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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. Hi, man. Happy to be here again. Yeah, I am. I don't know. I have mixed emotions about this one. So today we are talking about how the American state, particularly the sort of neoliberal American state of the last about 50 years, created Elon Musk and how

it is destroying itself. And we'll start with the fun part of this, which is that Tesla stock is down 25% in the last month. Yay. It's extremely funny. The protests are working. People are lighting them up, cars on fire, literally all over the world. There was just a big rash in France the day we're recording this. The pressure is working. He's having a bad time. 25% is just the start. We can get the other 75%. Yeah. And for people who, I guess,

don't know, the value of Tesla stock is directly tied to Elon Musk's net worth. Like, obviously he's diversified. He doesn't have all of his wealth in net stocks, but like when Tesla stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer. Yep. It's great. It's great. We love, we love making Elon Musk poorer. Yeah. It's the one line we like to see. However, comma, so we've talked a lot on this show about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the, to the American state and about all of the people who he is harming and the lives he's destroying and the people who are dead because of his actions. Yeah.

And I think it's worth actually getting into how he was produced and how it came to be that at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously wrote to the bourgeoisie, produce their own gravediggers. And, you know, his his his promised like inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and like this specific state seems to have produced their own gravediggers, partially in the form of Trump, but partially in the form of Elon Musk.

And it's worth actually going into the story of how specifically this happens. And also, I think what neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of I think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines of the story of the extent to which, you know, Tesla and SpaceX were built by American subsidies. But it's worth going into some of the some of the more structural elements of how this happened and why.

So one of the problems that we have here, and I say we have here because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates. Yeah, he says a lot of things he doesn't understand. Yeah. And unfortunately, he has inherited like the greatest of all neoliberal states, which

So the issue here is that Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism, whatever you call his sort of ideology.

you know, is supposed to be. And, you know, like he is just sort of a fascist. But on the other hand, he's a product of this wing of that movement that was created out of out of the neoliberal thing about like, you must like decrease the size of the state. You got to you got to eliminate all regulations. You have to, you know, keep keep decreasing the size of the state, keep fire, like, you know, fire all government employees, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And again, this is, I think, largely what a lot of people think neoliberalism is. Right. They think it's like, OK, neoliberalism is where the state gets smaller. And this has always been a fucking joke.

Like through this entire neoliberal period, the size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing. And this has always allowed a kind of like controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to, you know, when 2008 happens, right? Yeah. The economy, the entire economy collapses. And then out of the woodwork come all of these like Rand Paul sort of like quote unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and like all of these sort of fascist paramilitaries.

But, you know, they can come out of the woodwork and say, oh, the reason that the 2008 collapse happened was because there is too much government regulation. And this is like sort of what Bitcoin is, right? It's like, ah, the evils of capitalism are happening because like... Not enough capitalism. Yeah, well, it's because like, but like specifically, like the evil entrenched interests have taken over the state. You don't have the power to access the things that they do, which is obviously...

You know, like it is obviously true that these people have control of the state and you don't. But this sort of controlled opposition of if you put us in power, we'll eliminate parts of the state. We'll get rid of all this regulation that you can suddenly be in power. This has always been a controlled opposition thing, you know, and this is disappears in the form of sort of libertarianism or like on the most extreme end, anarcho-capitalism. Yeah.

And this is something that the Montpelier Society, which is like the people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all of their academics come from, they still have conferences, they've always had a problem with this.

Where there's always been a branch of anarcho-capitalists there who think the only thing that the state should do is enforce contracts or just that it shouldn't exist. Everything should just... Yeah. And the neoliberals are like, okay, you guys are fucking ridiculous. And the reason they think this is that the actual thing that these people believe, and this is something that if you read more Hayek than just like the road to serfdom, right? That's like the stuff for public consumption. If you read the stuff that you write for public consumption, if you read...

sort of like rope key and you read all of it, all of the sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF. And, you know, you go through all the different schools, what they actually believe, contrary to the things that they say, we're like, oh, markets naturally emerge in the state, just like exist to control them.

What they believe is that you have to use the state specifically to create markets and you have to use the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until they become sort of like good neoliberal market subjects. You go to work, go home, buy things and do nothing else.

And the product of this is the 1980s, right? It's the replacement of the welfare state, you know, which is the sort of carrots of the system with just the pure stake of the police baton and the prison system. Yeah, it's the end of like the post Second World War welfare state order, right, that we saw, certainly in Germany.

In the U.S., but mostly in Europe, right? Yeah, yeah. But this is very important. This never actually decreased the size of the state because what the state, you know, what it was, was it was a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from like the state giving you things towards the state, you know, like beating you over the head with a hammer. And also, insofar as it gives you things, making you go through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort of like scant welfare policies still exist.

Yeah, the state's surveilling you both for violence reasons and for withdrawing your benefits reasons. Yeah, and this is always something that all of these people have supported, right?

Now, the other important part for our purposes is the thing I said earlier about the state creating markets. And that's kind of like an abstract thing, right? There are sort of historical examples you can go through to look at what this looks like in a place where there aren't markets. But this is something that's very important because a huge amount of what Tesla is, is a direct result of, you know, pure neoliberalism in action, which is the state stepping in to create a market as its way of doing regulation and the way it interacts with the world.

And so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now, selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits. In 2024, the selling of carbon credits was 43% of Tesla's net income. 43%. Yeah. So we should explain what a carbon credit is if people aren't familiar. Yeah. Well, Axios has numbers on this. Their numbers are that since 2014, 34% of the total profits...

Tesla are from selling these carbon credits. So the way the system works is that the EPA sets standards for how much is this like, you know, read the Axios thing too, but like the EPA set standards for how much like CO2 per mile, all of the cars and trucks combined that a car company makes can can emit.

And, you know, instead of doing the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just going to be like a firm cap on these emissions. They're like, no, no, no. You know, this is what I say when I say they create a market. So what happens if you go over the cap is

isn't that like, you know, like people get hauled off to jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to buy someone else's carbon credits. And if you're below the cap, it gives you credits you can sell to other companies. So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right? Their cars produce like zero, basically, like they don't have any fossil fuel use at all within their line. Yeah. Yeah. Now, obviously, like, whereas, you know, you can ask the question, where is that electricity coming from? But, you know, like, but that's what doesn't get factored into it, which is part of the sort of

problem with trying to use the state like this to solve right it doesn't look at life cycle yeah yeah just looks at driving the car emissions you know this is the problem we're trying to use a regulatory state like this to solve the problem of climate change by creating a market and so tesla makes and again this is this last year this was 43 of its net income came not from selling cars but from selling these carbon credits so what they're doing is making it so that other companies can

can produce more cars that are less fuel efficient, can produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids. Yeah. It's why you couldn't get a plug-in hybrid EV pickup truck. Like, I think there may be plug-in hybrid Mavericks now, but like the reason that no US manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck, like the F-150 Lightning that they have now, is because they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead.

Yeah. And this is a fucking disaster for climate policy because instead of having all of the car companies just like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one car company that makes electric cars and then all the rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like CO2 per like miles, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And the secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now, is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort of impoverished.

in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of what a market is, right? When they explain it, it was like, ah, there's going to be all this competition in the market. The competition is going to create the best product. And what actually happens, and the neoliberals in their private doctrine understand this, is that when the state creates a market like this, what it's doing is handing like a person, like a single individual, a giant monopoly. And that's what happens. And that monopoly...

is one Elon Musk, who has now been handed the title of the richest man in human history by the state's regulatory apparatus. Because they've given him basically complete control over... I mean, there are other EV-only companies, but they're minute, right? Rivian or something like that. And he's got this scarce resource that the entire automotive industry now needs. Yeah, and again, this is, you know, going back to the market creation part of this. None of this shit existed...

Right. Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever produce by itself or whatever. Like this is a direct neoliberal intervention into the market, which is what neoliberalism is. Right. It's the neoliberal state coming in to create markets. And the product of it is Elon Musk. Yeah. It's a monopoly. Yeah. And when we come back from ads, we'll go into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon Musk and not all of these other companies that became the sort of single market.

and how else he's benefited from the state. We are back. So the other aspect, you know, so we've gone into how Tesla is built on this carbon credit trading. The other aspect of it is that Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money

From government contracts, the Washington Post in probably the last like expose they're ever going to do like this now that Bezos has been like we are free market capitalists. Yeah, like tried to go through and find all of the money in government contracts that they've gotten. They totaled it. Well, I think I think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that. But I told it at thirty eight billion dollars.

And that's just the ones that are unclassified, which is very important because a bunch of what SpaceX does, SpaceX is, you know, most other company, is a bunch of contracts for classified, like, the deployment of spy satellites. So it's definitely way more than that, right? Yeah. But this comes to the other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies, like, in general, do not make money, right? They hemorrhage money for basically their entire existence until they can find a bunch of government contracts that can make them money. Mm-hmm.

And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating shit after 2008.

And, you know, WAPO talks about this. They got a $465 million low interest loan from the Department of Energy in 2010 that basically saved the company from the brink of collapse. Good thing there's nothing else to spend the money on in 2010. No one else needed low interest loans or anything. It was fine. No, no. There was no attempt to build like a giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed. Yep. You know, nothing else was happening. I wasn't living in my car at that time. It was fine for me. Yeah. Thank you, Obama. Yeah.

And so and so as this goes on, right, the goal of you as a tech company, there's two things you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire on your pile of money. Or if you're a larger tech company, you are trying to amass enough U.S. contracts like U.S. government contracts to like get you to sort of stability. And this is what happens with SpaceX. SpaceX now has gotten 18 billion dollars of contracts with NASA, right?

And this is sort of a part of like, I mean, NASA has always used government contractors, but like this is different. Like this is just straight up. They are using Tesla's rockets to do things. And this is also part of why like Tesla and Boeing fucking this up is part of why a bunch of astronauts are fucking stranded on the space station right now, because these things do not work.

But there's been an enormous amount of money here. And the other thing, you know, this is one of the other sort of like great neoliberal things is that a lot of the factories that Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones that are in the U.S. are there because they get unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from local states themselves. All of this brings us to, you know, one of the other really core aspects of sort of the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling products.

in terms of selling cars. By the way, we should also mention, this is something Axios talks about, that if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, this company would literally never make money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This has been the case. I wrote about this, I think, two years ago. Yeah. I remember writing about this before Elon Musk had gone full fucking evil villain, I guess. But that's what they are. They're a carbon credit company that makes cars. Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by a $7,500 hedge fund.

tax credit for electric cars. Oh, yeah. I got some tax credit information on electric cars.

It's now the time. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to talk about the other one that's driving these unhinged sales? Yes, I do. Because I have been driving around San Diego and I have seen an obscene number of Cybertrucks wrapped in people's business livery. And it occurs to me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck, nor do people who need a pickup truck for work buy Cybertrucks because they suck at being trucks.

And so I did some digging and I discovered that the IRS has a special tax deduction for vehicles which are rated over £6,000 gross vehicle weight.

The gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not like the mass of the vehicle if you drove it off the dealer lot onto a scale. That's the maximum operating weight of the vehicle as specified by the manufacturer. So it's your Tesla with... I mean, there are very funny videos of guys loading one bag of compost into the back of a Tesla and being, it's a great truck for truck stuff. The other really funny one is when they try to attach a winch to it and try to use it to pull...

uh to pull heavy things the back of the truck comes off because it's just like made of like it's like secured by like glue like a unibody yeah it might not be a body on frame like a it might not be a proper truck i actually don't know no actually i will look into that afterwards i bet it's i bet most of the electric or like high mileage pickup trucks are not so yeah not a good truck actually under it's called section 179 under section 179

A vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating over £6,000, you can deduct up to £31,000 in the first year rather than deducting the depreciation of the capital good over time. So instead of deducting the depreciation of your vehicle that you purchased your business over time and not paying tax on that amount, you can not pay tax on £31,000 in the first year of your vehicle if it's over £6,000. There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles,

Like if you've got a Maybach or something really fucking heavy. So that would even cover the Model X, right? The Tesla Model X has a GBWR above that. With a truck, there are exemptions for work vehicles and they have to have a separate cargo compartment that is not the driver's compartment that is six feet or more in length. So the Cybertruck just happens to have a six foot bed. Whew!

Yeah. So you can deduct 100% of value in the first year, from what I understand, for these vehicles, which have a six foot bed. At least this was the case when I was looking. I became aware of the exact nature of this when I went on the Cybertruck Owners Club forum and looked what tax

deducted people were doing, right? And then I worked back from there. And it does seem that people are doing this. I think it might be changing. So you can only deduct a certain percentage soon. It will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you tax advice, nor am I qualified to do so. I'm not an accountant. This is not accounting advice. On top of that,

Mia mentioned the IRS commercial clean vehicle credit, right? That's a credit, not a deduction. So the deduction would discount the amount of your income that you pay tax on versus the credit, which is just rate credit. So potentially the person could deduct the cost of the Cybertruck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking Cybertruck, right, to prove it's a business vehicle. And then if you're wrapping it, from what I understand, like these deductions somewhat depend on the percentage of the vehicle's use that is business, right?

I guess this could be like the equivalent of a fringes on the flag tax theory. People claiming that when they're driving their their Cybertruck to go to Whole Foods, but it's wrapped, they're advertising a business. So it's a business use. I don't understand how how viable that is to claim. But well, you know, but part of this is like it's very.

very easy. Like, especially right now when the IRS is being gutted, like, it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit. People are not getting audited. Yeah. Yeah. So they can take a 7,500 commercial vehicle, clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much and, like,

you would struggle to persuade me that that is not why a lot of people are buying cyber trucks right like it's got the weight rating it's got the bed size like it's a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily you know like not all trucks have six foot beds now i will never buy a new truck because i can't find a truck that has like a decent seating arrangement and uh larger than six foot bed and four by four and doesn't cost more than i earn in a year but like

It's quite a niche overlap of trucks that apply. And for a truck with a six-foot bed and a 6,000-pound gross vehicle weight rating, the Cybertruck's pretty small and it fits kind of...

with people who don't actually need a work truck, but can nonetheless take advantage of the work truck tax deduction. So once again, thank you, government, for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the roads today. Yeah, and it's worth noting. So like Tesla, you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is like one of the best-selling car manufacturers, right? And part of it is from this, but also, you know, and this is the other aspect of

Of this, it's worth noting there's a very good Bloomberg article out today by Amanda Moll that talks about how 50% of all American consumer spending is now by people in the top 10% of the income bracket. So people make $250,000 a year or more. And that means increasingly that everything in the United States reflects the, you know, the sort of like cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes.

who all also want to buy this for their sort of, like, cultural grudges and, you know, to, like, to own the libs and, like, show how, like, much of a fucking man they are. Yeah. And, you know, and so you already have that initial incentive, and then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that, like, definitely this is, like, designed with the shit in mind. Yeah, without a doubt. And it becomes...

Like you say, it becomes like a status good and it becomes like a culture war signifier. Yeah. In addition to all those things. I guess people also like,

I've noticed that there's been a lot of backlash against people who own Teslas. If you go on the front, the day we're recording, the top article on the front page of Reddit on the third article, Reddit, the top post is someone who's been putting pictures that say, sell your car. It's got a picture of Musk, Zeke, Hyling on people's Teslas in Boston. Yep, yep, yep. Shout out to that person. Yeah.

Okay, so we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to sort of finish this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going. We are...

Now, I think this all, I think if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard of most of this. I actually, okay, you've heard of most of what I've said to some extent. I don't think you've heard what James has said before because I've seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here is that Elon Musk, on a fundamental level, is also a product of the endless bubble economy.

that we've all been living in for decades now. It's a product of an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Keynesianism. So regular Keynesianism, right, is about, you know, having the government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation. Also, you know, also like the military too, right? Like, let's not sort of like sugarcoat it, but it's about using a bunch of state money to like make there be jobs and using this to sort of, I don't know, the way they call it is like counter-cyclical spending, but it's like

They want to use the state to spend money, to make there be jobs, and to put money into the economy, and to put goods into the economy to counteract economic downturns. Asset Keynesianism is still the state expending a bunch of resources, right? But it's the state expending those resources both bureaucratically in terms of incentives and in terms of sort of tax structures, and specifically also very much in terms of the Federal Reserve's interest rates.

Specifically to increase the price of stocks and also, you know, and, you know, the reason he calls it assets, right? Because it's not just stocks, right? It's also things like real estate. It's to increase the value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you think it's going to be worth more later. I have talked about this a lot on this show. This has been the fundamental global economic strategy of most of the world's economies ever since sort of Japan kind of pioneered it.

in the 80s as after the US sort of like kneecapped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy to the Plaza Accords. And by the end of this fucking administration, everyone who listened to the show will be able to explain what the Plaza Accords and the reverse Plaza Accords are. That's when we stop. It won't happen here after that because you'll all understand and you'll stop it here. It can no longer happen here. You'll know. You'll know. You'll know the origin of the economy.

Yes. So, again, the Plaza Accords, the U.S. forces all of these countries to increase the value of their currencies relative to the dollar. This makes American manufacturing more competitive. It nukes all of their manufacturing. These countries need to find another place.

to, you know, develop their economy, right? And the thing that the solution Japan comes to is real estate speculation. This blows up. This blows up in the 90s. This is a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse stuff is from this. And then the U.S. is forced to do the reverse Plaza Accords in the 90s. This is Bill Clinton. And, you know, sort of annihilate American manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the rest, like prop up Japanese manufacturing to keep their economy from completely imploding. Japan was the number two economy in the world at that point.

But again, this means that the U.S. has now been doing this. There's the famous things called the Greenspan puts where like to try to stop a market collapse that was obviously coming with a tech bubble blew up. Greenspan kept cutting the interest rates over and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing and just making it bigger. And then eventually it blew up. This is what 2008 is, was, you know, we did a whole bubble. I mean, there's there's there's another bubble and collapse in between there. But like, you

You know, and this is what we've been doing for the last two decades. Like since 2008, we've been creating this giant tech bubble. And this tech bubble shit, this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part of the value of Tesla stock. It's just, you know, people who've been given a whole bunch of access to cheap credit. And by people, I mean like not really you and me, like a bunch of unbelievably rich people have access to like incredibly cheap loans and they use that money to buy Tesla stock. This is a sort of cyclical thing that just continuously increases the value of the company. And it's not just sort of like, bam,

banks and investors, a lot of money that goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension funds.

Yeah. From a bunch of a whole bunch of countries and also like a huge number of American states like your teachers pensions are all tied up in this because yeah pension reform with the way that we sort of like lost the pension as a normal thing was that it was you know it's converted to 401ks and the people who still have like regular state pensions all of that money is now sort of invested in the stock market and it puts a billions of dollars in into Tesla every year.

And so this is also another aspect. This is this is the broader structural level on which on which U.S. macroeconomic policy was designed to create a bunch of companies like Tesla and then U.S. sort of like micro policy, the micro creation of markets through tax credits. And, you know, all of these government contracts they've been given to do like everything from like fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit. Right.

And like the U.S. is like contracting out Starlink now. I mean, like all of this stuff, right, is literally how Elon Musk was created. Yeah. But there is a third, even deeper level in which, you know, we can look at how these cars are actually produced and how these rockets are actually produced. And they're produced by just incredible, the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers. And I think people tend to think about

you know, Tesla workers in the U.S., but there's Tesla workers all over the world. There's a huge gigafactory

In Xinjiang, you know, there's factories all over China. And, you know, these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit. They work in unbelievably dangerous conditions. And at the end of the day, they get a very small amount of money so that the richest man in the world can get fucking richer every day. Yeah. And that's before we consider like ingredient parts to Tesla's, right? Like the lithium that we just addressed, for instance, in our episode on Congo. Yeah. Yeah.

There are parts of your test, your test that come out of this country where there has been a war for as long as most of us has been alive.

Really very little effort has gone into improving conditions for people there, certainly for workers there, doing jobs that are essential to our economy. And to like, me and my 401k line going up comes from exploiting workers in Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world. Yeah. And, you know, this is something our standard of living is based off of. But at the end of the day, right?

Elon Musk's, all of Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the state's monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these people from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in order to stop these people from taking back the fucking value that they create. Mm-hmm.

Now, unfortunately, all of this sort of neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last 50 years, right, this attempt to sort of like depoliticize everything and have everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this sort of like non-politics where you're voting for two parties that are like literally even more the same than they are now. This attempt to do things like solve climate change through these promotion of carbon markets and create this sort of like stable, like capitalist hegemony forever, right?

has ultimately been self-defeating. It's why all attempts to regulate capital inevitably fail, because the functioning of the capitalist system, and particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism has worked, has concentrated the most wealth ever held by a single human being into the hands of one guy who was a Nazi. And then these people use their wealth to accumulate political power and seize control of the state, dismantling the systems that were meant to regulate them. And you can't solve this problem with regulation.

Because again, eventually, they will simply accumulate enough power, retake power, and eliminate the regulations. You can't even solve this problem just by killing them. I see people talk about the killing of billionaires in China as an example of this. And A, that's all political factual infighting stuff. And B, they'll execute people specifically to sort of appease the Chinese workers so that they never have to fucking watch the PLA get run out of Shanghai again. But the thing is, even if somehow you use the state to just kill them, it doesn't

It doesn't work because capitalism will just produce more of these people. If you actually want to stop this, if you want to stop this Elon Musk from destroying the entire country and quite possibly ending all life on Earth by fucking with America's nuclear weapons until there's simply not enough safety mechanisms to stop someone from accidentally sending one off, you are going to have to destroy them completely.

The permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch, the power of the billionaire, the power of the dictator must be broken. This tiny group of men cannot, as a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals, supply chains that produce everything we need to survive. It must belong to us. We create their wealth. The only way to save this world is to take it back. If we want to save democracy, the only way to do it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon Musk rules as a tyrant.

Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast that is lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too. They must cease to rule. They must cease to exist, not as individuals, but as a class. And the only way to do that is by giving control of their power and their property and their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of it in the first place. That is the tax that we have in front of us.

The challenge that we face is that we face effectively the entire might of the American state, which is the most like one of the most powerful apparatuses of repression that has ever been built.

Our advantage is that that apparatus of repression is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are, and I cannot emphasize this enough, maybe the two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan, after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the Revolutions podcast, concluded to be the great idiots of history who, by their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision at every single moment, are what makes revolutions possible.

And if these people are not the great idiots of history that allow us to bring them down and stop them from destroying everything that has ever been in this world that is good, then nothing else is. Yeah, we have the one great stroke of good fortune we have, right? All power has been concentrated in the hands of complete idiots who are addicted to Diet Coke and being mad at their children.

And they, you know, we have already seen they don't they don't understand how this apparatus works. Right. They fired the nuke police by accident. Yeah. So it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of the means of coercive violence. Yeah. When we started, you spoke about controlled opposition. Right. And the idea that like the great debate of our time is how much state regulation we should have and how much unfettered anarcho-capitalism we should have.

They are drinking the Kool-Aid that got them in power. That is...

The one thing going in our favor right now that they are dismantling the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe the myth that if the state didn't exist, they could be even more wealthy and even more tyrannical. Yeah. And well, and the second advantage that we have is that they have been they have set about systematically alienating every single group of people who they would need as their political base. They are pissing off the military. They are pissing off the intelligence services.

They are going through and they are systematically pissing off the farm states. And the farmers obviously do not have that, like, don't fucking matter. But they're pissing off the agribusinesses. They are individually going through and pissing off a whole bunch of the country's scientific resources. They're going through, they're fucking with the Social Security Administration. They're individually going through and pissing off every single group of people on Earth who matter. And people who, like us, under this system...

aren't supposed to matter until we fucking do something about it. And, you know, the other big thing that we have right now is that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by, by actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do.

And by pulling apart his base of support and by putting together coalitions of some of these people and not all of them, some of them, some of them, you just need to divide and conquer by getting them out from backing him. Right. Like the whole thing with, with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October revolution was that, but people just mostly stayed home. Yeah. And that, when that was how they won, like that's, that is largely what we need. We need these people to stay home, but these people can and will, if we have anything to say about it, be fucking driven home and, and,

Hopefully we can bury both the gravediggers and the people whose graves they were digging in the same spot in the dustbin of history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis, and I'm joined today by a special guest host, Bridget Todd. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I am completely excited to be here. I am a listener of the show, so it feels like getting to be on a show that I actually freak out too often. And I'm very excited for you to be here because you have a special report on

one of the people who I've been cyber-stalking for years. And I'm very excited to hear the details of what she's been up to these past few weeks. I kind of know the rough overview, because again, because of my cyber-stalking. But I've not done a deep dive the way you have. So I'm very excited to hear an update on this character. So it sounds like we are in a similar place when it comes to this person. And this person is none other than Candace Owens,

First of all, what are your thoughts on her? Because I am low-key fascinated with her. I follow her on social media. I watch her videos. I am weirdly captivated by her. I mean, I've covered her mostly through her involvement with Daily Wire. I've talked a little bit about kind of how that all fell apart, you know, like a year and a half ago or so. I've talked a little bit about her involvement in Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk and

And she's just kind of been one of these random orbiters of the online right-wing content sphere for, I don't know, the past six years at least. And I typically focus more on the Ben Shapiros, the Matt Walshes, back in the day, the Steven Crowders and stuff. But Candice was always just around. And she definitely...

went after a different demographic than what like my usual focuses, right? Like I'm focused on like what's going on with straight white men? Like why are they like this? And who is targeting them? And you know, and that's, you know, that's like the Matt Walsh, like Steven Crowder kind of angle. Like Candace Owens has like a kind of a broader net that she targets with her content.

So like she's always kind of come up as like a side character. I don't think I've ever done like a distinct focus on her before besides just you know whatever kind of crazy post or like you know anti-trans or like very like weird like racist rant that she goes on like everyone

every once in a while. Yes. So there is so much to talk about when it comes to Candace Owens. I'm sort of like you, like I sort of saw her as a side character, but only recently have I realized like, oh, people in my life are listening to Candace Owens and citing Candace Owens and they have no idea

have no idea any about her anything about her backstory yeah all the stuff that you that you were just talking about she's like reinvented herself like multiple times and you know some people who mainly come at this from like the anti-fascist research perspective might not be aware of her like latest rebrand which is what I'm excited to hear about today yes I just remembered how she had that whole event with Kanye when she did her like BLM documentary that was a whole other Candice era yeah so much oh my god I have to

I have to say, I was like low-key embarrassed for her because like during her Kanye West era, she was like, Kanye West designed the couture outfits for my Blegzit movement. And Kanye West was like, no, I fucking didn't. And like, I was like, oh, that's so embarrassing that you like, that you like publicly aligned yourself with Kanye West only for him to basically like,

diss you publicly right after. Yeah. And then come out as like an explicit neo-Nazi like two weeks later. Yes, yes. Oh, Candace, girl. So I want to talk about her. Like, I don't want to spend too much time on her background, but there are some pieces that I think like

are good for understanding kind of who she is, this chameleon figure that she's been. Totally. If there is not like a behind the bastards on her, do you know if there is? There should be if there's not. Not yet. Similarly on bastards, she's been one of these like recurring characters. Oh my God.

But she has not had a distinct focus. Robert Evans, get on it because we need the Candace Owens behind the bastard. So Candace grew up in Stanford, Connecticut. While she was a student there, she went through this horrible sounding racial harassment. A classmate left her like this racist death threat on her voicemail that turned into like a pretty serious local scandal because it turned out the student who made that

threat via voicemail, did so in a car with a group of students that included the son of the then mayor and then future Democratic governor of Connecticut, Daniel Malloy. So she got tons of support from the local chapter of the NAACP, and her family ended up suing the Stanford Board of Education and Federal Court for failing to protect her rights, resulting in a $37,500 settlement.

She went on to study journalism at University of Rhode Island before dropping out. And this is like the early 2000s? Yes. This was like young, like baby Candace, high school Candace before she was the Candace Owen that we know today. Yeah.

So I sort of like almost see a little bit of myself and where she got her start. Like me, she was an early adopter of using the Internet to talk about things like race and politics. Like me, that also seemed to sort of manifest in a lot of like low hanging fruit shit posts on the early days of blogging. Like in 2015, she was writing blogs making fun of Trump's penis size. Sure. Many such cases. Yes, many such cases. Yeah.

So in 2015, Owens is running a blog called Degree 180 where she wrote pieces criticizing conservative Republicans writing about the, quote, batshit crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party. The good news is they will eventually die off peacefully and in their sleep, we hope, and then we can get right on with the obvious social change that needs to happen immediately, she wrote on her blog. So back then,

then she was really someone who had like a progressive point of view and was doing a lot of public writing about what she was seeing and experiencing in politics at the time. Yeah, no, this is something that I guess some people might not know if they've only like become aware of her through Daily Wire is yeah, like in the pre-2016 like BuzzFeed internet kind of sphere, she was just like one of like these people who would, yeah, have like, you know, progressive-ish takes, criticize, empathize

embarrassing like politicians and like overtly racist stuff happening and then the degree to which this like heel turn happens is like one of the most stark examples I've seen in like a

I don't know. I'm trying to think of it if there's like any like exact parallel. I don't know. There's like certainly some like detransition like grifters. There used to be like ex-gay influencers or you know, it's like proto-influencers kind of before influencers were a thing. Like ex-gay speakers. But yeah, the switch around on Candice from these blog posts is so concentrated. So,

So in her own words, she describes it as happening overnight. There you go. Yeah. How it happened is like fascinating to me. So in 2016, when Gamergate was in full swing, Owens launched a Kickstarter for a project called Social Autopsy, which she described as a way to catalog the abuses of trolls and cyber bullies. Fun.

Fun fact, that Kickstarter is still up today. It is such a weird time capsule of a different time. There's like a video of her speaking earnestly about the need to like have the internet be a like safer, more equitable landscape. It is nuts. Like people should go listen to her speaking about this project.

So the plan for this project was essentially that she would create a way to de-anonymize online commentators and then connect them with their real names and their real life employers. And what's so funny is that that is the very same argument that a lot of people use, people who want to restrict the open internet still use today, that problems on the internet

online harassment and abuse would all be improved if only everybody had to use their government ID and government names to access the internet. And so like, it's very funny that that idea, it was bad then and it didn't really die. It was just recycled into today. Yeah. I mean, like there's a version of this that happens, or at least it kind of used to happen more in regards to like anti-fascist research where like you're like, you know, identify specific, like extremely racist accounts or like explicit neo-Nazis and

contact their employer in an attempt to get them fired so they can focus on

getting a new job and supporting themselves rather than doing racism online and in person, especially if he's like, you know, a member of like a group, whether that be, you know, the Proud Boys back in the day or many, many other groups, Patriot Prayer, now Patriot Front, that sort of thing. It's funny how hated this tactic is soon to be by people like Candace and the Daily Wire people, but he or she's advocating it herself. Yeah.

Exactly. In this post-Anita Sarkeesian kind of content world. Yeah. So pretty much everybody thought this was a bad idea, including video game developer Zoe Quinn, who folks might remember was kind of at the center of Gamergate and was viciously attacked. Owens was subsequently harassed and doxxed, and she blamed Zoe Quinn and other feminists for this and said so publicly. As you can probably guess, people...

People like Milo Yiannopoulos loved this. People who were promoters of Gamergate really hyped up Owens' claims that like, yes, feminists were actually the ones doing all the online harassing. Okay. I can see where this is going. So this event is what Owens credits with her turn from progressive to quote, becoming a red-pilled radical. She says, I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.

She starts promoting right-wing viewpoints on her YouTube channel, calling herself, quote, red pill black, which I gotta say is like pretty good branding. Like, I'm not mad at the branding there. It's like, okay, black woman talking about like right-wing stuff. Red pill black. I get it. I get it. Yeah, I'm interested to see how much the checkbook was a consideration here. Oh, yes. How much her Kickstarter got versus how much she realized she could get if she jumped on the other side of the content churn.

Well, she almost instantly gets noticed by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Points USA, right? And he hires her almost immediately. She starts cranking out these videos constantly.

that really perform quite well. Like her videos really go viral. Videos where she's doing things like dismissing the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Alex Jones gets her to co-host some of his InfoWars show. She's doing stints on Fox News as a paid commentator. Like business is booming for Candace Owens from this turn.

Yeah, this is around when I became aware of her. Yes. In 2021, she joins up with the Daily Wire. There was so much fanfare around them hiring Candace. Like, it was a big deal. She moved to Nashville. Yeah. Fun fact, there was even a House Joint Resolution, House Joint Resolution 350, a resolution in the Tennessee government to congratulate Candace Owens on relocating to Tennessee and for her work at Daily Wire that reads, Whereas Ms. Owens has earned...

The admiration and respect of millions of Americans through her activism in support of President Trump as a Black woman and her perceptive criticism of creeping socialism and leftist political tyranny. Very cool stuff. Yeah. Imagine it being like a joint resolution in your local government when you move someplace. Yeah. The governor of Tennessee was like super excited when the Daily Wire relocated their headquarters to Tennessee and brought in all these people. Like,

There was so many private dinners, meetings. There was a number of resolutions welcoming The Daily Wire to Tennessee in this 2021 period as they were just starting to launch their own streaming service website, which is why they recruited Candice is because they were looking for content creators to fill out their slate.

So you would think that this should be like a match made in heaven, right? Smooth sailing. They need incendiary content creators. She's an incendiary content creator. Should be a match made in heaven. Perfect. Not quite. Because things end in like this...

really messy public fallout just a few years later. So I know that you've done episodes on this. From my perspective, and I would love to know what you think, it's not 100% clear what went down, but the public friction between Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, one of the founders of Daily Wire, it seemed to be related to reactions around the situation in Gaza. Yeah, totally. So-

Ben Shapiro is Jewish and Owens, as we said, has said and done like a lot of anti-Semitic stuff, like a lot. And like actual anti-Semitic stuff, like that people use that as a way to like shut down like very, very admirable, like pro-Palestinian activism. No, like Candace Owens just is anti-Semitic. And it's the same thing with like

Jackson Hinkle, and she made it like an escalating series of anti-Semitic claims after October 7th, which slowly kind of like broke with the company and been like more and more and more of an over series of a few months. Yes. It's funny because like it also kind of mirrors this

this like online fight she had with Steven Crowder like a year or so prior when Daily Wire was trying to recruit him. And then she got informed about like how like abusive he was to his wife. And then she went on like a media blitz like against him as like as he was in negotiations like with the Daily Wire. She's like very willing to like

stir shit up. Like, even if it, like, goes against her own interests or the interests of, like, whatever company she works for, like, she is absolutely willing to, like, make, like, some kind of, like, chaotic spectacle regardless of her own, like, you know, financial security, I guess. Yes, like, she, I'm so glad that you mentioned that. She is not afraid to get down and dirty in public. And I do think, like, you know, as a Black woman who works with a lot of white men, I would imagine that she's probably thinking, like,

I have to have some kind of decorum. I don't want anyone to say that I'm being a crazy Black woman or whatever. It seems like she has no such qualms. She is like, I will make this a public, messy fight, and I am not afraid to make a genuine spectacle of myself. And so it is really important to note that, as you said, she wasn't just criticizing the

the Israeli state. She was like getting into like blood libel and like deep conspiracy theories. Yeah, no, it was there was some really nasty posts. Yeah. Like one of the things that she said, she's claimed that Judaism was, quote, a pedophile centric religion that believes in demons and child sacrifice and that she was waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power, like stuff like that. Not great. Not good. Not good. So as you said, like

This starts to become like a public feud toward her employer. She wrote on Twitter, no one can serve two masters and ended her post writing, you cannot serve both God and money. To which Ben Shapiro, her boss tweets, like quote tweeted, oh my God, like Candace, if you feel that taking money from the daily wire somehow becomes between you and God, by all means quit. Like messy. It's crazy that instead of having like

a company meeting. They were just doing this on twitter.com. Oh my God. And my messy ass was eating it up. I was like, keep fighting. Let them fight. Oh,

Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. I'm totally willing to watch this go down. I do not want to get involved. Right, right, right. Owens went on Tucker Carlson's show and said that Ben Shapiro was, quote, acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged for weeks now. She said that Shapiro, quote, crossed a certain line. When you come for scripture and read yourself into it, I will not tolerate it. Very cool. Yeah. So at one point...

Despite Owens' tweets that she wants Ben Shapiro to have a public, like, debate with her, moderated by podcaster Patrick Bett-David, Ben Shapiro was having none of this. He tweets, Jesus Christ.

As to the true reason why you didn't respond to my offer to sit down with you and discuss these issues publicly or privately back in February, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Like, this is lawyer-employee going at it on Twitter. I know.

I can't believe I'm taking Ben Shapiro's side here, not just because he's Ben Shapiro, but also because he's an employer. But it's a really tough situation here. Yeah, I feel the same way because, like, it's just not a great look to have somebody that you just hired to all this fanfare coming at you like this on Twitter. Like, everyone...

this is just my opinion so like take that for what it's worth just as somebody who has worked in media and been around the block the reason why I'm not comfortable saying like their feud was entirely based on Owens' anti-Semitic comments and behavior is that

She just went so hard and so public that something to me, I almost wonder if there was like a contract dispute here. Like she was like, oh, I can make more money on my own. Totally. Got to get out of this contract or something because like it just doesn't smell right. I mean, yeah. If she had like an inclination that she could afford to lose this job because she might make more money on her own, then yeah, absolutely. That would allow her to push this further than what she's doing.

she might otherwise might. There's been a lot of discussion in the right-wing content sphere about the Daily Wire's fairly restrictive contracts, despite still getting paid tens of millions of dollars. There is restrictions on what happens when you lose monetization because the Daily Wire is a company trying to make a profit. So totally, there could absolutely be other financial stuff going on here. I think it's more like an interlocking series of issues rather than just one thing or another. Yeah.

Yes. So after Rabbi Shmuley Botich criticized Owens for her defenses of Kanye West, Owens liked a tweet asking Botich if he was, quote, drunk on Christian blood again. Jesus. And I guess that was the final straw. A few days later, Daily Wire and Candace Owens ended their relationship with Owens tweeting, the rumors are true. I am finally free. Whew. Whew.

Okay, so that's what happened with her and Daily Wire. So where is she now? Well, this is where the story gets interesting because I had not heard from Candace Owens in a minute. And my reintroduction to her happened recently when I was trying to make sense of the dispute between two Hollywood A-listers, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. So the issue between Blake and Justin, it's a little bit complicated and ongoing, but it's actually...

a pretty interesting story that includes a lot of things that I enjoy, like how celebrities use media and how social media platforms can be weaponized for or against specific people. Email correspondence where people make themselves look terrible in writing because they do not expect those emails to be in a deposition later. Like, that is my favorite thing in the world. Like, please continue to put your wrongdoing in writing so that my nosy ass can read it later and be like, ooh, messy. Yeah.

So I do encourage, like, folks to read up on it because it does go beyond just, like, two celebrities having a feud. But you don't really need to know the specifics for our purposes. The quick and dirty version is that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were in a movie adaptation of the very popular novel by Colleen Hoover called It Starts With Us.

In December, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and starting a smear campaign against her. Baldoni strongly denies that and has sued her in response. Both camps have released information like emails, text messages, and video attempting to make the other look bad. So it has kind of turned into one of those inkblot tests that changes depending on whose version you buy. Version one is that Blake Lively was being sexually harassed on set by a fake sexist

feminist ally who is actually an abusive man or version two that Blake Lively is an egomaniac who was using her star power and A-list celebrity network like her husband Ryan Reynolds from Deadpool to control the narrative around her being a nightmare on set and steamrolling everybody on this project. Cool. Yes.

And so what's interesting about this to me is that it's one of those stories where algorithmically it depends on what silo or what pocket of the internet you're at to determine what version of this story you're getting. Much like Johnny Depp's defamation lawsuit. It sounds too much like the Johnny Depp thing, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And so for whatever reason...

TikTok thinks I hate Blake Lively and want to pour over every nuance of how she is a fraud, right? But someone else's TikTok might be like, no, Blake Lively, we should be supporting her. It's one of those situations where just depending on where you are on the internet, you might get a very different impression of the public sentiment leaning one way or another. Yeah, yeah. This is all the types of things I try to avoid learning about at almost all costs. So thanks. Yes, I do not blame you. Thanks for letting me know. So-

I was trying to get to the bottom of it because I kept hearing about it. Like, everyone was talking about it. So...

I'm talking to my cousins, who I would lovingly describe as normies and that they are not super online. It's like they're not like you and me. They're not like deep into the depths of extremism or anything like that. No, they're not watching like the Daily Wire for fun slash for work. Yes. And my cousins are like, oh, my God, there is this black girl journalist who has been following everything and breaking it down. She has all the tea. We'll tag you. That journalist was Candace Owens.

Okay. So... All right. You know, Candace has been making so many videos off of this. And, like, her coverage, if you... Coverage in quotes, has really taken off online. As The Cut put it in a piece called Candace Owens Has Gone Mainstream, they write...

Oh.

Of course. It's the woman who's lying about being sexually harassed. Of course. One listener of her podcast says she recognizes that Owen seems to have a pro-Baldani bias, but she doesn't care because, quote, she's urging us to look past the fact that this is not a feminist issue at all, that it's about getting justice for whoever is being wronged here. She's uniting the left and the right.

The right-wing women's magazine also published a headline about this, saying, So her coverage of this dispute has really allowed her to attract a lot more viewers beyond her, like, normal right-wing extremist base, which has generally been, like,

a lot of white men, like that who was really listening to her content before when she was with Daily Wire. Now she has really branched out. So like normies, like my cousins, who have no idea who Owens is, have no idea her background, her past, the work that she has done, and just think like, oh, she's a normal entertainment journalist, like digging and getting the dirt. I know she's doing this like on her podcast, I assume YouTube as well. She also just like

Trying to flood TikTok, trying to flood Instagram reels? Is this kind of part of how she's trying to expand her reach? It is. She's everywhere. And then she has her longer form podcast on YouTube, but then clips of her breaking down the top lies or top inaccuracies and things that Blake Lively has said, those go super viral on social media, the short clips. Yeah. Okay. And all of this has been just...

gangbusters for her growth and engagement. Here's how the Cut put it. Since Owens started covering the Lively Baldani case, her YouTube channel has exploded in popularity, allowing her to attract a much larger fan base than the audience of hardcore conservatives she has amassed over the years. Even though

Each episode about Lively racks up at least 1.5 million views. In the past month alone, Owens has amassed more than 450,000 new subscribers on YouTube, and her total video views have quadrupled since this time last year. This is according to data from the platform Social Blade. Oh, no. Over the past three months, her audience on YouTube has almost started skewing 65% female, according to data provided by a spokesperson, a marked shift from her past fan base.

So, yeah, she's exploding in popularity. She's everywhere. And now she's attracting like normie women who are just coming in for this celebrity dispute. Yeah. That's probably not going to end well, huh? Well,

Well, I don't think it will end well. You know, I was like racking my brain trying to figure out like why has this story taken off so much for Owens? And there are a couple of reasons I think this is like working for her. One, I hate to say it, but she is actually genuinely interesting to listen to, you know,

when she was a progressive voice online, she definitely was somebody who had a point of view and a clear voice and a perspective. And that really comes through when she's breaking down Blake Lively in these videos. She has a way of speaking that really makes you pay attention and signals to the listener, like, this person is really breaking it down. It's the same reason why on TikTok or social media, when someone is like, story time, or like, I

I'm about to tell you all the details of something. Those videos always perform very well on social media. And I think that Owens is just very good at knowing how to hold somebody's attention online. Like, I have to say it. Sure. I mean, he's been doing the content churn for...

almost a decade now. Like, yeah, you do get good at it on like a technical proficiency level. Yes. Also, you know, we just love good old-fashioned misogyny. And if that misogyny can be laced with like a conspiracy theory, I think that it's even better. So like, I think that part of this is just like social media platforms are always going to amplify misogyny. I

I would argue that things like misogyny, transphobia, misogynoir, racism, all of that is like baked into the experience of showing up online as a feature, not a bug. And I think that Owens takes it even further because she is

breaking it down like she's uncovering some conspiracy. Like, it's not just let's talk about Blake Lively. It's I'm uncovering the web of lies and I'm going to expose Blake Lively's dark truth, right? And so, like, of course that's going to take off. And she does gain this element of authority because she's a woman talking about this. It makes men feel better about being misogynistic because a woman's telling them it's okay to. I mean, this is the same thing that she was able to weaponize

for all of her anti-Black Lives Matter stuff, for all of her racism isn't real things. She tries to use that to her advantage, mostly to make white members of her audience feel good about their own racism because a Black woman told them it's actually okay. And that's been a big part of her career the past few years. Exactly that. And I think like,

she really understands that the inviting power of taking what you might think of as like a contrarian stance on something like, yeah, totally. Like after the Me Too movement, how many women got engagement by taking a contrarian stance, right? Like I think going against the conventional attitude that says like, oh, we have to automatically support the woman in this dispute probably makes people tuning into Owens's breakdowns feel like they're like,

free thinkers who were going against the grain, you know, by taking an unpopular opinion, which I do think connects to her more odious stances on things like trans people and women and Jewish people. Yeah, no, I mean, like, you see the same thing with, like, you know, like, the Gays Against Groomers thing, right-wing trans influencers, detrans influencers. It's the same, like, gambit. And certainly, I think, like, yeah, like, your identification of her as, like,

a professional contrarian is like very, very key to her success. Exactly. I also think like part of the reason why people are attracted to conspiracy theories is that it allows for like fantasy world building. And I think that I really see the ways that she injects that into her coverage. Even the word coverage, I put that in quotes because like

She is like a wild person. So her coverage is like also wild. She does not adhere to, as she puts it, quote, a traditional style of reporting. You know, I'll take her word for that one. You know what? I'll believe her on that single point. Yeah, I believe her. I believe that. You know, she amplifies rumors. And even once she read a letter that she said that she got from Blake Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds, his acting coach when he was 12. And according to Candace Owens, his

acting coach said that Ryan Reynolds was an obnoxious kid. You know what? I also believe it. Oh,

Oh, I have no trouble believing that. But like her coverage, it includes like side characters. Yeah, things that have no bearing on this whatsoever. I mean, this focus on like this like conspiratorial Ben is like the same. She's using the same tactics she did for her Black Lives Matter documentary for like most of her political work. Like she's using the same tactics over and over again. And eventually she like reaches...

this stress point or this threshold where she cannot see a path forward or she can't see a way to surpass it, and then she does a pivot. This happened with her progressive blog. This happened even at The Daily Wire. She doesn't work with Turning Point USA anymore. And this new pivot is learning, hey, it's super lucrative to be like,

a tabloid entertainment, quote unquote, journalist. Very easy, super lucrative, and all of the tactics you learned on the right-wing mediasphere work great here. Like, all of this, like, conspiratorial thinking, really a disregard for, like, facts and evidence works perfect for this sort of, like, rumor-based reporting, um,

And it spreads like crazy. And yeah, it spreads across political lines. You don't you aren't just targeting the mega people or like the far right. This this can be so much more broad to like the giant audience of like, you know, quote unquote, like a political people go to these platforms for a form of like of like escapism and entertainment rather than just hearing about politics yet again, because that's, you know, very, very tiring.

Yeah. And I think in my mind, all of it is sort of sort of connected. Like Ben Shapiro, nobody cared more about celebrities or talked more about celebrities than Ben Shapiro. He would love to be like, I don't care what Hollywood is doing, but he was obsessed with like Beyonce and Meg Thee Stallion. Like it was just like a negative obsession. Like, you know.

Anti-fandom is still fandom. When you make video after video about how much you don't like Meg Thee Stallion, in a kind of way, you are a fan just in the opposite direction. And so I think that Candace Owens really took that and learned how to perfect it. Because she is much... I think that she is much better at this than Ben Shapiro is. The evidence being that her YouTube channel is exploding with people who probably would never watch any of Ben Shapiro's content. The big bummer for me is that

The Daily Wire's first film, Lady Ballers, left us on a cliffhanger with Candace Owens and Matt Walsh sitting in a car talking about how Matt Walsh planned this entire plot of the film as some kind of scheme or social experiment. And it was implied there would be more. It was like a

Avengers Nick Fury type post-credits scene. And now we're never going to learn what Candace Owens and Matt Walsh get up to now because she's left the company. She's now doing her own thing. So now we just have this dangling plot thread that's just going to bug me forever. Like what does the Candace Owens character at the end of Lady Ballers do next?

I'm going to be thinking about this for like years. America deserves closure. We deserve to know. Just putting that out there. I think we do deserve closure. I just think my closures may be a little bit different. I am. I'm very fine having all of these plot threads wrapped up quite quickly, but I do not see that in the cards immediately.

So in terms of where she's at now, like, you know, my question is, like, has Owens, has this kind of like mainstream audience that she's been able to amass, has she changed her views? Is she trying to do a rebrand or a pivot? In an interview, she said, in terms of my perspective, I haven't changed anything.

I've been anti-MeToo since long before it was cool. Sure. I mean, that can be true. It's also true that she's getting better at propaganda and widening her footprint, which, yeah, then once her audience gets bigger, she might be able to slip in more things that I would find unsavory to a larger audience over time. But she also might be content to keep...

keep growing that and be slightly less off-putting in the meantime. But no, I mean, there's also just a huge audience for the anti-woke backlash, anti-MeToo stuff right now. That's kind of like the new mainstream, frankly. So I am certain that she's going to try to continue to flex that and grow that in the next few months, years. Yeah, so I agree with you. I believe Owens when she says that her stances have not changed much. It's easy to be like,

oh, well, she's pivoting to go mainstream now that she has these, like, women in her audience who are interested in celebrity. And you can, honestly, you can sort of see some of this in changes to her physical appearance. Like, she was sort of known for having very severe hair. The joke being that she had alienated herself so much from her fellow Black people that, like, no Black person was going to do her hair and that's why it looked that way. But, like,

Lately, you've really seen this like softening. She's kind of going for like a softer public look. She is pivoting to different kinds of programming. She's branched out into doing a book club for paying subscribers and some kind of a fitness program. That makes sense. Yeah, totally. Like the health guru fitness entertainment bubble. Yeah, that's huge. That's such a good grift. She's going to make so much money. Yeah. Yeah, she is.

But I really agree with you, Gare, that, like, I think that these new followers are certainly going to be walked down a pipeline that includes her extremist attitude just using celebrity scandal as a hook because, like,

As you said, celebrity scandals and celebrity stories are just considered fluff for a lot of people. So, like, people who care about extremist content and ideology are maybe not seeing that as a space that they need to pay too close of attention to about these stories that you might see on the cover of an Us Weekly. But these stories actually can be used to tap into extremist ideologies and unleash them in a whole new audience. And, like, like you were saying, if you are just, like, watching a podcast because you're

want to be entertained about a story about two celebrities, you might not have your, like, bullshit detector up to be like, wait, is this extremist content? Because it's seen and treated as a less charged space. And so, you know, that line of thinking that says that

you know, this is just fluff. It doesn't really matter what happens in celebrity news. It's not that it's incorrect. It is dangerous because it lends itself to people being more susceptible to it when extremist content is slipped in without even really realizing it. I mean, and like that relates even to like the originator of this Gamergate stuff and the whole like anti-woke

media fandom content sphere, right? Where so much of the anti-woke backlash has been built on people complaining that Star Wars is too woke now. There's too many women in movies. There's too many black people in commercials. Where did all the white people go? There's too many gay people in TV. There's too many trans people in TV. And that is definitely focused on by the rest of the Daily Wire goons. And you can very easily pivot back to that sort of cultural commentary

after you're done talking about Blake Lively. This is a very small jump where you're still talking about the entertainment industry, but with this anti-woke framing of why is all these minorities here? Why are they pushing transgenderism on kids? Whether that be talking about trans actors in the business, whether you be talking about

you know, like female led or like diversity casting, like all that kind of stuff that especially Candace can use her like contrarian position to speak on authority about talking about why are you recasting these legacy characters to be people of color? Or why is a woman the lead of this thing when it should be actually a man, you know, just like very, very basic stuff that's been a part of like the YouTube slop for a decade now.

But it still takes in a lot of clicks. And it is a lot of what the Daily Wire and right-wing content still does. It's all this weird culture war stuff. It's very, very tied in with Hollywood. Like you were saying about how Ben Shapiro claims to...

hate Hollywood. He's trying to build his own alternative to it, but he can't stop talking about it. He can't stop complaining about Disney's Snow White. And I can see Candace doing the exact same thing, but now with honestly a bigger, more apolitical audience that's much more malleable and can be shaped around these larger cultural trends when you think about this perception of this backlash against wokeness.

I absolutely think that's what we're going to see. And I can tell you, we can finish by, I can tell you about her next big pet issue, which is going to be championing Harvey Weinstein, who she has been interviewing him since 2022. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she explains...

while he is, quote, an immoral man, he is also a victim of the justice system. A victim, sure. A victim. And she says, I've always had faith in our court system and now it's beginning to change. Now I'm beginning to wonder if our courtrooms have been politicized. And the thing that's made her think this is Harvey Weinstein. Yeah.

It's wild. I mean, like Ben Shapiro is starting his own campaign to free Derek Chauvin. I think there's going to be a lot of pressure on the courts right now. I mean, you're seeing that from like Elon and Trump as well. I think undermining the authority of the court, I think is actually kind of part of this larger conspiracy

concerted issue amongst the entirety of the right right now, because this is like their biggest remaining roadblock to achieving their right-wing utopia is the court system. And I, you know, this may not be intentional on every person's part, like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens aren't, aren't like intentionally collaborating on this, but they may be copying each other's trends. And if they're seeing this, this wider push across the,

A large amount of the right-wing content people to put pressure on various aspects of the courts, including by using high-profile cases like Harvey Weinstein or Derek Chauvin. That's not a great sign. And I can definitely see them trying to do that in conjunction, I guess.

Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot more of it. Candace has a series coming out called Harvey Speaks that apparently tells his side of the story. So look out for that. And I think that's the thing. Like, I think with her content, like when asked why it was she thought that her Blake Lively stuff was really taking off, she says that she believes her new fans on the left, quote, have just kind of gotten wise to the fact that maybe women lie just like men. And so I just, in

implore folks that like

even if you think that you're just like retaking in this content because you're following fluffy celebrity news or whatever, it is so easy to go from maybe women lie to maybe women can't be trusted or maybe women shouldn't work and have jobs. A stance that Candace herself has actually advocated for despite very obviously being a working woman. And so I don't think we should trust Candace Owens even if she does this rebrand. Like, don't let her rebrand herself as like just a celebrity investigative journalist. Like, shh.

She put all of these odious views out into the world, and I don't want her to be able to soften it or soften what it is that she advocates for and what it is that she believes in if that is truly what she's trying to do to just sort of amass a more mainstream audience. So don't fall for it. If you're getting tagged in Candace Owens' videos, just know what she actually is about. I mean, yeah, I think for our audience, it's more likely that you'll have family members who are going to be finding this stuff

And you should find a list of sources, maybe this episode included, but probably, you know, you can find some articles as well. That gives some background on Candace's history and previous beliefs. You can pick and choose some of her most outrageous claims. So when your aunt sends you a video about how Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are kidnapping children or something, you can...

You can maybe inform Aunt Judy that maybe you shouldn't listen to everything this Candace Owens character is saying. Yeah, this Candace Owens might not be on the money, might not be on the level. No. Yeah, inform an auntie today. Yes, that's right. And that's all I got. I don't know how you usually end these episodes. Usually by getting sad, but I don't know. This has been an interesting dive into the life of a woman with...

With many, many careers. A chameleon. Many personalities. A chameleon. A chameleon of contrarianism. Ooh, I like that. If I ever write a book about her, that'll be the title. Jesus Christ. Oh, what a nightmare that would be. Man.

Scary. Bridget, where can people find you online? You can find me on my podcast. There are no girls on the internet on this network. I heart radio. I mean, you can find me on Instagram at Bridget Marie in DC or on blue sky at Bridget Todd. Well, thank you so much. Good luck in DC. Thanks for holding, holding the line out there as, as Elon, uh, puts a killdozer through your entire city. We're doing our best. I would love to talk again about, uh,

a DC update maybe maybe next time you come on the show oh my god yes please there we go well we will we will talk then goodbye everybody

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This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis, still banned from one of the top 15 highest endowment universities in the country. But I am not banned from this podcast.

Today I'm joined by Robert Evans and James Stout to discuss the very troubling news of students having their visas and or green cards revoked by U.S. Customs in relation to anti-genocide protests.

James, this is something that you've been putting together a piece on for a while. Yeah. Repeatedly trying to warn people of Cassandra-like to no avail. Yes. Yes. I do feel like we kind of saw this one coming a little bit, but that doesn't mean it's not bad. And specifically, the case we're talking about today, I think, is particularly egregious because it doesn't actually involve someone's student visa, right? So I've been working for a while on...

people who actually under the Biden administration were potentially facing deportation, right? But the material difference between that and now is that those people were facing deportation because the university removed their visas or the university removed them from the university and therefore their visa was no longer valid. In this case, it seems that the order came directly from the State Department to

to deport a guy whose name is Mahmoud Khalil. So Khalil was a prominent activist in the encampment at Columbia, right? But what's notable is that, and the events here, as best we can tell, went down like this. I'm referencing an AP article here that we'll link in the show notes. ICE agents came to his front door, which is on university property,

and told him that they were revoking his student visa and therefore he was being deported. He then informed them that he didn't have a student visa, that he was a legal permanent resident, right? Colloquially referred to as a green card holder. They then told him or his lawyer at some point, he got his lawyer on the phone and was communicating with them through his lawyer.

They then told the lawyer that they were revoking the green card. And at some point, it's reported that they attempted to detain his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, which, of course, is not a thing that ICE can do. So the difference between a legal permanent resident and a student visa is like the place I want to start this because they are materially very different. Right. Student visas are pretty fragile, right?

People lose their student visas for lots of things all the time. A green card is a much higher barrier. And the revocation of his green card is,

We spoke a lot before this episode about exactly where this comes from in Trump's mishmash of executive orders and speeches. Because after he was detained, we saw Trump truthing about specifically using the word green card. We also saw Marco Rubio tweeting about removing green cards, Rubio being the Secretary of State. Normally, the green card wouldn't be a State Department thing. No.

It seems the most likely cause of events, as far as we can tell from what we know right now, and today is the 10th of March, is that ICE came thinking he had a student visa. It's not particularly uncommon for ICE raids to not have all the information on someone, from what I understand. I mean, this is just a police thing. It's not just... Cops who are doing raids very often don't have...

all or accurate information. Yeah. ICE in particular very often don't have a judicial warrant. They have a warrant that they made to assign themselves, which is a different thing. They're supposed to require a warrant to get onto Columbia University campus. But as of now, I don't believe Columbia have clarified that they did have. And I think the apology also allows them to allow ICE onto campus in like exigent circumstances. So we'll have to see what exactly that warrant was for and why exactly Columbia allowed them onto campus. So, yeah,

It seems like they came attempting to evoke this guy's student visa, realized he didn't have a student visa, detained him anyway, and then kind of ex post facto these tweets and statements came out. But Garrison, you found some stuff in... I mean, Trump has made previous statements that are kind of unclear, right? He uses the word aliens a lot. Yeah, so we've been trying to kind of figure out the exact details of what is going on

what justification they have for doing this and how we can, like, extrapolate this out to larger trends. Because deporting, like, legal residents for college protests is pretty insane. And also the rhetoric coming out of the White House and, like, the White House, like, social media accounts around this incident is, like, extremely worrying. Like, the way they're basically putting up, like, wanted posters for protesters and, in general, the way that the White House account has been doing this, like,

own the libs like yeah memetic nationalism that the past few weeks has been has been really upsetting and this this has continued around this issue i think it is worth focusing on this as like a specific escalation because you had people like mamadu tall who i think cornell tried to revoke their student visa and then he's in some way negotiated back into that to stay

to stay on the interim provost. John Siciliano eventually ruled in Tal's favor, so he did not end up getting deported last year.

And now this new development in relation to the Columbia protests is a significant escalation. Yeah. Because not only is this not just like the university revoking NF1, which they do have the authority to, this is like coming directly from the Trump administration where they are going after specific students without the involvement of the university and students who may be legal permanent residents. Yeah.

Garrison found a fact sheet on WhiteHouse.gov where Trump is quoted as saying, quote, to all resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice. Come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you. And that would seem to include the legal permanent residents. Yes. Right. Like resident alien is a tax status. But again, like...

I think it's quite possible that the vagueness in the language is deliberate, not necessarily from Trump, but there are other people within the Trump community

cabinet who might seek to use that vagueness for things like this, right? Like who might see that as a benefit. Yeah. Well, and you see that with other things like with Rubio's State Department directives on trans people right now, where they keep the language intentionally vague. They leave the enforcement up to like individual actors, and then they can eventually like figure out

the logistics like in court once people be like, oh no, this is illegal. So like, yeah, it is vague because they want to test the actual like full authority of their power. But I think the specific like fact sheet, which is like a sister article towards this executive order,

Like James was saying, to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice. Come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses which have been infested with radicalism like never before. Unquote. So there you have him saying both resident aliens, which we can infer...

probably refers to green card holders as well as student visas. So these are two separate things that he has specifically named as going after. And now you see more direction from Rubio after this arrest that happened on Monday. You see more direction from Rubio and the State Department in specifically naming legal permanent residence as targets for removal and targets for ICE actions, which is not something that is extremely common.

Yeah, where I've seen it before is in cases of material support for terrorism. But that has quite a high bar of proof, right? That's like a listed organization approving a material, i.e. financial or physical support, right? Like in-kind donations. I've written about a guy who was providing material aid to the Islamic State called Siki Ramiz Hodzik, sending stuff from Bass Pro, actually. Like thermal scopes and hunting scopes and things like that. But

That has a much higher bar than this, which we will see, you know, because we have a legal permanent resident here and they're seeking to revoke that. I imagine we will see a court case and we will see exactly the justification for revoking his green card in that court case. That will be sometime in the future. Let's go on a quick break and we will come back to discuss some more of the details on what Mark Rubio is actually saying and where this could all end up.

Okay, we are back. I would like to talk about specifically some of the rhetoric that Rubio has been using since this arrest and a little bit of what he was saying before. Like we were saying before the break,

some of this kind of vague language can kind of be used to their advantage. And this is certainly like riffing off of very vague language that Trump would use on the campaign trail, right? Where he would talk about wanting to jail or deport protesters, like in general, regardless of their student visa holders, green card holders, or just U.S. citizens, right? Like Trump has made statements about wanting to do all of that. And campaigns like off-the-cuff statements and actual like government policy are two different things. And

Right now, like they're trying to figure out where the line between that is, like how much of this rhetoric can be turned into government policy. And we mentioned like the fact sheet from the executive order that I believe was signed in January, which is, you know, to quote unquote combat anti-Semitism policy.

And then like last week, so before this arrest happened, we had a post from the secretary Mark Rubio Twitter account official, quote, those who support designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, threaten our national security. The United States has zero tolerance for foreign visitors who support terrorists. Violators of U.S. law, including international students, face visa denial or revocation and deportation, unquote. So that one specifically, quote,

focuses, I would say, pretty firmly on people who have student visas, right? He names like visitors. And then after the arrest happened, he posted a different statement on his own personal account. Quote, we will be revoking the visas and or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so that they can be deported.

Unquote. Sharing an AP article. And then the Homeland Security DHS Gov account posted on March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism and in coordination with the Department of State.

Okay.

Unquote. And there has now been a flurry of posts from both the White House account and DHS accounts basically posting like a picture of this person saying that he's aligned with Hamas in celebration, almost like styled after a wanted poster, but instead it just reads like arrested. And that is like the, that's the rhetoric that like they're using right now on their official accounts. Something that like James, I think noted, it's important to like,

think about if ICE was just freestyling this action or if there was a directive beforehand to go after green cards specifically, right? And it seems like, at least for the people doing the raid, they did not care, nor did they know. They weren't informed. They just were told to go after this person from someone higher up, right? And that very well could be Rubio. I mean, a lot of DHS is being ran by Stephen Miller right now. A lot of this feels very Miller-esque. Yeah. Yeah.

We've got an update. As of the time of recording, I've just discovered that Mahmoud Khalil's lawyers filed a lawsuit challenging his detention and a judge in New York City, a federal judge, obviously, ordered that Khalil shouldn't be deported while that court then considered his case. Yes, I was going to bring that up. So that also, like his case will be considered in New York City, which is probably good for him as opposed to a more conservative jurisdiction elsewhere, right?

Totally. Like this happening in Texas, like in all of those districts where Elon Musk is trying to set up his corporations because there's friendly judges. This would be handled quite differently, right? Yeah, that's something migrants I speak to are at least aware of sometimes that they don't want to enter into Texas because the Fifth Circuit is seen as less favorable to them than, say, the Ninth Circuit, where they would be if they entered in California.

I'm sort of surprised if it is a Miller joint that it isn't someone like UT Austin or somewhere like that. No, they're going directly after this individual in part because he's somebody that a lot of folks who might otherwise be like,

up in arms about a move like this would say because of some of his connections and some of the things he said in the past. Well, he's, you know, supported groups that are really bad. Like, I think they're really trying to find the first case is they want someone that they can calve a lot of like liberals off from being too scared to support because he said some things that like they don't want to have attached to them. Like that's, that's how they're, and they're going to keep pushing that further and further each time you find some folks who are

You can scare off a lot of maybe what you might call like their otherwise natural support base because you can point out this thing or that thing they did that was that was not great. Yeah, ACLU types. Like when I'm not I'm not insulting or trying to say bad things about this guy. I'm just saying like that's that's the tactic here. Right. No. Try to get this guy is like, well, this guy did this. Are you do you really want to support that? Which is why you have to take an incredibly firm stance that no, the government doesn't get to do this.

The State Department doesn't get to do this. Yeah, regardless of any things that this person may have said. Yeah, the First Amendment is for everyone. I don't care what he said, you know? So, like, it's also worth noting that Columbia, specifically, The Intercept has reported on this, that there is a WhatsApp group called Columbia Alumni for Israel.

And they have been explicitly trying to identify the students and to call for prosecution and I guess persecution of these students. And I think the Columbia encampment was particularly objectionable to a lot of people. That was kind of the one that got a lot of the national focus in the reporting. So it's understandable that that's where they went for this.

Yeah, it's high visibility. And I think it's also very likely that they are just looking to have a test case for this to see if they can create legal precedent for removing people's green cards for, you know,

anti-genocide protests, right? And the specific details of that will become more and more or less important based on like the results of the case, as long as they can create that precedent, right? And specifically like the precedent for revoking a green card, something that's pretty substantial. They want something that's like, you know, in their mind, like the most favorable towards their outcome. So I mean, that's part of what they're trying to do with this specific case.

And it is very much in line with Trump's campaign rhetoric and versions of what Trump has said before. And now you're seeing someone like Rubio, someone who's a little bit more policy-minded, taking steps towards this outcome. Yeah, which I think is... The other thing they didn't get to do, I guess...

is that they weren't able to deport the guy at hyperspeed, which they have been doing with some people. He was detained in New York and then moved to Louisiana. People were very upset about this, rightly, because it's removing him from easy access to his lawyer and to his family and to his eight-month pregnant wife. That's all things that shouldn't be done. It's also something that the Biden administration did routinely.

We have other episodes on this, actually, especially in San Diego, where we have some funding that allows people who are detained access to legal assistance and

It has been very common for those migrants to be then moved to Texas. I've seen it with migrants I've met at the border and I've looked for them in the ICE immigrant detention locator and they've been moved to Texas. It's not uncommon at all. So it's bad that it happened. It was bad that it happened under Biden. It's still bad that it's happening now. We shouldn't have let it happen then. We shouldn't support it when it happens now. And I think before we go and break again, I do want to kind of close this section by talking about

they don't necessarily need an executive order specifically allowing Trump to do this. Or like, Trump doesn't need to make an executive order explicitly for this based on immigration deportation law. There will be an argument made in court that they have justification for this action already. This

This is something that I've already been through when I immigrated to the country and did my citizenship interview, right? If you have discussed in the past something that can be construed as support for a terrorist organization, that does disqualify you from U.S. citizenship, right? So there's going to be a lot of arguments.

like around like specifically these terrorism statutes that will make someone like this a subject for removal. Yeah. And that's going to be like the angle in which they go about this. And I think that's like worth keeping in mind. I also think it's worth, and I don't want to make this, because a lot of people online have, this shouldn't be our immediate priority.

primary concern, our immediately primary concern should be Mahmoud and the other people like him who are in situations like him who are going to be targeted. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if they get away with this, at some point they will start saying, look, if you support the groups that the government describes, or any support for any group that the government considers a terrorist, it doesn't matter if you were born here as a citizen, we can start. That is a potential instate of this, which is, again, not

should not be on your front burner. It should be the people being targeted right now, but also an awareness of like, this is part of why you have to draw such a hard line. Like if, if the situation was reversed and this were a democratic administration coming after an anti-vaccine student activist who is a permanent legal resident, it would be wrong for them to disappear them. Right. Like that has to be like where the line is drawn. Yeah. Yeah. The state should not have this like ability. Like we, we should not let them get away with this and we should

put as much support and legal support into preventing this from happening. I really can't say which way this will go. Like...

Immigration law is one of the most headache-inducing things I've ever had to go through in my entire life. He will be spending a lot of money on immigration lawyers now. Also, to be really clear, I'm not equating support for Palestine to being anti-vax. I'm just saying, if this was a shitty guy, it would still be wrong. If it was something that we like to laugh at for...

Getting measles in Texas. Disappearing people bad. If you thought Russia was doing anti-fascism in Ukraine, it would still be important. Right. Right. You know, to do this. And should we take a break and come back and discuss some more? Yes. Yes.

I wanted to give a little bit of background here, some of the stuff that I've been looking into. So on the 5th of February, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a series of memos. One of these was establishing a, quote, October 7th task force. I'm going to quote from it here. To prioritize seeking justice for victims of October 7th, 2023 terrorist attack in Israel, addressing the ongoing threat posed by Hamas and its affiliates and combating anti-Semitic acts of terrorism and civil rights violations in the homeland.

It then lifts several action items for the FBI, right? Among them is investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, anti-Semitic civil rights violations, and other federal crimes committed by Hamas supporters in the United States, including on college campuses. The final point is, quote, "...supporting efforts by the Israeli government, Department of Defense, and Department of Treasury to pursue non-criminal responses to the October 7th attack and other terrorist activities by Hamas."

There's a couple of things that are considered. Obviously, non-criminal responses could include deportation, right? Like if the person is not being accused of a crime, but nonetheless having their visa revoked. Also, the idea of cooperating with a foreign government, a government which is currently committing a genocide, potentially against people.

U.S. citizens or U.S. residents, it's quite concerning. It's especially concerning when we talk about that Trump executive order that we've already discussed, right? One of the parts of that Trump executive order that I noticed that I haven't seen any reporting on

was the, quote, infantry and analysis of all the Title VI complaints and administrative actions, including in K-12 education related to antisemitism, pending or resolved after October 7th, 2023.

Can you explain what Title VI is? Yeah, I can, Garrison. And I would love to. So Title VI is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, right? It prohibits discrimination based on race, colour or national origin. D.E.I. Yes. It applies to federally funded programmes, activities or institutions which receive federal funding, right? Which would cover almost every institution of education in this country, apart from some religious private schools, I guess. Maybe they still get some federal funding.

There have been a number of Title VI cases filed for anti-Semitic discrimination and anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab or Islamophobic discrimination since October 7th, 2023.

The ones filed for Islamophobic discrimination don't seem to be covered by this, but the other ones do. The Biden administration kind of rushed to finish up and resolve some of these in the last few weeks of his tenure. And normally the results were pretty ineffectual. It was like some more training, a review of policies.

Anyone who's been an educator at one of these institutions will have already been very familiar with the sort of anti-discrimination training video that you have to watch, and they were suggesting that you watch more of those videos. I'm not really convinced that that is the way we deal with hatred, but that's what they recommended. The Emory one I thought was interesting because they told Emory that it had to commit to a, quote, "'equitable handling of protest' after its campus police were so violent towards anti-genocide protesters."

A lot of the other cases are still pending, but it seems like the Trump administration is going to go back and review all of them anyway. It does seem like whether it spread organically or whether it was some kind of campaign to file Title VI complaints, a lot of Title VI complaints were filed after October 7th. And during this time when we saw campus protests and we saw support by some faculty for those campus protests, right? And we saw...

Some faculty who may or may not have supported the protest, but felt very strongly about the right of students to have freedom of speech on campus. And I'm sure they will have been kind of wrapped up in this big dragnet to do

This potentially raises the specter of at least career-threatening. And again, lots of faculty are not U.S. citizens, right? They might be permanent residents. They might be married to citizens. They might be here on a visa. There are a number of different immigration statuses that they could have that are not U.S. citizen that they could potentially lose. So what is Trump trying to do about these cases which could be pending or potentially

have already been resolved. Yeah, well, what they said is they want to familiarize institutions with the grounds for inadmissibility. So that's not allowing someone to enter the United States, right? And read out the section of the United States Code, a section of the United States Code. Quote, "...so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds, and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead."

as appropriate and consistent with applicable law to investigations and, comma, if warranted, comma, actions to remove such aliens. So it's in there, right? This is in Trump's late January executive order. This is the legal argument that they're making there. And they're asking universities to do some of that legwork for them, it seems. I imagine that this is the same section of the United States Code that we'll see here.

used with reference to Khalil, but it refers to like excludable or inadmissible aliens, which is people coming into the country. But I guess they could make an argument that like he disguised his inadmissible status or became inadmissible. Sure. I mean, there's these two sections, right? There's this one that revolves around who can be like admitted, who can be accepted. Yeah. And there's that one section, which is section one,

1-2-2-7 subsection A4A-C, which is the section specifically on deportation as relating to like supporting quote unquote terrorist activities. So I think they will try to use these both like in conjunction.

And I think it's also important to note out here the use of the word like aliens as opposed to the word that like Rubio was using previously, which is like visitors, right? Like visitors, I would say probably applies more to like student visa holders. Yeah, non-residents. Versus aliens. Aliens can be anyone, right? Like aliens can be visa holders, can be green card holders, right?

And so at least in the official wording here, the use of the word aliens is important as opposed to Rubio's posts on X.com, which now become official policy because we're in the hell world.

Yep. That refers to like, just like, you know, visitors to this country. The right has used aliens for a long time, right? Because it differentiates them from people. Yeah. It's like, it's very basic, like dehumanization language. Yeah. Right. In this case, it's, I think it's important. It's pivotal. So like, we have a sense of what will happen there. Um,

Maybe I could just finish up by saying if you are faculty or a student, if you're encountering this, you can reach out to us using our encrypted email. So if you'd like to reach out to us, it is coolzontips at proton.me. It's only encrypted if it's encrypted from the sender as well as a recipient. So that would mean using a Proton or other encrypted email to reach out rather than using an unencrypted email.

If you'd like to reach out again, coolzontipsatproton.me. Obviously, this is something we're going to continue taking an interest in. And obviously, it's something that we can't report the entirety of now because we're still waiting on the court case. But we are very interested in learning more about it. So please feel free to reach out. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, and it's something that Trump is also saying they will be taking a continued interest in.

He is promising that this is the first arrest of, quote-unquote, many to come. So as they continue to focus on this, we will as well. James, did you have anything else you wanted to say, like re-lawyers? Yes. So as I mentioned before, people under the Biden administration have been moved away from their lawyers. This is very common. It seems that now people are being moved away from their lawyers and having teleconference requests denied, i.e.,

Let's say, Garrison, you're a lawyer and you have a client detained in San Diego, then moved to Texas, and now you can't teleconference in for a 10-minute hearing. So you would have to fly, right, for that 10-minute hearing. Yeah, which is going to make it impossible both in time terms and financial terms. From what I'm understanding, I'm still digging into this a little bit more, but that's what I'm hearing.

So this is going to be an ongoing thing. I guess if you're an immigration lawyer in one of the places people are being sent to, like Texas, you can help, but you probably already know that and you're probably already doing that and you're probably already very, very overworked if you work asylum cases. So yeah, I think now is the time

for groups like the ACLU to step up or shut up. And we'll see. Well, the ACLU has come out against Mahmoud's arrest. Okay, good. The ADL, obviously, totally for it. Shocked. The ADL, an organization formed to help avoid another Holocaust, does not see any potential danger in a state redefining citizenship in order to disappear its political enemy. So we love the ADL here, folks. But the ACLU did. I mean, we'll see if they do anything, but they did, like, make a statement.

Yeah, and they've been very good. I should say the ACLU has been pursuing a lot of litigation against Trump administration. This is the sort of thing they're pretty consistently anti, yes. Yeah, especially at a national level, they've been very good at this. And so, yeah, you know,

Shout out to them, I guess. I don't know. We don't need to shout it out. It's their job. Yeah, they get millions of dollars to do this. Yes, like this is literally why you're there. Do a good job or else. You'd better do something else too. Yeah, yeah. You'd better show up. Yeah, I don't know. Don't donate to the ADL, I guess, if you were thinking of doing that after listening to this podcast. Don't...

Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP. PrEP stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it. PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

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Listen to the greatest true crime stories ever told on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh my God, you guys, it could happen here. Meaning our podcast. It could. It is. It's happened. It did. Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast It Is Happening Here? Yeah, uh-huh. That's a fun joke that I only hear 47 times a day.

And the whole point of the podcast was, well, initially, I was a crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen. And now it's a bunch of that stuff happened. And even more of it looks very likely. And so now I just feel bad all the time.

It's going to be called I fucking called it. I fucking told you, bro. I said this was going to happen. Why don't you rename the podcast? I just feel bad all the time. Yeah. Why don't you rename the podcast? Robert should have bought more stock and ammunition companies than he did.

And DJI. Jesus, should I have bought stock of DJI? Yeah, I'm going to buy a little DJI drone here soon. Yeah, there we go. A lot of people are going to be buying little DJI drones here very soon, James. I should point out that I'm buying one that's not capable of carrying a payload.

It's definitely a safer investment to pull out your 401k now when the market's crashing. Use that money. Buy drones. Those drones will be worth a lot more in five years. Or... What is that? That is a sound of a sound investment. A box of bullets. Yes.

It's like how boomers used to invest in silver or gold as a stable currency. No, we're investing in DGI. Like physical DGI drones. We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder.

You've got to get it in a bottle, Robert. In a box, it can get light struck or get moist. You want to get it in a special black bottle. James, I keep all of my gunpowder. You know how people used to take cocaine by wrapping it in toilet paper and swallowing it? No. Sure. Okay, well... If you say so, buddy. Speaking of toilet paper...

Nate Silver has a newsletter. And it would be useful as toilet paper, more so than it is as a newsletter. Sorry, I just felt like PTSD flashbacks from 2024 when you said that. It's okay. Normally my rule of thumb is...

Every election, usually starting in like December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or four times in a bucket, and then head over to Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls.

And I do this. I hate that I keep having I have regularly on election years. People were like, but he was always wrong. Like, no, he's he's reasonably good on polls. He's usually if you read what he's saying about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close to that.

So I read him during elections and I hate it because he's never been right about anything else. But he's he's a gambler. He's a very he's a degenerate, filthy gambler. And so when we're talking about degenerate, filthy gambler stuff and by God, election polls are the most degenerate type of gambling that exists. Yeah, he's worth reading. And then after.

After the election, no matter how well or badly it goes, I ignore him again for four years. And I didn't get to do that this year because on February 25th, 2025, Nate wrote a column called Elon Musk and spiky intelligence. Spiky intelligence. Am I hearing that right? Spiky intelligence.

Spiky intelligence, yes. And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm sure he used some AI, like he must have used some AI like video software to do that just like shows you a kind of spiky star looking thing and then like a blob with rounded edges.

I can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver thought that like we needed this illustrated. I have to see this. Yeah, yeah. I would like it to be shared. Look at this. Why did you like, oh, the promise of AI. We couldn't have envisioned a spiky thing. Wow. Yeah. It looks like maybe an amoeba. It looks like an amoeba and then like a poorly drawn star. It's Boba and Kiki. This is an actual thing. When Batman fifth

you wait this is a thing this is this is boba and kiki with a weird like digital fuzz

Who the fuck are Boba and Kiki? Yeah, okay, Garrison, yeah. It's like a social experiment to ask people what the emotional correspondence of each of these shapes are. It's a Rorschach test. Oh, it's like a Rorschach thing. Sure, or like, which one looks nicer, which one looks meaner, you know, that sort of thing. I'm a Kiki type. Like, I am a Kiki. Oh.

In terms of my behavior, I am... Garrison, now that you bring up Rorschach, all I can think of is how cool it would be if Rorschach from The Watchmen showed up in Nate Silver's house and did his thing. Unfortunately, I think Rorschach and Nate Silver might actually get along. They would become fast friends. Actually, yeah. No, no, Nate would... But after them getting along for like 45 minutes, Nate would take him to an illegal card game and Rorschach would murder everybody in the room.

Because they were gambling without a license. So I'm assuming Nate's going to try to argue that Musk's intelligence is akin to the Kiki drawing here, as opposed to the empathetic Boba. Actually, yes, there is a little bit of that in there. He does not mention this Kiki and Boba thing. I don't know if that's because I'm supposed to just infer it from the image, or if he's... We'll get your opinion on it. Is he ripping these people off?

because this doesn't count as enough for him to be crediting them if this is the underpinning of his stupid idea, which he credits to his stupid book that he came up with later. But I'm just going to start reading the stupid column. Well, hit us with the second paragraph, because that fucking lets go. We haven't gotten paragraph one, James. Okay, that radicalized me immediately. There's been a debate raging on Twitter. Noah Smith can run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the platform's owner.

Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest, and then there's a little I in parentheses because we need that. Elon is obviously pretty bright. And then there's two I's in parentheses. This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment. Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things.

Okay. You'd think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves Elon and intelligence, well, it was. Elon has run founded or co-founded Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, XAI, PayPal, and more recently, Twitter.

He's also managed to steer himself into a position where he's now the de facto chief of staff to the president of the United States. I do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects. Some of these were long shot bets. And Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk documents, he thought he'd be ruined if there'd been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success of some of these enterprises might also be debated. Yes. Twitter was a canny play for cultural and political influence. And he doesn't bring up in this whole thing where he's talking about like all the successful companies.

Not a word about the boring company. Not a word about Hyperloop, right? Yeah, any of the failed ones. His record does seem better if you ignore the two massively publicized and invested absolute failures. Yes. Well, and last week, I know there was a SpaceX launch. I'm sure it went well. I'm sure it didn't fling debris all over.

Lower. I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft. Also crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co-founded OpenAI, but not in a way that mattered. He just shot gun money in there and then kind of edged out. Yeah, sure. Yes. And is actively in a conflict with everybody who did make OpenAI as prominent as it is.

Again, Nate has to leave a lot out in order to start making this case. But he's going to argue that, you know, we're going to see how how well this co-presidency goes. But he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all of this stuff done. And he's also saying, well, like maybe Twitter won't be profitable, but we'll see how he could probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff.

Not a word from Nate about like, yeah, but he's just like, that's just breaking the law. So why are, why are we, why aren't we including in our canny businessmen, guys that get rich selling like shitloads of heroin for the cartels? Because yes, if you are breaking the law, sometimes that goes well for you financially. Well, Walter White may have done some bad things, but. But you can't deny he was a brilliant meth cook, you know? Yeah.

But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is. 1400, according to Isaacson. He's clearly some sort of outlier in many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably even a genius. And yet, first off, it becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider a 1400 to be an impressive SAT score and would normally be judgmental of someone who had an SAT score of 1400 if it weren't for all of Elon's other genius accomplishments.

And yet, when my partner and I were heading to dinner the other day and we saw some tweet that Elon sent, I forget which one because he tweets so much, we were both like, man, he's such a dumbass. Yes, someone can be both a genius and a dumbass. Welcome to what I call spiky intelligence. Here we go. This gets to like the core of what's annoying about Nate is his need to, he's one of these guys, you know what it is? He's an intellectual enclosureist.

Right. Where he's not confident to be like everyone is very aware of the fact that no one is good at everything and that people have holes in their competence and that there are like brilliant surgeons who are bad fathers or whatever, because there are different kinds of intelligence. This is like a broadly common understanding. Yeah. Nate has to give it a name so that he can sell his book. So he gives it the names. It's like an intellectual. Now it's my idea. I'm the one who came up with the concept that smart people can be dumb asses.

Stop it, Nate. It's annoying. Capital S, capital I registered trademarks by key intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. Now he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original and then links to somebody without really like crediting them. Interestingly, many of the instances online refer to people of the on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he has Asperger's syndrome.

But the concept is simple. While intelligence is a multidimensional phenomenon, the scientific consensus is that there's also something known as a G factor, sometimes also called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and verbal skills in the GRE are correlated. The correlations are loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's just going into like, he talks about like the absent-minded professor. Like it's all just these

these very common ideas that like, yeah, people are usually bad at more things than they're good at. Right. Like it's, there's, there's no need to, to explain like the, the, how Elon Musk has been successful at certain things, but,

but Nate does. And he has to keep going back to like, he makes a comment later in here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that like, well, if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves.

which ignores the fact that he's not making any of these decisions. He bought a company that already had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket engineers to design rockets. Elon is arguably good at hiring in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man.

Right. Like that's the actual brilliance that Elon has is he was very, very good at hyping people up and getting people to believe in him until he was too big to fail. Like that's the one thing he actually did. But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is, who is a guy who was really good at one narrow thing and now has a career writing about everything.

And he can't. That's like a dangerous thing for Nate to think too hard about. Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very soft and soothing ads. Yeah, we're back. I want to talk a little bit about the danger of being a guy who gets famous for being really good at one thing and then gets a job talking about everything because I've had a version of that experience. And let me tell you,

You're not ever going to be competent to discuss all of the things that you can make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No one ever has been. No one ever will be. Which is why what you ought to do is the thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on a bunch of people to like run a website with you.

right, where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately, it turns out 538 was a bad business venture. It got massively overvalued. A company spent a shitload more money on it that it was capable of making. And now everyone's gotten laid off. And Nate left years ago to do his sub stack.

You know, it's a tragic case in the problem of, like, hubris and the fact that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't run an entire media enterprise. But Nate doesn't like thinking about that. It isn't like thinking about the fact that maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at was being the guy from The Music Man. Because I think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period of time. A lot of people did. He still clearly does. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

There's been this thing lately where a lot of folks on the left have been like, oh, you couldn't always tell that he was a con man. You couldn't always tell that he was this bad. Like, he was always the worst. I was like, no. Like, back in 2014-15, when I was writing about the

billionaires and rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie Dimon because he had helped create the 2008 financial collapse. And he just seemed obviously much worse than this guy who up to that point was pretty much just making cars and rockets. You know, he had two companies doing that. Musk was not top of most people's radars for very good reason, which gets to like

There's this thing that's been created because of some of the sinister beliefs that his grandfather had and his family background, which has a lot of white supremacy in it, that this has been Elon's grand plan from the beginning and that it's all come together for him as if he's...

Marvel or a James Bond villain who's been executing this like 30-year plan to get where he is Yeah, yeah, when I think when you look at his cognition like he's not the same man. He was ten years ago He's not the same guy. He was when he started dating Grimes. I'm saying he was a good man before then I don't think he particularly ever was but he's clearly his brain has degraded in part due to contact through Twitter and

Well, yeah, and you can measure this through his posting as well. The types of posts he would make in 2017 are completely opposite to the way that he would talk about certain social issues now. He's not memeing about anarcho-syndicalism. Yeah.

We get to a few of those things, but I want to read another quote from Nate's article because he's going to talk about his book, On the Edge, which, quote, describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call the river. These people who occupy a range of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital are...

are bright, but in spiky ways. In Baron Cohen's dichotomy, they lean heavily towards the systematic side of the equation. They're good at abstract, analytic reasoning, but they may lack other forms of intelligence, like empathy, judgment, and self-awareness. They also have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence. For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrarian. And again, what you are talking about, all of these people, number one, when he says AI research, he's not

talking about people who are doing like the gut level coding. He's talking about Sam Altman, right? Yeah. Poker, venture capital. This is all gambling. You're all talking about gamblers. The river is just gamblers, Nate. It's people like you who put money on bets

and they are contrarian and competitive because that's how gamblers are. That's the intelligent, that's the river. Like he's thinking about it as like this specific chunk of intellectuals who have, you know, there's some dangers, but they have great potential to make the world brilliant. Like, no, no, no, no. These are just people who like wind up shooting themselves outside of a sports betting facility. Like...

That's the river, Nate. I have been turning into a monster during our friend poker nights recently. It's tough. Garrison, by the way, I've been meaning to talk to you about wearing the full data makeup because you know your skin can't breathe if you coat your whole body. You're only supposed to put that on your face. I don't do that every time I play. You get a gold finger yourself, Garrison. I don't put on the data makeup every time I play poker. Just that one time.

Actually, no, I've done that twice now, never mind. I have done that two times. Okay. It's becoming a habit. I also have the little hats. I ordered a 12-pack of the little poker visors to complete the outfit. Of course you did. Wonderful. Of course you did. It would be rude not to. For better or worse.

This typology, the river, is associated with high achievement in certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is also associated with high variance. Sam Bankman Freed built FTX into a company that investors valued at $32 billion before the House of Cards collapsed. Again, because he was a gambler. Yeah, because he was a con man. And again, Nate can't just accept, oh, he was never actually very smart. He just got really lucky for a while and then...

and then gambled it all away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought. Nate says, I interviewed SBF several times for the book and I can tell you that he very much falls into the genius but dumbass category. How about just dumbass? Lucky dumbass. It's not hard. What's the genius? Where did he prove that?

I mean, he proved that by fooling Nate Silver, a man who probably values his own intelligence like a great deal. I mean, that's the whole thing, right? Nate Silver can't, like, it would be ego death to admit that there are just some lucky dumb white dudes. Yeah. If a guy had won, like, one of the lotteries was like a billion and a half dollars, right? Got crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks because he just kept putting half a million dollars at a time on 21 Black at a roulette table in Vegas. Yeah.

And I would be like, well, obviously he's a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How else could he have made the money in the first place? No, he got lucky and then he gambled it all away because he doesn't have good judgment. Yeah.

So it's important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence. Namely, neither their worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story. And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless statement because that's true of every human being ever born. Yeah. But clearly Nate doesn't feel that way because only I think the undercurrent here is that only people like this in Nate's mind are worth talking about because only gamblers bring the world forward.

Right. Yeah. No one else deserves empathy. Yeah. Yes. Like you're just addicted to putting money on sports games and elections, Nate Silver. Anyway, so here's the two things he wants to warn us up or wants people to avoid.

Elon is highly intelligent in several ways, but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just because he isn't in others. And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does! It's not high school! Nobody cares about his SAT skills! Elon's what, like 50, like 55 or something? Like, what are we doing? Yeah.

Yeah. You are a middle-aged man. I don't even know what my SAT score was. I was going to say, like, look, I never took an SAT, but I spent more than a decade in full-time education, and anyone who ever told me their SAT scores, I immediately hated and never took them seriously. I've spent almost 20 years asking people questions for a living, and I've never asked anyone their SAT score. Sorry, Garrison. Although SAT might not be, like, a stable metric for evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method.

Absolutely not, Garrison. Just how much... Well, he does have an alternative method. I'm seeing what you might call an infographic. Because the next section of the article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence. So...

First, he admits he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to talk to him. I have to say, Elon does have better shit to do than talk to Nate Silver because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree. And that is a better use of his time than talking to Nate Silver. So,

So since he can't actually talk to Musk, he's going to model and extrapolate from, quote, many other Silicon Valley bigwigs I have met. Helping him in this is the fact that, quote, Musk maintains an extremely public profile. He's turned X into a running diary of his innermost thoughts. And in addition to that, the biographies of the guy. One more caveat here. I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory of Elon's career, not just his recent antics.

So we go down here and the next segment is dimensions where Musk has exceptionally high or genius level intelligence. So finally, Nate's going to prove it. And I'm going to I'm going to show you guys how he how he how he chooses to do that. What the evidence he gives us here is. And I think this is something that we should reveal to the audience after these ads. Good point, Gare.

All right, we're back. So let's look at what Nate shows us is the chief dimension where Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence.

I'm just reading that first line, man. So the first words under this are cognitive load capacity and overall horsepower slash ram. He's always on. I mean, literally look at how often he's tweeting. And then a huge graph that shows the density of tweets posted and when, which has been used by other people to prove that since sometime in late 2022, he's almost never gone more than about three hours without posting a tweet. Like,

It's just a solid red after he buys the site. This graph of when he makes his posts. He's never offline now. He's not sleeping. So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from 2014 to 2024 showing the time of day and when a post is posted represented by small red dots. And yes...

At around 2022, the thickness of the red increases dramatically. It's almost just a straight red line. And like the period of where he must be sleeping in this graph is very concerning. No, he sometimes sleeps from about 6 to 9 a.m.

as far as we can tell, but not regularly or often. That's like a streak of 2023 where he just isn't sleeping. He's not sleeping. And again, he's on drugs, people. I think they're probably prescriptive. I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed. When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you want to do recreationally prescribed, right? But this is drug user behavior.

I don't say that to judge drug users. I say that as someone who had a drug problem. Like, this is drug user behavior. And specifically, Silver is using this. And Elon's sobriety is possible. Sorry. And specifically, Silver is using this as evidence of Musk's intelligence. Yeah. Yeah.

It's not. He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he must be like a special type of person. He's railing Adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day, every day. That's what this is a sign of. And no one is allowed to take his phone away.

Anyway, here's how Nate explains why this is smart. In NBA terms, we'd say this is a player with an exceptionally high motor. And this is undoubtedly a valuable trait as the world becomes more complex. Last fall, I was simultaneously doing an extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to build up Silver Bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work. Even if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would only have been sustainable for a short burst.

But Elon is taking on, I don't know, approximately a thousand times more stress than that and has done so for years. No, he's not.

He just tweets. He has a massive, number one, all of the businesses are being run by people who are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to sit in meetings and say yes or no to stuff and occasionally tells them to do something crazy that causes issues, right? And they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now than it gained after the election. And SpaceX just had a giant rocket explode. Again, the boring company has

has not done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas and the Hyperloop is nothing, right? Like, this, this, this is just full of shit, Nate. Like,

Like what you have just described, running an election model that's functional, going on a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing. Oh, yeah. More actual effort work. Musk is mostly like sitting in an occasional meeting, doing drugs and injecting random women with his sperm and sending tweets. He doesn't do the injecting, I think. Oh, God. Garrison, that comes up.

Two! No! No! Oh, and it's crazy how it does. Right before he posts the graph of how much Elon tweets. Oh, God.

Okay, good. There it is. Okay. Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains. Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating, especially if Musk ostracizes people who might keep him grounded. More sympathetically, he's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities, doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which would be stressful on their own, while still managing to father 13 children and tweeting hundreds of times per week. Again, equivalent responsibility.

Tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering 13 children. He's not a father to them. No, he just... He contributed by... He didn't even have sex. Yeah, it is literally the lowest possible effort way to have a child. We, like...

I'm gonna guess most of the people with penises listening to this come like that's not a big effort you wouldn't include that as like what did I get done this week well in addition to working 40 hours I jacked off that's a little transphobic so

I said most. This is an HRT joke. Anyway, continue. I'm just saying, it doesn't count as work. No, no. Certainly not for most. Unless you're a sex worker, then it does, okay? Like, especially, I know a lot of male porn stars.

That is a difficult part of the job. That's why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that kill their hearts. I would like to get into more of Silver's justification for why he associates this high tweet load with intelligence. Well, because it shows rapid cognition and thin slicing ability. Okay. Mm-hmm. All right.

Yeah, sure. Indeed, in a capitalist system with a significant premium on being first to market, making decent judgments fast is often more important than making better judgments slowly. Canonically, VCs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders as though on Shark Tank, relying on well-owned gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble, as it has for Elon. What is Shark Tank's success rate?

Yeah. I bet there's a quick answer to that. Yeah. And let's consider that it has built in free television advertising for any product. Less than 50% of deals are successfully closed. My God.

Yeah. So I don't know. All this tweeting also shows abstract problem solving capability. This is related to the idea of creativity, though in Musk's case, it seemingly doesn't manifest itself in artistic prowess. Seemingly. Seemingly. You know what? I'll give it to Nate there. I'll give it to Nate. I don't disagree with you there. And then, of course, instrumental rationality.

Philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types of rationality. Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ends, basically figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want. For this category, I think you have to point towards the scoreboard. Musk has some unparalleled accomplishments and isn't about to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole, not one for nice guys. Now, and again, if Musk's actual goal is his stated goal, getting to Mars, then basically

backing the political party that is actively doing as much damage to the biosphere as possible, ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind of off-world civilization likely, I would argue, is a stupid decision. But he doesn't actually want us to get to Mars, right? He just wants to be in charge of everything. No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference. That's really all it is. Yes, yes. Yeah. Yes. And he has been very successful at that. But again...

It's the success of brute force. It's the same way as like, if you hire a thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps of a guy who annoys you, like you could say like, I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who annoy me, but really you just have a lot of dudes who can beat people up for you. Like, is that intelligence or did you just have enough money to hire thugs? Or are you just a mob boss? Right. Are you just a mob boss? Yeah.

And a mob boss no one is allowed to attack because it's going to be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon, you know? Anyway, we need Ghost Dog. It's pretty upsetting because, you know, a few weeks ago I was having a little bit of a resist-live moment and I actually ashed my clove cigarette on a parked Tesla. Felt pretty cool about it. But now I guess I can't even do that. It's too dangerous. No.

No, you can't. I could face substantial charges. You might want to text resist to a certain five digit number or something. That's probably the best way to solve this garrison. I just text resist to every single person in my phone book every day. It takes about seven hours. I have fallen behind on work, you know. But it's the only thing we can do to fight fascism.

The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep deprivation and drug problem apparently mm-hmm or at least that is how you show for it it's funny because I saw a Brian Johnson the billionaire who who's eating his son's blood or now plasma Oh, we had a dead guy posted his own like self-study on like the damaging effects of sleep deprivation And I'm pretty sure us like retweeted it with like with like an emoji or something like dude Your brain is completely soup

No, you are fried. You are the most cooked a man has ever been. It's an interesting study. There is legitimately interesting things to look at in Elon Musk's brain. Well, yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data put together exhaustively by researchers studying how not just sleep deprivation, but wealth and power impact the brain.

And like all of it makes a strong case that Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to his brain than like one of those career WWE wrestlers who like kills their whole family and then shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their brain later. Yeah, I mean. Well, before we close, I do want to say before any psychologists or sociologists or like linguists get mad at me. Yes, I know Boba and Kiki is...

Is that shape language correlation test? I, myself, as well as Nate here, have kind of expanded its usage to projecting even more human or emotional qualities onto these shapes or onto these specific words. So please, sociologists, leave me alone. Do not message me about faux pas and kiki. Please send Garrison your favorite French sociologist by direct message on x.com.

I'm afraid it's already too late. I think I already hear like 12 different Redditors typing. But yes, I think Nate's just using that image there as like a metaphor to like show how, you know, aggressive or manipulative Musk's own intelligence is as symbolized by a Kiki as opposed to, you know, maybe like a Bill Gates, which might be more like a Boba intelligence type. Okay. A little softer, a little bit more philanthropy, you know. Okay.

I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist and zizian literature for two straight weeks. About a quarter of a million words by my last count, Garrison. I don't have it in me to do this. Again, I'm going to get back to my Hitler books, you know, where things make sense, where the world is comforting and safe.

I'm returning to writing about the Syrian civil war, which is my comparative happy place. Ah, the Syrian civil war. It's a really great world. I do wonder if he's trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing by using that little filter that he used over to Boober and Kiki. No, because it would be, it's actually not fair use now, as opposed to if he just mentioned that thing. Yeah, because he doesn't talk about them.

then it is fair use, right? And he could use like a little clip of it to illustrate the point. Yeah, like I did with Manu Chao. Anyway, this is all I want to say again about Nate Silver until 2028. And if, you know what, the upside if democracy really does die is we'll never have to talk about him again. Yeah.

If Trump and Musk really take over fully and do a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silver. Nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin t-shirt. No, man, they'll be doing Assad numbers and he will still be analyzing that data.

straight regime capture of Nate Silver. Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten 104% of the vote, but... Those are spiky percentages. Those are spiky percentages. Why can't Nate Silver just like run like Trump's casino or something, right? This is just like...

Just like put him away. I understand if Nate, because Nate's rich, he doesn't need to do the other stuff. And if he was like just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well, yeah, that's what he loves, right? If I had Nate's silver money, I'd probably just write novels for the rest of my life because that's what I like to do. I don't understand why he keeps writing about politics. He's not good at it and he can't like it. He needs to feel special. He wants to feel like a special boy. Yeah.

who knows the answers that no one else does. All right. Well, anyway, this is us making fun of Nate Silver. So you don't, well, you can still make fun of him, but you don't have to read him. We did that for you. Good night.

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I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told. Join me every week as I tell some of the most enthralling true crime stories about women who are not just victims, but heroes or villains, or often somewhere in between. Listen to The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of the world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of March 5 to March 12. Trump films a Tesla commercial, RFK Jr. eats beef tallow french fries at Steak and Shake, and Sam Seder commits a mass casualty event on YouTube.

how's everyone doing today very happy to join you for ed this week huge fan of ed just like just big big ed guy so you know psyched to be here i feel like we should mention up top there's also the a bunch of unhinged tariff news and the most

like electing fucking Caligula's horse to the Senate thing I've seen in a long time. So stay tuned for that. Lots of good stuff. Yes, we will get to it. First, I would like to give a little bit of an update on a story that we talked about a few days ago, the detention and the revocation of a green card for a Palestinian activist, Mahmoud Khalil.

As of Wednesday, his lawyers have still been unable to even contact their client. There was a large rally outside the first court conference in New York this Wednesday. So we talked about this a few days ago for some background, an episode with James, Robert, and myself.

Robert, do you want to briefly summarize the situation and then I'll play a clip from one of his lawyers? The situation is that this guy got taken into custody. My understanding is it was at an apartment that he lived in with his wife. He was a U.S. citizen.

He became aware, it looks like at least about 24 hours before, probably became aware that he was being, it's a little clear if he was just like being surveilled or there was something else that tipped them off. But he contacted the school asking for help, convinced that ICE was coming for him about a day before they did. When they entered the house, my understanding is based on the claims being made by his wife.

that they did not, like, they didn't, like, produce a warrant or anything. He's still not charged with any crime. No, he's not been charged with any crime. They just took him and, like, turned off the phone when they were on the phone to their lawyers, if I'm remembering correctly. Correct. So it's, like, none of this is the way this should have gone. Like, if this was an arrest,

No, he was just like black bagged from campus. Yeah, but it's not an arrest again. And they've been very clear about this, that like they have specifically stated we're not accusing him of like breaking the law. Right. Like that's that's not what's going on here. Correct. And we will get to some of that later. I'm going to play a clip from a press conference outside court that happened on Wednesday, March 12th. This is one of his lawyers.

Mr. Khalil's detention has nothing to do with security. It is only about repression. The United States government has taken the position that it can arrest

detained and seek to deport a lawful permanent resident exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism. In this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and an end to the genocide in Gaza. The government takes the position that because the Secretary of State finds his dissent

unacceptable or contrary to U.S. foreign policy, he can be deported. As Romsey suggested, it's largely unprecedented, save for ugly historical precedents, including the Red Scare and McCarthyism. That's what we're talking about.

We're also talking about a period of repression that the Center for Constitutional Rights knows well, following 9/11, when we were in the courts trying to get people out of secret detention. One thing that's different now is the legal infrastructure is so much stronger and everyone out here on the streets knows that we cannot hide in the face of this amount of repression. We will be fighting in the

and fighting in the streets to bring Mahmoud home and prevent this level of repression from spreading to many others as the administration has threatened to do. So that was on Wednesday. For now, Khalil will be remaining in ICE detention in Louisiana. And ICE Director Tom Homan said Wednesday that, quote, free speech has its limitations, unquote. Yeah.

I have found some stuff today of people on the right attacking the judge who put out a, I guess, called a stay on this in part because the judge is Jewish. So it's nice to see the anti-Semitism being used in that way as well in this instance. Just fascinating. We're really breaking new ground in all of this.

A White House official did tell Friend of the Pod, the free press, not necessarily our favorite publication, but they do have an exclusive quote here, that the basis for targeting Khalil is being used as a blueprint for investigations against other students.

saying Khalil is, quote, a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States, unquote, said the official, noting that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest, saying, quote, the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law. So we have this official, like, openly saying, like, he's not charged with a crime. We're just wanting to see if we can do this. Can we deport

a legal permanent resident for saying something that we don't like. Yeah, and I think that there's been a lot of comparisons to this to direct McCarthyism. I think that's accurate to some extent. I think the most direct comparison to this is not McCarthyism. It's the Palmer raids. Yep. Which I think people tend to be way less familiar with. That was the first Red Scare, which was largely targeted at the industrial workers of the world for their opposition to World War I. And they did basically the same shit. A lot of people would give anti-war speeches and then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort of like leftists

would get fucking deported for it. So, yeah, that was a absolutely terrifying period of repression. If the line is not drawn here, and it should have been drawn like 200 miles back from here, but if it isn't drawn here, this is going to continue. This is going to continue to get worse.

And I mean, all this is all this is in relation to Trump's executive order, you know, about, quote unquote, anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, today in the Oval Office, he said something incredibly anti-Semitic and also anti-Arab somehow in like in the same statement saying, quote, Schumer is a Palestinian. As far as I'm concerned, he's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian, unquote.

Which is just an unbelievably anti-Semitic and anti-Arab statement all at once. Like, removing someone's Jewishness because of how they act or things they've said or things they believe in. Yeah. And it's one of those things, again, like, it's worth, like, covering this as it develops. There's not much to say other than, like, this is incredibly illegal and has to be opposed immediately and vigorously. Like...

Yeah, yeah. No, it's really bad. And of course, you're not going to have the ADL coming out against Trump here. The ACLU did, which I should note because I heard some people saying they did not expect the ACLU to. They have. But yeah, the ADL is fully in the camp of lock anyone up who's ever protested Israel.

And they're not going to call Trump anti-Semitic for making a statement like this. Because their interests are fairly aligned at this point. What's happening in Gaza. So I think now we're going to play a special report from James, who can't be on the recording here today. But he does have a report on deportations in Panama. So, James, take it away.

So something that we've seen in the last week is that the people who the U.S. government has deported to Panama, who it can't deport to their home countries, have in some cases been released by the Panamanian government and given a 30-day visa or 30 days to essentially exit Panama. And they're not really being given any support. So they're in some cases just sleeping on the streets in Panama City, right? Just wandering around, trying to work out how to get home and trying to work out what...

they should do next. Obviously, these people who have fled places like Afghanistan, Iran, places where they can't go back to, they would face persecution just for the act of having tried to leave, even if they weren't already facing persecution before, which many of them were, that that's why they fled.

So they've just kind of kicked it down the road a little bit and we'll see where this leads. But it's another piece of evidence that this wasn't hugely well planned, that the Trump administration just wanted to get these deportation numbers up at almost any cost. All right. We're going to go on a break and come back to talk about the Department of Education and tariff talk with Mia Wong.

Wow. Well, we are back. And, you know, it's everyone's favorite time of the podcast talking about tariffs. And before we get to Mia, I want to bring on a musical guest to set this section of the program up.

Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh.

That was worth the rest of our year's budget. Now, everyone will be getting paid for the rest of the year in Denny's coupons. That's all we have left after paying for this. But I think we can all agree worth it. Do you want to explain what that is? Because I still don't really have a clue what exactly that opening theme song is for Tariff Talk. Well, there was a great band called The Clash once, and they wrote one song that wasn't very good. And in

In it, somebody says something that didn't sound very much like the word tariff. But if you mispronounce the word tariff, it fit in. And that's where $42,000 of our operating budget this year went. Anyway, Mia, let's talk about tariffs. Yeah, now that I've gotten one of the two things I've ever wanted in life, play on music. So since last week,

This has been an entire roller coaster because right after we finished recording in like the next two days, everyone went, oh, the tariffs aren't going to be that bad because a lot of the tariffs that were hit with Trump's sort of general 25 percent Canada-Mexico tariff got waived after Trump agreed not to apply them to goods covered by the USMCA free trade agreements.

But then everyone remembered that the 25% steel and aluminum tariff was still going into effect. And so that went into effect this week. Now, there was also a brief, incredible moment of panic where Trump was talking about doubling them to 50%. He backs off of this in exchange for Ontario's Doug Ford stopping a like 25% increase in electricity prices.

However, comma, the trade war is 100% still on. Canada is doing a whole like sort of slate of reciprocal tariffs specifically on steel and also tariffs and taxes on a whole suite of other U S goods. Um,

I'm just going to read this from the Associated Press because this is no longer the trade war here is no longer limited to the US, Canada, China and to some extent Mexico. So Mexico's really hasn't been responding in the same way as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs or at least the sort of main focuses of these tariffs.

But this week, the EU officially joined the fray. So here's from the AP, quote, Across the Atlantic, the European Union will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon and motorcycles. Bourbon again?

Yeah, yeah, bourbon twice. Yeah, bourbon twice. It's twice as important as the other things. Yes, peanut butter and jeans. Actually, you say this. There was a whole, like, part of the whole speech. That was not a joke, Mia. People in the EU, like, this was part of the thing, was, yeah, like, we're hoping to restore the profitability of the American spirits markets when the U.S. backs down. It was also the only American product that Trudeau could name during his big speech. Very funny. Yeah.

Let's be honest. Outside of music, this nation has produced one thing of value to the world, and it's bourbon. Pretty reasonable. It's also very funny that it was like bourbon was like our what attempt number was it at making whiskey before we finally got one that was like.

Exportable? Terrible. Oh, I mean, yeah, it took generations. Look, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day, and bourbon is the Rome of liquors produced in Kentucky. Yeah, well, and speaking of it being produced in Kentucky, this is actually deliberately... Okay, well, all right, so the EU, in theory, the line that they're saying is that these are deliberately designed to, like, target things that are made in red states. They also did do soybean tariffs, too, though, which is...

you know, like you're dropping a nuke on Illinois here. Okay, so the EU has imposed reciprocal tariffs on $28 billion of U.S. goods. Also, on Tuesday, China's tariffs went into effect, which means the agricultural tariffs that we talked about last week, and notably, I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such a critical part of the system of American agriculture as the crop that you rotate out with corn to sort of preserve soil integrity. The Chinese tariffs are now in effect. It's mostly on agricultural goods.

Yeah. And this has, I think, in ways that are pretty predictable, at least to me, this has caused a lot of panic in the markets. There's been some sort of rallying as like more information comes in. But there's stuff that I did not predict, which is so, OK, Goldman Sachs has downgraded its projection for U.S. GDP growth. Their chief economist is talking about how he thinks we're going to get stagflation again, which is sort of wild. Stagflation was the thing in the 70s that was

you know, like, you have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time. This is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state and allowed the right to take power in the first place. That's funny, because when I Google stagflation, I get very different results. That could just be my own... No, that's stagflation garrison. Two very different things. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I think I missed that. Huh.

Anyway, Mia, continue. The things I have to deal with on this job. They didn't warn me. Every single time, I mentioned inflation. It's true, it's true, it's true. This makes up for a lot. If you ever get to fight the Undertaker, you have a song to go on to. It's true.

So, okay, now sort of more surprisingly, and this is something I have literally never seen before with the U.S., both Citibank, well, Citibank changed its name to Citi or something, but Citibank and UBS, the giant Swiss bank, downgraded the status of all U.S. equities. I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. They are also boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities. So this is basically like

This doesn't have, like, a technical official effect, but this is, like, this is basically their evaluation of what countries, like, stocks, basically, you should purchase. Right? And this also sort of applies to bonds. So, is that bad? This is...

Like, I assumed that the U.S. would get its actual credit rating devalued before this happened. I've never, this is, this is unreal. Like, the argument that they are making here is that it is because of the instability in the U.S., like, because of the tariffs and because of everything that's going on,

that, like, you should just fucking pull your money out of the U.S. and American companies and put it somewhere else. And they're specifically boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities, which is astonishing because, again, one of the countries, again, whose equity status that they are boosting is China. China's economy is a fucking disaster right now. They're dealing with, like, their fucking housing bubble going under. They've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer-based economy for years and years and years and years, and it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough.

to actually, like, fuel an economy by consumer spending. Like, they're, you know, they're about to take giant damage from the trade war. And also that, like, you know, like, it was only, like, three years ago the CCP faced their first, like, nationwide mass protest, like, since Tiananmen, right? And these guys, like, and again, these are the financial analysts of Citibank and UBS have looked at that and went, you are better off putting your money there than you are putting it in the U.S.? I mean, at this point, I think Trump's tariffs have wiped out

I'm reading $4 trillion from the U.S. stock market just in this past month. Now, trillion, is that... Okay, so for example, I have $32 right now in my pocket. Is it more than that? I think it's a little bit more. Okay, okay, okay. So it is enough to buy two different servings of pizza. Okay, I'm trying to put this into terms I can understand. Thank you.

It is, imagine one burger, right? And a burger in Portland does cost $32, so yes. Yes. Now, imagine a burger in Portland does cost $4 trillion. I mean, probably tomorrow, right? Like, who knows? I don't know. Eggs, man. If the fucking plagues that we're doing. We're adding levity because this is legitimately kind of frightening.

No, like this is I have never seen the financial press like this. Like the only times I've ever seen the financial press react to something like this is like they were kind of acting like this about the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn like taking power in the UK. Like they are like I watched a guy on CNBC. Right. This is not like this. This is not MSNBC. This is not even like CNN. This is CNBC. Literally go on air and call what Trump is doing, quote, insane news.

And start talking about how, and this is, I think, what these people are worried about, is they're, you know, the thing that they're seeing that's starting right now, and it's starting with these sort of, with these downgrades of U.S. equities, is capital flight, which is straight up a butt, like international capital, taking their money from the U.S. and fucking literally moving out of the country and moving it somewhere else because the U.S. is so unstable.

This is I don't know if anyone knows what mass capital flight from the U.S. would do because I've never seen anything like this. So part of what's going on, right, and part of the reason the markets have kind of recovered in the last few days after the tanking they did Monday is that like the inflation data came out and it wasn't that bad. But the thing is, all of the inflation data we're getting right now and all of the economic indicators we're getting right now.

It's going to take a little bit of time for the actual effects of these tariffs to set in. Right. Like these are these are things that like, you know, it's going to take it's going to take like six months, maybe a year before we fully see the impact of that. And but when we do, it is going to fucking blow a smoking crater into the economy. And the worst part about this is this isn't even the most unhinged part of this. The most unhinged part of this is how the Republicans have been reacting to all of this in Congress.

So one of the few things the Democrats have been trying to do, and I say one of the few because like the response has been downright collaborationist, but they've been trying to force Republicans to take a vote on the tariffs because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular now.

And they're particularly unbelievably unpopular among like the capital owning class who, you know, actually matter. So what they've been trying to do is that Trump did these tariffs by declaring a state of emergency. And the Democrats wanted to use the National Emergencies Act to force a vote on the tariffs. I'm just going to read this in The New York Times.

The national emergency law lays out a fast track process for Congress to consider a resolution ending a presidential emergency requiring committee consideration within 15 calendar days after one is introduced and a floor vote within three days after that.

But the language the House Republicans inserted into their measure on Tuesday declared that, quote, each day for the remainder of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that Trump declared on February 1st. So the point we are at right now is is in order to preserve a bunch of tariffs which are effectively about to fucking obliterate the entire world economy. Congress has declared that days don't pass.

This is fucking, this is completely unhinged. This is fucking like Caligula's horse in the Senate ship. Like, again, they are literally, they have literally declared that calendar days passing are not actually calendar days so that Trump can just keep doing tariff shit and rule by fiat. Like the Israelites, they have stopped time in order to win the battle.

it's, it's genuinely astonishing. And, and the, the extent to which this has kind of just been swept under the rug, the Republicans have been, you know, doing this kind of quietly. Right. And, and, and the fact that like the fact that the Democrats are not literally on TV every single second of every day going, the Republicans are voting to stop time so that Trump can destroy the economy is astonishing. It's this real, like sort of

by the Republican Congress that like they're ceding authority over policy like to Trump completely. Right. Like the government now is Trump ruling by sort of fiat and people attempting to sort of like run circles around him in courts, which is not, you know, working enormously well. Yeah, we'll see. And, you know, and this this is this is starting to have effects on like investor confidence, like in the in like the U.S. as a political entity in the U.S. as an economic entity, which is unprecedented. The

The other thing I think it's worth noting is that these people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the people around them have been saying for a long time that the plan is to cause a recession. And then after the recession, things are going to get better. And the financial pressures hasn't believed them. And this right now is the period in which they're starting to realize that they were serious about this. And I don't know what the political ramifications of that are going to be, because these are people who actually matter in the political system, but

And I think we'll see the ramifications of this play out in the sort of coming weeks and months. But this is a fucking cliff that we've hit. And we're now like Wile E. Coyote, like running off the side and trying not to look down. But on the upside, we have a great new song for everybody. So who's to say if any of this has been bad?

All right, we are back. Speaking of running circles around the courts, we do have a small update. Last week in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court denied an appeal from the Trump administration in a case regarding Trump's attempted federal funds freeze and the shuttering of USAID. This was a case filed by the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council.

The White House is now required to pay foreign aid contractors for work that has already been completed. And further details will be worked out back in the district court. And it's still unclear, you know, if the Trump administration is going to abide by the court's ruling and resume all required payments. But this is the first move from the Supreme Court regarding, you know, Trump's actions the past few months.

This has also not stopped Trump from trying to slowly close other entire government agencies. This very week, the Education Department laid off nearly half of its workforce, over 1,300 employees. Late Tuesday night, Education Secretary Linda McMahon went on to Fox News to say that this reduction forces only the first step towards abolishing the entire Education Department.

Saying, quote, this was the president's mandate. His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know will have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat. Unquote.

Yeah. And I mean, like, you know, we've talked on the show for a long time how eliminating Department of Education and eventually destroying public education has been a long running goal. Oh, yeah. Of the most absolutely unhinged of these people who are the people now in charge. And yeah, they've decided to just like individually fuck every child in the U.S.,

It's incredible. Well, and so far, the way that they're trying to close up the Department of Education is kind of in a more selective manner because they're still keeping certain parts of the department active. Yeah. On March 10th, the Education Department announced that they were launching investigations into 60 universities for, quote, Title VI violations relating to anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination, unquote. And this is in relation to anti-genocide protests on campus. And

This comes after Trump announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University. The Education Department is threatening that these other 59 universities may lose their funding if they do not, quote, enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin. National origin includes shared Jewish ancestry, unquote.

I don't know what to say here.

You get to see all the threads of this admin coming together, right? Which is that, you know, these people are also attempting to effectively destroy like the secondary education system in this country too, for reasons that are sort of unclear to me. I don't know. But what we're seeing here, right, is the ways that the Democrats sort of like falling into lockstep with the Republicans on back of the genocide in Israel has sort of led to this thing where the Republicans are using this to just straight up obliterate like all of the U.S.'s

like political, economic and social institutions. Well, and specifically with this like investigation, they are trying to get all these universities to cooperate in efforts to selectively remove students who have protested against the genocide in Gaza, right? This is the same attack on free speech and free expression that they're doing against...

Khalil, this is the same exact purpose, and now they're trying to get more and more universities to be complicit in the selective removal of people in this country who choose to express their First Amendment rights, regardless of whether they're a citizen, a green card holder, or on a student visa.

So this is all deeply, deeply worrying. Robert, you have a small segment you want to discuss before we start to close out. Yeah, just a little bit at the end here. So in the subreddit for the 50501 protest campaign, which is...

An attempt to do protests in all 50 states simultaneously, right? I think their next day of action is coming up in April. I'm not giving an opinion on the overall thing, but in the subreddit, somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard soldier, giving kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would respond to orders to carry out violence against U.S. citizens, right?

And I just wanted to chat about this because it's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly. My opinion is that one of the likely ways things come to a head, probably as early as this summer,

is that there is mass protests in D.C. and the Insurrection Act gets used and, you know, the guard at least are brought in to attempt to crack down. I mean, obviously, Trump has done a version of this before, and Trump and his state attorney have both discussed using the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests. I think they see D.C. as the place they want to do that.

So it's interesting to me to see a post like this. This is not a thing where, like, I've been able to verify this guy yet. There's a couple of points that make me think he probably is a National Guardsman. For one thing, there's a lot of them, right? Like, this is not like a National Guardsman. Where'd you find one? There's a ton of fucking dudes in the National Guard. For the other thing, everything he says is consistent with things that I have seen and talked to other people who are in and were in the Guard about.

There's one little bit where he advises people on like stop the bleed gear. And he gives good advice. He says only buy from NAR, North American Rescue. It's the same advice we would have given. He cites DOD Directive 134410, which is why he believes he's well within his rights to make a post like this. And in essence, what he's saying is that it is his belief that most of the military chain of command from NCOs up to officers are

would not be down with following illegal orders to fire on U.S. citizens. But the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon, would get over whatever issues they have with that very quickly. Right. That's the gist of it is that I think.

You know, within sort of the officer class and the NCO class, there are a lot of resistance to the idea of the military being used for domestic policing. That is less clear with kind of the enlisted class who are, you know, a significant chunk of them are very much down for Trump.

But whatever sort of divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon. And I think this is probably like assuming this is accurate. And I don't really see a reason to doubt it. There's nothing he's saying here that's crazy. I think this is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind that like when you're looking at the military, it's not the police. Like if I have to have agents, armed agents of the state cracking down on a protest, it's

I'm less worried about people being killed if it's the National Guard in general. But that situation can change very, very rapidly if like the situation becomes an active firefight. And I do think like that's a thing we have to consider right now is the possibility that.

We have U.S. soldiers, whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in shooting at American protesters like that's that's in the cards as early as this summer. And it's not a fun thing to think about, but I'm seeing more and more now.

Not just posts like this, but I'm having more and more conversations with people who are in the military or who were in are in the National Guard about their concerns about what they might be called upon to do. Some of this has to do with the border, but like it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military to worry about how they are going to be used in the immediate future. We're not talking about years. We're talking about this summer, right, is when there's a very good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head.

So these are things you should be thinking about if you're listening and you are in the military. These are things that you should be thinking about because the people who are in charge of our government right now have made a lot of statements about how they want to use the military to deal with protests. And the idea that that's going to happen very soon is not fringe or crazy. Although these people might have slightly more discipline when it comes to actual firearms use,

There is also incidents like in 2020 where the Kentucky Army National Guard killed someone via the misuse of crowd control munitions. I think that this is also worth stating, even if, you know, like a Kent State situation maybe is not as likely in like the modern day. There's certainly other ways to cause grievous harm in these sorts of like protest environments. And when we've seen, I mean, even in Portland, when we have seen, which you witnessed personally, unfortunately, Garrison,

The worst injuries to crowd control devices are usually people, in our case it was federal agents, but who are utilizing crowd control weapons and have not trained on them. Because there's certain ways you're supposed to and not supposed to use them, and these guys are just, hey, you know how to use a gun, you must know how to use the rubber bullet thing, you know? No, if you use less lethal, the way you would use a regular firearm, that actually leads to like...

much more like possible lethal consequences or like life-changing consequences. Yeah. Which, you know, police are more familiar with the regular use of crowd control munitions than necessarily, you know, like BORTAC or, or, or like state national guards. So it's something that's also, you know, worth keeping in mind.

Let's close by my least favorite segment, Stinky Musk, which still has a really bad name. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Musk's doge should be subject to comply with FOIA requests and public disclosures of information required of government agencies. With the judge ordering the release of email correspondence between Musk's team and the Office of Management and Budget,

and was ordered to, quote, begin producing documents on a rolling basis as soon as practicable, unquote. Now, despite Musk's claims of, quote, unquote, maximum transparency, last month, the Trump administration tried to shield Doge from public records requests by labeling the agency's documents as, quote, unquote, presidential records, which carries special protections.

This specific case is super interesting. The judge, a federal judge by the name of Cooper, also critiqued the way that the Trump admin tried to litigate this case. Quoting from Politico, quote, the lawyers offered virtually nothing in the way of evidence about Doge's operations or management. Indeed, the court wonders whether this decision was strategic, Cooper said, noting that the Trump administration lawyers had taken competing positions, including that Doge qualifies as an agency under some sections of law, but not others when it suits it.

Thus, Doge becomes, on the defendant's view, a Goldilocks entity, Cooper wrote. Not an agency when it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient, unquote. And I do like Cooper's analysis here of how Doge is very selectively an agency only when it causes benefit to Trump or Musk.

And finally, we have one other Musk story to close out this episode. Amidst Tesla's plummeting stock price, protests outside Tesla dealerships, and reports of vandalism of dealerships across the country, Trump has essentially started doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway. Upon climbing in a red car that he's not allowed to operate, Trump remarked, wow, everything is computer.

So this was a very odd and kind of embarrassing show of favoritism where Musk brought out a number of different Tesla models and Trump got to quote-unquote, you know, pick the one that he wanted to buy.

as he just sat in on this televised advertisement for Tesla as his company is losing a shocking amount of money in the stock market. There's literally a picture of him with the notes that he has in really, really giant... Like a Tesla sales note bullet point.

of how much certain models are, what their different features are, which ones have self-driving features included, which ones you have to pay extra for. Yeah, no, he's literally carrying a Tesla sales pitch as he does this televised appearance boosting his new best friends and co-presidents company.

Trump said on Truth Social, the radical left lunatics are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers, and Elon's baby, in order to attack and do harm to Elon and everything he stands for, unquote. So now not only has Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, which is, you know, its own form of unhinged, but on Tuesday, Trump said,

Trump announced that vandalism of Teslas will be labeled as domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will, quote unquote, go through hell. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote, ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Teslas by radical leftist activists are nothing short of domestic terror, unquote. So that will be fun to see how that plays out.

I feel like we genuinely are not that far off from just, like, Trump trying to hand down legal mandates saying you must buy a Tesla. Like, this is the...

This is the kind of shit that we're in now. No, this is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen. If Biden or any Democratic president did anything similar to this, you would have thralls of people screaming for his impeachment. Similar to the Eric Adams thing. It's one of the most blatant open displays of corruption I've ever seen, where a president is using his office to boost the personal financial interests of one of his top advisors, who's also like,

running government agencies essentially and doing massive massive cuts to prohibit their ability to like investigate his own businesses While also taking massive amounts of government money to keep businesses like Tesla and SpaceX Operable so this has been a pretty a pretty silly thing to watch unfold the past few days and and now Tesla shares have risen 4% after Trump's support for Musk and Tesla great well

I think that's going to do it here at us with the ED. To play us out, we're going to refer back to our friend, the Narcissist Cookbook, who put together our lovely new tariff theme song that you're going to hear every week until tariffs aren't a thing anymore. We reported the news. Tariff, don't like it. Casbah, rock Casbah. Tariff, don't like it. Casbah, rock Casbah.

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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