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This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis this episode, I'm joined by Na Wong and Robert Evans. Were covering the week of August twenty first and August twenty seventh.
Yeah, we sure are.
I can't believe cracker Barrel would do that. It's outrageous.
Yeah, that's clearly the biggest news.
Thankfully they switched it back. They took the cracker out of the barrel, and thankfully though they've.
Reversed course put the cracker back in.
I really don't understand how it's how it's woke. I mean, I do understand, because I understand how this messaging works, but.
It doesn't matter anytime anything happens, and they can see a backlash forming you after the fact because people were starting to get pissed off about the fucking cracker barrel thing in the same way like that happen with fucking Games Workshop earlier this year, Like they redid their logo in a shitty way. It is the same like minimal bullshit. Yeah, everyone's doing it.
It's it's not woke. Yeah, it's just incentivizing like capitalist conformity. This is why they've changed all of the buildings of like you know, McDonald's pizza Hut to the same structure, so you can use the property and resell it over and over and over again without having to do yes, big renovations. It's just all about capitalist efficiency. It's not about woke.
It's got nothing to do with woke. But there's people whose whole like Chris Rufo, whose whole job is sitting around and as soon as you started to see the backlash forming it and realize like, oh, there's probably gonna be a spree of these companies coming in with these new minimalist logos. Because it's clearly a trend in like consultancies, right like it started happening. This is not the first one.
So I'm just gonna look around until I see one of these that feels like it's got culture war potential, and Cracker Barrel is an obvious one, like if I'm looking, if I was looking out there, that's when I would pick right, Like.
I think they're also responding to, like, you know, the past few years where we've been removing like racist caricatures from logos right with like like Entemima's and like Lando Lakes and using this in a similar way, except they took quite kay leaning against the barrel. Yeah, so it's part part part of that whole backlash as well. It's
funny though I have seen like I don't. I don't know if it's from Chris Ruffo, but you know people similar in that orbit talking about how this thing actually is wokeism because minimalism is based on brutalism, which was invented by communists. So actually turning everything into this minimalist design is actually a plot from the Frankfurt School, the Communists taking over.
I mean, look, it doesn't matter outside of the fact that people whenever you buy into it, like you're you're helping to feed like if you like, even dunking on. That's part of like the problem is that like, yeah, just talking about this shit at all fuels the feedback loop, right, And that's that's what this is, is a feedback loop
that they're very good at manipulating for political purposes. And I'm not going to sit here and lecture you and say like stop commenting on this, stop talking about this stuff, but we do need to understand that this is the olds in the audience will remember the old Simpsons Halloween episode where the different like mascots from different companies like
come alive and start murdering people in town. And the solution that's an old ad Man gives everyone is like, well, if you want to stop the monsters, just look away. Advertising feeds on attention, you know, and as every once everyone ignores the monsters, they go away. And unfortunately that's not how things actually work because there's three hundred and fifty million people in the country and so whatever you choose to do about this isn't going to matter. But
the feedback loop is going to continue unabated. That much I can.
Say cracker barrel has fallen and like Christ after three days, has rose again.
Yeah. Great. Anyway, speaking of memes, unfortunately we should talk about this horrible mass shooting that is probably going to be the big story this week. I mean, I hate to reduce it to that, but yeah.
We're recording this on Wednesday, a few hours after the shooting. This is in Minneapolis.
Yes, there was a mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school, Annunciation Catholic School. This happened earlier the day that we're recording this, So that's going to be Wednesday, August twenty seventh. As of right now at about two eleven pm PST, two children are dead, Seventeen people, mostly children, are wounded. The shooter is also dead, and the shooter has been identified as Robin Westman, who graduated from the school in twenty seventeen.
Their mom also worked at the school until very recently.
Yeah, and that's not at all an unusual kind of situation. Mass shooters at schools often are either attending the school or recently graduated. There's been a couple of cases where a family member worked at the school. Like this stuff is all pretty standard for somebody shooting up a school.
What's different is one of the things that's different is that the shooter basically followed in Brenton Tarrant the christ shooters footsteps by covering their firearms and the gear that they were wearing and draw like I guess drew or painted on I'm not sure. It looks like with like a white paint pen, like white out or something like that,
a white paint pen and covered it. In the names of other mass shooters, references to racial annihilation memes like the Removed Kabab meme, which is in short, a memes celebrating the Bosnian genocide, and it was a meme that was specifically Brenton Tarrant had signaled in his like manifesto and I think on his gun he had a remove Kebob reference, but it's something he signaled and it was on the shooter's firearm as well as the names. I
mean Tarrant. There's references to Tarrant on there. Timothy mc McVeagh, te mcvay's name, just the word McVeigh is painted on there. Ted Kazenski, the Unibomber, a.
Whole bunch of other more recent mass shooters, people who are in like the mass shooter fandom, yeah, as well as just a collection of memes from like old memes.
Too utterly unrelated to shooting, Like there's a loss meme on there, and if you're a lot of people are going, wait, what the fuck? Really? Yeah, and if you're too young for loss. There used to be a wet well. I think there still is a web comic called Control Alt Delete.
It started in like the early two thousands. It might have gotten started in the late nineties, and it was part of like this, there's this boom in web comics in the late nineties when suddenly there's people are able to make their own comics online and make livings off of them. A whole bunch of guys made gaming comics after Penny Arcade, which is like the big one that
blew up. And one of them was Tim Buckley, who did a comic called Control All Delete that was not good, and he tried to have a serious storyline where his character's girlfriend has a miscarriage, and the strip in which he finds her having a miscarriage is called loss. And it's gotten to the point where people are abstracting the four panels into like a minimalist line representation of how
the blocking look like. It's a bit people have done everything like put loss memes on everything, like that's the joke at this point, more than a reference to the show is like, look at this new crazy place. Somebody put a loss meme, and.
So yeah, it's a game.
And a lot of what we're saying with the shooter is like, oh, this is the natural extent of a bunch of things, and a fucking mass shooter putting a loss meme on the bear or on the side of their gun before shooting up a school is the natural furthest craziest extent of the loss meme. Right.
If this is anything, it is like a mimetic shooting. It is based on a whole bunch of memes about other mass shootings as well, specifically in the way that engages in like anti semitism and racism and includes slurs and catchphrases. It's not in the way that the shooter actually believes these things ideologically. It is just to gesture to them as they exist in the lineage of other mass shootings.
It is.
It's a perfunctory use of slurs and of messaging that just kind of wraps around this whole like nihilistic fandom culture around other mass shooters, and like that is that's what this shooting is. I've watch now like seventeen minutes of video of the shooter like showing off their weapons, going through their diaries and journals, inspired by a whole bunch of like Eastern European mass shooters as well. And this shooter reminds me of participants of what's called the
true crime community or TCC. Not as in like the genre of true crime podcasts or documentaries, but it's more of an online fandom based on a personal obsession with mass killers themselves and specifically school shooters. And this community encourages reenactments and tries to get some people to do their own mass shootings. Yeah, and this is not the
first one of these we've had in this past year. Now, the shooting in Wisconsin last December I spent the rep Noow, which we reported on on NI could Happen Here, was also in this variant of like Columbiner True Crime community shootings. Repnow's name is on one of this shooter's rifles. Yes, there was a shooting in Tennessee a few months later which also referenced Repnow, done by a black white supremacist in cel whose manifesto was full of like plagiarized memes
and other manifestos. It's about this, like yeah, this complete lack of meaning, Like they scatter shot all of these memes and references and like bits of manifestos and like images to just to make this whole mess of stuff to look at. But none of it actually means anything.
Well, and the draining of meaning, the flattening of meaning is part of the pla. That's the point taking is taking a man who shot fucking fifty people to death and turning that into the same thing as a twenty year old joke about a comic strip in terms of its impact and severity, Because if that's no more serious or meaningful or painful than fucking a joke about Tim
Buckley's dumbass cartoon. Like, once you get someone in a mind state where they accept that they're willing to accept a lot of terrible things, right, And the goal here is creating content in the form of mass shootings, right, Like, that is the goal, and that is also what people are consciously. A lot of people want to be a
part of themselves. You mentioned the last year's shooting that committed by Samantha ruppnow, but there's also I found a December thirtieth, twenty twenty four article in Wisconsin Public radiowpr dot org their website. It talks about reupnow, but it also gives the story of thirteen year old Jamie Sitz, who killed herself in twenty twenty four and was a
member of the true crime community. The police went through her phone and they found a bunch of memes and reference and like her contributing to online discussions and telegrams and stuff for PCC. She was obsessed with the Columbine Kids, right.
She like engaged in a lot of those conversations, and she was posting about her plan to kill herself, but she was not interested in carrying out like a mass shooting or killing other people, and that fit in fine within the discourse like people in courage present basically right, Like yeah, I think part of the thrill hitary is just wanting to feel like you, sitting on your ass on the computer, you are impacting the world in part because you feel like that's the only chunk of the
world that you've got right, and that's tied into the hopelessness and the nihilism of all of this. I found a just random poster on Reddit in a discussion of the TCC community. I actually really like this person's summary of it. And this is like seven years old. Interestingly enough, it's not a new phenomenon. It dates back to interwar period Germany. There were many Germans at the time who were fascinated with the topic of extremely grisly murder and torture,
especially such instances where sexual arousal was involved. The German language even has a word for it, lust mort or lust murder. Serial killers were on the rise at the time, and many of them claimed to get extreme amounts of carnal pleasure from the act of killing or maiming, and there is this weird vein I found another study as I was looking into this that uses the true crime
community term. It's from twenty fifteen by Naomi Barnes of Utah State University, and it was like looking into fandoms that had grown up around serial killers and around spree killers online. And Naomi is using the word true crime community for just the general terms of people who are interested in true crime, not in the way that you and I have been using it.
Yeah, because we're using this this term to refer to like a specific fandom around like around these shootings, not the general milieu of like true crime podcasts and like documentaries and people who are into that sort of content. We're referring to a much more niche group of people online who operate on like Telegram, discord, Tumbler, and other social media accounts.
Right.
It's based around like specifically like like an obsession over actually doing these acts and like and and like they like cause play as these people. This isn't like your you know, average white woman who likes listening to true crime podcasts. This is this is something very different.
No, and that's that's important. But it's also important to note that, like what you've been talking about, this this need to recreate, and not just prior to actually carrying out a shooting, because most of them don't ever do that. There's this need, this obsession with the aesthetics to want to own clothing and objects and whatnot that like look like Eric Dylan or whatever. Right, the column bine band shirt.
Yeah right, And this does extend to the shootings, Like there's a number of shooters who have worn that KMFDM shirt because one of the columnbind guys wore.
It cementthro up now and I believe this recent shooter also had had a KMDS shirt picked out.
And what's interesting about that twenty fifteen study is that it is looking at the true crime community because columnbiners were already a thing. There'd been a number of copycat attacks, but the kind of social fandom around like that aspect of it had not really taken hold in a mass level in a way that the internet and virality could really make use of.
It involved on Tumblr like in that era. Yes, it's more like an infant compared to like the fully grown version that it is now.
Yeah, And what's interesting to me is this this paper kind of catches the communities. It's starting to calv Off. And so there's a chunk of the paper where she's quoting from a couple of different people who went and visited. In one case, they visited like Adam Lanza's house and the Sandy Hook Elementary School, and it's people visiting places like that, sites associated with like mass shootings and the like.
And she gives this mix of people being like, oh, like the first quesson he quotes who went to Lands of House is like, I was actually just really sad and I just wish none of it had ever taken place, Like it was all really horrible and it made me feel bad. But then a bit later she gives you responses from people who have the opposite reaction, Like there's this fella Paul, who does not specify which murder site they visited, but specified that it was a place where
a murder victim's body was found. And Paul responded, Honestly, I felt a static like, Wow, I'm going to place someone was killed. What if there are ghosts the murderer him or herself? I was absolutely off. My kid, we dug up some dirt and we keep it in a little glass bottle. It's like a religious pilgrimage, right, right, And that's the static and that's what this starts to document.
And that's where I'm like, oh, this is this study is mostly about an unrelated just a normal fandom, but you can see the bits like already popping up in twenty fifteen, these people who are having these estatic almost again like almost like psychosexual experiences being at the site of a mass shooting.
Yeah, and the further country that is then doing one yourself. And obviously this also is like a part of like a suicidal drive, a suicidal intention. While a lot of people kill themselves in the course of the act, right, it's a way of making your suicide not just be about yourself.
Right. And there's more to say about like the culture of fame in this country and like how how virality and whatnot has made it so that like these people tend to get what they want, or at least they know they've got a good chance of getting what they want, right, they're obviously not around to experience it, but like, as long as you do something sufficiently like weird and bloody, you're likely to get a good amount of attention for a while.
So that's the actual like background of what this shooting was. I think now we should probably mention how the shooting's being talked about more broadly, Yeah, because it takes a very different angle from the actual like nihilistic, like TCC fandom aspect it is. It is making this a more about like woke contemporary politics, I suppose.
Yeah.
Cash Betel's announced that he's investigating this as as an anti Catholic hate crime.
Yeah, which is just not true. I mean, it's almost certainly by a Catholic or somebody who was raised gath Like. Yeah. All the people who hate Catholics most are often lapsed Catholics.
Very early on, people started claiming that this shooter was trans Now, a few years ago, they did change their name to Robin, and the name change petition stated that at the time they identified as female. At this point, we still know very little about the actual shooter beyond like the videos they posted on YouTube of their weapons and a journal written in cyrillic and a note that they left to their parents discussing their fear of dying
of cancer due to vaping. I've not been able to look at their Internet presence or activities in the intervening years since changing their name, and their current gender identity is still not very clear. In a translation of their cyrillic journal, they discussed detransition quote, I don't want to dress girly all the time, but I guess sometimes I really like it. I know I am not a woman, but I definitely don't feel like a man. I regret
being trans. I wish I was a girl. I just know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we have today. I also can't afford that I only keep my long hair because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I'm tired of being trans. I wish I never brainwashed myself. I can't cut my hair now, as it would be an embarrassing defeat and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported. It just always gets in my way. I will probably
chop it on the day of the attack. Discussion of gender takes up a very small percentage of the journal. Most of their writing is about admiration for previous mass shooters and fantasizing about killing children from a very young age. On the cover of their journal, alongside a bunch of other like gun stickers, they do have a defend a quality Progress flag sticker with an AK forty seven YEP. From my perspective, this is just another one of those
memes that they're wrapping into everything. On one of their magazines, they wrote I am the wokeler, why so queerious? Right on the other side of the magazine had an anti queer slur. So I view this type of stuff in the same way I view the inclusion of like the Lost meme or like Ted Kaczinski or all this other stuff. This this like memified version of trying to throw everything at the wall just to make everything mean nothing right. And it's it's extremely like obnoxious and annoying.
But it it works.
But yeah, it works. And I don't know what else I want to say on this, onlike the trends angle, we.
Don't want to deny that like this is going to cause a problem, that this is going to be used by the right, like there will be There will certainly be rhetoric, and I've already seen rhetoric from you know, Jack posobc in that crowd around it.
About trans people targeting Catholics.
Well, this is why these people shouldn't have weapons or whatever, like this is why we should put them all in and I don't. I'm not going to minimize that that didn't start with this, that that kind of rhetoric, that conversation and this is useful to that crowd, and you know that is that is bad. I don't. We don't know what's going to happen or to what extent this is. Like we're talking right now that they clearly would like
to use this and are trying to use this. One thing that I would point out and I don't know if this is certainly not an on balance optimistic thing, but making Americans focus on a mass shooting for more than a day or two not as easy as it used to be.
No, Yeah, which is really devastating.
It's not good that we're there, but like two people dead, I'm just saying, like Americans ignore way bigger numbers all the time now the right, you know, there's not always a media campaign like there's going to be with this beyond trying to make this huge. But also they've done that before, right, they did that with the rep now shooting, right, Like, there were attempts to make that and it didn't.
Every mass shooting, right, they have tried to pain it's been done by a transperson, and I think in some ways that has depowered this rhetoric as a tactic. Yeah, by claiming every shooter is trans, most Republicans already believe that to be the case. So whether this person either was trans or used to be trans, it may not matter that much to the right because they already think every shooter is trans. Like right, Trump's already targeting queer people.
The right doesn't need an excuse to go after queer people. I don't think an event like this will make the hammer come down much harder. This could be a boy who cried wolf situation for the anti trans right, since their base already thinks that every mass shooter from the past three years is trans. I did a whole episode on this last year, called fake trans Terrorists. The Gun Violence Archive says that there have been two hundred and eighty six mass shootings in the United States so far
in twenty twenty five. If one or two trans people do a mass shooting, that would still mean trans people at one percent of the population, are less likely to do a shooting compared to CIS people. There was like one legitimate trans mass shooting targeting a school a few years ago in Nashville, and if this happens to be the second, I don't think that this new brain Rod Columbine true crime community shooting will make much of an
impact on trans people nationwide. Think of how quick conservatives moved on from the Zizians, and certainly being trans is not a motivating factor of this shooting. If you look at their writing and videos posted on YouTube before they did this, this nihilistic meme maximili has no trans causation. It has nothing to do with being trans. There's no
coherent or ideological leftist screed, there's no pronoun pins. Their journal talks both about quote unquote hating fascism and inequality, while also hating Jews, Arabs, Mexicans, Indians, calling Somali's subhuman and criminal, writing that quote white people should rule the world unquote, but that minority should quote unquote have rights. While talking about ideological Nazi killers, they remarked, quote, I don't often find myself aligning with these killers specific ideologies unquote.
They said that they disliked racism but also were racist. They wrote about killing quote unquote fags while also calling themself one on one of their weapons. This shooter and all the memes and rhetoric they use is most similar to the Rep. Noow shooting last December in Wisconsin in terms of the neo Columbiner school shooter obsession, as well as the white supremacist mimetic black in cell shooting in NNOC, Tennessee, last January. All these shootings are heavily referential, contradictory, and
intentionally incoherent. Right, every single extremist political faction is represented there, because that that is the point, is combining all of these references two previous mass shootings, So they're incorporating everything they can and things that they just think are funny, like just a whole bunch of like meaningless memes.
Yep.
And that's vastly more important than whatever gender identity the shooter happens to have right now at this point in twenty twenty five.
All right, Well, anyway, folks, there's going to be a lot of people going the sky is falling over what this is going to mean for people and how this is going to be used. And obviously this is terrible. I'm not telling you not to feel terrible about a mass shooting.
You should feel bad about the actual mass shooting.
You should feel bad about the mass shooting the sky. I mean, this guy's been falling right, Yeah, let's give this one a little bit to see if it makes this sky fall any faster, or if in a week we're like, no, this guy's still falling at about the same rate, which isn't good. It's just what happens. It's where we are, all right, ads, and we're back.
We can safely leave the brain rot in the previous section and now talk about something totally real. The economy.
Yes, the economy, which never kills people.
Okay, so speaking of things that have never killed any one, eye, that's so not true. The volkershaw killed so many people. But a very very critical rubicon was crossed on Monday of this week when Trump attempted to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board, Lisa Cook. Now, Lisa Cook is refusing to step down under the fairly obvious justification that the president does not have the power to do this.
Trump has been cooking a very weird thing, accusing her of mortgage fraud as a way to remove her from the Federal Reserve Board. But Trump does not have the power to do this. So we are in the midst effectively of a confrontation over this, where Lisa Cook has continued to just not actually leave her position at the Federal Reserve and is going to court. This is an extremely significant escalation of what up until this point had largely been a series of attacks on the Federal Reserve's governor,
Jerom Powell. There are a few factors here that one of the most important things is Trump's anger over continuing high interest rates or sort of high interest rate. Trump wants to slash interest rates because he thinks it will make the economy grow more. Now, when I said this was the crossing of the rubicon, what this is is this is the beginning of the fight over whether the Federal Reserve is going to be an independent density right.
Trump has been attempting to, as we've talked about in the show, appoint Stephan Miran as another one of the governors on the Federal Reserves Board. Miran very explicitly wants to eliminate the independence of the Federal Reserve. What to talk about exactly what that means in a second, But I want to read this quote from Fortune magazine report on it describing a JP Morgan analysis of the situation, because this has really spooked a bunch of major financial institutions for very obvious reasons.
Quote.
In a note on Friday, JP Morgan analysts, led by chief economist Bruce Cassman, highlighted key proposals such as giving atwill power to the President to fire FED by members and FED bank presidents, giving Congress control of the Fed's operating budget, and shifting the Fed's regulatory responsibility over banks and markets to the Treasury. So this is what Stefan Mihern has been proposing. This is what looks to be the long term plan of Trump and the people around him.
Eliminating the Federal Reserve is a long, long time goal of the far right for an extremely convoluted variety of reasons. The FED in and of itself is an extremely confusing entity. Its creation has spawned a full century of academic arguments about what the States even is, and it's complicated to describe. Also because most of the information will not most, but a significant portion of the information about it is just anti Semitic conspiracy. Because this is eliminating the Federal Reserve.
In the return to quote unquote, sound money is one of the key elements of a massive network of sort of right wing, very old right wing conspiracy theories. But I think that the thing that's best understood by people kind of is just about the Federal Reserve is the FED printer meme, and the Federal Reserve is the body that creates money like that is that is authorized to create the US dollar. That is why it's a Federal Reserve bank. It is critical on a level that is
difficult to express to the entire functioning of the world economy. Now, the Federal Reserve Board is technically a government entity, but it is it was set up explicitly to be quote
unquote non political. Now the extent to which that's true is fuzzy, obviously, But the point of it was so that there would be a large scale financial institution that controls like the money supply effectively, that that controls enormous portions of US sort of macroeconomics policy through its due as control of interest rates would not be able to be like directly interfered with by the President or Congress. That is that it's the whole point of this, you know.
It is effectively a measure to instill confidence that the US isn't going to just like turn the printers on and print a bunch of money from every other capitalist in the world.
Yeah, and like so much. When that promise goes away, what happens, I don't know. Yeah.
Well, and this is this is something that I think, I think is not understood very well.
Right.
The current conflict is largely over Trump wanting to be able to control the Federal reserves interest rates. Right, So he wants he wants the lower federal interest rates to make it make it cheaper to borrow money because he thinks this will pump more money back into the economy and this will make the economy grow. And he thinks that he's being like sabotaged by the FED. The Fed's
worried about inflation. But I actually think that focusing just on that part of the Federal Reserve is significantly underestimating how important the Federal Reserve is to the entire structure of the economy. There are so many just sort of random things that it does that are not particularly well understood.
I was talking about this earlier on a meeting, but the significant portion of the gold held by countries around the world is literally just keptain a vault under the New York Federal Reserve building, and that's just the sort of seemingly random thing that it does. I was reading about its payment system for reasons that I'll talk about in the episode to do about this next week. It just in a footnote about the payment system, there is a part where it says that the Federal Reserve runs
the payment system for the World Bank. So this is something that is a critical, critical, an extremely complicated center of the entire capitalist world. Right, Its payment infrastructure has trillions of dollars a year and moving through it. If this infrastructure stops working or breaks a little bit, a lot of the very subtle management of the economy of
the Federal Reserve does can stop working. And you know, again we've been talking mostly about interest rates and its ability to sort of print money, which is oversimplification, but you know, for example, the Fed also does these things like carries out these like massive overnight repo agreements, like inject liquidity into the market. There's all of these massive we are talking billions and billions of dollars of financial interventions that you basically never even hear about that have
been stabilizing the economy since two thousand and eight. And this apparatus if it is dismantled, if it has directly seized control of by Trump. And and part of what's going on with this board is that Trump is trying to get a majority of the people on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve to be his appointment so that he can control it directly, and so they can start bringing it under directly under the control of
I mean the president effectively. Right, this is something where if you unleash the doge people on the Federal Reserve and the payment system, the settlement and clearance systems stop working. We are talking about a catastrophe that it's unclear to me whether it's even been modeled. There are so many different complicated things that this institution does that these people do not understand particularly well at all and think that they can use to just sort of permanently create a
bubble economy that they can ride. And this is the first sort of shot over the battle. Isn't even in the right where this is the first engagement over the fight for that. There's also been a lot of sort of taco analysis of this, arguing that this is actually Trump backing down from trying to fire Jerom Powell to just try to fire one of the Reserve board members that's not backing down. There's also a chance to heal that. If this works, he's going to try to fire Powell too.
So we're gonna We're gonna keep watching a situation. I'm going to talk more about it next week when we know more, and also talk about what the Federal Reserve is as an institution, And we're going to continue monitoring the situation because it is extremely important and handing the keys over to these people is something that is dangerous enough that it is creating significant pushback among the actual people in finance and in the banking system who matter.
Great, well, it's so good. I mean, we'll see if this means anything other than more suffering for you know people. I guess that's where I am, as like, is there even a level of fucking with the money that Trump can do that that's enough to seriously cause consequences for him? And there must be, but it's just hard to imagine
if there was. It's this. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, that's the fun thing with the big stories we've got this week is they're all like, well, could get a lot worse, could just stay as bad as it is right now. Well, we'll continue to wait to see what's going to happen with all of that. Speaking of something that we don't have to just wait and wonder what's going to go on, because the news changes every single week. Here's the tariff song.
Rocket Jazz, Rocket Jazz, good sal locking rocking jazz, rocking jazz.
Boy.
Oh boy so, and yet another instance of the whole Trump backing down thing not happening. The tariffs on India that Trump had been threatening for the purchases of Russian oil have in fact taken effect. The terriff right on India is now fifty percent. This is a significant barrier
to any trade between India and the US. It is again sort of unclear whether India is going to bow to the political pressure here because as with many of these terriffs, we've talked about this situation with Brazil fairly
extensively on this show. The thing about imposing tariffs on a country to get them to fall in line with the American policy is that it pisses off everyone in the country, regardless of whether or not they would traditionally be US allies, and so there's you know, it creates a massive countervailing pressure against the financial incentive to fall
in line and stop buying Russian oil. I also, very briefly want to talk about something that I think is a sort of part and parcel of the tariff policy that Garson you have mentioned wanted to talk about, which is like the US purchasing ten percent of Intel.
Yes, socialism has been achieved. We did it. Now now you can finally call Trump a national socialist.
That's right.
Yeah, And this is sort of a intensification, I guess, of a agree that we talked about a while back, where Intel was talking about giving part of its profits to the US. This is just the US government is just buying a stake in these companies.
And this is.
Actually a very very weird maneuver by the US because the US has obviously bought companies before, right, this is how a lot of the bailout worked. But the thing about if you look at the bailout from two thousand and eight and you look at the US like purchasing the automakers, the US got these really weird specific shares
that don't give any kind of controlling interest. And here the direct rationale for this that the US should just own part of the chip manufacturers because they're effectively like domestic national security resources. Significant portions of the market think that this is going to be a continuing tread, and the US is going to continue buying stakes in these companies.
There is a sort of symbiotic relationship here in the sense that on the one hand, it's obviously not great to have sort of stakes in you bought by the US governments and have US government federal policy directly dictating
what these companies do. But on the other hand, it creates for these actual companies themselves, It creates a sort of symbiosis right where these people now have effectively guaranteed state backing that can bail them out of all of their unbelievably terrible business decisions around basing all of their production around AI. So yeah, and this this is all sort of part of the same hypernationalists direct.
National socialism, if you will, Yes, kind of national sentence, but the most stupid for we've ever seen.
Yeah, Yeah, I don't know, there's gonna be a lot of hype about this being like American state capitalism or something, and just ignore that, just just ignore it. It's bad. I think it's it's in the same category as a lot of the things here, which is that Trump administration is trying to consolidate as much power over the economy as they can, both in federal Reserve and through just straight up taking controlling parts of companies. This is a trend that's going to continue, and it's not good.
Do you know what is good? Though? You beat me to that exactly, that's right. The fact that we get a nice ninety to to I don't know, one hundred and twenty second break to listen to these ads. All right, we are back. There has just been so much news this week it's kind of outrageous. Trump is continuing his attacks against the Smithsonian for for going woke is He's promised a Department of Justice lawsuit against California for their
new redistricting map. A GOP House probe has begun to investigate if the DC crime stats have been faked this whole time, making it look like crime is low even though it's obviously super high as we all know. As Mia said, we have socialism now with ten percent of intel and Trump and Hague says announced that they want to change the name of the Department of Defense back to the Department of War because it quote unquote sounds stronger.
Hey, this is this is the only one of those that I that I actually agree with. They should do this, Like calling it anything other than the Department of War is incredibly dishonest.
Yeah, I wonder that I'll make it a harder sort of get people on board, increasing funding.
So it used to be called the Department of War, and it had a stronger sound. And as you know, we.
Won World War One, we won World War two, we won everything.
Now we have a Department of Defense with defenders.
I don't know if you people want to standing behind me, if you take a little vote, if you want to change it back to what it was when we used to win wars all the time, that's okay with me.
All right, that's coming.
You let me know if you want to do it. I think Department of War. It just sounded me.
And you said, sir, behalf of the Department of Defense.
Defense.
I don't want to be defense only. We want defense, but we want offense too, if that's okay, So you'll make a decision. But you know, as Department of War, we won everything. We want everything, and I think we're gonna have to go back to that.
All right, man, cool stuff happening in the FOE.
I mean, I do like that when he starts that speech, he has to go like we won World War One, Like he's like, there's a question at the end there where he's like he's he's like, he's like, just make sure. I don't know, I don't really remember if we won that one or not, but we definitely won the second one and others.
When as to how he would go about change the name as it requires an Act of Congress, Trump replied to quote, We're just gonna do it. I'm sure Congress would go along if we need that. I don't think we even need that, But if we need that, I'm sure Congress will go along.
I don't know that we do we need I don't know if what you need to change the name of the Department.
Of Defense, you do?
Yeah, you do? That makes sense to do that.
Auto Macro's sense right. What Trump is suggesting, heureus would wouldn't it simply be more efficient if there was simply a fearer, a single person to make all the decisions?
He said a lot of things in that vein recently is like Congress being more of a symbolic, symbolic branch of government that if we need them, they'll probably just agree with me, but like we don't.
Really that's your standard dictator stuff.
That's how we's been talking about it recently.
Now.
Earlier this week, a redacted transcript of Gallaine maxwells Gilen Jiselene Maxwell's meeting with Trump's DOJ has been released, where she denied that she ever witnessed President Trump engaged in inappropriate behavior, saying, quote, I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. The President was never gonna appropriate with anybody, and the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects unquote.
She also denied allegations that Prince Andrew ever had sex with a minor in her home, saying that a substantiating photograph is quote unquote fake.
Well, I can't imagine why she'd lie.
And also claimed that there is no Epstein quote unquote client less. So yeah, that all about wraps that up. I think we got to the bottom of the whole Epstein case. We don't need to worry about this anymore.
I would say, of all of those, the one of those that I might have believed before she denied it was that there wasn't an additional client list outside of what we've already seen like his black wole. Oh yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't keep all of that many notes on a criminal conspiracy.
Yeah, I don't think here's a list of being like, here's all of my pedophile friends in one place.
Here's what does make me wonder now, and this really is the first time I am, which is that they clearly came here with a list of Here is all of the things you need to say you didn't see.
Like maybe or she's just savvy enough to know what to say, Like I don't even think, Yeah, we don't even need to an allege a larger conspiracy here. I think everyone involved in this is quite savvy and knows what they should say and shouldn't say.
Yeah, I mean, I think the conspiracy is obvious, Like.
That's all there is. There doesn't need to be an explicit quid pro crow here.
Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting to me that she brings up Prince Andrew. If nobody brought that up to her she was asked about it, That's what I'm saying is I believe there's a conversation we're not privy here too, where she got marching orders in exchange for getting you know, she's basically out on work release, right, I.
Don't need to jump to such outrageous conspiratorial beliefs such as that.
I'm okay with it at this point. Yeah, I don't know what to what extend it was, but yeah, I don't know this is this is pointless, like, yeah, I don't know if this helps with his base. I don't know that his base is going to be like, well if Gilan Maxwell says it.
Nope, yeah, I mean people have responded positively, like Margor Taylor Green, who was previously going on a slight offense that on the Epstein things, has now fully come around being like, well, there you go. It's it turns out Trumpet isn't a pedophile after all. Thank goodness, that was a close call there.
I know this is being disseminated to his influencer network, right, and to the network of people that he like uses for stuff like this. I'm wondering about the actual like voter base, fan base, like time will tell, and the folks who are a step or two further than Marjorie Taylor Green like the like the people who are more like on the Rogan side of things, like, does this really move the needle for them?
Sure?
I hate having the cares like this, Joe Rogan, I'm gonna buy this shlot, But this does seem like, yeah, shameful even for him.
I mean, I think a lot of people can see that there's an incentive for going to say certain things, and I think people people are smart enough to understand that. I don't think she's going to tell the Trump's own DOJ about like a smoking gun involving Trump. Why would that help her try to get a pardon from the President?
Yeah?
I think I think. I think the important thing for this is that like, the people who are going to believe this are the people who just don't want to believe that Trump did this, and this is this is a reinforcing thing that can feed them. But the question is what asks for everyone else? And it's not particularly compelling for them.
All Right, We have four executive orders to get through before we close this episode, starting off with cashless bail. On Monday, Trump signed two executive orders targeting cash's bail, one specific to Washington, d c which directs law enforcement to charge people federally and hold them in federal custody, and to use federal funding and services as leverage to
pressure DC to change its cashless bail policies. The other executive order targets cashless bail nationwide and asks the Attorney General to make a list of quote, states and local jurisdictions that have, in the Attorney General's opinion, substantially eliminated cash bail as a potential condition of pre trial release from custody for crimes that pose a clear threat to public safety and order, including offenses involving violent, sexual or
indecent acts, or burglary, looting, or vandalism. The Attorney General
shall update this list as necessary. So, using that list, Trump's cabinet will then quote identify federal funds, including grants and contracts currently provided to cashless bail jurisdictions that may be suspended or terminated unquote, So it's trying to bribe states and local municipalities to cease cashless bail policies using federal funds, the same way that they've tried to do for a whole bunch of other anti WOUE policies Trump
has tried to force onto unwilling states. Second Executive Order from August twenty fifth, titled Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag. Let's start with a clip from Trump. I don't want to just play super long Trump clips because they know that can be annoying. But the way that he talks about disorder is kind of more interesting than the way the order is written. But we will talk about some of those smaller details included in the actual text. But here's a clip from c SPAN.
Flag burning all over the country. They're burning flags all over the world.
They burn the.
American flag, and as you know, through a very sad chord. I guess it was a five to four decision. They called it freedom of speech. But there's another reason, which is perhaps.
Much more important. It's called death. Because what happens when you burn a flag is the area goes crazy. If you have hundreds of people, they go crazy.
You could do other things, you.
Can burn this piece of paper, you could, and it's when you burn the American flag. It incites riots at levels that we've never seen before. People go crazy in a way. Both ways. There's some that are going crazy for doing it. There are others that are angry angry about them doing it?
Do you want to discuss that?
Sure?
What the executive order does there charges your Department of Justice with investigating instances of flag burning and then where there's evidence of criminal activity, that where prosecution wouldn't fall afoul of the First Amendment, and instructs the Department of Justice to prosecute those who are engaged in these instances of flagburn.
And what the penalty is going to be. If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, No.
Early exits, no nothing.
You get one year in jail. If you're burn a flag, you get And what it does is insight to write.
I hope they use that language.
By the way, did that insight to riot?
I love it. He has to check, yeah, because God forbid him. Actually he's citing Trump Trumpe auto pen That's right. So included in the order, it says, quote, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's ruling on First Men protections, the Court is never held that American flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action, or that is an action amounting to quote unquote fighting words, is
constitutionally protected see taxes fe Johnson unquote. The order directs Theatery General to enforce criminal and civil laws against acts of American flight discration that cause harm unrelated to First Amendment expression, which could include charging people with violent crimes, hate crimes, a legal discrimination against American citizens, what violations of American civil rights, crimes against property and peace, as well as conspiracies and attempts to violate in aiding and
abetting others to violate such laws, so it's like an anti rioting thing. The dj will also look for cases where American flag discration could violate applicable state or local laws, such as open burning restrictions, disorderly conduct laws, or destruction of proper laws, and will refer such matters to state
and local authorities for potential action. Finally, the Secretary of State shall deny, prohibit, terminate, or revoke visas, residents permits, naturalization proceedings, and other immigration benefits, or seek to deport any foreignational that has engaged in American flag to secretion activity. So that's how they're going to go after it. Rober, Are, do you anything to say on this flag burning thing?
I mean, they're waiting. I mean, and they didn't wind up waiting long. Someone did it immediately as they knew they would, so that they can get a case that they can take up to the Supreme Court. So we'll see, we'll see what happens. We'll see.
Yeah. Yeah, they want to prosecute one of these things and appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court to maybe change that ruling so they can apply it more broadly. Right, So it's part of the same test that they've done with a number of other things that seems unconstitutional, it seems to violate Supreme Court rulings. Yeah, but the point is to test that and see if they can change it, just like they did with abortion.
Yeah.
Can we go further and if this works, if we feel like we made productress on this, can we start pushing and saying other things are incitement? Right? You know? Can we start going after people who aren't even present who write something that is like, well, this was incitement to write because they wrote about the police murdering this guy.
Right, like a party of free speech strikes again.
This is the kind of thing where can I wargame out would they try this if they can get that far yeah, they will if they can get that far. Will they get that far? You know, is the Supreme Court going to give them everything they want on this? I don't actually know. I really don't know. So I'm going to try not to doom spiral too much. Just you know, let's see, none of us have any choice in the matter at this stage.
Finally, let's address the quote, additional measures to address the crime emergency in the District of Columbia. So it's another executive order from August twenty fifth. Trump wants to establish an online portal for Americans with law enforcement experience quote or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join federal enforcementities to support the policy goals described in Executive Order one four three three. That's the Making a DC
Safe and Beautiful Order from a few weeks ago. The Secretary of Defense is instructed to create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit within the District of Columbia National Guard who will be deputized to enforce federal law.
To quote the order quote, the Secretary of Defense shall immediately begin ensuring that each state's National Army Guard and Air National Guard are resource trained, organized an available to assist federal, state, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and in ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law, in coordination with respective Adjuncts General, the Secretary Defense shall designate an appropriate
number of each state's trained National Guard members to be
reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes. In addition, the Secretary of Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard Quick Reaction Force that shall be resource trained and available for rapid nationwide Deployant National Guard walking streets of DC are now carrying firearms after first being deployed without their service weapon, and since the operation in DC began on August seventh, there have now been over
a thousand arrests, including dozens of undocumented immigrants. Currently, the Pentagon is planning to deploy thousands of National Guard to Chicago to continue Trump's alleged crime crackdown.
I would have much more respect for princecour if he'd call me up and said, I have a problem, can you help me fix it? I would be so happy to do it. I don't love not that I don't have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it, no problem going in and solving you know, his difficulties. But it would be nice if they'd call and they say, would.
You do it?
He's hurt, poor guy. They want to ask him for help.
His little fewings he's going to have to do. He's ano have to deploy the National Guard without putschool's approval.
You know.
Gang In all of this focus on the people being killed and persecuted by the government, I don't think any of us has stopped and spent enough time thinking how does Donald Trump feel? And shame on us, you know, shame on us.
But it's not just Chicago. On Friday, the Pentagon told Fox News at upwards of seventeen hundred National Guard troops will be mobilized in nineteen states to be deployed across the country to assist ice in the nationwide hunt for
undocumented immigrants. The Guard will be activated in states like Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming, with effective status ranging from August through mid November, and operations expected to start in early September. Importantly, as we saw in DC, national guard from other states might
deploy too states. Specifically, in the case where Trump doesn't get cooperation from the governor who is in control of the National Guard of each state, he can deploy national Guard from somewhere else, like what he did in DC, pulling national Guard from other Red states being deployed to d C but mobilized in those Red states. So national guards from all of these states could be deployed in
a town near you, no matter where you live. And this operation specifically with these like seventeen hundred National Guard troops, is specifically to assist ice his plan to do this, like anti crime deployment in Chicago, is a separate yet similar plan. It's also pulling from National Guard. But these things are are two separate operations according to White House officials.
And I think one of the important things about this is that, you know, obviously there's the part of this where it's like, yeah, they want to at the very least look like they're just occupying cities and they are arresting huge numbers of people, but they also just don't have the manpower to do this kind of stuff, which is why they're pulling the national Guards, why they're trying
to expand the number of people on ice. This is why they're pulling National Guard out to do this kind of stuff, which that like, they don't actually have the repressive capacity to just occupy cities and they're trying to find the manpower to be able to do it.
So we will keep an eye out in September for these possible military deployments around the country. Yep, Hey everyone, this is Garrison recording a short update on Thursday since we have a little bit more information about the Minneapolis, Minnesota school shooting. So right after we recorded, rumors started circulating that this shooter was linked to neo Nazi satanic pedophile groups nine A and seven six four. Someone on Twitter found a neo Nazi forum account that they alleged
belonged to this school shooter. This account used in nine A symbol and an affiliated Twitter account made other nine A references. These claims gained a lot of traction from
leftist accounts and armchair experts. On Twitter and Blue Sky, lots of people were very eager to talk about something else besides that this shooter was trans and many pinned the blame on seven sixty four, the child exploitation group that operates on discord and telegram that Blackmaile's children and encourages some to commit acts of violence like school shootings. I talked about seven sixty four on my Nihilist Violent
Extremism episode from earlier this year. As these claims spread online, I remained skeptical because this shooter did not seem to really fit the profile of A nine A or seven six' four grooming. Victim this shooter did not really seem like an ON ninea. Acolyte they more closely resembled The True
Crime community. Fandom and while Sometimes True Trime community OR tcc may USE O nina references because other mass shooters have or because previous mass shooters have been affiliated WITH nina and related, GROUPS i did not see much evidence linking this shooter TO o NINE a based on the videos they posted to. YouTube and while Some Nazi satanist types have helped facilitate The columbiner OR tcc fandom there was no solid evidence linking a group like seven to six'
four to this. Latest shooting the shooter was in their. Mid twenties they weren't a fourteen year old being groomed into doing a. Mass shooting and Then on, thursday morning the forum account alleged to Be the minneapolis shooter and the source of claims calling them A on nina or sen six four grimmy victim started posting again on. The forum it wasn't the. Shooter's account the shooter did not fit.
That profile they weren't in A Cult, nazi satanist they were obsessed with, mass killers and translations of their cerelic
journal have helped to. SUBSTANTIATE this a journal entry discussed taking pleasure in dressing up as a. School shooter QUOTE today i assembled a school shooter cause play quote and in translations of, their journal they made explicit References To True CRIME, community tcc saying that they might cringe if they joined AN online, tcc community and it could make them not want to follow through on doing, an attack
DOING online tcc fandom as mostly full. Of POSERS quote i think joining a community would alienate my future unquote AND quote i feel a very small PORTION of tcc FEELS as I do harbor's admiration of. Intent unquote one more UPDATE before i closed the episode. Earlier Today, ON Thursday rfk junior was asked if he would now be
looking into if gender transition drugs. Cause violence he responded by saying that they were already doing studies looking, into that and then quickly pivoted to talking about quote launching studies on the potential contribution of some OF the ssri drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to. Violence unquote this lines UP With rfk junior's general focus on, PSYCHIATRIC drugs SSRIs, depression medication as he has. Previously stated that's all for us today On
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