It Could Happen Here Weekly 169

last year. During the dream of the power signing cam lets. People are doing it again this year. Simply do not lead a march onto a bridge, yep.

And I'm going to keep starting episodes hockeyboll get it, don't get kettled up bridges until this stop. All right, this is what this has been me as public service announcement of a bridge kettling. Let's get into the nature of imperialism and why Trump's is different. So we've been covering a lot of Trump's sort of I don't know the trade wars, his call for the US to seize the Gozel strip, a whole bunch of stories about the way that Trump is using the power of the American

state to do imperialism. And I think it's worth actually taking a second to unpack this because things are probably going to get worse. There is a non zero chance that we effectively start a war with Mexico in the next few months.

sort of tank in fear of them. There's been a lot of sort of defense of like free trade in ways where I don't think people actually understand what's happening. And to understand how what Trump is doing is different from the stuff that's come before, we need to actually understand what trade is now. When an economist talks about trade.

They go, oh, yeah, obviously, trade is when two countries exchange a thing, right, yep, But that's not actually what most of the stuff on earth that is labeled as global trade, that's not what it is, right, Look at like US Mexico trade. We're going to go a bit more into detail about what that stuff is. But do you know what most not most, but you know what

a huge portion of US Mexico trade is. It is the same company, the same company moving an auto part from one side of the border to the other, back and forth across the body.

way to think about global economy. Right there, there are some things we're thinking about specifically nation state trade, Like trade is important because you know, even even the same corporation moving goods around, right, that does contribute to how much foreign currency a country, right right, And so okay, there's things like balance of payments where if you run out of it, if you're a country and you run out of American dollars, suddenly you can't employ like fuel anymore

in your country, like explodes, And that's a very common way that like this happens in Trilanck, for example, pretty recently. This is a way for your economy to blow up. But that's kind of an edge case in terms of how global trade actually operates. But the problem is that it is to the advantage of the ruling class for you and everyone else to think about trade as something that's like a war between you and the country next to you instead of a corporation. Like fucking over everyone

involved in this entire thing. Now, there's a pretty interesting book that I read recently called Border Economies Cities Bridging the US Mexico Divide by James Greber Gerber Nicks Gerber, Okay, And one of the things he points out is that the two largest trade relations between any country, any two countries on Earth are the US in Mexico and the US in Canada. And those are the countries with the

highest tariffs that trumbles attempting to apply. Yeah, and it's worth actually understanding what this does by looking at what actually is traded between, for example, the US and Mexico. And the place I want to start is that one of the largest kinds of goods is moved from from Mexico to the US is computer equipment. And nobody fucking talks about this ever, No one, like zero fucking people talk about this. I am convinced this is because of racism.

But Mexico is a huge sort of like assembly place for a whole bunch of things like monitor screens, like computer equipment in general, and a lot of that stuff comes into the US. And there's also you know, the thing,

the thing that we started this episode on. That's I think the thing I gets talked about the most now is transportation equipment, right, And this is a combination of consumer vehicles and also like heavy duty cargo trucks, which are unbelievably important for the maintenance of the American economy, right of the entire global economies. Like having these trucks is a sort of vital infrastructure thing for the United States. You can move stuff around a lot of that cost

in Mexico. And then also like a lot of it is like whole cars that are like like finished assembly like in Mexico, and they get shipp across the border and there's a lot of things there. And these are also like all the same international companies that work in the US. So it's like Toyotas like Konda.

doing trade. You know. One of the things in one of the questions in this book is about why Mexico's economy never had the kind of economic bump that China did from the amount of industrial production if you look at like the East Asian tigers, right right, And I think part of that is actually something that is not mentioned in the book, which is if if you look at the East Asian economies that that develop their economies that you're talking like your South Korea's, et cetera, cedule

like a lot of those countries, like Japan, there was a lot of US military investment there in a way that's just not true of Mexico. Like Mexico is not like a place where you offshore you're supplying your supplies to because you need to move stuff to you know, fight the war in Vietnam. But you know, one of the other reasons is that, Yeah, Okay, so like where is all the profit from the international trade going. It's like, well,

it's going to a bunch of American and Japanese car companies. Yeah, because it's it's those those multinationals are the people who actually reap all of the benefits.

of like crude oil or whatever that they're extracting. So like, yeah, it's again one of these situations where it's not really like Mexico is sending its oil to the US. It's like I mean kind of right, that's like one of the more direct issh ones, But largely what's happening is that like again like it's an oil company moving stuff to you know, moving stuff around to do refinement of it so they can sell it. Now There's there's been some other stuff happening with Mexico that's a kind of

reaction to Trump's previous thing. And I think the extent of this has been overblown to some extent, but a lot of very low end manufacturing stuff has been leaving China for a long time. This is one of my media things on the show, is that this has been happening for a while because labor price has been rising in China and one of the places that these things went to is Mexico. So there's been a lot of like direct investment from trying to et cetera, et cetera,

and all of these things. You know, like these these these kind of movements. I'm talking about them because these kind of like seismic global economic shifts right of the kind that we're going to be see are driven by a lot of things, you know, I mean this stuff like currency valuations, like local tax laws, like state corporate planning policies like demands or just blah blah blah blah blah.

But one of the single most important things is the state of class struggle in a country and what effect that has on wages or like, you know, like straight up uprisings.

declining profitability. Right, you know what else has declining profitability? Well?

to other places. Yeah, and you know, and this is this is sort of what James was talking about earlier, right. The goal is to sort of weaken the power of the working class by locking people down into their countries and then moving capital to poorer countries, the weaker labor protections and also a weaker level of sort of like workers organization, right.

those working class towns are just destitute, you know. So that previously thriving a well organized working class that we had northern England, it's left kind of like it has to relocate or reorganize, right, and it destroys those like nexuses of working class power that existed in Britain up until the eighties.

a bunch of crazies. But specifically this kind of like offshoring and the container ships have been part of this, but like this specific kind of thing, and even the transition cold oil was like was a very deliberate thing done by like done by sort of American and British politicians in order to sort of break the power like miners unions. And you know, one of the major places that this went obviously like a lot of these things

go to Mexico. The sort of first round of these go to like the original like Asian tiger economies I was talking about, Well, I mean places like it, like Indonesia too, with a lot of those economies sort of like Thailand, those commies kind of blew up in the nineties. Yeah, but you know, one of the largest, most important ones was China. And you know it's important to sort of

remember I've talked about this on the show before. A lot of this is also the product of Tianoman Square, because the thing that's important to remember about Tianneman is that contra both sort of liberal histories of Tiannemen and also the sort of CCP line. Most of the people who died at Tannama were workers, right, Most people who were executed after Wridge were workers. They were like students died,

but it was mostly workers who were killed. And a lot of what happened there was that, you know, Tanneman was like the last time that China's like trade union federation, which is like now such a joke that it's like it's genuinely a subject of academic debate and discussion as to whether you can even literally consider it a trade union. Like that's that's how fuck it is. And the last time that Chinese trade unions took a political stand was in favor of the Tianeman protests. And then the army

shows up and just like like slaughters their base. Yeah, And what this does is it breaks the old Chinese working class, right, It breaks the alliance with the students that they'd had that was you know, and that was a durable political force dating back to like the nineteen twenties, right, And it breaks this extremely militant, well organized Chinese urban working class and replaces them with a more exploitable and

less organized like migrant working class yea. And that is the class that like to this day right now is like the engine of global capital or like those like three hundred million migrant workers yep.

which is pretty brutal. But like, yeah, these people, right, these these migrant workers who come from all over the world hoping for a chance that the things that capitalism have promised them are the people who have to be exploited so that people in wealthy countries can.

get being shopped by paramilitaries with machine guns. Right, And that's that's that's what the sort of spatial fix was, right, was moving jobs to places where the ruling classes sort of control was more firm and their ability to use violence was higher. Yeah, And so this is what the American imperial system sort of had been, right. It's based

on American capital flowing around the world. And this is also like international capital too, right, Like we've literally been talking about like Japanese corporations right doing like the same shit, right, But you know, it's like international capital flowing around the world, extracting resources and labor from other countries and accumulating it in American corporations like that. That's what free trade is.

very efficient model of empire. It's one of the most sophisticated imperial systems that the world has ever seen.

they prop up right wing military dirtatorship constantly. But the thing is, democracy and human rights are things that like people like and so you know, it was it's it's a weapon that he and and his sort of brand of conservatives, like anti communist conservatives like wielded it again communism, and it was a very very powerful ideological weapon because if if if your choice ceases to be between like communism and capitalism, and your choice is now between like

do you want to live in a dictatorship, but do

you want to live in a democracy? Like that's a very different question, and it's it's a very very important question for sort of how how the Cold War was won and how international power is wielded, right, because there's there's always been an illusion that there's an international community in that countries are like working together and and this is this is a very very powerful ideological thing, you know, I mean, and this is something like you live through this,

like God, it probably listen to you didn't leave to this now, dear God. But like like the Iraq War, right, the US didn't unilaterally invader Rock now I was called the quote unquote Coalition of the Wilding and included like like they dragged Australia in the war by threatening to like destroy their like milk shipping contracts with the Iraqi government, Like, so you.

of like right wing multilateral interventions in countries, right. Yeah, and you know he is caused with with his like threat to put tariffs on like, he's caused these people to become anti American. And this is the same thing with Mexico. Right, even the sort of like the nominally center left governments in Mexico like have cooperated with American imperism. But Trump doesn't want to fucking do that anymore. He wants to run everything just very purely and very openly as as an American empire.

like it's it's it's kind of different. Or Panama fuck, Like, you know, I was in Panama September of twenty four and I went to the Canal Museum, and Panama like is very proud of its history of independence.

join the US? Like he is trying to conquer Canada, Right, Yeah, he's he's been trying to He's been trying to force the government of Denmark to buy Greenland.

invade Canada. Like yeah, yeah, that's that's completely unhinged, right, And this is this, this is just a very very different kind of imperialism than than what existed before. And I wanted to go into I think why this is the case? Yeah, and I think the reason why this

is the case. Okay, So the reason that there's been such a defensive free trade is like people being like, oh my god, if he puts teriffs in place, it'll raise prices, and like, yeah, that's true, right, it'll crash the global economy because the global economy has been turned into a very very efficient engine of extracting profit from countries and putting them in the hands of corporations. Right.

It's it's working exactly how Trump wants it to work. Now, if the US wants to rebuild a manufacturing economy, that is technically possible, right, Reagan was able to do this. But what Reagan did instead of doing tariffs is that well, I mean kind of you but like the main thing that he did was this thing called the Plaza Accords. And the Plaza Accords was this this thing in the eighties where he forced Japan. Japan was the important moment,

like Japan, West Germany. I think there are a couple other countries like he forced them to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar, because like, you know, so if you have a currency and it's worth a bunch of like another person's currency, so like you know, you have like the dollar and it's worth like a million, like yen or whatever the fuck, right, the currency that's

worthless has a more competitive manufacturing economy. And Reagan was able to like restart the American like manufacturing economy for a while by doing this. But the problem is that

it blew up the entire world economy. And so to save the world economy, Clinton rolled back the accords and it, you know, and that was the thing that actually finally sort of like a viscerated American manufacturing and the exchange here was you know, and all of the stuff that I've been I've been talking about for the last few minutes. So there's a very very good essay written right after two thousand and eight called What's good for Goldman Sachs

is good for America by the economist Robert Brenner. And what the strategy became, and this is a strategy that was originally pioneered by Japan that we took was instead of having like a manufacturing economy, like actually a production based economy, you have an economy based on the value of assets.

sort of able to stabilize the system economically, right. What they couldn't stabilize was the political sector, where if you look at the two people who are currently running the United States, it is Elon Musk, who is the human personification of the stock price goes up bubble economy, right, and the other one is Donald Trump, who is the human manifestation of the real estate class, right, whose wealth

like belie enormously. And the thing is right, but because Elon Musk is like a tech bubble go up guy, right, those people don't think like the people who built like American financial capitalists, right, just like the people who designed the tratism, they don't think the same way Trump does. Trump is a fucking real estate guy, right, And this is how he sees the world. Right. He thinks in terms of land and borders and territorial control. And he thinks in terms of like what physical thing can I

steal from someone in order to make money? Right, and that you know, this is why you're trying to steal the Panama Canal. And and he thinks this way instead of like things that are more abstract like debt servicing and like, you know, the sort of lines of power in the coalition building.

its entire history. This is an article, oh, the title of which is Trump is Trump wants to redraw the map of the Western hemisphere for fun's.

this is the thing that Trump explicitly talks about. It is like he wants he thinks he can raise revenue from like terrosts, which like, no, he can't, but like what he can do is use the threat of tariffs to like force countries to do whatever the fuck he wants and this is the kind of imperialism that we're in now. It is a definite, substantive break from what we've seen in the US for a century, more than a century. Yeah, and I think I think it's important

for people to understand exactly how this functions. Yeah, and yeah, it's sick.

Using the justification of removing government bureaucracy, Musk and the Trump administration have installed their own batch of bureaucratic tech oligarchs, made up of former Tesla and SpaceX interns and engineers, teal fellowship researchers, pallenteer employees, eugenics enthusiasts, and literal nick fuentes,

pilled gropers. Career employees have been locked out of their respective agencies, both digitally and physically, as the DOGE team ransacks various departments and accesses wide swaths of sensitive government data. Agency officials who have tried to resist Musk's seizure of classified materials have been fired, and more federal employees have

been put on leave, including the entirety of USAID. This effectively amounts to Musk abolishing the whole department, all without congressional authorization or oversight, not even in executive order from Trump that extends presidential authority on a whim. The unelected Elon Musk decided to carry out the closure of an

entire government agency, and he is far from finished. Doge has hijacked the Treasury to withhold authorized payments to multiple agencies, resulting in an ongoing battle of lawsuits and court orders. This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, and this episode is an audio companion to an article I published on the shatter Zone substack linked below. In the description.

You can follow along online at Shatterzone dots substack dot com and click the hyperlinks for more information and sources. Elon Musk has personally directed the General Services Administration to terminate leases on quote unquote mostly empty federal buildings. The GSA, essentially the landlord of the federal government, was one of the first agencies to receive Musks quote unquote fork in the road deferred resignation letter offering to buy out the

entire workforce. The legality of the letter is still uncertain, as it promises to pay out currently unappropriated funds. IRS workers who accepted the resignation offer have already been asked

to return to work until May. The newly appointed GSA Commissioner, Michael Peters, a private equity executive that specializes in downsizing corporate real estate, has decided that quote non DoD federal building space should be reduced fifty percent quote, According to a GSA employee who requested to remain anonymous, on top of planning to cut the entire federal portfolio by half, DOGE is seeking to cut GSA's own budget by as much as fifty percent, with talk of consolidating GSA offices

into a few major cities using a quote unquote hub model. Wired reports that DOGE staff may be trying to use White House IT credentials to access GSA computers remotely. An anonymous GSA employee claims that few people at the agency have elected to take up the voluntary paid resignation offer,

with those who have mostly being of retirement age. High leveled Trump appointees used quote unquote scare tactics in agency emails pressuring career employees to accept the deferred resignation offer, warning that cost cutting measures will eventually lead to a further reduction in force. Employees are concerned that a reduced federal workforce would result in federal buildings losing their operations and maintenance contracts, with disastrous consequences for the functionality of

government buildings. Quote the brain drain is going to cripple our ability to maintain the buildings even more than it already was. We aren't overstaffed unquote for a GSA employee, they continued, quote, I think this process is already too far along to stop. I'm hoping we just need to get to the mid terms unquote. What is happening across the federal government right now is unprecedented. But this is not Germany in the nineteen thirties. It's not the fall

of the Soviet Union. We grasp at analogies to help contextualize current events that escape understanding. There are similarities, but what's happening is new, very American, very twenty first century. Think of the growth of the Internet, social media tech startups in fifty years. What's happening right now could be talked about in the vein of what happened to the

United States in the mid twenty twenties. Now, rhetoric of cutting red tape and breaking federal bureaucracy has been common political clap trap for decades, and previous efforts have been largely all bark and no bite. But now there's been a huge chomp. So why now? What happened? Trump has blamed entrenched federal bureaucracy or the quote unquote deep state, for preventing him from enacting sweeping change during his first term.

The obstacles Trump encountered didn't just come from Congress and the courts, but rank and file government workers who run day to day operations. Last month, the far right America First Policy Institute published a report titled Tales from the Swamp, How federal bureaucrats resisted President Trump. The author, James Shrek, a former Heritage fellow, credits quote unquote hostile career employees

for quote unquote refusing to implement policies. Shrek says, quote many employees refused or defied directives withheld information, slow walked projects that they opposed, performed unacceptably, and used strategic leaking

to undermine the president's agenda unquote. Trump himself realized this late into his first term and sought to remedy the situation by revoking civil protections for tens of thousands of federal career employees, reclassifying them as atwill employees under an executive order called Schedule F. This allowed Trump to treat

large swaths of government employees as political appointments. In his article for the America First Policy Institute, Shrek refers to career removal protections as a quote modern invention that protects entrenched bureaucracy unquote. Though Biden repealed Schedule F, Trump effectively reinstated the order on the first day of his second term.

Trump promised to restore his authority to quote remove rogue bureaucrats back in early twenty twenty three under his Agenda forty seven plan, vowing to quote wield that power very

aggressively unquote. When Trump first ran on Drain the Swamp in twenty fifteen, he was referring to corporate lobbyists special interests in Washington corruption, but now the term is used to deride the so called administrative state, federal agencies, regulatory boards, and bureaucratic career employees that maintain the basic functionality of our government. Both Schedule F and Doge are part of a too pronged assault on the administrative state, all in

service of consolidating than amplifying executive power. Trump has fully embraced the unitary executive theory proposed by the likes of Russell Vaught, Project twenty twenty five co author and the newly confirmed director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Although it's understood that Congress has quote unquote power of the purse, under unitary executive theory, Trump now believes that funding appropriated by Congress does not need to

be spent. Rather, the executive branch controls the flow of federal spending and Congress merely sets a ceiling on spending that the executive must not exceed. Under this interpretation of the Constitution, the president has sole and complete control of the executive Branch, including all of its agencies and departments. But people in Trump's circle like JD. Vance and Elon Musk could be pushing Trump to go even further to where the president considers both the judicial and legislative branches

as purely ceremonial and advisory. In the words of New Right philosopher Curtis Jarvin, and arguably we are already well on our way to that point. This centralized executive power allows the executive branch to achieve goals I would have previously considered to be quite lofty. And I'll outlined two of those examples, pulling from the aspirations of the modern conservative movement. After this ad break, welcome back to it could happen here, and get ready to say bye bye

to the FBI. Though the right has typically been thought to be firmly in the back of the blue camp, this isn't always the case, especially on the more extreme end. The far right militia movement has long clashed with federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and ATF. In the aftermath of January sixth, many Mega supporters found themselves at

odds with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Republican politicians began to feed into right wing uproar surrounding the FBI, as Trump himself became a target for investigations after the mar Lago raid. In August of twenty twenty two, Marjorie Taylor Green tweeted defund the FBI. Arizona Representative Paul Gosar joined in attacks on the bureau, hosting weight to destroy the FBI,

we must save America. That same month, right wing columnist and podcaster Liz Wheeler published in op ed titled Abolish the FBI, which called to quote farm out the vital functions of the FBI and raise the rest unquote. The new right publication Compact Magazine featured a slightly better written article by the same title, Abolish the FBI at CPAC. In March of twenty twenty three, Matt Gates, noted pedophile advocated to get rid of the FBI among other federal agencies.

Later called to quote abolish the FBI at a Heritage Foundation symposium on the quote weaponization of the US government in April of twenty twenty four.

sixth investigations. This was believed to be used for the targeted removal of agency personnel. Last week, the FBI handed over a list containing the information of five thousand employees and agents who worked on the January sixth investigations. FBI leadership initially chose to withhold employee names. In response, Bove accused the FBI leadership of insubordination. This was ultimately a fruitless effort, as data seized by Elon Musk's DOGE team

could easily match employee IDs to names. Trump has since agreed to not publicly release the names of agents until at least late March as lawsuits continue, and is required to give two days notice if the administration chooses to publicly disclosed names. But individual agents are still worried. An anonymous letter from an FBI agent to Warren's quote. Currently, there is an effort to cull a significant number of career special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation unquote.

Around one third of FBI agents were told they would be placed on leave. According to a government source who spoke on the condition of anonymity, FBI employees have lost access to systems, only to later regain access, while others were told to wait to find out about their employee status. Agents are now trying to negotiate back into their jobs, with sources saying FBI employees may be able to stay on if they can prove their loyalty to Trump and

disown the January sixth prosecutions. I write all of this not in defense of the FBI, but to demonstrate how far Trump is willing to go to expand his executive power and transfer law enforcement duties to agencies seen as more loyal to the president. Though I doubt the FBI will be completely abolished in the next few years. The agency could become unrecognizable, a shell of its former self, with hardline Trump loyalists replacing the existing and already largely

conservative workforce. Alternative agencies perceived as being more loyal to Trump, like Homeland security investigations, could start picking up the FBI slack. According to a senior government source, on day two of Trump's second term, HSI was instructed to reopen investigations into the twenty twenty George Floyd protests to quote identify protesters BLM rioters likely did to us after January sixth, unquote.

For another once considered far fetched goal of the conservative movement that now seems oddly within grasp, let's talk about the Department of Education. Conservatives have advocated for dismantling the Department of Education ever since Jimmy Carter signed its modern incarnation into law in nineteen seventy nine. Most notably, Ronald Reagan tried and failed to abolish the department in nineteen eighty one, but Reagan's Commission ironically strengthened support for the department.

Once Reagan ran into roadblocks, he instead sought to limit the Department's power end influence. Since then, calls to abolish the Department of Education have been a recurring Republican talking point among certain think tanks and politicians, but they have struggled to land sizeable blows against the department. Trump previously fiddled around with merging the Departments of Education and Labor

during his first term, but that plan went nowhere. In Trump's own Agenda forty seven plan, released in twenty twenty three, he expressed his goal of quote closing up the Department of Education in Washington, d c. Later, at the National Religious Broadcasters twenty twenty four Christian Media Convention in February of twenty twenty four, Donald Trump repeated this promise, quote, I will close the Federal Department of Education, and we will move everything back to the states where it belongs,

where they can individualize education unquote. Project twenty twenty five outlined how to achieve the effective dismantling of the department by transferring funding and duties to other departments such as Health and Human Services and the DOJ. Opposition to the Department of Education was a frequent topic at the twenty

twenty four Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Robert Sophie and I attended multiple panels and events taking aim at the department, hosted by groups like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation. On the first day of the convention, the party ratified their official twenty twenty four RNC platform, which called to quote close the Department of Education in Washington, d C. And send it back to the States where it belongs, and let the states run our educational system

as it should be run unquote. And now the Department seems to be next on the Trump doge chopping block. The administration is drafting a sweeping executive order. While Trump says he wants his education nominee Linda McMahon to quote unquote put herself out of a job. The planned executive order would not just direct the Secretary of Education to begin dismantling the department, but also ask Congress for assistance

in formally abolishing the agency. It's unlikely that Trump would get the sixty Senate votes needed to pass the quote unquote necessary legislation, but even if they can't manage to technically abolish the department, he could still try to rip it, scuts out, slash spending and forcibly resign or fire employees, basically make the department simply non functioning, much like what Doge did to USAID. Upwards of sixteen DOGE staffers are

currently listed in the Education Department Directory. Federal education employees have already received the Fork in the Road resignation buyout offer, while others have been fired for alleged links to DEI. Without someone like Elon Musk and Trump's administration, there was no clear path towards implementing some of the more lofty plans proposed by conservative thought leaders, whether they be Trump's own Agenda forty seven, the Heritage Foundation's Project twenty twenty five,

or Curtis Jarvin's dream of a national CEO king. Only Elon Musk could do this. You need someone with his influence, connections, money, experience, and knowledge of fringe neo reactionary Silicon Valley political theory to propose and carry out something like Doge. So how

did Musk get here? Though it's common knowledge that Musk has drifted pretty severely right word the past five years leading into the twenty twenty four presidential campaign, he was not an out and proud Trump supporter as recently as twenty twenty two, Musk deemed Trump too old to serve as president, again, tweeting that it was time for Trump to quote hang up his hat and sail into the

sunset unquote. Initially, Musk threw his support behind the doomed presidential bid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but as it became clear Trump would be the Republican nominee, Musk fell in behind his new party line, but his implicit support of Trump was kept on the down low. The two met in Florida in March of twenty twenty four among other wealthy Republican donors, as Trump was lobbying for campaign funding.

The New York Times reported that Musk did not want to publicly endorse Trump as of early twenty twenty four, telling friends the most he would do was an anti Biden endorsement. Instead of public support, Musk would create his own super pac to secretly help get Trump elected, timing payments so his fiscal backing of Trump's campaign could only

go public after the election. But all that changed on July thirteenth, after Trump's brush with death in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk seemingly took Trump's call of fight Fight, Fight to heart, tweeting less than an hour later, quote I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery unquote. This opened more frequent communication between Musk and Trump. Later that weekend, both Musk and Peter Teel called Trump to recommend J. D.

Vance as vice president. Next week was the Republican National Convention, during which Elon Musk was frequently name dropped, both by official speakers and regular attendees, talked about as almost some kind of mythic right wing superhero. On the final day of the convention, rumors circulated that Musk himself would make a surprise appearance on stage, Though said rumors did not come to fruition. Musk's specter haunted the entirety of the RNC.

Come August, Musk just finished overhauling leadership at his America Super Pack and was rigorously pushing pro Trump messaging on X the Everything app. On August twelfth, Musk hosted Trump in a two hour live streamed phone call dubbed in x Space. This conversation marked the first time Trump casually spoke at length about the assassination attempt. The pair also discussed quote unquote migrant crime and the need to eliminate

federal bureaucracy. Trump gave a rare compliment to Musk, calling him the greatest cutter, followed up by saying, quote, I need an Elon Musk. I need someone that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts. I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the States unquote. News outlets were more interested in reporting on the stream's technical glitches rather than Musk's idea for a government efficiency commission, to which Trump responded very positively.

Next month, on September fourth, Trump announced that, at the suggestion of Elon Musk, if elected, he would quote create a government Efficiency Commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms unquote. Musk himself agreed to be appointed head of the commission, aiming to cut trillions of dollars.

This announcement was not taken very seriously. The New York Times called commissions such as this quote a favorite Washington solution for delaying dealing with hard problems unquote, and The Times later reported that the commission quote can issue recommendations around federal five funding and regulations, but will be powerless to enact them without executive actions by mister Trump or funding approval by Congress, even though I can admit that

both myself and some of my coworkers underestimated Doge's ability to physically carry out Musk's suggestions with no Congressional oversight or authority. As the election ramped up, musk super Pac mobilized thousands of canvassers across key swing states and collected data to target both enthusiastic and unlikely voters. Throughout twenty twenty four, Musk spent over two hundred and ninety million dollars in contributions in support of the Mega campaign, mostly

via his own super pack. On October fifth, Musk made his first appearance at an official campaign event, joining Trump for his return to Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk continued to appear at Trump rallies in the month leading up to the election. By election day, Musk was firmly in Trump's inner circle, spending Election night and most of the next week with President Elect Trump atmar A Lago. After this adbreak, we will return to discuss how Elon Musk is now trying

to become the CEO of the United States of America. Okay, we are back, and now a few months after the election, Elon Musk is doing to the United States exactly what he did to Twitter. By the end, it still might technically function on some level, just worse in every way, prone to glitches, and full of Nazis. The previous version was already bad and harmful, but the new one somehow sucks even more and no longer has the aspects that

made it semi worthwhile. The Fork in the Road deferred resignation letters sent to government employees used the exact same title as a similar email sent to Twitter employees after Musk bought the com company. The Doge team has installed sofa beds on the fifth floor of the headquarters of the Office of Personnel Management to enable working around the clock,

mirroring Musk's previous actions. During his takeover of Twitter, Musk has brought on some of the same exact people who helped him take over Twitter, all of whom are now special government employees with odd job titles but immense power. It was reported and Wired that a Musk stooge told General Services Administration workers that the agency will now pursue quote an AI first strategy unquote, and that the GSA

should operate like a quote unquote startup software company. Musk has ordered the General Services Administration to terminate leases for all roughly seven thousand and five hundred federal offices, amidst a national call to return to in person work. This again is a classic Musk move, taken from his takeover of Twitter, in which to cut costs, he refused to pay rent for Twitter offices in London, New York City, and San Francisco while the buildings were still in use.

A current GSA employee was quoted and wired as saying, quote, they are acting like this is a takeover of a tech company unquote. Musk's own personal success hasn't been from his skill as an inventor or a software engineer. What he's proficient at is taking over corporations and molding them in his image. This is what happened to Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter in twenty twenty. Musk called the federal government quote the ultimate corporation unquote, and now he seeks to

become CEO. In doing this, Musk is following the tech industry motto of move fast and break things. So far all his actions bypass Congress. The slow controller of stable government, having everything be done via executive order and doge helps to speed run a full reboot of the administrative state. The motto of the old government may as well have been move slow and build things. Progress is slow, but

detonation is fast. The breakage of government isn't a mere side effect or a bug of this expediated form of rule. It's a feature to reshape the government into their ideal technocracy. First, breaking things is a requirement. They might not get away with all of it, and they don't need to. They're doing so much so fast, knowing that they will only get away with some of it. But with new Supreme Court approved presidential immunity and unlimited pardon power, they can

try as much as they want with zero consequence. These are not the moves you would make if you wanted a stable government. It's the moves you would make as a new tech company, which is why Musk's operation is masked with the Silicon Valley language of efficiency. The inefficiencies of government are part of the point. That's what creates stability, makes the country a trusted ally, and gives the dollar value.

think they are the smartest people on the planet. It's their view that since they're so smart, shouldn't they run the country. Musk has a personal interest in slashing the regulatory state, as it interferes with his own businesses and dreams of space colonization. Last year, Musk claimed that Doge quote was the only path to extending life beyond Earth unquote. The White House Press Secretary has said that Musk himself will determine when there is a conflict of interest involving

his businesses and Doge. SpaceX alone has received fifteen point four billion dollars in government contracts, according to The New York Times. The large reduction in the federal workforce through the combined efforts of doge and schedule F. There is an irrefutable similarity to a plan outlined by New Right blogger Curtis Jarvin, Peter Thiel's favorite philosopher. Last year, Robert Evans did a behind the Bastards on Curtis Yarvin, and

you should absolutely check that out for more information. In twenty twenty two, Jarvin outlined how a second Trump term could quote unquote reboot the United States government. This plan amounts to a corporate takeover of government, which subsequently reshapes the structure of government, akin to a corporation. Though in Yarvin's mind, it is not President Trump who assumes the role of CEO. Instead, the President acts as chairman of the board, and before inauguration should select a CEO who

is an experienced executive. This appointed CEO could then quote run the executive branch without any interference from Congress or the courts, to quote Jarvin. While President Trump reviews the CEO's performance in the background, Jarvin writes, quote most existing important institutions, public and private will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems. Trump will be monitoring this CEO's performance on TV and can fire him if

need be unquote. Musk may believe that he has successfully maneuvered Trump into appointing him CEO, but Trump could be well aware of Musk's ambitions, but is keeping him around as an emergency patsy, ready to fire when needed. The Trump admin is currently testing the limits of presidential authority, and once those limits get surpassed by the standards of Senate Republicans, Musk is the easiest guy to blame and

push out of the administration's inner circle. The first step in Yarvin's plan has the Trump campaign running on centralizing executive power to eliminate government inefficiency. This was both in line with Project twenty twenty five and Musk's suggestion of an efficiency commission once Trump gets into office. The plan is as follows, purge bureaucracy what Jarvin calls rage retire

all government employees. This is essentially being carried out by doge schedule lef and by just pressuring career employees to accept deferred resignation offers. By threatening future mass layoffs, senior level officials have been replaced by a batch of loyal tech oligarchs with links to Musk and Peter Teel. The stupidity of Doge was almost a secret weapon. The cryptocurrency meanness made everyone in respectable society not take the idea seriously.

What's the worst an advisory commission could do with no power to enforce its suggestions.

as well as more directed attacks. On January thirty, first, the Department of Defense kicked out NBC News, The New York Times, NPR, and Politico from their in house press offices and replace them with One American News, The New York Post, Breitbart, and huff Post. Under direction from Doge, the White House has ordered government agencies to cancel subscriptions

to policy news services from multiple news outlets. A White House advisor told Axios, quote, the eye of Sauron is on more than just Politico, It's all the media unquote. In terms of attacks on academia, the federal grant freeze has had devastating effects on university research. Another step in Yarvin's plan is to co opt Congress and ignore the courts. This is where we are at right now. The goal is to reduce both the judicial and legislative branches to

being purely ceremonial and advisory, as advocated by Yarvin. So far, the Trump administration has effectively sidestepped the legislative bodies via Elon Musk and Doge. It's highly unlikely Trump would ever be impeached or removed by this Congress. Furthermore, this Congress seems to have willfully given up on their power over the federal budget. To quote a senior government official quote, the real challenge is that Congress is on board for

now in losing their own budgetary authority. So far, a loan security guard standing outside you, sayed and the Department of Education has been enough to deter resistance from the Democratic Party. Last week, I interviewed to Derek Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina. The full interview will air tomorrow, but here's his short take on the current situation.

and the separation of powers unquote. This past weekend, Musk raged against a federal judge who ordered to temporarily restrict doja's access to Treasury Department data. Both Musk and the White House have labeled a judge an activist, with White House spokesperson Harrison Fields calling the order quote absurd and

judicial overreach unquote. On x the Everything app, Musk boosted claims calling this a judicial coup and shared an announcement from California Representative darryl Isa to introduce legislation to quote unquote stop these rogue judges. But even without added legislation, Musk and the Trump administration are gearing up to directly

defy judicial authority. On Saturday, Musk shared a tweet reading, I don't like the president it sets when you defy a judicial ruling, But I'm just wondering what other options are these judges leaving us if they're going to blatantly disregard the Constitution for their own partisan political goals quote. And On Sunday, Vice President j. D Vance posted a statement undermining judicial power.

That leads us to another step in Yarvin's plan, centralize the police, nationalize local law enforcement to place them under federal control. Trump has flirted with his tactic in the past, when he deputized Washington police as US marshals to kill Michael Rhinol. In twenty twenty, Doge staff threatened to call us marshals when you say to security officials who have since been fired, denied them access to classified systems. Jorvin believes this step is paramount.

step in Yarvin's plan. Mobilize populist support, but crucially, don't wait until you're at your weakest at the end of your term after losing an election under popular mandate, deploy your empowered supporters at the height of your powers to oppose any obstruction from government agencies or the cour sort. Trump may weaponize a Supreme Court ordained presidential immunity and his unrestricted pardon power to make any willing actor carry

out his bidding with zero risk of legal consequence. Now, even if Trump himself isn't aware of Jarvin's plan, his vice president certainly is. On a far right podcast in twenty twenty one, JD. Vance laid out a very similar vision for a second Trump term, using what the Peter Teel protege described as a dewocification program to purge bureaucracy.

because you will get taken to court. And then when the courts stop, you stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce It.

Without checks and balances, all those crazy things Trump tried to do during his first term would be a lot easier to enact, let alone, whatever Musk and the tech oligarchs want out of the United States incorporated. But that's a whole separate topic. The current fight determines the degree to which this power is seized, and Jarvin notes the importance of going all the way.

of this benefits their base in any tangible way. They just have to say it hurts the wrong people, and that satisfies them.

manifest the results of this constitutional crisis. We are dealing with managing crumbles versus a full system's collapse. Sad face emoji this is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Day. Last week I was working on an essay about how the Trump administration is trying to shut down the Department of Education. Now very quickly that project expanded to being about how Elon Musk is actually trying to internally coop the federal government and become the CEO of the United States.

That article is now published on Shatterzone dot substack dot com, and it's also.

But I decided to publish the full interview because I believe his perspective is still helpful and the conversational format alters the way we process information compared to me just reading a kind of depressing essay for forty minutes. So, without further ado, here is the interviewing.

Affordable Healthcare Act debate. So you always have this stage rights argument going on, and at least amongst the folks that are worried about that, public education comes up as being a target because there's this argument always that well, education is not in the federal constitution, so what business does the federal government have to be involved, and so it's really more of a talking point as opposed to any particular substantive reason why they want to get rid

of it. But that's really where it's come from. But you know, it's often been not that serious of a critique, but obviously it's gotten very serious here in the last couple of weeks.

have previously thought are kind of like pipe dreams. Calls to abolish the Department of Education, even this rallying call from the new Right the past years to abolish the FBI, general claims of you know, like draining the swamp, these types of like old it's almost like stereotypical claims that now through musk they've been able to like weasel their way into actually dismantling like large, large systems that make

the everyday functionality of the government possible. What should people know right now about the current attacks in the Department of Education? Trump is still allegedly drafting in executive order. He'll probably have to work through Congress, but we'll see the degree to which he even needs to do that what are you worried about like right now, and what do you think people should know about like the current the current attacks on the dewy.

that would need Congress. And I mean, it's a weird silver lining, but that gives me like some like measure of comfortability in this weird, bizarre world, only because you know, two weeks ago the administration was willing to do things that it had no authority to do right, just sort of his claiming authority to do everything. And so there is this at least recognition that there's not unbounded power.

So that's sort of the immediate threat is not that huge because the White House or Trump's power over the Department or to close it up is relatively narrow, like most of the Department is established by statute, and he can't just dissolve things or move things around that are created by statute. He can't take money that's for poor kids and spend them on vouchers. Right, these things, you know,

the law dictates. And the fact that he's implicitly acknowledging, or rather his advisors or implicitly acknowledging they need Congress's help gives me a little bit of comfort because I think that getting rid of the department is I'm not sure there's a majority in the House for that, but there's certainly not a filibuster, you know, sixty vote majority

for that in the Senate. So that's short term. But I think there's something far more disturbing to me, and it's the long term, This sort of idea that there's something illegitimate about the federal role and education, that there's something illegitimate about public education itself. Those are very dangerous ideas. I have a piece that just came out yesterday and Slate that says, look, you know, the federal role in

public education predates the Constitution itself. You know, probably no one, not many listeners, probably familiar, ever heard of the Northwest Ordinances of seventeen eighty five and seventeen eighty seven, but before we even had a United States Constitution. This foundational document laid out how our territory is going to become states. And without going through all the details, Congress embeds public education and the very fabric of what it means to

be a state before we even have a constitution. And so that's very important. Is where we start at the end of the Civil War, right where we almost lost our democer see Congress as a condition of readmitting Southern states into the Union, says that one of the terms of readmission is that you create public education system and you never take those rights away, right, forcing public education into the South in places where it never had been before.

You know, people are more familiar with the civil rights movement. So I won't go through all that, but just to take one more pause, I mean, Congress created a Department of Education in eighteen sixty seven, right to get this public education project off the ground. So this isn't some wild new sort of fantasy of liberals or unions that we need a department so that we can hand over

the spoils to teachers. This is an idea about what it means to have democracy in America and public education is a centerpiece of that, and the federal government has been pushing it for two hundred and fifty years. And that's a good thing. It's a good thing.

funds programs, not the executive. But if if ultimately Congress is going to shift all that authority over like that, that's a dangerous place for democracy to be. There are no checks anymore. So I think what you're raising up is the fear that there aren't any checks in place.

You know, Fortunately, there still is a legal apparatus. I mean, even if Congress isn't standing up shouting and complaining, it's still the case the president can't just do whatever he wants, and hopefully the courts, you know, would would step in. I use the word hopefully. I think courts will step in to limit his ability to do things that go beyond to statutory power. So the bigger danger, I think is that through law itself, Congress seeds more and more

power to the president with a new legislation. So if Congress were to pass new legislation giving the president more centralized power, well that would be a concerning thing to me. Let me just stop and we'll get to your next question to go. But we have a larger phenomenon that's just it's not just about Trump, and people don't necessarily realize this. I mean, look, I don't think that President

Obama was a dictator or had authoritarian tendencies. I was part of the Obama Biden transition team, but I testified against Arnie Duncan in a case or against the United States Department of Education in twenty twelve or fourteen or something like that, because the department was taking power that it clearly did not have in regard to a no Child Left Behind waivers. And you know, I told the current administration, as much as I hate it, right, I wish we could just wipe away student debt. I feel

bad for my students who have huge debt. But I said, it is beyond the president's power to just wipe away all this debt, and they did it anyway. The real point here is that both Democrats and Republicans have been asking things of their presidents that their presidents don't have the power to do, and their presidents are doing it anyway, right, And it's because our Congress is broken. Our Congress isn't

doing its job. So citizens are demanding that our presidents do things that they really don't have the power too.

government temporarily to like their goals be enacted. And at a certain point, it's really tricky when the thing that you always hear is, you know, like hopefully the courts will step in, hopefully they'll do something. If things get really bad, who will like literally stop them in terms of like the courts told them to halt the funding freeze, and there's there's still grants that they were refusing to issue that were already approved legally need to be followed

through on that they are still withholding. And it's really frightening when it comes down to like basic level of like is there people military police who will enforce this that things get really bad? That's something I don't have like complete confidence in anymore.

power to do anything. Right, So, our entire system really rests on good faith, or as I tell my students, like what is due to something you know, President Trump or Biden or whoever had done. The Federal District Court issued an order directing us marshals to take President Trump into a custody, so that order goes out. The marshals receive it, they march over to the White House. They come in the door and they say, we are here to take the president. Signed and it's already been fast

tracked by Supreme Court, signed by the Supreme Court. The answer to whether we'll just use Biden, the answer to whether President Biden is escorted out of the White House by US marshals is not a function of military it's not a function of police power. It's a function of when that piece of paper is held up, does the secret service member believe that the rule of law exceeds his loyalty to the man standing behind him.

the administrative state. Replaced them with our people. When the courts stop, you stand before the country and say, the Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it. And I feel like we're getting closer and closer to this scenario.

Jarvin's playbook for seizing executive power. And I feel like we're getting closer and closer to this, and so much of what's happening in various agencies it is about proving loyalty to Trump so that if there is some kind of constitutional confrontation, people side with them. DOGE is basically installing loyalty tests and running through communications to see what the loyalty to Trump is For different levels of administrative employees the FBI are negotiations to stay on, but only

if they can prove their loyalty to the president. And like it's it's all of these scenarios that again, like originally would be kind of far fetched. When you're hearing someone like JD. Vance talk about this a few years ago on some like right wing podcast, that's one thing

to watch this like happen in real time. For people like me who study like this type of like more like esoteric far right political theory, it's kind of surreal to watch the type of thing that you've been like writing about and thinking about, like on background for years now happen. I just kind of rambled there, But do you have any like, I guess thoughts on like this idea that like Vance is talking about in terms of like creating this constitutional crisis.

is my predisposition. But a week or so ago, I had a huge crisis of confidence, should we say, there were just a few events in the news that I was just like, I just never thought that this would happen in America. I never thought a governor would I mean, some of this was what governors were doing. I never thought a governor would do that. I never thought a president would do that. I just never thought, you know,

never thought, never thought. And so I said to myself, you know, are any of my opinions or projections you know, valid anymore? Because I'm the guy who never thought? And so that was that was you know, that was a tough twenty four hours for me. I'll have to say. So, you know, I don't know if like I just rebooted and for self sanity and move forward, or you know, whether there is still some truth and reason to believe

in certain stability. And I mean, I will say this, you know, as we started this conversation, and the fact that the White House is conceding that it can't do everything to the Department of Education that it wants to do without Congress is a good thing. If you read the five executive orders for that they've already issued there, it's a good thing that actually, if you read them carefully, it's mostly directing appointees to think about stuff, not actually

do stuff, but to think about stuff. And of course the president can appoint them to think about stuff. If they do the stuff they're thinking about, that becomes a problem. But again it is this sort of like can I grab a headline about what would sound like an awful you know reality, But really, all I've done is type of to think about that reality. You know, that gives me some faith, right And notwithstanding the fact that this United States Supreme Court, you know, granted an immunity to

all presidents that I never could have imagined. You know, this court does you know, issue opinions that surprise us every single term, and they line up with the rule of law. It's just it's unpredictable to some extent which which opinions those are going to be. So I have this faith, you know, these sort of pieces of of the puzzle that still suggests we're still democracy and are going to remain one. But you know, I have I

have my really bad days. I think, like you know, I think a lot of people have a bad day every day right now. It's you know, I just feel thankful minor mine or fewer and further between than others. And maybe that's just psychological coping. I don't know.

its opinions about various things. I'm not going to say that, you know that there were a bunch of abolitions, but there was a manumissioned society in North Carolina in eighteen twenty nine that had I think sixteen hundred members. Right. The very idea of sixteen hundred you know, anti slavery advocates in North Carolina in the eighteen twenties is shocking to a lot of people, right, But ten years later, only twelve people show up to the final meeting, right,

So you had something that changed there, right. And so you have this sort of period of escalating disunion and censorship and propaganda and sort of policing what is publicly you know, acceptable commentary in the South. All this stuff is happening sort of going in and you know, editing their sort of censoring textbooks, you know, demanding that books only be written by Southerners. Like, oh, I make a go on and on and on. We don't have time

for it. What I point out though, in my analysis of what's going on, you know right now, over the last few years of education, is that there are a lot of policies that are attacking public education in the way that they previously had, and a lot of them are symbolic of disunion instincts, right, sort of just sort of anti government, right, anti sort of whatever the current culture is. And then there's actually policies that I argue are facilitating disunion. And one of those that I talk

about is our public school voucher. I say, private school vouchers. You are so upset with You're so raging at the public school system that we need private school vouchers, right, and we are effectively paying, We're going to pay individuals to leave the public school system. And I call this a coded call for disunion, even if people don't think that's what they're doing. If we look back at where we started this conversation, which is institution of public education

as something upon which American democracy has been built. Of course, it has lots of flaws and it wasn't perfect, but it's been part of how we build a democracy. It's always been a bipartisan project. Now becoming the thing that we rage against now becoming the thing in which we are going to finance exit from. Right, this is a step towards disunion from a fundamental institution of American democracy. What happens to us if they actually execute on that plan.

I shudder to think about where we might be, because it's not just some private school that's the equivalent of the public school. We're talking about people on the public dollar retreating into their religious silos, into their racial silos, into their culture silos. And if there's anything I think that we could all agree on, is listening to only the people that you like on Twitter or listening only to the people that you like for the evening news is

what got us here. And if what we have is education that becomes the equivalent of MSNBC and Fox News and Newsmax and you know whatever else, like that is a dangerous place. I don't know how we build democracy on such a system.

I don't know how to get around this problem. This is something that you know, we've thought about a lot the past eight years, but certainly longer.

to say otherwise. But if what we're doing is talking about education itself, I think number one is that I think our leaders need to understand better understand the dangers of you know, vouchers for instance, like right now and I'm writing about this, like they think it's just a policy dispute, and like if you just look at the surface level, it's like, well, who cares if we give some more vouchers and that makes the most far reaches

of our party happy. But like I think sort of really stepping back and appreciating how dangerous this is to our democracy is step one. That's hard, right, I'm talking about teaching adults to see things differently than what they currently see them. But as to our schools, I mean, I've got a little bit of stiff medicine for both sides. I mean, I do think that in the push for more justice in our public schools, and I think we do need. I mean, that's what I've devoted my career to.

I do think that, Well, I don't think our schools did any of the any of the awful stuff that you know that the right has said, but I do think that they maybe were not as open to people disagreeing with them as they should have been. And what I really mean is in the push for justice, I think there was a bit of shutting down conversation. Not teaching children to reach their own conclusions, but giving them

conclusions and expecting them to reach them. And so one of the things I'm working on my new book is that, like, I really think we have to rethink how we teach history, you know, how we teach literature. Maybe not so much literature. I think our literature teachers are pretty good, but rethink how we teach those things such that we are not

committed to our children reaching particular conclusions. What we're committed to is our children engaging in free and open thought amongst themselves, right with hopefully an adult in the room that can you establish some guidelines. But I think you know, public education didn't do that very well five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago when I was there.

But I think in this moment of cultural fracture, we do really have to commit to free speech, open to a inquiry, listening harder, thinking harder, right, not just bullet points, not just bullet points.

you know, maybe you know it's a district court. But if the United States Supreme Court or a court of appeals told the president you lack the authority to sequestor those funds and he still did it. So just the budget, that's it. Just the budget, you know, just the belief that the president can spend our money however he wants with no constraint, and that would be crossing the rubicon. Now,

I'll tell you. And this is why you know you had to kind of be like a constitutional law professor, or well, you don't have to be a constitutional law professor, but you've been following it. It's like, you know, I have been alarmed, and this goes back. This isn't just a Trump problem. Like I was alarmed with the NCLB waivers.

Probably nobody in this even knows what I'm talking about. Right, like, you know, a decade ago, not that like President Obama was like going to take over the country, but alarmed that somehow another he thinks he can do this, Like why is he even testing the boundaries this way?

Like that's a big move to just say, yeah, I can I can commit this nation to a fifty percent increase and it's in its fiscal outlays tomorrow. That's not constitutional democracy. But now right, we have a present going even further than that. But he liked Biden at least thus far stepped back at least from the district court right when the court said can't. So it's really that sort of defying of the court at that point. Yeah, they've all been pushing the boundaries. He's pushed him further

thus far. They've all complied with judicial orders, but it would be the refusal to comply with judicial order.

in terms of like tests for loyalty. And it's at a certain point, like if he does something really bad at least for these next two years, like I don't see a way that he'll get like impeached or removed from office, like certainly not with this Senate, not with this Congress, Like that check and balance just no longer is viable due to the last election, and acting with that popular mandate has I think given them a bit more courage on their side to go, you know, a

little bit further, play a little bit more fast and loose some of these like checks and balances than what we've like previously seen, but this is certainly still still developing.

You know, offer some plausible rational rationalization for what you're doing, and you know, you minimize it, act like there's no big deal. What's startling here is that he is out in the open expressing his designs to us, giving us

the sort of thoughts. And that's very unusual. And it does show that what's acceptable from public officials is much different now because had you know, had Nixon shared his designs of the American public, he wouldn't have made it as long as he did, you know, and probably true of a lot of other presidents, they would have been gone. So what's actually acceptable as public behavior has clearly changed, what's acceptable as a policy agenda has clearly changed. And

so he's just putting it out there. He's putting his dirty laundry out there, and people are like, oh, this is normal.

find me there. I'm a professor of law at the University of South Carolina, And like I said, you know, Dangerous Learning just came out, you know, a week or so ago, really helping us, I think, helping us to see this current moment through a long lens of war on black equality, black freedom, and to be quite honest, just free and open debate. We've had those wars before and and we scarily are having them again.

And today we are going back to talk about Gaza, particularly what has happened and changed in sort of US policy relating to Gaza, to what's going to happen as the actual combat operations wind down, to the Trump administration's so far promises to effectively ethnically cleanse the entire area and turn it into some sort of weird US satellite. And with me today is Donna el Kurd, an assistant professor of political science, guest on our episodes about bib

N Yahoo over It, Behind the Bastards. Dana, thank you so much for being here with us. How are you doing today? I know that's a dumb question. I just asked you that at the start of this too.

and it would be turned into effectively American condos. Right, Like that's I think that's essentially the gist of the initial meeting, which was met with a degree of chaos even from Israel, because I don't think anyone entirely knew exactly what Trump was going to say when he got up on that stage, which is pretty normal Trump fashion. But yeah, how would you characterize kind of the initial reaction to that announcement.

for real, there's going to be a Gaza riviera. But what this does is it just expands the scope of what they think is possible for Gaza, whether it's preventing reconstruction and you know, basically keeping them in this kind of stagnant condition and allowing people to start trickling out and leaving and anybody left is considered combatant. That could be a possibility moving forward. It could cover up for more aggressive action ending the ceasefire. I mean, it's really

upended the things in terms of the Israeli perspective. Yeah, and how much they've accepted it, I think.

mass killing. You know, like there's no closed doors and Trump's plan Other than about three hours before we recorded this on Monday the tenth, a series of articles went out based on some of Trump's comments, confirming Palestinians wouldn't be allowed back into Gaza under his plan, right, the plan is for ethnic cleansing, right, Like, that's the only way to describe that.

like a pretty strong statement. I mean I was. I was surprised how strong it was about how much they do not endorse such plan.

I think I can make a deal with Egypt. You know, we give them billions and billions of dollars a year, and so far Egypt and Jordan have both said no, this is not something we're interested you and special Rapporteur Francesca Albanize said Trump's proposal was nonsense but has to be taken very seriously, which I actually think is a reasonably good summary of how to handle everything that he says. It's nonsense that you have to take it very seriously.

to even talk about it in these terms. It's not like le Bide administration was really holding them accountable either, But now again, because the permission structure has just been expanded to such a degree that we don't know what kinds of things we're going to see for people who remain in Gaza in the coming future. And obviously this derails any possibility for Palestinian and Israeli civil society actors who are trying to move beyond this particular status quo.

And there's no international actor that's really empowering those efforts, and so it's really bleak.

international level. The US saying we are backing a forced expulsion in genocide of an entire population does change the permission structure for every international actor in terms of like a massive variety of conflicts around the world, Like this is like a sea change in international norms that so many millions of people outside of Gaza will eventually and the probably immediately be effective.

And when the ceasefire happened, there was an argument, and I think that this is a valid one that Palestinians the fact that they were able to in the ceasefire agreement secure their right to return even to the rubble, that was a huge obstacle to this kind of precedent, and I think Trump is now try to upend that victory, even if it's you know, in terms of a precedent set or in symbolic terms, like you said, this is

now going to become how states operate. I mean, the Syrian dictator during the Syrian Civil War I think pushed the bounds of how states can operate. And this is another level.

it's never just Gaza. You know, these things metastasize. You have to view that those kind of actions in the international stage like a cancer.

We're back so to zero Beckon on Gaza. Obviously, one thing that comes up when Trump talks about this plan that is an actual thing that would have to be dealt with one way or the other, is that huge chunks of Gaza are uninhabitable right now and will be for the foreseeable future because of the sheer quantity of

munitions dispensed. A number of munitions that have been used in Gaza are cluster munitions, but even munitions that are not cluster munitions, when you're dropping bombs on particularly dense urban targets, there's a wide variety of things that can happen to those munitions on their way to their target, including them getting deflected by debris, them getting deflected by pieces of metal and rebar and the like that damages the device and stops it from detonating but leaves it

still in an active state. And the estimate I'm seeing for munitions used in Gaza is about ten percent of the munitions, and there's no way of knowing how many have been dropped, but estimates are at least thirty thousand in the first seventy days I think weeks sorry much less than seventy days, nearly thirty thousand munitions in the first seven weeks of the war, so a huge number, about ten percent at least, are still active and live.

And you know, for an idea of how long it takes to d mine and render an area safe for munitions like this, there are still people who die in France from wor World War One munitions, you know, up to the present day in twenty twenty five. So this is a massive problem. In the best case scenario, something

has to be done with these munitions. This is something that Trump has been bringing up and when talking about like his desire to clear people out of their d mine and then rebuild effectively what sounds almost like a vacation colony right for the United States. And one of the issues just with any sort of practical sort of effect with D mining is that USAID has been gutted as an agency, and that's the agency through which D

mining was done. We've spent billions of dollars, put billions of dollars into D mining around the world through USAID. The US military is actually not allowed by our laws to do D mining operations. There's a complicated history there, but like so we both got this situation where the proposed justification for pushing the population out is, well, it's not safe to be there, we have to determine it.

And also we have created a situation in which the organizations that do d mining can't do it anymore.

they won't be allowed to return. Yeah, well, all right, what are you demining? You really think you're going to build hotels?

like with the Greenland shit can become US policy. And that appears to be I mean, as best as I can tell, that's the origin of this.

I mean, parts of this are familiar and go back, you know, even to the Iraq War in terms of US Paul and further back right, like what is kind of the core of US support of Israel as our desire to have a stable territory within the Middle East from where we can project power, right, So, to that extent, this is like a natural expression of US policy for decades in the area, Like, well, what if we just take this for ourselves and then we have this stable

platform from where we can airstrike whoever the hell we want, and also Jared Kushner can have his condos.

Like I don't even, I can't even. I can't think of a single decision that's this reckless that's been made in my lifetime by American politicians other than the Iraq War, right.

which I suppose was not super shocking, but there were immediate announcements by New Orleans Police that they are trying to figure out what to charge this person under, which, like I tell me what kind of crime that is?

thing like that's the definition of protected speech. You know, if you're their employer, you can fire them for that, but you can't charge them criminally for that.

expanded understandings of anti semitism and the ideas. Even if you don't go after everybody, you're making an example enough that like you're chilling people's abilities to engage, whether it's on campuses or you know, off campuses, and so it's it's definitely I can tell you from like the academic perspective, like a number of disciplinary organizations and and and like mile Ease Studies Association and things like this, like they're

they're very concerned, like this is a very concerning moment.

not even in favor that's the wrong way to put it. Yeah, discussing the reality of the genocide.

so there is that conflation. And I will say that, like, we're seeing attacks on academic freedom, and we're seeing attacks on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly on academic campuses, both in public institutions, that have to uphold public laws and also in private institutions that have paid lip service to things like free speech and are now ignoring that commitment in the past. And so we've seen even tenured professors like what happened in Nihlenberg College, like tenured professors

being targeted losing their jobs. And I can say that this has really activated organizations like the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP, the Middle East Studies Association as well. Their Committee on Academic Freedom has been working to collect data on how this has impacted people's abilities to engage on the issue of Israel Palast that even in their

research or teaching. And then there was a study by two professors Mark Lynch and Shibity Tidhemi George Washington and University of Maryland respectively that found something like over ninety percent of professors who teach on the Middle East are self censoring Jesus. And it's not because they're out in front of the classroom giving a crap about giving their opinion.

and we won't be able to talk about anything. So really, this is the same decision a lot of hospitals are making around like the treatment for trade and skill wealth. We'll lose our funding if we do this, and we do all these other good things. But they never stop, right, like, you never actually are safe. There's no point at which

these people say it's enough. They take your ability to talk about or to act in one way away, and then they take it in a way in another, and they keep taking, you know, until you make a stand, and you might as well make a stand the first time they start trying to take shit from you, otherwise you're going to get backed even further into a fucking corner.

most people in traditional organizations, particularly professors, which is always where it starts. And yeah, that salient is just going to get whiter and whiter and whiter, right, like that that's the way this stuff works.

The precedent that is being set, and what is like kind of a silver lining is that the last year of the Biden administration, the last year plus of the Biden administration, and then even now, I think at least it has helped people connect the dots a little bit, like this is not an issue in isolation, and just because you don't happen to work on it doesn't mean that you're safe from people meddling in your syllabi or chilling your speech on other issues, whether it's trans rights,

whether it's you know, reproductive rights, whatever issue. If you don't toe the line, they're going to come for you too, right, And so I think that at least I've seen folks who are not who have never been, you know, activated on the issue of Israel Palestine, whether in their advocacy or in their research, they're making that connection at least, and maybe that's a silver lining that I'm trying to be less bleak here.

one thing is okay and the other is not. I don't know. I find it incredibly frustrating that like there's this pretended act that like, because you've got some people on one side who have made statements in favor of this group, that sucks that that is a reason for cracking down on the ability of people to talk about a genocide. Like it's it's just this hideous hypocrisy that I don't even understand how like people can keep that

consistent in their own heads. But they don't need to, right, That's always the thing with fascists.

to shut down any speech around it. And I was featured in this like Vox video and it was just like an explainer, and I received some harassment and like accusations that because I was providing context in a Vox video, which is what I was asked to do based on my expertise, that I was making excuses for, you know, what had happened on October seventh. And I was like,

is the red line now? Just even discussing anything like with any kind of expert tease or information like it's it's uh, yeah, it's mind boggling.

Trump's picks ultimately voted for them. And she's like, they're scared of getting murdered, and like, isn't everyone who says anything, and like you've got death threats for a vox video, Like why are these Congress people who have so many more resources to protect themselves, why do they get to be scared?

of thing. And so that's been something I've read in some analysis, and I don't think it's actually correct. I don't think that Trump is making these kinds of statements or possibly these kinds of plans, just as kind of like I don't know, multi level chess with Saudi Arabia to get them to sign a peace deal with Israel, and the conditions in the region I think have really shifted.

And I don't think Saudi Arabia, as I mentioned at the beginning, because they put out statements to this effect, I don't think they're at all interested in this kind of move right at this point. So I just maybe I would only add that Trump is not playing this long game that we think he is. Maybe we can take him at his word.

am proud to report that fascism has been defeated. The Philadelphia Eagles have beat the KK Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl. Drake has been executed live on stage. It's a great week.

visits the Uniteds. I don't think it ends well for anybody if he visits the United States. This country is too heavily armed and crazy right now. But they're doing this because Putin and Trump have evidently reached some sort of agreement about the end of the war in Ukraine. Zelensk,

he was not really consulted on this. He's made a couple of statements like, yep, we're hoping that this is what pushes everything towards peace, but it's very clear that what's happening is Ukraine is going to be made to give up a decent chunk of their territory. Now they do have Russian territory still to bargain with somewhat, so it hopefully will not be a situation where Putin gets is entirely his own way. But that is kind of

the what's happening. And the sea change that will accompany this is that new Secretary of Defense and Alcoholic Pete Hegseth made a statement and a meeting in Brussels that the United States will no longer be the guarante of peace in Europe. Specifically, he stated that we're not going

to tolerate of an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency. But this was an announcement that the post war sort of status quo is no longer something that we can rely on going forward, and that is a really significant admission from the sec deaff.

In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, every Western European nation basically came to a tacit agreement referred to as the Cordon sanitaire, which is when a right wing party starts to gain power, you do not coalition with them under any circumstances. Germany is actually like the last of the European countries to give up this idea. But the fact that the Cordon sanitaire has fallen in Germany is real bad news.

wouldn't necessarily have enforced that arrest warrant anyway. But this week Trump signed a little executive order titled in block capitals, as We've come to expect, imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court. In doing so, he followed the example of Putin, who in twenty twenty three put out arrest warrants for ICC prosecutors after they put out a warrant for his arrest. Trump didn't cite the Putin example. He called the ICC's

actions against Israel illegitimate and baseless. That's a quote He specifically called the warrants against UF Gallant and Benjamin Etting Yahoo baseless. He then went on to claim, quote, both nations are thriving democracies with militaries strictly adhered to.

It says that if the International Criminal Court investigates any of these people, Trump called the Clara National Emergency. It also imposes material sanctions and travel bands on both ICC prosecutors and people acting on their warrants, as well of the families of those people.

a lot of people in Africa. That doesn't mean that like African people can't do war crimes in Africa, of course they can, but it means that they're held accountable more often than when countries in the global North do war crimes, which they can do too. Okay, So Trump, that's like everything else he does, was condemned internationally for this right, including by several NATO allies. In so much as they really are NATO allies anymore given everything we've

just talked about. However, it's also worth noting that some of the countries like France, who condemned Trump's sanctioning of ICC prosecutors, also allowed someone with an ICC warrant I Benjamin that's in Yahoo to transit their airspace. So like, therefore commitment to the ICC perhaps can be questioned, Like this is a problem with the ICC, right it doesn't have an integral enforcement mechanism.

to rename it Red, White, and Blue. Lind God, let's get some quick reactions from the panel.

be an interesting problem. Now, treasuries again, our course, US treasury bonds. We will get to what those are in a second, but I need to read the rest of this quote. It could be that a lot of those things don't count. In other words, that some of the stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent. Therefore, maybe we have less debt than we thought. Now that's a very scary thing to say.

national debt works. Right, Like all of our money, literally every single dollar that is in circulation, every dollar that is in a bank account, that is literally government debt, right like that that's what money is, right, And these treasury bonds are as you were talking about earlier, Right, this is like the investment asset for literally the entire world. And there's trillions of dollars of these. Actually Japan is

the largest holder of treasury bonds. China's sort of been selling some of theirs, but they have a lot of them.

trying to like get money from people. And and you know, even if you listen to what that what the sort of bond analyst is saying, right, he's like well, it's fine, they'll just stop paying like US debt to other things, which is like unbelievably unhinged. Would also in and of itself, like like destroying the full faith and credit of the United States would absolutely just fucking annihilate the world economy.

And it's also another example of Trump not understanding how the empire he's inherited works, because like, the one of the ways the US funds is government is by getting its client states to buy like trillions of dollars of assets. Like that's partially why feelie. Look at who who buys US assets, Like it's China and US tributary states like Japan for example, which is just purely in American military protectorate. Right,

it's a sort of incredible system for the US. Right, you get a bunch of people and you, you know, you just you just sort of perpetually keep borrowing money from them, And it's this thing where they don't understand and who actually holds the power in the relationship, which is that the US having all this, is the one with the power and is the one that's getting everyone else's money for this sort of secure asset. So you know,

who knows what's going to happen with this. If this actually starts happening, like, yeah, this is the world rending economic crisis levels of stuff. Well, we'll see if he moves on it, he may simply forget about it, or we're going to wake up one day and like the US's credit's going to be downgraded to like junk bond status,

and yeah, everything's going to be chaos. So, speaking of Trump trying to sort of like take shots at pillars of the global economy, starting in March, he's trying to implement a twenty five percent tariff on all imported steel and aluminum. Most of that's actually from Canada and Mexico. I think in their minds is the thing about Chinese steel,

but it's mostly from Canada and Mexico. This is also a fucking shit show because the US manufacturing capacity that we still have and we still actually do have a decent amount of like very high tech manufacturing capacity, right relies on this stuff, and this is going to make it more expensive, gets bad. It will do nothing to deal with the fact that US doesn't produce steel anymore, which is the product of that. One day, I'll do

my structural Chinese steel over capacity episode. But you know, it's the product of like half a century of the global manufacturing economy, you know, becoming zero sum and they're simply not being a large enough consumer market for all of industrial goods, which means the production becomes increasingly you know, it becomes impossible to expand production to one place without you know, getting red production another place. In Trump things

you can solve those with tariffs. You can't. Mostly it's just another like throw things at the economy.

breaking news on Wednesday. This is coming out Friday. This episode is being recorded on Wednesday. Everything that you hear, if shit has happened in the US a few days, that's from the future.

in private. On Monday, Adams convened a meeting with his own top officials to urge them not to speak badly about the President and public, saying if they were to do so, it could risk federal funding. Later that day. That same day, Trump's Justice Department ordered the prosecutors in Adam's criminal case to drop the charges against him, in part, arguing Adams must be free of the burden of his corruption indictment to help carry out Trump's immigration agenda in the city.

by not making them be allowed to play sports. So that happened, and then a few other things have happened the past few weeks, and I'm kind of just like catching up on because I been really focused on, like reporting on like Muscus specifically, and there's been a lot of other stuff the past few weeks, So I'm going

to kind of get to that now. The State Department's travel website changed the acronym LGBT to LGB on a web page like warning about like how dangerous it might be to like travel to like other countries with like worse legal protections, say LGB travelers can face special challenges abroad. Laws and attitudes in some countries may affect safety and ease of travel. Many countries do not recognize the same

sex marriage. Many countries don't recognize the ex gender marker in passports and do not have it systems at ports of entry that can accept sex markers other than female and male.

gender ideology. Previously, the CDC removed like HIV and trans related like health info pages from their website, and as of yesterday, February eleventh, the web pages for the FDA, Health and Human Services and the CDC were allegedly brought back online, restoring their January thirtieth status. They did this like right before a court mandated deadline to restore these pages, so like I can I can now go back on to the.

current war on wokeness. Another aspect of this is there's been a whole bunch of orders from federal agencies to ban specific woke keywords across their databases, their websites, training information,

including from agencies like Noah. So just like the weather and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they released a memo of banning specific words across the agency, including words like ability, acceptance, access, affirmation, aggression, ally shift, androgyne a, sexual belonging, bias, binary, bisexual, black culture, DEI, discrimination, diversity, empathy, empowerment, equity, ethnicity, fairness, gay, gender, genitisphia, handicap, homosexual, LGBTQ, intersex,

pan sexual, queer, transgender, transvestite, as well as words like impartial inclusion, indigenous, intersectionality, justice, The word white has been banned, They space social justice, underserved communities, race, privilege, powerdynamics, the data, American multiculturalism. So just all of these Like again, this is like the Party of Free Speech has banned all of these words, and it's not it's it's it's it's

not just Noah. Also, the National Science Foundation has has released my most saying that they cannot have these words included in their documents because it could cause them to lose grant funding.

institutional marginalize, trauma, underappreciated, stereotype type, systemic underrepresentation, undervalued victim.

this kills every fucking grant. And this is this is one of these things where it's like you're literally just running straight into the federal law tells you you must do this thing, and the Trow Administration says these words are banned, and so like yeah, who knows, it's a really weird situation.

The move aims to ensure that quote unquote, no forbidden terms appear in the work band terms must be scrubbed. Great,

it's all really bad, yep. And we're seeing this this sort of like lists being formed increasingly, including this DEI watch list put together by a conservative oppositional research group called the American Accountability Foundation CHRIST who released a DEI watch list, which publishes the names, photos, occupation, and personal information of mostly black employees who work under the Department of Health and Human Services When the website was first discovered,

the employee profiles were labeled under targets. This has since been changed to dossiers like very very frightening, like very bad stuff, like very obvious intimidation for each target. The website lists a collection of alleged DEI offense, which includes donations to Democrats and social media posts having pronouns in their bio or previous work on since deleted diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Columnist Jamal Bowie says, quote, they are

mostly targeting black employees. So this is quite literally just a repeat of Rigrow Wilson's segregationist purge of the federal government. And like, yes, like all of this, all of this like push against quote unquote DEEI is like very clearly

just like white supremacists segregation in action. Like this is the whole point is that if any employee is a person of color, that means that they that they must be unqualified because they were hired only due to DEI and to avoid doing that, you could only hire white people.

And Trump's Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent out a memo directing staff on where to direct like grant funds and he said, quote give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average unquote, which is a very clear dog whistle to just like only hire like white Christians are Christians with big families, you know, parenthesis like white people. This is like very very obviously what they're doing.

US military and probably to an extent, law enforcement. We look at agencies like the FBI, there's a book called The Dictator's Army that heavily focuses on how changes like this impact operational efficiency, and the gist of it is that the goal, and clearly what Hegseth's job is, is to make the military into something that can't pose opposition

to the new regime. Right, that's the goal here, because there's a very realistic understanding that the military was one of things that stopped him from maintaining power in twenty twenty, right, both because the military was not willing to be used to crack down directly on protests and because General Milly acted as a barrier to Trump's attempt to do a coup the last time.

And this this took several years, but that was one of the first goals of the Nazi regime and power was reforming the military as much as possible in their own image.

Christian applicants. Yeah, and like that's the entirety of this point here, Like they're they're using DEI as like as this like magical wand to frame things that are like pretty standard and like accepted parts of like how you do like hiring practices, how you don't do discrimination to just specifically only only like uplift white Christians. And that's part of this like very basic like Christian nationalist project that people like Heritage have been trying to do for a long time.

understand the world. In order to sort of like purify their like white state, right like, you have to ord to the non white people, and you have to get rid of the queers, and you know, and people especially people who are fucking both. And so this is this sort of transformational project of changing this this sort of like just changing the composition of what the US is into, like and how its state functions, and how they can to like what level of violence they can bring about on people.

States like this, like noble historical project. H It's like stuff that they've tried to do before with that, like with that, like seventeen seventy six project that The New

York Times reported on. Part of Trump's order called for quote an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, an ennobling characterization of America's founding and foundational principles, a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout history, the concept that commitment to America's aspirations is beneficial and justified, the concept that celebration of America's

greatness and history is proper. And then the order goes on to try to ban the concept of white guilt, saying that like, teachers can get in trouble if any of their students feel guilty about things that people of like that same race have done in the past, and like making sure that teachers do not teach things in a way that could possibly make us students feel quote unquote guilt.

massive anti racist actions. And that's the that's like the thing that really truly tipped like a bunch of the Republican Party even further right from where they'd been with the Tea Party into into this into sort of trump Ism. It was, you know, it was a reaction to that and then this entire campaign, right, like all of the stuff that he's talking about here, you know, this is about twenty twenty, right, this is about reversing the gains that had beened, you know, and like obviously they were

incomplete gains. One of the things that did happen was that a bunch of teachers were trying to change the way the US history is taught to reflect that this country was like again, a settler colonial empire built by slave labor, and you know that that expanded its territory through genocide, which is just this is just objectively true

about how the US started. But the thing is, like that's not good for you know, these people's projects, right, Like saying that out loud is a fucking issue for them.

And so you know, their their attempt to roll back everything that was gained from sort of the Black uprisings is culminating all of this shit with like the purge of black workers for the federal government, with all of these things ordering you and like that's why they're talking about all of these weird all they keep banning all these weird like terms that don't make any sense, Like we were talking about like empathy, right, so like, okay,

so why the fuck are they talking about banning empathy? Yeah, because specifically these things come from the purges they've been trying to do in the education system, where they have a bunch of very specific grievances about like kinds of education stuff that teachers the teachers were implementing, particularly in sort of like middle and high schools.

will resume funding. The first tro was like two weeks ago, on February first, So it's not like like they just learned about this. It's that they have in some ways like perhaps caved to pressure. Again, like, these executive orders do not enforce themselves, These are enforced by people at agencies. These things do do not do not become automatically enforced.

So this is this is like one one step now you can go to a popular dot info who has been breaking the news on this specifically, and then some some breaking news that I have here on drop site quote unquote armored Tesla forecast estimated to win four hundred million dollars of State Department contract funds.