It Could Happen Here Weekly 176
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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast. It's just me, James, today and I'm joined by Jamie who is a librarian and we are here to discuss the pending federal cuts on library funding and I guess years of attacks on library funding. So welcome to the show, Jamie. Thanks for joining us.

Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, this is really great for me because I have been trying to find a librarian for a very long time to talk to us on the podcast. I understand that lots of people have been like really concerned that we covered this, but also very afraid for their jobs, which is a rough position to be in. So thank you for coming on. I thought we'd start with like there was an executive order on the 14th of March. I think it was called something like

furthered something, the federal bureaucracy cutting, slashing, diminishing, whatever, you know, I don't really care. One of the outcomes of this was, I believe, the Trump administration moving towards a complete closure of IMLS. Is that right? So...

It depends upon how much Joj and Trump and company are going to listen to Congress, because Congress has already funded IMLS, which is the Institute of Museum and Library Services, for this year. So that money already exists. It's already been allocated. And so in theory, they should be good for at least a year. And then next year when the budget comes up,

Again, it should be up to Congress because Congress created this institution and Congress funds it. But the executive order and the commentary on it does say that they would like to dissolve it kind of as soon as possible, definitely next year. So it's really up in the air about how fast things would move, what exactly would happen, if it would be this year, if it would be next year.

Whether anyone's going to listen to Congress. Yeah, we will find out, I guess. So can you explain for listeners who aren't familiar what IMLS is and what it does?

Yeah. So it's, as I said, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And so basically they're allocated money by Congress every year. And then they hand it out to states, especially then who kind of break it down into other grants. They give grants to states and libraries and institutions, but

for things that museums and libraries do. So that includes things like on the museum side, maybe putting together programming or doing big digitization projects. I used to work at an institution where we had a grant that did a lot of digitization of historic documents. And on the library side, they do all sorts of stuff, especially for public libraries. They

end up funding things like summer reading programs, equipment, especially for internet access, you know, all this stuff related to job training and those services that libraries offer. And interlibrary loan is a big one so that people can access materials that their library doesn't hold, but it's held by other libraries. And rural libraries and tribal libraries, especially, really, really benefit from this. Every single state and territory in the country gets these funds.

Okay, yeah. I was wondering about who funded interlibrary loans, so that they're the ones who facilitate the transporting of the books. Yeah, well, depending on your library. Some libraries will fund it from their operations budget, but if, especially for small rural public libraries where that might be very expensive, that is one thing that these grants go to is interlibrary loan. Okay, yeah. So lots of very important services. And

What would it mean if we didn't have that IMLS budget at all? Like, what would it mean, especially for like, like you said, those kinds of libraries that are financially, I guess, more marginalized in tribal libraries and rural areas and stuff.

So I first want to mention that the entire budget of IMLS for 2024 was something like $266 million. We're not talking about huge sums of money in terms of the federal government. It comes out to about 75% per person in the country. So we're not going to be saving on our taxes if this goes away. But that money makes a really big difference. So even smaller states that maybe have a million people in it might see a couple million dollars of these grants per year.

And so what that would mean is that the things that, maybe not all of them, but most of the thing that these grants cover would not be there. So that means that there wouldn't be summer reading in some places. That means that

They wouldn't be able to buy the hotspots that they lend out to people who don't have internet at home. That means that maybe there wouldn't be the class that teaches your grandma how to not get caught in a phishing scam. So all sorts of things. Those things just wouldn't be there because there's probably not...

especially in red states, other funds that are going to come to cover that. Yeah, I think I was looking online and the budget is something like 0.003% of the federal budget is going to. It's trivial. It's so small, right? Yeah. You could take the gold toilets away from the Navy and cover it in a day, right? It's so small. And yet it has this enormous...

out-sized impact, you know, the statistics say that every dollar spent on IMLS returns $2 to the economy. So it's actually, if you're going to measure it that way, highly beneficial, especially to these more marginalized areas. Yeah, maybe we should talk about that. Because I think if people like, maybe they just don't happen to go to the library, maybe they don't, you know, realize they have services they need, or maybe they don't live in the US. The

The library is not just a place where you can go and borrow the books, right? Like, can you explain some of the services that libraries provide? Like you mentioned some, but they really help people. Yeah. So for better or for worse, public libraries in the United States have become the social safety net of last resort because they already exist almost everywhere. And it's so hard to get

you know, not right now, but even in the past couple decades, other social programs started in many parts of the U.S. that things kind of just get lumped into the library. So now you get your tax forms there. Maybe they have a social worker on staff. It's the place that homeless folks can sit when it's snowing. Yeah. So that kind of is like a little bit of side from what we're talking about right here. But I really do want to point out that public libraries have become the social safety net in many, many places. Yeah.

So that aside, you know, offerings of, aside from books and other media, including e-books, audio books, movies in lots of formats, magazines, newspapers, etc.

There are tons of classes about all sorts of things, especially technology classes. It's a place that a lot of people, it's their only reliable internet access. So, you know, in 2025, you can't do mostly anything without the internet. You can't get a job without the internet. You can't maybe pay your bills without the internet. So that's a reliable place that people who don't

don't have internet for various reasons. Maybe they live so far out in the country that just doesn't go there unless you have satellite, right? Even now. Or maybe you can't afford it or whatever. Or there's one computer in your house and there's six kids and someone has to do their homework, so what's everyone else going to do? So then the computers themselves. And then also the other thing that IMLS also does is those grants will sometimes purchase research databases. So if people, kids especially, are trying to do their homework,

Again, like children's and teens programming is another thing between homework help, social things, clubs. So in a lot of places where there's not much going on, it's one of the places where young people can go in the afternoon or on the weekend and not be getting in trouble either because they're making trouble or the adults think they are because there's somewhere productive to be. There's somewhere that's inside supervised. There's something to do. And so...

that's the kind of stuff we talk about in normal times when we're trying to fight for like weekend service or later hours but if we're looking at it in in the lens of imls the building might be open maybe because maybe they have the foundational operationals but but then there won't be these programs there won't be these resources it'll just be a bunch of books on the shelves yeah it's like i don't know i'm amazed how many of my friends and neighbors don't understand how much celebrity does like i'm forever like a

San Diego, our housing prices are ridiculous and no one seems to want them to not be ridiculous. Well, lots of us do, but we don't get to choose. And so like we have a large in-house population and I'm always like helping my in-house neighbors go to the library, like giving them a ride or whatever so they can, yeah, like you say, access internet services. Apply for benefits. Yeah. Or just like sit and read the paper and know what's going on in the world. Yeah. And like

not get harassed by the cops just for existing, which is the rest of their existence here, sadly. Yeah. These are massively important to have. I think most people like have no one, like there's not really a big, like fuck the libraries movement, you know, like I think people, I mean, these, yeah, I guess, yeah, I guess there's a whole, like, uh, people should only read stories if they conform to certain gender stereotypes. Yeah. Well,

fuck those people um absolutely fuck those people yeah talking of fuck those people we unfortunately have to pivot to ads so uh you know here is some unfortunate advertisements all right we're back

Talking of people I dislike, actually, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, who was elected in 2020 and then re-elected, shamefully, this year, which is very disappointing. One of his first actions was to propose a budget which increased the funding to the police, surprise, and decreased the funding to the libraries that would lead to them closing for an extra day, right? And this is our, like, quote-unquote progressive mayor, who, you know, has been anything but.

But this isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, right? I've spoken since then to librarians around the country who for the last, at least half decade have faced funding cuts. Can you explain like, why doesn't the state see value in these services? I mean, I don't want you to like speak for, you know, like the Democrats defunding the libraries to give the cops more money, but can you explain like why there has been this ongoing assault on library budgets?

So, you know, you're talking about the last decade to half decade. I think we can really trace it back much farther, at least 30 years to the Clinton administration, actually. I want to talk about the Democrats. But even, you know, the roots farther back than that, because we have a neoliberal problem, right? So it's basically the idea that all activity should generate obvious immediate monetary profit, that everything should be run by a business, that everything should be subject to the market, quote unquote. And so that's where we are with libraries is that

Even though I can sit here and say every dollar that the IMLS spends generates $2 of economic activity, that somehow isn't even good enough. Because when the powers that be look at libraries, they just see money being flushed down the toilet, and that's the only way they can measure anything. So if you look at it and you're just saying, well, this is a place we spend money. This doesn't create money. This doesn't make more money happen.

The idea that everything should be run by a business and everything should be subject to market logics, that would say, well, if we're going to subject everything to market logics, libraries have no value because we're only measuring it. And can this make the balance sheet, can this make number go up? Yeah. And even though libraries do make number go up, it's not obvious. You can't make it obvious. There's no direct line between what libraries do and number go up.

even though there actually is, for example, with IMLS. So, you know, starting during the Clinton administration, when the federal government changed and how the federal government worked changed very much under the guise of increasing service quality, what they actually did was lay off a quarter million workers and, you know, turn everything into contract work instead of regular labor. And that, I think...

filtered down from the federal level into states and municipalities so that those levels of government too also started to look at how they ran their government things and in many places public libraries are arms of local government that those two should also be run like a business and be subject to market logics and therefore number does not go up we don't value this and

And that's basically it, is that, you know, it's hard now that we've had 30 years of overt neoliberalism in our government system and a couple of decades more of less obvious versions of it.

to make government, which is now being run like a business, even in the best of times, value things that aren't valued strictly monetarily. So there's no cultural value. And even if the monetary value isn't extremely obvious, it somehow doesn't count. Yeah, yeah. I guess it kind of... I used to lecture. I still do lecture at university, actually, starting again next month. But we pivoted towards everything has to be STEM.

in education generally because... Right, because that'll make money or something. Yeah, I don't know why, because Bill Gates made the line go up. And yeah, we lost so much that has not just intangible value, like you say, but actual tangible value, very, very obvious value. But nonetheless, like you say, it's not easy to put on a graph, so it disappears. Right. And then, even though cops also don't make money in a direct sense...

Somehow we can still fund that. So it really shows that, like, in the case of where you are, the carceral solution is now the only solution we have. And when we sit here as abolitionists and we say, well, let's get rid of all that stuff, and people say, well, what are you going to do instead? Our answer is often, it would be so different that it wouldn't be necessary. So we'd have prevention of the entire situation. That's one of the things that libraries offer is,

is prevention of the entire situation, making vast swaths of the carceral state unnecessary. So there's a conscious choice there, especially when money is being taken out of the balance sheets of a city government from the libraries and put into the cops, of this carceral choice of saying, we'd rather everyone's life is shit so we can throw them in jail than everyone have a nice life and no one would have to go to jail.

Yeah, and then they can come read a book instead. And yeah, it would be nice. It reminds me of one of the big projects of the anarchists in Spain in the 1930s was to create popular education centers, which included libraries, right? And they...

these entirely, they were not funded by the state. The state was not interested in making libraries in 1920s, 1930s in Spain. And they funded them from popular subscription and from people's union dues. And they built these Ateneos, which are now really beautiful places. One of the places I did my PhD in Barcelona. And like,

I wonder if there is, I guess it's very hard for us to conceive of a library without the state in the United States. And rich people putting little libraries in their middle-class neighborhoods is not the same thing. As much as they'd like to think it is, your little phone box library is not replacing these services. Is there a model for recreating this in a way that isn't reliant on the state, which seems increasingly hostile to it?

I think there's a couple models, and it depends upon how far down the revelation you go. So the example you gave of Spain, we have contemporary with that and slightly more recent versions of that in the U.S. So the workman's circle, now the worker's circle, they funded really wonderful cultural programs, including libraries. Unions often had libraries, especially back when they used to have more buildings. I'm part of my union, and aside from just being...

Where I work, we don't necessarily have a building per se. So those things have always existed, especially in the workman's circle, in ethnic communities who are trying to preserve a culture.

And that's something that fit into 20th century capitalism. And so if we go farther than the revolution, I read a really great pamphlet recently from the 70s, actually, that was from the UK. And it kind of discussed libraries, you know, if we make it through the revolution a little bit as being operated under a syndicalist model. Yeah. Where...

workers and patrons, which is what we call them now, there wouldn't be quite that split then, would be able to govern and run these libraries. There was a really great diagram. So there's definitely been ideas for a long time about what this could look like. Yeah, I mean, I guess in the collectivized economy of revolutionary Barcelona, libraries still existed, I think they always existed, and I'm sure it was along the syndicalist model because everything was. So yeah, I think that's a like,

a good thing for people to look towards. I want to stop and take one more break, and then I want to talk about what people can do to protect libraries. All right, we are back. So currently, like, I mean, this is like a funding cliff for the library system, right? I suppose it's hard to say, but like, how long would it take before people stop seeing these services if Doge was to start doging tomorrow? I honestly can't tell, you know, I think...

I think that people really doesn't, it's hard to say now, right? Because we do have the funding there. It's just, will it actually happen? Will the thing happen that has already been allocated? Yeah.

I think we have a little bit of time, but I would expect if that congressional oomph isn't expressed, that especially when summer reading rolls around, we'll really start to see it because that's something that a lot of people depend on to keep their kids occupied during the summer. And especially out, you know, in red states and rural areas, it's going to be very much like the, I never thought the leopards were going to eat my face kind of situation. Which is sad, like,

Because it's someone's kid who doesn't get to go to the library very often, right? Right, right. That sucks, you know, because it's going to be a lot of kids, especially without those resources. Yeah, I think about how I wouldn't have survived my undergraduate without libraries. All my grad school books are super expensive.

especially academic books. And like I relied very heavily on interlibrary loan. Yeah. And this is at the university level, to be sure, where books are very expensive. But at the public and school library level, you know, this is exactly why this is happening is because there is this

ongoing narrative from the last few decades where people, especially like queer kids, say that the library saved their lives. Young people of color saying like, this is the only place I could see myself in culture by reading these books. So of course, of course this is happening because that, you know, they want to take that away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's a place where people can kind of exist without that. Yeah. So let's talk about like, how can people engage to protect their libraries? What can they do?

What are some action items they can take? I unfortunately don't have great news. I don't think, you know, because of the way this is working and it is so much about just like raw brute power that no one at the federal government or even state governments for the most part seems to be able to counter. It's just like not something they can conceive of. Yeah. Yeah.

Because they already are doing things that supposedly shouldn't be allowed, right? We've already had the congressional funding. This should have a congressional... You know, this is passed by Congress, and yet an executive order and Elon Musk can undo it, right? If things were working, this wouldn't be happening. Right. So we are really kind of down the line a little bit in what we can do and how effective it's going to be. That said, there are things we can do. A lot of them are the...

The things that liberals usually do, which is like calling your senator over and over and over again every day and your representatives and your state government too to make sure that your state government is paying attention to what they're going to lose. There are certainly, you know, things one can sign on to for major library organizations. The ALA has been writing a lot and less formal organizations than that. I think one thing that we can all,

always be doing, not just in this situation, but if you want to be supporting libraries, one of the best things and easiest things you can do is go get a library card if you don't already have one and use your damn library. There's probably something there that you want. And that actually really does help because libraries, whether it's with something like IMLS or whether it's grants from foundations and or local funders, you know, their local government,

are better able to make their argument for why they should be given money if they have good statistics to say, we had 10% more readers this year. The number of books we loaned this year is higher than it's ever been. People are coming to our events in droves. That kind of success breeds success. If they can show that to potential funders, they're more likely to get money. So don't even bother to read the book. Just check the book out, keep it for a week, and give it back if you don't have time to read it. Make those numbers go up.

Yeah, yeah. And you can even like, let's say you're not inclined to go to the library for whatever reason, you don't like going out or worried about COVID or something. Like you can do most of this online, right? Like if you have Libby, you can borrow ebooks. You can borrow ebooks and audiobooks from Libby. Some libraries have streaming movies. A lot of libraries have...

still either all online or hybrid events that you can watch rather than having to go to the event at the library. You know, the one thing about some of those streaming services and Libby that I will caution about is that your data is less secure. If that's something you're concerned about, then it would be borrowing paper books. Okay, that's good to know. Because most libraries, even in the kind of

tech dystopian future we live in do a decent job or at least try to be good about your borrowing data when you borrow hard copies but because things like Libby and the streaming services are third party integrations those collect some amount of use data so

It's absolutely great to use those, but I would caution that if you are a person who has a very high threat model and you want to be careful about your data, go for the paper. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a nicer experience to read a paper book as well. What about like if people, I know lots of people who are librarians listen, email me, like is there a way that they can organize, which is the way that people are organizing, either to prevent this or like,

It's a way of harm reduction, right? Like as a way of reducing the damage that the state can do to people's access to learning. Yeah. So there are a few more radical organizations that I think are worth paying attention to. My favorite is Library Freedom Project. They're really wonderful. Okay. And more willing to say the thing without bullshit. Yeah. The thing that, you know, I would obviously urge every worker to do this, but if your workplace is not unionized...

yeah start working on that yeah um that will always give you more power so you should you should start trying to organize your workplace yeah definitely hopefully uh hopefully there's still time for people to do that like yeah because who knows where that's gonna go but you can at least try it it's still legal now yeah right why not why not start and like regardless of what happens like we're stronger in this together than we are apart and

Like unions have done a lot to prevent fascism in the past. And similarly, there are, depending upon what state you live in, there might be a state library organization that is active. And that would be just a good way to make connections with other libraries near you and their librarians. And, you know, maybe if you do lose some of your funding, you can put your heads together and, you know, use each other's resources and have joint programming and things like that. That makes sense. Are people like attempting, so I know some of the stuff IMLS have is like online archives. Yeah.

Are people attempting to somehow download that in order to preserve it in the event that it goes away? I don't know that that's really... Is that not what's at threat? That's not really what we... Yeah, I think that there are other kind of data rescue projects with the federal government that have better data than that. IMLS doesn't have that much data. So I wouldn't be too concerned with that. Okay.

So it's more like along the workplace organizing side. Yeah. It's definitely like trying to figure out to make, how to make your and the libraries around you keep going and offering the things to your communities that they've been offering. Yeah, definitely. It would be pretty tragic. Like there's a library not so far from my house. Like I can ride my bike to it and I go there all the time and it would be, be really tragic to be without that. Yeah.

So yeah, please continue to organize your libraries. Is there anything else that you'd like to plug or suggest people? It's a pretty bleak time generally, and I think a lot of us take refuge, especially in reading, actually. It's a way you can escape terrible things. Is there anything else you'd like to kind of suggest for people as we dive deeper into fascism every day at the moment? I think in libraries and elsewhere, it's just...

Being able to offer a counter-narrative, like not buying into the idea that the library is...

a money hole, you know? Yeah. It can only be valued monetarily. So when you hear that, maybe start going to your library's board meetings. And when you hear those kinds of things said, get online for the comments and offer a different narrative. And you can do that all over your life in different ways. When you hear that narrative that is monetary and neoliberal and harmful, offer a different one. Yeah, I think that's really good. Like, it's so sad to think that we should have to quantify the...

the value of everything monetarily, but especially something like a library. Like so many people have had such positive engagements with them, which have nothing to do with the cash next. They're sort of like generating revenue and that's what makes them valuable and what makes them special sometimes. So...

Hopefully people can advocate for that. How would you find your library's board meeting if you wanted to? If you have a public library near you, they should have a website and the website should have an events page that includes board meetings. Hopefully other information about your library's board as well. And if you can't find it, maybe call up the library and ask. They'll probably just tell you. They're really good at information there. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that is the thing that they do. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us, Jamie. That was great. It was really, really helpful. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

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It's where the adventure begins. Hey and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today we'll continue on our journey through Latin American anarchism, where we last left off with a look at the anarchist history of Uruguay. We talked about Uruguay's general history, its radical influences, anarchism's period of popularity in the early 20th century, its radical experiments, and its cultural influence. So today, we're going to talk about the history of Uruguay.

James and I, because James is here. Hello, James. Hi, Andrew. Today, we're going to look at what Iroquoian anarchists have been up to from the 50s onward, paying special attention to the activity of the Federación Anarquista Iroquia and the idea of especificismo. By the way, as James just indicated, I am Andrew, Andrew Sage. You can find me on YouTube as Andrewism. But all that aside, let's get into it.

The Federación Anarquista Uruguaya, or FAU, was founded in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1956. According to Paul Sharkey in the Federación Anarquista Uruguaya, the FAU had very strong working class roots, as many of the militants came from labor-heavy districts like El Cero, which definitely shaped their outlook.

The FAU was also very much emphasizing direct action over electoral strategies. It favored armed struggle as a necessity in reaction to state repression and economic exploitation. And the FAU had a very strong stance against Marxist-Leninism. Although some members sympathized with aspects of Marxism, many of them resisted the bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies that influenced that milieu.

Unlike in many other Latin American countries, as you may have recalled us covering in the past, anarchism persisted in mainstream relevance even after the rise of the Bolsheviks and their influence globally, and of course the coinciding fall of the anarchists in Spain.

According to Oliver Zizenko's 65 Years of Revolution, the FAU came about in a time when Uruguay's prosperity coming out of World War II had come to an end, as its agricultural exports were no longer needed to feed the Allies' massive standing armies. This economic downturn triggered major social unrest, which the anarchist presence was able to spring upon.

One such instance of unrest involved 150,000 workers going on strike in solidarity with their fellow workers in a tire factory. During the strike and after, the FAU involved students, unionists, intellectuals, community organizers, and even a few exiles from the Spanish Civil War to build up a more united labor movement.

So rather than having unions split along political ideological affiliations like moderates, socialists, anarchists, right populists, and so on, there would be one big tent just focused on labor. Now, I personally think a big tent has its benefits and its drawbacks, as with any other strategy. I think the benefit is obviously that it has the ability to mobilize a large number of people,

But I think the difficulty and the drawback is that having so many affiliations under that big tent can mean that there's not really much of a shared goal left behind. Like, yeah, the anarchists want anarchy. The right populists might just want to secure some benefits and protections. And the socialists may be interested in launching a party. Sure, they all proclaim to have some interest on the side of the workers. But how that manifests looks different from group to group.

But we'll see how that big tent approach turned out for the FAU. So they formed the National Confederation of Workers, or CNT, as that big tent in 1964. But even before that, there was a split. Not too much of a surprise. After the Cuban Revolution, the FAU was actually divided between those who were opposed to Castro and those who critically supported the revolution.

Those who were opposed to Castro eventually broke away from the FAU in 1963 as Castro entrenched himself in the Soviet bloc, while those who remained in the FAU were critical of Castro and his government but still supported the fall of Batista. Of course, with the Cuban Revolution came that very noticeable shift in American foreign policy.

They saw that with all that happening right in their backyard, they'd need to take a very different approach if they wanted to win the Cold War. So Zuzanko actually describes how in 1961, JFK changed the approach of the now infamous School of the Americas from preparing for Soviet invasion to preparing for anti-communist counterinsurgency against homegrown revolutions.

So as a result, militaries across Latin America became more right-wing and seized power for themselves to protect civilians from the danger of their rights. In 1964, it was Brazil. In 1968, it was Peru. In 1973, it was Chile and Uruguay fell. And in 1976, Argentina fell.

As Ozenko noted, in just over a decade, Uruguayan anarchists would become surrounded by right-wing dictatorships which collaborated to round up and exterminate left-wing dissidents of all flavors. Not to mention, the economic situation wasn't exactly getting better. According to Paul Sharkey, between 1955 and 1959, the cost of living doubled and wages did not keep pace.

By 1965, inflation was running at 100%, and by 1967, at 140%. Madness. Yeah. Well, just wait and see, Andrew. Oh, yeah, we are living in some interesting times. Yeah, yeah. You never know.

So the president that preceded the military dictator imposed a wage freeze and devalued the currency. That was his bright idea, his solution to the crisis. So people's lives were obviously getting worse. And the time had come for some decisive action. So the CNT aided in strikes across sectors and even tried to call for a general strike.

As Zinco writes, the FAU decided that they were going to take on a strategy of urban guerrilla warfare. So they tapped into a coalition of leftist groups to...

Robin Hood, food from the corporations, to give to the poor. Awesome. Love to see it. Yeah, but sadly the coalition couldn't last very long. Differences in strategy would lead to the FAU doing its thing by building defense councils, similar to those organized in the Spanish Civil War. Yeah, yeah, interesting. While the other groups copied a Che Guevara-style guerrilla army approach, forming the National Liberation Movement to Pamiros, or the MLNT.

The existential debate among anarchists in arms is this that you've just highlighted, right? It's need we form authoritarian structures similar to those using, for example, the Cuban revolution, the Russian revolution, these kind of status revolutions, which characterize the left in the 20th century in some ways.

Or is it possible for us to go from our community defense and the defense committees, like the six person groups at the CNT organized in Spain to a more egalitarian, large formation, like a, like a truly revolutionary army. And like,

The split that you're talking about is a split that almost every movement has. Yeah. Although the MLNT was necessarily anarchist. Right. They were like following the Castro model. Is that right? Like the Che Guevara kind of guerrilla warfare doctrine. Pretty much. The Guevara sort of model. Yeah. Although I'm glad that you bring up this point because it's actually something that I was writing about earlier today in preparation for a video. Oh, interesting. I think there's a

conflation that anarchists need to be careful with between leadership in the sense of authority, as in the right to command and control and that kind of thing, versus leadership in the sense of guidance, advice, coordination, expertise. I think that just as you might have an anarchist construction collective, right, and they're building structures

a house. You might have something like a foreman who is coordinating all the actions that all the different builders and all the different tradesmen are engaged in to ensure that the different parts of the house come together cohesively and seamlessly, that nobody's like stepping on anybody's toes, that everything is being done in a proper timing. That is an instance where there would be coordination without necessarily having authority.

It's just really a division of labor to ensure that the task that everybody is there to accomplish can be accomplished. And the person who is given that particular task within that division of labor is doing so by taking on that responsibility. But just as they have the responsibility, others will also have the responsibilities. And that does not elevate them above the other people in that association. Right, yeah. And so kind of in the same way that you have that in a construction site,

I think that that is the kind of approach we need to take in a military formation where the person who is, you know, respected for their knowledge of military strategy or has the information or the expertise to be able to handle the planning of that approach, because we're all here to win, right? We're all here to defend our freedom and to defend the freedom of the people we love. So there's no sense in splitting off into a bunch of different groups and failing at our task.

When we can come together where necessary to engage in the coordination of our strategy to improve the chances of our success. You know, and of course there is a vulnerability in times of warfare that we do have to acknowledge because, you

historically is one of the times that is the most ripe for authoritarian seizure and control. But because that vulnerability exists in those times is when I think we have to be extra vigilant of how that could potentially manifest. You know, we don't sacrifice our cause in defense of the cause. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, definitely. Like, because it's easy to do that. It's easy to be persuaded that this situation is unique and different and therefore we need to accept it.

some kind of compromise of the very essence of what we're doing. The method that like the people I have spoken to, both those within formations today and in Rojava and in most in Rojava, but also in Myanmar and those in

for instance in the iron column which was a five column in the spanish civil war they're probably most famous for leaving the front line to attack the cops because they felt like they didn't have enough weapons and the cops had too many and what they did was that they they created a concept of the minimum necessary discipline discipline being something that one has for oneself not the hunting that comes from above yeah and they um they had leaders who would lead in times of combat right when we needed to make

swift and decisive action. There wasn't time to obtain consensus. They used consensus to arrive at those leaders and

Those leaders were able in times of urgency to make urgent decisions, but that didn't confer to power or status outside of that moment. Yeah, yeah. It's just like in an emergency scenario. You know, if somebody is leading a surgery, for example, or leading a rescue operation, that doesn't mean that they're elevated above everybody else. It just means that they have the knowledge already.

and the skills to accomplish that particular task. And the others of their own free will respect that knowledge enough to go along with what the person is recommending. Exactly, yeah. And that doesn't mean that that person is inherently capable of bossing you around. Exactly. And I like the mention of discipline in particular because that really is the distinction. Because people talk about, oh, you need to have military discipline. How are you supposed to have military discipline without blind obedience to authority?

And sure, we're not going to have, we're never going to have discipline to the extent that soldiers are dehumanized and treated like cannon fodder, as you would find in a traditional authoritarian military. But the discipline is derived from solidarity. It's derived from the responsibility people have for each other, the care people have for each other within their formation, and the responsibility they have for their own actions, right?

as being part of that formation and for how their actions will affect those around them. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's something like, you see it again and again when you read the column, the Daruti column newspaper, right? They talk about discipline and how we have to have, our discipline comes from our commitment to our cause and to each other, not from any fear of repercussions or like quote-unquote disciplinary action, but from like the fact that we don't want to let our comrades down nor do we want to let our cause down. And like...

When people do do that, right, that there are, it doesn't mean that aren't disciplinary actions, but it means that those are like, like you said before, you don't break away from the core of what you're doing. So they agree by consensus to include with the person who has done the thing that is considered to be wrong, what a suitable punishment would be or a suitable set of repercussions would be so that it reinforces the idea of like consensus and like discipline coming from oneself rather than from fear of punishment.

Yeah, I think there is, of course, the potential for processes to potentially become, how do I want to put this? What I will say is I think it's necessary, but even in engaging with those who have, you know, broken trust or who have, you

seemingly split from the association or have jeopardized the safety or security of the association that you find ways to deal with those situations on a case-by-case basis. You know, that you're responsive to the particular circumstances that cause that action or that particular outcome.

rather than as we would find in modern militaries where you have like a very clear this action has this consequence this action has this consequence like a lot more flexibility is required because we understand that you know we don't have this matrix of crime that authorities do you know we're dealing with harm they're dealing with crime right and so in dealing with harm we have to approach each of those situations in the context of their situations rather than

in some sort of cold, like distant calculation. You know, I think in approaching it in that way, people are more willing, I think, to fess up or to take accountability for their harm because they know that there's that relationship there that are going to try to work through it. That while there may be many potential consequences to their actions, there's an openness to dialogue there rather than a rigidity of,

this is what you did. So this is the outcome automatically. Yeah. I mean, that is the latter is like a system that looks not at people, but at quote unquote crimes. Right. And like,

This is the opposite of a restorative justice system, which looks at people and the situations they are in and not just the worst thing that they happen to have done. We should return to South America, Andrew, if once again diverted it. Yes, yes. Although I feel like these digressions always get to something essential and brings out something extra to what I would have prepared in advance. So we had this split, right? We had the FAU and then you had the MLNT.

And they did collaborate where there was common cause, but it wasn't a permanent collaboration. And while this was taking place in the urban guerrilla warfare sphere, you had different things taking place in the labor movement. The FAU was dealing with the consequences of Big Tent organizing, as they found that the Uruguayan Communist Party, or PCU, had pretty successfully claimed significant influence in the CNT.

So in response, according to Sosenko, the FAU created a rank-and-file alliance called the Combative Tendency, which pushed for more militancy and less bureaucracy in the union movement. Through that alliance, the FAU was able to accomplish a lot more outreach and action. But in return, the president of Uruguay introduced emergency laws executed by the military to counter the unrest.

The revolutionary left continued to fight against the military's involvement in civilian life and also formed a daily paper called Ipoca. Then the government was like, stop, don't do that, that's illegal. And when the government says stop, don't do that, that's illegal, that means they put boots on the ground and, you know, raided their offices. And so the paper fell apart and the groups involved went underground. And like I said, the military raided their bases.

But then when the FAU was like, let's get the band back together, unfortunately, the other groups were too scared to resurface, understandably. And so because of that fear, the PCU kind of had a fall from Greece. You know, for a while, they were the big boys on campus in the CNT, but after the FAU kind of

came to the forefront again, with all its bravery and stuff, they kind of end up falling back. And you see, the PCU had chosen to appease the military because they believed that a leftist faction within the ranks of the army might support their bid for power, kind of like what happened in the Russian Revolution. And so, you know, they really thought they were cooking something, but as the saying goes, the stove was not even on. Yeah.

I haven't heard that one. That's good. Yeah, the military saw them as pretty much insignificant. So much so that while other leftist groups were facing severe oppression, the PCU was actually pretty much left alone. And so when the Union rank and file saw that and turned their backs on the PCU, they ended up turning their focus toward the combative tendency because at least they were doing radical and serious stuff.

And so the unions were under attack from all sides, the police, the military, and even neo-fascist gangs. And the FAU-led combative tenancy was focused on defending these workers' movements from those threats.

According to Zyzenko, the FAU held a secret congress and formed their own armed wing, the OPR33, which unlike other guerrilla groups in the region, wasn't a top-down organization. Instead, individual cells had the freedom to decide how they carried out missions and which actions they took part in. The FAU still set the overall strategy, but it wasn't about becoming some kind of vanguard.

Some of the actions, by the way, according to Sharkey, included bank robberies and factory owner kidnappings. It's like old school Spanish anarchism. Yeah. Well, there were some old school Spanish anarchists within their ranks. Yeah. So he really can't be surprised. Yeah, yeah, true. There's this wonderful line in Abel Paz's book about Ruti that says,

Daruti was very fond of children so he risked his life robbing banks to fund their education oh that's beautiful it's such a wonderful like that is beautiful yeah I don't know I just enjoy it very much the whole like you never know what direction that sentence is going to go in that is a quintessential example of that yeah I think yeah

yeah so you know you do what you have to do pretty much yeah yeah and like i think it's really like he wasn't maximalist for the sake of maximalism he was maximalist for the sake of like educating children yeah yeah it wasn't it he didn't see the violence as an end in itself exactly exactly it had a cause and a reasoning behind it yeah and the the fau was the same way you know their reasoning was just that

If the capitalist class was going to use force to protect their interests, then the workers should be able to use force to defend theirs. Yeah, yeah. France Fanon stuff. And so they did what they had to do. Meanwhile, the PCU was stuck to their policy of appeasement, which actually had a detrimental effect in the broader movement as the military kept growing in strength.

And so the very anti-communist military's involvement in breaking up all the work activities emboldened their role in politics. And then once they defeated the MLNT, with the FAU struggling to resist, isolated by the PCUs in action, the military took on the opportunity to coup the government, leading to the rise of Juan Maria Porreberry, the first president of the civic military dictatorship in 1973.

In the aftermath, the FAU made the tough call to move their operations to Argentina, which hadn't yet fallen to military dictatorship. From there, they worked within the CNT to organize a massive 15-day general strike. It shut the country down for a time, but it wasn't enough. And the efforts to keep up the fight were constantly undermined by the PCU, which still insisted on negotiating instead of taking real action. Meanwhile, the people were suffering.

According to Sharkey, between 1971 and 1976, there was a 35% fall in real wages, and by 1979, inflation was running at 80%, with wages limping behind at 45%. So until 1976, the FAU continued to work between Argentina and Uruguay. But after Argentina's coup, that was it. To Kojizenko directly.

During the US's Operation Condor, dictatorships across Latin America continued, coordinated to kidnap, torture, and murder leftists. Across the continent, between 60,000 and 80,000 leftists were killed, and more than 400,000 were placed in political prisons. End quote. Jesus. And I think we need to sit with those numbers, because it's very easy to hear numbers like that and just think, you know...

That's just a statistic, pretty much. We hear big numbers, our mind kind of goes statistic. Yeah. But to like think about the impact that would have for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to be just taken out, whether killed or imprisoned, leaving like a gaping hole of knowledge, of experience, of education, of radicalism. Yeah. A country may take decades to recover from something like that.

It's a cultural death in a sense. You know, this is the political movement, but it's kind of similar to how during colonialism, elders would be wiped out. And with them, all of their knowledge, all of their oral histories, all of their languages just wiped out in an instant. This is different, of course, as a political ideology, as opposed to an entire culture and ethnicity, but it's still just a massive loss.

of all that history all that experience all that radicalism and information just gone right yeah it's hard for a movement to recover from that yeah it's not like a genocide or like this colonial kind of you could call it like a decap well it's like a decapitation of a movement i suppose well i would say it's more than a decapitation because it's not just like notable figures that were taken out or particularly influential thought leaders or anything it's

Almost everybody. Yeah. Anybody who had that fight in them or had that radical knowledge or consciousness.

Yeah, anyone with any lived experience, all the things they'd learned or the mistakes they'd made and learned from like a gun, like the movement has to begin almost from like a blank slate. Yeah, the history is basically racist and so all that's left is really what they might have written down. Yeah. Which is obviously only a small portion of what they might have had to share with the rest of the world. Yeah, especially in a movement that's been criminalized and pursued by the state, right? Like,

what they write down is what they risked the state discovering so that they're only going to risk writing certain things down. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, when you look at this, this, this, this didn't just happen in Uruguay. That's happened all over the world. In some cases, this massive wipe out of the anarchist movement took place even earlier, you know, in the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s. But in, in all of these cases, it's,

That loss is something that we are still, in a sense, recovering from. We kind of had to slowly build back, but we still haven't ever reached, in many places, the height that anarchism was at, at certain points in its history, in certain parts of the world. Yeah. I mean, look at even like Spain still has very strong anarcho-syndicalist movement, right? But like the best of the anarchists died in,

in Aragon, in Madrid, and in concentration camps afterwards, or fighting in the Second World War. And it took decades for that movement to recover. And it's still not as strong as it was. This was one of the high points. Especially when the legacy is so much erased. When you look at how histories are taught everywhere in the world,

You're barely going to get a mention of anarchism, despite the massive role it played in shaping the 20th century, 19th and 20th centuries. Yeah, this has been one of my constant things as a historian is that like,

When people write histories today, they write them from the perspective of the inevitability of the state. And I'm not alone in making this analysis. David Graeber does it. Jim Scott did it too. The idea is that people who exist outside of the state are behind and that they have failed or chosen not to advance to the more advanced human existence that is the state. Mm-hmm.

Jim Scott does this in The Art of Not Being Governed, right? Like, if we look instead as people who have chosen to refuse a state, then we understand anarchism as a choice that people would make knowing the options available to them rather than a step backwards or failure to advance to the state. And we can look at the whole of history from that perspective and see it very differently. But most historians don't. Exactly. Exactly.

I'm sure you've encountered this where people just kind of assume, oh, well, the anarchists lost. That means they're destined to lose. Yeah. They lost that particular fight. That doesn't mean the war is necessarily lost. And additionally, states have lost too. Yeah, states continue to lose. States, state projects have lost, continue to lose. You know, the capitalist project, capitalist businesses, they lose, they fail.

That doesn't mean that the project is destined to lose or destined to fail. It just means that particular iteration or that particular attempt was not able to succeed in all its ambitions. Yeah, and as historians, we shouldn't be making that judgment, right? We should be attempting to learn from and document the past rather than to sort of categorize it into failed and successful. Yeah, that too. Because the standards of failure and success...

often dictated by the standpoint of the status quo. Yes, very much so, yeah. It's kind of like how the Haitian Revolution is spoken of as the only successful slave revolt, or one of the only successful slave revolts. And the standard for success in that case is that they were able to establish an independent state.

Whereas other slave revolts in other parts of the world, including within the Caribbean, would have taken different paths. The Maroons, for example, their former revolt was a withdrawal from the system that surrounded them, creating a pocket of resistance, isolating themselves. Same thing in Brazil. We had the Quilombos, the settlements that extracted themselves from the surrounding oppressive structure and tried to survive to the extent that they could. Not all of them lasted.

But nothing lasts forever, you know? Countries rise and fall. And so I think if we limit ourselves to just the example of Haiti, particularly in the context of success in a slave revolution,

I think we miss out on a lot of those other examples and opportunities for inspiration and guidance. Yeah, I think you're right. I think like, uh, this applies to lots of places. I think about it, like, you know, I'm fortunate to have this like background in history, but also to be with people in their moments of revolution and to like spend time with revolutionaries in Myanmar. And like one of the, uh, the analyses that you'll always see is that like

this creation of liberated spaces is a not enough or be like, there are also places within the non-government zone where there is still very strong control from a pseudo state. Right. Like, but I think that overlooks the fact that, yeah, there are not like libertarian states, but people are living their lives without gods and masters that they are like experiencing freedom in every moment.

And they are liberated in their own lives as they continue to struggle to liberate territory and other people. And that might be what success looks like. Yeah. Like they are able to be self-realized. Yeah, just the psychological experience in itself, it cannot be under-unestimated or underrated. Even if it's on that small scale of the individual, that's still valuable. Yeah, and if we acknowledge that,

It's much harder to go back. Like those people can't go back because they've existed in liberation, right? Like they've lived in a free way and like they will always know that that freedom is possible, that they can live without authority, live with, without,

state power that that like liberation is a thing that can exist not just in our minds but in physical space and like exactly they will always know that like that's that's available and if we can tell those stories so will other people exactly exactly because that is something i speak speak about so often it's the need to

In the process of social revolution to develop people's powers, drives and consciousness. You do that by giving people both, of course, theoretical education and, you know, sharing knowledge in that sense, but also through experience. Because I have used this phrase before, you can't put the gene back in the bottle. You can't go from experiencing freedom to

to a situation of unfreedom and then shrug your shoulders and think, oh, that's all there could ever be. After you've experienced an alternative to the status quo, you're not going to go back to thinking the status quo is all there is and all that could ever exist. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We have to remember that when we're looking at these things, like we can, it's easy to look from where something ended and project that back, but we have to understand how it felt when people were doing it too. Exactly.

So we're kind of, we kind of left on a somber chapter in Uruguay's anarchist history. Because unfortunately it was only after the fall of Uruguay's dictatorship in 1985 that anarchist militants were able to return to Uruguay and re-establish the FAU in a fractured political and social landscape with greatly reduced numbers.

Some of the former anarchists involved in the FAU created the People's Victory Party, or PVP, in exile, which had attempted to reorganize resistance efforts, but also fell into some Leninist tendencies. But the mainline FAU continued to focus on grassroots organizing, worker struggles, and political education.

It continues to be engaged in Latin American anarchist networks, particularly with Brazilian and Argentine groups, like the Ferraçao Anarquista Caucha, the Ferraçao Anarquista Cabocla, the Ferraçao Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro, and the Argentine organization AUCA.

Despite its past radicalism, the FAU has shifted towards a broader approach, integrating mass movements while retaining its commitment to anti-authoritarian socialism. Since then and up to today, their approach has aligned with the practice of Especifismo, which they developed to rebuild their strength in Uruguayan political movements.

That approach has since been influential across Latin America and beyond, including North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. I've actually spoken about Especifismo on this podcast before and on my channel, but to give a quick summary, Especifismo is an organizational approach guided by three key concepts. The first is the need for a specifically anarchist organization built around a unity of ideas and praxis.

The second is the use of the specifically anarchist organization to theorize and develop strategic, political, and organizing work. And the third is active involvement in and shaping of autonomous and popular social movements, which is described as the process of social insertion.

Especifists reject the left-unity idea of a synthesis organization of revolutionaries or even multiple currents of anarchists loosely united because they feel it boils down to a lowest common denominator politics.

They feel that when this unity is preferred at any cost, it leaves little room for united action or developed political discussion. It can be described in a sense as an affinity group with the shared interest in the advancement of a very specific politic, but they aren't just internally focused. Unesco is focused on building popular power as a means of revolutionary transformation, rejecting both electoral and vanguardist Marxist approaches.

So the Especifismo distinguishes between specifically anarchist political organizations or affinity groups and broader mass movements. And they advocate for anarchists creating the former and inserting themselves in the latter, building up anarchist presence and the presence of anarchist ideas in unions, in student groups, and in community struggles.

So if you want a more in-depth exploration of Especifismo, I suggest reading the discussion between Felipe Correa and Juan Carlos Mecoso called The Strategy of Especifismo on the Anarchist Library.

And they talk about how the fragmentation of the working class under neoliberalism has created some very distinct challenges that require fresh organizational strategies and less dogmatic rigidity to simplistic class analysis. But they also speak for the need to coordinate and discipline and strategically engage anarchist groups within social movements, retaining their independence but engaging in their struggle.

And they also end up in that interview discussing the FAU's long-term strategy as a process of resistance, rupture, and reconstruction. Resistance meaning that they're strengthening grassroots organizations, direct action, and ideological development. Rupture meaning that they're breaking away from catalyst institutions through revolutionary action. And reconstruction meaning that they're establishing new social relations based on self-management and mutual aid.

It's kind of similar to the way that I break down social revolution conceptually as an approach that incorporates both opposition and the proposal of alternatives.

So I have been thinking about a specific small lately. I made that video many years ago and my anarchist understanding has shifted a lot, especially recently in going back and looking at how I would have analyzed things previously. I think there's some different directions that I might take certain things in. I think, for example, the idea of affinity groups engaging in social intuition is extremely valuable in

in shifting the conversation within, you know, these mass movements. But I also think that there's a risk in the ways in which a specifismo, if not properly understood or conceptualized, could end up opening ground for co-optation towards some rather un-anarchist outcomes.

You know, what I mean by that is, I think it's important when discussing Especifismo to be very careful against the interpretation of it as some kind of vanguardist strategy or way to dictate a vision of anarchy. I think that even if somebody's taken the Especifist approach in creating an affinity group organized around a very specific form of anarchism,

That group should still be in conversation with different tendencies and engaging in an ongoing process of critique and convergence of ideas. I believe this was the sort of motivation between Malatesta's idea of synthesis and the Synthesis Federation in anarchist history. I'm still learning a bit about that.

But anyway, I'd love to hear about, you know, what the FU and North Anarchists in Uruguay are up to here now. You know, they can feel free to reach out to me. I have a website now, andrewsage.org, and I wish them all power to all the people. That's it for me today. You can find me on YouTube and Patreon. And this has been It Could Happen Here. Peace. Have you ever wiped with a piece of dry, single-ply toilet paper and wondered...

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Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead. Welcome to Kidnapping Here, a podcast where I last left RFK Jr. on the proclamation that if he was to take office, millions will die. And all evidence suggests that I am going to be right about this. I am your host, Mia Wong. With me is Gare. Hello. He's making the meme come true. He's making the millions, millions must die.

We're really, really... Really, truly, only the white man could make real unlimited genocide in the first world. It's great. It's great stuff. So, this is gonna be a recap episode of... Not even all. Like, some of the stuff RFK Jr. has done since he's gotten confirmed. As the fucking United States' Secretary of Health and Human Services. A organization which includes...

so many things, but like, for example, the NIH, the CDC, FDA, I believe. Yeah, many, many things. So, okay, there are lots and lots and lots of different rounds of budget cuts that are happening and grant cuts happening

From a whole bunch of different departments and agencies. We're going to start with National Institutes of Health cutting a whole bunch of studies for vaccines for new diseases. So RFK Jr.'s thing was, well, we're not going to fund any COVID research because COVID is over. So no more research into COVID vaccine treatments. We're not going to fund that. Now, obviously, COVID is not over yet.

Trivially, obviously, you catch it and it makes you sick and sometimes you die and sometimes you get debilitating long-term negative health outcomes. But this is the logic that they're using to just be like, no, fuck it, fuck it. We'll cut all of the funding that we can find that does this stuff. Now, the problem again, and so these cuts look a lot like the very beginning of the Trump administration where they were just going through and like,

you'd get a giant list of grants that got cut in the sense that they're like control effing programs, right? And they're like searching for keywords and then just killing all the block grants that do that. We'll get more into this at the end of the episode with like a different set of cuts. But one of the big issues with this is that it's killing coronavirus research in general. Like all of it.

He's getting like massive cuts. And so this includes, I think it was CNBC or as you're putting on this, killing a bunch of fairly like late stage research on things like, you know, like actually having vaccines that could work across like the broad category of coronaviruses because like obviously there are a whole bunch of different kinds of coronaviruses and there are certain sort of

vaccine techniques that can work to suppress the families of them. And fucking, I don't know, maybe the Europeans or the Chinese will figure out how to do that because it sure as fuck isn't going to be us after we cut all this fucking funding. It's great. So, all right, we're starting sort of, I guess, on the vaccine beat here because there's so many different kinds of bullshit going

One of the other really big things that happened is Dr. Mark Peters, who was the guy who like did Operation Warp Speed, which was Trump's like big push to get a COVID vaccine now. And this is something I think is worth highlighting. And again, this guy like worked under Trump, right? A lot. And some of these programs are we talking about later were Trump programs. But Trump won. I mean, like Trump did do some anti-vax shit and say some anti-vax shit. But.

He wasn't like a hardline anti-vaxxer? Definitely not, no.

Yeah. At many points, he tried to take credit himself for the fast response of the COVID vaccine, which, hey, as long as we get the vaccine, do whatever you want, buddy. And the amount that that's been memory-holed, and they're trying to just alter history regarding the COVID vaccine is a little head-scratching. It gives me that slow-growing headache that I'm experiencing now.

every day, nearly all the time, just not due to COVID, because I've actually, to my knowledge, never gotten it. But it is a headache of political origin. Yeah. And I think one of one of the one of the interesting elements of this is something I talked about more like in the wake of like the immediate wake of 2020, like 2021, 2022, is there used to be a big split in the Republican Party between like the lab leakers and the anti-vaxxers.

Because the thing about being a lab leak person is that, like, you can't be a China released a bioweapon person who also thinks that the vaccine is evil, or at least you shouldn't be able to, that those are, like, mutually... It took years. Legitimately, this is enough cognitive dissonance that even, like, the Alex Jones types, it took years for them to sort of, like, develop a level of cognitive dissonance that allowed them to do this. They did do it, eventually, and what we're seeing right now, right, is, like...

Trump, as a way of sort of shoring up his anti-vaccine flank, has just like handed control over all public health policy to these just like hideous anti-vaccine like cranks. And so Peter Marks, who was like one of the big guys from Trump won and who stayed on through Biden, who was like, yeah, OK, I'm going to fucking get this vaccine to work. He has been forced to resign. And Marks also was the guy who was in charge of vaccine safety in the U.S., right? Yeah.

And he's forced out, and he said in a statement for CNN, I mean, you can read the whole thing somewhere, but, quote, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, this is RFK Jr., but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies. So, that's good. That's the guy who used to be in charge of our country's vaccine safety going, like, yeah, this guy wanted me to just fucking lie about vaccines constantly. So,

That's great. That's fun. So before we get into the people who he's also he's bringing in to do his like unbelievably fake hack bullshit vaccine study stuff, we should talk a bit about the measles outbreak in Texas. Now, the reason that this isn't getting more coverage is that this is going to get a really significant amount of coverage on this show in the near future. When when those episodes are done, this is going to get significant coverage.

For now, what I think is sort of important about this is that so there has been an outbreak of measles, which like there should not be outbreaks of measles. We have defeated measles. We have the vaccine. You can take it. It's part of the MMR vaccine. You take it and then you don't get measles. But there are massive, you know, like communities who are fucking not vaccinating. And as like in large part because of the fucking anti-vaccine shit that's being spread by people like RFK Jr.,

And faced with this, RFK Jr. has done a bunch of unbelievably mealy-mouthed bullshit about his personal choice to do vaccines, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then also did a whole thing about how he was going to have the government send vitamin A to, like, combat measles, which is just nonsense, right? Like...

So this is obviously just a complete fucking fiasco. We're going to cover this more as it goes on. Yeah, so stay tuned for more measles horrors. Yeah, the other thing we're not going to cover because it's going to be covered by these products and services are these advertisements. I would love to talk more about them. We're still trying to get that HIMS and eventually that THEMS sponsorship. We're getting closer. We're getting closer. Getting closer.

We are back. Now, what we are not coming closer to is finding a connection between vaccines and autism because there isn't one. It's all fake. However, people who don't believe this include RFK Jr. So RFK Jr. has been...

Doing something. Okay, it's genuinely a little bit unclear who exactly is running this, whether this is like the Department of Health and Human Services is like a broader organization or just the CDC. But he's trying to set up a bunch of people to like basically cook the books and try to publish some shit that shows a link between vaccines and autism. It's genuinely deeply murky and unclear as to who's doing what right now. But one of the people who's been brought in to do this is

is David Gere, who is, oh God, oh boy. I mean, even by the standards of guy whose job it is to like cook evidence to make it look like there's a connection between vaccines and autism, even by their standards, Gere is like an absolute fucking hack. So we talked about Angie Wakefield on this show and there is weirdly a Wakefield connection here too. So Wakefield's the doctor who originally cooked up

like a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Gear is from like a slightly different faction of these cranks. And this is the fashion that's more that's like the most closely aligned with RFK Jr. And this is the faction that thinks that like weird methylmercury or whatever the fuck in some older vaccines was causing autism, which like, no, it wasn't.

But he, you know, he and his dad, Mark here, like did a whole bunch of work to try to sort of establish this evidence. I'm going to read this from NBC just describing their work. Quote, the Gears conducted research from a makeshift laboratory in their in their carpeted wood paneled suburban Maryland basement. So get there. They're doing this shit from their basement. Yeah.

published several studies, many of which were retracted, and promoted an unproven treatment for autism that cost families tens of thousands of dollars and included injections of Lupron, a drug used for prostate cancer in early puberty. In children, it's only approved for precocious puberty and comes with side effects including bone damage, heart issues, and seizures.

They diagnosed kids with precocious puberty without proper testing and misled parents into thinking they were signing up for an approved autism therapy. A 2011 Maryland Board of Physicians investigation found the Gveras had violated standards of care. So, to back up for a second, right? A, they claimed that mercury in vaccines is causing autism. B, they claimed to be able to treat it with vaccines.

Puberty blockers? Like, they can cure autism with a puberty blocker? Yes. Which is also extremely funny given, like, you know, all of these people are, like, trying to ban puberty blockers now. I'll give it to them. That's fine. We're gonna cure autism by giving all these autistic kids puberty blockers and making them trans.

Sure. Sure. Let's go for it. Let's give that a shot. I'm sure that won't create a whole new problem for them. Yeah, that bone damage thing isn't real, but that's fine. Yeah, unfortunately, this is one of the other problems. This is like...

You get a lot of sources that are just fucking making shit up about these fucking diseases. To be fair, I also am probably... I'm unfamiliar with this exact puberty suppressant. Yeah, I don't think LeBron's like... But in general... Yeah, in general, the bone damage thing is bullshit. The bone density loss of puberty blockers is mostly negligible. Yeah. So again, this guy is like, I found the cure for autism and it's puberty blockers. Very funny. You know...

I do know a lot of autistic people that have gotten, uh, how do I say this? Um, they've seemed more comfortable once they've transitioned. I guess I'll say it like that. I, look, I, it's being on the right puberty blocker is better for an autistic kid than going through puberty. If you are trans. Oh, but yes, come on.

This also shows how like the attack on puberty blockers for, you know, quote unquote trans minors is completely nonsense because these drugs have been used for cis children to cease early onset puberty. These are fully reversible drugs.

Yeah. These are used for cis children. It's used by these, like, hacks and weirdos to, quote-unquote, cure autism. Yeah, by these same people as an autism cure for the vaccines. Oh my god. Even though these are the same, like, drugs, these, quote-unquote, like, chemical castration drugs, as Matt Walsh would put it, are, you know, now trying to be banned for trans children. So...

you know, hypocrisy always, always, always matters. It's always, it's always important to point out their hypocrisy because that's how we win. So here, this is one, one more step towards victory. Garrison, Garrison, listen, pointing out hypocrisy is important because morale is a terrain of struggle. It makes you feel good. And that's a little bit important. Average Jon Stewart post, but okay, let's continue.

So his father, Mark Gere, who he was doing a bunch of this research with, was stripped of his medical license. Now, David Gere actually amazingly, amazingly was not stripped of his medical license. And Gere, do you want to guess why he wasn't stripped of his medical license? He didn't have one. He didn't fucking have one.

So instead, instead he was prosecuted for doing this shit without a medical license. He also doesn't have a medical degree. He has like a, he has like a liberal arts degree. Okay. That, that rules. These, these liberal arts students are giving our kids transgender hormones. Many such cases.

He's like the only person I've ever seen who actually genuinely did do like dangerous and unauthorized like fucking like medical like unauthorized medical experiments on on children with puberty blockers.

Like, he's the only one. Yeah, this is the first instance I've, like, heard of, like, mass unethical use of puberty suppressing drugs. It's a fucking anti-vaxxer. This is the guy they're bringing in to, like, to cook up a connection between vaccines and autism using, like, fucking Bears Day or whatever. So, investigative journalist Brian Deer, who is, I think, probably most famous to people who've watched, like, an H-Bomber guy video as the guy who brought down disgraced ex-doctor Angie Wakefield,

Deere also wrote about this guy in his unbelievably dogshit study about... So he publishes an unbelievably dogshit study about the mercury in vaccines causes autism, whatever the fuck. And it gets basically immediately obliterated the moment autism activists discover it and they're like, holy fucking shit, these people are evil. I'm going to read a quote from Brian Deere's article about it.

One of Ms. Siddal's, that's the person who, like, the autism, like, advocate, activist who, like, discovered this stuff. One of her complaints concerning the Greer's apparent institutional review

The seven-member IRB, Institutional Review Board, consists of Mark and Dave Gere, Dr. Gere's wife, two of his business associates, and two mothers of autistic children, one of whom has publicly acknowledged that her son is the patient-slash-subject of Dr. Gere, and the other whom is a plaintiff in three pending vaccine injury claims?

So the IRB, right, this is like an ethical sort of review board thing that you're supposed to go through to get your studies approved. So the IRB for the study, again, is these two guys, his dad's fucking wife, two of the business associates, and the mothers of two autistic children who think that vaccines cause autism and are like, one of whom is in a lawsuit about it. And the other one is taking the fucking puberty blockers to try to cure the autism.

So this is the guy who is being brought in to do the book cooking is a guy with no medical license No medical degree if we had to retract his papers because they were bullshit Yeah, also and that's something that's common between him and RFK juniors all these people they think that like I mean and this is gonna be relevant we get to the sort of HIV AIDS part of this is that these people think that diseases are caused by my nutrition and not by you know, like diseases and

And they think that you can treat them with just being healthy instead of like vaccines. And, you know, this is this is their worldview, right? This people are sort of eugenicists. This is also why they like one of the reasons why they fucking hate autism so much.

is that they're just, you know, just on a sort of political level. Like, that's just sort of what their ideology is. Imagine how many skilled drone pilots they're going to lose. It's really going to backfire on them. Womp womp. We will see. Speaking of womp womp, here's some ads.

All right, we're back. Let's hear more about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the second Kennedy to have a hole in his head. But this one's from a worm. Oh, OK. So let's let's talk about the last group of things here.

which is another series of massive budget cuts that they're doing this is another thing where they have a giant list of grants that they're fucking cutting this is another like anti-dei and so you know there's a lot of the things that i guess you would expect from one of these like you can only study white people ones so like there are a whole bunch of programs in this list of like grants that they're cutting that are like studying you know racism and medicine and like the the differing

medical outcomes between people of different races because they're getting different levels of medical care because of the environments that they're in. And this is all stuff that these people do not want there to be research demonstrating that racism exists in the medical system because it's just extremely bad for there just to be objective evidence that there is racism and that it's bad and that it kills people.

So another very bleak thing that I haven't seen much coverage of is that a lot of these grants were funding research into trans healthcare and also the effects of like violence against trans people and things like mental health. There's, you know, and this, this is also something that's devastating because like, like the state of trans medicine, it's like, we know things that are safe and we know things that work, which is just letting people transition, but also, you know,

There's so much more stuff that we need in terms of like hormone regimes that like work better. Right. And things like that. And also like, you know, I'm just sort of like basic health outcome stuff. And yeah, these people do not want anyone to know exactly how bad that they're fucking transphobia is affecting the people that they're inflicting it on. And so, yeah, they're like, fuck it. We'll just get rid of all these people's funding. There's also a whole bunch of stuff that has to do with COVID right.

I'm just going to read the description of one of the fucking grants they cut to give you a sense of like the shit that they're cutting. Development of a handheld rapid air sensing system to monitor and quantify SARS-CoV-2 and aerosols in real time, which is actually would be an unbelievably useful thing, right? Like a system that could detect,

fucking COVID like aerosols, like in real time and tell you that there's fucking COVID in the air. Staggeringly useful. They don't fucking want it. One of the big things that they cut is like, you know, we're talking about this with sort of like cutting my programs to study structural racism in medicine. They basically went on a, like a county by county basis and found every single grant that

like state by state, county by county, city by city, every single grant that talks about studying the effects of COVID on non-white people, you know, and they're doing this. I think people have forgotten about this, but one of the things that RFK Jr. said, like, I think this is during the campaign, was he had this giant rant about how COVID was like specifically targeted to leave Chinese people and Jews alive. Yeah.

which is great. That is how he put it. Someone should probably report that to Trump's anti-Semitism task force. Yeah, yeah. You know, hall monitor, whatever. No one cares anymore. Yeah, I mean, they're just, you know, so they're just trying to destroy all this stuff. They've also just like in blocks, just like got rid of every single fucking thing that was funding like any program that was like mental health care.

As a block thing, they're just cutting all of it, so that's gonna make everyone even more normal than we already fucking are. See, actually, I agree with this, because this is the one thing where I think the lifestyle choice thing does matter, because I just read Yaoi when I'm sad, and it fixes me, and if everyone does that, I think we don't need any of these other mental health services. What are you doing? You're manic, though!

Read more yaoi. You can read a lot more. Because famously, the yaoi reading demographic, the most mentally stable and normal population. God.

One of the other ones that's unbelievably concerning is, again, like county by county going through and cutting funding for like things, things that promote child vaccination. They are systemically trying to cut off kids from getting vaccines and they're trying to get rid of anything that opposes like their efforts to try to convince everyone to like all parents to fucking not have your kids get vaccines. Yeah.

They also cut a whole bunch of grants for rapid disease response, which is great. We'll get to the exact reason why that's so fucking terrifying in a second in the very, very immediate term. They also have killed 145 grants for HIV, and this is a whole bunch of different HIV programs. They are killing funding for distributing and getting people to use PrEP, which is a pill that massively helps prevent AIDS.

HIV infections, especially if you're a trans woman and you are having sex, you should get on PrEP. Or a twink, I will say. Thank you. Yeah, the uptake rates for trans women are specifically lower. Which is the thing that we know because we have these fucking funding and we're not going to have that shit anymore because they're cutting all the fucking funding for these fucking research programs. I sometimes do forget that there are

trans women with different like lived like sexual backgrounds than me because coming coming out of coming out of twink culture it's like ingrained like like your co-host who who permanently has only ever come out of lesbian culture

Yes, no, because in twink culture, getting on PrEP is ingrained pretty hard at this point. Yeah, well, it's ingrained in a lot of places, but there's places where it isn't. And those places are where things go very, very bad very quickly, which is why, obviously, they're eliminating the fucking research for this, because they want to fucking kill queer people. Like, they think that HIV is a fucking lifestyle choice.

RFK Jr. in particular thinks it's because of poppers. Which is now leading to the poppers raids. Red alert, everybody. Red alert. It's getting pretty scary out there. So it's really fucking bleak. I mean, they've cut, you know, they're trying to just fucking get rid of this because these people are just fucking unhinged virulent homophobes and transphobes. And yeah, they want to fucking cut these programs because they think it'll hurt us.

They've also laid off the entire Office of Infectious Diseases and HIV AIDS policy staff. Is that bad?

Oh, it's bad. Here's the first CBS. Yeah, so they do child. They're one of the other groups that has childhood vaccination efforts. They also run the fucking national vaccine program, which nobody knows what's going to happen to it now, because, again, the thing that was supposed to run it is just fucking gone. So who the fuck knows what's happening with that now? They are probably going to just completely destroy Trump's like giant Trump actually in his first term had a giant program to like end HIV that like.

Kind of did stuff because it was someone else's program that Trump just kind of implemented. We're getting so close to the HIV vaccine. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and so who fucking knows? It's probably just completely fucked. Yeah. This is going to have just unbelievably hideous consequences on millions and millions of people. And they, that's not even that they don't give a shit. It's that they think it's cool and funny and based when people like us fucking die. Yeah.

Now, on the other hand, the rest of the US population is about to run into the same fucking thing that all of these stupid ass bankers thought, which is that, oh, Trump will just fuck with the queers and leave us alone. No, we're going to close in the same place that I closed the last time I talked about fucking RFK Jr., which is the fucking bird flu, which is that he wants the solution to the bird flu is he wants to fucking let it rip. And he just wants to just like be like, oh, we can just like take the birds and survive the bird flu. And we'll just let the we'll just let it spread and just use those ones. And those ones will be healthy.

Now, so the thing about this bird flu, right, is that it kills within three to four days. Immunologist Matt Cosey in Scientific America describes how this thing, again, within three to four days has a 90 to 100% kill rate.

So, you know, you can't just do this, right? Because it'll just, it just fucking kills all the birds. He doesn't want to fucking vaccinate the birds, which is the thing that like, if you want to stop this, but this, this fucking pandemic from spreading, you need to do it. Right. And once again, I need, I need to emphasize enough that when I, when I, when I talked to virologist about this, they said that like letting the bird flu rip through all the fucking bird populations, right? Just letting you fucking spread, letting it kill everything until you only have the ones that like didn't die is if you were like trying to cook up conditions for

Like, field conditions specifically to try to get it to develop a mutation to spread to humans, this is what you would do?

Is he would just let it fucking spread uncontrolled and kill everything? So this is what we're doing at the same time as again, anti-vaxxers are fucking running the running or fucking vaccine services as we are cutting the staff of cutting, cutting the grant funding for, for people who do response to like rapid response to emerging diseases. As we are cutting the fucking entire policy staff for the office of infectious diseases, they are building a fucking pandemic. Yeah.

And all of these fucking people think that COVID was fucking cooked up in a lab. And what they are doing is like they are now doing the thing they are accusing everyone else of doing, which is they are fucking attempting to implement a policy to cook up a fucking play in a lab. Except it's not going to be in a lab. It's going to be in America's fucking factory farms. And we are all going to suffer the consequences of it. Well, I assume you saw the statement from Cantor analysts on Monday, the Wall Street article.

investment firm. This founder was like a really was a really big Trump donor, was on the inauguration committee. But two of two of their analysts put out a statement today calling to reevaluate RFK Jr. as secretary of health and human services, calling out his, quote unquote, apparent anti-science and libertarian agenda.

saying it will put people's lives in jeopardy to advance a discredited theory on vaccines. Look, I will say this, like, there are a lot of rifts in the Trump coalition. RFK Jr. and his people cannot fucking be allowed to run these institutions. They need to be fucking run out now. If we do not do this now, millions of people are going to die. I have been saying this. I am going to continue to say this because you can see in real time all of the things that are going to lead to all of these people fucking dying. And...

You know, his position is not incredibly secure in this coalition, right? Like, yeah, there are lots of sectors of capital who don't want the entire fucking population of the United States dying a plague. Yeah. After Carl's grandson's resignation, tourist analysts also put out a statement advocating for vaccine use and specifically against RFK Jr. and his vaccine rhetoric.

investors also spread similar anti-RFK Jr. rhetoric over the weekend following Mark's resignation. So, yeah, go fucking, I don't know, I don't know exactly which public official you pressure or who you go scream at to try to get rid of this guy before he fucking gets us all killed, but go do that. I don't know. Go harass your legislator or whatever or find the nearest person who can be yelled at who will convey this

Stand outside your local CDC office with a sign and protest the CDC. The hospitals are empty. It's fake. Oh, God. Oh,

And on that note, getting us yet another fucking one of those... Actually, do they even do the misinformation labels anymore? Unlike Spotify and shit and like YouTube? Oh, of course not. Oh, God. We lost the election. It's not happening. Truth and reasonable-ness lost the election. Sorry. Not we.

So, alright, yeah, this is the spitting kid I have here. Get this guy out of office before we all fucking die in a plague. Again. Have you ever wiped with a piece of dry, single-ply toilet paper and wondered...

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This is It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout. This episode is going to be about ice actions against students, scholars, and professors around the country and this wave of deportations targeting people engaged in pro-Palestine speech, protest, as well as some individuals who have been roped up in this new wave of deportations who have not publicly engaged in Palestine activism.

Let's start on the evening of Saturday, March 8th. Mahmoud Khalil and his wife were returning home from dinner when plainclothes ICE agents followed the couple into their campus apartment building at Columbia University.

A man wearing a Marvel graphic tee arrested Khalil for then unknown reasons and threatened to arrest Khalil's wife, who is eight months pregnant and an American citizen. When Khalil's wife brought his green card from their apartment, she says one of the ICE agents placed a phone call informing someone Khalil was a permanent resident, to which the person on the phone replied, let's bring him in anyway. What?

You're going to be under arrest. So turn around. Turn around. Turn around. Turn around. Turn around. Stop resisting. Stop resisting. Okay, okay. He's not resisting. He's giving me his phone. Okay? He's not. I understand. He's not resisting. Put your arms around me. Don't worry, Mike. You're going to have to come with us. I'm coming with you. Don't worry. No one's resisting. No one's getting worked up. Just go ahead.

You guys really don't need to be doing all of that. During the arrest, Khalil's lawyer, Amy Greer, spoke on the phone with one of the ICE agents who said that they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil's student visa.

Greer reiterated to the agents that Khalil was in fact a permanent resident with a green card, but the ICE agent just responded by saying they were revoking the green card instead.

Khalil is a graduate student who has been studying at Columbia for over two years. Last year, Khalil emerged as a visible figure in the college encampment protests, becoming a public spokesperson and a lead negotiator on behalf of Columbia University apartheid Divest. Though never being arrested, Khalil faced harassment from right-wing Zionist doxing campaigns calling for his deportation.

And when ICE did come for Khalil, disappearing him to a detention facility in Louisiana and cutting him off from communication with his wife and lawyer, throughout all of this, he was not charged with any crime. Instead, ICE and the State Department are using a rarely used Cold War era immigration statute that gives the Secretary of State the power to exclude or deport any non-citizen of the United States if there are, quote, reasonable grounds to believe that

Yeah, that was the one that like, I remember at the time you and I were discussing this like in our group chat and we were trying to work out like how the Secretary of State could be revoking a green card. Yeah. And I think that's

I think you found this or you found it somewhere in there. The Trump administration has been very, very good at finding very obscure pieces of law that it can wield against migrants, right? Like no one in 2016 would have foreseen what they did with Title 42, which is a public health law. And they're doing something similar here. I mean, they may have spent the last four years looking for these things, especially when the campus protests began. But like this is entirely...

unprecedented as far as I'm aware. And right after this happened, we discussed how this case was probably going to be used as a testing ground for employing these tactics on a more widespread scale, creating legal precedent. And sure enough, Khalil's case was not an outlier. This was just the first public instance of the Trump administration's directed targeting of students they believe to be associated with protests against Israel and its actions in Gaza.

And this wave of actions by ICE had actually already begun before Khalil's arrest. The day before Khalil was arrested, ICE agents knocked on the door of PhD student Rajani Srinivasan, who a few days prior was suddenly notified that her student visa had been revoked. When ICE agents knocked, she did not answer the door. The next day, ICE showed up again to her Columbia University apartment.

Trina Vossen was not home, but upon hearing of Khalil's arrest just a few hours later, she decided to quickly collect some belongings and flee to Canada. Five days later, when ICE returned to her residence, but this time with a warrant, Trina Vossen was already gone. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem praised this as quote-unquote self-deportation. Yeah, they talk about this a lot. Like, self-deportation is definitely one of their goals. They talked about it before Trump even came into power. Like,

That's what we're seeing a lot of these spectacle raids and like spectacle deportations. Scare tactics. Yeah, exactly. The desire is that people leave. Is she a Canadian citizen or like... I don't believe so, no. Okay. It was just the fastest flight from LaGuardia. Out of the country. Out of like, you know, the closest she could be. Yeah.

I wonder what her immigration status is in Canada now. She is currently figuring this whole situation out still, navigating her legal options both in Canada and the States. Yeah, that would be interesting too to see what Canada can offer her. I don't think the Trump administration would go after having her extradited back because as you say, she's not accused of a crime and they've kind of got what they wanted. Yeah.

It'll be interesting to follow that. There is no need for extradition because none of the people that we're talking about today were accused of any crime. Yeah. With the other cases of quote-unquote self-deportation, one of the issues is people have had their passports seized and held, like lots of Venezuelan migrants, so they actually can't or it would be very difficult for them to just get on a flight and leave.

which I think is in part why she made the decision to get out when she could. DHS claimed in a statement that Srinivasan advocated violence and was, quote, involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization, unquote.

Isis targeting her seemingly stems from being mass arrested while trying to return to her apartment from a picnic with friends on the same day as the Hamilton Hill occupation. She couldn't get home and was caught up in the crowd and was arrested among a hundred other people.

She received two summons for obstructing traffic and failure to disperse, but her case was quickly dismissed. Homeland Security claims that failing to declare these two summons is what caused her visa to be revoked. Okay. Interesting.

That same week, ICE went after another green card holder at Columbia, a 21-year-old student named Yung-Sau Chung, a permanent resident who immigrated to the United States from South Korea with her family when she was seven. On March 9th, ICE agents visited her parents' home looking for Chung. And that day, she received an odd text message reading...

This recent arrest was allegedly in reference to being detained, among others, at a sit-in protest at Bernard College on March 5th. Chung was charged and then released with misdemeanor obstruction.

After receiving that sketchy text message, Chung got an email from Columbia Public Safety reading, quote, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has asked us to inform you that Homeland Security investigation agents are seeking to make contact with you in connection with an administrative warrant for your arrest. Consistent with the university's practice, we wanted to share this information and their request with you. If you are represented by counsel, it may make sense for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS, unquote.

Chung's lawyer decided to call, quote unquote, Audrey from the police, who revealed that she was actually an HSI agent and that the State Department was revoking Ms. Chung's residency status.

Now, rather than opting for self-deportation or turning herself into immigration authorities, Chung decided to go into hiding and fight the deportation in the courts while trying to evade ICE detention. When ICE failed to locate her, they enlisted the help of federal prosecutors. To quote from the New York Times, quote, on March 10th, Perry Carbone, a high-ranking lawyer in the federal prosecutor's office, told Ms. Ahmad, Ms. Chung's attorney, that the Secretary of State, Mr. Rubio, had revoked Ms. Chung's visa.

Ms. Ahmad responded that Ms. Chung was not in the country on a visa and was a permanent resident. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Kobani responded that Mr. Rubio had, quote, revoked that as well, unquote. Yeah. So this is the exact same language we saw with Khalil.

And it displays a general uncaring towards who they are actually targeting and what their actual legal status is in the United States. They think they're going after people with student visas, but when it turns out they have green cards, that doesn't stop them. They still continue to do it anyway.

On March 13th, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants, citing a statute for harboring non-citizens, but Chung was nowhere to be found. Like Khalil, the Trump administration is arguing that her presence in the United States hinders the administration's foreign policy agenda.

But her lawyers note that Chung was not by any means a quote-unquote movement leader. She was simply one of hundreds of students who joined in nationwide protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. Her lawyers write, quote, Ms. Chung has not made public statements to the press or otherwise assumed a high-profile role in these protests. She was rather one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns, unquote.

Chung had previously faced a university disciplinary process, which found she was not in violation of any university policy related to protests last year. Chung's lawyers filed a lawsuit to prevent her deportation, claiming that ICE's actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional. This lawsuit reads, quote, Officials at the highest echelons of government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike, including Ms. Chung's speech.

ICE's shocking actions against Ms. Chung form a part of a larger pattern of attempted U.S. government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech, unquote.

On March 25th, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order halting efforts from ICE to detain or relocate Chung. The judge said that the government produced, quote, nothing in the record to indicate Chung is a danger to the community or a, quote unquote, foreign policy risk, or that she was in any communication with terrorist organizations. The judge said that there would be, quote, no trips to Louisiana here, unquote.

This is in reference to the big ICE detention facility in Louisiana. We'll be right back after this ad break. Okay, we're back. Now, although Chung has at least temporarily halted ICE's efforts to detain or deport her,

Not all legal recourses have proven successful. This week, a U.S. district judge declined a request to block the deportation of Cornell student Mamadou Tal after the State Department revoked his visa.

On March 31st, Tal released a statement, quote, Yeah, it's pretty bleak.

So Tal has elected for the quote unquote self-deportation option, at least for now. I believe his case is going to continue, but he's not going to remain in the United States. Yeah. I think he returned to the UK, right? I believe so. Yeah. He's a British citizen.

Now, interestingly, last September, Cornell University itself tried to revoke Tull's student visa for involvement in student protests. But he successfully appealed and was able to continue his African Studies PhD remotely. Yeah, I spoke to him a little bit back then, just via direct message. But I think at that time, whatever his agreement was, it seems like there was a component of it that at least he didn't want to talk about it in public, which is fine. Everyone has a right to do that, and he should do what's best for himself. But...

Maybe I'll try and follow up with him again now, see if he wants to speak. Because he seems to have, like...

He's been, of all of these people, the one who's been able to make the most statements and control his narrative to some degree. Yeah, no, he entered this period of radio silence after he won his appeal last fall and then only started speaking publicly again once he began getting targeted by the Trump administration the past month and a half. I think he proactively filed that suit, right? Yes. Yeah.

Now, the scale that Mark Rubio and ICE are seeking for in regards to deportations is seemingly going to be increasingly large. On March 27th, Secretary of State Mark Rubio claimed that he has revoked over 300 student visas so far, saying at a press conference, quote, we do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas, unquote.

Now, there are a few ways the government is currently trying to find these quote-unquote lunatics. ICE seems to be targeting non-citizens who have been arrested or detained at Palestine protests, even if their charges were subsequently dropped. This is the case for Chung and Srini Vassen, as well as former student Lekha Kordia, a Palestinian who was arrested at Columbia campus protests in April of 2024. She is currently being held in an ICE detention facility in Texas.

Now, beyond arrest records, the government is utilizing the World Wide Web and social media to identify new and returning visa applicants and possibly current visa holders that, quote, support terrorist organizations, unquote.

Social media screening of immigrants and visa holders has been slowly ramping up since 2014 and accelerated during Trump's first term. But a new directive from Secretary of State Mark Rubio, titled Enhanced Screening and Social Media Vetting for Visa Applicants, was sent out on March 25th and leaked by journalist Ken Klippenstein. The directive cites two executive orders from Trump, measures to combat anti-Semitism and, quote, protect

protecting the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats, unquote. The State Department is now requiring consular officers to conduct a, quote-unquote, mandatory social media review with screenshotting for students and student exchange visitors with the intent of looking for evidence of, quote, advocating for, sympathizing with, or persuading others to endorse or espouse terrorist activities or support a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Unquote. This applies to FM and J visas. So student exchange visas, academic visas, and vocational visas. The directive also instructs officers to search social media for, quote, conduct that bears a hostile attitude towards U.S. citizens or U.S. culture, including government, institutions, or founding principles. Unquote.

Which is kind of the most incredibly broad thing I've ever seen. Yeah, I mean, that's leaving it at the complete discretion of the officer, right? There's already been an instance of U.S. Customs agents denying entry to someone who had a quote-unquote anti-Trump sentiments found on their phone.

Now, though this new directive is focused on denying or revoking student visas, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to expand its social media data collection to U.S. citizenship, green card, and asylum applicants. Basically, anyone and everyone in the U.S. immigration system, no matter their current status or what previous vetting they might have already gone through.

On March 5th, DHS issued a 60-day notice for public comment on a proposal for, quote, uniform vetting standards and national security screening, unquote, that includes the collection of social media information for all non-citizens applying for immigration benefits like citizenship or permanent residency.

A statement from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service reads, quote, these efforts ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine national security, or promote harmful anti-American ideologies, unquote. Yeah, like the anti-American ideologies, again, it's just vastly broad, right? It's like crazy Red Scare level stuff. Yeah. And I'm guessing this will be...

either like a literal control F of whatever they can find of your public social media or some kind of AI system. That's what it seems to be, right? Former immigration agents have suggested that they're probably going to use some AI system for this as they've already kind of used more primitive versions. But ramping up to this scale and with like this increased focus and like attention on quote unquote AI is going to affect the way that they do this vetting process. Absolutely. Yeah, great.

So though the government is trying to increase their social media screening, so far, they actually haven't had to do that much of their own research to identify targets for removal. On March 17th, a Georgetown scholar named Bidar Khan Suri was arrested by Homeland Security outside his home in Virginia, where he lives with his wife, who's a U.S. citizen, and their three kids.

According to Suri's lawyer, masked agents, quote, refused to tell him the basis for the arrest, handcuffed him, and forced him into an unmarked black SUV, unquote. Later, his wife was informed that her husband's visa was revoked based on the social media posts and that Suri was sent to ICE detention in Louisiana.

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin posted on X that Suri was, quote, actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting anti-Semitism on social media. The Secretary of State issued a determination that Suri's activities and presence in the United States rendered him deportable, unquote. Of course, any single post in support of Palestine is going to be seen as, quote, unquote, promoting anti-Semitism, according to Mark Rubio.

Suri's lawyer wrote in a court filing, quote, Yeah, it seems like he was identified through his wife, right? Correct. And we'll get to that. Suri has no criminal record, and according to a colleague, he did not attend campus protests.

However, Suri's lawyer writes that his family have been victims of a doxing campaign, with his wife stating that a website had, quote, claimed falsely that my husband and I have, quote, ties to Hamas, unquote. The Homeland Security Assistant Secretary referenced that claim in a public statement on Twitter. And this harassment stems in part from Suri's father-in-law being Ahmad Youssef, a former advisor to Hamas.

A federal judge blocked Suri's deportation as immigration court proceedings continue, but he still remains in ICE detention. What kind of visa was he on? He's not a green card holder. He received his visa to continue doctoral research on peace building in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's some kind of academic or exchange visa. I don't think we know the exact type that he has. Okay. Yeah. It would be interesting to know, are they searching...

just through F1 visa databases? I mean, obviously not if they're finding these green card people. Well, I think specifically in this case, they're searching social media. They're not searching through their own databases. They don't care what kind of visa he has. They're looking at this doxing campaign that's been targeted at him and his family for over a year and using that as the basis to deport him. Right. And then being like, can we deport

He's not a citizen, so yes, basically. Even though his wife is a citizen. Yeah, his children, presumably, therefore, are also citizens. His wife, whose father is Ahmad Yusuf, they can't deport her because she's a citizen, or at least they can't deport her right now. Who knows if they'll try to denaturalize in the future. Yeah. But this is the easiest person to target. Yeah. And I think that's kind of what they're going for. Like, a lot of this is...

It's like the politics of owning the libs, right? It's like the politics of being angry at your niece and nephew on Facebook and wanting to humiliate them. It's not a particularly coherent policy other than the Palestine protests made a lot of people on the right mad and they don't like migrants and now they're using...

this obscure legal provision as a cudgel against everything they dislike. Yeah, and using social media to identify people who have never been arrested, never been charged with anything. Yeah. We're going to finish our discussion on these doxing campaigns and ICE action-starting students after this ad break. All right, we're back.

So right now, the two main vectors for ICE detention, whether you have a green card or a visa, seems to be previous arrests or these mass doxing campaigns. Now, someone like Mahmoud Khalil was never arrested or charged with a crime, but instead has been the target of harassment from both a local campus doxing account run by Columbia professors and fellow students, as well as larger right-wing Zionist organizations like Canary Mission.

A few days before being arrested by ICE, Canary Mission posted a video naming Khalil as a quote-unquote siren emoji, suspected foreign national alert. So what is Canary Mission, if you're lucky enough to be unaware? Since 2015, Canary Mission has been collecting and publishing personal information of people they accuse of promoting, quote, hatred of the United States, Israel, and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond, unquote.

Now, they have profiles for a few legitimate American neo-Nazis, but many profiles only cite criticism of the Israeli government and its actions in Gaza as proof of alleged anti-Semitism. And now there is increasing evidence that the government is using websites like Canary Mission to target students, professors, and scholars for ICE deportation, a

Essentially outsourcing intel gathering from these pro-Israel non-government organizations. A few weeks ago, Canary Mission uploaded a profile for Rumeza OzTurk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University. They included a picture, her resume, and linked to an op-ed she co-wrote last year for her student paper criticizing the university for its ties to Israel amidst the war in Gaza.

For this, the Canary mission claimed Ozturk, quote, engaged in anti-Israel activism, unquote. Two weeks later, while walking alone to Iftar dinner for Ramadan, a plainclothes ICE agent approached Ozturk on the sidewalk. As he grabbed her arms and wrestled away her phone, five more agents surrounded her and pulled up their gator masks as neighbors began filming the arrest.

Within 24 hours, she was moved to ICE detention in Louisiana. A statement from Homeland Security claimed that HSI, Homeland Security Investigation, had determined that Ozturk, quote, engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans, unquote.

And Secretary of State Mark Rubio said, quote, we gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses, unquote. Yeah, I mean, again, like...

Writing an op-ed is like as central to the First Amendment as things can be, right? Yeah, there's no evidence she was even attending campus protests, let alone tearing up the university. She co-wrote an op-ed and you should not be deported for engaging in protest on a university campus at all, right? This is blatantly unconstitutional, extremely worrying.

The fact that this person just got a profile in the Canary Mission website for writing an op-ed and then this is used as justification for her deportation is still an even greater escalation. Yeah, if we're talking about this sort of liberal idea of the marketplace of ideas, the way that ideas enter the marketplace, you will find nothing more amenable to liberalism than writing an op-ed in your campus newspaper. That is the

the most well-behaved, straight down the middle, constitutionally protected thing, way to engage in anti-genocide activism, pro-Palestine activism. So in a sense, this one is particularly disturbing. Like a defrontal assault on First Amendment rights for non-citizens is what it is. Yes.

On March 24th, Canary Mission published a new section of their website titled Uncovering Foreign Nationals, which lists the profiles of non-citizens who they believe qualify for deportation. Jesus. Another far-right pro-Israel doxing group called Batar, which even the ADL lists as an extremist group...

Which is wild. Batar says that they have given the Trump administration a deportation list of thousands of names, including citizens that they expect to be denaturalized.

People like Mamadou Tal and Mahmoud Khalil have been targeted by both of these organizations. People will be familiar with, I don't know if it's Bitar or Bitar, but you probably have seen videos of them on campus trying to hand pagers to people. Pagers. Yeah, like... Making light of the pager attack Israel did. I mean...

making a threat like sure like if you're going to come onto a campus and make a fucking bomb threat and accuse someone else of terrorism uh i mean the hypocrisy is kind of the point but uh or even just like you know quote-unquote celebrating the deaths of people right yeah right like like mocking this attack which killed children which you know crippled people it's just disgusting it's like just abhorrent

They seem to get a lot of attention online because they do the thing where they go up to people and say deliberately provocative things and then film their reactions, right? They're kind of IRL trolling. The past week, ICE actions against students have seemingly accelerated.

Alireza Daroudi, a doctoral student from Iran studying at the University of Alabama, was arrested by ICE on March 25th in the middle of the night at his off-campus apartment. Daroudi's entry visa expired, but he was allowed to stay in the States as he still maintained his student status. It's unknown why exactly he was targeted. He has no ties to protests or any notable online footprint. It could be his...

Ethnic origin, right? Like... Yeah, it could be his name, right?

Yeah, but we should explain the status thing a bit more for people who aren't familiar. So like your status is when you're in good standing with the university. So normally that means you need to be enrolled in 12 credits per, you might be on semesters, you might be on quarters. I don't think it's usually matters. But you have to, there's a minimum course load. It may be different for different systems. I don't know. You'd also need to be in good standing in terms of like not late on your fees, right? Your tuition fees, that kind of stuff, right? Not in any...

You haven't been expelled or excluded from the university for any actions that you've taken, that kind of thing. It means you are currently a student at the university, basically. The only time this normally affects international students I'm aware of, like as a person who now teaches students, is like they can't drop below a certain course load when otherwise they may wish to drop below a certain course load to either focus on, they might have like a research degree

They might be doing other stuff on campus like TAing, right? Sometimes that TAing counts towards their course load. Sometimes it doesn't, but it can affect things like that. But generally, it would be the university that would update that status, right? That would notify U.S. Customs and Immigration if somebody fell out of compliance with that.

if I'm hearing right, that doesn't seem like that's what happened here, right? No. Simply, his entry visa expired. So, if he left the country, he then would have to get another visa to get back in. But he can stay as long as he still has his valid student status. So, not only is ICE trying to revoke these visas, but they're trying to essentially say that by revoking these visas, they are also attempting to strip them of their student status, which is like a separate step from

These things can get kind of very, very blurry though. Yeah. Like I don't quite know how that works in terms of like, are ICE supposed to be able to, I don't think it hugely matters at this point. Technically the state department does have that ability, but it's under the same like foreign policy risk designation. Okay.

And they'll justify it by saying, well, his visa already expired. So we're just removing him because his visa expired. Right. Even though that's not really how this works. Yeah. And they don't have to remove him for that reason. But yeah, in this case, I guess they're going for something else. No, because the University of Alabama did not elect to rescind his student status. He was a student in good standing. Yeah. And thus legally allowed in the United States. Yeah. Yeah. Like everyone else here, he hadn't done anything that...

would under normal circumstances lead to him having any interactions with USCIS.

Just this last week, ICE detained a University of Minnesota grad student at their off-campus housing. The university released a statement saying that they had no prior knowledge of this incident and had not shared any information with federal authorities. This person's name is still not released. Last week, a student at the Southern Illinois University had their visa revoked. The school administration told their college paper that the university has no role in the visa revocation process.

The Illinois governor's office is working with schools across the state to, quote, ensure they are being vigilant about what's happening on their respective campuses. The governor's team has asked universities to communicate with international students about the general resources available to them through the institution. In addition, we have suggested that they connect impacted students with legal resources that have been in place for several years, unquote, according to a statement sent to the university paper, The Daily Egyptian.

Tina Sickinger, which is a very cool name, the school's director of international student and scholar services, sent an email to the international student body of Southern Illinois University, advising them to carry photocopies of immigration documents with them at all times, as well as proof of enrollment and records of U.S. residences.

The email recommended that students, quote, use caution on social media and exercise discretion when participating in political demonstrations or protests, unquote. Warning that though protests should be protected speech, quote, such activities can sometimes be misinterpreted and may carry risks to your immigration status, unquote.

Unfortunately, I think this is the university trying to look out for these students. Yeah, that's the best you can expect from them, really. And they are providing legal resources to these students. But they're essentially saying, you shouldn't post anything or do any protests because then ICE might come kidnap you. Yeah. Which is just a fucked up situation to be in. Yeah. They don't have any other ability to stop this right now.

I am curious what Pritzker is going to continue to do here, though. Yeah, I mean, none of what they've said is wrong. It's kind of what you can expect from the university, the best you can expect from the university, really. It's like, hey, we've noticed it's happening.

So that is the situation as it currently stands. I do have one final tidbit here just that highlights the absurdity of this whole situation. On March 24th, a lawsuit on behalf of Israeli Columbia students and relatives of Israeli October 7th victims was filed against Columbia Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, and individual Columbia students, including Mahmoud Khalil.

The lawsuit alleges that these Columbia groups and students are the domestic propaganda arm of Hamas and even claims that these groups had advanced notice that the October 7th attack was going to take place. Oh, come on. So the plan was kept secret among Hamas's own political allies in the region. But they gave an Ivy League university in New York City a heads up. A tip off.

They just let them know what was coming. Completely absurd. Yeah, absolutely. Like the IDF completely failed to see this coming, right? But not the folks at the Ivy League universities who were ready and waiting. Hamas didn't tell the Houthis. They didn't tell Iran. They didn't tell Hezbollah. Didn't tell Hezbollah. But they told student activist groups in New York City at the Columbia University campus. Yeah.

Absolutely ludicrous. I eagerly await this court case, I guess, to see what evidence they have of this. The evidence is going to be like someone had a Palestinian flag. Some of the quote-unquote evidence that they allege is that some of these activist accounts had renewed activity in October of 2023, before the attack happened. But this is just a simple coincidence. Obviously, these people did not have a heads-up

that the October 7th attack was going to take place. The lawsuit also argues that protest activity is not First Amendment protected speech, but in fact, quote, substantial assistance in the form of propaganda and recruiting services and in coordination with a designated foreign terrorist organization. Again, alleging there is some kind of communication between Hamas and student activists in New York City.

Yeah, this is ludicrous. One of the reasons that maybe we're seeing this so much over the Palestine advocacy is that Hamas is a listed foreign terrorist organization. Many other groups and lots of groups in that part of the world are. But it's just a bigger stick to wave, I guess, material aid. No one has been actually accused of material aid to a foreign terrorist organization as far as I'm aware.

But like that is kind of the sort of stick that they're waving, right? That is the thing that they're alleging. I will end us with just this kind of final note. Now, while there are little signs that this would happen at a scale this large and this focused under a Democratic president,

A degree of consent for this type of targeting was manufactured the past year as it relates to Palestine protests, with some liberals and democratic politicians associating activists as pro-Hamas terrorists.

And this is the consequence of that public perception building and the consent being manufactured for that framing. And now that the even more evil side is in charge, they can take that justification and run with it way further than what a Joe Biden or a Kamala Harris would have done. So it is far worse, but it's not in a political bubble. This has been like a growing project for the past few years.

There was no point at which the Biden administration really effusively said, this is protected First Amendment speech. We may not like it, but it is central to the Bill of Rights. It's central to what America is supposed to be about.

They never defended the constitutionality of this speech. Yeah. Nor would they have intervened to stop the deportation of someone like Tall if Cornell decided to revoke his status, right? Right, yeah. I don't think the Biden administration or a Kamala Harris administration would be directing these universities to take that action themselves, nor would they be, I think, revoking student visas at scale like this. No. But they would have let ICE do the stuff that ICE does.

if universities themselves elect to remove student visas or unenroll these students. And a degree of the complacency here is placed on the actual university administrations, the university staff, who have been vilifying these protesters for the past two years. Yeah, and I mean, in some cases, right, like I'm thinking of one of Columbia, professors got away with things which are absolutely unacceptable, like 100%.

in some violation of your agreement with the university as a member of the faculty, like doxing your students, photographing students without their consent, following students around, like absolutely unacceptable. Like in any other context that you would be immediately shit-canned for that. Like really, really, the only reason you can lose tenure seemingly is being a fucking creep to students or stealing a lot of money. And like universities did allow that for students

more than a year under the Biden administration. And like, we're seeing the consequences of that now. It's also worth noting that since I've had to quote from so many government statements this episode, the Trump admin is continuing to correlate any expression of sympathy or solidarity with Palestine and

as explicit support for Hamas. Basically, anything you say that's critical of the Israeli government, its actions in Gaza, are being interpreted by the Trump administration as anti-Semitism and support for the October 7th massacre. This is a false equivalency. What the government alleges should not be automatically taken as the truth. These tactics have been used for years to broadly smear pro-Palestine activists while also hurting anti-Zionist Jews.

And I guess like finally, we are not necessarily endorsing every single thing that every single one of these students has said. Yeah. We do not necessarily agree with the framing of every single sentence that they have said. Yeah. I mean, we don't know everything that they've said. Yeah, exactly. This is like completely separate to that.

Yeah, it doesn't matter. We are defending their right to engage in constitutionally protected speech. Correct. No matter what they're saying, no matter if they have opinions on Hamas that differ from ours, no matter what they are saying at a campus protest,

It should not result in ICE targeting them and hunting them down and forcing students who attend sit-in protests into hiding to defend their own rights and to keep their green cards. This is like a completely absurd and like blatantly fabricated

fascist, to use the now overused word, frankly. But this is. This is what that is. If this was happening in China, if this was happening in Russia, in other countries, people would be very quick to call out... I mean, it does happen in Russia, right? Exactly. And people are quick to call it out. Yeah. The State Department of this country has called it out, right? Rightly. I don't agree with everything the State Department does, but I do agree with them on that. Like,

Yeah, and I think this is like, I know if you find yourself having a discussion about this, I think almost everyone in America can find something that they disagree with the government on or have disagreed with the government on. And like this hurts every single one of us, right? Like everyone's right to freedom of speech is challenged when someone's right to freedom of speech is challenged. And like, I think that is the way to approach this. It doesn't really matter anymore.

if the people whose speech is being challenged right now their speech is oh if it's odious to us if it's something that we don't agree with like that isn't what's at stake what's at stake is everyone's right to say everything without government consequences well i think that doesn't for

For us today at It Could Happen Here, we will continue to report on the targeting of students, scholars, and professors, and immigrants in general as the Trump administration ramps up its deportation efforts. If you would like to contact us about these topics,

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How do you feel? I feel liberated. Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty. We are free at last from being able to afford things. I am so, so liberated right now. Yeah. Unchained from the burden of having money. Yes. Yes. Well, as the Buddhists say, you know, freeing yourself from attachment is really the path to nirvana. Mm-hmm.

Trump really is our first Buddhist president. He is. One thing they say about him. That's right. He may be the new Dalai Lama. Who can say? The Dalai Lama. And he hasn't. Yeah. And the priests who look for him after he dies when he comes back. Unfortunately, they're probably on a fucking travel ban list now. Oh, my God. I mean, pretty good chance they're in ICE custody at the moment. If I understand Buddhism. Yeah.

Well, I think we should just get right to the most pressing news, which is line go down. Line is on its way down. Line in free fall currently. Yeah.

It's funny because they chose, they were supposed to initially, I think it was going to be 3 p.m. or something, EST, 2 or 3, was the initial time they wanted to announce this, which would have given the stock market a couple of hours. On April 2nd, right? Yeah, on April 2nd. Liberation Day. On Liberation Day. There would have been a couple hours for it to...

and they attempted to mitigate this, I guess in the hope that we would all get over it overnight. We would forget. Some other shit would happen. Before the new prices even came in, we'd be like, ah, now I'm on to the next thing.

But the Dow and the Nasdaq, all plunged. Because it's clear if the president is deliberately shifting an event to not hurt the stock market, that's going to hurt the stock market. It's good when you see a 90 degree angle on the old stock market graph. That's when you know someone's really crushing it in the economic department. And so far, we're recording this a little afternoon on Thursday, April the 3rd.

So just in the course of today, major stock indexes have dropped by about 5.6%, which means about $2.7 trillion in market value, which will be the largest decline since March of 2020. So we are it is looking like this is going to be at the very least a stock market decline in line with the one that came as a result of the global pandemic.

With the noted caveat that there's really no reason to believe it will get better at any point. Yeah, you can't really vaccinate against stupid. Now, I'm not qualified to give financial advice, but I think everyone should pull out your 401k right now. Go to the bank. Withdraw all your money. All of it. Empty your account right now. Put it into the worst tasting survival foods. And you're going to want to buy Kel-Tex. Lots of Kel-Tex.

In a caliber no one else has. 5'7". Get the one that doesn't take magazines. 32 ACP. I won the 32 ACP. That's it. That's it, James. Everyone buy 32 ACP handcuffs. It succeeded in ending one world war and it won't let us down. We call that doing a Hitler, but in a good way. Someone here has to be vaguely responsible and say, don't fucking do that. Do none of those things. Zero. Zero.

Empty your accounts. Get hard cash. Mark Cuban told people to do that. Absolutely not. Mayor endorses Reagan coin as the exclusive safe source of retirement savings. You're going to want to put every dime you've got in pressed latinum. Now, I know that that's the currency from Star Trek and does not exist. Nevertheless, cancel your accounts.

Put it all in Latin. I mean, it's going to exist in like what, like 40 years per the Star Trek timeline? Exactly, get in on the ground floor. If it's not already a meme coin 10 minutes after this comes out. More stable than your 401k right now. You could be rich just in time for money to stop being a thing. There you go. There you go.

This is why we're launching CoolZone coin, guys. I've been saying this for years. It's redeemable for whatever money the Ferengi use when they exist. We should probably talk about why the stock market is doing poorly. So I think, Robert, you can handle this segue. Well, you know, wait, what is that? Oh, my God. Is that Mia Wong's theme music? My God. Tyree, don't like it.

Oh, God.

That was a great purchase, you guys. I mean, can we all agree? Worth every penny. It really was. The best financial purchase we've made is the Tariff Talk theme song. We're going to get so much mileage out of that thing. It's an unbelievable steal. We're going to be using this fucker for years. At least something good came of this. Yeah.

When you're struggling to get by with your family, just remember the song. Yeah, yeah. This will keep you warm as you huddle around a barrel waiting for the new police, which are just called murder police, to reach your shantytown.

Anyway, yeah. Let us talk tariffs. Power, sections of the left have long argued, is in logistics. It was logistics that allowed the capitalists of the 1970s and 80s to crush the labor movement by enacting the so-called spatial fix to the crisis of capitalism. By shifting production from countries where workers' movements were strong to countries where violence against workers was easier and workers were thus poorer and more exploited, CEOs could pit workers against each other in an endless race to the bottom.

These practices became known as offshoring, infused with the international attack on unions and the power of workers heralded in the U.S. by Reagan. Together, they crushed the workers' movement and implemented neoliberal austerity throughout the globe through a regime that is colloquially known as free trade. Now, there was, of course, resistance to this. Maybe most famously, the uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas in 1994, on the day that NAFTA went into effect.

But for all of the victories and all of the spaces that were carved out, it is still the CEOs, the bosses, and the capitalists who rule the world. However, in the wake of their defeat...

sections of the working class came to see their own power as a product of the nation, of masculinity, of American jobs for American workers. In this view, you didn't need to form a union. You didn't need to organize. You didn't need to fight the bosses who exploit you. All you needed to do for the high-paying blue-collar jobs of the 1960s to return was getting rid of the immigrants and bring jobs back home.

This American nationalist ideology was extremely useful to the ruling class. It allowed them to turn the rhetoric of the old base of the workers' movement into a fascist movement, which they could then use to smash any genuine workers' struggle and then ride to power to impose more brutal austerity and more pro-capitalist reforms to, in their view, make it impossible for their power ever to be challenged again.

But a strange thing happened. In the nationalism bred by the defeat of the workers' movement, the human personifications of the capitalist bubble economy in Donald Trump and Elon Musk have come to see their own victory as defeat. They became convinced that the trade deficits, which from a capitalist perspective simply do not matter as long as companies are making money. Yeah.

Sorry. Yes! They know better for shit! Who gives a fuck? What you are calling a trade deficit is us getting things we want from people. Yeah, it's buying stuff. I saw a good post. It was like, you don't have a trade deficit with your dentist. You just pay them to fix your teeth. Like...

Yeah, I was told at one point in this nation's greatest living previous moment of crisis that what we needed to do was go buy things to make it better. Not anymore, buddy. Nope. Because these people, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and the cadre of weird white nationalist fanatics that surround them have absolutely convinced themselves that if you have a trade deficit, you are being ripped off by foreigners. Yep.

And so they concluded that we needed to put tariffs on fucking all of the rest of the world in order to bring American jobs back to Americans. A new national autarky for a fascist world. Now,

The ruling class, all the capitalists, all these fucking goddamn Goldman Sachs motherfuckers, financial analysts, all of these CNBC dipshits, all of these motherfuckers at BlackRock and all of the global hedge funds, and all of these motherfuckers, all of the tech dipshits, all of the people who backed Trump to a hilt, simply assumed that none of these tariffs would ever happen, that it was all campaign bluster, that he was lying out of his ass.

And, you know, Obama, again, I've said this before, ran on abolishing NAFTA. So there was, you know, and what the fuck ever came from that, right?

We, of course, fucking tried to tell them otherwise. We tried to tell them that they could not fucking control the fascist beast, that one day it would rise to consume them all along with us. Mm-hmm. They didn't care. They backed Trump anyways because they thought they would get fucking tax breaks. And now, Liberation Day is here. Don't forget crypto. They were really bullish on that. Crypto. Yeah. Yeah. All of these motherfuckers, they really thought that Trump was going to fucking, that literally all Trump was going to do was punish the transgenders, get rid of woke, and give them tax cuts. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

And now the tariff walls have gone up. The old world is dead. The new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. Now we're in what I'm referring to as the Chinese century. I came up with this this week on my own. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Good. Now that's, of course, named after Chinatown in San Francisco, which Garrison is very bullish about. Positive real estate developments there. You're big into real estate. People don't know that.

Chinese real estate, absolutely where you want to be right now, both in Chinatown and in actual China. You put all your money into Chinese real estate. The bubble can't pop a second time. It can only go back up. It does. There were so many enemies on the verge of defeat in the traditional US geopolitical sense. China's economy wasn't doing great. Russia could have been easily pushed to collapse. And we were just like, no, no, no. You know what's better? We're going to shoot ourselves right in the dick. Yeah.

Which we've snatched defeat from the jewels of victory. We're going to shoot ourselves in a dick with a bullet that Venmo's both of you guys. It's great. We dug up the Cold War, resurrected it, and then lost. Yeah, just to lose. It's beautiful. It's sort of like Michael Jackson coming back for Space Jam if he had immediately thrown a basketball so hard at a Bugs Bunny skull that it put him in traction.

I'm sorry, wait, did you just say Michael Jackson? No, Jordan. Didn't I say Jordan? You just said Jackson. You definitely just said Michael Jackson. You know, leave it in. Different movie may be better, you know? He always performed well around kids, so...

Oh, good God. I love Space Jam. It's a good movie. All right. No, Garrison, it's forever tainted now. So let's talk about the nature of what's actually going down with these tariffs. Yeah, let's get to the tariffs. Terrible. Tariffable. Tariffable. That's right, Garrison. Nope. Yeah, so, okay. So let me just read off some of the ones that are going to fuck everyone. Great. 54% tariff on all goods.

From China, this is a 34% tariff that is being added on to the 20% tariff that was already on. There is a 20% tariff on all goods from the EU, 46% on Vietnam, which is

fucking devastating because it's a huge amount of capital from china also speaking of the china panic our strongest geopolitical ally in the region like in terms of having a military right yeah a country that we've been discussing going to war for quite recently yeah like we we just we we have literally and this is this is the funny thing about all of these vicky ostawa pointed this out the more

Closely allied with the U.S., the more fucked you got by these? It's such a weird move. Yeah. Yeah. 24% tariff on Japan. What is it? Like 80 or 90% on fucking Cambodia? Why? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So we'll get to why in a second. I want to also cover, so there's a 37% tariff on Bangladesh, which is going to be devastating for, I mean, a lot of the textile imports. 25% on South Korea, so fucking rip you ever getting a phone again. 32% on Taiwan, so rip the entire tech industry. Fucking rip Taiwan too.

These tariffs are going to devastate the international economy. Okay, I have been angry about this since the fucking election. People have been calling these tariffs a tax. That is just no. It is not what's happening here. Calling it a tax is to completely underplay how serious this is. This is not a fucking tax. This is the wholesale destruction of entire industries.

And some of these industries like fast fashion, which, you know, has always been undergirded by the exploitation of workers from China to Bangladesh and also like in the US too. But like, you know, fuck those things, whatever. They never needed to exist. Fuck them. But like, you know, like you're probably not gonna be able to fucking buy board games anymore because they're going to be too expensive to produce. Oh, it's going to shatter games like tabletop gaming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's done. Like the economy as we knew it does not exist anymore.

As of, like, this morning. Right? Everything that we've known about how this thing works is fucking done. And some of these are just, you know, like, unbelievably hideously cruel. So there's, for example, a 44% tariff on Myanmar. Yeah. Which, you know, is a country, yeah, devastated by a horrific war, wage for a brutal dictatorship, and also fucking suffering from a catastrophic earthquake. And we're like, fuck you, eat shit, 44% tariff. Also embargoed, no? Like, we've seized their government assets in the United States. Like...

Yep. There's one on like Diego Garcia, for instance. Yes. There's one. It's on the British Indian Ocean Territory, which collective population is primarily U.S. soldiers. Yeah. Yeah. Like Christmas Island is on there. Yeah. You know, there's one more that I want to talk about, which is that Sri Lanka has been suffering from an unbelievably devastating series of economic crises and they're getting hit with a 44 percent fucking tariff.

In a moment when, like, they already haven't had enough dollars to fucking import fuel for their economy to function. So this is going to be devastating, not just for us, but for a whole bunch of people across the world. So this is the other aspect of this, too, that's really fucking brutal, is that for the U.S., right, we don't need other countries' money. We don't need to have piles of any other country's money around, right? We can just buy things in American dollars. Mm-hmm.

But if you are Sri Lanka, you need American dollars to buy oil. Yes. There are so many fucking things that you could only buy in American dollars. And when these tariffs go up, when the prices increase and when they can't fucking sell their stuff, that means that they don't have dollars. And that means that they can't get access to a whole bunch of the vital commodities that they need to survive. And this is just going to fucking devastate them. And I think that's been an angle that I really wanted to make sure we talked about because it

It's been I haven't seen any fucking mention of it at all, even though those people are going to suffer the most in this are people who are already completely on the fucking edge whose economies have already been collapsed. We've already been so brutally exploited by these same fucking people. And they're just fucked. Yep. You know, we always say we know like to reefs, but we do like these ads. We're back. I don't feel great about that. But now there is a funny part of all of this.

There is some fun here. Oh, good. Which is, okay, so one of the big questions about the tariffs was how were they going to calculate the tariffs on all of these countries, right? Because they were saying that their tariffs were going to be a projection of like currency manipulation and like value-added taxes and like all of these like subsidies to vital industries. And, you know, and the question again was like literally how can they possibly calculate the tariff rates of hundreds of different countries and taking into account all of these things, right? Yeah.

Now, the news that had been leaking a couple of weeks ago was that they were going to do brackets. What they actually appear to have done is ask ChatGPT... ChatGPT? Oh, no! No, it's entirely... People have, like, reverse-engineered the prompts. It's almost directly just the ChatGPT. Probably, there's a couple...

different engines that gave almost identical responses, but it's probably chat GPT. It's amazing that they're doing the same shit as like my undergraduates and the people are doing the same shit in their response. I'm sure your undergraduates spent a little more time trying to hide it, James. Most of them are smart enough to like pad it a little bit so that you can't put the prompt into chat GPT and find it. Yeah. So my lowest F are undergrads.

I want to give a lot of credit to the economist James Sirarecki, who's the guy who figured out their formula. So their formula, and this is drawing stuff from the... I mean, I saw it from James first, but like... So their formula is literally just, you take a country's trade deficit with the U.S. And it's also important to note here that they're not counting services. They're only counting goods, right? When again...

If you're missing the products and just getting in services, that's half the economy, as I understand it. Yeah, yeah. Especially for the U.S., which provides an enormous number of services. But these people are fucking fascists, and so they don't think that services are fucking real, right? It's the same ideology that undergirds the whole thing about service workers not being fucking real workers. Literally, the only real job is that one video of a guy wrestling with an oil derrick. Yes, that is the only job. That's the only...

That is the only job. He was actually a manager and he was just doing that for the video. And was doing it very wrong. You gotta rub some mud on you. You gotta get super, super muddy. You gotta take some pieces of metal and move them around to where they're not supposed to go. That's when you're a real laborer. That's labor. That's working. Only jobs are things where you wear safety toe boots and everything else. And that's the thing though, because their image of the world is the fascist image of the world. And in the fascist image of the world, labor is just masculinity. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's like, that's why they're fucking doing it like this. And so, you know, and so, so the fascists have asked chat GPT,

How to do tariffs and what they got is again, so they take the country's trade deficit and divide it by their total exports in the US Now this is nothing right like in economic terms. No, that's not how you do anything This is this is not a real thing like this is this is like trying to measure someone's height By like dividing their favorite number by the average radius of an apple like Okay, yeah, you know, what are we coming after me here?

Look, I have my maintains. Just because I do math a little differently. Okay. There is no scientific basis, Robert, for measuring height by dividing favorite number by apple radius. We simply must accept the truth of science. That's what you say, Joe Rogan, and I feel differently.

The dictatorship of ChatGPT is just... It's so bleak. Yeah. Yeah. It's just shit. They asked ChatGPT. It's a mix of they don't actually care or think this will affect them, and also they legitimately think it's the smartest person in the world. Yeah. Yeah. It's smarter than them. Yeah. Which may be a good thing. But not in this instance. Mm-hmm. Well, and you can tell the extent to which they were relying on this and didn't cognate themselves because... So after...

It started to spread that this is just how they were doing it. After James Surowiecki, like, calculated it, the White House said, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, no, no, no, that's not right. We use an actual complex formula. And so they released a fake formula. But the thing about the formula, right, is that the formula is just, it is literally just trade deficit divided by total exports, but they threw in two random variables as Greek letters. Right.

But there's one on the top, there's one on the numerator, one on the denominator, and they're the same, so they cancel each other out? That sounds right to me. See, that's how you know they're smart, is because they're using Greek letters. Yep. Which Greek letters do they use, and which person's fraternity does it represent? I don't even speak Greek letters, so they must be smarter than me. You know what? I rescind my complaints.

This is how the economy dies, not through tragedy, but through farce. It's both. It is both, yeah. Tragifarce, I think is what Marx called it. A lot of people are going to die.

You know, and I mean, like, like my actual serious line on this is that this is the great double bind of capitalism is that we are all reliant simultaneously. We are reliant for our survival on the same economy that will make us all homeless, right? Is the same economy that we need to fucking eat every single day that even in good times, this economy fucking strips from us the value of the labor we produce and hands us back a bunch of fucking scraps that pay for not enough of anything that we need.

So even as our enemies, you know, tear apart the system that exploits us, we are the fucking ones who's going to suffer. Neoliberalism finally has, in Trump, produced its own gravedigger, and our fucking job, and the job of every single one of us and every single person listening to this show, is to make sure that we also aren't the ones thrown into this fucking grave. And this is going to require a kind of organizing that is in some ways like, but in some ways unlike anything we've done before. We're about to experience a level of

unbelievable economic chaos that we sort of saw during 2020, but during 2020, there was, you know, as bad as everything got, the state stepped in and decided to do welfare reforms, right? Like, they gave people a bunch of fucking money. And it wasn't enough, but they did it. Now, none of that shit. We are the only people who are going to be able to keep each other alive. Yeah.

And that's what we have to be doing right now is we have to be keeping each other alive until we are organized enough and we are powerful enough to fucking run these people out so they can't ever fuck us again like this. We can resurrect neoliberal globalism. We can restore free trade. That's right.

That's right. Bring it back to the Clinton era. Oh, God. One last thing we should mention is that like this is already united the entire world against us effectively. Oh, yeah. People, countries who have never worked together before in their entire existence are working together. And unfortunately, polls also show Americans can distrust or the tendency to view like Canadians and the EU as enemies is rising both for Republicans and Democrats. Yeah. So that's great. That's great. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.

Yeah. And also, you know, and like the thing to think the other thing that we have to do here, and this is this is literally our responsibility on this podcast and also the responsibility of like fucking everyone who is having conversations with another person is that this is entirely Trump's fault. He fucking did this. Like, oh, yeah, this is not fucking the EU or whatever the fuck whoever's doing retaliatory. Yeah, this is this is no one else ever wanted this.

Yeah. Yeah. No, like the people who put Trump in power didn't want this. This is just him. And so, yeah, the, the, the, the actual solution to this is all of us running this fucker out and not us getting drawn into his fucking bullshit wars with Canada or Greenland or whatever the fuck country he decides to invade in the next like year. Oh,

Is that all for Tariff Talk? Yeah, that's all we got on the tariffs. I don't know what else to say. I mean, I'm just looking at the numbers right now where the Dow Industrial is down 1,500 points since the start of the day. So things are looking very good. All of the lines, like if you look at the way in which the line went down,

There's like, it's just this direct vertical drop on the third. It's shocking. No, it is a 90 degree angle. It is legitimately, if you set the Google stock viewer thing to a one day view, the drop is so shocking that it looks like it just started down. It prompts you to turn your phone in the other direction. I've never seen anything like it, but I guess no one has.

Yeah. No, I mean, some of us, I guess people still alive in the 1930s. Yeah, I guess. Woody Guthrie has. My fucking grandma, I guess. Like... Yeah, it's great. We did it in the 1930s. It was bad then and it's...

And now, well, now that we got those pesky tariffs out of the way, let's talk about the actual most important thing to happen this week in the news. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker has broken the record for the longest speech at 25 hours and five minutes. Yeah, that's horrible. Beating Strom Thurmond's filibuster of the 1957 civil rights bill by 46 minutes. We did it, folks. Excellent.

Outstanding. Good. I'm just checking on our Wall Street bets and they're having a real one today. That's pretty funny. I will say, I will say the thing about the Booker one. So if you were writing a parody of the Democratic Party, you would write that Cory Booker did this and like did the did this filibuster and then immediately turned around and voted yes for a cloture vote to allow Trump to appoint another nominee. And that's exactly what they did.

Yeah. We can't even pair. You can't parry to them. It's beyond parody. I like, yeah, it's astounding. It's astonishing. It's not even a filibuster. He's not filibustering anything. He didn't actively stop anything happening other than people not paying attention to him. I got a response from someone being like, well, you know, they didn't get to do anything on Monday. And I was like, yeah, they weren't really planning on it. And things continued as normal Tuesday. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and here's the thing about that, right? Like, do you know how many Democrats there are in the Senate? Yeah.

Do you know how many hours you could filibuster them for if you were actually determined to fucking do this and on how many different things? If we had a rotating series of Democrats. Yeah, sure. If you tag teamed it. Yeah, but they're not there.

They're not willing to fucking do it. No, and they'd be stopped eventually. The Republicans would do something fucked up to stop it, but at least you'd have tried. Yeah, yeah, and people would maybe take some fucking energy from that. And even if you were going to do this as a fucking show vote thing, you could have voted no on the cloture motion to like fucking...

Do the, to like appoint the next nominee. They're just like, no, fuck you. The fact that Chuck Schumer caved on the Republican budget from a few weeks ago and secretly got a number of Democratic senators to switch their votes to make it pass. And no one did this for, for that, which, which previously Democrats were talking about this budget bill. Like it's the worst thing to ever happen because it is a bad bill. Yeah. It's really bad. And then they just caved last minute or specifically Schumer and the people he talks to caved.

And Schumer definitely would not have been in support of Booker doing something like this for that bill. But now Schumer gets to applaud along as Booker delivers a 25-hour, maybe, like, well-orated speech. No, it was a very well-written speech. Like, technically, it was good, but that didn't matter. It's just this pure show of, like,

symbolic theater. Yeah. What's the point? It's like if a Congress person got out and conducted like a perfect rendition of, uh, the Nutcracker, like symphony of like the ballet portion of that on their own in front of like the Capitol building. Like, well, that's impressive. It's spectacle. Like you're clearly very good at what you're doing, but it didn't change anything. Like it had no impact on the problems. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, you're good. I'll give you that. Cory Booker can deliver a fucking speech. But that was really not what I was looking for. Fiddling impressively while Rome burns. Thanks, Cory. Yeah, and every single moment that Trump is in power, the way that they fucking just...

rolled over for him looks worse and worse. He acknowledged it in the speech. He said, I failed and so did we. We didn't rise to the moment and we let this horrible thing happen. Yeah. Which I, even I got a little briefly, oh shit, maybe he actually recognizes like. No, okay. Although because it took him like 20 hours to like break emotionally to the point where he could like admit that to himself. Acknowledge his deep, deep,

deep failure. Yeah, but like it took having your brain be shattered by this like pretty impressive physical act that like destroys your body, soul, and spirit in any way. I think that's all we have to say about that. Let's go on an ad break and come back to discuss more sad and actually also possibly good news or at least bad for Elon Musk, which is good for us. Yeah. All right, we are back.

I think let's pivot to James Stout for an update on Venezuela. No, El Salvador. Well, no. El Salvador, yeah. El Salvador, the torture labor prison, James. Of course, we have to begin my segment today by saying whose birthday it is on the day that you're hearing this. So if you want to plant a tree for Apo...

Get out there and plant your tree. Unfortunately, that is the only good news we have today. Border Patrol has spent most of this week touting the quote lowest number of border crossings in history. It will shock listeners to hear that this is not historically accurate. Border encounters are way down. If there's one thing that I have ever taught you, it is that border encounters are not the same as unique individuals because people are being sent directly back to Mexico and will tend to return it

attempting a different route crossing the border, right? Those are way down. And they're the lowest since they began publishing monthly data in 2000. But numbers were way lower in the 50s and 60s and before then. It's relatively immaterial. It's just sort of a nitpicky point, I guess.

Today, what I really want to talk about is the case of Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was removed by the Trump administration to El Salvador, to Secot, in a way that they have admitted was a mistake. So we have to go back a little bit to understand Mr. Abrego Garcia's story and how we got here. He was arrested in mid-March due to the United States government claim that he played a, quote, prominent role in MS-13, MS-13 being the Salvadorian gang, right? Yeah.

He'd come to the United States in 2011. He was fleeing gang violence. He was allegedly arrested in 2019 outside a Home Depot where he was standing with other men looking for work. However, the incident report for that particular incident gives other names, but not his. At that point, a...

Prince George's County Police Department detective filled out a, quote, gang worksheet and claimed that Mr. Abrago Garcia was associated with or a member of MS-13. The evidence he cited for this was a Chicago Bulls hoodie

and the claim of a confidential informant. The confidential informant claimed that he was part of a group within this gang that was set up in a state that Mr. Abrago Garcia had never lived in. The United States in 2019, ICE argued that he shouldn't be

given bond because of this alleged gang membership, right? And so he wasn't given bond, but through an asylum claim, although he didn't get asylum, he was protected from removal, right? So a judge ruled that he couldn't be removed back to El Salvador.

where he would presumably face violence. When Mr. Abrago Garcia's lawyers tried to interview the police detective who had filed this report accusing him of gang membership, they found no record of his arrest and that the detective has been suspended since then. The department in question also settled a lawsuit with its own cops over racism in the department.

J.D. Vance, who has a law degree, right? The J.D. is, I guess, before and after his name. He has a law degree from Harvard, has claimed that Mr. Abrago Garcia is a convicted member of MS-13. This is not true. I can't find any evidence that he has any conviction of any kind.

I'm going to quote here from a filing by the United States government. On the 15th of March, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error. So the government there has admitted in a court filing that they accidentally sent this guy to the prison labor camp in El Salvador, right? According to ICE acting field officer Robert Cerner, quote, he was an alternate.

So it appears that they had a large list of people they wanted to put on this flight. This is interesting, right? It's an insight into their process for filling that first flight that some people didn't feel they had enough evidence for, but somehow this guy, who again has never been convicted of

of having any membership of any gang, they put on this flight, right? His wife and child are both US citizens and they have sued in court. That's why we're seeing this, right? They've sued for the United States government to stop paying El Salvador for his detention and for the United States government to demand he return.

Vance has advanced a kind of unique legal theory in response, claiming that withholding of removal only prevents someone being deported back to their home state. I mean, you could technically, that is what the withholding

is, right? Like it's like he can't go back to El Salvador because he will be at risk in El Salvador. So they can deport him to a third state, but they deported him to El Salvador or renditioned him to El Salvador, right? I'm going to read J.D. Vance's post here. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I'll start with the second paragraph. In 2019, immigration judge, parentheses under the Biden administration. For those of you who are familiar with dates,

uh it's at 2019 it was was under the first trump administration that was that was the trump administration yeah okay moving on determined that the deported man was in fact a member of the ms-13 gang he also apparently had multiple traffic violations for which he failed to appear in court a real winner

It is telling that the entire American media is going to run a propaganda operation today, making you think that an innocent, quote, father of three was apprehended by a gulag. Father of three is in quotes here, by the way. Yeah, yeah. And gulags generally not capable of doing the apprehensions themselves. If we think of a gulag as a place, it is the police who apprehend the person, send them to the gulag.

Moving on. Here are the relevant facts. I'm still quoting. The man is an illegal immigrant with no right to be in our country. Obviously, the judge determined that he was protected from removal. Quoting again, an immigration judge during the Biden admin determined he was a member of the MS-13 gang. Again,

Again, that's not the case. It's staggering the extent to which they can say a sentence where every single individual word is a lie. Like, stunning. Yeah, yeah. The fact that so many members of the modern Republican Party have memory holds 2019 and 2020 as being under the Biden administration is just insane. Yeah, it's bizarre. I think what they're referring to is the initial hearing where he was denied bomb was in 2019 and then he filed his asylum claim and later was protected from removal.

uh but that's not what they're saying here but like even the way they just they talk about like the covid response they talk about 2020 they talk about it as if joe biden was the president they're not gonna lock us down again but you locked us down yeah who did that and then the last one i think is most rebellious because he's not a citizen he does not get full jury trial by peers in other words whatever due process he was entitled to he received

The immigration court doesn't generally present the opportunity for a jury trial, right? Vance, again, holds a JDE. He presumably knows this. What's more disturbing is the claim made by the United States government in its filing in this lawsuit that the Abrego Garcia family filed. Quote, because plaintiffs concede that Abrego Garcia is not in the United States custody, this court cannot hear these claims. So they're claiming that no U.S. court has jurisdiction over

over the question of these people who are in El Salvador because they're not in U.S. custody, right? Which, obviously, if they stick the landing on this, it suggests that, like, it is a one-way ticket to the prison labor camp, right? That you cannot challenge that in U.S. court. You ain't going to get very far in court in El Salvador, right? So, what they're suggesting here is this is a forever detention that

There is no habeas, right? That was what they were asking for, habeas corpus. Can you explain what habeas corpus actually is for the listeners? Yeah, it means bring me the body, right? In this case, it is... Yeah, you have to present evidence in order to charge, like, convict people and things. It's like the sine qua non of having a justice system, a criminal justice system, right? You have to, like, show something. Yeah, you can't just be, like, bad man and then put the guy in jail, right?

The most basic thing is that like, yeah, in literal terms, it means you have to like actually take somebody in front of a court in order to determine if they're like being detained for a reason. Right. Like a judge has to see them and say like, yes, this is this is not an unlawful imprisonment. There is a charge. There is some degree of evidence that somebody did something. Right. Wait.

which they have not provided here, right? Not that like you can prove they did it, but like something was done and you are here for that for a reason. Yeah. Yeah. So in this case, we don't have any of that. Mr. Abrego Garcia is still, the way his family found out he was in Secod was that his wife identified him by scars on his head when they shaved it and a tattoo they saw. Jesus Christ. Yeah. They had no idea.

It presumably doesn't come up on the ICE detainee locator, you know, that you're going to look up your family members or any of your family members are detained by ICE. It doesn't have El Salvador as an option. So yeah, this is where we're at. This is a case I will be following, right, because I say it's pretty pivotal. If they can argue that the court doesn't have jurisdiction, obviously I'm sure at that point that ruling will be challenged and it'll run up the courts. Currently it seems like the only court they're going to listen to is the Supreme Court, but ever

evidently that this is what they're going for. This is their argument here, that once you're in El Salvador, you're out of their hands and they can't do anything. So sorry, even though it was a mistake, you're stuck there forever, which is pretty disturbing.

Yesterday, me and James did an episode on ISIS targeting of students, scholars and professors that they believe are associated with pro-Palestine protests. So we did an update on that story that I did a piece on or a segment on last week on executive disorder. So for a follow up on that, you can look to yesterday's episode. But we are going to close with, I guess, kind of a feel good story because it makes Elon Musk...

Sad. He has had a bit of a rough week for Mr. Musk's businesses and his political projects, I guess.

Elon Musk's efforts to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court have failed as the Democratic backed candidate swept the election, maintaining 4-3 liberal control of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. Yeah, I mean, the gist of it is like three or four days ago, all of my friends from who are scanties got furious because Elon Musk wore a cheese head.

You know, like the ones for the Packers that people from Wisconsin wear when they're at games. While he got up on stage and gave a million dollars, basically immediately before, like about a little less than a week ago, a higher court ruled that

that it was not bribery for him to offer people a million dollars at random if they like voted or showed up at like, you know, different rallies and stuff, which is like what he's been doing, right? Is making these basically fake offers of a million dollars because these two went to members of the local Republican Party. Like it was clearly set up. Yeah. The head of

the college Republicans of Wisconsin must spend $25 million on this race. He danced around on stage wearing a cheese head and he gave out million dollar novelty checks to quote unquote voters who won a contest by signing his petition against activist judges, which has been the new rallying cry on the right is that everything that's going wrong, everything that's stopping Trump is from these activist judges that we have to unseat.

He also gave $100 each to every person who signed that petition. And on election day, Musk offered voters $50 if they posted a picture of a Wisconsin resident outside of a polling place. Yeah. How is that allowed? These are the same people who scream about like election interference, rigging elections, buying elections, stealing elections. It might not be. And like, what...

Like, this is insane stuff. You can go to jail for giving people a water bottle in line at polling places in multiple states.

And Musk is allowed to give people $50 for pictures posted outside of polling places. What the fuck is happening? But luckily, the negative polarization against Musk and Tesla that's been increasing the past few months has resulted in Judge Suvin Crawford beating the mega hat Republican judge who last year went as Donald Trump for Halloween, beating this guy by 10%.

This was a massive, a massive reversal of the 2024 presidential election results in Wisconsin. There was a record high turnout for this spring election, 40% higher than the last Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which was in 2023. Which, by the way, that was also a high turnout election too, right? Yeah, yeah. Like that previous one, then this one just fucking obliterated it. Like this was like just under the results of like what you would expect out of like a midterm election. Yeah, yeah.

They shifted every single county in the state blue compared to the 2024 presidential election and on average by about 10 to 12 points. Massive, massive shifts. And this was before the tariffs, by the way. Like, this was before the tariffs were announced. No!

No, this was pure personal dislike of Elon Musk meddling in Wisconsin politics. Well, like and everything else has happened since January. But like it does seem like Elon Musk's personal presence was a net negative and all the money he spent. Luckily, the next day there was a Tesla sales report saying,

which was one of the worst in the history of their company, with 50% fewer vehicles being delivered in the first three months compared to last year, with Tesla stock continuing to plunge the past week, although with reports that Musk might

exit the inner circle of the Trump administration, those stocks are kind of flipping back and forth as he's expected to return to his company. Yeah, yeah. And who knows? Like a lot of that's clearly the tariffs. Well, yes. And then with the tariffs, this is a whole other issue. Real double whammy for Tesla. The reporting is that people around Trump have largely soured on Musk.

Who knows how true that is? There's always a lot of like reports from the Trump inner circle that are like, I don't know. It's yeah, he's always had a very leaky. Yeah, but and I can see it being multi causal, like Musk has failed badly in Wisconsin. The kind of suspicion right now is that Schibble or whatever his name is, was down by about five points relative to other MAGA candidates in the same election.

which people are attributing largely to Musk's intervention. Well, and like they were testing out if he was like a stable, consistent, reliable political operator, or if what he did in 2024 was kind of like a one-off event, if he's like a one-trick pony there. And this complete, like devastating loss demonstrated that maybe this unstable drug addict

No offense to drug addicts, but specifically for Elon Musk, who's railing ketamine all the time and trying to run the entire world. Luckily, my friends who might indulge in ketamine don't try to run the entire world. You say that now, but you'll get older at some point. They'll have midlife crises too. But he was shown in a very public way to be an unstable political force.

And yeah, that's going to turn some of the people in the Trump admin against him. Yep. Anyway, I think that's all I have to say about this Wisconsin race. All right. Well, I think that's probably an episode. Wait, shit. Hold on. I just found the funniest fucking thing about this tariff thing I've seen yet from fucking VFX. Oh, wait, wait, wait. One sec, one sec. Tariff, don't like it. Casper, rock.

Okay, we're back. Apparently, the tariffs are not broken down by country. This is a quote from this guy, VFX, on Twitter. They're not broken down by country. They're broken down by top-level internet domain. No!

It's why the island is populated entirely by penguins, the .hm domain, and why the Diego Garcia military base are listed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like fucking McDonald's Island. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And why Réunion and Gibraltar are listed separately from France and the UK. I wondered how Gibraltar made it on that. Yeah, like, La Réunion is part of France. Why are we hitting these guys? Yeah, it's because they used it all at the yellow line.

Okay, that makes sense. That is what a 19-year-old who never went to college but thinks he understands all of reality would do. Okay, great. Dictatorship of Chad GPT. Fucking phenomenal. My fucking God. Unbelievable. Look, look, okay.

The note I want to close on is that, so podcaster Mike Duncan, the creator of the Revolutions podcast, a man who has spent literally tens of thousands of hours writing about like every revolution that's ever happened.

At the end of the original run of the series, Revolutions, he makes this point, which is that all revolutions work because you encounter one of the great idiots of history, a man who is blessed with the inalienable ability to make the wrong decision at every single time. And my God, if we can't beat these motherfuckers, that shit's entirely on us because we have been handed one of the greatest idiots of history that has ever existed in the history of humanity.

And our fucking job now is to turn that into fucking a better world. Do something. Yeah, we'll see. The problem is that there's a lot of greater idiots out there and they all do still have guns and money. One of the great tragedies of the world is that very, very stupid people can still fire guns.

We made them too easy, folks. Yeah, I've seen that happen a couple times. Yeah. In the old conduct of my work. Anyway. All right. Well, we reported the news. We reported the news. Now, you go out there and, you know what? Find someone who lives on the aisle of McDonald's.

near the Arctic and kick their ass today. Fuck them up. Fuck that island. Do trade with a penguin. Pay 10% more. Yeah, send us a picture of you fighting a penguin and we'll make sure you get a hat or something. Yeah, yeah. We'll send you some merch. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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