Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #5

The primary winner was off Day AfD Alternative for Germany would be kind of the closest English translation of the name of the party. This is a far right party. It is primarily popular in East Germany now, but it has surged massively after years and years of being decidedly on the political fringe. One of the reasons it has always been on the political fringe is that German parties, both centrists, Conservatives and the left, have had a tacit agreement since the end of World War Two called the

Court on Santaire. It's not just Germany, this is the thing that used to be present in all of Europe. And basically the gist of the Court in Sanitaire is you don't form a coalition because these are parliamentary democracies, right, so usually no one party has fifty percent or more of the vote. So you know, a party with twenty and a party with fifteen and a party with eight

and they form a coalition government. And the norm for up until now, and thankfully is still the normal we'll talk about that is that you don't coalition with AfD, which is a part of why that and kind of lingering stigma about the Nazis kept them from being a major force in German politics until you know, over the last eight or so years they have grown substantially to the point where in this recent election they doubled their support from around ten percent to a little over twenty percent.

This makes them they're not the largest single block in the German in the Reichstag.

sixty four. So AfD is a minority in the government compared to all of the people who didn't vote for AfD, but the rate at which they're increasing is a serious problem, especially since most Germans list immigration as their primary voting concern right now, this most recent election had unusually high voter turnout. Twenty twenty one election, seventy six percent of

the country or so voted. More than eighty two percent of the country voted in this most recent election, so the fact that like you have record high turnout and AfD doubling its support is deeply chilling. Now it's not one hundred percent bad news because one of the other stories here is the new Left Party, well not super new, but the Left Party, which is kind of came out of East Germany's Communist Party, massively increased their support too.

And they actually for the first time, like very significantly increased their share of the vote, which had been under this kind of five percent threshold before and is now at about eight point eight percent. So they went up by an amount. Actually it's not like as much as AfD went up, but like in terms of a percentage

of their prior vote, it's a similar increase. So there's another party that had significant gains in this and it's it's kind of a newer party called the BSW, which is you could say they do a little bit of like a Red Brown Alliance kind of thing, where there's some left wing messaging in what they're saying with they're also like super anti immigrant and they're not, you know, it's not kind of like to the extent that the

AfD is. But when they came on to the scene, they were expected by some people to pull votes away from the AfD this election, and that's really not what happened. And in fact, a lot of the votes they pulled were from Social Democrats and the left parties, so that was one of the you know, it's because the way the parliamentary system works, which is more rational than our system. This didn't like hand the whole election to off day. Again.

This is the benefit of a system like the Germans had, which is pretty explicitly set up to make it a lot harder for a right wing dictator to get in again. But it is interesting to me that that kind of messaging, I mean, it's further kind of evidence of what's been happening everywhere, which is when your party positions itself to try to win over far right votes by kind of mixing in Well, okay, what if we did some sort of you know, liberal lefty policies, but we also got

really racist. You don't take votes from the far right, but you do wind up pulling the worst people from the left. Yeah, and yeah, I guess that's kind of like the broad strokes. Now, like this is bad, although it's also not comprehensively a nightmare. One of the things that's kind of hot. I don't know, positive may not

be the right. Wait, but interesting to me is if you looked at the twenty twenty one election maps of the strongest party by constituency in the twenty twenty one election, and I found a good article German election results explaining graphics on DW dot com. If you just google that,

you'll find it. In twenty twenty one, off Day obviously, like the whole northeast was you know, their territory, but they also had strong inroads into the northwest parts of the country, right, you know, primarily like rural areas and the like. But like there was a there was a lot of red on that map orthwest portion of Germany.

In the new election that's all black, which is the CDU right, Which means while off Day's representation of the Reichstag and like number of voters increased substantially, their geographical reach has been kind of cauterized, would be, in a fair way of saying it is, which is interesting to me hard to say too much, like does that mean, you know, I think some of what has happened here, Because it's important both to note that this is bad, it's bad that the Nazis got doubled their share of

the vote, but also it was expected to be a little worse than it was. You know, there's some evidence that after JD Vance made his speech introducing AfD, their pollings started to like freeze a little bit. And it may be the fact because a lot of older voters came in and they they seem to have primarily gone with the CDU, with this sort of center right party.

So the story here is you can maybe look at it as a lot of older, more conservative Germans who are also old enough to really not like the idea of the AfD came out and voted for, you know, the center right party in order to kind of cut off their power. The other thing, though, that's kind of a lot less optimistic, is that AfD is most popular among people under thirty, who widely don't view it as an extremist party, which is deeply, deeply concerning.

is frightening. That said, there's allso some evidence here that the situation in the United States has galvanized a chunk of the German voting populace to attempt to stop off day and kind of one of the positive things that came out is prior to this election, there was a lot of talk about whether or not the CDU would choose to coalition with the AfD and thus into the Cordon sanitaire. And to make a long story short, they're not going to do that. They're looking to coalition with

the Social Democrats, which is a good thing. You know, it doesn't mean no one will do that in the future. And unfortunately, a majority of German voters suspect AfD will be in a coalition by twenty thirty, but it hasn't happened yet. And that's as good as things get right now. And that's what I got to say about Germany.

And it'll be interesting to see like if this if this anti like far right United States trend continues to more countries beyond, like Germany in Canada, but I'm still I'm still eagerly, eagerly waiting for the next Canadian election.

embrace of Putin's Russia. But what also is happening right now is people like countries that had been heading at a very a more authoritarian right wing direction and turning around in part due to the war in Ukraine and turning away from kind of the international right wing movement, as Poland being the best example right where had Polish politics have changed substantially in the last several years, and a big part of that is the war in Ukraine.

And there are a lot of Poles who I think otherwise would have been more on board for a lot of the socially conservative shit who are like, well, but all these fuckers are pro Russia and we're Poland, Like, no, all right, let's go on a break and return to talk more about the crumbling world. And you said, yeah, all right, we are back. I'm gonna ther to James to to do a segment on usaid.

Well investment, I think that it's just a charge, right, You're just giving the money to the United States government, and in return you will receive a Green card plus privileges, and it will be not a Green but a Gold card. So that's great. That is the EB five visa if you're not familiar, required you since twenty twenty two, it's been one million and fifty thousand dollar investment and the creation of ten jobs. So it had some kind of like it trickled down economics. It's not a real thing.

It's a lie that they tell you. But it had some idea that these rich people would create jobs in the US people who are less wealthy. The gold card seems to not have that. You just have to be rich, right, So that's say, that's an interesting change to the immigration system. The other thing I want to talk about today is a United States Agency for International Development, better known as USAID.

It's been a target of like the anti woke right for some time because they fundamentally don't understand what Joseph Nia would have called soft power, right, their power to persuade, the power to influence outcomes around the world with things other than tanks and bonds.

if it was quote serving US interests. The State Department then issued guidance that seemed to go beyond the executive order and cut nearly basically all usaily expensive On the thirteenth of this month, that's February if you're listening, later, a judges shued a temporary restraining order. This TIERRO didn't really stop them from doing what they were doing, because

it told them to continue with existing contracts. And what the State Department claims that it's doing is implementing clauses that are already in the contract, so the contracts will have some kind of kill clause, right, and that they claim that they're implementing that, so they think they've found a fun work around. Rather than talking extensively about court battles,

I want to talk about what this means. These are cuts made by the richest man in the world that have had a direct, tangible, and devastating impact on the poorest people on the planet. In Sudan, eighty percent of emergency kitchens have been closed. That means that close to two million people will go without food. Local groups who

organize the kitchens are running out of money. The way this works is that even when Rubio issued a communication talking about continuing food aid, it's unclear exactly what that means, because in this case and in other cases, USAID is sending them money in order to provision themselves locally, as opposed to sending them food as an inkind donation.

or deciding who to feed, which is pretty bad. On the border between Thailand and Myanmay, a place where Robert and I have been to report, I've heard that people are having babies right now outside lat of clinics and life support machines have been removed for it to people who were relying on those life support machines obviously.

no one really knows what that means. Right. The order reads, quote life saving humanitarian assistance applies to core life saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance.

As I mentioned before, the mutual AIDS who are in coalition was receiving financial assistance to help it provision, right, which is much better than the US going through all the infrastructure spending of being able to deliver that aid itself or through USAID contractors. Other contractors implementing partners of USAID are still owed money for work that they completed before January, before the stop work orders stopped payment to them.

For work to begin again on any of these contracts, they need the contract officer to sign up on it, and it's at a lunclear exactly how many of these contract officers are still employed at USAID because of the federal employment cuts. So essentially USAID has stopped all over the world. In addition to this, in this country, four hundred and ninety million dollars worth of US grown food, which is in the USAID pipeline to go to people who very desperately needed food, is currently at risk of

spoilage according to USAID. So it's not just that people are starving, it's that we are allowing food to go bad here while people starve in other places, which is pretty bleak. I will just really briefly hear plug the mutual aids who don't coalition. If you'd like to help, you can direct to them directly, And it's mutual aids who donig If you'd like to do that, it'll be into show, not to if you're driving or whatever.

And we've seen them continually deny court orders from judges, fine loopholes, fine workarounds, and Musk and Trump continue to just openly float like defying the order of the court. Representative Andy Ogeles introduced articles have appeachment against a specific quote unquote activist judge. This will go nowhere. They don't have nearly enough numbers to make anything like this happen.

of the Court. In some related news, last week, President Trump signed in executive order stating that the president can change laws erroneously, citing Article two, which only calls for the presidents to quote faithfully execute the law. I'm going to quote from the order the President to and the Attorney General, subject to the President's supervision and control, will interpret the law for the executive branch, instead of having

separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations. The next section is titled reigning in independent Agencies. It reads the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commission have exercised enormous power over the American people without presidential oversight. These agencies issue rules and regulations without the review of

the democratically elected president. They also spend American tax dollars to set priorities without consulting the president, voters, and the president can now hold all federal agencies, not just cabinet departments, responsible for their decisions as the constitution demands. This is absurd. This is like extremely dangerous, one of the most like blatant like attempts at power that we've seen since Dick Nixon. Like this is gonna get litigated, but this is crazy.

The the fact that we have that we have a president saying that he has the ability to interpret the law something that specifically he cannot do. That's why, it's why we have three branches of government, just like openly openly claiming that power is like very worrying. Again, like I feel like I have every episode on Executive Disorder, I say that, you know, I'm very worried. I'm very concerned, but that does continue to be the case.

at birth on official documentation. I will quote from the statement quote don entities will review policies for quote unquote intimate single sex spaces and take appropriate action to ensure such spaces are designated by sex and not gender identity on installations, facilities, ships, and any other infrastructure under the jurisdiction of the Department of Navy unquote. So this will force women into bathrooms and barracks with men. It's in line with the stuff that like Trump's been talking about

and the stuff that he's been signing. But we are still getting more and more of these implementation guides getting sent around to various departments.

including the US one. But like, and many of these people I should add, like have had that they're like post surgery right, and not that it matches hugely, but that people who might pass is as women or men and they are now forced to live according to their gender assigned at birth pretty fucked up.

reporting on the implementation guides for visas. I know there's been a lot of articles in the Guardian and a few trans journalists have conflicting interpretations of a few Department of State cables regarding the issuing of visas to people who are trans Specifically, I think the main cable that we've seen allows the continued issuance of visas, but that would only match what the case officer or like the whoever whoever is like handling the actual these information, whatever

they determined to be the assigned gender at birth to be, That's that's how it would get issued. But I'm going to wait to report on kind of the rest of the nitty gritty details, because there is conflicting information from like from like these like policy wonks, lawyers and journalists themselves who are trying to figure out kind of what the full implications of those cables are. But we are

aware of them, We've been talking about them in our chat. Yes, they are bad, but I don't necessarily want to like overblow the scope of some of these things just to like induce panic when when really this is all kind of vary in line with Trump's earlier orders to only have male and female documentation that matches assigned gender at birth.

abortion and assisted reproductive technology like IVF. Now, this change was directly in compliance with Trump's executive order to enforce the High Amendment, which Mia has talked about lots before on the show. And then on February fourth, they actually re established coverage for assisted reproductive technology, so probably just IVF, but abortion was not re established, so.

of the DOJ and the FBI. If you seek to hide in any corner of this country or planet, we will put on the world's largest man hunt, and we will find you, and we will decide your end state unquote. Agents and government employees have warned that under Patel, the Bureau will be on course to refocus efforts away from far right street fighters and accelerationists and towards the nebulous

BLM Antifa. In related news, on Tuesday, a far right extremist named Joe Kent was confirmed as director of the National counter Terrorism Center Kent is a former Special Forces and CIA operative. He's described himself as an American First populist and has strong ties to the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. Kent has praised Joey Gibson for standing up to Antifa, and Kent himself employed a Proud Boy to consult on a failed congressional campaign in twenty twenty two.

Kent has historically advocated that the FBI refocus their efforts to target Antifa. And this is like all amidst a report from the Guardian suggesting that the Nazi cocelerationist group the Base, has had a decent resurgence in activity and recruitment efforts inside the United States.