It Could Happen Here Weekly 171
03:21:14 Share

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that has been really, really fucking bleak basically since Trump took office. So instead of doing another episode about how doomed the U.S. is, we are taking a, I don't know, a field trip to Argentina to talk about something extremely funny. And that extremely funny thing is the Argentinian president, Javier Malay, promoting a meme coin and maybe going down for it.

And with me to talk about this is really the only person I could have on to talk about a crypto thing, who is Molly White. And I'm trying to explain who Molly White is, but my explanation of this is, in the same way that the great 20th century Marxist theorist C.L.R. James' book Beyond a Boundary is both universally considered to be the best book ever written about cricket...

and also literally calling it the thing that it is, the best book ever written about cricket, is like a damning insult to how good the actual book is. Molly is probably the world's best crypto journalist, and writes the newsletter Citation Needed, also does Web3 is Going Great, which is...

everyone should go listen to it. Molly, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. What an intro. I've been waiting for an opportunity to use that one for such a long time. Great book, by the way. Everyone should both go subscribe to Citation Needed and also go read Beyond the Boundary because it's great. So, we were talking about this before the show. I

I had planned this episode out before Elon Musk showed up at CPAC with Javier Millay, like with Millay's signature chainsaw doing an even weirder version of Millay's thing about like cutting regulation with a chainsaw. But Jesus Christ. Yeah, what a spectacle that was. Oh my God. Like Steve Bannon doing the Nazi salute wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened there. I...

That was only like day one. Well, that's overdone now. You know, everyone's doing it. You have to do something new. Yeah. You have to get to wander around the stage with a chainsaw. Like he didn't even do the Malay thing, which is you have like a book of regulations or whatever. You cut it with a chainsaw. And you saw it in half. Oh, God. Yeah.

So I am very excited to talk about the crypto scandal that might finally bring this administration down. However, and I am deeply sorry. I already I apologize before this recording started. I am deeply sorry. In order to explain who Javier Millay is, I have to do the single most difficult thing I've ever attempted in my like, not just in my like my history as a podcaster, like that's obviously trivially true, but like my entire history doing theoretical work in general is

Which is, I'm about to attempt to explain Peronism in under 10 minutes on 4 hours of sleep. Let's see it. So... Here we fucking go. Because... To take a sense of why we have to do this, right? Like, Malay is able to take power...

basically because he's one of the first candidates in a long time in Argentina to run as an anti-peronist. And that may seem weird because, hold on, wait, shouldn't there always be... Okay, if you have an ideology, shouldn't the person from either the left or right side of the political spectrum be running against an ideology? And no, no. Up until basically now, both the left and the right in Argentina were both peronists.

So to get an understanding of what Peronism is, we need to go back not just to who Juan Peron is. And we'll we'll get to who Juan Peron, who's like the guy this ideology is named after. And, you know, the ideology is based on like this guy returning from exile from the military coups. But we have to go back to one of the sort of foundational parts of of the modern Argentinian state and history.

That element is the fact that Argentina has one of those militant workers movements in the entire world and has had it for about a century.

I was on Margaret's show, It Could Happen Here. Jesus Christ, not It Could Happen Here. Good Lord. You tell them I'm four hours asleep. You're doing great. Thank you. Thank you. I haven't even gotten... We have not gotten to my final analysis of Peronism where the closest thing I can compare it to is post-short cultural revolution 1970s era China. So this is about to get so much more unhitched. But a while back, I was on Margaret's show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, to talk about...

the second Argentinian giant anarcho-syndicalist uprising in about a span of four years, which was the giant anarchist rebellion in Patagonia in 1921, 1922. This is the second one because the first one was the 1919 general strike, which ends in an event called the tragic week where everyone sort of gets killed by the military. But, you know, the fact that there's two in different parts of the country, enormous anarcho-syndicalist uprisings in a span of about four years.

is a demonstration of the fact that this is one of the most militant working classes in the world. And any political movement that is trying to hold power in this country is going to have to deal with the fact that the Argentinian working class at any moment can, you know, if you're a factory owner, you can wake up one day and there's a black flag flying over your factories because your workers have seized it. And the sort of culmination of this, and the reason this is even still relevant today, is that

Like, the last of what you would, I guess you could call, like, the classical 20th century revolutions. A line of uprisings started with, like, the original formation of the workers' councils in Russia in 1905. You know, and that continues to, like, the occupation of the factories in Italy through the two red years, like, 1918, 1919. Like, the anarchist parts of the Spanish Revolution, like, the revolutions in Hungary and Algeria. Like, you know, all, like, through 68, like, the factory occupations in France and Italy. And, like, all this whole lineage of, like...

The thing that happens when you do a revolution is workers occupy the factories and try to seize control of the country. The last one of those ever was in Argentina in 2001. Like everywhere else in the world, this shit was gone. And then randomly in Argentina in 2001, like there's a giant one of these uprisings that is, you know, only really put down by a sort of left Peronist government agreeing to like tell the IMF to fuck off.

which was like, you know, a sort of seismic change in the political landscape. But all of this is to say that, okay, if you were a capitalist in Argentina and you have to deal with this, like, what do you do?

And the answer is to create the most unhinged ideology the world has ever seen by uniting socialism and fascism under the single banner of Argentinian nationalist class collaboration, which is the thing that makes no sense, but you have to understand, like, Peronism is... Oh, God. Peronism is simply the weirdest ideology ever. I promise we are going to get to the fun crypto stuff, but we have to unfortunately do this. We have to do our homework first. And part of this is...

So Juan Peron, the actual guy whose ideology is based off of, is an enormously popular president in like the late 40s and 50s until he gets overthrown by a military coup.

And to get a sense of, again, like how weird this guy is, like this is a guy who when he comes into power, a bunch of the most famous Nazi war criminals and like not just, you know, obviously like like the famous Nazis flee to Argentina. There's a whole meme about that. Right. But I mean, we're talking like guys from the Ustazi, like guys, guys who literally did the Holocaust by hand, like flee to Argentina during his administration. And when a military coup overthrows him, they flee the country.

So, again, like the U.S.-backed military junta is less pro-Nazi than this guy is. He is also personal friends with Che Guevara and considers like the Cuban Revolution to be like part of his like revolutionary project. So a deeply, deeply weird, deeply weird guy. And the result of this is that, OK, so you have a military dictatorship through like the 50s and the 60s, right?

And, like, the entire time this dictatorship, not the entire time, but most of the time this dictatorship is happening, right, the entire political spectrum sort of projects all of their...

political energy onto we want perone back because perone is remembered as like the guy who like brought workers rights to the country and also like gave women the right to vote and also as you remember it is like a stable nationalist right-wing government by the right so like everyone on like both sides political spectrum project all of their political aspirations into the single figure of perone which works because he's not in the country he's not not there so you know and because he's gone you can project anything you want onto him

And this is to a large extent the origin of modern populism, right? Like the, you know, modern populism is the projection of all grievances onto one guy and then having that guy come in, take power, do constant sort of semi-political mobilization to like fix your issues. And one of the interesting threads here is that like the theoretical origin of left populism is

is very specifically Peronism, because one of the theoreticians of, like, modern left populism, one of the most famous ones, is my old nemesis, the Argentinian political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, and his wife, Chantal Mouffe, who were, like, they were, like, you know, these people were, like, the theoretical forces behind a bunch of, like, the European left in this sort of Euro-communism era, and even up until, like, like, Podemos in Spain, 2011, like, these are the people who are the theoretical force behind so much, like, left electoral stuff in the last, like, 50 years, and,

And it's all from LeClau, who was a left Peronist. So all of all the dots are going on the pinboard. And while he's gone, he's this guy that like from an American perspective, it's like imagine that like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump from 2016 were both the same guy. And both sides were just trying to get this one guy to come back to Argentina and like fix everything.

So this creates like the left and right Peronists. And when Peron comes back in the 70s and like immediately gets elected president again, the right Peronist just literally starts slaughtering the left Peronist in the streets. And Peron like backs the right Peronists against the left. And you would think this would destroy left Peronism. But no, no, left Peronism was in power in Argentina until like Malay's election like a few years ago. It's...

Oh, so OK, so like why would you still be a left Peronist after Peron like had all your boys machine guns in the 70s? Part of the reason this works also is that he dies and his wife takes power and there's like another military coup. So, you know, he's not like in power long enough, kind of for like the disenchantment to really set in. He's he's in power just long enough for people to remember it as like the break between the dictatorships.

And at this point, I can finally attempt to go, what is Peronism? After, like, how many minutes of, like, oh, God, I think I've gone over my 10-minute limit of what is Peronism.

But, okay, Perón's deal is this, right? Like, so, okay, like if you're a Peronist, right, in a Peronist state, everyone is supposed to be equal before the power of the Argentinian state. And so if you're a leftist, you focus on the everyone is going to be equal part. And this means on the one hand, you know, there are real substantive gains for the Argentinian working class that they didn't get under the, you know, the sort of previous administrations and under the Junta, right? You know, you have like massive expansions of workers' rights, right?

nationalizations of a bunch of sectors of the economy. You have this like strategy of national development through like import substitution. There's, there's like a long strain of like feminist Peronism from, you know, his like, like him, him being the administration where women got the right to vote. Um,

On the other hand, if you're a fascist, you focus on the like before the power of the Argentinian state part, which means like permanent class collaboration. And this is the part of the deal that brings the right in is like the deal is that, OK, so you give the workers all this stuff and you set up these really complicated patronage networks.

you know, people have jobs and like they have a social safety net, at least in theory. And the trade-off is you will never, ever again attempt to like occupy a factory or like, and like drive these parasites who run your entire life out of power. And the second part of that is this, like this hard line unhinged right wing, like Argentinian nationalism, which is wielded against, for example, like Argentinian indigenous groups. And so I,

I promise the comparison to the, to the long culture, the seventies long culture revolution, we've reached that point of it. So to, to understand like really what this is, right. It's an active counterinsurgency that is sort of, that is waged by the state and waged by a bunch of like parts of the social sector to, to, to enfold this really dynamic and militant workers movement into the state in such a way that there can still be politics kind of, but it won't actually be a threat to the ruling class.

And my sort of like closest thing to this is this very, very weird period in Chinese history between like the end of the short culture revolution in like 1969 and the death of Mao in 76.

where, like, the most unhinged parts of the Cultural Revolution are sort of over because Mao has set off, you know, so 1967, like, Mao sets off this uprising in Shanghai. He does this deliberately as part of his, like, strategy to, like, gain power of the party. The problem is that control of Shanghai is no longer in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. Like, the workers take the city. And this is a disaster because they've all been reading about the Paris Commune. The thing about the Paris Commune is that they had, like, direct elections of people, and they're

there's a moment I, I actually, like I found this, this moment of this transcript where Mao was talking to Joe and lie. And Joe and lie is like, if we let these people do direct elections, like it's going to lead to anarchism. And now he's like, Oh shit, we have to stop this. So what, what happens is that he, he wheels together this baffling coalition of like student red guards and the sort of somebody with some, some like a loyal, like rebel workers factions, uh,

along with a bunch of like the remaining party bureaucracy and the military, which is a coalition comprised of everyone on every side of the cultural revolution. Right? Like normally the cultural revolution is broken down into very roughly. There are rebel factions and there are like government factions. Right. And he's, he's pulled together a coalition of a bunch of elements of both of them with the explicit thing of, we are going to end the revolution. And, and,

In the short run, what this does is it leads to the back half of the Cultural Revolution that people don't talk about very much, which is instead of everyone dying because there are rebels running around, everyone's dying because the state is killing everyone to bring everyone back under control. And that's what most of the people who die in the Cultural Revolution are killed, putting the whole thing down.

If you want to try to understand like what Peronism is, right? It's this ideology of bringing together all of the different sort of disparate political factions in a moment, right? You're bringing together everyone from like the fascist on the right to like the socialist on the left. And you're bringing them into the banner of this one guy in the same. And the reason Mao is able to do this is because like he's Mao, right? Every single like faction on every side of the Cultural Revolution, whatever they're trying to do is justifying it in the name of like, oh, this is what Mao wants.

This is what Peron is doing, right? He's drawing together the entire political spectrum in a way that he can sort of stabilize power, take it away from like the Junta and forge this permanent political coalition. And this results in like the sort of total dominance that this ideology has over Argentinian politics means that like basically every election in Argentina until like Malay takes power is an election between the left and the right Peronists.

Okay, okay, I am so sorry. This finally is the end of my attempt to explain Perotism, and we're gonna go to ads. When we come back, I'm gonna actually do this interview that I've been promising. I am so sorry. Okay, we are back. Thank you so much for surviving this. This sort of brings us to, like, how he kind of takes power and how, you know, there's an economic crisis. There's, like, all this inflation. And so he comes in on, like...

I don't know. We were talking about this beforehand. I want to talk to you about this. Like, there's all these really weird parallels between this and the American election where it's like, except the inflation in Argentina is like real. Yeah. We just have this sort of like boogeyman version of it. They actually have hyperinflation. Yeah. Yeah. Hold on. Let me check the current inflation rate. Yeah, I think I mean, it's like several hundred percent right now.

I think it's like 300-something percent, which is actually, Millet's entire thing was that he was going to stop inflation. It's actually, it's way worse under him than it was under the previous, like, Peronist administration. Oh, there's one last thing I forgot to mention, which is like, you know, why, if you're on the left, would you take this deal? And this also ties into, like, how this politics, how his politics took over the state, which is that, like, you know, there were people in Argentina, like, under these Peronist governments, got things that are, like, unimaginable here, right?

Like there's one that's important to me. And like, obviously, like it's still you're still living under capitalism. A lot of it still sucks. But like one of the things that people won under these governments was this mandate that one percent of all government employees had to be trans, which is like unimaginable here. Like like even at the height of like, you know, like sort of trans acceptance or whatever, like that's there's what like that's that's not that's not a thing that's even like

No one even, like, thinks to ask about that. And, like, yeah, like, I don't know. Like, yeah, like, I might sell my soul to Juan Peron if it meant that, like, none of my trans friends ever had to sleep in an alley again. Like, I, you know, but the wheels fall off of this. And they put the self-described anarcho-capitalist in power. Which is great. And, oh, God. Okay, and this finally gets us to the fun part of this. I said at the top of this episode that, like, he did a meme coin, right? Can you explain what that is?

Oh, God. Yeah. So meme coins are a particularly weird part of the cryptocurrency world where they basically go out and say that this is a token that has no inherent value, which, you know, skeptics would argue that that's true of all cryptocurrency. But

But meme coins very actively embrace that fact. And they're often themed around a meme. So, you know, a lot of people know of Dogecoin, which is themed about the, you know, around the Shiba Inu dog. They're also sometimes just themed around sort of an idea or a person or a

You know, just sort of whatever is capturing the public attention at any given moment. And the idea is that you buy in and all of the attention causes more people to buy in. And if you're really good at it or really lucky, you're one of the first people to buy in. And so you buy in at a low price and then you sell after everyone else has bought in and pump the price up higher.

That's the idea. In reality, it doesn't really work that way. It's full of insider trading and market manipulation. And it's not sort of a fair game where anyone has a chance to be one of those early people. But that's sort of the shape of it, at least. And so I guess that brings us to Libra, which is the coin that Millay was convinced, I guess, to endorse. Yeah. I mean, I think this is interesting thing here, too, where it's like our

Our government is just like a fucking meme coin now. Like the thing that is in control of the American state is Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is just the Dogecoin meme. Like, yeah, we're in sort of a post ironic world at this point where crypto and the U.S. government are somehow completely intertwined. And I guess we should probably mention that just before Trump took office, he launched his own meme coin, which was the

The Trump token followed very shortly after by his wife launching the Melania token. And they did what all good meme coins do, which is that they spiked in price based on the original interest. And then they lost everyone a bunch of money once the price came back down because with meme coins, people lose interest and move on to the next one. And, you know, the Trump token shockingly does not have enduring value anymore.

Yeah, and that's the interesting thing about it, which is like, okay, this is just a pump-and-dump scheme. Yes. Like, it's just securities fraud. We have an entire economy based on security. Everyone doing securities fraud, and everyone knows that securities fraud... I don't know.

I mean, it's really cynical. Like if you actually talk to people who are deep into meme coins, either creating them or trading them, there's this broad acceptance that like, oh, yeah, it's totally a scam. People are trying to run off with the money after they launch these tokens. Like there's all of this market manipulation happening. Average everyday people who are seeing these stories about people buying in super early and then

making a million dollars out of thin air. Like that never happens. Those aren't average people. Those are like deeply sophisticated trading bots or people with insider knowledge. Like everyone knows this and openly discusses it. And yet there's still this active participation in it because the idea is that like

okay, sure, it's a scam, but if you get in on the scam early enough, you can be the scammer and you can be the one who profits and, you know, screw everybody else. So it's like this really deeply rotten, like cynical, weird,

world yeah i remember you talked about this on jamie's show about like how just deeply nihilistic it all is yeah and i think you know i mean it's not even it used to be you had to do metaphors to draw a direct line between this sort of like the nihilism of this shit and like the nihilism of putting like malai or like putting trump and elon like in office but now it's just

I mean, they just do the meme coin, right? Like there's no... Yeah, the mask is like fully off of crypto in the meme coin era, I think. It's kind of amazing how during the previous crypto boom in like 2020 and 2021, there was this phrase that everyone was saying, which was wag me, which was like, we're all going to make it. And the idea was like, we're all going to get rich together.

everyone's going to succeed. And now it's like, they've totally, like you never hear that anymore. And now it's like, oh, I will punch you in the face and steal your wallet if I get the moment opportunity. And that is like broadly accepted throughout the crypto world. Yeah. You know, and like that, that is also like what Malai has been doing to like everyone in Argentina, right? Like his, his thing that came in is he, I mean, one of the things I remember from like the very first days he was in office is he was talking about all this stuff about how,

they were going to take away welfare benefits from anyone who was arrested at a protest. Yeah. And like that didn't stop. There's been massive protests, like basically since the moment he took power. But, you know, like it's just this really deeply cynical, very explicit thing of like pitting people

like everyone in society against each other, like, you know, like making this argument to, there's like a crime thick article about this where it's like, they, you know, like he's very explicitly making this argument to like, well, okay, if you're, if you're like a private sector worker and you're making no money, the reason you're making no money is because wages are too high in the public sector.

It's because taxes are too high. And if taxes and corporations were lower, they would pay you more. It's like, yeah, no. But it fits into this sort of like pure nihilism of like, yeah, everyone trying to grift each other. And it's I mean, it's really recognizable here in the United States, too, where it's the same story of like, oh, you're not making enough money because, you know, people are stealing your tax money and it's going to, you know, people who don't deserve it or it's going to these people.

programs to fund foreign aid instead of people in the United States. Or, you know, it's like very much trying to pit everyone against one another so that you don't notice that the person who's actually taking the money is the guy who launched the meme coin or the people who have the insider information. You know, it's like this very direct mirror of what is happening in society. And yet it's like so obvious. Yeah.

The problem that we have is like, I think people do broadly recognize that like everyone who is rich got rich by fucking robbing people. But instead of trying to do anything about that, the solution that's being posited by these people is like, well, instead of you just being scammed all the time, like you could be the scam artist. You could be the robber. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's like the new scam instead of like, you know, because like organizing is fucking hard. Right. And like attempting to fight these people is really hard. They have all the money. They have all the power. They have the police. They have the military. Yeah.

And so you get like this shit. On the other hand, sometimes it backfires because these people like are like all in enough on on this fucking meme coin shit to like run it. So, yeah, let's let's let's talk about this specific meme coin Libra. Yeah. So it's kind of a weird thing.

example of a meme coin because you know most meme coins the idea is like this has no intrinsic value this has no purpose you just gamble on the token price and hope for the best libra was ostensibly supposed to actually have some sort of point to it um making it much unlike most of the meme coins but it was still you know basically a meme coin under the hood and

But the idea was that like somehow some of the profits from this Libra token were going to be put towards supporting Argentine entrepreneurs or something like that. There was a sort of like social benefit side to it where, which was all very vague and like there was very little detail. Yeah.

You never really know with these things what is actually supposed to happen. But that was the story, is that this is going to support Argentine entrepreneurs and it's going to funnel money to their projects and all this. It almost feels like an older kind of scam. It reminds me of an NFT scam where they'll be like, ah, somewhere in the future we're going to make a game and you're all going to vote. It's like that thing, but they brought it back for one last ride.

Right. It's like the historical like 2020 era crypto scam where it was like, look, we have this beautiful roadmap of all these things we're going to do and we're going to give you gifts and rewards. And then it's like, OK, but how is it going to work? And they're like, oh, don't worry about it. We'll we'll tell you later. Just give us your money now.

And that was kind of the idea with the Libra coin. But basically, the team behind it had some folks who were involved in something called Tech Forum Argentina, which was like a group of tech entrepreneurs with this sort of like blockchain angle to it, who had access to Malay via this sort of

project that was happening in Argentina where you could like pay to come to this conference and Malay was going to be there and all this. And so they joined forces with some meme coin guys who had a lot of experience launching other meme coin projects, including the Melania token, including the Enron token, which was literally launched by someone who purchased the like trademark rights to the Enron company. I forgot about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That came back to haunt us. Yeah.

And so they all joined forces and launched this meme coin and they were able to get President Millet to promote the meme coin on his Twitter account by saying, like, here's this Libra project. It's going to support Argentinian entrepreneurs. Here's the contract address. Buy in.

And so everyone got super excited because a president had just endorsed a meme coin and he unfortunately was too slow to be the first president to do such a thing with Trump beating him to that particular record. But I actually I actually can't believe I'm blanking on his name. The guy in El Salvador hadn't pulled one yet. Oh.

Oh, yeah. But Kelly, I'm like stunned he hadn't done it yet. Yeah, it's probably because he's a real Bitcoiner and Bitcoin maximalists are not a huge fan of any other cryptocurrencies. That would be my guess. But yeah, it is a little surprising. Yeah. Oh, also, OK, there's another unhinged angle here, which I want to briefly mention because it's extremely funny. One of my good friends, Julie, pointed me to, which is part of the thing that's like originally that originally made me want to do this is that

So one of the people who was like involved in like this hookup process with like the crypto people,

was this guy named Augustine Lahaye, who's like this very, very famous conservative writer. And he's the guy who like introduced the concept of gender ideology to Argentina. So he's like one of, and one of what lays like big things is like being a TERF all the time. Right. And the guy who like got all of these people into TERF shit is like the guy who introduced him to this fucking crypto scam. And he might have to sell him out in order to get out of the crypto scam bullshit. Yeah.

Which is just, oh God. Trans people getting our revenge. You love to see it. Speaking of crypto scams, we should take one more ad break before we get into all of the rest of this bullshit. We are back to the main story of the really unprecedented access this administration has given the crypto people.

Can you talk a bit about who the people involved in this are? Because it's a lot of very, very large players in this world. Yeah, so, I mean, it's still sort of coming out, like, who exactly was involved and to what degree they were involved. But it's really starting to look like the...

creation of this meme coin was spearheaded by a bunch of guys at a group called Kelsey or Ventures that has been involved in, like I said, launching a bunch of these tokens. And that's sort of a family run operation. There's a guy named Dr. Tom and then his two sons, Hayden and Gideon, I believe the other one is named. Jesus Christ. Like, oh no, making these guys in a lab. Yeah.

And, you know, they're kind of young guys, like Hayden is like 28 or something like that, which is, you know, typical for the crypto world, I guess. But yeah.

Yeah. And so Hayden Davis is the mastermind behind much of the launch. But they're working very closely with a bunch of other people in the crypto world. And that's something that they sort of have to do with these big, splashy token launches. You know, the Trump token had to do this as well, where you can't just show up as like a president and launch a meme coin and expect everything will just work.

because when that many people all try to buy a token at once, you know, you need someone on the other end to actually be selling the tokens. And, you know, there's all of this infrastructure behind it that goes into these launches. And so you need people to do the market making and there's the liquidity providers and there's all these, you know, projects under the hood that are involved.

And it's beginning to look like a lot of those people were deeply involved in these token launches in ways that was perhaps not entirely proper. Yeah. I know propriety around meme coin launches is maybe a lot to expect, but...

You know, there's sort of talks about how one of the co-founders of a project called Meteora, which is one of these huge liquidity platforms and also a place where people are actually buying these tokens. Can you explain like what a liquidity platform is for listeners? Yeah, yeah. So it's basically sort of what I suggested, which is that like if you go out and launch a token,

And you don't do any prep. When someone goes to buy that token or sell that token, there's no one on the other side of that trade. You need some amount of liquidity in the markets when you start off. Yeah, so there have to be actual tokens that you can sell to people. Yeah, and if someone buys one of your tokens, they want to be able to sell it to someone as well. And so you need to be able to sort of...

absorb that kind of trading without just assuming that, you know, out of thin air, these people will exist on both sides of the trade. And so there are these projects called liquidity providers where, you know, sometimes it's like big firms will provide liquidity and they'll step in in that role. And that's sort of the market maker end of things. Meteora is a little bit unusual in that

they do like decentralized liquidity provision which i'm not going to go into too much detail about because it's very mind-numbing but it's also so funny that like the terms that have taken hold for these things like our financial terms and it's like yeah it's like like this is not liquidity in the sense of like does the u.s government have cash on hand to pay something this is like are there these like stupid little weird program things to like move other programs around yeah

And it's not even dollars. You know, we're not talking about real dollars here. We're talking about like people providing you one fake token in exchange for another fake token. But I think they very much intentionally use the traditional financial terms to sort of lend a degree of legitimacy to it and cover up the fact that like, oh, and if you're a liquidity provider and you just like siphon all the liquidity out of there, you've just made a ton of money in a total scam. But it sounds legit because it's a liquidity provider and it's something that exists in like traditional finance.

But yeah, so there's this Meteora project where that liquidity operation all happens. And, you know, Meteora was deeply sort of involved in some of these big token launches, like Trump token was starting out on Meteora. Melania started out there. This Libra token started out there.

And now it seems like the co-founder was very closely connected to this Hayden guy. He even supposedly introduced the Melania team to Hayden Davis, the Kelsier guy. It sounds like, according to some of the allegations out there, he was personally involved in a lot of this early insider trading that I'm sure we'll get into when it comes to Libra token and why everything went so wrong. And it seems like there is this

sort of network of people throughout this meme coin world who are running these big platforms and who are making connections and all of that, who are personally insider trading a lot of these big token launches so that when those people who are buying it up early and making all this money, it's like, oh yeah, that's the guy who runs Meteora. Right.

This happens so much in the crypto world, and I should stop being surprised every time it happens. But what happened is when the co-founder of Meteora stepped down,

The other co-founder, who was like previously not really known, stepped up and was like, hey, I'm the other co-founder. And he released this whole statement about how Ben Chow, the co-founder who stepped down, was, you know, he thought he was totally innocent of all this and nothing shady was happening at Meteora, etc. The other co-founder who just like came out of the woodwork, he runs Jupiter, which is the other. It's like the ostensible Meteora competitor. It's like, oh, yeah, it's all just the same people.

you know, behind the scenes. And, you know, some of the insiders who were sort of whistleblowing on this were saying, oh yeah, the Jupiter guys were all insider trading too. The Meteora guys are insider trading. Like they're all trading against you. So it's really exposed a lot of the rot in this sort of meme coin world

in all of this infrastructure and the fact that like, oh yeah, yeah, when you're buying meme coins, like you are playing in a rigged casino, which has certainly not done any favors to the meme coin reputation, but certainly also to malaise as well. Yeah.

Yeah, so let's get into Millay's involvement in this. Can you lay out the timeline of this? Because it's so funny. Yeah, it's a little wild. So unlike the Trump token, Millay did not launch this token. He was not the mastermind behind it. It's not clear how much he really knew about the team behind it or what they were doing, but...

He was certainly convinced to endorse this token and, you know, pump it up on Twitter and all of this. And again, this is not an unusual thing for meme coins to do. I mean, it's unusual for them to find a president, but apparently not now. Like, that's true. It was unusual for them to find a president.

But, you know, there's this whole process with meme coins where they try to find influential people to talk about them, to drive the interest in the token. And so they will hire celebrities or people who are influential in the crypto world or, you know, anyone with some degree of a platform to promote a token. And.

Ostensibly, they're supposed to disclose that they are being paid to promote the token. They rarely do. Yeah. It is technically illegal, but like rarely, rarely enforced for someone to promote a token without disclosure. One of the very few cases where it was enforced was against Kim Kardashian, of all people. Yeah.

That shit's all gone now. Yeah, and that was years ago before the SEC was bought by the crypto companies. And so... Yeah, and like, I mean, they literally did, I think like yesterday, yeah.

Was it yesterday as we're recording this? We're recording this on Friday. Was it yesterday that the... Is it the SEC or the SEC that dropped the case against Coinbase? SEC. That was today. Yeah, this morning. Oh my god, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, we're seeing this everywhere, but the SEC has paused a case against Binance, which had involved allegations of actual fraud, not just the sort of like minor securities law violations. Yeah.

Fraud is also actually a securities law violation. Those are all, by the way, a bunch of like very, very like like Binance and like Coinbase are like the biggest players in the regular crypto market. Yeah, Binance is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. Coinbase is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. Coinbase spent over 75 million dollars on the most recent political event.

cycle in the U.S. and now is reaping the rewards by having the SEC case against them dropped. So I would not expect much in the way of SEC enforcement against crypto founders or companies, especially given that they have also installed crypto-friendly people at

at the SEC, at the CFTC. The CFTC nominee for chair is an Andreessen Horowitz guy who is advising them on crypto policy. Like, it's totally rotten now. Yeah, well, and also, like, the actual guy running the government right now is Elon Musk, who is, you know, like...

of their fucking boys. Yeah, and the guy who's ostensibly running the project has his own meme coin project, so I suspect he's not going to be super keen on anyone enforcing laws against meme coin operations either. Yeah, good God. It's such a mess. Yeah, alright, back to Argentina. Back to Argentina before we get lost in despair. Oh God. Yeah.

Yeah. So so basically, you know, the coin launches, Millet, you know, fires off a tweet about how this is such a great meme coin. And, you know, he he gives the token address so you can all go buy it. And then very early on, it becomes clear that there is some degree of insider trading happening.

So, you know, the beauty and the horror of crypto is that it's all recorded on a public blockchain. People can look at who is doing the early trades in these tokens. And it fairly quickly becomes apparent that the wallets that were involved in launching the token, and so the ones that are being controlled by the people who, you know, actually created this token and are promoting it,

are also involved in this early sniping of the token. And sniping is when you use crypto trading bots, you know, like automated programs to buy up the tokens very early on at low, low, low prices, you know, earlier than any human could reasonably be expected to go hit the buy button. Yeah, it's the thing that like fucking ticket scalpers do or like the reason why you can't buy a PS5 is that all these...

trading bots get in like immediately. Exactly. It's 100% analogous to that. But in the case of these trading bots, you know, often they have insider information. They have the contract address before it's public so that they can be like split second on it to buy these tokens early. And then they usually dump them really early too. So, you know, if Melee tweets about a meme coin, the price shoots up within minutes of this thing launching. And within minutes, these snipers sell off and they make

of dollars often in profits. And it is that selling that often causes the price to crash right back down again, causing those average people who thought that they were early to be the ones basically subsidizing the folks who make millions of dollars off these launches. It's public

a dump it's just literally just a puppet dump like it's just fraud like i just right i i don't know like i just this is my my like old like 2010 sense of ethics emerging here which apparently doesn't exist in the sort of bold new world of like nihilism but like this is just fraud yeah no i know and like people talk about you know oh we need crypto regulations like you don't need any new regulations

Fraud is still fraud. Like stealing from people is illegal. But that's like a whole separate point. This entire thing when everyone was doing this on Wall Street, it like crashed the economy a bunch of times. We were like, holy shit, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to do this. But I don't know. Capitalism is such that you could just buy the government and now all your fraud schemes are legal. Right. If you do it on the blockchain, crime is legal, apparently. Yeah. But yeah, so, you know, there's this really early,

scandal where it's like, oh, you know, insiders are trading this token. Everyone's calling it a rug pull because that's like the colloquial term for when someone launches a project and then steals all the money. And it certainly looks like that's what's happening. And so Millet very quickly distances himself from the project. He deletes the tweet that he made and he sends out a new tweet saying, basically, I didn't know anything about these guys. I don't really know what their project is. I just thought it was this

you know, cool thing that it was going to support Argentinian businesses. I, you know, I renounced all affiliation with it basically. And then he, of course, like blames his political opponents for trying to weaponize this against him. And, you know, he goes very much out swinging on people being like, I can't believe you're taking advantage of this scam to come after my reputation. Oh, the Perotists made me do it. Oh, right. Exactly. He's like, this is all your fault somehow. Yeah.

So anyway, you know, that all happens and it sort of launches the project into chaos because the way that the people on the inside are talking about it and huge grain of salt here because, you know, these are people who are potentially admitting to their crimes. Well, it also like these are professional liars, like their job is to lie to people for a living. Like it's.

And yeah, and several of the things that they've said have already been proven to be untrue. So like huge, huge, huge grain of salt here. But their story is that, oh, we were sniping the token. Yes, but it's not bad because we were doing it to try to protect people from the other token snipers who show up on launches like this. Like we,

No, no, you don't understand. We had to do the scam to save you from the other people who were trying to do the same scam. You're not even exaggerating. That's literally what they said. That's so good.

And so they come up with this like harebrained theory where they're like, okay, if we snipe the tokens early, we can stop other token snipers from accumulating these huge piles of the tokens and then dumping them and causing the whole thing to crash. And so, you know, they will be limited to sniping smaller quantities that won't totally wreck the whole, you know, chart basically and cause it to go to zero. And then we'll take our accumulated pile of tokens and like slowly seed it back

in to try to stabilize the chart. I mean, it's like blatant market manipulation that they're describing, like in defending themselves against allegations that they're committing crimes, they're admitting to new crimes. It's like this whole thing. But that's the story is that they were like, we had to do this to protect the chart. And the idea was that like Millay was going to make this video.

promoting the token even more and at that point they were going to put all this money that they had taken back into the project but of course that video never came because melee had already cut his losses and was like i don't want anything to do with this

And so now the guys who launched this token are sitting on like ostensibly a hundred million dollars worth of tokens. I use the word ostensibly because it's crypto and the numbers aren't real. And you know, there's really not a hundred million dollars floating around in there. People, again, people talk about how this is like a $4.5 billion crypto scam. There was never $4.5 billion in this. It's all fake money. But like the,

It is true that there were people who put real money into this. They got totally scammed, basically taken for a ride because they thought that they might be able to make money on it because the president endorsed it because they thought there was this, you know, somewhat legitimate scheme behind it to go to Argentinian businesses.

They lost their money and it all went to this guy, Hayden Williams, who is, you know, connected to Millay, who has some degree of influence with Millay, who claimed in text messages that he controls Millay. Oh my God. Yeah. By the way, use the N word, by the way, in these two. You have to, like, who these people are? Like, this is, this is, this is a white guy using the N word. Like, yeah, this guy is like whiter than I am and using the N word to say that he controls Millay. Not great. Ah,

He said in this text message that was leaked that he was sending money to Millay's sister, who is very influential and who sort of is Millay's right-hand sister. You know, it's sent money to her and that as a result of that, Millay will do anything that I want. He'll say what I want. He'll tweet what I want. He'll, you know, he's my puppet, basically. Of course, Millay was very unhappy about this characterization, but it seems like there's money trading hands behind the scenes, even though Millay was not

you know, behind the token directly. And, you know, this has all resulted in somewhat of a political scandal for Millet, which is both surprising that, like, of all things that could have caused a political scandal for Millet, there are so many things to choose from, and this is what it was. But...

you know, he's now facing these these allegations that he was complicit in the fraud, that he should be impeached. Even, you know, there's some rumblings among the opposition party about trying to start some sort of impeachment proceedings against him. And it's all gone very south very quickly for him, I think. God, it really would be so incredibly funny if this is the thing that brings him down. I don't know if it will, but also like

I don't know. This is one of these like it in an even bigger way than like the Trump plane crashes are like a political fucking godsend like handed down to the opposition and the Democrats aren't don't use it. Right. Because, you know, the Democrats.

right instead of just like doing do is it doing anything i would do which is starting literally every speech with fucking no cops no kings no crashes um they're like they're like no we're not doing anything but like this is like if you were like a catholic opponent of this administration like this is like fucking god like reaching a giant hand down and going hey have this thing to beat him like have this stick to beat him over the head with

Yeah. And, you know, to their credit, I feel like Argentinian politicians are taking better advantage of this than U.S. politicians have taken of their many opportunities because they are calling for, you know, impeachment. There have been, you know, many lawsuits filed against Millet. And, you know, there is a judge looking into his case.

degree of connections here. Obviously, there is some amount of corruption over in the Argentinian government. And so, you know, the degree to which they will adequately investigate themselves is somewhat questionable, let's just say. Yeah. And, you know, the likelihood of an impeachment proceeding actually, you know, getting the votes to go to trial is certainly questionable. But

This has been used in a somewhat effective way to attack the credibility of melee, which is worth doing, I think. And I'll say this about Peronism, right? The thing about Peronism is that it's the engine that devours social movements, right? Anytime a social movement comes in, the Peronists consume it from the inside, right?

The thing about the way that, like, Perotism functions is, like, okay, so they've eaten all these social movements, but it's not quite like the U.S., where you can just, like, disband it and make it go away. Like, you actually have to still have the thing the social movement does, and that means that these motherfuckers can throw a protest. Like, whatever else you say about the Perotists, they aren't capable of putting an unbelievable number of people into the streets, and I'm really interested to see what's going to happen, like, this weekend and over the coming weeks to see if we see another...

17th giant round of protests, like also specifically about this. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be curious too. It's really interesting to me, like to what degree this resonates with everyday people, I guess, in Argentina, because, you know, there's a lot to complain about with the Mule government. And so, you know, it's sort of fascinating to me that people are latching onto this and

You know, it's sort of interesting just to compare with the United States where there's a lot to complain about with the Trump administration. And, you know, people were complaining about the meme coin. But by the time that was, you know, partly because it was pre inauguration. And so Trump hadn't started signing all the executive orders. And so it was very quickly overshadowed by the other sort of blatantly illegal things happening within the Trump administration.

And so it didn't get that much traction in sort of the longer term. So it's interesting to me to watch this play out in a different country where, you know, Millet has been in office for some time now. And, you know, this has gained at least some degree of a foothold. And I'll be curious to see, you know, if that endures or not. He's he's sort of trying to play it off as like,

you know, oh, everyone knows crypto is risky. He said something, he tried to do this like damage control interview on TV where he said that basically like the people who bought this token knew they were playing Russian roulette and they got the bullet, which is a wild thing to say. Jesus Christ.

Yeah, that's just a nutty thing to say, but also very in character for him. And, you know, he said something in that interview to the effect of like, you know, only a couple thousand people lost money. What's the chances that those people were even Argentinian? Like, we shouldn't even care if they were, you know, not Argentinian. And so, you know, it's sort of interesting to watch him try to downplay this. It's like, well, yeah, of course people lost money. It's a scam, you know, like, yeah, I guess.

I think part of the reason this is like a real issue for him is that like he really truly, you know, and it's something that like Trump is also doing this. But he like really truly went out to like his main base of supporters. Yeah. And was like, I was going to take you up behind a woodshed and shoot you and like take the money out of your pocket. And like the way he's like systematically fucking all of the people who are supposed to be his political base.

And, like, Trump was also doing this, but, like, people sort of, like, haven't set in that this is what's happening. Whereas, like, this rug pull thing, it's, like, this is, like, the only thing that the fucking unhinged right-wing crypto bro people care about. Like, this is, like, the one thing you could possibly do to, like, piss them off. Yeah.

It's really interesting to see like what causes crypto people to turn on you, because it did happen in a much more limited way with Trump, where, you know, the U.S. crypto movement, I guess that's not the right word for it, but the industry or the crypto world had really supported Trump very heavily. And, you know, they had donated to him. But there was also this widespread belief among people who traded crypto that Trump was going to be good for crypto. He was going to cause crypto prices to go up. He was going to

fix all these regulations that they thought were holding the industry back and all this stuff. And then when Trump came out and launched a meme coin, some of his most devoted fans among the crypto community were horrified by it.

And they really responded in a way that I think a lot of people didn't expect, which was like, I can't believe he's doing this grifty meme coin. He's supposed to believe in crypto, not just use it to steal money from his supporters. And so, like, there was actually this degree of shock that very briefly rattled the crypto world.

in the U.S. as well. And so I think that's, you know, sort of interesting to see is that like, OK, you're allowed to do scams and, you know, run your government in a way that personally benefits you as long as it's not reflecting poorly on us and it's not taking money from us. But as soon as it starts to make people, you know, look askance at meme coins or the crypto world in general, or it starts to affect crypto prices, then things turn bad somewhat quickly. Yeah.

Yeah, I wonder, I don't know, I'm interested in your take on this. Like how much of that is people who are in less meme coin-y things who are worried about like their assets because they at some point like have to be able to cash out? Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Like there are factions in crypto.

where I sort of referred to this earlier when we were talking about Bikili, but, you know, there are Bitcoiners who believe that Bitcoin is the one true cryptocurrency and that everything else is a total scam. And so they are really upset when these meme coins come out because they feel like it reflects poorly on Bitcoin because people just sort of lump everything together. There's sort of a step down from that, which is people who...

think that there are more legitimate cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin, but meme coins are not them. And so there's been all this talk recently where they're like, look at all these meme coin scams that are getting in the news. You know, there was like the Hawk Tua meme coin that totally like stole a news cycle for a minute there.

And they're terrified that, you know, people are starting to think of crypto as meme coins. You know, it's just one and the same. And they're like, people are not going to think of all these wonderful, legitimate cryptocurrencies and all of their use cases if they're thinking about Hawk to a coin and how they ripped off a bunch of people, which like.

Personally, I think that the reputation is perhaps somewhat deserved. But, you know, there is this belief among some people that like, oh, this is not real crypto and it's giving the rest of crypto a bad reputation. And we're actually starting to see talk of that in some of the higher places where, you know, I've been seeing reporting that people are talking about the Hoctua coin on Capitol Hill. You know, like when they're talking about shredding regulations to prevent people from running securities frauds.

the opposition is like, well, do we want Hawk to a coin everywhere? Like, is this really what we want? And so it is, you know, affecting the public perception and the perception in, you know, Congress to some extent, which I think is what's really scaring people because

They've just made these huge inroads with, you know, all of these now crypto friendly politicians and friendly regulators. And now crypto is out here making a fool of itself right as, you know, new legislation or regulation might be installed.

Yeah, and this gets me to, I think, the thing I want to close on, which is, you know, like, we actually did successfully, as a society, kill the NFT. Yeah. Like, we took that motherfucker out back and stabbed it to death. And I'm wondering whether you think that, like, this is a moment where we can, like, use this as a wedge thing to try to, like, fucking kill this entire industry and how vulnerable they are to, like, the negative PR rattlings from all of this?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point that like the NFT, even as crypto has had a resurgence, you know, Bitcoin crossed $100,000. NFTs are like nowhere to be found. You know, like the NFT platforms are struggling. A couple of them just went out of business. And

I think it is largely thanks to the fact that NFTs became really cringe, you know, like everyone was like, oh, those stupid monkey pictures. And that had like a really devastating impact on this entire industry that was supposed to be like the future of art or whatever, you know?

And so I think there is that potential throughout other portions of the crypto world. I would not be shocked to see that happen to these meme coin platforms where they sort of lose their novelty value and people just see them as big scams and there's really no point. But

Unfortunately, I don't think that, you know, all of crypto can be undermined by the cringe factor or, you know, the sort of societal distaste for it, because, I mean, there are people who have bought Bitcoin early, who have.

of dollars in crypto, in Bitcoin. They are now working in the U.S. government. You know, they have like very strong control over very powerful institutions. And so there is this countervailing force to keep crypto alive at

basically any cost. And I think we're seeing them somewhat desperate to do that as we're seeing calls for, say, a Bitcoin strategic reserve, which is something that keeps coming up. The idea that the US government should personally stockpile Bitcoin, which they make a couple of arguments as to why they should do that, which are not very convincing even to some of the people in the

the sort of underlying thread through it is that if the U.S. government holds a substantial amount of Bitcoin, they won't be able to afford to let the Bitcoin price collapse or to do anything that might threaten the cryptocurrency industry. And so I think that's why we're seeing the attempts to

you know, sort of work crypto into government checkbooks, into the banking system, into traditional finance, you know, people trying to get Bitcoin ETFs into, you know, your pension plans and your retirement funds and things like that is really to make it so endemic and so, you

contagious, I guess, to the rest of the financial world that it's almost like, you know, this this threat that they're holding against the government, which is like, all right, if you kill us, we'll kill you. Yeah. And I think it's this interesting thing of like, sorry, I know I said we were going to close up like, no, this is fun. There's this interesting way in which like this seems like the end game for the entire like tech bubble economy is like

you know like none of these fucking companies have ever been able to make money right none of these fucking companies like they all they all every like fucking like everything from like like fucking uber to like fucking like google and amazon like hemorrhaged money uber will hemorrhage money until it eventually the bubble pops and it dies right

But like Amazon only really started making money. You know, Google was kind of making money, but like Amazon only started making money when they started getting government contracts for like their cloud computing shit. Yeah. And like that looks like the end game. Like, you know, this is this is the thing with like Elon's like fucking electric armored vehicle contract is like the only thing that can keep the bubble going is just pure state intervention. But that also gives me a little bit of hope because I think the thing that's kept this giant bubble economy going for like over like a decade and a half now is

has been really, really... Even under the original Trump administration. I mean, the original Trump administration kind of got bailed out by COVID to some extent. Like, you know, I mean, like the original Argentinian economic crisis was this... There was this huge wave of currency collapses in 2018 where it was sort of contained. Like the IMF did a bailout in... Well, it was trying to do a bailout in Argentina and it kind of got contained, but it set off a black wave of uprisings. But like, there's been this like really... It's taken this really careful financial management and like all of these like...

like a trillion dollars of like overnight repo purchases like every day from the treasury to like make sure there's enough liquidity in the banking like industry to prevent like the kind of like 2008 style collapses. And I think it's taken a really delicate hand and

you know, like, I don't think it's a good thing, but on the other hand, like these guys just fire the nuke police, like while they were moving a nuke. And I, I wonder if they can actually keep the dance going or if they're just going to, or if they're going to fuck up their bubble economy, just blow it all up, which might maybe nuke all of these people in the process. Maybe. I also think that, you know, if we're talking like accelerationism, I think that one of the most interesting things that we're going to be seeing now is that the

The crypto industry has long argued that they have all this potential. They are just around the corner from reinventing the financial system to be wonderful and spectacular. And the only reason that they haven't actually made true on that is because of those pesky regulators that are stopping them from doing all the stuff that they want. And so they've spent years now

vilifying the regulators, claiming that the industry would be so wonderful if these regulators would just let them innovate. And now they've got the regulators. They're in a world where, you know, they basically own the regulators. All of the enforcement cases against them are going to go away. You know, the friendliest possible regulations are going to be introduced.

And now crypto doesn't have that excuse anymore, right? They can't just say that the reason we don't do anything useful is because these stupid regulators won't let us lend you Bitcoin or whatever. And so I think, you know, there is going to be this moment where people are like, okay, so...

do it now, you know, like do the innovation now. And it's going to expose a lot of the popsicle sticks and bubble gum that's holding up this crypto industry because they don't have that excuse anymore, which I think will be interesting. I just hope it doesn't take like, you know, the economic collapse of an entire country to prove it.

Well, my line on this is that, like, accelerationism as an ideology doesn't exist anymore because there's nothing you can do to do the acceleration. Yeah. Right? Or something like left accelerationism. Like, Trump and Elon Musk, like, just have their fucking foot hammering the pedal all the way down. We are accelerating as fast as we can possibly go, and all we have left is to, like, make sure that the fucking acceleration goes our way and not theirs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, I guess like, you know, it's me trying to find a light in the darkness, you know, it's like, all right, well, I guess at least we might see the crypto industry fall apart. Yeah. Well, look, they might bring down the first anarcho-capitalist president. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. Today, Argentina, tomorrow, the world. Yeah. Well, and I think also just like, you know, it's interesting to see this uprising and sort of broad distaste for Millet and everything that he's doing when everything that he's doing is so clearly modeled after Donald Trump and his affection for Elon Musk. And so, you know, to see people sort of turn on that is perhaps a little bit instructive. Yeah.

And I think this is interesting kind of like bounce back thing too, because he's like, you know, he's someone that he's modeling himself on Trump one, uh,

like the first Trump administration, but he got even weirder with it than like Trump one did. And now Trump two is like modeling itself back. Yeah. They're like slingshotting, but yeah. And, and, and, and, and I don't know, hopefully the, the fucking rebound hits them too. And they also get the backlash to it. And we, yeah, I don't know. We, we don't all die when they accidentally set a nuke off because we've driven them out of power already.

That would be nice. Yeah. Well, Molly, thank you so much for coming on the show and for talking with us about this unhinged bullshit. And also just genuinely thank you. Thank you for reporting on all of this shit because, oh my God, it is not easy. I don't know how you stay sane. I don't pretend I do. I think that's the secret. You just have to give in to the madness. Yeah.

Yeah, well, thank you for having me. Yeah, and where can people find your work? You can find me at citationneeded.news. I also run Web3IsGoingJustGreat, which is Web3IsGoingGreat.com. And then I'm on social media everywhere. You'll find me from either of those websites. Yeah, we will put links to all of this in the description. Thank you again. And yeah, I don't know, go make crypto so uncool that these people have a terrible day in panic. I'll do my best.

Hi everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and the people putting them back together. And today Garrison and I are joined by Hayley and Dan. Both Hayley and Dan are gender affirming care providers in the Northeast and they both work at federally qualified health centers. Welcome to the show guys. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Okay, so for people who are not familiar, maybe they've been fortunate enough to have really good healthcare their whole life, or fortunate enough to not live in the United States and have this bizarre web of healthcare provision. Can you explain what a federally qualified healthcare center is? Sure. You mind if I take this one, Hayley? Sure.

So I would start by saying that our industry, our advocacy arms would riot if they assumed that federally qualified health centers weren't good care, right? So I got to dismiss with that to start. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I guess good is a relative. Yeah. I've relied on a federally qualified health care center for a while and it was great. They were very nice. Actually, my prescriptions cost a lot less now than they do with my very expensive IHOP insurance. Yeah.

So around the 1960s, there was the sort of free clinic movement that got started. And what grew out of that became the federally qualified health center system in the United States.

So there are roughly 1,600 unique federally qualified health centers all over the country. And we, as in sort of, you know, a confederated set of health centers all across the country, are responsible for treating those most in need in the United States. So the Medicaid population, those without insurance, we cannot turn anybody away if you do not have insurance.

People in rural areas where health care is very difficult to access and to get, undocumented folks, and really everybody in between. At the health center that I work at, we mostly treat folks on Medicaid, which is pretty typical, although you'll find in states with no Medicaid expansion, it's a lot more uninsured and less Medicaid. But we are the nation's safety net health care provider. And without us, there are roughly one in 10 Americans would not get their health care. Jeez.

I guess people who are not in the United States, do you want to go and give us a one minute speed run of what Medicaid is, Medicare?

Sure. So America does not have a nationalized insurance program, as we are very frustrated with most of the time. It's mostly commercial insurance that you mostly get through your job. But if you are not fortunate, it's not the right word. But if you're not fortunate enough to get that, Medicaid is the system that gives health insurance to people who are living at or below the federal poverty line. With the Affordable Care Act or the ACA, Obamacare, that level raised a little bit. So you could still get Medicaid if you were at

above the federal poverty line, but this is mostly for the working poor. That's who gets Medicaid.

Cool. Yeah, it's a great system. Let's talk about how this is funded then. Like you said, the US doesn't have like a single-payer healthcare system. So how are these healthcare centers funded right now? Or maybe how were they funded like six weeks ago? Yeah. So most of the work that we do is fee-for-service. We're not a lot different than a lot of other places in that regard, right? If you have Medicaid patients, we are a fee-for-service program. We give

provision of care to them on a per visit basis, same as anywhere else in the country and how that works. And we get reimbursed for it. What makes FQs different than everywhere else is two things. One, we get a special rate that is designated because of our willingness to take on these more expensive, more complicated patients and to ensure that they are healthy enough to keep

About expensive systems of care, like emergency rooms and things of that nature. Yeah. And two is that we have a grant called the Fed 330. And this is a sort of like large sort of use it as you need to grant that depending on the agency is anywhere from five to 25% of your total annual funds and is meant to cover all of the folks who can't afford care and are uninsured.

Part of my funding also, I do a lot of work with HIV and HIV prevention. So a lot of my work is done via Ryan White funding. And there's some other kind of separate funding streams that's applicable specifically to gender affirming care. However, it's all kind of messy and tied up in a lot of those other funding streams that Dan mentioned. And there's some specific limitations because of those funding streams, again, historically, because

Who knows right now? But through something called the Hyde Amendment, it means that our funding would be at jeopardy if we provided abortion care. So there are some kind of limitations. A lot of what we do as an FQHC is providing really comprehensive, expansive care. We're kind of some of the few clinics that do everything that we do under one roof. But there have been some limitations, specifically abortion, to that. Yeah, it's more of a like...

A healthcare experience that I'm used to as someone from Europe, like going to one of these centers and like the American one where you get a referral and then get it approved and blah, blah, blah. And like a lot of the ways that I talk to friends who live in other countries, like I feel like my role is kind of more similar to like a GP role.

As a nurse practitioner, there isn't necessarily an equivalent, but I feel like a GP is kind of a very similar universal way to understand a lot of what I do. Yeah, that makes sense. So can you explain Ryan White Funding? Like, where does that come from? Why is it called Ryan White? So basically, Ryan White Funding is...

initiated in, I believe, the early 90s during the AIDS crisis and was a large government initiative. It's named after Ryan White, who was a patient who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion. So Ryan White funding right now is a major source for funding things like PrEP, which

which is medication for prevention for HIV as well as direct HIV treatment. Yeah so a number of these things right gender affirming care perhaps care for people with HIV or preventing people from getting HIV through pre-exposure prophylaxis like you said like these are things that have been like like at the center of the culture war for the current government right like they're there like

The things that they point to is, you know, whatever that sort of like in Paxton's impact on construction of fascism, he talks about moral decline, right? And this is their moral decline, that this is what they use when they're constructing their kind of we will save you narrative. What does that mean for funding?

And like, what does that mean more importantly for your patients, for people who come to you for these different types of care? I mean, I think it's terrifying. I think I'm more on the patient facing side. So a lot of the conversations I've been having are just about the uncertainty. I'm a prescriber for a lot of trans youth, adolescents and young adults. And so moreover, I

The uncertainty of just being able to get their medication, the stress of being publicly named and targeted in this culture war has just created a climate of...

fear. As my job, I want to be able to reassure patients that I am going to fight for them and do all that I can. But it's really scary. As Dan mentioned, a lot of our patients don't have financial safety net. They don't have a medical safety net. We're really the one option for them. And if our clinic does not continue to offer this type of care, these are our kids who are going to go without hormones. I prescribe puberty blockers.

My work as a gender affirming care provider isn't just walkers and hormones, but those are medications that we know are life-saving. We know that unfortunately kids will suicide if they don't have access to those medications. And so I think, you know, talking about funding, talking about

And these bigger shifts politically, you know, are things that unfortunately a lot of the conversations I'm having are really coming just down to safety and safety planning and figuring out support networks and talking about creative ways to get hormones if we can't prescribe them. Yeah.

I think it's worth talking about the fact that there are so many angles of attack on this, right? There is the one that is just very clearly aimed at trans kids, right? The EO that specifies protecting children, it's nonsense. But that is aimed at ending this care everywhere. Now, are they going to be able to do it everywhere? I don't know, maybe, but not quickly. But they can end it for FQHCs all across the country by simply making it like the Hyde Amendment.

If we were to perform abortion services at the place that I work, then we would lose our Fed 330 funding and we would lose our FQ designation, which would cut our rate in half.

And that would devastate the business and put us out and mean that we could not care for the thousands and thousands and thousands of other people that we care for besides those kids, right? Right. Then there are also just the doge fuckery that is going to harm all of this and may create a lot of the same outcomes, right? Which is they turned off

grants kind of just across the board. Yes, some of them were targeted on things like gender-affirming care, but most of them were just like, it's a grant, we're turning it off. And then there was the TRO, but much of that funding has remained frozen. We have been told that the system is up and running and that they undid what they did and the courts stepped in and, oh, don't we have the courts still here in the United States? Isn't that a good thing?

but they just kept the funding off, whether because they're incompetent or because they're actively defying the law, doesn't really matter. And as a result, federally qualified health centers all across the country have laid people off. They have closed clinics and have entirely gone underwater in some cases. And then those people are not there to treat

that needs them so badly. And all of these systems are grounded in their communities. So when you lose, you know, the clinic that's in LA that had to close its doors for the office that's, you know, on one side of town, the people there knew that place. It was perfect.

part of their community, part of their existence. It was grounded in that community and its community's needs, and that's just gone. And this puts us in a very difficult position and, you know, leadership in a very difficult position of figuring out, well, do I worry about these trans youth and the fact that they might kill themselves, or do I worry about the impact that

standing up on principle and saying, I won't toss them to the wolves might have on the rest of the system. And it becomes a very difficult sort of situation for us as providers to navigate. But, you know, in fairness to leadership, which I disagree with, for them too. Yeah, that's tough. Can you briefly explain, like maybe lay out a timeline? Because we talked about executive orders there. We talked about a TRO situation.

Like there was a large number of executive orders, right, in the last three weeks. So like maybe people missed them. Can you explain the pertinent executive orders and then what's the tentative restraining order? Yeah. So on Trump's first day in office on the day of his inauguration, so January 20th, he signs 100 some odd executive orders.

The ones that are particularly of interest to us in healthcare were protecting children against chemical and surgical mutilation is the name of it, which is a disgusting and vile name. Yeah. And then protecting women, something, something, something. Defending women. Yeah, defending women, which is similarly aimed at transgender individuals. And I think will be used after we are under attack for trans youth to come after trans adults in federally qualified health centers as well.

Those EOs led to later that week on Friday, we got emails to every PI, which is principal investigator on every federal grant that we had that said, because of those two, and there was one about DEI, which is also an executive order, you are not allowed to use any of these grant dollars in service of anything in defiance of these three executive orders. So that was the first shot we got and it came only four days later.

It's threatening, but it wasn't specific, right? It didn't specifically say we're going to do X, Y, or Z, but it was, here's the threat. The following Tuesday, Doge is let loose and announces that they are freezing federal grant funding tied to anything that is in opposition to

to those things. If you actually looked at the Excel file that they released with the actual grants, it froze everything. Like it was not just the stuff that they felt was in opposition to this. It was like everything. We have a ton of grants that were on that list at the agency that I work at. And boy, oh boy, oh boy, was there a lot of panic going around.

Wednesday rolls around and they get a judge to come in and sort of put a halt on it. And then later that day, the press secretary says, oh, we're just going to rescind the memo. We're still going to freeze everything. And then the judge comes back and puts a temporary restraining order. So in theory, what that should have meant is that all of that grant funding once again flows and

And it did not. Importantly, too, for us, given how much Medicaid dollars we take in, Medicaid portals in all 50 states went down. So we could not get any of those dollars in service of what we were doing for 12 hours, but still.

It was this very concerning situation because Medicaid was not on their list of things that they were after, and yet we couldn't even access it at the state level. A few more weeks go by and there's news popping about hey, you said you unfroze stuff, but it's still frozen. Another judge issued an order saying that no, for real, I need it this time. Unfreeze everything. I know some of the grants that we had that we couldn't access seem to have come back online, but I

I don't know. You know, I think it would be an impossible thing to do an accounting of like every single one that might have been turned off that might or might not be back on right now. But I am doubtful that at this point, every single grant across the federal agency is potentially available for folks. Just seems unlikely to me. Yeah, we should pivot to advertisements here. So I'm going to do that and then we'll be right back.

Okay, we are back. So you talked about these grants being turned off or not coming. What does that mean? Does that mean people don't get care? Does that mean providers don't get paid? Does that mean they can't access their prescriptions? What does it look like if I'm trying to access care through one of your clinics? So, yeah, I'll speak to that a little bit on the prescriber side because I think, you know, having direct contact with someone who works in the administration is really the only way that I can

have really been able to get any updates. So as a healthcare provider, it's been utter chaos. Basically every day we've gotten different messaging around whether or not appointments can be scheduled, new patients can schedule intakes, whether or not we're able to prescribe these life-saving medications. And no one knows exactly what's

Gender affirming care is basically health care. There's nothing that separates it. There's no hard line. There's no clear distinction. It is medically indicated evidence-based care. So saying you can't do gender affirming care, it literally doesn't make any sense in terms of, you know, what we do as prescribers. And

On my end, I've been faced with intimidation. I've been faced with kind of whisper networks of misinformation coming from administration trying to get us to stop prescribing because they do see this type of care as a liability.

I'm still prescribing. There is no state law in the state that I am in that prevents my ability to practice to the full extent of my scope. There are also no medical indications for me to stop prescribing. And I'm ethically bound as a nurse practitioner to do what I believe is best for my patients, which is to continue to provide them with the care that they need.

but it's terrifying. I think importantly, Haley and I have the advantage of working for a more economically stable institution. There's a lot of health clinics out there that have a week's worth of working capital, right? So if all of a sudden they lose access to every grant dollar, they lose access to their Fed 330, they were scheduled to draw down on a grant that was going to cover a whole bunch of upcoming expenses, but they haven't done it yet. And then they can't like in

Like in very real ways, that may mean that the doors are closed and the place goes under and that no one can get care there. And there is this real challenge of, you know, how do we decide what is the best thing to do? But for me and what sort of started working with in our agency, at least,

to organize around this is that like this is an anti-fascist practice that is the right medical thing to do it is the right ethical thing to do but it is also our chance to take an anti-fascist stance against this government because if we don't stand now for the very first group they're coming for then the next group which is without question trans adults

and undocumented people then those groups will fall just as quickly and then at some point we're doing the poem the first they came for the socialist thing and and i just refuse to be a part of that yeah let's talk about what that means then like like you said it's difficult to get any any response from administration right in terms of what you can do in terms of what you can't do

How are staff and providers organizing to make sure that they're able to keep providing for their patients? So just to provide also like a little bit of a peek into kind of the broader landscape of this, our clinic is not alone in their confusion on how they've been handling this. Mm-hmm.

Not only FQHCs, but also hospital-affiliated clinics, academic medical clinics have basically clinic by clinic decided on their own plan on how to manage this, which is also incredibly confusing for providers and for patients. But something that was really heartening was that NYU Lane-Gone, this was in the news recently, they canceled appointments for two kids, literally just two kids. Yeah.

which is more than enough. And it sparked this enormous outcry and protests.

And so I think there's also on my end, a lot of solidarity building with other providers who are doing this work and a lot of inspiration. There are clinics out there, some who are FQHCs like us who have stood firm and they've said, our doors are going to stay open. We're going to keep providing this care. And so I think there are models out there. And I think that there are networks of healthcare providers that

who are committed to continue to advocate and just continue to do this, right? Because a lot of what we're facing right now is intimidation. It's not actual legal threats as of yet. Yeah, I think the organizing side has been challenging, but also hugely rewarding, right?

It became really obvious really early on that both from the federal government's perspective, as well as from our organization's perspective, that the uncertainty was where they wanted us all to live and die. That was the place that served them and their goals the most. And so how does uncertainty sort of foster? Well, people don't talk to one another.

one another, right? Like this is true kind of in organizational sense. It's across the board, right? If you're in a union, you don't talk about your salary. It doesn't benefit you. It benefits the boss. And so if we're not talking to one another about where our lines are, who we're going to treat, whether we're going to keep doing it or listen to them, what we're being told or not being told that we're consulting lawyers, all these other kinds of things, then we're all just alone in the dark kind of, you know, trying not to scream and cry about the horrors that are happening around us.

So we pulled together folks with conversation here, conversation there, folks who before anything was going on internally, you know, made really bold statements about what they would and would not do around this kind of stuff. And now all of a sudden there's an internal network that's looking at, well,

okay, so individually we can keep doing this care because it's the right thing to do. But as a group, if they start coming after us, we have a lot more power. There's a lot more that we can do. And I suspect, and you know, Haley's getting at this point that like there are probably a network of us across the entire country in these kinds of settings that are not talking amongst ourselves publicly.

at our workplace, but are really not talking about it amongst ourselves on a national level. And I think we have some power that could be used there to really make a difference in all of this. And I am optimistic that if we talk about this, we get this out there, we make sure everyone's communicating openly about it, that there's a real possibility that we can work together to prevent this from being the first of many dominoes to fall.

And one thing that's interesting, I think, is that with trans healthcare, trans healthcare is inherently radical. Like trans healthcare is not something that came from the kind of medical hierarchy. This is by and large a field that was communal. Trans people were doing their own trans healthcare before it became kind of institutionalized into a lot of these spaces. So I think

We also have a lot of providers who are willing to fuck shit up, right? Like the community and the providers are intertwined. And I do think there is a real kind of radical bent to this type of work, which is why I think a lot of us have been so easily able to

and strategize and kind of come together. It's a pretty small world as well. We sat down on a call and talked about, you know, what are we going to do? And I made mention that like, oh, through my other organizing work, I've got a DIY connection for Estradiol. So that's a huge thing that will help us

if we can't prescribe this anymore, if Medicaid stops covering it, yada, yada, yada. I was like, but I don't have a, you know, a DIY solution for tea. If anyone knows of anybody, that'd be great. And immediately someone's like, oh yeah, absolutely. I do. It's tested. It's a 99.9% pure. We're ready to go. So now like, I wouldn't have done that. There was no way for us to know that that was the kind of radical work that people were doing, if not for coming together on this kind of stuff. Yeah. I think maybe we should explain like the inherent risks, like legally. Yeah.

And then the distinction between those two hormones legally, right? Like if people are unaware. Yeah. So, you know, as a medical provider, again, I have to be a little bit careful here, but basically because testosterone has been used by mostly the cis male community as an anabolic steroid and used, you know, in some that would call like anabolic steroid misuse or steroid use disorder, right?

it is a controlled substance. Estradiol is not. They're both bioidentical hormones. Every human on this planet, their body makes estrogen and testosterone, ENT, estradiol and testosterone. However, in the United States,

testosterone is considered a controlled substance which makes it a little more tricky for folks to access without a prescription and also can put them at legal risk if they do so right like there's a built-in legal consequence for people who are trying to manufacture that or who are trying to obtain it like outside of the sort of prescription system not that there aren't other probably legal threats coming down the pipeline i guess also testosterone is uh

Yes, it is a controlled substance. It does flow in the bodybuilding community. Yeah, it's not well controlled. Yes, and that is also worth stating because, yes, if you go to your average gym... Oh, yeah, you can walk across the border to Tijuana and see how gas stations have the prices, like unleaded premium...

Yeah, you can get testosterone prices like displayed in the same fashion. I mean, I'm sure you're a huge fan of Joe Rogan. So many of my other patients who are not trans have been influenced to purchase testosterone because of our good friend Joe Rogan. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating stuff.

Yeah. Which is also gender-affirming care, for whatever that's worth. Like, cis people get gender-affirming care, too. Yes, they do. It's a lot easier for them right now. So...

Let's talk about like what this organizing looks like on the ground, right? Like if someone's working, maybe they're not in a FQHC, right? Maybe they're working in an academic health center. Maybe they're working, you know, in one of the many other places where you can access gender affirming care in this country and they are feeling like alone or they're scared and they're not receiving any affirmation or help from their management and they don't know who they can talk to among their colleagues. Like,

how are people connecting? Like, what are people talking about? And like, how can people who are, because, you know, the healthcare system is vast in this country because it duplicates itself because the nature of American privatized healthcare, like,

How can people who want to continue providing care for patients do that? How do they organize their colleagues? How do they contact people who are already organizing? Like, let's talk through the nuts and bolts of it. I mean, I think there's a lot of national orgs out there that are really doing the work. So if you're a medical provider, I would highly recommend to join GLAMA, which is the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, because they have some lawsuits filed.

And as a member of GLAMA, that could possibly give you some additional protection following other orgs like Lambda Legal, SAGE, which is an organization for an elder gay, lesbian, and queer trans folks. Trans people have existed and have built organizations. A lot of those organizations are fighting this on a national level. And some of those are more geared towards

healthcare professionals like Glamour. I would say there's two conversations that we all need to be having. Those external organizations are huge and necessary for direction. Within your own space, you have to talk to your colleagues in a way that's honest and talk to them about risk-taking, talk to them about where you will and will not be

fudge on some of these kinds of things. Talk to them about the value of the work that you all do, because there's more of you doing it. Talk to your trans colleagues. They exist. They're out there. Like they have very strong opinions on this. I am sure. And then talk to a lawyer, talk to an employment lawyer, because your corporate attorneys have very different goals than you do. Their goal is simply to protect the company and its bottom line. And if

Both they and the federal government and the sort of DOJ are spewing absolute bullshit. So don't let them flood the zone with nonsense. Get a lawyer who can tell you what's nonsense and stand firmly in that because it is. And then when you start thinking about as an organization, as a group, as a set of employees,

communicating with leadership about these kind of things, know that the law is actually not on their side, it's on yours. And let them know that they are exposing themselves to vulnerability for malpractice and for civil rights violations and any number of other things that they probably don't want to be on the hook for. This is the leverage that we've got right now. It seems to have slowed things down a little bit internally for us that they've had to confront like a very well-

pointed out legal opinion that said that like they were exposing their providers to civil lawsuits if they didn't do this and that the fdca the federal tort claims act didn't protect people under these guides that has been really beneficial to us the other thing i would say is like there's a real union sort of feel to a lot of this and as we started coming together a bunch of us realized well we all kind of had union conversations somewhere along the way but

Corporate unions and like SEIU represents a lot of like individual sort of arms of companies like the ones that we work at. They aren't interested in the politics of the work you do. They're interested in your benefits. They're interested in you as a worker, but they're not interested in like your relationship to the work. And so we're approaching this not necessarily as a union, but from the perspective that if we need to strike on

on behalf of patients and their access to care, like that's a tool in our toolbox. And we don't have to do anything more than declare it a strike to be protected under the NLRB and some of these various different things. And we can do it for political reasons instead of for pay reasons, which means we can do it as a diverse group instead of as all the nurses, all the advanced practice providers, all of the psychologists and therapists and LCSWs, where they break us apart by discipline instead of by, you know, what sort of managerial status you are.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a, it's a very good point. I read a book recently about how the, um, the longshoremen in San Francisco stopped weapons going to Chile or El Salvador by striking and refusing to load weapons onto ships. And like, that's a union energy we could use right now. Yeah. Yeah. I think people would be well advised to like, I will say that they'd be well advised to check with federal and local law because like some state legal landscapes can be very different. Right. Yeah.

I want to end with like, people are probably afraid of accessing care, right? Like people are probably afraid of going to see their providers. Like understandably, like you said before, like especially kids or people under 18 are like right in the center of

The president of the United States called out a friend of mine personally by name recently. She's a trans athlete and like they're really coming after people. I understand that people are afraid. Like what should they know if they're concerned about their, their hormones supply or they're, they're on puberty blockers right now. Like if people are listening, what would you, maybe they don't know where their provider stands, you know? Yeah. I mean, I, I tell my patients this, but I'm in awe of them. They're incredible. Um,

And a lot of them are nerdy theater kids who love cats and they want to just exist. And some of them are also incredible outspoken activists. They are just amazing. And I will fight with everything that I've got for them. And I really hope they know that. I think one of the mantras I've been given to fellow colleagues, as well as to our leadership to like get their heads on straight is,

is that like fascism is messy right like it's it's a scary messy there are a lot of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks but the things that in theory are still in place like when and if they fall we have different problems than the ones we're facing now right so we still have in this country protect

protections for your healthcare information. So if what you worry about in going to the doctor is that someone will find out that you're trans and put you on a list, like I can't tell you that's never going to happen, but I can tell you that if it happens through your healthcare clinic, like we have significantly changed the threat model that we're all living in because HIPAA doesn't matter anymore and doesn't exist.

Your providers are spending enormous amounts of time thinking carefully about how they document, where they document, how much of a deal they want to make it, whether or not they can change the thing they're prescribing for you and what diagnosis it's for. We are finding ways to sort of throw as much cover and shade and, you know, camouflage over this as we can. But you shouldn't not come get care. Your life matters. You being in the body that you were meant to have matters.

Come talk to us. Come ask for help. We're here to do it. And we're not going to stop until they make us. And right now, they can't make us. And so we're going to keep doing it. And I think the mantra of trans people have always existed. Trans people exist. And personally, I'm going to do my best to make sure that for every single one of my patients that they continue to get what they need, however that looks like.

Then it is good to hear. I know a lot of trans people have essentially trauma with aspects of the medical community establishment, whatever. And like, you know, not all practitioners, maybe as much in our camp as maybe you are. And I would encourage people if they are, if they're still looking for care through like these sorts of channels.

You should try to find out where other trans people in your city are already going. There's certainly clinics that will have stuff on their website that indicate that they either specialize in this or they offer this.

as opposed to, you know, maybe just a general practitioner who may not be, you know, the greatest in this vein. And like this still happens. I've talked to a lot of friends recently who've spoken about having increasingly uncomfortable experiences with nurses or doctors when they're trying out like different clinics or different providers, university providers. So it is definitely worth doing some research beforehand. So, you know, the place you're going is going to be like,

with you, which is just an unfortunate reality of being trans. But that has been the case for a long time and it only continues to be a factor when considering care. Absolutely.

Yeah.

We don't really want to totally fly a trans flag on the roof right now because it's just going to cause everybody harm. So talk to your friends, talk to people in your community. They know us, we know them. I have a lot of activism experience outside of my work and it's amazing how many of those people end up being the same people that are in this conversation because of the way that this all works. Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to say, I think, unfortunately it is, it is the norm and evidence shows out like large evidence that,

studies show that trans people are treated pretty horribly by the healthcare system. And most of my patients have experienced that in some way or another. But like I was talking about before, a lot of trans healthcare kind of comes from a DIY community. And there's a lot of really good community information about, you know, kind of who to trust and who you can go to in terms of finding an allied provider. Yeah. Yeah. And that's really good.

I think that was really great, guys. Thank you so much for your time and for your words for people. Is there anything else you want to share? Or perhaps if people want to support your efforts somehow or support people's access to care, there's an organization you could direct them to. Or maybe like a way people can reach out to you. I know a lot of people, there are people in my family who are healthcare providers who have substantially changed their outlook on the world and politics by how terribly their trans patients have been treated.

So like, you know, like some of us have been organizing for a minute. Some of us have been organizing for like literally a minute. And like, how do those people access these networks? Like how can people who are not in health care support you and what you're doing and reach out? The gender liberation movement is incredible. They're doing a lot of work.

kind of public facing to really get the point across on why this is so essential and also why everybody should have the right to their own bodily and gender autonomy. I think I mentioned earlier, but LAMA, if you're on the healthcare side and, you know, there, there are also kind of, if you're in an academic setting looking to WPAS, the World Professional Association for

transgender health, kind of going to the experts in this field and really following and mirroring what they're doing. I think if you're looking as a

cis person who gets your care somewhere that might get federal funding but this is a thing that you care about would encourage you to sort of make people get on record about this kind of stuff right it's been the most distasteful piece of all this is the kind of like weaseled hiding in all of this so force them on the record ask them if they don't tell you send them an email if they don't you know respond to the email send a follow-up email like

make people get on the record about this so that we know where their values are. And if their values don't align with yours, take your business elsewhere. Because at the end of the day, healthcare is a business because the United States sucks. And so we have to use those dollars in the ways that we can, and it matters in a lot of ways.

I don't know that anyone will care to, and I certainly don't want to present us as the people with all the answers here because we just like are figuring this out as we go too. But you can email us at communityhealthresistance at proton.me and maybe let's have a conversation. Maybe there's like a ton of people in the FQ world

who want to do like a Amazon or a Starbucks like DIY union project where we're all working on this together for the politics rather than the pay as the primary sort of reason for it. Let's be a red union and get something going. I don't know that we can. I don't know that it's the right call, but I imagine there's more of us out there feeling this way than not. Yeah. And like whatever it is, we're stronger together than we are apart. So like talking is how we fix this.

Thank you so much, guys. I really appreciate you being so open about this. And yeah, I hope that you succeed. You're able to keep taking care of people. Thank you. We hope so, too. I'm Michael Phillips. I wrote a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis and have co-authored an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.

And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist who covers extremism and far-right movements for a variety of publications, including the Texas Observer and the Barbed Wire. School board meetings used to be boring.

Board members typically spend hours discussing financial reports, land purchases, plumbing contracts, and other tedious topics. But beginning in 2020, Christopher Ruffo, a former documentary filmmaker and fellow at the Right-Wing Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025, launched a campaign to convince Americans that public schools have become communist indoctrination centers.

Ruffo falsely claimed that public school teachers were brainwashing schoolchildren with something called critical race theory, or CRT for short. Adherents of critical race theory argue that racism has become so intrinsically entwined in American politics, law, and culture that anti-discrimination laws typically fail.

While CRT is studied in some graduate schools and law programs, it hasn't been taught at the grade school level where the outrage has been directed. That's certainly not the case in Texas, which influences curriculums across the nation due to its large population and purchasing power of textbooks. But precision wasn't the point of Rufo's campaign.

Rather, it was to refashion CRT into a sort of political cudgel, something that Ruffo admitted to in a series of tweets in 2021. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory, Ruffo wrote. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans, end quote.

On Fox News, Newsmax, and other right-wing media outlets, Ruffo convinced parents that instead of teaching kids reading, writing, and arithmetic, public school teachers were using CRT to brainwash white children into hating themselves and goading black children into hating white people. Radical teachers and professors, Ruffo warned, had launched a sinister campaign to destroy the American way of life.

In a foundational paper called Whiteness as Property, the critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth from the rich, and redistributing it along racial lines. Rufo's timing could not have been more perfect. The artificial CRT panic broke out during the COVID pandemic. Parents already felt frustration and fury about the hardships of campus closings, remote learning, and mask mandates.

Now convinced that their children were being taught to scapegoat white people for all the country's problems, parents across the country exploded in rage at local school boards. Reuters reported on one meeting that turned violent in Loudoun County, Virginia. What had been planned as a typical school board meeting in Virginia's wealthy Loudoun County this week devolved into pandemonium. Shit!

With hundreds of parents flooding an auditorium to accuse the school system of teaching their kids that racism in America is structural and systemic, something the school board denies is part of the curriculum. Things got so heated that the board members eventually walked out, leaving the police to deal with the unruly crowd, two people left in handcuffs.

I have a first amendment right. Loudoun County School Board has been roiled for months by accusations that it has embraced critical race theory, a school of thought that maintains that racism is ingrained in U.S. law and institutions and that legacies of slavery and segregation have created an uneven playing field for black Americans.

The idea that CRT, as it's known, is infiltrating public schools has become a rallying cry for conservatives who, like many in Loudoun, say it is being used to indoctrinate children that America is a racist country. Critical race theory is anti-white and it's not American. Those with an ear for historical rhymes may find this outcry familiar.

Resistance to racial integration and the civil rights era movements drew similar accusations of being hostile to whites and being a product of anti-American communism. And those with experience teaching students might chuckle at the accusations of ideologically motivated brainwashing and indoctrination. A common joke posted by teachers online is that, quote, if we could indoctrinate students, students would always read the syllabus.

But that didn't stop panic over CRT expanding to include anti-LGBTQ sentiment as well, with queer students and teachers who supported them being placed squarely in the crosshairs of a well-funded national hate machine dedicated to ginning up fear among local parents.

Here's a clip from one speech I personally witnessed at the school board meeting of my hometown school district, Grapevine-Colleyville, from August 2022. Embrace simple truths. There's only two genders. And boys should go to boys' rooms. Girls should go to girls' restrooms. And guess what? Teachers shouldn't be forced to use your freaking made-up fantasy pronouns. Fight like hell. Hold the line against the LGBT mafia and their dang pedo...

As absurd as all this may seem, there was something to this national phenomenon that was rooted in reality.

As of 2020, the United States had become more culturally diverse, racially integrated, and accepting of LGBTQ people than ever before. And our education systems have increasingly reflected that reality. There's also a deep irony to this reaction.

Prior to the advances of the civil rights era and beyond, schools in the United States have often been the centers of ideologically motivated education, but not the fantasy Bolshevik propaganda that outrages the right. In fact, it's usually been the opposite. For most of its history, American public schools have effectively advanced white supremacy, female subordination, and submission to capitalism.

In this episode, we're going to look at what has actually been taught in American schools over the years with a particular focus in Texas, and how what you learn about American history depends on where you live, and how Christian supremacists are successfully inserting their theology into school curriculums in much of the country, with Texas playing a leading role. Textbooks before the 1950s and 1960s civil rights era were explicitly and astonishingly white supremacists.

School books in the South, for instance, portrayed Confederates as gallant gentlemen fighting for a noble lost cause. This influenced popular culture, as we see in films like Gone with the Wind. Meanwhile, school kids were taught that abolitionists who wanted to end slavery before the Civil War were terrorists who needlessly plunged the country into civil war. And this, too, steeped into the public imagination of movies like Santa Fe Trail, starring Van Heflin.

The time is coming when the rest of us are going to wipe you and your kind off the face of the earth. According to the myths promoted first in schools, then echoed in mass entertainment, slavery would have gone away eventually if only white slave-owning Southerners had been left alone to figure it out themselves. Screenplay writers have often echoed what they heard in the classroom as we see in this scene from the 1940 film Santa Fe Trail.

Here, Raymond Massey plays John Brown, a white abolitionist who tried to start a slave rebellion in Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859. Massey portrays him as a thoroughly crazed maniac, while Errol Flynn depicts future Confederate General J.E.B. Seward as sweetly rational. Half of the people in America believe in your theory. A lot of them even condone your methods. That'll guarantee you a public trial. I'm not on trial with the nation itself.

Are you too stupid and blinded by a uniform to see what I see? A dark and evil curse laying all over this land. A carnal sin against God can only be wiped out in blood. But why in blood? The people of Virginia have considered a resolution to abolish slavery for a long time. They sense that it's a moral wrong. And the rest of the South will follow Virginia's example. All they ask is time.

From the 1880s until the 1960s, school books depicted the country's only brief experiment with multiracial democracy at the time, the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877, as a time of rampant corruption. These books often described emancipated African Americans as ignorant, lazy, and expecting government handouts, while their white allies were portrayed as crooks.

American schoolchildren, furthermore, learned from their teachers that so-called radical democracy was not a good idea, and sometimes dictatorship was the better option. The 1924 textbook, Our World Today and Yesterday, A History of Modern Civilization, published two years after Mussolini's fascist government took over Italy, had nothing but praise for that nation's new dictator.

The authors told the impressionable high school students the following about the world's first fascist leader. Mussolini has chosen a ministry made up of capable men and has straightened up the badly demoralized finances of the country. He and his followers are accused of suppressing liberty and downing the communists by violence.

Nevertheless, he has done much to do away with strikes and to reestablish conditions as they were before the economic demoralization of World War I set in. Again, school books reinforced an American culture in the 1920s that responded to the horrors of World War I, labor unrest, and the impact of immigration by becoming not only more intolerant, but also more anti-democratic.

All the while Mussolini's propaganda machine churned out images of a thriving country and a virile leader. Ilduce stripped down for the camera, worked side by side with the peasants and wrestled wild animals. Never mind that this one had no teeth. Nonetheless it was working. Mussolini attracted fans worldwide, including Thomas Edison, Sigmund Freud and Mohandas Gandhi. Here he speaks to his many supporters among Italian Americans.

I tell it, the Italians of America who are working to make America great.

Another textbook published in 1935, The Record of America, told students that the so-called founding fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, were not big believers in democracy, an attitude the authors seemed to endorse. As The Record of America put it, "...the founders had little faith in the ability of people as a whole to maintain self-control and wisdom in government. They had no confidence in the man without property."

a man who had failed to accumulate property would be regarded as shiftless, lazy, or incompetent, and not deserving a voice in the government of others.

The Constitution was written to retain power in the hands of those who release radical and to set obstacles in the way of radical mob action. After the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements, history textbooks for the first time covered the horrors of slavery, the heroism of African-American abolitionists like Surgeon or Truth and Frederick Douglass, and the evils of the Ku Klux Klan with clarity. But the backlash was swift.

particularly after the election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama, and the rise of the hyper-conservative Tea Party in response.

In 2010, Tea Party supporters took control of the Texas State School Board, which has control over Texas school book curriculums. They felt that this reckoning with America's racist past undermined patriotism and demanded a rewrite of school lesson plans. In 2015, Ronnie Dean Barron got a text from her son, Kobe.

He was glancing at a ninth grade geography textbook published by McGraw-Hill assigned him by his high school in Paralin, Texas, near Houston. He sent her a video highlighting a map in a shocking caption. Soon Burren posted her son's video online.

That video, as KPRC reported, spread outrage across the nation. A video post on Ronnie D. Buren's Facebook page. So I'm going to show you the book, and then there's just an interesting section. Went viral. Her video has been viewed more than 1.8 million times and has 48,000 shares. To get to the topic of conversation, you literally have to turn through the pages of her son's geography textbook. Immigration in the United States can be divided into four district periods.

Kobe, who's in the ninth grade at Pearland High School, was studying immigration when he read this in his textbook, a comment that referenced African slaves as workers. As if we worked our way up in America, as if we came here by choice for a better life. The offensive caption read in full, quote,

The Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s and the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.

The publisher of the book, simply titled World Geography, later apologized for the euphemism, noting that it did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves. The company said it would revise the digital version of the text and future print versions, but it was unclear at the time when the new edition would be in students' hands. The caption wasn't an accident. McGraw-Hill had given the state of Texas what it wanted—

Rather than anything like critical race theory, the State Board of Education in 2010 adopted changes in Texas curriculum standards for public schools, known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, that imposed a whitewash of American slavery, raised doubts about human-caused climate change, and imposed other right-wing content. To be sold in Texas, school textbooks had to meet the board's standards.

Texas State Board of Education members are elected from districts that tilt the body towards rural parts of the state and serve four-year terms, while the governor appoints the chair of the board. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the board has been dominated by Christian right activists, as a 2013 PBS report notes. Don McElroy has three jobs, and he loves them all. Good morning, Dr. McElroy's office. Job number one, dentist.

Job number two, Sunday school teacher. And job number three, member of the Texas State Board of Education, a seat he's held for the last 12 years. But it's that third job which has put this dentist and Sunday school teacher from Bryan, Texas, into a national debate over what kids are taught in school. Critics have accused McElroy of injecting his religious, conservative beliefs into the curriculum.

About every 10 years, the board revises the textbook standards for different subjects. Any books bought by the state must conform to these guidelines. The last big battle was over the science standards. This year, he's tackling social studies.

The demands Texas makes of textbook publishers matter, as PBS reported a decade ago. According to publishing insiders, textbooks are often tailored to fit Texas's standards because Texas is the largest buyer of textbooks. That means the choices made here could determine books that other states will buy. And that's led to a school fight that has the entire country looking on.

This is how Kobe Burin ended up with the World Geography textbook that used the word workers to describe chattel slaves. Kathy Miller of the anti-censorship group Texas Freedom Network said, quote, it's no accident that this happened in Texas. We have a textbook adoption process that's so politicized and so flawed that's become almost a punchline for comedians.

Those serious about education aren't laughing, however. In 2018, the state board removed Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be presidential nominee of a major political party, from the list of major historical figures Texas students must learn about. A decision later reversed after embarrassing news coverage.

In 2010, the board mandated that textbooks depict the Civil War as primarily a struggle over states' rights and not slavery, a choice that was later modified in 2018 to return slavery as the primary cause, but still maintained that, quote, states' rights and sexualism were key contributing factors.

Approved books still tell students that segregated black schools in the Jim Crow era, quote, had similar buildings, buses, and teachers as white schools, maintaining a hint of the separate but equal logics that upheld segregation. One textbook included a cartoon in which a space alien lands on Earth and asks if he's eligible for affirmative action programs.

Texas standards also misled students into thinking there was controversy about whether human activity has led to climate change and to, quote, consider all sides of scientific evidence regarding evolution, even though the scientific consensus in favor of fossil fuels, drinking climate change, and also the scientific consensus regarding evolution is nearly unanimous. Students can get dramatically different versions of American history based on which state they attend schools.

A New York Times comparison of textbooks used in California and Texas showed that both versions of the same history textbook include an annotated Bill of Rights. In reference to the Second Amendment, however, the California textbook notes that several federal court rulings have allowed regulation of gun sales and ownership. The Texas version of the same book replaces this commentary with a, quote, blank white space, as the New York Times reported.

Texas and California textbooks both introduced students to African American authors during the Harlem Renaissance, but only Texas students are told that, quote, some dismissed the quality of the literature produced by the Harlem Renaissance. As the New York Times reported, the California version of the history textbook addressed the issue of white flight.

the phenomena whereby parents moved from cities when schools became integrated and moved to overwhelmingly Anglo suburbs. The California textbook said this. Some people wish to escape the crime and the congestion of the city. Movement of some white people from cities to suburbs was driven by a desire to get away from more culturally diverse neighborhoods. Others believed the suburbs offered better and more affordable living.

The Texas version of the same textbook deleted the sentence referring to racism as a motive for white flight, but left the reference to a fear of crime, reframing what students learned about why suburbs grew so rapidly after World War II. The Texas State Board also specifically asked one textbook publisher to emphasize how many clergy signed the Declaration of Independence and to underscore the supposed importance of religion to the founders.

These particular demands were the result of intense lobbying by a Texas Christian nationalist, David Barton. Barton, a 70-year-old lifelong resident of Aledo, Texas, which is a small town just southwest of Fort Worth, has become a major influence on the Republican Party and its attitudes towards education, not just in the Lone Star State, but across the nation.

While reporting on the Conservative Political Action Conference for Rolling Stone, I recall being given a copy of one of Barton's books. He calls himself a historian, although his only credential is a bachelor's degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A one-time science and math teacher at a Christian academy in his hometown, Barton plunged into politics in 1988 as a Republican activist with a penchant for homophobia. He declared that homosexuality is as evil as any deed Adolf Hitler committed and said that the lack of cure for AIDS was God's punishment for a wicked community. Quote, your sexual choice is not a God-given right, he said on one occasion.

In 1988, Barton founded Wall Builders, a nonprofit the organization says is dedicated to, quote, educating the nation concerning the godly founding of the nation.

Barton believes that Americans have been deceived about the true meaning of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which declares, quote, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion. The founders, Barton claims, only meant that Congress should pick a particular Protestant denomination as the national faith.

Barton also argues that Thomas Jefferson meant that the wall of separation between church and state should operate only in one direction, that the government should not interfere with religion, but that Christians should dominate the government. As Barton said in an interview,

So we've got to get away from being scared to say we're a Christian nation. What we've got to do is define it the right way, define it the historical way. We can't let the left steal 300 years of heritage. We can't let them wipe out 300 court cases, wipe out what dozens of presidents and governors have said simply because they don't like the term.

We are a Christian nation. We have been a Christian nation, and that doesn't mean anything they think it does. We're not theocratic. We're not coercive. We believe in free choice. We don't believe in any of the others, and that's what we've got to get back to doing. We don't need to be ashamed at all that we're Christians and that we believe we have a Christian nation.

The story is much more complicated than Barton says, and he gets the most important details wrong. Most of the generation that led the revolution and wrote the Constitution agreed with Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, that when church and state mix, both are harmed. Jefferson successfully established separation of church and state in his home state of Virginia in 1786, when it adopted the Statute of Religious Freedom he authored.

The First Amendment, adopted in 1789, also banned Congress from, quote, establishing a religion. And most states embraced, to varying degrees, the doctrine of church-state separation. There were some states that objected to this notion. The state governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts, for instance, initially interpreted the First Amendment as meaning only Congress could not establish religion, but states could.

Citizens of those two states paid taxes that supported the Congregationalist Church, respectively, until 1818 and 1833. For decades, some states had so-called, quote, Jew laws that prohibited non-Christians from holding office or had similar bans on Catholics. Such laws were the exception, however, and fell by the wayside by the end of the 19th century.

The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, placed the same limits on state power that are placed on the federal government regarding the establishment of religion, a limitation upheld in the 1947 Supreme Court case, Everson v. Board of Education. Barton has campaigned to overwrite that history with his own alternative narrative. Towards that end, he's collected approximately 100,000 primary documents written before 1812.

Based on that selection of material, he argues that American leaders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and their peers wanted only Christians to lead the nation, and that American law should be based on the Bible. Barton believes that not just the Bible, but also the original United States Constitution, which includes provisions protecting slavery, such as the Three-Fifths Compromise, were directly inspired by God.

He asserts again, with no evidence and without defining terms, that 52 of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were, in his words, quote, orthodox or evangelical Christians. In reality, the early leaders of America didn't speak with one mind regarding religion. Many were deists who saw God not as a deity invested in the daily lives of humans, but

but as a dispassionate clockmaker who put the gears of the universe together, wound it up, and let it run on its own. Their God didn't intervene in history or perform miracle healings at spiritual revivals. When Ben Franklin proposed opening the first session of the 1787 Constitutional Convention with a prayer, the proposal was voted down, with only four approving Franklin's motion at a gathering that as many as 55 attended on any given day.

In their letters, many of the founding fathers scoffed at the accuracy of the Bible and the reliability of its myriad translations. As John Adams said of the Bible, Benjamin Franklin told his friend Ezra Stiles that

that Jesus was a wise philosopher, but that he had personal doubts that Christ was the Son of God. Franklin questioned whether the depiction of Christ's life or even his teachings as described in the Gospels could be trusted. As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see,

but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have doubt, with most of the present dissenters in England, as to his divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it.

And Thomas Jefferson, who Barton insists believed that the American government should be based on Christian values, was even more blunt about his central Christian belief regarding Jesus and his virgin birth. Jefferson wrote, Jesus was a man of illegitimate birth.

of a benevolent heart and an enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law. Barton's books and speeches are filled with misquotes and statements attributed to historical figures that no credible scholars have been able to find. He cherry-picks evidence to bolster his claims about the founder's religious beliefs.

Barton, for instance, made up a story that Jefferson started the practice of holding church services in the U.S. Capitol. More reputable scholars argue that while there's evidence that Jefferson attended one service held at the Capitol building, there's no evidence that he approved them officially.

What's more, Jefferson was far from an Orthodox Christian or the sort of Christian that dominates conservatism today. He edited and published The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jeffersonian Bible, which is a condensed version of Jesus' teachings from the Bible that excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, the resurrection, the raising of the dead, and so on.

These sort of facts are the subject of Barton's 2022 New York Times bestseller, ironically titled The Jefferson Lies, exposing the myths you always believed about Thomas Jefferson. For instance, Barton depicted Jefferson as defining the United States as a Christian nation.

Here's the real Jefferson in his 1785 book, Notes on the State of Virginia. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are 20 gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Barton's book on Jefferson went too far for even some of Barton's fellow Christian conservatives.

The History News Network website derided the book as, quote, the least credible history book in print. Ten Christian conservative scholars so harshly criticized Barton's book that his publisher withdrew it from circulation because it had, quote, lost confidence in the book's details. Yet in spite of the questions regarding its truthfulness, another evangelical publishing company eventually released a new version.

In spite of his flexible relationship with the truth, Barton is a major player in Republican Party politics. On a podcast, Barton claimed that Republican U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson consulted with him about staffing at the Capitol. Johnson made a speech at a wall builders event, telling the audience that the theocratic evangelist had, quote, a profound influence on me, my work, my life and everything I do.

Because of Barton's influence, the state of Texas recently okayed public schools teaching Bible stories to kindergarten children. Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate and Trump's choice to be ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, owns the company that designed those lesson plans.

Huckabee has long produced so-called history videos for school children that promote Christian nationalism and the idea that the United States has a unique relationship with God, such as a series aimed at older children called One Nation Under God, which portrays a Revolutionary War soldier and George Washington suggesting God was on their side. We will bring the plagues upon our British oppressors, just as Moses did in ancient Egypt. And we will win the same freedom.

We fight for the idea that we can make something great here. God's spirit compels us forward. And the time to fight is upon us.

This video series may not be shown to kindergartners in Texas, but the lessons in the Huckabee Design curriculum clearly favor a Christian worldview at the expense of other religions. The scripture-filled lessons are not required by state law, but the state will reward school districts with extra tax dollars per student for teaching Huckabee's product.

This is an attractive offer to the many school districts in Texas that are currently filing deficit budgets and struggling to raise revenue. Meanwhile, Barton's political and cultural influence has grown exponentially over the last decade.

One of his political action committees played a major role in getting Ted Cruz elected to the United States Senate. He is close allies with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who wields power typically held by governors in other states. Patrick said this at a 2022 conservative political action convention in Dallas about who he thinks wrote the U.S. Constitution. We were a nation founded upon not the words of our founders, but the words of God, because

He wrote the Constitution. He empowered them. We were a Christian state, and we've been blessed because of that for so many years. In 2010, the Texas State School Board, for the first time, required that textbook publishers portray a particular biblical figure as an honorary founding father.

This supposed founder was famously portrayed in the 1956 box office smash by Charlton Heston, who later served as a five-term president of the National Rifle Association. Go on to thee, O Israel. You have sinned a great sin in the sight of God. You are not worthy to receive these Ten Commandments.

In Texas, regardless of a lack of evidence, textbook publishers are required to tell students that Moses, the prophet depicted in Judeo-Christian scripture as well as the Koran as leading the Hebrews out of slavery, was a major influence on the authors of the Constitution.

Furthermore, under Barton's influence, the state of Louisiana enacted a law in June 2024 which requires every public school classroom in the state to prominently display a version of the Ten Commandments from the Book of Exodus derived from Protestant translations of the Bible.

This past November, a federal court issued an injunction barring enforcement of the law. With Barton's encouragement, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick fought to get a similar bill passed in Texas that would have required every classroom to feature a display of the Ten Commandments at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall. And as the law put it, quote, in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.

The bill passed the state Senate with unanimous Republican support, but died when it didn't come before the Texas House in time for a legislative deadline. As KVUE in Austin reported, Patrick has vowed to continue his crusade in the coming months. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick resurrecting a bill to force public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. That bill was originally proposed

proposed during last year's legislative session, but missed a key deadline and died in the House. Louisiana just passed a similar law this week. The lieutenant governor posting on X saying, quote, Texas would have and should have been the first state in the nation to put the Ten Commandments back in our schools, end quote. The lieutenant governor says he will pass the bill during the next legislative session.

Under the Ten Commandments bill, moral codes from other major world religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism would not be posted in classrooms, presenting a clear case of a state government violating the First Amendment. Princeton historian Kevin Cruz explained why such laws, like those signed by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, ignore the United States Constitution.

There are three references to religion in the Constitution, and all three are ones that keep religion at arm's length away from the state.

There was no religious test required for office workers, a remarkable revolutionary act at the time. The First Amendment says there will be no national religion established by the national government. It says that we will not interfere with your private right to worship or not worship as you see fit, right? That is what the Constitution says. And so Landry says he wanted to put this up because Moses was the first lawgiver. He's not. The Code of Hammurabi

predates Moses by four centuries or something. But also, if you want to look at the real law of the land, put the Constitution up on those walls. Let students read what the real law of this country has to say about the proper role of religion in politics.

The history of posting Ten Commandment signs or plaques or building such monuments in public spaces over the last 70 years has an origin that might shock many right-wing cultural warriors who associate Hollywood with godless liberalism.

As Cruz points out in his book, One Nation Under God, how corporate America invented Christian America. The three-hour, 40-minute epic movie, The Ten Commandments, was a monster hit and wowed audiences with its 25,000-member cast and advanced special effects when it was released in 1956. The movie grossed more than $85 million.

The film's politically conservative subtext was unmistakable. The director, Cecil B. DeMille, hated the New Deal and testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that communists exercised malign influence over unions, including those in Hollywood that drove up the cost of filmmaking. The film can be read as a metaphor about the Cold War, with the oppressive Egyptians representing the Soviet Union and the freedom-loving Hebrews standing in for the United States.

At the beginning of the movie, DeMille appears and calls the movie, quote, the story of the birth of freedom, the story of Moses. The movie also captures the racism and, ironically, the anti-Semitism of a country that had not yet emerged from McCarthyism. The historian Alan Nadell tells a revealing story of two cast members in The Ten Commandments. According to the story, during the film's production, Charlton Heston's wife became pregnant.

DeMille then told Heston that if his wife gave birth to a boy, the child would be cast as the baby Moses. When Heston's wife gave birth to a son, DeMille sent her a telegram saying, congratulations, he's got the part. Meanwhile, an adult actor, Woody Strode, appeared in the film in two markedly different roles.

A former NFL star who broke the 13-year informal NFL ban on African-American players when he signed with the Los Angeles Rams in 1946, Stroh played both an Ethiopian king and the enslaved attendant of Moses' adopted Egyptian mother. DeMille thought that the audiences could tell whether a swaddled white baby was a boy or a girl.

but apparently assumed they wouldn't notice a black actor playing both a king and a slave because of the racist belief that all black people look alike.

Meanwhile, a movie set in ancient Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula featured an almost entirely light-skinned cast. Even though DeMille's mother was Jewish, the only Jewish actor to play a major role was Edward G. Robinson, who earlier became famous playing gangsters. And he won DeMille's favor perhaps because he was a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the communist witch hunts.

Thus, the one prominent Jewish face in the Ten Commandments was cast as a bad guy, a Hebrew named Nathan, who continually tries to undermine Moses and convince the escaped slaves to return to their Egyptian masters. We're gathered against you, Moses. You take too much upon yourself. We will not live by your commandments. We're free. There is no freedom without the law.

As Cruise documents, when the Ten Commandments film was initially released, DeMille came up with an ingenious marketing strategy. He teamed up with a conservative anti-communist organization, the Fraternal Order of the Eagles, to establish Ten Commandment monuments across the country.

Around the time that southern states erected new Confederate monuments to protest desegregation, Ten Commandment monuments appeared at the county courthouse in Evansville, Indiana, the Milwaukee City Hall, and near the U.S.-Canadian border in North Dakota.

Nearly 150 such monuments were erected across the country. Momentum stalled during the civil rights era to the extent that an Alabama state justice, Roy Moore, suffered ridicule when he placed, without authorization, a self-funded 5,280-pound monument in the rotunda of a judicial building housing the state's Supreme Court in 2001. The monument was ordered removed two years later.

But once fringe figures like Moore have moved closer to the American political mainstream because of the influence of people like Barton, Lieutenant Governor Patrick, and their allies. The contemporary obsession with festooning public spaces with religious artifacts has as much to do with malevolent nostalgia as with religious zeal.

Men like anti-CRT crusader Christopher Ruffo, along with Barton and Patrick, want to return to the world that made the Ten Commandments film, a world in which white people are centered, the accomplishments of dark-skinned people are erased or expropriated, and where America stands as an untainted beacon of freedom in spite of its history of enslavement, imperialism, and genocide.

And now, once again, advocates of historical amnesia have a friend in the White House. The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that. Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system. It's called accreditation for a reason.

The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally. When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.

On January 29th of this year, Trump issued an executive order mandating the withdrawal of federal dollars from any public school that allegedly imprints, quote, anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our nation's children. This could include teaching them about transgender identity, providing services to trans students, or educating students about America's long, bloody promotion of white supremacy, homophobia, and

For transphobia, the order also requires public schools to provide quote-unquote patriotic education.

Those like Trump, Barton, and others who have clamored the loudest about schools as centers of indoctrination are now imposing their own form of propaganda, returning history classes from kindergarten to graduate schools to the days of the 1920s and the 1930s, when textbook writers praised fascist dictators for keeping unions in their place and those willing to die to end slavery were painted as the bad guys.

In the civil rights era, black and brown parents boycotted public schools that discriminated to undermine their funding, created their own freedom schools that provided lessons in black and brown history, and marched against the old Jim Crow laws.

Parents who want their children to receive an honest accounting of the nation's past will do well to learn from these predecessors and to disrupt the meetings of right-wing school boards as loudly and enthusiastically as the parents who were conned into a frenzy about the phantom dangers of CRT. This is Michael Phillips. And this is Stephen Monticelli. Thanks to Betsy Freehoff for reading passages from textbooks and to Dan Glass for reading quotes from the Founding Fathers. Of course,

Thanks to you for listening. Hey, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Robert Evans, and I have an episode for you. It's also an article I wrote for our sub stack, Shatter Zone. So I'm just going to get into that. Since February 5th, 2025, a document has been circulating among Democratic Party staffers and liberal think tank experts warning about Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley-led coup to end U.S. democracy.

The document is titled The Imminent Neo-Reactionary Threat to the American Republic. It opens with a statement that the brief was, quote, iteratively and collectively compiled by a broad, bipartisan, and decentralized network of experts who wish to remain anonymous due to concerns about being targeted.

The full document is here. The table of contents is split into three main areas. One, the new shape of threats to the American Republic. Two, understanding recent events in the context of threats to the American Republic. And three, a list of appendices. The title of the actual file when I received it was Evidence Brief for Journalists, and the introduction describes its aim as, "...explaining the nature of the current political crisis to journalists who are attempting to inform the public."

However, I spoke with two sources who are members of these groups and received the document. They told me that to their knowledge, the document was not mostly spread to journalists, but instead among networks of think tank employees and DNC staffers, people you might refer to broadly as policy wonks.

One source I interviewed explained, it is a thing for think tanks to frame overviews for laypeople as briefs for journalists or Congress, see the IPCC reports. Part of me thinks the framing for journalists is just a shortcut for this is somewhat specialized knowledge broken down.

The paper opens by acknowledging the scope of the executive power grab being perpetuated under President Trump and the destabilization wrought by Elon Musk and his Doge team. It then notes, "...the threat is an order of magnitude beyond just a presidential power grab." It states that Musk is tied to a, quote, "...broader group of Silicon Valley tech elites, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen."

Curtis Yarvin is labeled as a thought leader in this group, quote, called the neo-reactionaries.

And I'll stop here to note that this summary is accurate enough for mass consumption, but I have some issues with it. Musk probably would not label himself a neo-reactionary, and he doesn't have much of a history with Yarvin. Peter Thiel does, but it's more a relationship of patronage than mutual influence. It would be more accurate to say that Thiel and Andreessen find Yarvin useful because of his success in spreading to a lot of young techie kids the idea that tech CEOs should run the world.

Musk, I feel, has largely jumped on this bandwagon with the neo-reactionaries because those tech kids are useful foot soldiers. Yarvin's ideas about retiring all government employees and destroying the independent media and academia are convenient for Musk's own ambitions.

This context may be unnecessary for explaining the overall danger of the neo-reactionaries and Musk to regular people, but I also think it's a mistake to credit Yarvin with more power than he holds. The document refers to him as the leader of the neo-reactionary movement, and I think that gets across kind of the wrong idea about how all of this works.

That said, the document does do a pretty good job of summing up the threat that we face. Quote, the neo-reactionaries have openly stated their aims to destroy the nation state and the constitutional order and replace them with a newly privately owned corporate state to be run by a CEO dictator. Citizens become subjects owned by the state, state slaves in Yarvin's terms, because everything rots when it has no owner, human beings included. That last quote is also one of Yarvin's.

From here, the document argues that Musk and his team are attempting to bring about this dystopia by taking over the, quote, nervous system of the state. Another Yarvin quote. These would be the data and communication systems that Doge is trying to centralize in its unaccountable hands. Next, the authors of this document make a call to action. Quote,

The most dramatic reversals of democratic breakdown, 1977 India, 2022 Brazil, 2023 Poland, have been accomplished by radically large-tent cross-ideological coalitions with little in common except a desire for the continuation of a constitutional order. Evidence suggests that the present threat to American democracy is dire enough that such a broad-tent approach focused on Musk and his associates may be required.

And I think this is the most interesting and hopeful part of the whole document for me. For one thing, I believe it does accurately state what's needed in the present moment, a popular front against autocracy and dictatorship. I would add to their list of relevant examples of popular fronts, the original, which is France from 1934 to 1938. So it's heartening to see evidence that this understanding has started to grow within DNC policy circles and the people around them.

The source who sent me this document in the first place described themselves as a member of, quote, a few unofficial networks of climate activists who are high-ranking in the government and policy think tank circles. They noted that these are normally, quote, very milquetoast lib spaces, but, quote, they're being radicalized rapidly.

Both sources I interviewed for this requested anonymity. The second person I talked to with gave an explicit reason. They stated, quote, In other words, they believe the Republican Party has spies within the DNC and people they know have made statements to that effect.

They were worried that these, quote, GOP moles might reveal their identity, but more so they were worried that these moles might have planted the document itself and put false information inside it with the goal of provoking a reaction from Democrats that would be useful politically to Republicans.

I do think this caveat is worthwhile. It's certainly not impossible. And I think the frank admission that the DNC likely has Republican spies inside it is also really worth stating. But I should note that when it comes to the actual accuracy of this document,

I don't really see much to take issue with. I've spent more time than most people studying Curtis Yarvin and the neo-reactionaries. I would not describe myself as a top expert in the matter, but I do have a good base of knowledge here, and nothing that I've read in this document struck me as obviously false or incorrect. Nor did the overall tone seem hysteric or unreasonable.

So I asked my sources if over the last month they'd seen more people talking about Yarvin in their daily lives within sort of the circles that they work in and around, because again, they communicate with a lot of DNC staffers and politicians. They said respectively, no, and quote, that's kind of one of the odd things to be frank. This guy, Yarvin, is being brought to big events in DC. He's been referenced by Bannon and Vance. I have heard his talking points come from Republican mouths, but he's largely not tracked.

That concern comports with some of fears that I had late last year about Yarvin and the neo-reactionaries. Namely, I had believed for some time that Yarvin and the people kind of aligned with him, largely a lot of these Silicon Valley folks with money, had become much more influential among Trump and his tight inner circle than was widely understood at the time.

Ultimately, I wrote and researched two episodes of Behind the Bastards because I thought it was valuable to bring more attention to the subject. I really had kind of a gut feeling that this was going to become much more relevant very soon, which is why I picked it as the topic for the episode we did with Ed Helms, who's

by a pretty good margin, the biggest celebrity we've had on the show so far. And I hope that that would help kind of get what we were talking about out to a wider audience. And it did. The episodes did very well. I think between YouTube and our downloads and the podcast, we're probably at something like a million listens for them at this point. But our listener base is a mix of leftists and progressive liberals, right? Their interests are not representative of the Democratic Party at large.

It is noteworthy and perhaps even important that influential individuals in the policy space with connections to Democratic politicians and the DNC as an organization have started a grassroots effort to spread the word about Yarvin as a threat. And that's what this document represents. It's even more noteworthy that this document is unsparing about the danger and the fact that a clock is currently ticking over all of our heads. Here's another quote.

And speaking of things that can't be reversed, my love for our sponsors.

We're back. So to continue from this document, there's a section next titled National Security. And the focus shifts from Yarvin and his neoreactionaries to Musk, who it claims, quote, poses a uniquely significant security risk.

This, in its argument, is because Musk and Doge espouse, quote, anti-constitutional ideologies and, quote, are under the influence of America's principal foreign adversaries, China and Russia. It goes on at some length about Musk's foreign business interests and how they might compromise him.

Now, I don't disagree that Musk is compromised, but I see his actions as very much consistent with those of a man seizing power for himself. I do understand why people speaking to an audience that is largely, you know, when it's bipartisan, it's folks who are kind of more on the centrist side of things in the policy space and otherwise largely a lot of like Democratic Party employees and politicians. I understand why you focus on the China and Russia of it all.

But when it comes to both accurately stating the threat and getting a lot of people to care, I really don't think that's the right strategy to take. I think it's an issue to focus popular messaging around how this all empowers, quote, America's principal foreign adversaries, because they're not going to be able to do that.

Most Americans don't really think that way or particularly care about that. And beyond that, the larger issue is that the primary adversary Musk has empowered is not, in fact, the Russian or Chinese governments. It's himself. And he personally, as an individual, is currently a greater threat to every citizen of the United States than any foreign government. I think that's undeniable. And I think, again, it's an error not to frame it that way.

The next section of the paper lays out the definition of a coup. Quote, in essence, a coup is a, number one, rapid seizure of state power by unelected actors who acquire that power by, two, seizing critical government infrastructure, and three, weaponizing it to neutralize legitimate government actors' efforts to stop them. The unelected actors then use this power to, four, remake the rules of the political game in a way that cannot easily be checked or undone through democratic processes."

Now, it argues convincingly that all four of these steps are underway now. One thing I found compelling is the way in which this document recognizes the threat that cryptocurrency represents right now and how it can and will be used by the new regime to cement their power in ways that sidestep the present legal system.

Quote, without canceling elections, for example, cryptocurrency can be used to create informal but powerful new levers of political influence. Politicians can sell personal coins to unknown buyers who vote on public policy on the basis of their shareholder power, shielded from public view. I think that's a real thing to be concerned with, and I also think it's very clearly part of the goal of this project.

Now, next we have a summary of the neo-reactionary agenda, which lists some additional names among the Silicon Valley elite currently championing an overthrow of democracy. These include David Sachs, Blasji Srinivasan, and J.D. Vance. Also name-dropped is a political theorist named Nick Land, who is in fact referenced twice in this paper—

He is quoted directly as having said in his paper, The Dark Enlightenment, quote, for the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative.

Landis had a huge impact on a lot of these guys, although he's not really a Yarvin-like figure, as in he's not this kind of guy who sees himself as, or I think really wants to be, a shadowy puppet master orchestrating the overthrow of democracy from behind the scenes. He's really someone stating what he believes to be kind of inevitable concepts and realities about our present historical moment that happen to comport with a lot of the things that these guys believe.

Now, the authors next lay out Yarvin's concept of the butterfly revolution, which is based on an essay he wrote in 2022, in which he laid out how a full reboot of the U.S. government could be accomplished. Quote, quote, Yarvin's seven part butterfly revolution has been roughly summarized as follows. Number one, have Trump run for president on the platform of getting rid of an efficient system. Number two, once he wins, purge the bureaucracy, rage, retire all government employees.

Number three, ignore the courts through declaring states of emergency. Number four, co-opt Congress. Number five, centralize the police, federalize the National Guard, create a national police force that absorbs local ones. Number six, shut down the elites, the media and the universities who make up the cathedral. Number seven, get people on the streets whenever there is any obstruction by a government agency.

And obviously, all of that we've seen Trump and his people make moves towards in the last couple of weeks, right? And that's, in fact, what the next chunk of the document is. Subsequent pages summarize the first days of the Trump administration and Doge activity, and they show how it comports with the butterfly revolution blueprint. Now, we've all lived that in real time, so I'm not going to summarize their arguments here.

So the document ends with a section on actions and rhetoric to watch. Those are listed as, quote, government contracts, which fund many of Musk's companies at present. And the next is Greenland and Mars. Quote, a core tenant of neoreactionary ideology is the replacement of nation states with network states.

but states require territory. Technocracy, Inc., a predecessor to the neoreactionary movement whose one-time director was Elon Musk's grandfather, proposed a North American technate where the entire continent of North America would be united under one technocratic superstate. There is currently a Peter Thiel-backed network state project called Praxis in Greenland. Musk's public statements about colonizing Mars can also be read as part of a territorial project.

Lastly, it lists crypto, which the authors primarily seem to fear as a method of deniably bribing Trump. Now, I think most of this is pretty credible, although I feel differently about Musk's talk about colonizing Mars. I think that's been more about PR than anything.

I do think there's a good chance he's just delusional enough to think that that's something feasible on any kind of close in time frame that we start building persistent colonies on Mars. I think the science suggests that if that ever happens, it won't be anytime soon. And I think he knows that. I think he's largely understands hype well and how to use it. And Mars has been an easy way for him to do that over the years.

years. Overall, I'd say the document is fairly thorough in its layout of the neo-reactionary ecosystem and the actual plan currently being acted to end U.S. democracy. It includes a section that lists several of the earliest known Doge employees, and it quotes extensively from Yarvan and somewhat less extensively from Landt.

The paper's ultimate conclusion is that Musk is using this moment to turn himself into the kind of unitary, all-powerful executive that Yarvin longs for. This is an executive who rules alongside a largely ceremonial president as well as courts and a legislative system that are equally ceremonial.

After laying out the bulk of the actual threat, the article promises that, quote, section three articulates what Congress and other actors can do in order to stop this threat. However, the document in its present form does not include any section three or any comprehensive list of solutions Congress and other actors might carry out in order to stop the present assault on democracy.

And perhaps there's a later version of the document that I don't have access to that includes that. Perhaps this is just a statement that wasn't edited out, I have to say.

as heartening as I find the way in which this document talks about the threat that we're facing and the fact that I think it's overall good that people in positions of influence around the DNC are talking about this stuff. It's also kind of perfect that at the end, they're like, hey, you know, don't worry, we've included some tips on how to defeat these guys. And then they just don't, you know, if the situation weren't so dire, it would be a lot funnier. But unfortunately, it is pretty

Pretty dire. Now, if you want to take a look at the full document itself, it's quite a bit longer than what I've read to you now, but it is really worth reading, especially if you have been hearing about this Curtis Yarvin guy or the Neo-Reactionaries, and you kind of want to know how this all fits together with what Musk is doing in more detail. If you go to my sub stack at ShatterZone, the most recent article is the text of this, and I include a couple of different

points, links to the full document, which I have uploaded to Scribd. And you can read the whole thing if you want. It has not been altered since I have received it. And again, yeah, I think it's worth getting out there and spreading to more people. So that's the episode. We will be back tomorrow with something else. Until then, folks, I don't know. Keep an eye on this shit. Bye. Bye.

This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House. Yes. The crumbling world and what it means for me and you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. Yes. This week, we're covering the week of February 19 to February 26. And boy, if you thought we had ED before, do we have ED now.

We still haven't got that hemp sponsorship, but we'll keep trying. We're going to keep working at it. I'm also looking to get us a penis pump sponsorship. Speaking of penis pumps, let's talk about the Germans. So Germany had its election very recently after their most recent coalition collapsed. The way their government works is that periodically governments...

can't continue being governments. And so they have to have a very sudden election. I'm not going to explain it much more than that, but the, the actual results of the election were pretty interesting, right? The primary winner was off day. AFD alternative for Germany would be kind of the closest English translation of the name of the party. This is a far right party. It is primarily popular in East Germany, not,

now, but it has surged massively after years and years of being decidedly on the political fringe. One of the reasons it has always been on the political fringe is that German parties, both centrists, conservatives, and the left have had a tacit agreement

since the end of World War II called the Cordon Sanitaire. It's not just Germany. This is a thing that used to be present in all of Europe. And basically the gist of the Cordon Sanitaire is you don't form a coalition because these are parliamentary democracies, right? So usually no one party has 50% or more of the vote. So a party with 20 and a party with 15 and a party with eight, and they form a coalition government. And the norm for

Up until now, and thankfully is still the normal, we'll talk about that, is that you don't coalition with AFD, which is part of why that and kind of lingering stigma about the Nazis kept them from being a major force in German politics until, you know, over the last eight or so years, they have grown more.

substantially to the point where in this recent election, they doubled their support from around 10% to a little over 20%. Yeah. This makes them, they're not the largest single block in the German, in the Reichstag. They're number two though, right? They are number two, I believe. Which,

Yeah, it's not great. Yeah, the CDU is still significantly larger. Yeah. Although not like overwhelmingly larger, to be clear. So basically right now, the CDU, which is the centrist party, and it's kind of like center right, a little center right, has 208 seats in the Reichstag. AFD has 152. The Social Democrats have 120. The Greens have 85. And the

And the left party has 64. So AFD is a minority in the government compared to all of the people who didn't vote for AFD. But the rate at which they're increasing is a serious problem, especially since most Germans list immigration as their primary voting concern right now.

This most recent election had unusually high voter turnout. 2021 election, 76% of the country or so voted. More than 82% of the country voted in this most recent election. So the fact that you have record high turnout and AFD doubling its support is deeply chilling.

Now, it's not 100% bad news because one of the other stories here is the new left party. Well, not super new, but the left party, which is kind of came out of East Germany's Communist Party.

massively increased their support too. And they actually, for the first time, like very significantly increased their share of the vote, which had been under this kind of 5% threshold before and is now at about 8.8%. So they, they went up by a, an amount actually is not like as much as AFD went up, but like in terms of a percentage of their prior vote, it's a similar increase. Hmm.

So there's another party that had significant gains in this. And it's a, it's kind of a newer party called the BSW, which is, I, you could say they do a little bit of like a red Brown alliance kind of thing where there's some like left-wing messaging in what they're saying, but they're also like super anti immigrant. And, uh,

They're not you know, it's not kind of like to the extent that the AFD is. But when they came onto the scene, they were expected by some people to pull votes away from the AFD this election. And that's really not what happened. And in fact, a lot of the votes they pulled were from social Democrats and the left parties.

So that was one of the, you know, it's because the way the parliamentary system works, which is more rational than our system, this didn't like hand the whole election to off day. Again, this is the benefit of a system like the Germans had, which is pretty explicitly set up to make it a lot harder for a right wing dictator to get in again. But it is interesting to me that that kind of messaging works.

I mean, it's further kind of evidence of what's been happening everywhere, which is when your party positions itself to try to win over far right votes by kind of mixing in, well, okay, what if we did some sort of liberal lefty policies, but we also got really racist? Yeah. You don't take votes from the far right, but you do wind up pulling the worst people from the left. Yeah. Yeah.

And yeah, I guess that's kind of like the broad strokes. Now, like this is bad, although it's also not comprehensively a nightmare. One of the things that's kind of hot, I don't know, positive may not be the right way, but interesting to me is

If you looked at the 2021 election maps of the strongest party by constituency in the 2021 election, and I found a good article, German election results explained in graphics on dw.com. If you just Google that, you'll find it. In 2021, off day, obviously like the whole Northeast, uh,

was, you know, their territory, but they also had strong inroads into the Northwest parts of the country, right? You know, primarily like rural areas and the like, but like there was a, there was a lot of red on that map in the Northwest portion of Germany in the new election. That's all black, which is the CDU, right? Which means, uh,

While Ofde's representation of the Reichstag and number of voters increased substantially, their geographical reach has been kind of cauterized, would be a fair way of saying it, which is interesting to me. Hard to say too much, like, does that mean... I think some of what has happened here, because it's important...

Both to note that this is bad. It's bad that the Nazis doubled their share of the vote. But also, it was expected to be a little worse than it was. You know, there's some evidence that after J.D. Vance made his

speech introducing AFD, their polling started to freeze a little bit. And it may be the fact because a lot of older voters came in and they seem to have primarily gone with the CDU, with this sort of center-right party. So one story here is you could maybe look at it as a lot of older, more conservative Germans who...

are also old enough to really not like the idea of the AFD came out and voted for, you know, the center right party in order to kind of cut off their their power. The other thing, though, that's kind of a lot less optimistic is that AFD is most popular among people under 30 who widely don't view it as an extremist party.

which is deeply, deeply concerning. And AFD won the majority of like working class, unemployed and male votes. Yes. Yes. Pretty substantially. Yes. They did extremely well with young men and unemployed young men in particular.

And that's all deeply concerning. So, you know, there's a few things going on here, all of which are very interesting to me. But the power Ofte continues to have with younger, really young Germans is frightening. That said, there's also some evidence here that

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

which is a good thing. You know, it doesn't mean no one will do that in the future. And unfortunately, a majority of German voters suspect AFD will be in a coalition by 2030. But it hasn't happened yet. And that's as good as things get right now. And that's what I got to say about Germany.

Yeah, I mean, and people frame these results as like slightly better than expected. Slightly. Previous polling showed AFD being slightly better in results and that dipped for Vance and Musk started really trying to push AFD both in person and digitally. So you saw a slight dip there. Yes. And this is the other thing that's kind of worth noting. That kind of like red-brown party in addition to being kind of

pro-social programs, anti-immigration. They're also very anti-United States. Okay. So that may explain some of that too. Yeah. It does seem like things are changing a lot. And one of the things that we've seen, like we spoke about before, like not just in Germany, but in Canada was that like,

People hate Musk and Trump so much in the rest of the world that their endorsement could be something of a kiss of death electorally. Yeah, the Conservative Party in Canada has been growing pretty exponentially in terms of popular support the past few years as the Liberals have tanked. And now those trends actually started to reverse that.

The Canadian, like, Liberal polling is up 10 points. The Conservative polling is down. Conservatives might not even be able to control Parliament in the next election as they were, like, expected to. And it'll be interesting to see, like, if this anti, like, far-right United States election

trend continues to more countries beyond like Germany and Canada. But I'm still eagerly waiting for the next Canadian election. And this is part of the story that is really interesting right now, where we've talked a lot about the transnational fascist coalition. You know, the fact that

Trump and his people have had the quasi dictator of Hungary, you know, over at Mar-a-Lago and have repeatedly cited him as an inspiration for how to take and centralize power. You know how close Bolsonaro was in the last Trump administration, like, you know, obviously the Republican Party's increasing closeness and embrace of Putin's Russia. But what also is happening right now is.

people like countries that had been heading in a very more authoritarian right wing direction turning around in part due to the war in Ukraine and turning away from kind of the international right wing movement as Poland being the best example right where Poland had Polish politics have changed substantially in

in the last several years. And a big part of that is the war in Ukraine. And there are a lot of Poles who I think otherwise would have been more on board for a lot of the socially conservative shit who are like, well, but all these fuckers are pro-Russia and we're Poland. Like, no. All right, let's go on a break and return to talk more about the crumbling world and USAID. Yeah.

All right, we are back. I'm going to throw to James to do a segment on USAID. Yeah, we are back. And before I talk about USAID, I do want to talk about something else that has been advertised along with whatever products and services support this show. And that is the gold card. So the gold card, if you're not familiar, is something that Trump floated this week to replace the EB-5 investor visa.

Trump suggested that the gold card, it would require a $5 million investment. Investment, I think it's just a charge, right? You're just giving the money to the United States government. And in return, you will receive a green card plus privileges. And it will be not a green, but a gold card. So that's great. That is the EB-5 visa, if you're not familiar, required you since 2022. It's been...

$1,050,000 investment and the creation of 10 jobs. So it had some kind of like, trickle-down economics is not a real thing. It's a lie that they tell you. But it had some idea that these rich people would create jobs in the US, people who are less wealthy. The gold card seems to not have that. You just have to be rich, right? So that's an interesting change to the immigration system. The other thing I want to talk about today is

It's the United States Agency for International Development, better known as USAID. It's been a target of the anti-work right for some time because they fundamentally don't understand what Joseph Nye would have called soft power, their power to persuade, their power to influence outcomes around the world with things other than tanks and bombs. Oh, yeah.

And again, if your power is soft right now, you might consider trying HIMSS or one of our other sponsors. HIMSS is not a sponsor. Sorry, James. We needed to do that. I have been diverted, but I'm returning to my topic. The agency has been massively impacted by Doge and Trump administration cuts, right?

The Trump administration suspended all foreign aid in January via executive order on the 20th of January in order to assess if it was, quote, serving U.S. interests. The State Department then issued guidance that seemed to go beyond the executive order and cut nearly basically all USAID expenses.

On the 13th of this month, that's February if you're listening later, a judge issued a temporary restraining order. This TRO didn't really stop them from doing what they were doing because it told them to continue with existing contracts. And what the State Department claims that it's doing is implementing clauses that are already in the contract. So the contracts will have some kind of kill clause, right? And they claim that they're implementing that. So they think they've found a fun workaround.

Rather than talking extensively about court battles, I want to talk about what this means. These are cuts made by the richest man in the world that have had a direct, tangible and devastating impact on the poorest people on the planet. In Sudan, 80% of emergency kitchens have been closed. That means that close to 2 million people will go without food. Local groups who organize the kitchens are running out of money.

The way this works is that even when Rubio issued a communication talking about continuing food aid, it's unclear exactly what that means. Because in this case and in other cases, USAID is sending them money in order to provision themselves locally, as opposed to sending them food as an in-kind donation, right? Whatever...

He communicated, these people are not getting food. And as a result, the people who run these mutual aid kitchens, it's a mutual aid coalition of Sudan, are facing the horrible decision of having to turn people away or deciding who to feed, which is pretty bad. On the border between Thailand and Myanmar, a place where Robert and I have been to report, I've heard that people are having babies right now outside lock clinics.

And life support machines have been removed for it. So people who were relying on those life support machines, obviously. And at least one person has died. Yeah. And I'm sure many, many more people that have died. Yeah. I mean, that's just what's reported. Like it's a lot of, most of what happens there does not get out. Yeah. I will try in not too long to be there and report on that. But it's pretty devastating right now that Robert and I have met the people who run some of these clinics and they are some of the most incredible people doing amazing work.

And yeah, they relied on USAID funding, as lots of other places do, and that's not happening now. The State Department has exempted, quote, life-saving humanitarian assistance programs from the cuts.

But no one really knows what that means, right? The order reads, quote, life-saving humanitarian assistance applies to core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance. As I mentioned before, the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition was receiving financial assistance to help it provision itself, right? Which is much better than the U.S.,

going through all the infrastructure spending of being able to deliver that aid itself or through USAID contractors. Other contractors implementing partners of USAID are still owed money for work that they completed before January, before the stop work order stopped payment to them.

For work to begin again on any of these contracts, they need the contract officer to sign off on it. And it's a little unclear exactly how many of these contract officers are still employed at USAID because of the federal employment cuts.

So essentially, USAID has stopped all over the world. In addition to this, in this country, $490 million worth of U.S. grown food, which is in the USAID pipeline to go to people who very desperately needed food, is currently at risk of spoilage, according to USAID. So it's not just that people are starving. It's that we are...

allowing food to go bad here while people starve in other places, which is pretty bleak. I will just really briefly here plug the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition. If you'd like to help, you can direct to them directly. And it's mutualaidsudan.org if you'd like to do that. It'll be in the show notes too if you're driving or whatever.

And there is like ongoing legal fights over this issue on Tuesday, February 25th. Another judge ordered the Trump administration to resume hundreds of million dollars of funding towards USAID. And there's no indication Trump's going to follow that order. They're already planning to appeal again. They have already appealed before.

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

frontal assault on the separation of powers is what he's proposed, right? Like, they don't have their numbers yet. Yes, well, and then they have openly floated just like defying orders because they're interpreting the actions of the judges as like themselves unlawful. But Musk has himself called to impeach judges who violate the law. And I believe his most recent pinned ex-post is...

reads, quote, if any judge anywhere can block every presidential action everywhere, we do not have a democracy. We have a tyranny of the judiciary. So what a great legal mind. Shit we were saying back in 2023. So this will continue. I mean, I'm really, really waiting for a final showdown between

Trump, Elon, and, you know, maybe the Supreme Court and, you know, seeing if they will actively defy a ruling from the Supreme Court if they indeed rule against Trump and Musk.

But until then, I feel like we're just kind of all chugging along as the Trump administration, you know, very, very unconstitutionally defies the authority of the court. Yeah. In some related news, last week, President Trump signed an executive order stating that the president can change laws. Cool. Erroneously citing Article 2, which only calls for the president to, quote, faithfully execute the law.

I'm going to quote from the order. The president and the attorney general, subject to the president's supervision and control, will interpret the law for the executive branch instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.

The next section is titled Reigning in Independent Agencies. It reads, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and Securities and Exchange Commission have exercised enormous power over the American people without presidential oversight. These agencies issue rules and regulations without the review of the democratically elected president. They also spend American tax dollars to set priorities without consulting the president.

Voters and the president can now hold all federal agencies, not just cabinet departments, responsible for their decisions as the Constitution demands.

Unquote. This is absurd. This is like extremely dangerous. One of the most like blatant like attempts at power that we've seen since Dick Nixon. Like this is going to get litigated, but this is crazy. The fact that we have a president saying that he has the ability to interpret the law, something that specifically he cannot do. That's why we have three branches of government. Just like openly, openly claiming that power is like,

Very worrying. Again, I feel like every episode on Executive Disorder, I say that I'm very worried and very concerned, but that does continue to be the case. Yeah, it is very concerning. I don't know what more to say because...

It's mad. Like we're watching a coup happen on the timeline while everyone just continues to go shopping and stuff. Like it's pretty weird. Speaking of shopping, I just got a fantastic Swedish M90 field jacket. It looks great. It fits tight. I'm very happy. Garrison's becoming a milserp. We will go on break once again to come back to talk about the Navy and the FBI. All right, we are back.

Let's now talk about the Navy, arguably one of the gayer branches of the military, besides the drone operators. Oh, you're really missing out on the Marines, Harrison. As multiple Marine veterans have told me, the U.S. Marine Corps is the gayest place I've ever been. The Marines are the gayest place I've ever been.

Marines are like part of the Navy, right? Come on. They are. They are. They are. And they hate it when you say that. Go cry about it to Daddy Trump. I don't care. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. So, meanwhile, there's shakeups in the Navy and the Marines as relating to Trump's anti-trans executive orders.

And we have obtained an ALNAVE memo directed to all Navy units and Marine Corps from February 25th that outlines the Department of Navy's guidance on how to implement the anti-trans executive orders. Now, this includes ending programs and policies related to, quote unquote, gender ideology all across the Navy, as well as only using assigned sex at birth on official documentation. I will quote from the statement, quote,

D.O.N. entities will review policies for, quote-unquote, intimate single-sex spaces and take appropriate action to ensure such spaces are designated by sex and not gender identity on installations, facilities, ships, and any other infrastructure under the jurisdiction of the Department of Navy, unquote.

So this will force women into bathrooms and barracks with men. It's in line with the stuff that Trump's been talking about and the stuff that he's been signing. But we are slowly getting more and more of these implementation guides getting sent around to various departments. James? Yeah, and just to clarify that to people...

Most of these bases are pretty full, right? These are pretty crowded places. So this will mean women sharing rooms with young Marines, right? This will mean them sharing non-stalled bathrooms, right?

with young sailors and marines right this will force them into very confined spaces together on board ships like this isn't like uh some kind of sort of minor inconvenience or whatever like this this will put these people at a demonstrable risk for assault for bullying which is a serious thing and an issue in lots of militaries including the u.s one but like

And many of these people, I should add, like have had, they're like post-surgery, right? And not that it matters hugely, but they're people who might pass as women or men and they're now forced to live according to their gender assigned at birth. Pretty fucked up.

It's not great. I'm going to wait before I do reporting on the implementation guides for visas. I know there's been a lot of articles in The Guardian and a few trans journalists have conflicting interpretations of a few Department of State cables regarding the issuing of visas to people who are trans.

Specifically, I think the main cable that we've seen allows the continued issuance of visas, but that would only match what the case officer or whoever is handling the actual visa information, whatever they determine to be the assigned gender at birth to be. That's how it would get issued. But I'm going to wait to report on kind of the rest of the nitty gritty details because there is conflicting information

from these policy wonks, lawyers, and journalists themselves who are trying to figure out what the full implications of those cables are. But we are aware of them. We've been talking about them in our chat. Yes, they are bad. But I don't necessarily want to overblow the scope of some of these things just to like...

induce panic when really this is all kind of very in line with Trump's earlier orders to only have male and female documentation that matches assigned gender at birth. Yeah. I would say also, like, if you are soldier, sailor, airman, airperson, marine, whatever, and like these executive orders are affecting you,

You can email us at coolzontips at proton.me. I know trans folks tend to serve at a higher rate than cisgender folks. So there's a good number of people who will be affected by this. And for whatever it's worth, if you want to talk to us, you can reach out to us.

I'm also going to note, we obtained information on the Department of Defense removing travel coverage for abortion. On January 18th, the Department of Defense Travel Management Office removed a section from their joint travel regulations that outlined travel allowances for, quote, non-covered reproductive health care, quote, meaning like abortion and assisted reproductive technology like IVF. Now, this change was directly in compliance with Trump's executive order to enforce the Hyde Amendment, which Mia has...

talked about lots before on the show. And then on February 4th, they actually re-established coverage for assisted reproductive technology, so probably just IVF, but abortion was not re-established. So that means that travel cover for abortion-related medical care, reproductive health care, is no longer...

There. Correct. Correct. Yeah. For our last main story, I'd like to talk a little bit about updates to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump goon, rap producer and children's book author Kash Patel has been confirmed as FBI director.

And Patel is joined by far-right podcaster and conspiracy theorist Dan Pancino, who has been appointed deputy director. Oh, God. And look, I gotta say, I'm just glad there's an adult in the room now. You know?

Thank God. Again, I don't want to just be talking about how kooky everything is in this new administration, but this is wild. Yes, this is bonkers. No, no, no. Garrison, I disagree, and that's because I have professional solidarity. Anything that's good for podcasters in general is good for the country. Right.

So, not great. Not great. Last week, Patel told senior officials he wants to relocate upwards of 1,500 employees from D.C. to field offices around the country.

And in a statement on last Friday, which is February 21st, Patel said, quote, unquote.

Agents and government employees have warned that under Patel, the bureau will be on course to refocus efforts away from far-right street fighters and accelerationists and towards the nebulous BLM Antifa.

In related news, on Tuesday, a far-right extremist named Joe Kent was confirmed as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent is a former Special Forces and CIA operative. He's described himself as an American first populist and has strong ties to the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.

Kent has praised Joey Gibson for standing up to Antifa, and Kent himself employed a Proud Boy to consult on a failed congressional campaign in 2022. Kent has historically advocated that the FBI refocus their efforts to target Antifa, and

And this is, like, all amidst a report from The Guardian suggesting that the Nazi accelerationist group The Base has had a decent resurgence in activity and recruitment efforts inside the United States. That's good. So, not cool stuff happening. Read the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I guess I'll close, unless we have any other thoughts on Kent or Patel or our podcaster deputy director. What are you supposed to say? All right.

I mean, I do think it's funny that because of the number of podcasters that have been hired, there have been statements by people in the administration that like there aren't going to be any more conservative podcasters because we're giving them all government jobs. Well, that's more...

him's advertising dollars for us. That's right. That's right. I feel like this is going to be huge for us. I would like to close on three more funny news moments from the past week. Elon Musk danced around with a chainsaw at CPAC while multiple of his ex-wives and baby mamas pleaded for him on Twitter to respond to emergencies regarding his children.

Including that weird far-right journalist and Babylon Bee contributor who has had an increasing spat with Musk and now, I believe, has filed for complete custody of their child. Yeah, well, I mean, good luck, I guess. I guess good luck. I can't think of a worse situation to be in than Elon Musk being one of your legal parents. So, like, for the sake of that child, I hope that she succeeds.

Tesla stock is down nearly 30% this month. There's been a real pressure on him because people in Europe are refusing to buy Teslas and a boycott upset at him for doing the whole Nazi salute and being a Nazi thing. And finally...

It's very sad news. A crypto trader killed himself live on a Twitter space in order to start a meme coin. Sorry, sorry. On an X space in order to start a meme coin. How do we feel about this, folks? I know it's a dark time for our community.

They did start the meme coin. Multiple meme coins actually were started. Well done for the people cashing in on the guy shooting himself in the head and then bleeding out for 30 minutes on stream. You are vampires. I don't know. Not the cool kind. No, yeah. Not the cool kind. The evil kind. Vultures. Vultures can be cool as well, I guess. It depends. Yeah. Well, I think that's it for us. We reported the news again. We reported the news again.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

At Emory University, we believe in those with the ambition to achieve, the passion to learn, and the optimism to see the possibilities ahead. Founded on a belief that the wise heart seeks knowledge, an Emory education combines experiential learning in Atlanta and beyond with unrivaled collaboration and discovery, all to prepare you for a world that needs your leadership. Learn more at emory.edu.