It Could Happen Here Weekly 195

controlled in some way. And so that's really what I want to highlight in today's episode, the infrastructure of this system and how it's used to control, you know, both in terms of the physical infrastructure and the digital infrastructure of our lives. So I suppose to start off, i'd ask, when was the last time that you noticed infrastructure shaping your choices?

I think it really controls like how much time you spend on it, much energy you invest into and of course even just our neighborhoods, our environments, our cities with they laid out, it tends to affect you know, just how often we go out, where we go, what needs a transportation we use, and I mean with physical infrastructures concerned, and how it's been used to control people. That goes

way back into history. You know, coloneal powers often built transport infrastructure in like roads and railways and ports with the very explicit purpose of extracting raw materials from the colonized territories to get to the imperial core. You know, the systems we're not designed to say over the mobility needs of the local populations. They usually create a direct line from the mines and the plantations and the resource rich areas to the coastal ports where they could be exported.

you know, the actual economic self determination of the people. Yeah, in that area, it didn't matter.

place where the raw material can be extracted. Because between the China was doing a lot of what you could generously call foreign direct investment or like neo colonialism in lots of places in Africa, right, And it was the contrast between those two traveling experiences was so profound, Like obviously you travel faster on the smooth roads, but like you don't immerse yourself in the human experience of meeting and sharing that travel with people, which is why I

do these things in the first place. With just like such a profound contrast. I remember it really striking me at the time.

of the country. They still don't have access to some of the basic social services and resources that the urban core has because you know, the urban rural divide in many ways mimics the corporate free divide on.

in society and distribute opportunity. But the infrastructure that tends to be set up is more so for consolidating state power and channeling the movement of people in predictable, survailable ways, and prioritizing access for certain populations while excluding or marginalizing others. So, of course infrastructure development has the capacity to help people. You know, it can increase accessibility, can make people's lives easier, and it can also just manage and contain them and

varied sources. And we see a lot more examples of this sort of infrastructure control when you look at the class and racial dynamic within societies. Those sorts of divisions and separations and stratifications they of course manifest physically. You know, in the US you had literal segregation areas that were designated for black people, listening for white people, water fountains

and neighborhoods and all these different things. You also had redlining policies, and nowadays you have spaces that were redlined and thus lacked investment, and thus when neglected infrastructurally due to that racial and economic inequality, those spaces are now right for development in the form of gentrification because the property is so cheap, so undervalued, and so the people who made something out of that lack are now being

pushed out. And in South Africa, I mean, up until recently, these are partid era policies created townships that were deliberately located far from white urban centers, there were lacked and services and transit options, and physically reinforced the racial division of that society. And even today around the world you have human zoning laws and transit access limitations and public holes and policies that recreates historical class divisions and racial divisions,

ethnic divisions. And I'm sure you and your with all of the I mean, every time I talked to you have like a new travel story to tell. I'm sure you've witnessed something like this.

it's fascinating. The other example I think of is like Chris Elam's done some fantastic writing on the development of Barcelona, and you have like the unregulated working class for Raval, like this area just next to the Rambler where the streets are just fucking small, a winding and crazy and there's never not laundry kind of over you know, over your head, and it's a very I like to go there.

like where the working class would be kept. And the working class, to be clear, were like seen as there was a colonial relationship between the boys who are the working class in Barcelona because most of the working class were not Catalan. They would actually put signs at the top of these working class areas saying like Mutia begins here, right, these are the Musians and people from Mustia, the people from outside of Catalonia, and Catalonia stops here where the

working class exist. That later reflected in the working class self identity, like it came to refer to the Ravala's Chinatown, not specifically because of a high concentration of people from from the Chinese diaspora, but because they've seen Chicago gangster movies where Chinatown was like the area where the gangsters were, and they were like, yeah, we're fucking gangster, like we're going to call it Chinatown that you want to come

in here, will fucking shoot you. Like I thought that was really fascinating, like response to the way that they have been alienated by infrastructure.

it's infrastructure could never be neutral. Yeah, and when you see that, you can't unsee it because you look at the amount of decisions it would have had to have gone into, you know, some of the examples you mentioned or the examples I mentioned, you know, the design decisions and say, okay, we're gonna put this rule would hear instead of here, Yeah, we're going to use this material

instead of this material. Who you employ to build those structures that infrastructure also as an impact in the surrounding area. Are you employing people within the community, employing people outside? What's happening there? Who's funding this infrastructure, who's maintaining the infrastructure? Yeah, what level of surveillance has been implemented, Where are the public transportation roots and why they here not there?

So you call a lot the usual suspects suburbanization, car centric infrastructure, how it isolates people and increases dependence on vehicles, and he called this dependence a radical monopoly because all the other choices have effectively been eliminated. Technically, you could walk along the highway, but you're not going to You're going to get a cart, right, you can't choose to walk a cycle in that sort of scenario.

data centers, all these things. They're not as obvious as roads and railways and you know, neighborhoods, but they are just as if not in some ways even more powerful in terms of controlling what people access, how fast they access it, under what terms they access it, or because it's so intangible it's so hard to pin down, it can often escape scrutiny. But there are companies that own these things. There's a small group of very powerful corporations

that pretty much dictate how things are running. You know, most people they know about China's Great Firewall and how it's used to coordin off China from the rest of the Internet in some ways. You know, it's sensors to websites and switch results, it monitors people's activity, and it usually has these state monitored alternatives to some of the popular global platforms like Google and Facebook. Right, But Google and Amazon and Meta and Microsoft. It's not like they're

any better. You know, they're don't run and things republic could so if you will call out what China's doing with the with the Great Firewall, and I agree, I don't think that any govement should have any control over what people access. But you know, it's not like censorship, data harvested and surveillance are unique to China. You know a lot of other governments, in collaboration with these companies deploy soft censorship. You know, they de rank things in

the algorithm, they filter certain keywords, they selectively block certain things. Yeah, things are maybe automatically flagged or moderated, and that often affects people from the LGBTQ community in countries where you know that's that's a fig no no, or you have even the manipulation of language, the words people use as

people try to get around censors. Hence the proliferation of terms like great and essay and self delete and unlive and all these other euphemisms which I mean, on a step, I don't use any of them, and I despise them.

I mean Facebook was famously found culpable for genocide, right, Yeah, they played a major role in the sort of attitudes that were developing and the marginalization that was sort of targeting Hinger community and the subsequent genocide.

positions and their opinions. It's very important at a time when like they're facing marginalization even from revolutionary forces within me and and we cannot sustain an Internet connection to

allow them to do that. We tried to do a live panel and it was very hard for you know, these guys are running around Cox is bizarre, where tens of thousands of Hinga people live in refugee camps trying to find connectivity, like just another example of how they continue to be marginalized by the systems that first allowed them to be genocided exactly.

going their way. You know, they've they used it and all of it. Recently, you have the suppression of the center in protests, you know, to influence elections or to restrict information, substructionalism and communication during crises.

What'sapp because everybody else uses WhatsApp. Yeah, And it's it's so easy for them, because we're so concentrated on these platforms, It's so easy for them to pop at us, to flex their their muscles and control the direction of public discourse. And I mean it's amplifying things, suppressing other things, maximizing our engagements, exploiting our cognitive and vulnerabilities, polarizing discourse, distorted reality.

You know, in digital spaces, this might take the form of community built mash networks or alternative Internet local servers. You know, you have projects like guifi dot net in Catalonia, or you have the NYC Mesh in New York, and these are efforts to engage in you know, pay to pay and decentralized communications with all the reliance and the telecom giants. And then you also, of course physically have examples of infrastructure resisting central control, participatory urban planet movements.

You have gorilla urbanism. You have you know, of course, the long and storied history of squatting otherwise known as informal settlement. And these informal settlements are hubs of innovation and a lot of cases in things like Nai Rubi or in Rio Gario. You know, these these slums and favelas, they're hooking up their own electricity, hooking up their own internet, hooking up their own water is supply. Yeah, because they recognize that this is within their hands, this is within

their capacity. You know, we don't have to have everything, you know, passed on to us from one hye. You know, we can you know, sort of claim our own voices and design our own spaces. If you're really interested in how infrastructure has the capacity to control and really just how states sort of see things, I have to of course recommend the classic James C. Scott Seeing like a State.

to this is a city which is established through colonialism, right, And there was a brief time before things were terrible in Venezuela where people were trying to make it and largely it was people trying to make things better, and like the state for a time allowed a space for that to exist before it stopped allowing a space for that to exist, which is where we're at right now, right, and very clearly the state right now is very repressive in Venezuela, to be clear, Like I didn't want to

give put fuel on the tanky fire or whatever, but it was actually a really beautiful thing and it facilitated, right, I was like nineteen.

were telling me, like when they were hungry in the jungle, strangers who didn't speak their language would try and give them food.

with my hand braided shit. And I'm carrying this little girl, and like I've been coming for some time, and like the sense of community that you felt there amongst like a really terrible situation, but like because everyone can see you walking down his little walkway, Everyone's like, oh hi, how are you? Like you know, the kind of I'm trying to work out what they what they need and

how we can best help. Like I just remember thinking like what the fuck is wrong with and then going back to the United States, right, and sitting in my little house and like, you know, you know, like that, like I'm fortunate to know my neighbors and to be close to them, but not many people are. And like for most people, you know that they get out of the house and go to their car, they drive to their work.

don't own a house. But the profound alienation that we feel, in part because of the physical infrastructure, the ability of humanity to fall back into caring for one another, to like, that's what we do when we are not like physically and like intellectually restrained from doing it by structures both both physical and digital, and even emotional that divide us

from one another. And I've kind of thought about that ever since, Like, how do I build a place where people have more stability, people have privacy, people have their material needs.

Communities can exist like that. They're the theory of the Mediterranean public sphere that sometimes comes up where like again in working class Barcelona, right, people don't generally have air conditioning and it can't get very hot, so you just spend a lot of time outside balcony whatever, you know, front port if you've got one that creates community, right, that creates a public sphere, like a place that is it's not quite our home, but it's not controlled by

someone else either, it's like a community space, and that doesn't exist in like I don't live in the suburbs, but like suburban America, you know, where everyone has these like literal fences around all the shit that they own.

was trans people. They decided it was DEI, they decided it was how the twenty twenty election was stolen. They just decide that there's like some major problem, and then they repeat it often enough that it becomes like something that seemingly a share of voters actually care about. And they're trying to make autopen be a thing. And there is actual, like possible results of them focusing on this

as we as we will see. But the autopen fixation started this past March when Trump posted a truth on truth social claiming that Biden's preemptive partons of members of the January sixth Investigation House Committee are quote hereby declared void, vacant, and of no further force of effect because of the fact that they were done by autopen unquote. Great, this is not real. This is not this is not like a real thing that he can disclaim on truth social.

autopen is. An autopen is a tool to automate the signing of documents by replicating a signature. And this is a machine or a type of machine that's long been used in the White House, like Thomas Jefferson bought and used an early iteration of such a device shortly after was patent in eighteen oh three, Lennon B. Johnson's auto pen was photographed in the White House for a National Inquiry or recover story titled the Robot that sits in

for the President. And it's funny that now you get Fox News headlines that are basically written very similarly talking about how actually a robot or the autopen itself was acting as president and that's like a controversy, okay versus it was just like a fun news story back in the fifties.

and other official policy documents. The Office of Thegal Council found that quote, the President need not personally perform the physical act of fixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill

to become law. Rather, the president may sign a bill by directing a subordinate to a fix the president's signature to such a bill, for example, by autopen unquote, though there still is debate whether the president needs to be physically present during this process or simply authorize the signing.

And you know, you have people like Steven Miller in this administration who try to find niche little laws or statutes to then apply in a way that it was probably never designed or we have since these laws inceptions have decided not to use the laws in that way because that doesn't make sense of our current context. But someone like Miller very willing to do such a thing.

And there could be, for instance, some obscure aspect or interpretation of like proxy signature laws that they could try to like form course through into their interpretation of like Article one, section seven of the Constitution, which might make

some auto pen signatures in valid. But this is something that's like kind of dismissed in a lot of legal circles because as like a practical matter, it would be disastrous to start rescinding executive actions based on this interpretation, because like decades and decades of laws and regulations would then fall into question and possibly become void. So lots of people just like kind of don't think this is like a real question or a real concern, And part

of me thinks that as well. But as like someone like Miller is demonstrated, they're absolutely willing to use like niche arguments or precedents to do some pretty like crazy stuff. Do you know what is not very crazy?

what they're really focusing on. In early June, the Justice Department launched an investigation into Biden's alleged use of the autopen, with the DOJ Pardon Attorney ed Martin writing in an email that this investigation is to determine whether Joe Biden was quote competent and whether others were taking advantage of him through use of the autopen or other means unquote, with a specific focus on the primpt of pardons for members of Biden's family and clemency for thirty seven death

Row inmates who sentences were converted to life in prison. So this is the real crux whether Biden was competent and whether people were using the autopen without his knowledge. And I think the reason why they're there start by focusing on these pardons, whether for January sixth investigation committee members or for those close to Biden. Like this all relates to Trump's campaign promise of retribution.

is that it's not about the autopen itself. It's about this secret cabal who are using the auto pen without

Biden's knowledge. So a few days after this investigation was announced, the White House released a public memo from Trump entitled reviewing Certain Presidential Actions, which ordered the Attorney General and the White House Council to investigate quote whether certain individual rules conspired to deceive the public about Biden's mental state and unconstitutionally exercise to the authorities and responsibilities of the president. And this document reads like something I would read on

like a conspiracy theory website five years ago. It's written in a very similar style.

thousands of documents to affect radical policy shifts. Unquote. The memo states that Biden's advisors uote unquote tried to hide the true extent of his mental decline to quote cover up his inability to discharge his duties.

commutations than any administration in United States history. Although the authority to take these executive actions, along with many others, is constitutionally committed to the president, there are serious doubts as to the decision making process and even the degree of Biden's awareness of these actions being taken in his name.

Given clear indications that President Biden lacked the capacity to exercise its presidential authority, if his advisors secretly used the mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity while taking radical executive actions all in his name, that would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the presidency. A circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of

numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden's name unquote. So though the two thousand and five Bush DOJ memo does support the use of the autopen to a fix the president's signature, obviously it still must be the president who decides to sign a document, with the Office of Legal Counsel memo state in quote, we do not question the substantial authority supporting the view that the president must personally decide whether

to approve and sign bills. This is pretty obvious, and that's why so much of the autopen investigations are around Biden's deteriorating mental state and not the auto pen itself. It's about trying to prove whether Biden was either not mentally capable of sufficiently authorizing a signature to be a fixed to certain documents, or was just completely unaware that the autopen was signing certain documents with White House advisors specifically covering up Biden's mental decline to take advantage of

his compromise state to personally direct policy. And that's what the investigations are going to try to prove. The White House is already making repeated assertions that this was the case and this question may be finally settled in a Trump sympathetic court, and Republicans are currently trying every angle of attack on this. Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has started a Senate investigation, and a House Oversight Committee investigation is

already up and running. The past month, Kentucky Republican James Comer has been subpoena in Biden admin officials to testify on the use of the auto pen and Biden's mental faculties while in office. Comer's own letters and subpoenas for this investigation have been signed with a digital signature, because this is such a common practice in Washington and like all over the country. Now trying to think of all the official documents you signed on your computer right now.

Metadata from a subpoena cover letter sent to former Senior Advisor to the First Lady Anthony Bernal showed the document was authored and signed by someone named Benzene, an Oversight Committee staffer, not James Comer. Because again, this is pretty regular. Even the investigators are doing this process themselves while doing

the investigation. Part of the reason why the Republicans are trying to make this a continuing story and not just about you know, the pardons is because as like Biden appointee judges began blocking Trump's executive orders, the focus on the autopen turned from just pardons towards use of the autopen to nominate federal judges. And this is where things

get a lot more slippery. Last month, Fox News asked House Overseec Committee Chairman James Comer if not just pardons may be found to be null and void because of the results of this investigation, but possibly also judicial appointments.

were legitimate or not. Are you also looking into Biden's judicial appointments as well.

by a very small inner circle. We brought a few of those people in the inner circle and asked them simple questions like were you ever told to lie about the president's health? And they couldn't answer that question. They had to plead the fifth to avoid self incrimination. This raises an issue whether these pardons, whether these judicial appointments,

and whether these executive orders are legal. I believe that if this investigation keeps going in the way that it's going, that's going to a very serious concerns about whether or not Joe Biden even you what was going on around him, much less whether he authorized the use of his signature

on all of this stuff. I think all of these are in jeopardy of being declared null and void in a court of law, and that's a big deal for the Trump administration, because so much of what Trump is up against in court now with these liberal, biased Biden appointed judges is the fact that they're using and citing some of these executive orders as reason to throw out President Trump's agenda and President Trump's executive orders. So they tried to trump proof the the administration on the way

out the door. And the problem that got now is the American people realize that Joe Biden wasn't the one calling the shots, and he may very well have not even been mentally fit to make decisions to authorize the use of his autopin if he even authorized it. So this is going to play out in a court of law. I think our investigation is going to be a substantial part of evidence in it, and that's why we're doing the investigation.

our country's history. Now we all saw the debate, and so much of their argument for this is resting on how much everyone understands that you have a whole bunch of former White House staff writing books on this topic now. So with that aspect in mind, they still have to defend the use of the autopen and Biden's competency and awareness of all of the decisions being made to do this.

Last month, had his first interview with The New York Times since like twenty twenty one, where he discussed how he gave oral authorization for all of the pardons, with the autopen operation specifically being managed by the Staff Secretary Stephene Feldman. He said, quote I made every decision. Biden said that the White House used the autopen specifically for

the last batch of pardons. Biden said that they used the autopen because of the high number of pardon warrants issued totaling around four thousand, which affected three categories of federal convicts, people serving home confinement, non violent drug offenders,

and people on death row. He did not choose or prove like every single name on that list, but claims to have determined the criteria and categories, saying, quote I was deeply involved I laid out a strategy how I want to go about these dealing with pardons and commutations. I pulled the team in to say, this is how I want to get it done generically and then specifically unquote.

In preparation for the final months of the Biden presidency, his White House counsel wrote an email to staff in like November of twenty twenty four, laying with the process four reviewing pardons, the last step being quote the president makes the final decision on the final pardon and or

the commutation slate unquote. At this point, around a dozen people have been subpoenaed and are giving testimony, and investigation is looking through emails from the time, specifically starting with these pardons, because I think that's the only way they

have to like investigate this right now. It's easier to investigate the pardons from the last three months the presidency than just all of the documents as signed over the course of like four years, or even just two years if you look at like the past two years of his presidency. So specifically, they're focusing on the final pardons as like a way in to figure out the process for how the autopen was functioning and who was using it, and they may try to extend that process out to

things like judicial appointments over time. I think trying to rescind the appointment of someone like a Supreme Court justice very unlikely because obviously Biden had awareness that that was going on, but they might try to pull more fucky shit with the circuit court appointments or that kind of stuff. I don't think this is like the most important story

facing the country right now. Obviously the stuff going on in Washington, DC and many other aspects of how the Trump administration is operating with ice and with trans people affects people more immediately. But I've been specifically trying to pull information on how they're crafting this narrative around the autopen ever since he made that first truth back in March, because I saw this as a ongoing reality crafting project

which might accumulate in something actually meaningful over time. And none of these investigations have released their findings yet, and they're not expected to for at least a few more weeks to months. But it's something that I think is worth keeping an eye on right now, especially considering you know, Miller and others, and like the Heritage foundations focus on trying to find niche loopholes in which executive power can

be really exercised. And if one of the ways to remove some of the roadblocks towards this president's executive power is to undermine the executive power of a previous administration, it would be the first time we see that strategy

actually enacted. And it sounds like kind of cartoonish, but that's so much of what they're currently doing is pushing everything to that extreme, trying to test all of these more niche theories that you see people talking about in the past, Like around twenty eleven, when Obama first signed legislation with the autopen, you had a whole bunch of libertarians complaining that this is unconstitutional because he wasn't physically present when the document was being signed, and so you

have like think pieces on that at the time that then kind of get memory hold, and now you're going to see some of those justifications back again and actually try to test them out in court, especially if you have a Justice Department investigation, you have an Attorney General investigation of a cent an investigation, and a House investigation. If one of those can stumble onto or develop or

invent some compelling argument. We will actually see versions of this complaint be tested in a way that we never have before, because it would be like disastrous to the

functional aspect of this state. If you determine that all presidential documents signed via autopen are not ballid unless presents in the room, that would be a massive domino tipping over which you know, most reasonable people who work in government, like elder statesmen, are not going to want to do that because that sounds like a fucking nightmare, like legally speaking, and it would be like disastrous, like it would destroy some fundamental aspects of the government. But right now, destroying

aspects of government is kind of the point. That's what we saw with Doge, That's what we saw during the first few months of the presidency, using this kind of tech startup thought process behind running a government. You have to break things first so that you can rebuild it in a way that suits you better. And if that means stripping away two hundred federal judges to put in two hundred of your own, that would have massive benefits for them. And I think that's part of why they're

having this focus right now. Oh yeah, that's kind of all I have on that, So once you have some closing thoughts.

never actually do this. They can't do this. The system doesn't work that way. There's just been this belief that this can't happen, right, it can't happen, or that like if it did, obviously you know the cops will stop them, the FBI will stop them, the army will stop them. And there's a reason why they've went out of their way to gain control of all of those organizations before

doing this. So yeah, I mean, you cannot. We can either pretend that someone's going to stop them and you don't have to worry about it, or just accept that we are where we are and there may be some unprecedented things that need to be done. Yep, that's all I'll say. Legally, that's all I should say.

Amazon would want to do with this. So if you go to use Amazon's infrastructure or use their AI, that buzzphrase it now is everywhere the computers that do those things or those requests or decide what products they want to market to you through their algorithm. That's what these data centers do. So it's essentially an entire city.

Cities nearby get absolutely destroyed by it. Typically they're brought in through some sort of tax incentives by the local city council or local county, and so that's exactly what was happening here with Tucson. So the local city council was pretty friendly to the idea. They were talking to this beal infrastructure to bring in Project Blue, they were giving tax cuts, they were giving all these incentives to bring this gigantic, megalithic thing into just south of town.

And part of the insidiousness of this is that this was going to go forward until someone noticed it.

of things that happened in Tucson. In the nineteen sixty There were groups that were actively fighting the spread of highways highway infrastructure, so they were anti freeway, and their reasoning and rationale was it that freeways were the arterial infrastructure that allowed for the destructive spread of tracklum developments. So the way to help one way is to prevent the destruction of the local environment and the spread of

a city was to diminish its freeway footprint. And I think you can see this is true if you look at any big city now like Phoenix is essentially a hive city, and all of the growth comes because of freeways, right.

They were talking about putting in a very secure and encrypted data center for the purposes of protecting their intellectual property. And I was talking to this guy. I was like, what is this like your recipes or what is it you it's a McDonald's protects Yeah, And this was wild. No, they don't care about the recipes. They were protecting their software that determines where they should buy the next piece of real estate to put a McDonald's. McDonald's actually a

real estate company. And I have seen this in real time with my life because I've lived in a very remote part of the Arizona Desert the frontier for lack of a better term, of Arizona for a long time. And the first thing that popped up in this one little area in the middle of.

so aligned with you put a freeway. When you see a freeway suddenly show up in the middle of nowhere. Someone has a goal to put a giant tract home development out there and sprawl that city a little more so. Anyways, going back to the original topic, these people in Tucson in the sixties were anti freeway and they actively changed

the way Tucson grew. And I think it's one of the major reasons Tucson, if you've ever been to Tucson versus Phoenix, is a very different, culturally different vibe of Phoenix.

wrote a lot of environmental activism. He had a lot of views that were kind of deplorable, but when it came to climate and when it came to the environment, he was pretty on point. And his work spawned an organization called Earth First, which was one of the not the first, but one of the most famous direct we're

talking direct action climate activist or Clyde. You know, they were the ones that were destroying bulldozers, driving them off cliffs, some burning down Ski Shelle's like pretty wild stuff because they believed there was no retreat in defensive Mother Earth. He's a quote, but anyways, he was Tucson. Earth First birthed in Tucson, and then Earth First was a victim of the green scare and many of them are still in prison for their work. But they did have an effect.

Whether you agree with that sort of direct activism or not, they had an effect. But here we are, it's been many years after those big main activities and all that stuff became quiet. You don't really think of like direct action activism when it comes to the environment like you

did back in the eighties and nineties. But when this data center popped up, groups started showing up in Tucson that really felt very earth first e I'm not talking direct action like firebombs, but their speech, the way they were organizing, coming to city council meetings and not just showing up to speak but disrupting the meetings, like causing a scene, and their work so far and I will mention some of them later in this topic have actually sort of forced the hand of this city council to

deny the project. And so looking back, you're like, it's interesting to see the residents of things like those old freeway activists and Edward Abbey and Earth First it's still there. Tucson still has that, and you see that coming up now in regards to this data center project and other things that are starting to happen.

what you just described so many American cities. You drive to it and it's just like this, like constantly looping revolving piece of film of Walgreen, McDonald's nail salon, super cuts, Chili's, rinse and repeat, and it just every ten miles. It's the same thing Dutch Brother's coffee. It just never ends. And Tucson is not yet like that. It still has still has a soul.

like I'm excluding you. This is just the group that I landed up connecting with and following. So but they are also doing a good job of aggregating others too. So almost all of their posts have like a bunch of other groups tagged in it. So if you were to look up the No Desert Data Center folks, you're going to find a.

and posters. And they weren't just sitting there quietly waiting for their thirty seconds to speak. They were disruptive, they were loud, and they were not going to not be heard. So that type of activism in this instance very clearly is the reason that this happened. Because if you read the writings of a number of the city council members, they were very sympathetic to the data center. One of them was talking about like, this is the wrong thing

to do. If we block the data center, they're just going to build it anyway, and it's better for us to be involved because then we can help tune it to be better for the community. No no, no, no, no, you're just whitewashing a horrible thing. And so this group and other groups called them out on that immediately. Nice, So like, no, that's not it. So I think I'm answering your question. But it groups like this, Yeah, throwing up in large numbers, being loud, not only online but in person.

the Phoenix. Actually, let's hot that, like this data center would have consumed a massive amount of energy I presumed, like just keeping the computers cooled, right, and a massive amount of water.

of like you know, gigra apphical reasons. But now Phoenix is measurably and demonstrably hotter because it never cools off.

twenty degrees can kill you. But the problem with the heat is that as you never get a chance to cool off. Heat over time is more dangerous to human to all living organisms. If you get a break, that's what keeps you alive. So it can be one hundred and twenty during the day, but if it's seventy five at night, that gives you a moment to heal and recuperate for the next day's heat. Phoenix is one of not the worst, believe it or not, but one of the worst versions of a heat island, and they are

actively working to make that better. But it's kind of hard to undo what's been done. Yeah, Tucson, once again, because the sprawl is diminished by activism of the past, did not become the heat island Phoenix does. So while it might be one hundred and thirteen during the day, it might get down to eighty at night. Yeah, and that really is a big difference for not only sustainability, but for the health and safety of everyone that lives there.

One of the things that I find is interesting is the justification for these data centers is because Arizona is seen as a place that doesn't have significant natural disaster risk. But one of the things that's being left out of the conversation I don't know why this is the case. Is that heat and heat islands are a natural disaster.

equivalent of that of metropolitan Tucson. Pieces yeah, so you double the power load of the entire city for this data center. And the cooling system there's two different ways to cool there's quote unquote air cooled and water cooled. They can tell you whatever they want. The reality is they're probably not going to be affected with air cooled in this environment, so it's going to be water cooled. And the data on that also seems to be the water consumption of this was not only equal, maybe worse

than that of Tucson itself. Looking at this site right now, water positivity claim for the initial two years, but the initial estimate was six hundred and twenty two million gallons. Whoa, yeah, yeah, with a seven hundred milliwat expected demand, it's crazy. And so what happens is not only does the city council

just see dollar signs in their eyes? Local electrical infrastructure TEP the two soon electrical or other data center places where data centers are located suddenly do things like stop worrying about any form of arbon positivity, or they get rid of all their carbon goals so that they can build and work with people like this, Because if you double the power consumption of a region overnight for a data center, yeah, think of the waste that you're going

to produce to do that, right, Yeah, And suddenly how do you produce that power. You're not going to have a nuclear plant pop up tomorrow, so you're going to do other things like burn more coal. Yeah, and so your carbon and carbon positivity or attempt to move away from carbon waste, they just throw that out the door so they can have these lucrative, juicy contracts with these data centers.

will vote yes for it. So like Nikki Lee, which is the ward for a councilwoman, was the one that was arguing against essentially saying that we should approve the projects so we can have better control of it, and the activists said against that. But it's just they're just going to keep changing the tune until the activists get essentially worn out. On top of that, this is not the only data center being proposed in Arizona. There are currently three of them under proposal. So there's this one

in Tucson and two of them in Panall County. The one in Panall County starts off at the small size of three hundred acres, but it's proposed to go to three thousand acres. Jesus, They want to build a ultimately a three thousand acre data center that sprawls essentially from southern Phoenix across the entire north south breath of Pennall County, on the west side of the I ten southwest of Elois, extending through significant what are indigenous or what were indigenous lands,

destroying whatever cultural remains are there. But imagine if this two hundred and ninety acre data center was going to equal the power consumption and water consumption of Tucson. What is a three thousand acre data center going to do.

We're just gonna drink your water belt heat into the sky, destroy your desert so you can have a disturbing psychological parasocial relationship with an ai avatar. And we're gonna do it at your expense. Verma Land, isn't that lovely?

in Tucson. Rights, that's where a lot of these companies have the headquarters, right, the people who make the border surveillance infrastructure. What can we learn from this struggle in Tuson. If we're not in Tucson, we might not even be in the US. Because there are some unique things about Tuson, Right, It has this history of activism, and it's always been I don't want to use weird in a Rogatree way, but it hasn't conformed to like the neo liberal capital

model of a city. But I don't think it's unique. There were things I think that anyone can take from this victory and the continued opposition, Right, So what can we learn from it?

stop there. We see three more data centers being proposed in Arizona proper, the three thousand acre dream site that I've mentioned already is they're just going to keep changing and moving and trying to do it somewhere else. The reality of this is that when we look back at the workers' rights movement right there was the IWW the

Industrial Workers of the World. The thing is Tucson winning one fight against this data center only is a microcosm of the greater macrocosm of the consumption of these tech bros and tech industry people who do not care about the climate, do not care about you, do not care about the community, do not care about the water they consume, and they will destroy everything in their path for profit. We know that that is what this form of data

capitalism is. And so Tucson's lesson is everyone has to be this And I agree with you that Tucson isn't unique in that there are other places that will have the fight, But this is truthfully everyone's fight, because the amount of pollution that would be belched out of this data center or the ones being proposed in Arizona affects everyone. The reality of climate change is, in my opinion, indisputable.

We're seeing it every year. It's worse, and it is human induced or a large degree, unlike some people want to deny. Yeah, and having your AI avatar on the Internet is not in the interests of humanity as a whole. So we have to work on this on a much large It's a global issue.

CO two footprint. And so what happens in Tucson will affect them, right, and what they do cannot alone help them survive, right, And they've appealed to the world's solidarity, made a whole podcast about this, and the world has not shown up for them. Right, So, like I think people, you're right, like, this is a global struggle. It's one

that you know. It doesn't stop in Tuson, doesn't stop in Eloy, doesn't stop in Phoenix, like it stops when these data centers, which are antithetical to our survival of a species, stop being built for shit that we don't need.

a solar panel? Absolutely do that. But the real truth and reality of climate change and the destruction of our environment and this planet that we all inhabit, it's not the individual, it's the corporations is at a nation state level and a corporate level that is going to destroy our small Biosphere one. Ironically, biosphere is we'll talk about

the experiment is near Tucson. Actually Biosphere two was a little experiment that was a self contained nineteen eighties thing where these scientists essentially encapsulated themselves in air tight bubbles to see if they could live with the CO two production that they were creating within it. The truth was they couldn't. The ocean turned to algae and they would have died. So they learned Biosphere two wasn't going to work. But we have bios for one, and the individual doing

the solar panels or recycling. That's a good thing, and that's moral, but that's great, it's something we should do if we can. But it's us we have to act against the truly destructive forces, and it's the corporations and the nation states that are belching destruction into our planet, not the individual recycling or not recycling as a soda can.

and those things need to stop. That kind of stuff across the board, not just in Tucson, not just in Arizona, but everywhere needs to be a thing where everyone comes together and realizes that these people are consuming the very planet that we need to live on. You see Elon Musk talking about going to Mars. We got with the human race has to go to Mars because a meteor might hit the Earth. No, your company is what hit the earth, my friend, You're the one destroying the Earth, not that meteor.

art on it. I will tell you that they will also link you to a number of other.

at least delaying Project Blue, hopefully stopping it. Yeah, and the next post they put up was about the data center in Eloy, so they understand that this is broader in scope than just one desert.

content in multiple different places. The easiest way to find all of them is range dot tv and you'll find my.

at the beginning of his time in office. On July thirty first, we finally actually found out what those terrorists are going to look like, and what those terrorists are going to look like is PRISTI ann Effectively, what happened is that roughly, if the US runs a trade deficit with you, you get a fifteen percent tariff, and you get a ten percent tariff if we run a trade surplus with you. Now there's a bunch of other individual rates.

We'll get to some of them in a second, but it's worth emphasizing that this this doesn't make any sense. So okay, before we get into the structural effects of this, I want to sort of look at what the nominal stated justification for imposing these tariffs are and how they're at odds with each other. And this is the point where we're turned to later. Part of the justification for the tariffs is that, Okay, they're trying to use tariffs

to replace the income tax. That's nonsense, it's gibberish. You literally cannot raise enough money through tariffs to replace the income tax. But okay, that's the thing that they want to do. The other nominal justification, and this is what's being used in negotiations and is the thing that is causing individual tariff rates to randomly sort of be jacked up. Is that Trump is pissed off that the US runs trade deficits with countries. And again, like this is basically nonsense.

The US pays for things in its own currency. We don't actually need other places currency. It doesn't matter if you run trade deficits. I really hate that Rand Paul is right when he said I run a trade deficit with my grocery store. But like, that's how the American Empire is supposed to work. These people do not care that this is how the American Empire is supposed to work.

They have been handed the most sophisticated imperial machinery that has ever existed in the entirety of human history, and they see numbers on a chart which says we pay them more money than we're getting and they're pissed about it. But again, okay, if that's a state of justification, right, then why are you imposing a terra fun countries? We have a trade ser plus two that doesn't make any sense, and the difference between them is only five percent, So

what are we doing here? It's nonsense, like our trade policy is being run by people who don't understand how any of this works and are operating off of, you know, effectively just pure anger and rage. So I'm going to talk about a few of the really really high rates. We're not going to focus on much on the thirty percent South Africa, for example, but oh boy, so Syria is at forty one percent, which is absolutely fucking hideous.

Syria is a country that I don't know anyone who listens to this show is aware of the extent to which Syria has been devastated by the civil war, and this is an incredible blow to their economy. Laus and Me and Mar are also being terriffed at forty percent. And we promised in the executive disorder to explain how Trump recognizing the junta so Joe Biden had refused to

recognize me and Mar's like military coup government. As long time listeners of this show are aware, there is a military coup in in memr There is a large gale revolutionary process attempting to overthrow this government. My co host James Stout and Robert Evans have done a lot of very good reporting on this that you can go find. You should find is some of the best journalism that

I've ever encountered. But the US's official position has been that we don't recognize the coup government because it is, and this is true, a coup government. But Trump just sent the junta a letter of that says you're tariff to forty percent. And the thing about this is the junta was like, oh shit, hell yeah, Like that means you recognize us, right, because you're sending us official fucking notices of shit. So you're recognizing US as the legitimate government of me and mar And so the junta is

like thrilled by this. There's some evidence of like the US lifting sanctions on them after. It's kind of messy, but yeah, great. Somehow, in the attempts to sort of just like squeeze every last drop out of all of these countries, we have recognized an incredibly brutal military dictatorship.

Hate that back to the more direct tariff stuff. The tariff's on Laos is also going to be devastating for Lahosian economy, which is a lot of the economies in Southeast Asia are pretty heavily export driven, and it's one of the places where a lot of textiles manufacturing takes place. After the sort of increase in labor prices and increase in resistance from the labor movement in China kind of pushed all of that capital down the make Coung River delta.

This is going to absolutely fucking suck for everyone in Laos. And you know, this is something I want to keep emphasizing over and over again that these turf teriffs, people they hurt the most are workers in places like Laos, in places like Syria. Right, Hugoid should just be absolutely fucking devastated by it. Now, let's also talk Switzerland, which was the other country that had a terriff at like

forty percent. This one is genuinely really funny, which is that it seems to largely be driven by Trump being pissed off of the trade deficit, which is like, compared to like the scale of the US economy, the trade deficit is like zero dollars. But the funniest part of this is that the trade deficit is largely driven by

gold imports. Now, this is extremely funny because If you know anything about the American right, you know that a lot of the ways that they did their funding, especially when they were sort of building their operations, a huge source of their funding is getting their followers to buy gold. This was the original Alex Jones grift, right. I think he still does it a little bit now, before he sort of pivoted in supplements. You would partner with like

gold salesman and like silvia salesman. This and this has always been a huge source of these people's money. Now there's there's been a little bit of decrease in the prominence of gold as a thing. Actually, there's a very good Folding Ideas video about this incredibly bizarre Idris Elba Weird Gold promotion documentary which talks about the ways in which gold has been sort of threatened by bitcoin and well mostly bitgcoin. But it's like cryptocurrency in general is

like the scam. You're trying to sell all of these sort of weird prepper and like hardline quote unquote sound money libertarian y types. But it is very funny that this is in effect a self reinforcing cycle, because the thing about the price of gold is that it is largely determined by how fucked the rest of the economy is gold. People who are trying to sell gold are trying to sell you on the fact that the economy

is about to fucking explode. But this is a cyclical effect, right where these teriff rates go up and the economy explodes, and so people buy more gold from Switzerland, at which point are trade balanced with Switzerland gets worse.

just funny. Trump has also announced and this has not gone into effect yet, who fucking knows when if it goes into effect, But I think it's worth talking about, which is that Trump has been talking about putting a one hundred percent tariff on semiconductors unless you invest in the US. So Apple sort of in response to this, pledged one hundred million dollars in investment in the US

to build chips. And I think it's also worth looking at the ideological underpinnings of this, because a huge part of this thing is something that you've been seeing increasingly on the right, is this dream of making domestic iPhones. And if you look at the people in the tech sector, right, the sort of tech billionaires you run all this stuff, they're openly fantasizing about like, oh, these like soft weak liberals are going to be forced to like work in

the factories and put iPhones together or whatever. And it's worth emphasizing that this is just not possible, right, And this is true of a significant number of the things that they want these tariffs to do. They're just not possible results of the policy levers they're pulling. A couple of months ago, I described a sort of similar policy thing to this as like they are attempting to scream at the moon in order to control the tides. It's like,

it doesn't work. It's not the right lever. It literally can't do what you think it's going to do. And it's worth going into why, which is that we can't make iPhones here because we don't have the migrant labor force to do it. And a lot of you may be thinking, oh, well, the US has a lot of migrant workers. No, you don't understand China, which is where most of these things are built. Even with the tariffs, like a lot of you know that there were some

downcycling of plants, that stuff has mostly been upcycled. Again, China has three hundred million migrant workers. That is almost the entire population of the United States. Right, we are talking about individual plants with two hundred thousand workers. That is the low end estimate. By the way of those numbers, we don't actually have very good numbers on how big some of these fox Con facilities are. The low end estimate is two hundred thousand. Right, And again this is

just in time production. So okay, what does that actually mean? Right? This means that the production cycles work on a lot of For example, the way that UPS works, right, We're like, you have a bunch of people who are effectively seasonal or part time workers who only come in when demand increases. So for UPS, right, and it's actually a relatively similar

schedule to the way it works in China. But it's like there's these massive surges around the holidays with apples, it's more like September November roughly, But it's in order to like massively be able to ramp up production in time for you know, the sort of like massive holiday

increase of orders. Right, But in order to do this, you need to have a production apparatus where you have two hundred thousand workers there, but you can also get rid of most of them and they can support themselves doing other stuff for the rest of the year, and then you have to be able to bring them back in during peak season. We just do not have the populations to replicate this, right, even if you're trying to replace it with prison labor. The thing about the American

prison system is that it's decentralized, right. This is actually a key element of how the US economy is structured. Prisons are one of the sort of three major sources

of jobs in rural areas. The other two are like Walmart style service jobs, which replaced anything else that was in the economy, and the military basis, which is part of why you know, like like this is part of why rural politics of console reactionary, because like, okay, so if your options in the economy are soldier, prison guard, service labor, you're gonna generate a bunch of unhinged reactionary bullshit. But again, even even though the American prison system has

a really high population. These people are really spread out, and iPhone production requires sort of like mass centralization, right, that's the only way to get these things to work. Plus, the workers that you're bringing in have to be skilled

enough to be able to do this shit. And this is a capacity that's built up in China over the course of like decades, right, And we don't really have this now that people have tried moving this production to other places like Vietnam, for example, the teriff rates there are also making this extremely difficult, but it's been really really hard to replace. And the other issue, and this is a technological issue, not just a sort of issue of the systemic elements of the population of China. The

infrastructure to build microchips in the US doesn't exist. And it's not just that the infrastructure to build the chips doesn't exist. It's actually way worse than that. And this is why all of the attempts and the Biden administration has put an enormous amount of money into this. The Chinese government also has put an enormous amount of money specifically into the microchip angle, and none of them may have been able to do it. And part of it's

technological problem. But part of it is that the machines that you need to make the chips don't exist, right, But the machines you need to make the machines that make the chips also don't exist. And the machines you need to make the machines that make the machines that

make the chips also don't exist. We are so far up the supply chain, right, And this is one of the you know, one of the things, the thing that they're trying to do through sort of like pure politics, right through like just like the pure exertion of state power, is to reshape the fundamental structural way that the supply chain has worked. And the way the supply chain has

worked is by intense specialization in very very very small areas. Right, So Taiwan, for example, becomes the only place basically that can manufacture these chips, and that intense specification means that like the machines, that the machines that they that are used to build this thing are only made by like one company in social land, and like machines to make those machines, like who the fuck knows where they're built.

And this is the thing where the technology involves has become so complicated and the laborers become so specialized that you're dealing with machines that like just straight up not many people in the world know how to use, and not on the people in the world know how to create, and so we're so far up the supply chain, right, And this is also if you want to look at like what the impact of these terrorists are going to be, right, because these supply chains are so specialized, you know, can

you can think of these supply chains as like incredibly complicated machines, right, and any sort of like little rock that you throw into the machine, or do you know, you throw sand into the machine and suddenly the ball bearing doesn't work at quite the right efficiency, and so things just start breaking down across the entire supply chain. And they think that they can just replicate all of this with just like pure tariffs and like throwing money at it, and no, you can't. These are these are

actual structural things of how the economy works. Now, do you know what else is a structural element of how the economy works? Idiots? These products and services and the fact that they fund this podcast. Woo, we are so back now one of the other kind of terriffts I think I've been calling I guess like defiance tariffs. One of the things that Tromp administration has been doing is threatening to impose a fifty percent teriff on anyone who

buys oil from Russia. India has been threatened with this. India's current terrif rate is twenty five percent. They're right now threatening with another twenty five percent against in the fifty percent. It's sort of unclear exactly who's going to

back down here. More interestingly, and we've talked a little bit about this, Brazil, there is a fifty percent turf teriff on Brazil again for refusing to release Bolsonaro, which is very funny because this has managed to piss off the entire sort of political sphere in Brazil to the extent that like Bolsonaro has had to come out and announce this because Bolsonaro was getting fucking torn to shreds by the Brazilian right for being basically a trader, sort

of lapdog of the US as they're sort of, you know, imposing this direct attack on Brazil through this fifty percent tariff. Right, it's backfire so spectacularly that like Lula, who was floundering, is now writing this incredible wave of sort of anti American Brazilian nationalism from both the left and the right. So Lula, who is who is again in a pretty strong political position because of this, has refused to do direct talk to the US because he was like, absolutely

not fuck this. Here's a quote from Reuters. We had already pardoned the US intervention in the nineteen sixty four coup, said Lula, who got his political start as a union leader protesting against the military government that followed a US backed ouster of a democratically elected president. Quote. But this is now not a small intervention. It's the president of the United States thinking he can dictate rules for a

sovereign country like Brazil. It's unacceptable. Now. Again, as I said in the ed, there's a lot of things now that are worth looking at here. Right, we have, on the one hand, this direct connection from Lula from you know, the sort of subtle CIA backing of military coup stuff which happens under the table. To you know this just like the president of the United States is telling you

how to run your country. And that is a substantive shift, even if like the CIA overthrowing your government like has more of a direct political impact on it. Right. The thing about the thing about the way American power worked was that it was mostly supposed to be under the table, and it's not now. It's just it's just out there in the open. Right. The premise that the US governments, like the president of the United States, should just be able to tell another country what to do is the

fucking premise of American imperialism. And now they're just saying it out loud. And it's also worth noting that it's not like Lula is some kind of like anti American radical right like Lula worked really well in his first term in office, which works w Bush, but again because of the way that the political wins have shifted here, right to the extent that like Bulsonaro has had to condemn an attempt to get him released from prison, which is so funny because he's doing this. He is, he is,

he is pushing very hard. Now there hasn't really been a response yet for Lula's like call for organized terror resistance from China and India and Bricks. I don't know if there's going to be. It's worth talking a little bit about what Bricks actually is here, So bricks stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. It was originally like an asset class designed by some guys at Goldman Sachs who were you know, trying to like classify the

assets of this kind of like developing economy thing. It was like, you know, you can buy bonds and these things and maybe you can classify their asset rates together, and has kind of become a political alliance. But you know, there's a lot of people who will attempt to sell you on bricks being the sort of like leftist anti imperial alliance, you know, and as a sort of socialist thing. And like I will simply ask, right, who is doing the socialism here? Right? Is it a butcher of Gujarat?

Is it she quote we must oppose welfarerism jimping? Is it Vladimir? We will show Ukraine true decommunization putin? Is it the African National Congress of selling your country to Bank of America? Is it the butcher of Haiti?

like almost at war with each other over the border. Right, these are a bunch of countries that absolutely fucking hate each other. It's never been a coherent political project. Lula is trying to turn it into one, but like I fucking I don't think that's gonna work. So, you know, that's sort of what's been going on on the front to sort of national resistance. But Lula does have, you know, a kind of very very large and powerful political force

behind him domestically to resist this. We'll see what happens going forward. It's also worth noting that China has been negotiating with the US, and their tariff increases we're supposed to go into effect have been delayed for another ninety days.

So we're stuck in this holding pattern again. But let's talk about what this means for the economy, right, And I think the very short term answer is that I don't think anyone really knows right, Like, the actual macro effects of this are things that we've only just started to see. No one's ever really tried to model this out because there's no reason why it whatever happened, you know, And you're starting to see things behind the scenes, like

medical supplies being incredibly difficult to acquire. You're starting to see a bunch of very very weird items and supply chains become increasingly difficult to find. But again, the supply chains are going to break down in ways that we just don't really understand. What is going to happen, and what has started to happen is inflation is increasing. I want to sort of again review our kind of inflation theory, right, which is largely derived from our friends's strange matter sort

of supply chain theory of inflation. Their uses of inflation is that, like, it's not set by just supply and demand. It's set by cost plus markup. Because you know, price is not set by like an autonomous thing called the market. Price is set by like a guy with like a price gun. Right, It's directly set by people. And the way that those people set the price is you know the cost of acquiring the item, plus and markup for

their profit. Now, one of the sort of fundamental like insights here is that price is sort of sticky until it isn't, right, which is that like, okay, So the actual thing that controls price is sort of like how pissed off consumers get at price increases, but also comma that is also very very much tied to brand, right, And if you raise your prices and consumers get pissed, you even if you drop them again, that doesn't necessarily

mean those people will come back, right. So you know a lot of times when they're when when there's price increases, companies try to eat it. And that's and that's been what's happening with a lot of these things right where at each point in the supply chain, people are you know, people are having to sort of pay for the tariff parts, right, And when someone has to pay for the tariff, they increase their prices that they sell it to the next

person in the supply chain. The next person's supply chain increases their prices right now, So the way that these terriffs play out, right is that each person in the supply chain is doing costless markup, but their costs are going up. So your options are either you sell it at the same price and you reduce the amount of markup you're getting, which is just reducing the raw profit

you're taking in, or you raise your prices. And these things are trying to not raise their prices, and part of this is from direct political pressure right like Trump has been threatening companies to not raise their prices from the tariffs. But prices are starting to increase. And as this goes on, and as more and more teriffs come into effect, that it becomes more and more difficult to evade the tariffs. The prices are going to keep increasing

because they're driven by these supply chain price increases. So you know, cost is going to go up. It is going to have absolutely devastating impacts on workers across the world, primarily not in the US, but the workers who are in these export oriented economies are going to have to deal with just the absolute horror of large scale economic collapse. You know what, who else hopefully doesn't have to deal with the absolute horror of large scale economic collapse. It

is the products and services to support this podcast. We are back now. The thing I want to close this episode on is not actually a look at the economy because I think, you know, we kind of don't know exactly what's going to happen with the economy other than bad. But there is something that I think we can look at that's been broadly ignored or miscovered, which is what

these tariffs say about the nature of the state. And I think what's happening is that we're seeing a fundamental change in the way that the state functions from the previous sort of neoliberal regime to this like just really openly fascist one. And I think the most clear example of this isn't necessarily the terriffs, so they are a pretty clear example. It's this extremely weird like extortion agreement reached between Trump, AMD, and Nvidia. I'm going to read

this from CBS quote. US chip makers in Nvidia and AMD will pay the US government fifteen percent of revenue generated by sales of their AI chips in China. A White House official confirmed to CBS News this is just

a shakedown, right, you know. This is part of a negotiating process by which originally AMD and Video were going to be banned for selling the reiships to China, and in order to be allowed to sell these ships to China, Trump was like, okay, if you want to do that, give us like thirty percent of your revenue, when they

were like, okay, what if we did fifteen percent? Right, this is just a shakedown, and you know it's been described as such all over the press, but they're missing something fundamental here, which is that the state fundamentally is just a shakedown.

into something that it fundamentally isn't. That kind of analysis is just wrong. The state has always and has always only been the localized monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Right,

That's all it is. That's always ever been. Everything we know about the state today, right from the legal system to education, to roads, to environmental regulation to the welfare state, are all just functions that were tacked on to the core monopoly on violence, either as part of a carrot and state gambit to maintain control of population or simply as a concession to popular force. You can just have a state that is a bunch of guys with guns who rule purely by fiat and have control over an area.

That is a state. Everything else that we think of as being part of a state is tacked on, and trump Ism as a political force has simply reverted the state back to a pure mode of extraction. Right, the state is men with guns who take shit from you

to pay for those guns. And it becomes it was breasthtakingly clear that this is, you know, how the state is functioning Tree and Trump administration, because the Trump administration has been slashing benefits while handing tax breaks and giant government contracts worth billions of dollars to the tech elite. And they've been spending tens of billions of dollars, you know, to hand to the men's with guns and to recruit

new men with guns for the mass deportation regime. Right, this is just a pure version of the state as an extraction regime, as a regime that fucking takes money for you at gunpoint to buy more men with guns,

so it can take more money from you. Trump Ism imagines that you can collect this money to pay for the apparatus of violence and terror from just pure extortion of foreigners in the working class, you know, And we talked about this a bit at the beginning, right, this is part of why they want to do tariffs, is they think to replace the income tax. You know, the income tax is just like absolutely despised by the extra state elements of the ruling class because rich people hate

paying taxes. But there just isn't enough capital to run a state life that with unemploying some kind of like MMTS money printing, which has alienated a huge part of from sosterity coalition because his quote unquote deficit reduction stuff hasn't actually produced the deficit. So the people who like really really care about that shit ideologically are pissed. But also on a fundamental level, this is already how most

city governments operate, right. They are enormous police budgets extracted at gunpoint, either from the city council directly or directly from the working class from fees and fines and tickets like just leveled at working class people directly. And this is something that is a little different from how previous regimes of neoliberalism has functions, because those previous regimes of neoliberalism did a lot of these same things, but they

were run through regimes of debt extraction. Right. It was you know, it was the imf right coming into your country and being like, okay, if you want to pay back this these loans that this dictator took out, right, you're going to have to like sell your entire fucking working class into pe andage so that your entire economy is going to be reoriented towards paying this debt back. But again, that was debt extraction, base and finance based.

Trumpism wants to take out the middleman and just straight up set give me all your money if you want to live. But this is not a particularly smart strategy. There's a reason that the state takes on other guises than just a man with a gun asking for your wallet. Right, A more literal regime, a more direct regime, a regime where the violence is just out in the open, invites more literal resistance than a sort of symbolic regime or

a regime that operates through more principles. All regimes of accumulation, of dispossession of resources taken by violence to produce more violence come to an end. Brick by brick and stone by stone. Trumpism too will be torn to the ground by the hands of the people who it thought it could exploit.

And so the episodes that were being streamed on HBO Max and I think they're now they've now moved to like Netflix. Those episodes all did still air on PBS, however, Comma the only aired nine months later. But yeah, I want to be clear about that. And then Garrison, do you want to talk about PBS kind of not existing anymore.

I deeply apologize to the cast and crew and production staff of Sesame Street.

Along with this announcement, Trump police a presidential memorandum reading, in part quote, the local government of the District of Columbia has lost control of public order and safety in the city. The mobilization and duration of duty shall remain in effect until I determine that conditions of law and order have been restored in the district of Columbia. Robert who in the past have you heard talk about federalizing the police?

And here is another version of an acting such a policy, mainly citing this crime epidemic in DC, though according to DC Metropolitan Police and their own crime figures, violent offenses which peaked in twenty twenty three fell to their lowest in twenty twenty four, lowest time in over thirty years, and now in twenty twenty five, I've continued to fall even lower than that, though. Trump claims that these stats, just like the just like the Bureau of Labor stats, are all made up. We're all fake.

across DC and even across the country. Trump cited three incidents leading to the federalization of DC police won the assassination of two Israeli MC staffers in May, a fatal shooting of a Congressional intern in June, and most recently, an alleged violent car jacking of the DOGE staffer known as Big Balls and a possible future recipient of the Presidential Medal of Honor.

the way. On Wednesday, Trump discussed extending his control of DC police past the thirty day limit.

long term extensions, because you can't have thirty days. Thirty days is that's by the time you do it. We're going to have this in good shape. And don't forget in the border. Everyone said it would take years and you'd have to go back to Congress.

to be a problem. So all of these things that apply to law and order are are front and center for us. And I don't know, weeks, months, what will it take. That's the President's call, but we're going to be there for him to execute as swiftly as possible.

talked with DC resident bridget Todd this morning. We should have an episode with her perspective coming out early next week, I think Sunday night.

his last term as well. Right, this is not entirely unprecedented, but his desire to specifically not just take away any sort of autonomy that the city has and put it under direct federal control, but to see troops in the streets and federal agents in the streets is not surprising. It's something that like, it's not even should be I honestly shouldn't even call it a prediction. It's just something

he's been repeatedly saying he's going to do. So the fact that it's happening now, you know, the only thing that's surprising to me is that it happened in la first right, and that they really do seem to have and who knows, you know, this could change by the time the episode airs, but they do seem to have something of a I don't know if a block is the right way to phrase it, but they don't seem yet willing to go for the Insurrection Act. That still seems to be a bridge too far for some reason.

I'm not one hundred percent sure why.

deportation with they did some of it, and then they got right out of the city. And so I think, I don't know, I think I think there's a kind of apocalyptic framing of this where it's like, Okay, well it's over, they can just do this. But also it has not been going well for them, and like was it from DC the video of the guy of the guy just like throwing a sandwich at the National Guard throwing a subway sandwich. Yes, yeah, right, like actual regular

people really don't like them. And I think I think we're just going to see escalating resistance as more than like fucking eighty guys get deployed there. And I don't know, it's unclear to me whether they can actually just like maintain this or if they're just gonna say, like we did it Joe in like thirty days and pull out right.

falling and be like, look, we proved it. So that I think that is probably what it will what it will turn out to be. But if they try to push forward to a new crime bill like Trump is mentioning, or call it a national emergency to help strengthen his own powers. I think that's indications that this could have some longer lasting results. Let's go on and ad break and return to talk terrif I suppose.

after this, thank God. But coma however, good lord, the people they are trying to put an office right now. I so long ago, in the galaxy far far away, I made an argument that the Trump regime is built on peer stupidity, that there is no plan at all. There is only you know, a raviting mall of the oblivion of reason that obliterates all attempts to comprehend it and leaves only the words, yes, they really are that stupid.

And this argument was about a guy named Stephan Miron, who was Trump's share of the Council of Economic Advisors, and his plan to like make other countries pay taxes on holding US bonds, a thing that is just unequivocally good for the United States. And you know this is a plan. You can go back and listen to that episode from a few months ago. This is a plan so monumentally stupid that the only way I can think of describing it was like yelling at the moon to

stop the tides. Anyways, Trump is trying to get that guy appointed to be one of the board members of the of the Federal Reserve. And the staggering thing about that isn't just that he's doing this. It's not like this is not the guy who's in the news right now for being unbelievably stupid and getting appointed to an

extremely important structural agency of the American economy. Because they are trying to appoint senior economists at the Heritage Foundation E J and Tony as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after they fired the last head for like releasing the job support Right, this guy, Okay, I make fun of economists for being dumb as shit all the time. He might legitimately be the stupidest economist I

have ever seen. Just on blue Sky, like the day this was announced, right, I saw someone dunking on him for drawing a chart where he doesn't seem to understand that people retire and that when they retire they're not in the labor force anymore. Where he was doing this trend line that was based on the assumption that like people wouldn't retire. There are so many just incredibly basic economics since he doesn't understand. There's a post that I saw.

This is the first one. That was the second one that I saw, the first one that I saw, And it's really funny because this is like in the New York Times now, but I just like saw this on Blue Sky. Was this post by this economist's name Joey Paulitano, who said, quote an economist's so dumb. I had to explain to him how the price index works. Will now lead the BLS.

so fucking stupid that things are happening. I have never seen with right wing economisy before where other right wing economists are going like, this guy can't be allowed to take office. He's going to fuck everything up because he's too dumb. Like I am watching economists at the Manhattan Institute, which is an organization that was literally found in by Reagan's director of the CIA, William Casey, right like that.

The Mahattan Institute is a right wing institute, right like again, this is this is this is an organization founded by Ronald fucking Reagan's CIA director. And I am watching those people go, this guy is too stupid to be put in office. Please don't put him there. This is unprecedented. I've never seen right wing economists break rank on the sort of like affirmative action program they all have for

like really really underachieving right wing shithead economists. It's astonishing and so and the reason he's being brought in, and this is also the reason he was like the chief economist of the Herrer's Foundation, is that he has been calling for getting rid of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and also thinks that again like like Trump does it, they've been like cooking the books to make democrats look

good and Republicans look bad. And so if he gets appointed and this is also like goes to the Senate, but him being appointed here effectively signals the end of independent economic data from the federal governments, hooray, which is a just catastrophic, Like every single part of the governments, every policy organization, every like every every single element, every corporation, every element of the entire US economic system relies on

this data being nonpartisan and accurate. And it's obviously like, yeah, all like all data is political, but like it being like reasonably accurate is like the defining thing about the US economy is that this data is there and functions and this is what everyone based their decisions off of. And he very much looks like he wants to just

end that. And I want to close by noting that're like one of you know, at the very end of the Soviet Union, right, one of the things that was taken as like the giant signal that things were going to shit there was that like their leadership by like the like the mid late eighties was deploying satellites specifically so they could use satellite imagery to check the output of their own factories because there their control of the economic statistics had become so like just annihilated right by

just like mass falsification, their loss of control over the standards that their measuring regime was seen as like, this

is the regime falling apart. And we are like eight months out from Google doing that shit, right, Like, we are not very far out from companies doing a thing you have to do with like remote provinces in China where the fault were, Like there's data falsification of Like okay, we're like using satellite data to like measure freight loads and like measure electrical consumption and like figuring out what factories are open at night to figure out how much

that's You know that that is something that is very much in our future. I'm only kind of joking about the satellite shit. I think we probably will live to see that, assuming this thing goes through, assuming they remember how to launch satellites. Well it won't. It won't be them, It'll be it'll be like corporations doing this. Oh sure, sure, yeah, like you using the row satellite grads and.

still in cope. I don't know what we'll report to you back on the show when all of that enormous clusterfug blows up.

seats with some Democrats expected to return very soon. Nothing stops Abbot from just calling another special session once the Democrats return. In fact, he has said that that's exactly what he's gonna do.

the same. So we will we will see how this develops over time. But yeah, Texas Dems may be home sooner than expected.

Shooter then fired upon six buildings on the CDC campus, with the total of five hundred rounds being fired during the incident, with two hundred shots hitting CDC buildings. One Decab County Police officer was killed. The shooter later shot and killed himself. Police were contacted several weeks before the shooting by unknown individuals due to quote recently verbalized thoughts of suicide. According to the GBI director Chris Hosey, this

was about the soon to become shooter. Police found written documents from the shooter expressing distrust in the COVID nineteen vaccine. Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Josey said the shooter quote wanted to make the PUBLICBLIC aware of his discontent with and distrust of the vaccine unquote, with sources who knew him telling ABC News he blamed the vaccine for making

him sick and depressed. The CDC director sent a letter to its ten thousand employees earlier this week saying, quote the dangers of misinformation and its promulgation has now led

to deadly consequences unquote. The Monday after the shooting, RFK Junior oh No, who recently defunded mRNA Vaccines, visited the CDC campus to express condolences for the family of the officer killed, as well as to quote offers support to all of the CDC employees who are a part of a shining star health agency around the world to quote

from an interview he gave with SCRIPTS News. When Kennedy was asked what would be done to stop the spread of vaccine misinformation to prevent future incidents like this shooting, Kennedy said, quote people can ask questions without being penalized and quote we don't know enough about what the motive

was of this individual unquote hate that. That's all pretty pretty disgusting seeing narratives that RFK Junior has promoted for his own profit for years yep being used to justify as shooting targeting the CDC headquarters.

or the police. You know, two or three hundred rounds would not at all be odd for how many police would fire in response to a guy like this who is just bag dumping, you know, into a building. It's unclear to me did he see people through the windows and was he trying to hit them or was he just shooting at the buildings to make a statement. The fact that he did shoot and kill a police PAE officer, presumably with intent, makes it more likely that maybe he

was trying to hit people inside the building. I don't know how much it's worth splitting hairs here, but I am like it is kind of unclear to me. Was his goal more to make a statement or was he hoping to like rack up a body count of CDC employees and this was just as close as he could get. I don't think we really know. Maybe we probably never will.

this level. The legal justifications used for the First Amendment have not made much progress in federal appeals courts so far. If the case does get chosen, it would be primarily for like ideological reasons based on specific new Supreme Court justices. But it is still unclear if this will get accepted, and I'm thinking not super likely. I don't think this is something that we need to have tons of panic about at the moment.

thousand workers. Like three hundred and seventy seven thousand workers is an astonishing number of workers to just straight up the union doesn't exist the next day, Yeah right, they just their contract sharp being recognized. This in and of itself is really stunning, and also the lack of response by the union movement, especially considering the number of people involved.

It's just been like strongly worded statements and encouragements for the Democrats to pass a bill through Congress to recognize collective bargaining rights, which speaks really really ill of the broader labor movement that like, again, they just took away the unions of almost four hundred thousand people, and Organized Labor's collective response was just to kind of shrug. So that's really fucking bleak. It's probably going to be spreading to more agencies as this plays out. Yeah, it's really

I don't know. And even the language unions of using it talk about it. They're like, oh, this is union busting for speaking out against anti worker policies, and it's like, no, it's union busting because they literally got rid of the unions of three hundred and seventy seven thousand people. What are we doing here? I don't know. I'm gonna have more on this as I guess more word from union sources.

There's a staggering lack of information about this and people are being slow to respond, but I want to mention it here because it's devastating and hideous and yeah, it's real fucking bad.

This means that ICE agents are also returning to enforcement at schools, not just ICE agents as we know, other federal agents' board patrol ATFDA, etc. Are all taking part in immigration enforcement now they're no longer restrained by the sensitive Places doctrine, which previously stopped them from doing enforcement at schools and churches and other places where it's generally considered not worth it because doing so obviously provides a

massive disincentive for family to take their children to school. In this instance, in Chula Vista, second largest city in the County of San Diego, ice detained a parent a block away from a school, leaving two young children in the car. Like most schools in the area, Tula Vista Elementary School District will not allow ice on campus without

a warrant unless there's an active emergency. Just to explain that active emergency thing a bit I guess, for instance, in Uvalde, because all the local cops were cowards and stood outside, it was actually a border patrol team or attacked specifically who killed the shooter there, So that would be an example of when immigration agents might enter a campus during an active emergency. In Los Angeles, a fifteen year old boy with disabilities was pulled from a car, handcuffed,

and detained by federal agents at gunpoint. He was accompanying a relative who was reaistering at the school, and he was in the car with his grandmother. The agents, who appeared to be bored patrol from videos i've seen, release the boy after intervention by school staff and left live ammunition on the sidewalk. For some reason, these look like five five six rounds from the pictures I've seen, I'm

guessing it's just terrible weapons handling procedures here. It appears that this boy was not the person they were looking for, but nonetheless they've obviously horrifically traumatized this young man for no good reason. In response, LA Unified School District is

ramping up safety patrols. These include volunteers, teachers, and school cops. Apparently, obviously, school cops cannot directly prevent immigration enforcement officers from doing immigration enforcement, but they can notify people of their presence, and they're trying to have safe zones around schools so that people can either safety walk to school or safety drop their kids off. They're also changing their bus programs.

Buses are part of school district's property right, so just as ice could not enter a school without a warrant, nor could they enter that bus without a warrant, and it would be within the training of the bus driver to deny them access if they did not have a warrant. So the bus would potentially be a much safer way for people to get to school that are having their parents drive them. And so what la USD is doing

is expanding their bus programs in LA. I've seen a lot of information on this in the resource guide that was published by the LA Office of Immigration Affairs.

asylum case. And she can't work because she doesn't have a work permit, and she has cancer, which is obviously something which is very difficult for her to manage alongside the massive stress of immigration enforcement. Right now, she needs to raise seven thousand dollars to pay her lawyer. I'm looking at the GoFundMe as I record this and it is at one thousand, nine hundred and forty one dollars.

If you would like to help, you can go to www dot GoFundMe dot com, slash f slash urgent, hyphen help, hyphen four, hyphen bouquette, b uk e t s hyphen asylum, hyphen case, or you can just go down as a show notes and click the link. We really appreciate all the support you guys have given.