It Could Happen Here Weekly 172
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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.

Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast. It's James today and I'm joined again by Kevin Macdonald. Kevin is a retired officer from the Irish Defence Forces with some special forces and peacekeeping experience. Welcome to the show, Kevin. Thanks very much for having me. And just as a sort of disclaimer at the very start, any views or opinions that I express, they're the opinions of a retired senior officer from the Irish Defence Forces. Can't be construed as being in any way

the views of the Irish Defence Forces, nor indeed that of the United Nations. So I just wanted to put that out there before we get into it. Yeah, not a UN or Irish Defence Forces spokesperson. Not that we've had many of those, I suppose, on our show. Kevin, we're here today to talk a little bit about the situation in Congo and perhaps more specifically, like how the peacekeeping mission there has evolved and changed and sort of morphed over the years.

So maybe just to begin with, I can give an idea that like this city of Goma, which is the capital of North Kivu province, has recently been captured by M23 rebels. Would explain who they are, for people who aren't familiar in a minute. It's a city of about a million people. I believe they're saying around 3,000 people have been killed in,

in this operation, which is, I mean, it's a massive death toll. In a short space of time. It's very short space of time. Yeah. And some of the other stuff I've heard, like at one point there was a prison within the city, which there was a jailbreak and they think,

Hundreds of the women who were incarcerated there were sexually assaulted and in some cases burned alive after the jailbreak happened. Thousands of Congolese military and police have surrendered. A contingent of, I believe, Romanian women

private military contractors were captured. Yes, captured, surrendered, either way they went into Rwanda, I think about 300 of them, which is a significant amount of mercenaries. Yeah, yeah, especially when you're talking about Romania, which is not a vast country. Yeah. Understandably, a lot of things are happening in the US, people may have missed it, and I think people in the US, just due to the nature of news being quite navel-gazing here,

may not be as familiar with the conflict in Congo. Like if they know about it, it's from Warren's Eve on songs or maybe from a couple of films. Liars, Guns and Money. Yeah, yeah. What's the other one? Roland the Thompson Gunner. That's the... Yeah, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. That's it. That's the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So let's talk then about the various United Nations peacekeeping missions in Congo. They've been there since the 1960s, is it? On and off. Yeah, so the first mission in the Congo was Onok in 1960. And a lot of people would say that that was the first UN mission. But as I think we discussed the last time, the first UN mission was Fremantle.

full-scale war in 1950 in Korea. And that mission is still in existence, the UNC, the United Nations Command. But I suppose speaking about the Congo specifically, so in 1960 there was 17 newly independent states, of which 14 were from Africa, agreed to a call from the UN to establish this mission in the Congo. And Ireland...

answer the call as well. So we deployed, it was the first time that we deployed with the UN. And we had a battalion there from 1960 to, I think, 1964 or whenever the initial deployment ended. And it was a fairly tough, intense introduction to peacekeeping. In early 1960, there was an engagement between an Irish platoon and a large group of Beluba tribesmen

And there was nine Irish soldiers killed and 26 Belubas killed. And that was the first time that Ireland kind of had to deal with that kind of death overseas. Yeah. So it was pretty traumatic. And then in 1961, you've probably seen the film The Siege of Jadaville. Yeah. But it recounts the true story of an Irish company under Cominac Pat Quindlen. His company was 158, roughly, strong.

And they were attacked while they were at mass on a Sunday morning by a group of between 3,000 and 4,000 Katanganese, well-armed soldiers, backed up by French and Belgian and South African mercenaries. They also had an attack helicopter and they had an attack jet. I think you had some of the old Rhodesians in there as well at that time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately. Anything for a fight. But the Irish held out for, I think, over a week.

And they didn't give up when they ran out of water. They didn't give up when they ran out of food. It was when they had no bullets left. They negotiated a surrender. Thanks to the skill of the officers and NCOs and men,

Not one fatality on the Irish side. Unfortunately, when they came home because they had surrendered, they were treated like pariahs for years. It was seen like a stain on the nation. Now, if God forbid, they had 50% casualties that have been treated like heroes. And it's only in recent years that they're getting the recognition that they should have got back in 1961. That's really interesting. I didn't know they'd been treated that way. It's quite sad to hear. Yeah, it's a strange one. And a lot of the people that were, we'll say,

shunning these officers and NCOs and men, it's hard to serve overseas. And like if the UN, they tried once to resupply them with ammunition from the air, but it wasn't successful. So if the UN had fully supported that company, they would have held out even longer. Yeah.

But I suppose that's the way things go. So that's the first mission to the Congo. And I could be corrected, I think 64, 65, it might have sort of started to draw down. Then in 1999, after it was the first or the second war, the UN established MONUC, M-O-N-U-C. And that lasted from 1999 to

until 2010 when it was renamed and rechanged into MONUSCO. And the difference between the two is that MONUSCO is what we call an integrated mission. And the three pillars of an integrated mission are the restoration of the rule of law, the protection of civilians and the provision for long-term recovery and democratic governance.

So it's combining, we'll say, the force of a military presence, but also there's special advisers on justice, on policing, on governance, all that sort of stuff, which you wouldn't have in a mission like UNIFIL, which we discussed the last time. Yeah, yeah. Which is the earlier form of peacekeeping. So MONUSCO was supposed to have left the country in 2024, but they were given, I think, a one-year extension. Yeah. And...

Unfortunately, with the M23 Rebel Advance, the mission is relocating most of its staff, evacuating others. The difference between the two terms is very specific. You relocate within a country and you evacuate out of a country. And I also note that some of the hybrid African Union missions

peacekeeping operations. There was, I think, 13 South Africans killed in the initial stages of the onslaught towards Gomo. So that's kind of where we are with the... I think at the...

At its height, within 21, 22, there was probably a strength of 20,000. But if you think the DRC is the second largest country in Africa. It's vast, yeah. And the 11th largest country in the world. The size is just phenomenal. So you can imagine what the Congo in its entirety, no more than Sudan, but what the Congo in its entirety was back in the day. Yeah. Absolutely huge.

Yeah, it's vast. It encompasses different climate zones, different ethnic groups, as we're seeing, right? 200 million ethnic groups. Yeah, yeah. It's a fascinating place. It's a place I've wanted to go for a long time. I spent some time on the Congo-Rwanda border a few years ago. Not so far from Goma, actually. Like riding my bike around and...

It's a very interesting place in terms of what Rwanda is a very interesting place in terms of its relation to its neighbors. I think people will probably struggle to conceptualize. I actually saw somebody had posted on Twitter, somebody who talks about Syria, mostly like how on earth is Rwanda invading Congo? And they had like a picture, you know, and the land mass of Rwanda is one of the smaller countries in Africa. And Congo is obviously a vast country.

Are you comfortable explaining a little bit of the Rwandan involvement? It's complicated and it goes back to the genocide back in 94, I think. And the two Kivu's, North and South Kivu, which is on the border with Rwanda, there's a large amount of ethnic Tutsis

Congolese Tutsis there. I think what Rwanda has always projected force into the two Kivus and Katanga because like literally that's where the money is. Of course, Rwanda would say they don't, but they are actively supporting M23 and have. And most of the M23, certainly the leadership would be ethnic groups

Congolese Tutsis. So ostensibly, I think the raison d'etre for Romanda's involvement was to protect the ethnic Tutsis from Hutus that had escaped from the genocide. So it's complicated, but if you kind of park those complications and think of the money trail,

it kind of leads to the two Kivos because 70% of the world's cobalt, I think, is kind of located between the two Kivos. And then you've gold, diamonds, all the other sort of rich minerals. Yeah, incredible wealth in Congo. Yeah, but I was reading that the estimated deposits in eastern Congo

it's something like 23 trillion. Like it's off the wall stuff. So it's no wonder it's become the battleground that it has essentially since 1960, because in 1960, after getting independence, the Kivu and Katanga wanted to secede back by Belgium. And that's kind of what kicked off a lot of the conflict in 1960. And the reverberations from that are still kind of being felt and being exploited because...

Everyone wants to get a piece of the action, like all the surrounding countries. So I see, I think it was yesterday that they're planning a meeting

I think it's this week or this weekend to try and resolve the conflict. And this time they're going to try and include M23 in the meeting rather than ex-Google. I don't think they have a choice. I mean, they're heading down to Bukovu. Yeah, I mean, M23 have said that they're going for sort of the whole country now, that they're not, you know, it's not a regional or ethnic movement so much as a... And they will, M23 would say that they're not like...

per se ethnic separatists, right? Like I think they would claim that they're like a liberation of Congo force. And then you've Burundi supporting the Congolese government. You know, there's all kinds of, as you say, like regional and international actors because of the wealth in Congo. And then like, as Congo emerged from the DRC emerged from its colonial past, right? It's always been destabilized by these, these,

actors both regional and international who wanted a piece of that mineral wealth and then they've created and sustained these differences which have become i think there's some evidence to suggest that like certainly that they're like the ethnic differences have become more pronounced and more like intransigent i suppose or like you know it's become more difficult for those ethnic groups to coexist over time due to decades of conflict right and then and killing and it's a very it's

difficult situation and it leaves people like the civilians living in Goma today in a terrible situation where I think this is the fifth time that people have attacked Goma. It's certainly...

I think the last time was about 2012, was it? The last time M23 took Goma. Yeah, and that's when the, which we'll probably discuss later, the 4th Intervention Brigade retook Goma in 2013 in a relatively short space of time compared to how long it took to fall. They regained it fairly quickly. Yeah, so I think we break for adverts now. I'd like to come back and discuss the 4th Intervention Brigade because I think it's something that people ought to understand when we talk about peacekeeping.

And we're back. Okay, so yeah, you mentioned the Force Intervention Brigade, which is something a bit unique within peacekeeping. And there's a lot of, like, when people talk about peacekeeping, they'll be like, oh, why aren't they fighting? Why aren't they, like, going and stopping the things? And I understand why people ask that. So can you explain a little bit about what the FIB was and what it did? The concept of the Force Intervention Brigade was, I think,

to my knowledge, is the first UN mission that developed that concept. And they actually changed the mandate to include an offensive capability for UN troops, as opposed to defensive or separation of warring factions. This was full-on warfighting. And what they had figured out, because the DRC is so big, that the footprint, even with 20,000 troops, the footprint on the ground was not sufficient to, we'll say,

As I said, one of the three pillars of an integrated mission is protection of civilians. And they were finding that very difficult. So they decided to use a concept of protection by projection rather than protection by presence. So not alone did they have the Force and Divergation Brigade. They had the joint protection teams and also an idea of a rapidly deployable battalion.

So the idea was that the Force Intervention Brigade would say do the heavy lifting. And then when hotspots would flare up, they could use either the rapidly deployed battalions or the joint protection teams. So the idea was that rather than having static positions trying to protect people, they would go where the action was. That was the idea. And in fairness, the FIB had artillery, mortar, snipers, attack helicopters, UAVs,

special forces they retook gum and i don't know the exact time frame but i think it was less than a month um one of the problems and i think we touched on it the last time we spoke and i think this was a specific problem to the how the fib didn't really keep going the way it should have is that two of the main tccs were tanzania and south africa and they would have had

slightly different agendas in terms of who they should and they shouldn't attack based on their government's position.

Sorry, TCC is Troop Contributing Countries. Excuse me, I should have said that. Yeah, it's a sea of acronyms here. I've tried to avoid all these faction acronyms. But yeah, explain that a bit. Because when people think of the UN and peacekeepers or troop contributing countries, the only time it comes on the news in sort of the global north is when

people from say Northern Europe or North America are part of these UN peacekeeping missions. So they think of people, British troops, American, Canadian, what have you, in their blue helmets, right? But the vast bulk of TCCs don't come from Northern Europe, right? In Africa, the majority of TCCs are other African countries. I think I'm right saying it's a majority. Yeah, like here in South Sudan,

Most of the big battalions are Rwanda, Nepal, Mongolia, China. Generally speaking, in my experience in the Central African Republic and here, a lot of the battalions come from Africa, which is fair enough. I mean, it's their continent. Yeah. And they should have a stake in trying to foster peace and develop peace and help.

countries in less or more dire situations than they themselves perhaps are. And so it's, I understand your point about different countries being aware of what the UN does based on, I take for instance, everyone in Ireland knows about the UN and they know about the Irish in Lebanon and in Syria and in Africa. I'm sure in the United Kingdom, because you've got a very small UN footprint. Yeah. Cyprus being one, and there's a few of you guys here.

generally people in the UK, I'm sure you'll be able to enlighten me on this, wouldn't have the exact same intimate knowledge or even interest in the UN because basically they don't have a big footprint, a deployable footprint. Yeah, yeah. And it's the same in the United States. I think it's not something that people think about for the most part. And so like,

There's this question of like, why doesn't the UN, certainly I think when people saw what happened recently in Lebanon, they were like, why are these peacekeepers, you know, where you had these peacekeepers and we spoke about this in the last episode, right, being shelled.

being shot at. You know, the people were asking why they weren't out there fighting. And there are a lot of reasons for that. One being that's not what they're there to do. But yeah, when we had this force intervention brigade in Congo, they did some good things, right? They were able to retake Goma. And for the people who lived in Goma, I'm sure that was very important, like that meaningfully improved their lives. But like, it also comes with these complications that you've addressed, right? Like each of those troop contributing countries,

You need everyone to be committed to the same mission, I suppose. And if your government is giving your armed forces one mission that differs slightly from that, which whoever's in command of the force and the infantry brigade has, then we get friction, right? Or it's not as efficient as it could be. Yeah, I think, I'm sure I mentioned this when we last spoke. It's one thing developing a robust mandate. But if the TCCs

don't have the skills, the experience, the training, the equipment or the will to enforce the robust nature of that mandate. Well, then the mandate isn't really worth anything, you know, so it's kind of like, yes, the FIB was extremely effective for a while until it wasn't. Now, whether that was a lack of will on the TCCs or on New York or mission leadership, I have no idea, but...

It was a great idea and it worked and then it didn't work. Plus the fact that the DRC wanted the mission to downsize and eventually leave, that added to the, well, should we really invest in something when we're going to pull out? Because the country doesn't want us here anymore, which is, again, it's a fair point. Yeah, right. No one wants foreign troops in their country, right? You know, walking around, especially, you know, engaging their own citizens. But

I mean, it's interesting. I was watching a speech. The current president of the DRC, Felix Tshisekedi, I've tried my best to pronounce that correctly. It's not that disrespect. He was saying that the international community is bordering on complicit in M23's advance because of the failure to do anything about it in a speech he gave this week.

And it was interesting because it had previously been, like you said, for very understandable reasons, especially in the DRC, which has this long and horrible history of colonialism. The terrible things done in the Belgian Congo. We've covered this a lot on Bastards, another show that we do. People can listen to that if they want to. But now he's asking for more help, which is also understandable because...

His military is 125,000 or so, and a large number of that is not very combat-effective forces, maybe. And they've just been overrun in Gomer, in a big city, a city of a million people. So where do you think we go from here? We're in a very unique time in world history in which the United States is...

It's doing some things with its foreign policy. I mean, I won't really mince words about it. I think it's terrible. But if we talk about USAID, right, I was speaking to people on the Thai-Burmese border last week who were telling me that USAID has turned off life support machines as part of its drawdown and that people obviously directly died as a result of that there.

So the U.S. is not necessarily averse to having terrible consequences to its whatever it's trying to do right now, which I don't really have a good word for. So where do we go from here with the U.S. becoming more isolationist? Well, let's discuss for a few minutes the alternatives to U.N. peacekeeping. And there's a lot of them here in Africa. So

You have the South African Development Community, SADC, the East African Community. There was an African Union stroke UN hybrid mission in Darfur, UNAMID, which is closing. There was an AU mission in Somalia. There is the Lake Chad Basin Multinational Task Force. There's the Group of Five for the Sahel. Then you had EUFAR.

which was an EU force in Chad and in Mali, and subsequently became Minar Kat in Chad and Minuzma in Mali. Then you have the EUTM mission in Mali, which I was part of at one stage, and another one in Somalia. And of course, we have our mercenaries, you know, and...

When it emerged that there was over 300 of them allowed into Rwanda, I was reading a report that they were getting something like $3,500 a month, whereas the DRC soldiers

we're getting maybe $300 a month. Yeah. You know, and these guys were brought in to protect the mines because again, it goes back to money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're protecting resources, not people. That's a different thing. So what are those, like those African-led peacekeeping missions look like? Like you talked about these various like international and regional groups. I think it's, it's certainly worth a try because the UN hasn't,

the ability, nor indeed the money, I presume, to keep doing these large, big missions. At one stage, the three largest missions were Minusco, which we're discussing, Minusca in the Central African Republic, and Minusma, which was in Mali. Mali's gone. DRC is on the drawdown. Central African Republic is still there, but I've noticed...

I spent four years there and obviously have a keen interest in the place. But there has been a big increase in anti-French, it's a francophone country, anti-French and linked with a kind of an anti-UN sentiment. Now, the special advisor to the president is from Russia.

Wagner had a big part to play when I was there. They were key players. Yeah. Most likely they're interlinked. Yeah, I mean, and they've done some things which are horrific in terms of, we've covered that as well with Brent Dermott on the show. I did want to talk about this because the US is talking about withdrawing its sort of

what we call like soft power assets right around the world and i saw like i forget who it was saying like oh let the chips fall where they may it's very obvious where the chips will fall in this part of the world right like um when i was in rwanda every fancy road in rwanda they call them chinese roads because they go from the mines to the airport yeah belt embraces yeah it's as naked a resource extraction project as you'll see right um now china also does the soft power thing they'll build hospitals and and

I forget where the quote comes from, but every time the US comes, we get a lecture, and every time China comes, we get a hospital. This will reorient the way these countries, specifically in Africa, associate with the world, right? With the US drawdown and the United Nations not capable or willing of sort of doing these massive peacekeeping missions. And I think for very understandable reasons, groups like the EU, you know,

It's best not to have large deployment to European armed forces in Africa for reasons that are probably quite obvious. So, like, yeah, we're likely to see... I mean, hasn't Wagner rebranded itself as the Africa Corps now? Yeah. I'm not sure who's running it now, but I'm sure the strings have been more closely pulled by...

by Putin as opposed to having very loose control when Prokosian was there. Yeah, yeah. It was giving him like a standoff capability. This is just a PMC, nothing to do with me. But I would imagine after his drive to Moscow and his subsequent demise, I'm sure that whoever is running the Africa Corps is much more tightly controlled by the Kremlin. I would imagine.

Yeah, it's like a British East India Company kind of model, like a sort of proxy colonialism, but very tight. Like you say, it's just almost just like a different badge on the same thing there. I think this is one of the things that won't get talked about in the next four years because the US media will talk about the US a lot again. I mean, they always do. But I think people should be concerned about this, about the future of

for multinational peacekeeping in Africa and more importantly, I guess, the future for or interlink with that the future for human rights in Africa.

What do you see as like meaningful ways that people can advocate for a future for Africa, which is not just another set of countries extracting resources and leaving very little for the people there, which is something that has happened. You know, I'm a British person. This has happened by British people for a very long time and other European people for a very long time. But like, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try and stop it happening in the future.

That's a difficult one to answer because ideally African problems should, in my opinion, be solved by African nations. Yeah. And that's the reason that the African Union and all these other ones that I mentioned, I think are an attempt to do that. Yeah. And certainly...

Europe and the US shouldn't be dictating how Africans govern themselves. They should be assisting in good governance, good policing, good judiciary. But it kind of goes back to money again because there's so much of a vested interest. I heard a figure that M23 would get $800,000 a month from some of the mines in Kivu. Yeah, I can believe it.

Well, it's that kind of money floating around. A lot of people maybe don't want to sort things out. Yeah. And it may suit to leave the mayhem there and use all these artisanal miners who are getting paid a couple of cents a day.

And Rwanda has just got a big contract with the EU in terms of diamonds. Yeah, I mean, that is the thing, right? We can tell where this stuff comes from. There is a means to try and limit the amount of these resources which can leave conflict zones in a way which benefits belligerent parties. It's where the markets for those resources are willing to do it, right? Yeah.

And everyone has a stake in the pie, whether it's the overseer of the mine, whether it's the company that owns the mine, whether it's the people that move the product from Kivu into some neighboring country, and then ultimately the people that buy it commercially in Western Europe or around the rest of the world. Yeah, yeah. And it's...

People think of diamonds a lot, and I think there's been a kind of movement to purchase diamonds which are ethically sourced or to just not use diamonds to sort of move away from them as like a store of value. But it's also the parts in your mobile phone, isn't it? It's not just like fancy engagement rings. This is it, yeah. Are you willing to pay double the price for more ethical mining methods? Most people probably aren't. Yeah, that's the thing, right? And especially when...

it's out of sight, out of mind for most people. Even compared to, you know, obviously genocide of Palestinian people or the, you know, when we think about these other atrocities, right? Like those have not remained out of sight, out of mind because they're visible on people's social media, because, you know, people in Palestine have phones and they can film. And that's, I think, meaningfully wrong.

changed the way like I wouldn't have thought American people would would care about Palestinian people I moved here in 2008 and You wouldn't have found much interest in Palestine. You wouldn't have expected them to promote ethnic cleansing of Gaza Yeah, I know you well you wouldn't have expected that either but the movement like to support Palestinian people at this from the grassroots and

And then also the government doing the exact opposite. You know, it's come from the bottom up. It hasn't come from government advocacy.

But we don't see that as much with certainly this part of Africa, right? And it exposes a consequence of people in Congo maybe aren't able to access those global networks of social media and maybe to share their stories. And I think it's also a consequence of us in the media not reporting at all. I've for years tried to sell stories about Africa to American publications.

And at best they'll want a story about like the people who are starting like social enterprise, European or North American people starting like social enterprises or like sort of beneficial companies. And I understand this have a role, but like,

you're not going to persuade me that there isn't a single African person of interest to you. And that like, it's someone who came from North America, that it's the only relevant story to tell in Africa. And like, I've had this falling out with so many editors over the years that like,

No, I don't want to tell that story. I want to tell a story about people from Congo in Congo, about people from Rwanda in Rwanda. I live in a town towards the west coast of Ireland and there's a guy from there. What I'll do is I'll send you a link. Yeah, yeah. But he's passionate about

about getting free education in africa between online courses and online libraries obviously the more education you get the better chance you have of having a better life so yeah i did go some stuff and i'll send it on to you and then you can figure out whether it'll be an interesting topic or or whatever but i just literally as we were talking i was thinking of how one guy is trying to change conditions for younger people in africa and trying to give it to them

That's it. Yeah, that's the key is like people doing it. One of the things that people did, which I thought was really great as an example, as a model is from October, about October the 10th of 2023, I suppose, was

People weren't going to school or university in Gaza. And very quickly, there weren't any universities in Gaza because they all got bombed, right? The colleagues of mine in academic departments started putting on seminars and lectures that Palestinian people, be they displaced or still in Gaza but with access to internet, you know, still displaced but internally displaced, could attend and continue with their educations.

And I thought that was a really great, like solidarity based way to facilitate access to something that people have had taken away from them through no fault of their own by state aggression. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There's a model for that. I mean, colonialism has done many terrible things, but it's given us a common language with a lot of our African friends, you know,

you speak French and English, you can, you can do quite well. So like, yeah, there are things available and I wish people would, uh, I don't think people should stop caring about Palestine. Of course I don't, but I do wish they would care more about people in Africa too, because, uh, like they don't deserve this any more than anyone else. I was born in 1960 when the first mission went to, to the Congo. Yeah. And, uh,

It's been going on. Like, I'm 64. It's been around 64 years. Yeah. So, no more than the problem with the Palestinians. I think some people, unless you have a specific interest in it or feel passionate about it, a lot of people just, I think, tune out and go to the next pronouncement from the White House, you know, sort of clickbait. Yeah. So, I think it's a sad fact, but it's the factor, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a shame. And like, you know, if there's one thing I'd like to do with my career, I'd like to spend more time in that part of the world and do more reporting and, uh,

I think we could do a lot as a media with just explaining how life is for everyday people. Because people think about Congo in terms of the M23 and the Congolese government and the Hutu militias and this and that. But the vast majority of people are just trying to get on with their day. They want a better future for their children. And the fact that your mobile phone is cheap is maybe making their children's future worse. And that's something that we need to reckon with. And e-cars.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the thing people don't talk about electric cars. It's always weird as all that stuff go. And then even here in America, right, where the US trying to mine lithium on reservations where, you know, the land, the little land is left indigenous people to have sovereignty on is where it's now trying to do this very invasive form of mining.

Kevin, you've written a book, so would you like to, as we wind down here, do you want to explain a little bit about your book so that people are interested in your life and your time as a peacekeeper and an archaeologist? Okay, so what started off as a lockdown project when COVID hit back in the day, I decided I would...

write an account of my weird and wonderful life for my, just for my family. And once you start writing, as you're no doubt aware, you start remembering. And suddenly I was at something like 100,000 words and I thought, right, there might be a book in this. And I know, obviously I'm opinionated about my own book naturally, but it's not just a book about some random military guy waffling on about his, his military career.

I've a separate career in mountaineering and a kind of a nearly separate career in archaeology. So it's a mixture of soldiering, mountaineering and archaeology. As someone said it to me, it's a bit like Chris Bonington meets Bear Grylls meets Indiana Jones. Yeah.

which is kind of a weird and wonderful way to do it. So the title of the book is A Life Less Ordinary, which this was a recruiting slogan in the 1990s for the Irish Defence Forces. Oh, I didn't know that. I think I'll send you the link. Yeah. If not, I'll do it. Yeah. Immediately. So all your viewers can order the book. You can only get it online at the publishers. It's not on Amazon, unfortunately. Yeah, well, I

I don't know, maybe for the best, given the way tech people are playing the US economy. Yeah, you can get it online. You can get it sent to the United States if you're interested. I did. Thank you so much for your time, Kevin, your insights today. I know we really appreciate it. Is there anywhere else if people want to follow you online aside from the book? The book is probably the best one. It's probably the best way to get in contact. I'm on LinkedIn and the normal stuff, just LinkedIn.

Google Kevin MacDonald and I should come up. I was resisting for years and years and eventually I googled Kevin MacDonald and I was surprised at the amount of Kevin MacDonalds there is. There's a famous American actor I think called Kevin MacDonald. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But just as a small parting shot, when I was in Mali, I was researching the archaeology of Mali and the world expert on Malayan archaeology is a professor, naturally.

Kevin MacDonald. So I sent him an email and I said, by the way, I'm also an archaeologist and my name is Kevin MacDonald. And he goes, my word, I'll be in Bangi or in Bamako in two weeks time. Let's meet up. So the two Kevin MacDonalds, two archaeologists met up in Bamako to discuss archaeology. That's nice when these things come together. Another one of my weird and wonderful stories. Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Kevin. It's always nice to hear from you. You're more than welcome, James. You're welcome.

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So check out Lenovo.com slash Legion. Empowering creators everywhere. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and the people trying to put them back together again. I am today's guest host, Margaret Kiljoy.

Today is one of those episodes about people, well, trying to put it back together again, or I guess really an episode about people trying to stop them from making things fall apart. Because today I'm going to talk a little bit about the fight against the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline.

Last Tuesday, February 25th, 2025, the last criminal trials from the campaign to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline were held in Parisburg, Virginia. As you might have guessed, based on the fact that you've never heard of Parisburg, Virginia, it's a tiny town nestled in the Appalachian Mountains.

It's also the county seat of Giles County, Virginia, and it, the town, is home to almost 3,000 people. It's in the southwest of the state, right up against West Virginia. Culture and geography, of course, both reject things like state lines, though governments are obsessed with them. For 10 years, the people of Central Appalachia, on both sides of the imaginary line, fought against this destructive pipeline.

Their campaign tied nonviolent direct action with lawsuits and public pressure campaigns, and they very nearly won. It took backdoor dealings at the highest level of power to force the pipeline's construction, with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin holding 2023's Inflation Reduction Act hostage until President Biden personally guaranteed that the pipeline would be constructed, overriding all of the courts, activists, and locals who'd blocked it along the way.

Essentially, the ostensible Democrat Joe Manchin said, fine, I'll vote for your climate bill, but only if you fuck over the state that I represent. The pipeline, owned by Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, was supposed to be built in a year. Thanks to the campaign against it, it took six and a half years to build. It was intended to cost the company $3 billion. It cost them more than twice that.

which is not bad for a scrappy movement of mountain people, hippies, and punks. It's not bad for a bunch of grandmas and college kids. I'll be covering the full campaign in more detail soon on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. This podcast is, instead, about the trials. Twelve defendants went before the court that day, eleven of them facing felonies and serious prison time. In the end, none of them were sentenced to time behind bars, I am happy to say.

A friend of mine invited me down to cover the trials. Twelve defendants all in the same day, all in the same courtroom with the same judge. I said yes. West Virginia is a bigger state than its own map would indicate because there aren't freeways that run through it, so it takes a very long time to get anywhere. So I packed up my van and headed down on Monday night. That night, sleeping in my van, I had a stress dream about court.

where I'd forgotten to take off my knife before going through the metal detectors, and spent a very long time talking to various cops about who I was and why I was there, before being stuck outside the courthouse in a large crowd of protesters surrounded by a large crowd of cops. In that dream, someone who wasn't on either side stood up to give a speech, but too near an open flame and his clothes caught fire.

Us anarchists, again, I'm talking about my dream here. Us anarchists rushed to help him while the cops stared on with blank stares. We beat out the flames and held his burned body while the cops stared on with blank stares. We screamed for someone to call an ambulance while the cops stared on with blank stares.

I like when my dreams lend themselves to obvious symbolism, in this moment where the apparatus of the state is content to let all of us burn, whether in the fires of fascism or the fires of climate change. But I woke up disturbed nonetheless, with the sun barely over the horizon. I ate a quick breakfast and I drove the rest of the way up to the actual courthouse and the actual trial. Fortunately, at the actual thing, no one caught fire.

I parked on a nearby street and made my way to the courthouse. I didn't accidentally bring a pocket knife, which is easy for me to do since I usually have three on me because I am a totally normal human. I did, though, bring an audio recorder, which was equally forbidden in the courtroom. I went through the metal detector and surrendered my little bag with the Zoom recorder. Later, press came into the room and I tried to get my recorder back, but I was told, that's real media.

Without a press badge, I don't look much like someone who works for iHeart. I settled into a seat and waited for the proceedings. Eco-defendants and eco-defenders both poured into the tiny, dingy courtroom. The ceiling had holes in it. The drywall was sagging. Appalachia is an extracted-from region, a place from which wealth is gathered, not a place where wealth goes.

We were reminded repeatedly that the fire code limited occupancy of the room to 89 people. And it sure seemed like they brought in as many cops as they could to limit our numbers. Many more supporters waited outside. Most of what I did that day was wait in the courtroom, because most of the courtroom drama was happening behind closed doors, as the prosecutor, the judge, and the eight or so defense attorneys all argued and fought over the details of plea deals.

Most of these characters, judge, prosecutor, and lawyers, were quite familiar to the people working with the movement. This was the last trial of many throughout the 10-year campaign, which has relied heavily on nonviolent direct action since 2018. The prosecutor in particular, a guy named Bobby Lilly, was a well-known figure.

Usually, when people say things like, the prosecutor was a clown, they're speaking figuratively. But Bobby Lilly, the prosecutor, is a balloon artist in his free time, and his Facebook is full of photos of all of his balloon creations. The rumor is that he clowned his way through law school. All right, which look, if I wasn't predisposed to not like this man because he was arguing for the imprisonment of people trying to save all life on earth, I would kind of think that's cool.

But it does mean that there was a clown prosecution, and some people who were there to support the defendants wore balloon animal hats to mock Bobby Lilly, though they were forced to leave those hats outside as no hats of any kind were allowed in the courtroom. Coming in that morning, we expected most of the defendants to take non-cooperating plea deals they'd already agreed to.

Non-cooperating plea deals are deals in which the defendant refuses to cooperate with the state's investigation of other protesters. Basically, this means these are non-snitching deals. A few of the defendants, though, were ready to take their cases to trial. I've decided to largely not use people's names in this reporting.

Those names are a matter of public record, of course. But we are entering unprecedented times, and I don't see any particular advantage in making their names more public than they already are. But do you know what I do want to make public? The sweet, sweet deals offered by our advertisers. I love making those public. Here they are. And we're back. The charges against the defendants seem politically motivated.

This isn't to say the defendants might not have walked onto pipeline worksites and disrupted activity there. There was certainly a coordinated campaign to do just that. But the charges against them were artificially inflated. I was talking to a supporter during one of the many long interludes in the proceedings.

who explained to me that nearly everyone on trial that day, and a large percentage of all defendants throughout the course of the campaign, were charged with felony misuse of a motor vehicle, a.k.a. joyriding. To be clear, no one has been accused of hijacking construction equipment and riding it around.

It's just one of the many charges levied at protesters in order to get their bail denied or inflated to tie everyone up in legal proceedings for longer and intimidate people into pleading guilty to lesser charges. These are similar to the kidnapping charges that a lot of protesters got as well, despite that, well, no one was kidnapped during the course of the campaign, except, of course, by the state.

Another supporter explained to me, inflated charges has been part of the Mountain Valley Pipeline's legal strategy all along. The same as protesters look to tie the pipeline company up in court and delay construction, MVP's strategy seems to have been to drag out court cases and keep as many individual forest defenders caught up in legal jeopardy as possible.

Of course, they shouldn't actually have the means to change people's charges. But if the fight against MVP has taught us anything, it's that the state caves to business interests every time. Most defendants from the course of the campaign have taken pleas that include suspended sentences so that they never do jail time as long as they promise to never try to save the world from fossil fuel infrastructure.

It seems like MVP wants each person who catches charges to be out of the fight. But fortunately, Frontline's work is only a portion of the work involved in defending the Earth. When someone told me that this was MVP's strategy, to catch everyone up on charges, I wasn't really skeptical because it made sense. But I still had that confirmed for me in the courtroom. You see...

A few lawyers or other legal representatives of MVP were present in the courtroom that day, standing at the back of the room, seemingly eavesdropping on the courtroom chatter. Word on the street was that part of their goal was to gather information for the ongoing civil litigation happening against environmentalists. But eavesdropping goes both ways, and one supporter I talked to overheard them talking to each other about how they wish they could drag these cases out even longer.

Once court began, defendants went up one by one before the judge. Most entered pleas of not guilty with stipulation. This is, in essence, a way to accept a plea agreement without actually accepting guilt. So each person went up, pleaded not guilty with stipulation, and then was found guilty by the judge on their lesser charges. The process took three to six minutes per defendant. I tracked it.

The defendants were there for arrests stemming from actions that happened between October 2023 and March 2024, from three different actions, all on nearby Peters Mountain, a mountain which sits on the horizon of Parisburg, Virginia, and which defies the border between Virginia and West Virginia. Most of the action from the campaign happened on either Peters Mountain or another mountain in another county, Poor Mountain.

One action in October 2023, like I said, court has been dragged out for a very long time, was an action in which one person locked themselves to an excavator while others were there in support. The supporters of the action were facing felonies too. Some of them, a while back, were re-arrested at their own arraignments, given additional charges, and put into jail for days. It's not hard to imagine why the defendants were nervous in the courtroom that day.

Even though most of them had already sorted out their plea agreements ahead of time, the state is fickle, condescending, and unpredictable. One of the defendants that I talked to told me about their own case. The evidence supporting the charges against pretty much everyone was weak, but the evidence supporting the charges against this particular person were particularly weak.

The state kept offering this person plea deals before anyone else. Will you be offering the same deal to my co-defendants? The defendant kept asking. The state kept saying no, so the defendant kept refusing the deal. That defendant came to court fully expecting to stand trial rather than take a better deal than what their co-defendants were getting.

The big story of the day actually revolves around that particular point. At least one of the defendants who came prepared to stand trial last Tuesday wound up being offered much more generous plea agreements at the last minute because the state knew its case against them was flimsy. Those who accepted non-cooperating plea deals were hit with suspended sentences, community service, and restitution.

The details differed from case to case, but in general, people were given a year in prison hanging over their heads if they're caught breaking the law in the next year, and have to spend between 50 and 100 hours doing manual labor for Giles County, Virginia. I've been told this can range from something benign, like painting murals, to something intentionally humiliating, like cleaning the toilets at the police station. The single biggest issue of contention was restitution.

The defendants are being ordered to pay for the overtime costs associated with arresting them. One defendant, who was, I believe, arrested at a Moms Against the Pipelines action, a woman who simply wants her children to grow up in a world with a habitable ecosystem, was in court last Tuesday to contest the restitution payments. This is, as I understand it, the only issue that was not fully resolved that day. The case the defense made was one that I found convincing, although of course I have a bias in that direction.

Essentially, the defense's case was that people are not legally on the hook for the investigation of their own crime. That it would set a very dangerous precedent to have people have to pay for the cops' time to arrest them. The prosecutor's argument was, and I rudely paraphrase here, yeah, but fuck these people in particular.

that because there was a campaign against the MVP, their crimes ought to be treated differently and the same standard of the rule of law should not apply to them. Again, I'm paraphrasing, but that really was the takeaway that I seemed to get. The judge said he would need to consider the case law on the matter and would not rule on it that day. But you know what he would have ruled on if he was the judge of this podcast? He would have ruled that it is time for advertising. And we're back.

The only case that actually went to trial, as I understand it, was for the only misdemeanor case of the day. A protester who was accused and convicted later at the end of the trial of spending a couple days living inside a length of pipe to prevent it from being buried in the earth.

The full incompetence of the police was on display, from the state trooper who didn't know what the word diameter meant when asked to describe the pipeline in question, to the police who admitted that they didn't actually bother watching the entrance to the pipe. So they didn't actually see the protester when they emerged from the pipe. In court, the cops said the protester came up to them to turn themselves in and said, quote, well, you're lucky I'm honest.

A large part of the defense's case was that the defendant had been denied the right to a speedy trial, which seems true to me. Misdemeanors in particular are supposed to move through the court system quickly, not drag on for a year. Because again, it seems quite likely that MVP has been working from the start to drag on court cases as long as possible. All the while the trial went on, supporters outside had a table set up in the parking lot with homemade food, a staple of this movement as far as I can tell.

The connections between the frontlines and their supporters built a very strong movement indeed. After the trial, an older local man gave a heartfelt thank you to everyone who had put their bodies on the line to protect the mountains he loves, and I went around and talked to people, feeling a bit odd to be there as a stranger to the movement and as a journalist. Blocking pipeline construction through nonviolent direct action is simple in principle, but complicated in the details.

The core of it is that you leverage your own safety in order to prevent construction crews from working. Since your own safety is what you're gambling with, it's, well, not safe. The idea is you put your own body on the line. In 1998, for example, an Earth First activist named David Chain died when a logger dropped a tree on him and killed him. And despite ample evidence that the logger in question had been aware of the protesters and had been threatening them, no charges were pressed against him.

In 2003, an American anarchist peace worker named Rachel Corey was killed in the Gaza Strip when she stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer, trying to stop the bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian home.

Even when you aren't murdered for doing it, the work itself is dangerous too. Shortly before I joined my first forest defense campaign in the Pacific Northwest, an activist named Whorehound had just fallen to her death from a tree sit, and her absence was a tangible presence in every meeting and every forest defense camp for years after. So I don't feel like I'm speaking hyperbolically when I say that in that courtroom were some of the bravest people I've ever met.

who risked their lives to stop a clear and present threat against it. And again, I genuinely believe this is not hyperbolic to say, a clear and present threat against all life on Earth. Climate change could very easily destroy every ecosystem on the planet. This fight is bigger than Appalachia. These forest defenders at this last trial knew that they would likely face felonies were they arrested, and they knew that people have died doing this work before them.

And I don't want to speak to everyone involves gender identity, but it seems likely that some of them were trans as well, and thus risking spending prison time in the wrong prisons, which is a particularly dangerous position to be in. I don't say this to try to scare people out of joining movements like this. I can name people who have died in nonviolent direct action campaigns, and occasionally people have served real jail time.

But I've met thousands and thousands more who have saved wild places, who have built lifelong friendships, and who have proven to themselves that they are who they hoped they would be. I want to end this by reading two statements. One was written by one of the defendants and was posted onto the Appalachians Against Pipelines Facebook page on March 3rd. You can read the full statement over there if you'd like. Quote,

Today, we proved that co-defendant solidarity works. We were able to see how different strategies against a stacked system play out. It is in the court's best interest for us to take a deal out of fear of trial. But today, we showed that they are just as afraid of an uncertain outcome, and we can use that to our advantage when we work together.

The people who went to trial or pushed it to the brink got objectively better outcomes than those who took deals ahead of time. And those who took deals often had to struggle with changing conditions at trial, but still felt obligated to comply. I and another defendant held out, in part out of principle for people who had not been offered deals, and in part to say, fuck you, Bobby Lilly, our prosecutor, who is a literal clown.

My co-defendant and I went to bat for another who was not offered a deal. At first, my co-defendant was offered a deal, a rather nice one at that. But my friend said no. The clown blinked. My friend basically went to trial. Technically, they took a deal, but they basically started a trial. Prosecution made a motion to amend charges, but abruptly, the clown and his cop buddy left. They ran. They had no evidence.

Another deal, which was even better, was offered, and this time, I got one too. For me, it was good, and in agreement, we took our deals. The one other person was offered an okay deal, but opted to go to trial with eyes open at the court's incompetence and crushed it. Little Bobby Lily looked even more like a clown.

Every deal that was offered only got better, especially on the day of the trial. You don't have to accept the first deal, or the second, or the third, or the fourth. And when they try to pit us against each other, it is because they know we are stronger together.

Initially, we were charged with conspiracy. The real conspiracy is between prosecutors and the judges, between the cops and the corporations. It is the conspiracy between your landlord and your boss to keep you exhausted and hungry, unable to fight back.

It is the dictatorship of the billionaires to keep us bound to their world where they make and break their own rules. This is bigger than a 42-inch wide, 303-mile long, ticking time bomb running through Appalachia. It is the fact that our lives are bought and sold by the large landowning class who were able to ram this project through under Joe Biden despite the harm it'll cause because it will make them money as the world burns.

Then here's another statement from the person who sat inside the pipe, and the statement is from last year. Quote, winning looks so much bigger than just stopping this pipeline. It's a win through the community folks continue to build. It is a win because of the insane amount of skills that people have gathered and shared.

It's a win because whether or not this pipeline ever has gas running through it, the legacy of resistance in Appalachia still lives. Extractive industry knows that they can't fuck with the communities here without going through hell. And we better not let them forget that.

Many times in my life I have felt consumed by grief. Grief for all the places this pipeline has destroyed. For communities who continue to be ravaged by the state and industry. For the senseless violence committed against people and land every day. For friends and strangers forced into cages. But what keeps me moving is knowing that I feel such grief only because I have such deep hope and love for what could be and what we have the power to create.

Find or facilitate radical community wherever you call home. Think about the things you are willing to sacrifice for people near and far. Dream of worlds that feel out of reach, because I bet they aren't as far away as it may seem. That's the end of the quote. And so, yeah, though the criminal trials are over, the civil legal fight rages on. MVP is attempting to wield civil courts to silence its opposition.

And if you want to help support that fight, which continues, you can donate to Appalachian Legal Defense Fund, which you can find probably by just searching for it. But you can also find it by going to bit.ly slash app legal defense, all one word, no dashes. Anyway, that's it for the episode. I'll talk to you soon.

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Hello, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today. We have a very special episode in which everyone is a doctor. I will be leading the discussion, of course, as a doctor of modern European history. But I'm joined today by Venkatesh Ramnath, who is a practicing pulmonologist, a professor at UC San Diego Health, a medical director of several ICUs in rural and urban settings, and also the author of the sub-stack, Be a Health Architect.

Welcome to The Showing Test. Thanks for joining us. Great to be here. I'm also joined by Dr. Kaveh Hoda, a gastroenterologist and the host of our favorite medical podcast, The House of Pod. Of the many you listen to, I'm sure. Yeah, they might call a super user in the medical podcast space. You listen to more than me. Most importantly, Kaveh is, of course, our friend. That's right. Our resident doctor with a useful doctorate. So,

What we want to talk about today is Medicare and specifically some of the cuts to Medicare. More broadly, the... I don't know where you have to put this. Challenges for people working in healthcare in the Trump administration. We addressed...

specifically gender-affirming care in a previous episode, but it doesn't start and end there, right? That might be the thing that sort of the cultural wars have been focusing on recently. But I want to talk more broadly about the challenges facing healthcare. So first of all, would one of you care to explain Medicare for people who are not familiar? Some listeners might not be living in the United States or they might just not have encountered this yet in their life. So could one of you explain Medicare

this particular sort of type of health insurance is and how it's maybe more vulnerable than other types to federal government changes? I could take a stab at it. I'm not a health policy wonk, but I am a physician that has to deal with Medicare all the time. So Medicare, in sort of general terms, is a type of health insurance that

that is provided by the federal government. It is almost exclusively for individuals above the age of 65, as it dates back to the 1960s with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program. And so since that time, there has been this blanket issue

coverage for any individuals above that age such that all their medical services or products, whatever they need for their health care, is actually covered by the government. This is the federal government. Now, the interesting thing about Medicare is that there are different parts to it. There's Part A, which is primarily for some essential services and includes hospital care.

There's Part B, which includes whatever physicians' fees go into that health care. And then there's Part D, which relates to pharmaceutical prices, so your drug costs. It's not comprehensive in the sense that there's always something more that individuals need, but Medicare, for all intents and purposes, is the sort of standard, and it should cover most of an individual's needs. Now, that said...

the commercial payers, that is the other insurance companies that are not federally government-sponsored, take their lead from Medicare. So a lot of the different payment rates...

or coverages and services, they all look to what the centers of Medicare and Medicaid services dictate as far as what is an acceptable reimbursement rate, what are the rules around what should be covered and what should not. So that's why Medicare is such an important entity for the United States. Yep.

I'll add to that. They set the lead of importance here too, because if we're talking about telemedicine, telehealth, how important that is to Medicare patients, to everyone in the country at this point.

Then if they are to cut it, if that happens, as I think we're probably going to discuss, if that goes away, then the other private insurance companies are going to follow. That's right. It could be across the board changes led by these changes in Medicare. Yeah. So let's talk about those changes. And as you mentioned, right, there's this telemedicine. It's a waiver, right, that has allowed people.

to be funded through this for the last five years, I suppose. It's going to expire by the end of this month, which is March 2025, if you're listening later. Explain why telemedicine has been such a positive step in healthcare since, if you could, since 2020, and then why

what we're facing if it's no longer funded federally. Maybe I'll start this one, but Venkatesh, definitely want you to weigh in on it as well. Just to give a little background, over the past five years, it's grown quite a bit and it's gone from being kind of this emergency stop gap to a real cornerstone of what we consider modern healthcare. And now it's exceedingly common, like over 75% of hospitals in the US connect at a distance from

via video conference or some technology to patients. And it's been popular on both sides. It's been popular on both sides of the aisle. When it first was done, as you mentioned, during COVID,

When they said, okay, we're going to peel back some of the restrictions on Medicare coverage for these telehealth things. It was considered like a victory, like one of the few good things to come out of COVID. Yeah. Both sides liked it. It was popular amongst patients. It was popular amongst medical providers. It was good for Republicans and Democrats alike. Yeah.

And as you mentioned, it's been kept going through being put in some bill or another since it was initially put in, I think as they called it in 2020. And it's been put in one bill or another to go with the funding. But then came this last December when Congress was going through their spending, it was only given this three-month reprieve, which is going to be up, as you mentioned, at the end of this month. And if it goes away, there's a lot of factors, we'll go into a lot of them,

But there's a lot of people, older patients, immunocompromised patients who don't want to come into office, people with disabilities, people who can't get around that well, people in rural areas, which is really how it started, people who are going to be hurt all across this country. And at this point, the majority of people have had

at least one experience or more in a year with telemedicine. It's become a part of a lot of people's lives. And if it goes away, you know, there's still going to be healthcare as it is. I mean, it doesn't mean healthcare is going away, but it is going to put a tremendous burden on patients and hospitals for that matter across the country. Yeah. Let me, let me add to that. So, um,

You know, telemedicine has been around for a very long time, at least technically speaking, right? I mean, you can go back to the 1970s, even when you talk about the intensive care unit, which is where the sickest people in the hospital are. There are studies that come out of the 1970s. However...

Ever since people have had iPhones and been on Airbnb and everything else since 2007, that inflection point actually had a wave of opportunity that washed right into medicine. And as Kaveh is saying, we have such a fragmented healthcare system

that has folks living in rural areas, suburban areas, and urban areas, all of whom are at the mercy of what specialists may be there contracted at any given time for any given specialty. Now, telemedicine, as it's gotten more and more popular, has kind of leveled the playing field. I mean, you can be in a rural place like where I'm sitting right now on the U.S.-Mexico border, or you can be in New York City

you know, one of the densest populations, but you may not have access to specialty expertise without telemedicine. With telemedicine, you can now have access. And I've seen patients love it. You can deal with the sickest of the sick, like I said, intensive care units.

but you can also have outpatient experiences. And we've seen a number of different commercial opportunities that have leveraged that. But the point is that as we're hearing on this, it's become sort of a standard operating procedure for how we deliver healthcare. And if you just pull the rug out from that, there can be some unintended consequences to that that are not insignificant. Yeah. And it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people, right? Like if I think about my own experience with it,

I was traveling recently and got COVID like a couple of months ago. And there was no need for me to go to a clinic and be around other people, right? I just needed to contact my doctor and get some prescriptions and check in. And like, it was so much better that I could do it in my pajamas from the bed rather than like having to get out. And I'm lucky I have access to a car. I can drive to the doctor's surgery. It's not that far away. I have a job that accommodates my schedule, but there are a million reasons why it might be very beneficial to people.

So let's talk about, you mentioned this before, but we have commercial insurers and people might think that this is limited to older folks or it doesn't affect them or it's something that only impacts people who have Medicare. But as you said, Medicare kind of sets the standard for what is covered and what isn't covered, right? So can you explain how this might end up

resulting in just a massive cliff. I've seen it described as a telehealth cliff. Yeah, so basically, sort of this convoluted way that we pay for services is it looks to one standard, even though some may argue, how did that standard come about? But regardless of that, Medicare is the central authority that basically tells everyone, this is what we should be doing and this is how much we should be paying for it.

Now, the commercial insurers can decide to exceed that if they wish. If they, say, have an employer whose employees they want to have a special contract with, that's fine. That's not restricted. But the bottom of what is considered a reimbursable amount is really set by Medicare.

And so they move the bottom. And so if you drop the bottom, you can pretty much well assured in this, you know, in a capitalist sort of mentality that the costs should go down. Right. I mean, why should you pay more for something that you don't need to? Right. And we see that we see that every year. OK, every year there's new technology. But the slightly older technology, which is, again, covered by Medicare.

they move those reimbursements down. So whether it's a sleep study, you know, for someone with obstructive sleep apnea or difficulty sleeping at night, or it's some ophthalmology technology, or it's some ultrasound machine, it doesn't really matter what it is. Medicare is always trying to minimize costs, which is understandable. They want to make it cost effective, but they are setting the lead. So everyone will follow what they do. That's kind of the way that our system is sort of set up.

Yeah.

in terms of its quality, we know it works well. And about 90% of cases of telemedicine to get the same outcomes if the patient was there in clinic. And that 10%, that's not, it's not clear that they're getting inferior care in most of those cases. So it's an effective treatment. And, you know,

You could make an argument that it is cost effective in some ways too. It's particularly clearly for like things like dermatology, pediatrics. These are things where it's clearly cost effective to have it. But even beyond that, it's not even necessarily, I think a strong argument that we'll be losing money from it and that cutting it would help us in the long run. I feel like we're being smart about how to manage American healthcare system and how to keep it afloat.

telemedicine is going to be an important part of that going forward. I do want to add something here, and I do want to be careful about the term because telemedicine and telehealth are not only sort of a catch-all, but they're sort of used interchangeably, right? And just like anything, you have to be specific about the term. So I think what we're talking about on this topic

on this podcast is telemedicine in terms of a two-way audio-visual interface where you can have a direct face-to-face consultation or interaction with a practicing practitioner. Usually that's going to be a physician, but it may be a nurse practitioner or other physician extender, we call them. But just to be clear, telemedicine also extends to

other types of devices like wearables, those things that they're either, you know, trackers that you can wear as your Fitbit or a sleep device, you know, that you can wear around. Those kinds of things are kind of put into the telemedicine bucket and

And it's not clear to me, at least, how that is going to change. I think April 1st is when the face-to-face coverage from a professional fee standpoint, that is slated to end because they did liberalize it during the COVID pandemic.

And it's been extended, I think, another year around that. And that will definitely change the dynamic here. But it's not clear how much of it extends to other types of remote physiologic monitoring services and products. Right. Yeah. So something like a glucose monitor or like some other, yeah, which...

could be catastrophic for people, right? If they don't get those funded. Right. We're going to take a little break for advertisements here. Maybe you'll get an advertisement for a glucose monitor or even insulin. Only hope. Yeah. I'm glad they're taking some of that money that they've made me bleed out of my wallet over the years and returning it to me in the form of podcast advertisements.

All right, we're back. Let's talk more broadly about, I guess, the changes in the legislative environment for healthcare might be a good way to put it. I think that you were an excellent op-ed recently where you discussed, you were one of the many recipients of the Tell Me Five Useful Things You Did at Work This Week email. I thought you wrote a really good piece about the varied and critical work that you do.

Can you talk about like, what is the feeling among healthcare professionals, physicians, whoever you'd sort of like to speak, speak as going into four years of, of possibly vastly reduced government spending and, and, uh,

sort of bizarre and haphazard cutting of the federal bureaucracy that we're seeing. Yeah, it's a tough time, certainly. And coming out of the pandemic, this is not what really anybody expected. But, you know, the stresses have been mounting for quite a while, right? Healthcare professionals are seeing and feeling more stress at work, whether it's

the demands of the job, meaning that there are fewer resources to spend on a heightened number of patients with increasingly complex diseases.

Or even just the questions that we are getting from patients. A lot of patients now are asking me really financial questions. I mean, literally the other day, I had a woman who was unfortunately having septic shock and was faced with having to amputate her leg. And I was speaking with her husband because she was becoming more and more delirious.

And he was just asking me about, well, I'm going to have to sell my house in order to fund what might come down the pike as far as being at home with services. And I was trying to kind of get an understanding of how he viewed his wife actually going through the thing that we're watching in the moment.

But it's a preoccupation that has taken up a lot of space in the room. And it's now coming on to physicians to sort of navigate at least some questions and answer those questions around it. So that's a long way of saying that, you know, physicians and nurses and other healthcare professionals are feeling more and more stress in a system that's just buckling, right? And the last thing anybody needs is to be having to do more without really a clear plan

understanding of the purpose around it, right? And we are all for cost-effectiveness. We want that to work. We also want to provide care irrespective of someone's religious, political, or other beliefs. And yet, you know, we have to work within a system that we kind of

are not really understanding how they're approaching this issue. Are they, are they with us or against us or somewhere in between? It's, it's sort of a, it's a moving target. And so I think that's, what's, that's, what's kind of sandwiched a lot of healthcare professionals. And we don't really know where to turn for some of the answers that we ourselves are looking for. I would add also, you know, we're seeing this active dismantling of the U S healthcare infrastructure and our

Our friends in the academic world in particular, it's a very stressful time for them. Who knows if their studies are going to go through? Who knows if they're going to get their funding? Who knows what's going to stay, what's going to go in the next couple of years? There's a lot of concern over that, obviously. But even in the medical world outside of the academic centers, obviously,

I know a lot of doctors right now are concerned and they're concerned about what's going to happen to the state of our scientific community that helps us with new advancements in medical technology in the coming years. And it seems like, as Venkatesh was alluding to,

We're dismantling all our ability to follow, to study, to really closely track infectious disease in a time that is exceedingly dangerous across the world with rising disease, tuberculosis in this country, measles in this country.

In Uganda, there's Ebola again. There's threats all over the world. And this is one of the worst times I could think of to be in this moment of austerity. And particularly because so much of it seems unclear to us why.

Why these things are being done, you know, is, is it all because of this ridiculous gender ideology? Do they actually think they're saving money with some of these things? It's a very unclear time. And of course there are a lot of people in the medical world, doctors included that are conservative or Republican voters, uh,

Getting into conversations with them about this is sort of a tough thing to do because, like Finke mentioned, they, like a lot of us, want to make sure we're doing this in a cost-effective manner. Something we talk about and we have been talking about in medicine for a long time, particularly academic medicine, interestingly enough,

which is really on the cutting board. It's academic medicine that usually talks about, you know, trying to be cost effective. What tests are we going to order? What labs do we need to get? How are we doing this in the most cost effective way? These are important things that are discussed and cross the political spectrum in, in,

medicine, I think there is some concern, even amongst some of the more right-leaning doctors. But again, it's hard because they've gone this far down the road. It's hard to know when they're going to pull back. What's the line in the sand for them about what is maybe too far for this administration? Yeah. And certainly an area where we're seeing that right now is in public health, right? We don't really know...

I'm going to Texas next week where there's currently a measles outbreak. Yeah. Things that we didn't think that we might be seeing in this country again, we're seeing again. And like, as you say, it's coming at a time when like, not just funding is unstable, but also like the, I guess like the basics of science have been somewhat politicized. Right. To a degree. And like people, I don't know if that's something you see in your practice, but like,

certainly like I was talking to a doctor friend who said half their clients are now like declining vaccinations as, as I was there to get, you know, every disease that I could get. I have a lot of travel vaccinations, so I'm always getting new and exciting vaccinations, but, uh, I'm making up for some of the gap, I guess, but it's, uh,

it's, it's a really challenging time, right. From, from that perspective as well, like the culture around it. Yeah, that's right. I mean, even here in the San Francisco Bay area, you know, I've seen more vaccine hesitation than I remember ever seeing before in the past. Yeah.

It's sort of a vexing question because I think some of this is, let's be clear, some of this is on our messaging. You know, as healthcare professionals, I mean, there are more and more articles. In fact, there was a Wall Street Journal piece a couple weeks ago that was saying how patients, you know, are increasingly not trusting their doctors. And there are data to say that we don't communicate very well, right? So there is that, and that's on us. Mm-hmm.

And, you know, another op-ed piece in the Boston Globe by Ashish Jha, you know, did a mea culpa around some of the things that public health, we did wrong. We got it wrong in COVID where we didn't, you know, deal with some of the doubts and lack of evidentiary base for masking and some of these other things that basically hurt us in the end. So there's definitely that. However, you know, restoring the trust in healthcare professionals is

It's sort of like a basic step to anyone getting their health care. I mean, I think people still go to their doctors. Most people still trust their doctor to some degree. And I think that that's at least a bright spot in where we are, because when we've lost that.

I think we're really in trouble. I mean, it's slipping, but I think that there is a way to restore that trust. But it just starts with a conversation. You know, if someone has a vaccine hesitancy or they don't understand what's going on,

That's the opportunity to open the doors to a dialogue. And I think maybe that's, you know, maybe that's the starting point for any of this. We all want cost effectiveness. We all want, you know, transparency. We also want to have choices that make sense to us, but let's not make it an adversarial confrontation. And I think that that goes for both sides.

I would add, though, I agree with you on pretty much all of that. I agree that we need to have those conversations, even if they're difficult. We need to be able to look back objectively about things that worked and didn't work. But a lot of these sort of mea culpa's that have come out about like, you know, this is what we went wrong and why we lost trust.

If I'm being honest, including that one from Ashish Jha, it has a lot of, in my opinion, pick-me energy. A lot of people who are trying to appeal to the incoming administration and be like, hey, look, I'm cool too. I'm not always about vaccines. And to me, that's just as bad too. And I do think we need to have an honest conversation. And I do think we need to be clear about how we do science. Something we need to be able to explain, and you're absolutely right, which we didn't do very well, is...

look, we are working with information we have at hand. We're doing everything we can. This information may change. When it changes, our recommendations are going to change too. And that is tough. That is a tough message to get across because people don't like nuance like that. People don't like the uncertainty of that. People want to know yes or no, absolutely. And sometimes it's hard. It's hard to find good communicators in science to do that. But you're exactly right. It is incumbent upon us

as doctors who have a sub stack like yours have a podcast like mine, who are academics, who have a reach to students and beyond to, to communicate these things. And even though it would be awesome to,

If for the next four years, my podcast was just about farts and poop, I know I have to do a lot of this stuff because I know how important this is now more than ever. So I totally agree. It's going to start with conversations. I think that's a big difference between...

this is the information we have available and we're doing our best with it. And when we get new information, we'll do something different if that's what that information points to. And these people are acting out of malice to deprive you of your rights, which is sometimes what's been suggested by some people. And I think a good way to defeat that, as you say, is communicating around it. It is very sad that when I was doing the research for my PhD dissertation, I wrote about

First, I wrote about violence in the anarchist builders union for my master's. And then I wrote about public health and popular sport in the 1930s in Barcelona. And a lot of what you saw anarchists doing in Barcelona in the 1930s was talking to people about tuberculosis, educating people about tuberculosis and explaining what tuberculosis was and where it came from.

And like, that was in 1931. How far we've come, baby. Wow. Yeah, it's great. There were some other things from the 1930s which have also made an unwelcome return. Tuberculosis is not the only one. There's also the Nazi salute in large public gatherings in the United States. Holy shit. Which, yeah, I don't know, anarchists had answers for them both in the 1930s and they're the same answers that apply now. I think...

people like people will be distressed by this right like a lot of people of my age and younger I guess it's folks a bit younger than me for the larger part like the pandemic was a life defining event for a lot of younger folks right and it

was a scary thing it still is a scary thing like getting covid still really sucks and i know people who have long covid and it's the thought of that is is petrifying to me people will be genuinely anxious now right at this potential dismantling of the public health apparatus like a rise in vaccine hesitancy less funding for research such that if we enter another pandemic with some

novel infectious disease, we won't be able to respond as fast. The response to COVID, for the criticisms of it, like the speed with which we had vaccines was amazing. So that came from like Venkatesh's college at UCSD actually, or at Salk, I guess, which is next door with free parking, which is nice. So like,

What would you say to people? Because this is a thing I see more and more among folks who are friends of mine, right? It's like real worry about infectious disease, real concern about

new variants of COVID or about the bird flu is one, right? Or these other infectious diseases. I saw 50 people have died of an as yet unexplained disease in Congo recently. What would you say to those people? Because their concerns are somewhat legitimate, right? If we go into another pandemic, we're not going to be anywhere near as effective as we were in 2020 because of all these combination of reasons we've discussed.

That's a hard question to answer. I would say, let me back up. I think that the COVID pandemic, yes, there are a lot of things that went well. The vaccine development was phenomenal. I mean, revolutionary. Who would have expected that to happen? However, it also just revealed how shattered our public health system really is in terms of messaging, even detection, monitoring.

spreading information, even the vaccine distribution was completely chaotic. Right. So so I don't want to say that, you know, the public health response during COVID was some sort of paragon to be emulated or replicated. Right. So so that said, though, absolutely. I mean, you know, how are we going to handle COVID?

A new era of this what if, you know, scenario where we don't know what virus is coming next. I mean, I'm seeing these days, I'm even seeing viruses that never caused the kind of respiratory failure in the past. They're doing it now, whether it's RSV, the respiratory syncytial virus, or

or even non-COVID coronavirus, which should just give you a cold, the sniffles, and yet it's causing devastating, you know, pneumonias. So we're in a new era and, you know, antibiotic resistance is not getting any less, you know, problematic. So what do we do in this era? Well, I think awareness is the first thing, okay?

Awareness around, yes, I mean, these diseases are transmitted from person to person. We all know somebody who doesn't want to take a vaccine. I mean, I don't think that's a surprise to say. We know of somebody or directly or maybe one degree of separation, right? And I think you need to have those community conversations. You need to have one-on-one conversations. Yes, it's going to be uncomfortable, but we got to talk about it and talk to your healthcare provider about it.

I mean, yes, you can look up stuff on TikTok. Yes, you can look up stuff on Google or you name your online resource online.

But you want to have a person that can actually understand from years of living and breathing this stuff, and also who listens to you as a human being in the same community or somewhere nearabouts, right? To put together what the science says in some sort of meaningful way to you, and not some anonymous resource that may or may not have

all the data at their fingertips. So I guess it still goes back to how does anyone find reliable information

Where do you go when you've got questions? Most people want a human being who's lived and breathed this with experience to help them navigate. I certainly see that not just as a doctor, but as a friend, as a family member. I mean, I constantly, you know, they're asking me these things. And I would suggest that, you know, your audience may have connections both personally, but also professionally to those folks that can help them navigate.

You know, and to answer your question from my perspective is a challenge. Because I think people should be concerned. In fact, I just did a two-parter with one of the world's best virologists talking about the, you know,

possible bird flu pandemic that could arise and all the threats that are out there. And so I do think there are some really significant, serious risks to be worried about. However, I'm never going to say there's nothing that can be done about it. There's plenty that can still be done about it.

I still maintain hope in the medical community for what we're able to do and what we're able to accomplish. And to echo what I think both of you guys have said or would at least agree with, there's a lot of changes that we can make locally amongst our small sphere of influence and then growing out from there in terms of getting vaccinated, in terms of wearing masks when needed, or at least looking at the data with an open mind and sharing good resources.

Because one thing that the younger population is good about and what some of these people you're mentioning, James, is they're good at detecting bullshit online. And that's a skill that needs to be honed for medical literacy as well. And I'm hopeful that that's going to continue to improve.

maybe stupid optimism, but I do believe the younger generation is going to continue to be better at that than the older generation. And I think that will help battle a lot of the misinformation that's out there. But yeah,

But there are things that they can do. In fact, for getting back to the telehealth thing, for example, talking about telemedicine slash telehealth as Ventesh sort of broke down in terms of it being cut at the end of the month, there are people that are really pushing against that, including Ro Khanna, who's here, a legislator here in California, who's

proposed a new bill. I haven't been able to see any of the details of it, but there are a lot, including Amazon, by the way, Amazon is one of like 350 companies that have written a letter to the, to, to Congress to help push for this funding. So if you can call a Congress person, if you can do that, if you can keep bothering them, telling them how important it is, I think those are things that can help. So I think that's a good place to start.

Yeah, that's a really good piece of advice. If I could just follow up with that. I think part of what will help with the support for some of these programs is to take

take a few minutes to think about what the other side is worried about. We all know about the excesses of certain online bad actors who use telemedicine to promote ADHD medications or other types of psychotropic medications, which was not supported and it actually caused harm. There are things out there that are excesses and

and somewhat harmful. And if we could, as a community, sort of help frame the approach to dealing with some of those things and preventing some of those problems, then I think some of the support

will kind of sort of show itself. I think the worry is if you open up the floodgates too wide, you know, human nature being what it is, it's going to encourage bad behavior. Not that anybody wants that, but there is something to be said about some scrutiny, right? So if we're the ones, and I completely support the use of telemedicine, but I also want to be careful about how to promote its thoughtful and safe use and

Wed that in the proposal and not just leave it for others to figure out. That, I think, would potentially change the conversation around, well, you just want this and we're not going to give it to you. Like, the standoff will subside when you try to work a partnership out as opposed to a give it to me or else kind of scenario. I don't disagree with that, but I also think you're giving...

Doge more credit than I would, which is to say that they actually really, they really would focus or listen to. I think what they've just done is literally, you know, take a chainsaw and,

and cut away at major federal funding and then kind of seeing what was really bad about that and what wasn't and being like, oh, okay, maybe we do need people in charge of nuclear security. Oh, maybe this is popular. We'll put it back. You know, I kind of, I kind of think that they're not taking as much attention or care, but I also do agree that the point is, is valid. I mean, sure. There's, is there fraud in some telemedicine? Yeah, I'm sure. Um,

probably small, very small percentage, but if we can specify its use, if we can be better about that, I'm, I agree. I'm, I'm all for it. Yeah. Especially right now. I was just thinking as you were talking about, like how important is people at accessing reproductive healthcare and being able to access reproductive healthcare wherever they are and like how much more difficult that would be. Right. People didn't have telemedicine appointments. So I think we've spoken about before on the show, but,

But yeah, I'm sure there are some small cases. I'm sure there are a bunch of cisgender guys getting gender-affirming hormonal care through telemedicine who probably could go without and be okay. Guys, I'd like to wrap up there, but I want to give you a chance both to, you talked a lot about like

science communication. So where can people find you online? Where can they see you communicating your medical knowledge? Okay. Well, so I, thanks James. I have a sub stack. It's called Be A Health Architect. You can look me up at Be A Health Architect.

And, you know, I have a conversation there around an issue that certainly affects me and those around me, which is physician burnout. But in the larger sphere of health care professionals, it really touches everybody in health care. So that's where I'm I'm posting actively. I'm also sharing that, you know, through various other avenues such as X and Blue Sky and other places. You can you can find me there. Look forward to to seeing you there.

Yeah, I would also recommend Venkatesh's Substack if you're in the medical field in particular. I think you'll appreciate it. A focus on burnout is as important as it's ever been, if not much, much more. I mean, we were talking about burnout and moral injury in doctors before COVID, and now, you know, a couple years down the road, it's only worse. So I think it's really important, and I do recommend it. Or

you know, check out his latest article in the Los Angeles Times, as you mentioned before. As for me, find me on Blue Sky at CaveMD. But more importantly, just listen to the podcast, The House of Pod. If you are a fan of this show, I think you're going to like The House of Pod if you haven't already given it a try. It's a lot of the same people that you hear on this show.

I'm the house of pot. James included. He's going to be coming back to talk about the measles and with an author of a new book down there about, about the measles outbreak. And, you know, we take a look at grifters, medical grifters. We take a look at some people that would be considered medical contrarians. We take a look at some of the quackery in medicine as well. So I think you'll appreciate this show. If you like the,

the whole behind the bastards verse, I think you'll, you'll get into the house of pods too. So check us out, uh, wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah. Great. Thank you so much for joining us guys. Really appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you.

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Welcome to an It Could Happen Here special report. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by James Stout and Sophie Ray-Lichterman. So excited. We are here to discuss Trump's first joint session speech of his second term.

This is basically the equivalent of a State of the Union, except it's too early to really give a good State of the Union, even though this month has felt kind of like a year. So we are doing a special report here in addition to our regular executive disorder episode, because there is just so much to talk about that we cannot fit it all in our regular ED.

Just let it go. Pause. Pause for effect. Okay. You can't get me, Garrison. Speaking of, this was the longest. Oh!

It's a joint session speech in American history. And man, it felt like it lasted forever. Yeah, I was going to say, and boy, howdy, did it feel never ending. It went on so long. Not a great feat of oratory, really. I was supposed to watch some yaoi with a friend last night and they came over and I was like, ha ha, gotcha. Actually, I have to watch this speech first. Don't worry. Usually it's only like an hour or so.

I did the exact same scam. Two hours later. I did the exact same scam to my friend Sarah. She was like, you know I seriously love you, right? Because this is horrible. Horrible. Two hours later, it finally ends and they're like, okay, we can finally watch Yaoi, right? And I'm like, no, no, no. I have to watch the Democratic response speech. Don't watch it.

Don't worry, it should be shorter. And thankfully it was. Yeah. But yeah, let's just start by talking about the beginning of this speech or rather what the general overview of this speech was. This was not a leaning across the aisle speech, right? This wasn't trying to unite the country. No, it was not. But, you know. This catered to core mega supporters and new issues at the center of the modern right wing media machine.

The version of the speech I watched on ABC frequently cut to Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro sitting together overlooking Congress as they were special guests of the president and the first lady. Yes.

Magic. They did the same on CNN. I switched back and forth between a couple channels. I noted this to our team, but when I first looked up what time the speech was starting, I turned on my TV and went to CNN, and I happened upon them talking about if Dems...

should not applaud or if they should heckle and some motherfucker I don't care about said that gems should find places to applaud him to show unity. Cool. Sure. Yeah. That,

That's always worked well. Dems should find places to applaud him to show unity. Applaud the king for ruining the government. Yeah. For firing all the workers. Give him a clap, why don't you? Sorry, James. I realized that got a little insensitive. Wow. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Garrison, this is why we have to watch those videos where the bad actors talk about how they feel. Not anymore. Are you talking about our workplace harassment videos? DEI is over, James. No more of those videos here in the free state of Georgia. That's illegal. Unfortunately...

Here in California, I have approximately 75 little, little red bells when I log into my workday. But like a single time early in the speech, Trump asked Democrats, why not join us in celebrating America? After he complained, I could cure any disease and these people sitting right here.

the Democrats, they would not cheer. I could cure any disease and these people wouldn't cheer. No, no, that was weird. I mean, like some Dems didn't even show up. They had this hub cave of wearing certain colors. They did the same performative bullshit they always do. And they had what I can only describe as like church paddles with little catchy sayings on it. They weren't even like...

I mean, like, come on. Like a ping pong paddle. Ping pong paddle is a good description. But no, some Dems did not show up in protest. Others were black, kind of like in mourning. Yeah, who cares?

Some of the women's caucus wore pink. Very cool. Very feminist. And others were the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Sure. That'll help. But, you know, Trump just pointed towards the Democrat side of the chamber throughout the night and just referred to them as the radical left lunatics. Like this, this, this was not a across the aisle speech. No, it wasn't. This was, this was, if anything, emphasizing democracy.

the divisions within the country. One of the, one of the things that happened before the speech even started was like, he drove in with Melania and Elon first lady and first bitch boy. Yeah. First buddy garrison. First buddy is the, is the official term. First buddy. Yeah. I don't know, but like, you know, Trump starts off the speech with America is back.

And like, how far back are we talking? Because you're not wrong. Yeah. Like 1864, I think is the goal. I mean, this is the same phrase that Biden opened his first speech with as well. I think Biden was referring to like, we are back to pre-Trump America. And now Trump is using this phrase to refer to like this like mythical America. Right. Sure. But no, Trump took the stage to USA chants throughout. Yeah.

Yeah. Throughout the rotunda. That was, you know, I grew up watching the House of the Parliament, so I'm used to like the boomers getting unruly. But this was something else. They're just so feral. It's weird. So cheesy. The speech was outlining like a new golden age of America and the renewal of the American dream.

Trump talked about how he has accomplished in 43 days more than most administrations do in four to eight years, and that we're just getting started. Cool. He referred to this wide popular mandate, a quote, a mandate like this has not been seen in many decades.

referring to winning all swing states, winning the Electoral College and the popular vote. And reference to this mandate kind of sparked the big... Boo? Big disruption of the night. Specifically when he started saying, we won the popular vote. Which like...

Is that heavily disputed? No, I don't think that's not specifically what Mr. Green was talking about. I'm not necessarily talking about when he specifically was sitting. That's when the crowd had their biggest reaction of the night, which like weird, in my opinion. That's great. It's the thing that Democrats are doing now, which is trying to be like the Republicans, but live like Democrats.

kind of, I suppose. But not really because they didn't follow fucking through. Without any, like, strength. Like, without any actual, like,

Right. We saw the sort of blue and on attempts at election denial after the election. And I don't think that's what they were doing here. Agreed. They gave off this very ineffectual kind of half-arsed attempt at booing. And then aside from Green, they all just sat down and waved their ping pong things. Yeah. So Representative Al Green from Texas, old man with cane. Mm-hmm.

It's a good cane. It's got a gold handle. Yeah, it's snazzy. I thought, I mean, it's the sort of cane you normally see a sword coming out of, if I'm honest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would have been cooler. That would have been cooler. But instead, he just waves the cane around talking about how this mandate doesn't mean that there's a mandate to, like, you know...

cut Medicaid, cut Medicare. That was specifically what he was talking about. Television mics did not really pick that up. No. And a lot of reporting didn't either, which was shitty, I thought. Like, a lot of reporting just mentioned that he had shouted and not what he had shouted about, which I think is like, really when you, like, what the media is doing is serving as like the propaganda arm of a certain class of people when they're more upset that he was shouting than that he was protesting the fact that people are going to lose their health care and probably die because of it.

Yeah, and, like, Trump started, like, yelling over these protests. There was, like, a brief, maybe, like, you know, minute or so, like, yelling match in the chamber. Mike Johnson was like, what do I do here? Eventually, you know, Mike Johnson threatens Mr. Green, gives a warning, and eventually directs the Sergeant of Arms to restore order and remove him from the chambers. Mm-hmm.

Not a regular scene in American politics, but a scene that you might be more familiar with in overseas politics, specifically in democracies that are in trouble. You'll have more and more scenes like this. Yeah, we didn't get any smoke grenades like you see in Serbia. You know, it's still 2025, James. We still have three more years.

Three more years? Yeah, three more years for him to break out the ass off smoke grenades. Whether or not this is like, you know, performative or cringe, it's like it's something that demonstrates, hey, like this, this actually isn't normal more than holding up a cheesy sign next to Trump reading. This is not normal, which is some others did in protest. This actually is treating it like a serious situation now.

And more Democrats should have done this. They should have staggered their protests throughout the entirety of the speech, continually disrupting it, making the speech basically unable to end, pushing this past midnight, having an endless procession of people having to be escorted out. You should force Congress to censure half of the sitting Congress people. Like if this really is like an actual existential threat,

to our democracy if if trump represents right now a genuine constitutional crisis which he does he is ignoring the courts the people in congress should fucking act like it 100 percent

They should have gone literally single file, one by one. Stagger it every like three minutes so that he just is unable to finish the speech. Yeah. Like have Mike Johnson do this every time. Because he was thrown. Yeah, he was thrown. And they should have continued to do this. The fact that no one else did.

is pretty disappointing. You could see Vance was very uncomfortable as well. He did have that nervous smile for most of... Well, he normally does when he's confronted with a human being, but...

later on in the speech after trump talked about you know trans women in sports and the price of eggs you had you had a group of democrats wearing resist t-shirts walk out of the speech in protest and like that's so much more pathetic than actually like standing up and talking about how this guy is ignoring the courts and is actually breaking the constitution like that's what they should have all been doing instead of wearing resist lib merch performatively yeah it uh

You could write an Onion article parodying this, but you actually couldn't because they would just do that next time. Like if they really think this is the last the last joint session of Congress ever going to have, they sure didn't act like it or whatever. But this is going to be the first ad break in a series of two mid episode ad breaks that we are playing on this show. So here's the ads.

All right, we are back. I hope you pick up your new ad break themed T-shirts to walk around in protest of capitalism. Yep, not made by unions. All right, let's talk about transgenderism. One of the first topics Trump had discussed at length was the anti-trans culture war, declaring that the government will be woke no longer. Oh God, that fully fucking sent me. I'd forgotten about that.

It's just so asinine. Like drunk old man at pub. He bragged about signing an executive order establishing that there's only two genders.

as well as in order preventing quote-unquote men from playing in women's sports. He first pointed out to someone in the audience who was a former volleyball player who got hurt by a volleyball and then decided to quit the sport, and they now blame this on the fact that a trans woman was allegedly responsible for probably spiking the volleyball. Yeah.

Which, yes, is painful. For playing sport the way that everyone else plays sport. Yeah, for trying to win. Yeah. In a team volleyball context. So, yes, this was the first kind of these political props that Trump brought along to kind of point out and demonstrate some of the things that he was talking about.

it just seems like this person was not a very good volleyball player. But the next example Trump pointed to, I think James can speak better on, but Trump said that essentially there was a quote-unquote man who beat a woman in a race by five hours to the shock of the audience. Yeah, so look,

It will shock listeners to hear that most of what he said is wrong. He directly referenced a friend of mine. He was referring to Austin Killips, who is a woman. She's a trans woman. She's a very good cyclist. The reason she was doing the race, which is the Arizona Trail Race, it's an 800 mile ultra endurance race. I used to do these kind of things. The reason she was doing it is because of a UCI, Union Cycliste Internationale, the governing bodies stopped trans women competing. So she did these races which were not sanctioned by them.

She did get the record. The previous holder of the record was a cis man. The cis man had previously beaten a cis woman, Lael Wilcox. It's interesting that in this particular discipline, actually, cis women have been doing as well as, if not better than men. Lael Wilcox owns nearly all the long distance records in the United States. She's a phenomenal athlete. The idea that there's some inherent biological advantage is interesting.

It's particularly nonsense in this sphere of cycling. But the reason that she was five hours ahead is because this race is 800 miles long. Those records are broken by that kind of period. Not all the time, but when you have athletes like Austin coming from the higher paying areas of the sport into this, which has been a much less well-paid and much smaller area of the sport, you're going to see these records getting broken. And again, she broke a record that was held by a sis dude.

Crazy. Yeah, it's fucking ridiculous. I mean, like the level of like propaganda and lie. I mean, my mom watched the speech and she was like, that doesn't seem possible. And I was like, because it's all bullshit. Yeah, it's the second time he's picked on Austin. And obviously it pisses me off. You can read her op-ed in The Guardian where she wrote about this the last time he cited her in his executive order. And I would encourage you to.

So after this initial dive into the trans topic, Trump followed up by talking about how egg prices are out of control. Take a shot. Which happened about 15 minutes into the speech. But near the end of the speech, Trump returned to the trans topic, pointing to the anti-trans activist mom named January Littlejohn, no comment, whose kid secretly used they-them pronouns at school.

With Trump discussing how wrong it is for schools to secretly transition students. And this actually just isn't true. Surprise, surprise. The parents in this case knew that their kid wanted to use a different name and pronouns at school and actually were the ones to inform the school of this, according to school emails obtained by CNN.

Not that this matters. And I will say, during this clip, when the camera cuts towards his mom, all of the people that were used as political props that were cut to, they all had the most bizarre look on their face. Completely blank, soulless. Not even really excited. This woman, who was one of the faces of a

florida's don't say gay bill just yeah completely like blank expression because this thing that the president's talking about is just a flat-out lie and like you know it you lost a federal lawsuit over this lie but here you are on national tv now the prop of the president yeah on national tv in front of both houses of congress attacking your own kid yep for trying to be who they want to be a subject on which you lost a lawsuit like

And then Trump directly asked Congress to pass a bill banning trans healthcare for children, saying, Wokeness is gone. Our country will be woke no longer. Whatever. Such a loser. The next topic was Elon Musk's doge.

Trump essentially just read out a list that mischaracterized aid programs or scientific research grants, talking about how Health and Human Services paid for housing for displaced immigrants in the United States, money for Middle East Sesame Street for making mice transgender and an LGBTQ education in Africa, as well as DEI in Burma.

Which I will now pivot to James again to fill in some context here. Yeah. So I'm aware of this scholarship because I'm aware of the people within the civil disobedience movement who were talking to the state department about it. And they begged for it not to be a DEI thing because they could see this happening, right? It's the Lincoln Scholarship Program. I'll link to it in the show notes, but it exists to empower people in Burma, right? With technical skills and to rise up young leaders in Burma and

It's not a DEI program, but for some reason it was categorized as such, right? It talks about respecting diversity because as

long-term listeners will know, Myanmar is an extremely diverse country, right? With more than 50 ethnic groups and hundreds of languages spoken. So like, that's why it talks about respecting diversity. This is one of the few things the United States has done for the people of Myanmar after pumping up their economy, pumping up real estate, and then doing nothing when the military seized power there and started to brutally repress the people. And, uh,

The U.S. is also, I should add at this point, holding a billion dollars of the Burmese people's money that it froze when the coup happened. And if it doesn't want to give them these scholarships, it could give them back their money. But I'm sure it won't. I know this one pisses me off in particular because obviously I'm very invested in the cause of the people of Myanmar and they are my friends. Yeah.

And this is very emblematic of the way Trump and Elon talk about a bunch of these aid programs, how HIV prevention programs will be LGBTQ use aid money, right? They find a way to mischaracterize it in the most culture war way. Yeah, talking about public health programs as circumcisions. Right. Yeah, exactly. They'll try to find every single health or education program and turn it into some LGBTQ or DEI culture war issue. Trump claimed on stage that they've found...

hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud. Now, the Doge website previously listed $105 billion in, like, found savings. But this very week, the website scrubbed five of the highest dollar value receipts after journalists found massive errors in Elon's estimated count. Shocking. And now its wall of receipts totals around $8.

8 billion, though that might also be an overestimate, according to some journalists. Amazing. Trump also talked about alleged social security fraud, claiming that millions and millions of dead people are getting social security. This just isn't true. The math is not mathing. Yeah, this has been their thing for a while, right? Dead people are voting, dead people are getting social security. Yeah.

Yeah. Trump's own social security administrator has like said as much the super old people in the database simply don't have death details logged, but they are not receiving payments. There is improper payments in the social security system, usually around 1%. Mostly that's overpayments or entertainments to people who are actually alive. And there is a system for resolving those already in place because social security is a pretty old system that we've had for quite a while.

And like, I don't know, like Trump skirted by a lot of economy issues. And the way he did so was just by repeatedly claiming that Doge and like cutting this fraud will magically fix the economy, right? Like this is how he wants to frame this. Eggs are too much money. All of these things.

and he has no actual solution to it so instead we're going to fix the economy through doge through finding all this fraud and somehow we will we will locate this like pot of gold hidden somewhere that will magically make our economy better and this is this is his solution because he doesn't have any real solution yeah i should have pointed out that linker scholarships were in fact a trump right they started in 2019 this round of them so like good job cutting your own fraud donald she'd

Do you know what else started in the first Trump era, Garrison? Advertising. Advertisements. Was, I believe, Trump's first executive order. He established the podcasting advertising industry, which, you know, supports us to this day. Today is the backbone of the American economy. I mean, that's actually, unfortunately, more true than it should be. You know, if anyone wants to buy any colloidal silver. No, no, no.

Okay, we are back. On top of trans issues, the other, I would say, most cited element in this speech was the border. Trump referenced the Lake and Riley Act, which requires DHS to detain illegal immigrants who have admitted to, were charged with, or convicted of theft-related crimes or any crime related to serious bodily injury. They're not necessarily illegal. They could just be undocumented people. They could be asylum seekers. Correct. Correct. Yes, that is a good point.

I just want to note, it was incredible the amount of sad-looking children and or family members that he had as his propaganda prop people. He had a lot of props for this speech. A lot of props for his speech. I had a friend watch with me, and she just kept going, how did he find these people? These people have been figures of his campaign for years. Yeah, I explained that. I explained that. Yeah, he's brought these same individuals out

As Gare just mentioned, over and over and over again. Same thing with Fox News. Same thing with One America News. Their entire life revolves around being political props. It's an industry. Right.

There was nothing new here. Trump signed an executive order on stage to rename a wildlife preserve in this like anti-immigrant propaganda move. He called for mandatory death penalty for anyone who kills a police officer and asked Congress to sign that into law, which is mostly like an anti-immigrant dog whistle, essentially trying to find a way to kill immigrants who are like

charged with the death of a police officer. Yeah, they proposed the same thing for people smuggling drugs into the United States, like effectively charging them as if they were going to give all the drugs to one person to murder them and therefore giving them the death penalty.

now that he wants to label all these people terrorists or you know has labeled these groups terrorists it gives the like the government a lot more leeway to to do stuff like that yeah i mean proving membership of those groups would be a challenge sure i mean so is proving membership to antifa yes exactly yeah we haven't seen how they're gonna well we've somewhat seen how they're gonna try in the in the latter case but uh not in the former i guess we'll we'll see i'm

I'm sure at some point in the next year or two. But like Trump said that like previously, America has quote unquote buckled under migrant occupation. But now we are achieving the great liberation of America. That's the sort of language he was using for this section. And he said how they rule from mental asylums and prisons. Very standard campaign language.

rhetoric that he's used for years now. If you're new to this podcast, you can go back, you can search the word Hukumba or border, and you can listen to interviews with probably hundreds of migrants. You can listen to my Title 42 series, you can listen to my Darien series, and you can judge for yourself if these people are criminal or bad or mentally unwell.

The economy had a very minimal focus compared to border or trans issues. He really skirted over the tariffs thing as fast as possible. Briefly talked about the federal funding freeze, bragged about terminating the Green New Scam, something that has never existed. Talking about withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords again, as well as the corrupt World Health Organization and the anti-American UN War Crime Council. Very cool. Yeah.

bragged about ending climate restrictions, you know, drill baby drill, going after rare earth minerals, talked about no tax on tips over time and benefits for seniors. And then briefly discussed that on April 2nd, he will be enacting reciprocal tariffs just completely across the board for all nations. And he did warn farmers there is going to be an adjustment period. Quote, there will be a little disturbance, unquote, certainly

Certainly. When you adjust to not having a job that pays you any money anymore. Crashing the economy will have a bit of an adjustment in the period. It will be a bit of a little disturbance. Yeah, I mean, just like he just kept going through these obvious ridiculous claims and making Trump side comment stupidity, like calling the Middle East a bad neighborhood. Sesame Street joke. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just incredible. And James, our colleague Molly Conger had a good point. She did, yeah. Of her many good points. Trump said that people had never heard of Lesotho, at the same time pronouncing it in a way that one would only know if one had heard it pronounced rather than seen it written on the page. Very, very funny Southam. He also said something about Liberia, like implying, like, I would encourage people to understand the history of Liberia if they think the US doesn't owe Liberia a thing or two.

One of the last focuses of the speech was national security, promising a golden dome missile defense system, which Trump has previously talked about at previous 2024 campaign events. Obsessed with gold. Obsessed with gold. Obsessed with dome. That his administration... Jesus Christ. Garrison didn't even crack for those listening. Once again, his...

Got him now. Once again, he announced that his administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal, saying, we have Mark Rubio in charge. Good luck, Marco. If something goes wrong, we know who to blame. Right. Cool. Yeah, amazing. His comments on Greenland were specifically odd, saying, Greenland, we strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America.

But the full quote about Greenland was very odd. He said, quote, we need Greenland for national security and even international security. So weird. And we're working with everybody involved to try to get it. But we need it really for international, for world security. And I think we're going to get it one way or another. We're going to get it.

It's a very small population, but a very, very large piece of land and very, very important for military security.

Unquote. Okay. Yeah. Very odd. Very odd comments. A whole collection of English language words. He is continuing to say that one way or another, he will take Greenland. I think his focus on it for national security is particularly interesting. I think this has something to do with trying to make the US and Russia these two massive world powers that both have Arctic land interests.

at their disposal considering climate change or a variety of issues. But I think that this does move towards

this like quasi like Duganism of like this like multipolar world that, that Putin certainly wants. And Trump is kind of signaling that, you know, through the influence of Bannon, uh, he's also moving towards with like Putin and Trump at like, you know, the two people who control the world. Speaking of, uh, Trump did talk about receiving a letter from president Zelensky asking to return to the negotiating table and, uh, bragged about freeing another weed smoking teacher in a Russian jail, uh,

Returning him home to America. And oddly enough, Trump met with the mother of this teacher in Butler, Pennsylvania, right before he got shot, which led him to point towards the Comparatore family, again, pronouncing it in a completely new and different way. All of the members of the family seemed very not thrilled to be there. Completely blank expressions. Quite.

Quite odd. Extremely weird. Yeah. So this is where he ended the speech, was talking about, you know, getting shot, and then kind of went on a very long 10-minute, almost GPT-esque ramble about, like, America. I didn't take any notes on it because it just sounded like word salad, but there is a few other miscellaneous things from the speech I do want to mention before we close out. Trump bragged about stopping all government censorship and having brought back free speech to America, saying it's back.

Which is, you know, slightly humorous amidst reports of grants being pulled for using quote-unquote the bad words, wrong words, as well as a truth social post, a truth made earlier today, Wednesday,

saying all federal funding will stop for any college, school or university that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. No masks.

So in one moment, you can celebrate bringing back free speech. And in the other, you can call for deporting people who protest or imprisoning students for protesting on their own university campuses. Very, very typical Trump double speak type stuff.

He talked about bringing the people back to the office. Like these are all like normal Trump. Yeah. Well, yeah. And these are things that have happened already. Most of the half of this speech was celebrating things that he's already done. The other half was like asking Congress to help him do more things mixed in with these weird propaganda moves. Like,

making this 13-year-old brain cancer survivor an honorary Secret Service agent, and admitting this very square-looking teenager into West Point. Who, by the way, this teenager has the most cop phenotype I've ever seen before. It's crazy. I was shocked. I'm like, whoa, they found him. The cop phenotype. There he is. Which is two more of these weird props.

It's like in the cave in Plato. Everything else is just a reflection of this cop kid, every other cop. It's so odd because Trump spent this speech talking about how we're bringing back merit-based hiring. We have, quote, ended the tyranny of DEI across government, private sector, and military, as he then just did to DEI hires on stage. But, you know, who am I to say?

So that's kind of all I have to say on the Trump speech right now. I will briefly, very briefly talk about the democratic response. The democratic response was done by Senator Slotkin from Michigan.

who opened by saying, America wants change, but there's a responsible way to make change and an irresponsible way. Trying to paint Doge as like this very irresponsible and brash way to achieve efficiencies, something that we all obviously, you know, want the government to move more towards. She warned about how Trump's actions may result in a recession, warned about losing Social Security, Medicare, and VA benefits. Uh,

quoted Musk, who recently called Social Security the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, and attacked Musk and the 20-year-old Doge members for using their own servers to access your sensitive data. Slotkin spent

A lot of the rebuttal praising Ronald Reagan. Odd for a Democrat, I would say. I don't know why. Strange. Don't know why you as the opposition party are continuing to base your politics on praising Bush and Reagan. Very cool opposition party, bros. Very fun stuff. She also said, I've lived and worked in many countries. I've seen democracies flicker out. I've seen what life is like when a government is rigged. Like, yeah, I bet you have. Former CIA agent.

She also mentioned doom scrolling. So that really shows how the Democrats have the finger on the pulse here when doom scrolling is mentioned as something not to do, saying instead you should hold your elected officials, including me, accountable, watch how they're voting, go to town halls, demand they take action, and organize. Pick up one issue you're passionate about and engage. Doom scrolling doesn't count. Join a group that cares about your issue and act. If you can't find one, start one.

And that was that was the bulk of the 10 minute Democratic response. Oh, boy. What a what a what a fun what a fun day in American politics. That was any final thoughts, James? Sophie, like this speech, this episode is running long. Yeah. So I really don't have any final thoughts other than bad.

Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. The Democrats are unwilling to do anything actually serious. Once again, the attempts at quote unquote fact checking the speech are also incredibly pathetic to look at. Truly. There's this New York Times fact check, which I will close on just because it made me and the rest of our group chat very upset about

which outlined this long paragraph from Trump saying, over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States, many of whom were murderers, human traffickers, gang members, and other criminals from the streets of dangerous cities and all throughout the world. Because of Joe Biden's insane and very dangerous open border policies, they are now strongly embedded in our country. But we are getting them out and getting them out fast. And the fact check for this very, like, false claim is, quote, fantastic.

Fast is a relative term. This statement is misleading. It's just... It only focuses on the ending sentence saying that we're getting these immigrants out and we're getting them out fast. Ignores...

calling many of these 21 million people human traffickers, gang members, and criminals does not say that we never have had open border policy. Like, it's crazy. Even like the liberal fact checking is completely pathetic and toothless. And like, fact checking doesn't work. It's not useful anyway. That's why I'm not spending this whole episode fact checking Trump's claims. But the fact that you're going to parrot

Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, that got me upset. And then I watched Yaoi and then went to bed. So there we go. Glad you got your Yaoi, Harrison. Anyways...

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This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Robert Evans, Mia Wong, James Stout, and Sophie Lichterman. Tragically, we all have ED.

All right, I got it out of the way. We can continue the episode now. This episode, we are covering the week of February 27 to March 5. Number go down. Public humiliation ritual of Vladimir Zelensky and the age of U.S. global supremacy is over. Welcome to the end of the American empire. It sucks way more than I thought it would. Yeah. Uh-huh. Well, I mean, look, some of us have been saying this. Yeah.

First it's tragedy, then it's farce, and then it's whatever the fuck is happening now. Yeah, we have crossed the tragedy farce horizon. We're well beyond anything Marx could have anticipated. Yeah, where we're going, we don't need farce. Like,

Like, I am upset about how landy and everything is becoming. Like, I feel like you have to be almost forced into being an accelerationist now. Like, there is no other way out. Did you watch the Democrats last night, Garrison? It's like this non-consensual accelerationism. Yeah, yeah. That, like...

People have spent years trying to resist this accelerationist push that even now I'm seeing like analysts like embrace. Like, I guess we have to be accelerationists now, which is very bizarre to see. Yeah, as I've been saying, there is no more ideology called accelerationism. There is just acceleration of what you do about it. So fun hole we've gotten ourselves into. Yeah.

Speaking of, let's start talking about Ukraine. A place which accelerated. And that Oval Office meeting that happened last Friday. That was a little bit odd, wasn't it, folks? Harrison, say thank you. Thank you. Yes, I realize I've been under your employ for four years now. I've said thank you many times. Each of you, thank me. No, I'm kidding. Jesus Christ. Wow. Sophie has gone mad with power.

I'm going to go call the EU because Sophie has asked me. Yes. So I don't know. I'm sure people saw like a two minute clip or something. I watched the full 10 minute section, which is much more crazy. Yeah. And like in Trump's push to get like this ceasefire deal, Zelensky's hesitation has been because he's

Putin has broken multiple ceasefire deals. So how can we be sure that he will respect this one? And that's kind of what jumpstarts this extra combative exchange between Trump, Zelensky, and eventually little boy, J.D. I don't know. Robert and James, you're war understanders. Yeah, that's what it says when I go into my HR page. The increasing story of

And this affects Ukraine, but is not just limited to it. The story of the next several years is going to be the mass rearmament of Europe and almost certain nuclear proliferation. France, who has, I think, 295 nuclear warheads and extremely advanced first strike capability, as well as a first strike doctrine.

is, under Macron, has just made a statement that he's willing to have France be the nuclear shield for the rest of Europe. The UK also has enough nukes to kill way more people than actually live there. Unfortunately, their nuclear defense system and reaction system is very tied into the US one. I expect you will see them separate from the United States as the United States becomes more and more of a geopolitical adversary to France.

England and to everywhere else in Europe. I think we're going to see more smaller states in Europe get the bomb. I think in general, I'm shocked if in four years there's not at least another four or five states that have that have gained access to the bomb. Yeah, because the overarching international lesson from Ukraine is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give up a nuke and get one at all costs.

Yeah. Famously, the European national anthem will now be because of it's not love. It's the bomb that will bring us together. Yep. Yep. Garrison. Not great. I don't like that. I'm not saying this because it's good, but it's also literally like if I was in charge of European security. That's what you do. My priority would be let's get as many fucking nukes out here as we can. Yeah.

I think we should say that like this is how U.S. diplomacy happens. This sort of shouting out and humiliating non-U.S. leaders is what the U.S. does. The difference here is that Trump did it in front of the entire White House press corps and TV cameras. Yes. In the Oval Office for everyone to see. Yeah. And it doesn't give Zelensky a place to back down. Right. Like he's a leader of a country that is at war. He needs to show strength.

And like, certainly sort of with the current understanding of leadership, he needs to show strength. And to show strength, he doesn't have many places to go when he's been humiliated like that, right? Well, and like, you know, Trump was yelling about, you know, World War III and then Vance chimes in. Yes, he's particularly incoherent. With his little, like, thank you speech. And I think, Robert, I think you pointed out

to me earlier, like, why Vance jumped in on this the way he did in, like, a way to establish dominance when Vance and Trump have very little cards to play? Because this is a guy who has been, like, at war for years now. Uh-huh. And, like,

they need to feel superior to that. And that's why it's a public humiliation ritual because that's the only method they had right now. No, because there's nothing really like they play act at masculinity and their fan, especially Trump's base really like feeds into that.

But they definitely also have that deep insecurity that because of aspects of our culture and media, I think most men who have never been to war have a little bit of that. I don't think it's a natural thing for men, but I think it's a natural thing in our society. I think it is extremely common verging on universal. I went to war in part because of that derangement.

And by the way, war doesn't do anything to make you better. But what it does do, what it has done for Zelensky and why he acted the way he is, is that like,

He's he's literally been in the position of his entire family and him having AK-47 shoved into their hands because a Russian kill team was in the city gunning for him and his family as bombs fell all around. Like, yeah, he's he's just he's I think he just has too much pride. Sorry, pride's even the wrong thing. He's learned over the course of fighting this war. When you are up against a strong man, you can't back down. Right.

Yeah. You'll just keep getting pushed back further and further if you do that. Because he wouldn't have gotten anything if he had sat there and been nice and let them make fun of him. The ending would be the same. They'd made up their minds prior to that meeting. Right. And one of the things Zelensky has going for him, and there's a lot he doesn't have going for him, he's not a coward. People have noticed that he's not a coward, and that has bought him some of the support. And it has allowed...

him to remain in that position of leadership, a relatively uncontested, right? They haven't been able to have elections. This is something that the Ukrainian opposition have also kind of consented to. It's not like he's being a dictator here, as Trump has alleged. But like his personal bravery and willingness to confront these strongmen is something that like,

draw strength from in Ukraine. And he can't afford to let that go. He actually was fairly submissive in this exchange. He was letting Trump talk way over him. Zelensky did not raise his voice. I don't, frankly, I don't understand how people even deluded themselves into thinking this makes Zelensky look bad or like he wasn't proper. Yeah, he handled it like a grown-up would handle it. Like he tried to point out what you're saying is wrong.

This was clearly like a coordinated trap from like the entire White House team from like the press corps. Yes. Like talking about like why he doesn't wear a suit and like someone like Rubio, like a neocon that has more of this like geopolitics focus. Like he was like literally like sinking into the couch as this was happening. Like, like,

Rubio was not thrilled at this. Yeah. No, no, because Rubio, he has no personal pride or backbone. So he is willing to try and remake himself as a Trumper. But in his actual heart and soul, he's a Reagan Republican. Totally. Sure.

Or maybe at least a Bush republic. Definitely Bush. And I know like Zelensky was literally kicked out of the White House on Friday. He's now trying to find a way back into the negotiating table. On Monday, the United States suspended all military aid to Ukraine after Trump has continued to inflate the numbers in regards to the amount of military aid we have sent to Ukraine, often by a magnitude of 200 billion dollars.

And I don't like this was one of the first things that me and Robert noticed at the RNC, like how much Ukraine was like a top issue for them. Like people wouldn't shut up about Ukraine. And it took us a few days to like acclimate, be like, OK, like why? Why are they talking about it in this way? Like it was it was it was very odd. And Robert did a deep dive on that last year with front of the pod, Rudy Giuliani.

Garrison, I just wanted to update you. I've been talking with Rudy about the album that you and I wanted to drop with him, and he is on board, so we will be moving forward with that this spring. That's exciting. A little taste for all you listeners. This is very much a part, in my mind...

a part of Bannon's push for this quasi-Douganism, this idea of a multipolar world of Trump and Putin, with Putin expanding power into Europe, while Trump tries to seize control over more parts of North and Central America, taking the Panama Canal, eventually Canada and Greenland.

You know, and like both people wanting, you know, more, more Arctic land that will be useful considering climate change. And Russia already has their fair share. So that's why, you know, Greenland is so essential for national security. Like Trump talked about endlessly in his joint session speech, I guess, uh,

Mia, do you want to add something about this mineral thing before we go to break? Yeah, so I think one of the important things here is that this is the definitive break point. Like, this is the moment that people are going to point to when they look back on the moment the old American empire died. And that empire, you know, the sort of post-World War II international order thing, right? The way the U.S. maintained its geopolitical and economic power was by a network and system of alliances with a bunch of the, you know, with their allies and sort of

in places like Japan, but also, you know, across Western Europe. They maintain this series of economic and political alliances that was able to win the Cold War, you know, make the U.S. like the world's lone superpower. But in order for it to function, the U.S. has to, like, maintain the alliance system, even as it's doing imperial power protection, and use its allies effectively.

Well, and like the U.S.'s power primarily has always come from the fact that like, or at least in this century, has been from the fact that we're the center of the global economy. Yeah. Right? And the second part of it has been its ability to wield power in international institutions, right? Yes. The U.S. seizing control of the IMF and the World Bank and, you know, using sort of trade, like trade doctrine to sort of empower itself. Right.

And this is all fucking gone. The U.S. is alienating, like, everyone in the fucking globe, basically, except for Russia. And, you know, now we're entering this really kind of... Argentina? Maybe. We'll see how long that government holds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, like, and the thing that it's pivoting to now, right, is the stuff that used to be, there'd be a sort of, like, coalition...

thing and the U and American corporations would do this stuff behind the scenes is now just unbelievably explicit. The U S is just straight up openly doing resource colonialism. Like they're straight up. They're demanding that Ukraine exchange its mineral resources for protection. Like it is, it is straight up a protection racket. Yeah. The proposed way that it works is,

is that there's going to be like a quote-unquote development fund controlled by the U.S. and Ukraine, like jointly, but I mean, it's just going to be controlled by the U.S. I don't know why people are pretending that Ukraine is going to like have a say in this. I'm going to read from the proposed agreement. We don't know what the text of the final agreement is going to be. Zelensky has recently expressed that he's willing to sign it, but we don't know exactly what it's going to look like. Here's the quote from the document that we had.

The government of Ukraine will contribute to the fund 50% of all revenues earned from the future monetization of all relevant Ukrainian government-owned natural resource assets, whether owned directly or indirectly by the Ukrainian government, defined as deposits of minerals, hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas, and other extractable minerals, and other infrastructure relevant to the

to natural resource assets, such as liquefied natural gas terminals and port infrastructure, as agreed by both participants, as may be further described in the fund agreement. Another quote. The fund's investment process will be designed so as to invest in projects in Ukraine and attract investments to increase the development, processing, and monetization of all public and private Ukrainian assets, including, but not limited to, deposits of minerals, hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas, etc., etc.,

ports and state-owned enterprises as may be further described in the fund agreement. So what they're talking about here is not just like seizing control of Ukrainian mineral resources. They're talking about like privatizing the Ukrainian state and selling it off and taking the profits from that. They are talking about seizing ports, which I have seen no media coverage of. I do not know why it is in the agreement. You can just read it there.

I notably on the show am not like I am well known as not a China supporter, but I deeply remember for five years, everyone losing their fucking minds about China doing this exact same fucking thing with port lease agreements. And the U.S. is just doing it now. And this is this is just what the new international order is going to be. It's the U.S. just very, very openly instead of instead of working through allies, instead of working through sort of like regime change operations. It's just the U.S. going to be going like, OK, like you are all going to die unless you give us all your money.

Speaking of giving us all your money. Wow. Hell yeah. That's right. Magnificent. That was art. Here's some ads. All right. All right. We are back.

Robert, you want to talk about Syria? Yeah, Syria. I hardly know. OK, anyway, I was sent a document by my good friend Joey Ayoub from the Fire This Time podcast. Sorry, the Fire In These Times podcast. Joey's great. It's a document that the U.S. is sending out to NGOs around the world. This one was sent to an NGO doing humanitarian work in Syria.

And it's basically you have to fill this out in order to have a chance of retaining the funding that has been paused right now. Right. So it's part of the USAID pause. If you want to get that money, you have to fill this out and basically prove that you are in line with the new executive orders and policies of the United States government.

There's a bunch of questions on here that you have to answer. A lot of them are yes, no, but many of them are just like normal shit, right? Does your organization have a current risk management framework or policy? Yes, no. If yes, please describe the framework or policy, right?

not extreme or anything like that. You have to say that you're not working with cartels, narco human traffickers, but then you have to say you have not quote organized groups that promote mass migration in the last 10 years, which is interesting. And when you're dealing with like war torn areas that are helping like refugees escape, uh,

It's clearly going to be damaging to a lot of NGOs that have done very good work to save people. Number five is, does your organization encourage free speech and encourage open debate and free sharing of information? Yes, no. And then right under that, does your organization have a clear policy of prohibiting any collaboration, funding, or support for entities that advocate or implement policies contrary to U.S. government interests?

So free speech, unless it's not stuff that we like, right? Yeah. So kind of always been the way to be fair. Now, kind of the most, I mean, not kind of by a wide margin, the most fucked up thing about this is that it then goes down again, right after the free speech thing. First off, I should note number 11 after the free speech question, can you confirm your organization does not work with entities that associated with communist socialist or totalitarian parties? Yeah.

And then below that is basically a question of whether or not – and they frame it as like, does this project take appropriate measures to protect women and to defend against gender ideology as defined in the below executive order? And then it links to the defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government executive order.

And then it asks, does the project take appropriate measures to protect children and links to the same executive order? So it is basically saying your organization has to support effectively like transphobic policies in Syria in order to continue to get U.S. money. Right. Like and the fact that that is there are one a requirement for aid organizations receiving aid worldwide now is deeply harmful. And it's also just like.

Syria was already transphobic. Like the Syrian government is not really pro-trans. But the fact that this is just being like... This is going to be like across the board. Yes, everywhere. This is going to be everywhere in the world. If you want to get U.S. funds to save human lives, to stop the spread of diseases, you have to officially embrace transphobic policies. That's the stance of the United States government.

that that matters more than stopping the spread of Ebola in the Congo. And this is particularly worrying for HIV preventative measures across the world as well. Most of the language that's used there has been heavily targeted. We're just going to get a whole bunch of people sick and die because of these actions. Yeah, until it starts getting people sick and dead in this country.

But we probably won't stop then. Probably not. James, I pivot to you on our semi-regular border update. Yeah, it's me, the border guy. I was down at the United States border this weekend, the one with Mexico, not the Canada one. And when I got back from the border, I saw an announcement from the Pentagon, which announced the deployment of a striker brigade combat team and an aviation battalion. So...

What's the Striker Brigade Combat Team, you ask? Normally, they're like 4,400 soldiers. In this case, they're sending 2,400 soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division based in Fort Carson in Colorado. Striker Brigade Combat Teams are based around strikers. What are strikers? They are...

armored fighting vehicles with eight wheels. They're pretty cool. Yeah. I've hung out in a couple. A lot of them have fully automatic grenade launchers on the top. They have decent air conditioning, you know. Big vehicle outside, small vehicle inside, as with all military vehicles. Great when you're six foot three like me. But,

Famously, not really something you can use for policing the border. No. Honestly, a lot of arguments as to whether or not they were good at their stated role in warfare. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Bradleys have been having a comeback in Ukraine. The Strikers, not so much. Yeah.

what they're not good at is moving through incredibly rugged mountainous terrain like stuff where I was on Saturday. This is something chuds don't understand because a popular thing among chuds is to take their Toyota Tundras or their F-150s or their Jeep Gladiators and send them down to this company in Florida that adds an extra axle and two more wheels so that they have six wheels because they think it makes truck go better. Yeah.

Why? Doesn't that just ruin the suspension of the truck? It ruins everything. It's a horrible thing to do to a truck. Yeah, no, the people at Jeep have actually been thinking about how to make Jeep better for quite a while. Actually, very amusingly, the place I was down at the border this weekend, it's

There's a very rugged road that you drive down and then you get off and you hike. And I remember a few years ago, a guy, fresh, minty fresh TRD Tundra straight off the lot. And I've just negotiated this in a 1980s era Toyota pickup.

with my friend standing in the back to counterbalance and add weight as we go. I offered a spot for this guy. He says, no, he doesn't need it because it's a TRD. Immediately destroys his oil pan. Oh, yeah. Beautiful. Love to see it. These strikers are doing pretty good is what I'm hearing. Yeah. So we're excited to see the strikers. Perfect vehicle for the terrain. But,

The other vehicles that we're going to see are UH-60 Blackhawks and Chinooks from the General Support Aviation Battalion who are deploying alongside them. There are also about 1,100 soldiers from sustainment units, people who facilitate the, in this case, infantry and aviation deployment. There's some public affairs soldiers, there's people with logistics, people who are going to help

make this deployment happen, right? In a press release, Northcom, that's the North American command of the United States military, New South United States Army, said, tasks carried out by a second strike brigade combat team would include detection and monitoring, administrative support, transportation support, warehousing and logistics support, vehicle maintenance and engineering support,

personnel will not conduct or be involved in interdiction or deportation operations. So this is the posse comitatus thing, right? They're not directly going to be doing cop stuff. They're just going to be helping Border Patrol do cop stuff, supposedly. But this is still very different to the previous deployment we saw. The previous deployments were of engineers and military police, right? So the engineers, the Marine Corps engineers, what they seem to do is get up every day and put razor wire on fence, right?

and then wait for someone to take photographs and put razor wire on fence again, right? And Marines love putting razor wire up. It's not the job that everyone hates the most. Yeah, yeah. Everyone loves razor wire. Handling razor wire is famously fun. Easy. Doesn't get you horribly cut the fuck up. Yeah, it's just what you're signed up to do, I think. What are the MPs doing? They will be facilitating CBP operations, I'm guessing, like SIGINT,

like helping with intelligence, that kind of stuff. Probably anti-drone stuff. There's been a lot of talk about drones. I have not seen any small drones. Most of the areas where I go on the border are federal wilderness or state wilderness, so drones aren't allowed there anyway, but I've never seen one.

What makes this different is that these are infantry soldiers, right? This is a concentration of troops. Everyone in the military either kills people or helps people kill people. These are the killing people guys and girls. And well, no, there are no non-binary people. And secret lays. Yeah, yeah. Secret lays. And the closeted they-thems. Yeah. If you're a closeted they-them in the military, best of luck to you. That's what makes it different, right? This is a significant concentration of troops all...

on the border with one of our allies. This is coming as the United States has used drone overflights to pass information to Mexican authorities that resulted in the arrest of cartel personnel in Sinaloa. So it is a significant change and I

I imagine, based on what I've heard from sources, that we will see more of this, right? The US's deployable infantry troops will be coming to the border. It means that we might soon be seeing foot patrols, right? Soldiers on foot walking through the mountains to the border because we ain't going to see striker mounted patrols out there if they want to keep their strikers. They're adding more helicopter assets, right, which can both move people to more remote areas and...

do more surveillance surveillance i would assume yeah yeah i mean like when a hiker was shot down at the border a few weeks ago and i was out there very quickly thereafter and they used a uh 60 first well they actually didn't evacuate the person in the uh 60 they went in the uh 60 evacuated them in a eurocopter and then another military black hawk was kind of flying over after that and i'm guessing that was just to kind of provide cover for the uh like the first responders right who were going there to to i

I think in that case, they're investigating the scene, the person had been evacuated, but there are very remote areas of the border, which probably are best accessed by helicopter. And so that's what they will be doing. But this does represent a significant concentration of combat troops on the border with our ally, which is not a normal thing to do. And it's worth bearing in mind that as we're doing troop buildups on the Mexican border, there are a lot of people in the Trump administration who want to do just full-on cross-border US military operations in Mexico. They want to do invasions. They want to do...

like what they think of as like hell actions. So yeah, it's a lot of support for like drone strikes right now, which the terrorist designation does kind of pave a road to. But obviously it's worth noting for those not familiar that Mexico is a different country and you don't just get to drone strike other countries. That's an act of war. Well, and speaking of they, thems in the military, I will do a quick follow up before we go on break. We mentioned last week about efforts from the Navy to, you know,

House trans naval

members? Sailors is where the kids are calling them. I guess they kind of are sailors, aren't they? But basically house them with people matching their assigned gender at birth. Same thing with access to intimate spaces like bathrooms. This has escalated further to now a general quasi-ban of trans people from the military altogether with a few implementation paths towards this.

a form of like, don't ask, don't tell. We will report on this more in the future as a part of a larger piece on the Lavender Scare currently happening across the government. But that did happen literally like a few hours after we recorded it. We got word that they are seeking to disband trans people from the military altogether. Anyway, we will go on break and return to talk tariff.

We're back. Hey, I wanted to note something I was unaware of because I have not changed my friend's name in my phone, but Joey now goes by Aaliyah Ayub. I apologize for the error there, but James corrected me, so we're good.

Teamwork makes a dream work. And never changing people's names in my phone makes, well, actually, I usually... I was going to say, I'm impressed you have a name saved in your phone. Well, Aaliyah is a friend, so I actually have their name saved in my phone. 90% of the texts coming at me at any given time is just a series of unlabeled phone numbers. And it's chaos. I'm just guessing that people are who is someone I should be in contact with. That's absurd. Well,

there's no tariffs or butts about it, but the economy is at a bad spot. Oh, no. I was going to do, I was going to do speaking of absurd, but no, no, even worse. Even worse. You know what, Gare? I'm proud of you. That's almost as good as my rock. The Casbah joke. Mia, do you want to do tariff talk?

No, but we're doing it anyways. So after after those horrors, we got we have other horrors, question mark. So on Tuesday, Trump's tariffs on Canada and Mexico and also an additional 10 percent tariff on China went into effect. So these are 25 percent across the board.

There's tariffs. There's some... I think they're only like 10% on Canadian oil. Canadian energy. Yeah. Yeah, like energy stuff. Weirdly, that's not also applied to Mexico, even though there's a shit ton of oil. I don't know. And at sort of the last moment, there was a kind of...

He got called by all three of the heads of the big three auto manufacturers who were like, if you don't exclude auto tariffs, we're all going to die. So he's he's like pushed tariffs out for one month. They're suspended on automotive imports. We still don't know what the fuck that actually means, because it's unclear whether he just means like cars and trucks or whether it also includes auto parts. Deeply unclear.

There's also all tariff aluminum and steel imports. He announced a tariff on in the speech. The copper war we knew about. I don't think we knew about the aluminum and steel imports, which are new, which are also going to be sort of catastrophic. I want to read this amazing quote from CNBC.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that Trump's tariff will cause, quote, higher prices. But he maintained that only some products would be affected and that price hikes would be temporary. Famously, price hikes are only temporary. Hold on, hold on. It gets better. We haven't even gotten to the good part yet.

Lutnik insisted that those rising prices should not be considered inflation. Okay. As the president said last night, there's going to be a short period where there will be some higher prices on certain products, the cabinet secretary said on Fox News. It's not inflation. That's nonsense. Certain products for a short period of time, he said. No! Now, the definition of inflation, and I cannot emphasize this enough, is prices going up. So, great, great stuff here.

There's also, you know, as this has been unfolding, there have been reciprocal tariffs from Canada. The first round of negotiations between Trump and Trudeau basically went nowhere. Canada's putting tariffs on and this is true of both Canada and China who have both done reciprocal tariffs. They've been more limited. They're only targeting sort of specific sectors, right?

Well, the Chinese rates are lower. China's, yeah, rates are really 10 to 15%. The big one from China, and I'm very confused about this whole, the way everyone's talking about this, because everyone only seems to be talking about Canada and Mexico in these, even though the tariff rate on China is now up to 20%. Yeah. He did it over two steps, right? Yeah, yeah. He slid under the radar. You know, obviously, like, yeah, okay. So, like, the U.S. and Mexico and the U.S. and Canada have the two largest trading relationships on Earth. However, comma,

The Chinese reciprocal tariffs are really going to hurt because one of the big things that they're targeting is U.S. soybean exports. Now, we do $12 billion of soybean exports per year. This matters enormously, though. It has an outsized impact regardless of sort of the dollar amounts here because...

Midwest farming, huge parts of it, is based on yearly rotations between soybeans and corn to maintain soil quality, right? Like the farm that I grew up near, this is what they did, right? A massive portion of Midwestern agriculture functions off of this. And it's just also just like...

soybeans and corn are like primarily what human beings grow. Yeah. Yeah. And rice. Like those are really the big three. You can't, you can't eat that corn, but yeah, you don't, but it's part of your food. So then chili, it becomes definitely. Yeah. Yeah. It's corn syrup and shit, but yeah. Well, corn syrup. And also it's, you know, what the animals eat.

Yeah, when they feed it to cattle. And chickens, yeah. And so this is going to have a massive disruption on American agriculture. Trump has also been talking about imposing a tax on all American agricultural exports to some sort of weird, like, American autarky thing. So here's the thing. People are calling this a tariff. This is not a tariff. You don't impose tariffs on something that you are exporting. That's not how this works. You know, like, you can go back to a basic, hey, division of powers. Congress has the power of taxation. Wait, how is he doing it?

Who knows? I don't know. We're so far beyond that. But like, the thing that he's hinting at here, right? Like, if he really is trying to sort of like prevent all U.S. agricultural exports, this is apocalyptic? Yeah.

And it's also worth noting, this is something that's also been lost in the news, but he's been talking about this. He's been talking about doing these tariffs to the EU, 25% of cross-border tariffs to the EU. Now, what I think is important, so the markets today on Wednesday have been going back up. They immediately tanked, like, Tuesday. This week was nasty. Like, Monday, Tuesday was red. And what's happening here is that none of this shit

None of the analysts, none of the people getting paid like fucking $30 million to you to do financial analysis or whatever the fuck. None of these people, none of them thought that these tariffs were actually going to happen. They all just assumed that they were, oh, he's not actually going to do it. He's not actually going to do it. It's just a negotiation. No, no. He's doing it. He was going to do it. There probably will be like sector by sector negotiations to get temporary lifts on them. But none of this shit was priced in. None of the financial analysts, like no one was doing business planning or whatever. Like none of this shit was supposed to be real. And what's happening right now is sort of like

They're latching on to this thing with some of the auto tariffs being lifted for a month. Again, one month, not an actual lift, but one month. They're latching on to this and they're going, okay, maybe we can sort of reverse this. But this is the first moment that the financial markets have actually had to grapple with the fact that Trump is going to do all of the shit that he says he's going to do. And like that afternoon, Bloomberg had a guy on like calling Trump a dictator and saying he wasn't going to have elections. We are beginning to see capital flight from the U.S.,

Where investors are openly talking about pulling their fucking money out of this country and pulling it somewhere else because it's no longer stable. And this is something that, you know, I think the next dam will be when the U.S. is like credit rating gets downgraded. But we're starting to see the dam break on the financial class and all of these analysts and like people on Wall Street realizing this.

That no, he is going to continue to throw bombs at the entire world economy in order to sort of carry out his like, I want to be like the fucking big man empire guy.

I mean, like, Trudeau had a call with Trump on Wednesday basically going, hey, what the fuck, man? I thought we had a deal. And Trump was like, well, I'm not seeing much progress on the whole fentanyl thing. And Trudeau was like, what the fuck are you talking about? And Trump then basically pointed towards him not being satisfied with

until there's a new Canadian government. Like, he's not going to want to lift these until Trudeau is out of office and asks Trudeau when the next Canadian election is, hinting towards the fact that he just is going to refuse to seriously negotiate with Trudeau and will wait until whoever the next guy is

Meanwhile, you have a post from the Chinese embassy in the U.S. saying, if war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we're ready to fight till the end. Yeah, I will say, I will say, the guys they put on the embassy PR comms are dipshits. Like, those are not the guys running the Chinese government. Those are like the fucking clowns they put at these administrative posts to like scream about wolf warriors or whatever the fuck they're doing.

the reporting I've seen from inside the Chinese government is that they also were like, what the fuck are you doing? And they're trying to figure out, like, okay, like, how do you negotiate with this? Yeah. Like, they're having real issues because, like, for all of the shit the Chinese government does, like, this is a government of capitalists. They want to make money. And they're looking at a guy who is willing to just blow the entire thing up. Here's my pitch.

for what we should do with China, right? You know how China has this border conflict with India that could end the world, but usually just involves two groups of people with spears that were originally made in the 13th century having phalanx fights in the mountains? Yep. We should just send over a couple of thousand Marines-

and do that with china get it all out of our systems this whole all this war talk just have a couple thousand dudes have a big old spirit fight we film the son of a bitch we get some drones we bring in maybe we bring in tarantino he'd be great to film the fucker you know we we really just have a good time with it and then we just go back to not not doing stuff like this

Look, I think if we get the U.S. and China to compete against each other in the U.S. Special Forces games and we show this to Donald Trump and we have the Chinese government take a staged loss or something, we could solve most of our problems. You can just edit it to be whoever, like for both countries, right? You have an America version and a China version. We already do this. Yeah.

So the last sort of serious thing that I want to talk about here is that this, especially the stuff he's talking about with you, but also with sort of Canada, this has broken the sort of international coalition that all of these people have been setting up for a really long time. Right. This whole sort of coalition of all the sort of world's right wing governments like coming together in this like national thing. And like,

they're really fucked now. Like, the Canadian right was just, like, about to take power, and they might not now, and even if they do take power, they're gonna have to, like, deal with the fact that they've all been, like...

fucking maniac Trump supporters this whole time. And Trump has just been like fucking their entire country. And like these people are now talking about like, again, like shutting off power to the U.S. And this is happening all over the world with all of these fascist parties who've been allied with the U.S. and are now having to grapple with the fact that the U.S. is just going to, it's just going to fuck them. Weirdly, the thing it reminds me a lot is like the situation you got at the end of the 70s in East Asia with the communists where it was like,

Okay, so we have three nominally communist governments on the border with each other, right? You have China, you have Cambodia, and you have Vietnam, and I guess you have Laos. And then those three governments, instead of forming a united bloc, all go to war with each other. And that's sort of what we're seeing with the fascists right now. Because Trump has decided to just be like, fuck it, we're just going to do tariffs on everyone, it is really starting to tear his coalition apart. And hopefully this rolls back a bunch of their gains everywhere else in the world, and yeah, these people eat shit. Yeah.

And I think Trump is using for leverage here beyond even tariffs, like cutting out Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence group, halting intel sharing with Ukraine. Very, very drastic steps in terms of like

national security and Intel sharing. I mean, it's, it's just deeply clear that what's happening is we're ending every single thing the U S used to do that Trump does not see as a direct financial benefit and largely aligning ourself with Russia against every state that does not have the physical power to stop us. Yep.

Well, that does it for us today. I know on Tuesday night, Trump did a speech to a joint session of Congress. We have a whole episode on that that released yesterday because there was just so much to talk about. So if you want to hear our thoughts on that, you can check out yesterday's episode.

on his congressional speech full of a lot of a summary. Yes, because the speech was very long, focused a lot on trans people, focused a lot on the border, talked about national security, really skipped over the economy because no guys are great because because that's not really going to good. Keep shooting holes in it.

Really skipped over that. Focused more on trans people as the single greatest threat facing this country. But yes, if you want to hear about that, check out yesterday's episode on the It Could Happen Here feed. The shortest summary possible. Speech bad. Speech bad, yeah. Speech bad. The era of woke is over would be the other summary I give.

If the era of woke is over where you're employed, if the era of woke has ended your employment and you'd like to reach out to us, you can using our Proton mail address. That doesn't mean that it's not, like if you're not using Proton, then it's not end-to-end encrypted. If you are, then it's encrypted, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily totally safe. So you need to do what you think is best. It is crosswordless.

CoolZoneTips at Proton.me. If you don't work for government, but you do work for Elon Musk in another capacity, it would also be very funny to hear from you about what that is like. So yeah, CoolZoneTips at Proton.me. Increasingly relevant, considering that social security layoffs have started and

And they're now seeking to cut possibly upwards of 50% of the social security workforce. Yeah, and the IRS. So I'm sure that's going to work out great for government revenues. I'm sure everything will be fine and America will be back on top in no time. It is back. America is back. I learned that last night. We reported the news. Yes, we certainly did. We reported the news. We reported the news.

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.

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