, and rightfully so. One of them is that RFK gave a speech on the back of new data that showed yet another rise in the rate of autism diagnoses, and as I said on a previous episode, it's because we're looking for it more.

But he made a statement about people with profound autism not being able to pay taxes or write poems, you know, or that sort of thing. And while he was he was specifically talking about people with quote unquote profound autism, it's reasonable for people to assume, like, yeah, but that's just kind of what he sees is basically everyone, right,

and I don't think that that's an unfair assumption. And then coming right up on the heels of that, there was an announcement from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health about RFK Junior's new effort to quote unquote study autism. And basically, what they're going to be doing is collecting comprehensive patient data with broad coverage of the US population and kind of organizing it within the NIH. This is

the first time this has been done. But they are going to be grabbing basically everything they can get their hands on. And we're talking about a mix of medication records from pharmacies, lab testing records, genomic data from people who like go to the Department of the basically data taken by the VA, data taken by the Indian Health Service, as well as data from private insurers. And they're also

going to be buying data from smartwatchs stuff like fitbits. Right, who does sell their data to anybody with like twenty dollars hanging out the back of their pocket. And as a heads up, if you are looking for a fitness tracker, you should look more into this. There are a few that have reasonably good data protection histories. Garman is one of them. This does not mean it's perfect. All of them will hand over your data if given a court order to do so. None of them are going to

break the law to hold on to your data. But Garman doesn't just like sell willy nilly to anybody who wants to like advertise based on it. Right that said, most of them do the last thing I'd write was something like twelve out of fifteen different free fitness tracks apps they checked sold data pretty widely, So yeah, about eighty percent. Yeah, it's the vast majority. Right, So, the NIH is basically looking at taking the data that exists.

They're not talking about really gathering new data, but they they are talking about collecting everything that exists and putting it under one roof for the first time. And this is for a couple of purposes. Right. They want to be able to track the spread of different illnesses and different health problems within the population. These are their claims, but also they want to create a disease registry specifically

to track Americans with autism. Right, And this is because Kennedy describes autism as a preventable disease, which is not accurate. And the fact that this database and these other databases are being made should be very worrisome. Right, It's both important to talk about the fact that he is specifically signaling out autism while also stating like, that's not the only thing they're looking into. Right. They want data on people who are on SSRIs, who are on ADHD medication.

They probably want data on drug use. Right. There are a lot of things they are looking to be gathering, and none of it is shit that they should have access for.

of these kids. And I'm not saying those parents don't want to do things that they are already doing things to their kids that are harmful, But those parents want control over what they see as their kids health care. They want the freedom to experiment with medications on their kids to quote unquote fix them. And this data is going to be used both to provide basically to be massaged to provide evidence that different treatments that don't do shit do in fact work. And I think I have

suspicions of financial interests there. I keep getting questioned like, well, what do you think is going to happen when the autism cures don't work, Well, then they're going to put people in camps. No, the autism cures already don't work. This is an industry. They make money off of this. They make money off of drugging and medically torturing these children.

And as far that is, the threat is that it is going to get easier to do at a larger scale, and it is going to be harder to fight, even illegal to provide good information on what does and does not work. And that is what's happening right now as opposed to something we might be worried about, you know, years down the line. And yes, we should fight anytime the government is trying to put populations of people into a motherfucking database like this, we should fight all of

this tooth and nail. I just think this is what I see as the danger. You know, Yeah, the risk is this to centralized stuff. It's a centralized acceleration for things that have already been happening, less so than just like large skilled direct sator intervention.

If we start from the top and go down, the Supreme Court temporarily banned the government from renditioning Venezuelan men in the district of North Texas to El Salvador. I think people maybe sometimes this got a little misinterpreted on social media, like you have to look at who the class was, and the class was a group of Venezuelan men who were in immigration detention in North Texas who were going to be sent to Well Saladore, and that

was who got the relief. The case at the time was pending before the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and the Supreme Court said that once that court active, the government could appeal to the Supreme Court. However, they added, the government should not, and I'm quoting here, remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.

And in this case, the government more or less ignored this, and it did so by sticking to its line that they can't bring him home to the United States, saying that the requests were and I'm quoting again here, based on the false premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate Abrego Garcia's released from custody

in El Salvulo. Their claiming they were ordered to return him, and somehow in their minds, returning him does not include ensuring his release, like they're saying that they're only obliged to transport him should he be released anyway.

They also doxed his wife this week by releasing a protective order that she had once filed and withdrawn, and when that was released, it contained her address, so she's now hiding in a safe house.

Ricardo Pradovasquez. He's not among the two hundred and thirty eight people we know on the manifest for those sent twelve Salbador. He doesn't appear to be in Venice Whaler, which is where his passport is from. And the fact that the government claims that they sent him. The government has said they sent him on the March fifteenth flights. He's not listed there. He's not visible in photos. Has led to concerns that we might have sent more people

to Asarbadorre than we currently know about. He entered the country with a CBP one appointment. Right, which of all the ways to enter is the one that the US government was trying to force people to use at that time.

This concern has been compounded by the fact that it also emerged this week that the US has sent at least one detainee, Omar Abdul sata Amin to Rwanda, and the combination of these two things raises a concern that they are sending third country nationals to detention in other

countries that we are not yet aware of. Right, of course, the Rwanda Plan was something that the UK government hatched a long time ago, and the Kagami government in Rwanda seems to see this offer right as a way of gaining legitimacy with governments in the global North, especially given the widespread criticism for its actions in the Democratic Republic

of Congo. Recently, from the Handbasket, which is like a kind of substacky outlet, they've reviewed memos between the US government and the embassy in Rwanda, and I'm quoting from one of them here. The US provided a one time payment of one hundred thousand dollars to support social services, residency documents, and work permits. Rwanda has also, according to the Handbasket, agreed to accept ten more third country nationals. So the US is paying Rwanda a little bit more

than it's paying El salbad Or. Right, it was paying El salborda twenty thousand per person per year, but it's a one time payment. Nonetheless, I struggle to believe that you could concoct a way in which it would cost Wander one hundred grand to produce a residency document and a work permit for an Iraqi national. But yeah, this has obviously led to the concern that people are being sent to other places that we don't yet know about

talking to people being sent to other places. A US citizen, Jose Hermosille, was detained by ice after approaching a border patrol agent to ask for directions.

girlfriend's family in Tucson. He told the agent he was from New Mexico, and the agent accused him of lying. In his account, DHS has to produce a transcript with I'm not going to call it a signature because it just has the word Jose written underneath it. Right, Mister Hermercio, according to his girlfriend, has some learning difficulties, and by her account, he wouldn't have been able to read the

English language transcript that he's alleged to have signed. So, like, whether or not he signed this is rather a material right. He clearly, judging by her account, was not aware that he was in it. Judging by this, this is not even a signature with a last name. It's laughable to suggest that he like consentingly signed this. But nonetheless, he was detained for ten days till his family produced his documents in court.

or Spanish. He speaks an indigenous mind language, but he gave his real ID card and Social Security card over to a state trooper. He was detained and charged with illegally entering the state as a quote unquote unauthorized alien. Similarly, the trooper claims that Lopez Gomez said that he was

in the country illegally. This is like some kind of communication error or these law enforcement officers are just like lying or trying to construct like language traps to make someone agree to a statement that admits that they're in the country legally, which allows them to be detained. He

was put into a twenty four hour ice hold. The next day, a federal judge verified his birth certificate, which is brought by his mother, but claims to lack the authority to release him, though he was released later Thursday night, and he was arrested under a new Florida law signed by the Santas last month, which a judge blocked earlier

this month. On April fourth. This basically allows the state troopers to act as their state's own like border patrol, and it penalizes immigants who quote unquote knowingly enter or attempt to enter the state after entering the United States by eluding or avoiding examination or inspection by immigration officers.

There's been instance like this like the past few months, which have which have increased in frequency since Trump has taken office. Yeah, let's go on a break and return to talk tariff. Okay, we are back. How's the how's the economy going?

countdone clock on those being unsuspended. But we got a view of how that happened from the Wall Street Journal, and the Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary Treasurer Scott Bessett and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik basically waited until Trump advisor Peter Navarro was out of the room, and then it was in a meeting, and then they cornered Trump and we're like, you gotta roll these terror you gotta do this pause on the tariffs.

they can grab control of the fucking puppet reins. But this this does actually lay bare something that's sort of important about this, which is that like there is a huge fight inside of the Trump administration between kind of lutnik who's like the representative of a bunch of different sort of sectors of American capital, right, Like he he's a representative of like you're fucking like Walgreens, dipshits, right, and like he's also representative of with the finance people,

and those people are losing their fucking minds over the tariffs because it's again going to destroy the economy. But Navarro is you know, it's just like a hardline sort of like anti China ideologue. And and Navarro is the person who's been driving the most intense versions of these tariffs.

And it's a real issue for everyone else in the administration who doesn't want this to happen because Navarro is like the one guy in the administrator in the Trump actually likes and so they can't directly move against him because they lose. Like Elon Musk tried this and like it got nowhere. And so you know what we've been seeing is is just like again, the tariff policy here is just being set by who's the last person in

the room with him. Yeah, so we're probably still like about sixty days ish out from these terrorists coming back into effect. I mean this basically means like they'll be hitting in the summer, which is also just like absolutely the worst conceivable time for these terrifts to take effect in terms of like if you were just like deliberately trying to cause a massive popular mobilization against you. This

is what you would do. They're not that, they're just dumb, but like, you know, so okay, let's most move on to the sort of big news of this week is the press has been carrying stories about Trump backing off of the one hundred and forty five percent China tariffs and the fact that there's going to be negotiations and it's all going to get wound down, and like, I'm pretty sure this is just kind of pure lutnik shit to try to calm the markets down. The issue with

this story is that there are no negotiations, right. Everyone keeps talking about how the US is going to do negotiated settlement with China. There have not been any negotiations. There are not negotiations. There has not even been a process to start negotiations, because you know, the last stories we had about this was that like neither side wants to be the person to like start going to the table because like asking the other side for negotiations makes

them look weak. Like Trump has been asking China to ask him the cert of negotiations. The Chinese are refusing. And the second issue here, and this is The more substantive problem with with a sort of negotiated back out is that the Trump Navarro position hinges on the line that the trade deficit inherently like with China, is proof

of Chinese market manipulation. And the thing is, there's no actual way to systematically address that, right, Like there's that there's nothing that like either China or the US could do that would that would reverse the trade deficit. So there's no sort of like you know, like yeah, like like the obvious way out here would be for like Trump to take some kind of weird symbolic victory and like China to be like we're doing a fenntional crackdown

or some shit. But the thing is, like, ideologically for someone like Navarro, and Navarro is the important figure here, like Navarro just wants trying to destroy it.

is like Trump's guy. So I I just don't buy all of this, all of the fucking stories that are coming out, And this happens constantly, every single time there's one of these things, there's all these stories being like, well they're gonna get rolled back. It does actually mean this, and that just happens. Right, we have one hundred and forty five percent rais on China. Now, the last thing I want to talk about is what the actual effects of this has been. And the effect is that it

has been. There's been a massive slow down and a massive like shutdown in in exports from China to the US, like an internship container ship traffic. Right, we're talking about I'm just gonna quote from CNBC here. So they're talking about Optimizer, which is like a tracking system for ships, and they said, quote, year on year, the data shows a forty four percent drop in vessels schedule to arrive the week of May.

larger than others. And again, the tariff, we still haven't even seen the actual shocks of the tariffs yet, and we're already seeing a decline in experts from China that is like again around the level of the lockdowns. And and you know, I think like people remember like the kind of unhinged shit that that caused, right, and that's something that you know is only going to intensify. And the other part of this, right is that the strategies right now for how this is being dealt with is

moving through Vietnam, moving through Cambodia. But if you remember the rates from the original sort of like turf tariffs from Liberation Day, right, like the teriff from Vietnam was like one hundred percent or some shit, it was like

eighty percent. I don't remember, zat my head, but like there's no actual viable strategy of just of ways you can route these goods through and it's been especially hitting the sort of drop shipping companies, right, like people like Temu and anything that realts in air phrase just getting fucked. And so this is all just you know, just sort of rolling in the background, is just this logistics crisis,

and it's it's it's it's also an echo crisis. And this thing I actually want to close this section on is that, Like, so the big issue with these sort of empty boats, right and these cancelations at boat orders, is that in order for it to be profitable, because all of these these shipping companies run on such low margins, right, they only barely survive the pandemic by taking out a series of just like unhinged sort of like weird collateral

based loans. And in order for these companies to be profitable, they have to continuously keep on completely filling up ships.

to unless the entire thing is full. So the supply chain disruptions that we are going to see from this, as this sort of escalus and as this continues, and especially in a few months if the liberation dataies go back into effect, are catastrophic, And we really like, it's just it's this way. You can hear the thunder, you can see the lightning, but the storm hasn't hit yet, and it is going to and when it does, I

don't know. I was trying to do a poetic thing about how we're all going to get fucking dredged, but we're fucked. It's going to be unbelievably bad. And the only process right now inside of the administration that doesn't involve like some kind of mobilization is like, again, is Leutnik winning this fucking intra intra administration political battle with Navarro?

I'd like to talk a little bit about student crackdowns for Palestine protests, kind of in a different way we've discussed like ICE going after and detaining and deporting and taking away visas and green cards, so unrelated to that side of it. On the morning of Wednesday, April twenty third, the FBI served multiple search warrants in southeast Michigan, presumably related to Palestine protests and encampments from the past year.

There's also some reporting of law enforcement activity in other states, like Pennsylvania, but I'm still waiting to confirm that. The press secretary for the Michigan Attorney General confirms investigators executed

search warrants for three homes. He said that people were briefly detained during the execution of these warrants, but they were all eventually released, and he noted, quote there is no immigration enforcement angle to the execution of these search warrants unquote, so these people aren't being investigated by ICE to get deported necessarily. This is seemingly for other protest activity. A pro Palestine student group says that these rates happened

at around eight am quote. Early this morning, police an FBI agents rated four residences of University of Michigan pro Palestine protesters, refusing to show warrants. They seized all electronics and a number of personal belongings on quote. But let's close this episode by returning to my most Stephen Colbert Skibbity Biden segment, Stinky Musk, which is still the worst

day I've come up with. Last Tuesday, Elon Musk said that quote working for the government to get the financial house in order is mostly done unquote, So Musk is moving closer to stepping back from DOGE this May, around the time that his Special Government Employee designation is set

to expire. Reporting from Washington Post claims that Musk is growing tired of the vicious and unethical attacks from the left and that is kind of dragging on him, with other reports suggesting that Musk is annoying other Cabinet members and administration officials more than Trump himself. In fact, just this Wednesday, a few hours before recording, Musk and Bessett, we're having a pretty intense shouting match in the White House.

Going forward, Musk says that he plans to work for the government about one to two days a week for the remainder of the Trump presidency so that he can quote make sure that the waste and fraud that we've stopped does not come roaring back unquote. He keeps referring to his work at DOGE is like being already completed. Essentially, we already found all of the fraud, and now we

just have to make sure more fraud doesn't happen. We've previously reported on the alleged fraud that he claims to have found and the false numbers up on the doge site. But it seems like this work really is like winding down the musk. Doge like reply to this email with five things you've done this week, or else be fired. Directive has essentially sputted out senior officials did not comply

with the core aspects of the directive. It was never really enforced, and the Trump Office of Personal Management later said that this was voluntary and that OPIUM officials may've never actually ever read those response emails at all. Though a small number of agencies are still requiring compliance with this mandate, and in some fun news, Tesla stock just continues to decline, dropping to half its peak from last December, and anti Tesla vandalism is potentially spiking the cost of

Tesla insurance. Tesla had a just disastrous earnings call this Tuesday, April twenty second, showing that Tesla profits have fell seventy one percent over the first three months of the year. A total revenue has decreased nine percent compared to twenty twenty four, with car sales revenue dropping twenty percent compared

to a year earlier. The Tesla CFO stated that quote, the negative impact of vandalism and unwarranted hostility towards our brand and our people had an impact in certain markets unquote. In a company statement before this earnings call, Tesla claimed dot quote unquote a changing political sentiment could impact demand for their product. Musk announce that he would be shifting his attention back to Tesla and that his Doge time

allocation will quote unquote drop significantly. Musk talked tariffs on this earnings call and tried to carefully like not bash Trump while stating concerns over the high tariffs, saying quote, I've been on the record many times as saying I believe lower tariffs are generally a good idea, but this decision is fundamentally up to the elected representative of the people, being the President of the United States. So you know, I'll continue to advocate for lower tariffs, but that's all I can do.

sell cars totally. And so each like subsequent cycle of people not buying cars is also destroying their carbon credit subsidies, which is like this sort of like spiraling like cash crisis thing. So you know, look, zero Tesla sales as possible, we can keep driving at world as possible.