It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
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Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? Ow goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all-new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Listen to The Hookup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, dickless version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless Dickless Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only.

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Listen to Dubbed Dynasty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi. Hi.

Hi, I'm Sam Mullins, and I've got a new podcast coming out called Go Boy, the gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. Has spent 24 of those years in jail. But when Roger Caron picked up a pen and paper, he went from an ex-con to a literary darling. From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts, listen to Go Boys.

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

Welcome to It Could Happen Here. It is continuing to happen. Stonks. But we will discuss stonks probably later this week. This episode is going to be much more fun because I am pleased to have returning to the show, Ellie Ehrman, writer, comedian, and creator and host of Going Down with Ellie Ehrman, a trans political comedy news show. And I'm going to be talking to her about what's going on in the world of comedy.

As well as joining us here is Teen Vogue's news and politics editor, Lex McMiniman. Welcome, both of you. Hi. Hi, thanks. So we're going to be talking about the recent Teen Vogue special issue cover story on Vivian Wilson, the estranged daughter of Elon Musk.

Ella, you put together a fantastic piece last month, and this is what we're going to discuss. How this article came together, that viral photo shoot in Japan, which is fantastic. All the styling in that shoot was lovely. But I think this particular piece was really relevant for trans people, and also relevant because of the way...

global politics has been shaken up by a few specific people. And focusing in on Vivian, I think, was really special. So I guess I would first like to hear about

Like, yeah, like the broad strokes of how this first came together. From our perspective, you know, I don't know that like everyone is aware of this. And certainly I don't know that all of my friends in our various trans subcultures know this. But at Teen Vogue, we've been covering like trans politics and trans rights for a long time, like far before I got here. But I've been here for almost four years and it's been a pretty big part of my beat in part because of it being like a very unavoidable thing.

thing within following like U.S. state legislatures and then obviously like at the federal level, which has only intensified more and more in the last year. And so that's like one aspect of it. But at the same time, we love young people that shitpost. And so Vivian had been on her radar for a while. Totally. I also think people are maybe more aware of this whole like comrade teen vogue thing.

vibe of like, we're really interested in talking to people that have a clear political leaning that have like a sense of how they see themselves in the world in a political context. And Vivian sort of came right out the gate as someone who was really eager to share her thoughts on these things. So from last summer, like within like a month of when Vivian was kind of introduced to the world through her, um,

talking about her on Jordan Peterson's podcast. We were trying to get in touch with her and it was something I was talking a lot about within the office and we didn't really know what to do because she just kind of emerged from nowhere onto the internet. And so I had been talking about it a lot, including with Ella, because we talk a lot. And so Ella eventually revealed like, oh, that's oomphie. I am mutuals with Vivian. Not oomphie. You did kind of, I mean,

Are you threads oomphies? What are you oomphies on? Instagram. Instagram, nice. I would never use threads, my god. So over to you. That's my Teen Vogue intro, but Ella, if you want to. Yeah. No, because I am interested in contacting Vivian because she was certainly getting an unhinged number of media requests starting last summer. Yeah, that's true. Right, so she did that one NBC interview after Elon went on Peterson.

And I do not work at Teen Vogue, but Lex and I know each other because you're contractually obligated to know everyone else who's part of the, you know, deep state Illuminati doing trans politics online club. Yeah, I was just going to say trans people club, but also deep state, yeah. The pronoun council, yeah. We're all established members. We swear allegiance once a year. There's a whole ritual. Don't worry about it. So when I got in touch with Vivian last year,

fall, which I got in touch with her initially to see if she would come on Going Down. And I reached out to her and I said, do you want to come on my live comedy show? And she said, no, I'm actually not

sure live comedy is for me. I'm a little worried I'm not funny enough. And since then, she has changed her mind. She's told me repeatedly that she regrets saying that to me, that she has decided she actually is funnier than everyone else alive. All of the things that a prolific 20 year old poster might say. Absolutely. But so I got in touch with her.

And then she said no. And I was like, okay, well, at least I have this mutual now. And then a few months later, I mentioned to Lex that I'd gotten in touch with her. And Lex said, okay, so she doesn't want to do a live comedy show that nobody knows about. Who amongst us does not want to do a live comedy show? What if instead we did a really fancy photo shoot and put her in Teen Vogue, a legacy journalism magazine? And I said, honestly, I think that's a better sales pitch. And it was. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it is really compelling. I mean, the photo shoot pulls a whole bunch of people in. It's certainly, if I was in Vivian's position, that would be interesting to me. And it does help spread around. So much of the piece is talking about the struggles of living as a young trans person in America, and the fact that you can use a Teen Vogue photo shoot to spread writing about that around the internet is

super useful. Yeah, I mean, I just want to second what Lex has been saying. I think the work Teen Vogue has been doing is really important. So many, I mean, Garrison, you know so much transmedia is independently distributed and DIY, and I love us for that, but it is always really heartening to see media

like mainstream media institutions uplift trans voices the way Teen Vogue has been doing. And it's also like Conde Nast as an institution, which is like Teen Vogue's parent company is only one of multiple media conglomerates that will very proudly like use trans people in a representative way, like, and like sell magazine covers with trans people on it. Like you,

You can think of Hunter Schaefer, for example. She's been on the cover of several Vogue's. But at the same time, Hunter Schaefer also received a misgendering passport after the Trump admin. So, like, I think that if legacy media is unwilling to connect the dots between, like, profiting off of, like, the aesthetics of trans people, but not actually profiting

like talking about the political underpinnings of like why trans people are even able to be visible at this time and like what the you know trap doors term align calls it of trans visibility means then it's like why even do this work in the first place so Vivian was like a really great opportunity for us to like build on like we've done several photo shoots particularly with trans women because I and trans girls at Teen Vogue because we like feel very strongly and Ella makes this point in the piece that like

The way that trans femme people are objectified and commodified and also the target of such extreme vitriol is something it feels really important to take a stand against. It just felt like doing this with Vivian, who's so high profile, but also hadn't had the opportunity yet to take control of her own narrative in the public eye. And with this being her second ever interview, first ever photo shoot, it just felt like a really big opportunity that was worth taking.

using as a big swing, you know? No, like, she is at, like, the center of this, like, matrix of trans commodification in so many ways. Like, this special issue was the first time Vivian was really, like, framed as the subject matter of, like, any piece and, like, framed as her own person. For the entirety of her adult life, she's been used as this rhetorical object. Like, both biographies

by her dad, but as well as, like, by people on the left who's, like, objectified Vivian to use her as a bludgeon against her father. Totally. And, yeah, like, people are very willing to, like, commodify or use trans people in certain ways, but to have, like,

trans people writing about other trans people in a way that frames them as a subject matter is so important. Yeah. I mean, I think Vivian, one of the things that drew me to the story in the first place is that Vivian's sort of case is such an interesting microcosm of the trans experience as a whole. Yeah. She's incredibly talked about for something that is not her fault and not under her control at all. In the same way that right now on the national stage, like trans femininity and transness at large, but specifically trans femininity is a

the like problem to be spoken about um by especially conservatives like butler calls it a a phantasm the like gender nonsense i read that book um you have my copy i think

I'm almost certain I do. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. Almost certainly. That's the trouble with gender, right? Gender trouble, yeah. No, that's the original book. It's Who's Afraid of Gender. Thank you very much. I have your book, but I haven't looked at it in a long time. Except for to remember the word phantasm. And so, yeah, I totally agree with what Lex said. It's really exciting to sort of take her out of being used as a prop character.

and give her own voice back. I think one of the most exciting moments in the piece to me is the moment where I ask her about sort of the allegations that Ilan shifted rightward because of her, and she pushes back against...

sort of that narrative very strongly. And I think that is the way we've seen her being used both on the left and the right as, as sort of a, this is why he's doing this. It's clearly the fact that he has this 20 year old trans girl. And she's like, actually, that's a crazy thing to say about a, about a 20 year old. And especially to like counter the narrative of her life. That's been driven by Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography, which is like so hostile and,

And to have like a prominent, like a prominent biography like that, like trying to make a narrative out of, out of your existence. And it was something you have like no like input in, no control. And that's like, so demeaning. It's also like a very like, you know, trans misogyny moment as well. Like, yeah, it is interesting how, how much of like Vivian is so relatable. Like, like a lot of trans people have, shall I say, challenging relationships with their parents, maybe not to this extreme, but, but,

Sometimes, frankly, right? Like there's a lot of people are forced to cut off contact with their family. Yeah, no, I've just been thinking a lot about this because, you know, Trump released yet another executive order. I think that this one was today basically trying to codify allowing trans youth to access gender affirming care as abuse, quote unquote, which is like something that the Republicans

Republican Party has been flagging for months that they were going to do at the federal level as well. It has already shown up in the rhetoric around trans youth health care, which obviously is going to be used as justification for targeting trans adults' access to health care. And something that, you know, I'm the only trans person on my team, something that kept coming up in Vivian's story was that it was almost like anyone could relate to this because anyone can relate to having like

a shitty parent, an abusive parent, like a bad dad, whatever. And so I think there's an extent to which this story has, like, a lot of value in, like, forcing cis people to really be confronted with the fact that, like, how trans youth are treated, like, objectively is, like, abusive and it's not the access to

healthcare that is the abuse. It's like the way that they're dismissed. It's the way they're belittled. It's the way they can't even be like trusting their own parents to be looking out for them and to the extent that they have to push themselves out into the world to clarify that point. So like that's one aspect of it. I totally agree with what you were both saying that it is like a microcosm of the trans experience. But I do think there's like this other valence for like

allowing her to like control how this is being perceived or received sort of by cis media and like cis, like the cis political sphere, which is like how trans people are just getting shoved into that over and over and over again with very little context felt like a really valuable thing to be able to do given how like, frankly, so much of my coverage right now just feels like it's like trying to raise attention to the fact that like, these are kids, these are young people. Like everyone should be able to relate to a young person saying like, I am,

have a bad parent and that sucks and is a formative thing for me like that is something that like other children are afforded the ability to do and like we just don't let trans kids like have that as something that's part of their truth when it's such a key part of like growing up trans in a hostile household.

And something like Vivian talked about at length is like, as someone who did transition as a minor, there's all of this like villainization around whether that's, whether that's puberty suppressing hormones, whether that's having HRT and how like the, the landscape that like me, like her, her,

Ella and like a lot of people that our age like came out of is not going to exist for the next generation of like trans kids, or at least it's going to be very different. And we need to do everything we can to stop it from being as bad as it, what it looks like it's going to be. And Vivian like talked about this at length in the piece with the restriction of puberty blockers, all of the stuff in schools and this, this complete demonization of not just the healthcare, but also like the,

the people of like trans kids as this own demon of America that's like invading or is like threatening. So I think it is really cool of Vivian to talk about that at length in the special Teen Vogue cool photo shoot article.

I will say, I think, yeah, I think it's so important that that's talked about and I'm glad she did. I'm also really glad as someone who covers like trans politics and news all the time, it was such a breath of fresh air to be able to frame this piece as something

like a look into what like the joy of transition looks like and, and looking at like how her transition has brought her closer to the life she wants to be living. And I'm not that old, but like talking to someone who's a few years younger than me and who transitioned at an earlier stage in life gave me like such a beautiful vision of what the future could look like if we, if we fix some of the bullshit that's going on these days. Yeah.

Alright, I'm being clowned on in the chat. I'm not that much older than Vivian is what I meant. And now I'm peaking my microphone and the podcast is going to sound terrible. Look what you've done. This is your fault. I'm not that much older than Vivian, but she started transitioning at a much younger stage of life than me. And to see what that has done for her and like

I don't know. It was just really beautiful to talk to a 20-year-old girl and be like, oh, you're trans, but it's not actually that big of a deal. It also confirms a thing that... I made a joke about this earlier with we love young people that shitpost, but I think so much of...

liberal and right-wing talking points about, like, young people in general, like, sees them as so humorless. Like, they are like, eh, cancel culture, na-na-na. Sure. Like, nonsense. Whereas Vivian is so funny. Like, we actually struggled to cut jokes out of the piece. Like, Ella and I, Ella could tell you, we went back and forth for hours about so many jokes that did not. And just one-liners, like, she's so quippy. She's so funny. She's extremely funny. A very dense style of humor. As in, like, there's a lot of, there's a lot,

packed in like almost every other sentence. Lex and I are both some of the fastest talking people I know. And I would put Vivian in that same group of people who can keep up with us or out talk me. That comes across in the writing too. Like the way that the interview is transcribed, you can, you can read that pace into the piece. She's awesome. So much of our editing was just like sort of taking out, yeah, like little jokes or like

she's 20 so she is swearing all the time or dude the amount of cursing i much love but also that was the editing process for this was much less like stress and more just like how many f-bombs are we keeping today heart hand emojis the way edits goes is you send in a piece and the editors give you like change some stuff and then i get to look at a new draft and i get to be like hey uh why do you change that and then we go back and forth over and over again until

Until eventually it's not up to me anymore. But at one point I did have to say, actually, femboy is one word. Correct. It's different from fem space boy. And she meant something specific. And I felt really like I was bringing... I'd like to clarify, I was not involved in the grammatical edit of that. There were multiple editors whose hands that touched. As a subject matter expert. What can I say? I said, excuse me, Condé Nast. Femboy means something.

No, I am so happy that we have someone like Vivian who's able to appreciate drag way more than what I'm ever like able to, even though I can like appreciate it like on like a conceptual level, having this like complete, sincere, like engrossment in it.

is so thrilling, because a significant portion of this piece is talking about how much Vivian loves drag. Oh my god, and so much... Ellen knows nothing about drag also, so that was like a really good combo for all of us. That was, I, yeah, I sat down with her and we started talking and very, very quickly she brought up RuPaul's Drag Race, and I would just like, she kept calling it RPDR, which I'm pretty sure I've...

Don't even get into this right now, Ella. Garrison, is that something you call drag race? Have you heard RPDR said out loud? I've never heard this, no. Okay, whatever. What I'm here to say is, as someone who actually watches drag race, Ella, that is actually not that uncommon to refer to it that way. But you know, we had two different roles. As the two trans people whose brains were wiped by the story, Ella's job was to actually raise the peace in mind was to interface with Vivian about drag race. About drag race. So...

Clearly it all came together the way it was supposed to. I did at the very end of our first call. I said, do you, is there anything else you want to say? And she, and she talked to me for another 15 minutes about, about drag race specifically. Yeah. Like I know I'm like sort of meant about your dad or about like any of the important things we talked about this as you're like, no. So in season 15 of drag race, that rules. That's so cool. She's the best. Yeah.

But no, it's so funny that you talk about how there's this caricature of humorless trans people, which is very funny because all of the biggest shit posters online right now are mostly trans women. The trans comedy scene is huge. And this is something that Vivian talks about, spending the COVID lockdown in online queer communities and how...

how like the, the like drama and like conflict in those spaces trains you for how to be like really like funny and snappy. How fighting with, with like, like fellow queer teenagers, like, like prepared you for, for that, which has like certainly been like my experience. I mean, there's a reason you can sort of tell, and I'm sure this applies to beyond trans people, but you can sort of tell which social media you grew up on. Like if you were a Tumblr teen or a Reddit teen or a 4chan teen, like,

You can tell because your style of fighting and making jokes changes. Because it's such a deeply formative part of it. And I don't know what online forums the right were on growing up, but they were the wrong ones. Well, a lot of 4chan as well. Sure.

Just the not funny parts. Yeah, no, I'm still trying to untrain my defensive way of writing that I learned on Twitter. Because it's a horrible style. Horrible style of writing. You have to have like 12 prefaces. Exactly, yeah. So article one, I am not...

A racist. Waffle pancaking the entire time, which is weird because Twitter does have its own style of humor, which I also picked up on. But it also has that defensive style of writing, which needs to get untrained. But it is a work in progress. I think it's downstream of Tumblr. I remain strong on my stance that the Tumblr porn ban ruined the internet. No, absolutely. Absolutely.

I guess I'd like to talk a little bit more about the structure of the piece and how it succeeded so much in putting Vivian as a subject, right? Because the first half is written in more of a traditional article format to give context and frame Vivian as a person. But then halfway through, it switches to a back-and-forth interview, which allows Vivian to just speak for herself. And I think having both of those and not just one or the other strengthens the piece entirely and strengthens

like being able to see Vivian as a complete person. Cause like, as I'm, as I'm getting the context, like for her life and the political situation in the first half, then I get to see how much she reminds me of like,

regular 20 something trans girls um and you know like half of the friends i have though i do disagree on team pita pita's a bitch boy it's team gail all the way thank you controversial all right all right all right i'm i'm excited that we we agree on this um but those those sorts of like offhand comments and like there's there's other things that like give you like a

you know, a view into this person, it's so useful to have, like, you know, at least 50% of the piece be this, like, just straight interview. We unsurprisingly talked a lot about how we were going to structure this piece and...

partially landed on Q&A format for like, we knew this was going to be a behemoth, like no matter how we tackled it, given the subject matter. And then ultimately how long the transcript was, you know, just like it, there were many aspects of this that like, we were like, okay, how do we,

how do we do this in a way that's going to read well to people? Because something we also think about a lot is like accessibility, like young people famously hate reading now. We, but we wanted this to actually be something that like a young person could sit down, dash through, still get some like, you know, historical political context out of and still come away being like, ha ha, team PETA, team Gale or whatever the hell. Right. And so, and maybe have like subway surfers on like another phone at the same time. Exactly. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And then I would say the, the,

I want Ella to talk about the transcript and interview stuff. But the intro, I think, is probably where I spent the most of my time editing this piece and adding stuff and...

A lot of adding stuff, it ballooned. We wanted this to be a lot shorter than it was. And then it just kept feeling like there were more pieces to really tie it together. But I would say the reason that was the case is because it was a really hard line to walk to acknowledge that people would be clicking on this in part because of Elon, but that we wanted to...

tricked them into coming for Elon but staying for Vivian yeah like it's not about Elon nor like should it be yeah right and so like one like Ella and I had a zoom with Vivian in what November was the first one or was that I think so yeah November December to just like so she could kind of get our vibe and just kind of suss out if she was willing to like consider this at all and one of the earliest things she said was like I don't really want to talk about him I don't want

to be about him. And we were really down for that. Like, we don't think that her story is about him, ultimately. It felt really important and it was also challenging to make sure that

we felt like people were coming away with it from this without like a garbled interpretation of what the stakes were for her to be coming forward like we wanted it to be especially right now while so much of mainstream media is really fumbling their coverage of like politics at this moment it felt really important to be like trans politics especially especially and then also just like

all of it. So like all of it. And then especially trans politics, we just really wanted the intro to be like as strong and also like informative and also like kind of funny and also like just all the things because, and I would say that probably took the most time Ella correct me if I'm wrong, but. Yeah. I mean, I think the intro started off as probably an eighth of the piece and, and yeah, now is, is closer to a half of the piece and there were so many hands on it. I wrote like sort of a

very loose like skeleton of what that intro ended up being. And I would say the most like it wasn't that many people adding text. It was mostly me. Mostly Lex. But

But part of that is because, I mean, everything Lex said, but also that Musk is currently a high-level government official and is in the news all the time. I mean, when we started writing, the intro said that Musk had 13 children, and then we had to update that twice. New kid just dropped, yeah. Over the edit process. Yeah. Things wouldn't stop happening. And then also Vivian wouldn't stop posting, which was crazy.

a little bit frustrating. At one point, I had to DM her. I said, hey, if you get any more information, can you please just tell me and not post it on threads? And she said, oh, totally. That girl is a poster of hearts. But yeah, I mean, I think...

I really love the balance the piece found in the end. Early on when we were talking about structure, I think I pushed for more of a standard profile, mostly because, you know, then I get to show off my writing skills more and I like to write. But after talking to Vivian, even after our early pre-interview, but certainly after the full interview where I sat with her for a very long time over Zoom and a 14 hour time difference,

I immediately was like, no, if I write this out, it's going to be mostly dialogue anyway, because her voice, she's so voicey and it's so fun to keep it in that voice. She has a very, very distinctive voice. Yeah. Yeah. And so do you, Ella. And so like, it's like, that's really the strength of the piece in so many ways is that like people come away with it

it doesn't feel like you're in the background or like hiding behind something when you're writing this piece. Like it very much feels like the success of it is because you are a part of it. And the New York Times reported that this was Ella's first freelance article. So I just wanted to add that, you know, Ella kind of did her, did her big one with her first article. Thanks. No, this is now everything I write for the next 15 years will be underwhelming. It's all downstream from here. Woo.

It's not true. Barron Trump, I'm coming for you. You're going to re-enroll at NYU. Exactly. They'll never see me coming. I am waiting for him to get fixed by like a bisexual she-they. It's got to happen, right? No, I don't think so. I don't know. Obama was like into a bisexual she-they and he still bombed the Middle East or whatever.

But no, like mainstream coverage is just completely failing trans people right now. I got so mad at a Washington Post article yesterday that I that I skied it about it. Something I never do. Was it the sports one? Yes. After after President Donald Trump banned transgender girls from competing in girls sports.

A Virginia high schooler joins the boys team. She wasn't going to let the president's executive order stop her. Framed as like a feel-good story. Fucking infuriating. And it's so like transparent. Like, and I, again, I feel like I keep bringing the cis into the space. I'm really sorry. One of my like cis colleagues was like,

This is disgusting. Why did they write this, like, a feel-good story? And it's like, my thing is, if, like, if anyone with some amount of critical thinking skills can see exactly through what you're doing, why even do it? Like, it's so transparent, like, the way that that story was written. Because it gets...

clicks i mean i guess we you know what got clicks was vivian so i actually don't know about that's true and say that and say that i did and i will do you want to talk about the length of the transcript because i am curious how long vivian talked for am i am i allowed to say that i think i'm legally not allowed to say can we explain why uh when we're not recording i can explain why okay

I think I got to say most of what I want to say. I mean, I think Vivian's just like a delightful person and I'm really excited for her that she gets her moment in the spotlight. Um, and that hopefully this like helps her build herself as a public figure outside of and away from Elon Musk. And she has all of these aspirations to perform and model. And I hope she gets to do her Anna Wintour drag, um, one day soon. Oh, me too. I love that movie. It's a great movie. Um,

Hi, Anna Wintour. Lex, do you want to plug your little outlet? What's this? It's Teen Vogue. Oh, yeah. I don't know if anyone's heard. Actually, so frequently people haven't heard of it. So it's actually fine. Yes, you can find us at TeenVogue.com. We have no paywall. We have a fact checking department. Most of mainstream media is not doing it like us, if you consider those two points. So, yeah. Labor politics, especially Teen Vogue, has been phenomenal.

the past like eight years. Yup. So true. If you love Kim Kelly, she is our labor columnist. So come through. I also do some of our labor coverage, but like definitely not to the extent Kim does.

Yeah, I'm on the things. I'm on the socials. Yeah, that's it. That's all I had. LOL. Ella, where can people find you on the World Wide Web? I'm on Instagram and X The Everything app as Ella Yerman or Ella.Yerman on Instagram. We're going to get you on Blue Sky one of these days. Blue Sky. We can fix the vibes. I'm on Blue Sky. I just forget about it. We can do it. Can we?

I suffered through 2012 Tumblr once. I don't need to do it again. That is so not the vibe. I wish it were, but it's not. Oh, flu sky. No, it's more 2019 Twitter. Yeah, I agree. Ugh.

You can also find my show at GoingDownTV on Instagram, GoingDownTheShow on YouTube, GoingDownShow on Patreon. I don't know. I make a Transgender Daily show. You guys know about it. New studio looks great. It's so fun. We gotta get you on there. We gotta get you to come hang out. Hey, well, I will be in town shortly, so... Hell yeah. Oh, fun! I go to the taping so I can crash. That'll be fun. You should do it. Hell yeah. Okay, are we... Did we do it? Yeah, we're done. Ha ha ha.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. And if you've ever felt the weight of letting go of people, past versions of yourself, or the expectations placed on you, this episode is for you. Lizzo opens up like never before about self-love, transformation, and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore. Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing. It's true.

The Grammy goes to Lizzo. I think it's also hard when the things that you stand for are the same things that you're being scrutinized for. The weight that is no longer on me is not just fat or physical. I released so much to get to this point. And to be honest with you, I don't feel like I've expressed myself fully in the last two years. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking. It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed.

It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story. This is my friend Daisy.

Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream.

It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.

This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carvel. This is Levitown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.

Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless with me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, everybody. It could happen here, here, and this is Robert Evans. We're a show about things falling apart, and boy, howdy, they sure seem to be doing just that, as they always are, and have been for years. In fact, anticipation of the end times, I think, is probably close to the number one hobby in the United States at this point.

I suspect if you counted up the dollar value of all the collapse-themed movies, books, prepping gear, monetized social media content, and, of course, religious sects in the country, the apocalypse would be one of our big industries. Doomsday prepping alone was an almost $1.2 billion business last year, and it's expected to more than double by 2030.

Our popular fiction can't even imagine a better future right now. 90% of modern future media takes place during or shortly after an apocalypse. The odd exception today, like Bong Joon-ho's recent Mickey 17, is so rooted in Trumpist politics that we only catch occasional glimpses of anything beyond it.

In other words, in our fiction, there's no respite from the news. We watch a slow-motion, self-inflicted global economic collapse and then relax with shows about mushroom zombies or literal wage slaves created by mind-control surgery. In other words, it's

It's bleak out there. Tomorrow could be the day Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, or uses the military to occupy Greenland, or like one of a dozen equivalent horrors we all just know are coming in some form or another, even if no one can say when. And I'm not here today to tell you how we're gonna get past all of that or fix it, because I don't know. So today...

I'm just here as a merchant of hope. My job is to convince you that our species will someday get past our bullshit and perhaps even lay claim to the stars. And no, Elon Musk isn't going to have anything to do with that.

But in order to convince you of all this, I'm going to have to talk about a movie. It's called Roar, and it is technically a 1981 comedy adventure film about an American naturalist. This guy lives on a nature preserve in Tanzania filled with big cats. His family comes to visit at the same time as a grant committee shows up to evaluate his project.

Which has an unclear goal. He's apparently just trying to prove people and giant cats from all over the world can live together, which the movie shows they can't.

It's really immaterial what happens in the plot. All I can tell you is how Wikipedia describes it. I've watched this movie dozens of times, and I have very little idea what it's supposed to be about. This is because, in any given scene, the script is only ever a vague suggestion, as each scene starts with actors trying to read lines and evolves into those same actors trying to survive while being mauled by dozens of lions, tigers, and panthers.

I should probably step back a minute to explain some things. Roar is largely the brainchild of Tippi Hedren and her husband, Noel Marshall. If you're on the younger side, Tippi Hedren was the female lead in a little movie called The Birds. It is a horror film and also an early apocalypse flick by Alfred Hitchcock.

It's often credited with inventing modern horror cinema. Hitchcock himself sexually and psychologically harassed Hedren, but his worst actions came during a crucial scene where Hedren was attacked by a flock of birds.

Up to the day of filming, Hitchcock had assured Tippy the birds used in this scene would be animatronic. But when the time came to shoot it, she spent five days having hundreds of live birds hurled at her in huge numbers by the crew. Hedren later described it as brutal, ugly, and relentless. Cary Grant, her co-star, told her she was the bravest woman he'd ever seen.

Now, whatever other impacts this had on Tippi, she has no discernible fear of animals after this point in her life, though she really should.

Her husband, Noel, is a bit more of a mystery to me. He was an agent, a producer, a film investor, and a serial entrepreneur whose best financial decision was putting money behind what became The Exorcist. In 1969, he and Hedren were in Mozambique while she starred in the film Satan's Harvest, about which less is said the better. This is only relevant because during their time in Africa, they observed a pride of lions lounging about an abandoned home. And this gave them an idea.

They wanted to make a movie about poaching and conservation, something that could use the power of film to save these majestic creatures being threatened by humanity. All four of their children agreed to star in it and to help with production. But there were immediate snags. They wanted the film to be set in a big cat sanctuary, but actual lion tamers warned them that it was flat-out impossible to keep so many large felines together safely. This would eventually prove to have been very accurate advice.

After a while, one tamer introduced them to their first tame lion. And for reasons known only to God, he suggested to this traumatized movie star and her family of charmingly deranged Californians that they could just get their own big cats and train them by adopting animals confiscated from their previous owners. Generally, sketchy zoos and circuses.

So a lot of these cats had never known the wild, and they'd often been badly mistreated. Given that this was the 1970s, we must assume that some had been confiscated property of Coke dealers. Tippy and Noel had no professional or legal qualifications to care for dozens of big cats. When the authorities eventually found out, there was trouble. Although since Hedren and Marshall were rich, they bought their way out of said trouble by purchasing a rural compound and having a house built specifically for they and their dozens of apex predators to live.

While lions had inspired the initial vision, the compound in California soon filmed with big adopted cats of every kind. Tippy and her husband took them in and raised them among and around their own children, who came to see the animals as something between pets and family. When they actually started filming the movie that became Roar, making any kind of movie had become secondary to the act of caring for these many, many giant traumatized kitties.

As I noted earlier, the plot to Roar is kind of immaterial. I've never watched it with the sound on. I can tell you, though, that none of these cats were trained in any really meaningful way, which meant that every scene devolved into the same spectacle. The cast, surrounded by dozens of giant cats, stumble through a few lines before one or all of the cats begin to bite and claw them, at which point each scene becomes about surviving from one moment to the next.

Roar took more than five years to film and more than a decade to actually make. No cats were harmed during the production of this movie, but more humans were injured than in any other film production on record. Of the 120 or so cast and crew on Roar, more than 100 suffered significant injury, often more than once. Yann DeBont, the cinematographer, had his scalp ripped off by a lion, requiring 120 stitches. He went on to make Speed and Twister. Mill

Melanie Griffith, Tippy's daughter and a future star herself, left production at one point because she was worried a big cat might rip her face off. She ultimately returned and immediately had a large chunk of her face ripped off, requiring extensive surgery. This all sounds horrifying and impossible to justify. But before you make a final judgment, I want to remind you of two things. One, for all its horrors and severe injuries, fewer people were killed on the set of War than in Alec Baldwin's recent film, Rust.

The second thing that you must remember is that Roar is a work of art on the level of Moby Dick. If you watch it enough, among the right people and in the right headspace, you can come to a deeper understanding of every facet of human existence. I've taken a lot out of it over the years. Recently, it has convinced me that we will one day get over our bullshit and escape the present hell that our species seems mired in. I know that doesn't make much sense now, but give me some time. I'll explain why. But first...

It's probably time for some ads. We're back. And the first thing I need you to understand about all of these fucking cats is that in every mauling caught on tape, and there are dozens of them, I see no anger or malice in the actions of these cats. I don't even see hunger. It's clear to me as a cat owner that the cats didn't see these people, Tippi and her family and the cast and crew, as prey or as a threat.

If anything, they saw them as fellow big cats, cousins and close kin, who they extend a kind of familiarity and perhaps even a kind of love that, since they are cats, is expressed primarily by batting at them with claws that hit like bowie knives embedded in the hood of a speeding Camry. If you have cats of your own, you understand.

Now, given that nearly every person on this film was badly injured, including Tippy, who got gangrene from infected cat wounds, and all of her children, you might feel inclined to judge who are Noel or both of them for risking their kids' lives to make this insane movie. I understand the impulse, but I believe it to be an error.

The first thing you need to see to understand the deeper dynamics going on with Roar is a picture from a Playboy magazine photoshoot of Tippy's husband and co-star, Noel Marshall. He's in his office on his typewriter, and this fully grown male lion gets up on his desk because it wants attention. Again, normal cat behavior. Now, despite the best efforts of this animal, who has to weigh 500 pounds, Noel Marshall won't stop focusing on his work. And so the cat, inches away from his face, roars.

The sound of a male lion's roar is deeply imprinted on all of us, an epigenetic memory passed down by the handful of our ancestors who heard the sound up close and lived to tell the tale.

It has such a foundational impact on our mind that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film studio, used it to open every movie they made from 1928 on. I believe they did this because the sound is a sort of hack to compel our attention. It pulls an audience out of whatever state of mind dominates their outside lives and makes them more attentive to the film that is to come. And so the first thing you need to understand about the people who made Roar is that Marshall, upon having a living adult lion,

inches from his face, roar, gives the creature a look that says, hey man, can you give me a second? I'm like, I'm in the middle of something. I bring this up so that you will understand that these were not people operating on anything close to the same wavelength as you and I. Their lives and their choices are, to outsiders, inconceivable.

There's another great photo from the set of that Playboy shoot. While the camera people roamed the hedron compound, one of them caught a shot of Tippy's adolescent daughter, Melanie, jumping into a pool. An adult male lion, which she must have considered to be in some way a member of the family, sees this girl passing by in the corner of its eye, and that motion ignites an instinct inside it. So like any cat of that size in the same situation, it reaches out to bite her.

Afterwards, the Hedren family and the cast and crew had complicated feelings about what happened that extended to the present day. Tippy divorced Marshall almost as soon as the filming finally wrapped. She has alleged that while Roar was being made, he utterly ignored her well-being. She also does not seem to have ever seriously considered leaving. She later wrote that she, quote, "...was into it every bit as much as he was, and that production was an obsessive, addictive drama."

John Mitchell, Noel's son, who acted in the movie and, like everyone else, was mauled repeatedly, came to own the rights to Roar when his dad died in 2010. Dad was a fucking asshole to do that to his family, he said recently. He also said this, It was amazing to live through that. I should have died many times, but I kind of want to do it again.

If you have any friends or family who have survived extended periods of heavy combat, there's a good chance they may have expressed a variation of the same feeling. This is because trauma is sometimes a drug. Taking it can be more than just hell. It's often also a high, which is one thing that drives a lot of people crazy. I need to take a moment, away from Roar, to talk about some people that I met in 2017 in Iraq during the desperate and ferocious urban combat against ISIS.

The closer I drew to the front, the more guys I met who were elite veterans of the Iraqi Special Forces. They did the bulk of the fighting. These were mostly young men, ranging from the tail end of their teens to their twenties. Many had grown up in places like Fallujah, fighting from the time they were seven or eight, sometimes younger.

They'd been born into the U.S. occupation in many cases. Their earliest memories were as runners, ferrying supplies and information to the older men and teenage boys who did most of the fighting. When the opportunity presented itself, they sometimes dropped grenades or improvised explosive devices on U.S. troops, most of whom were teenagers themselves.

Now they fought against ISIS in close quarters, building to building, a few weeks at a time. Periodically, they'd rotate off the front and would go to Erbil, an hour or two away. Many of them were gangsters in their spare time, running drugs and guns in brothels. They spent their days off in a drunken haze of Turkish amphetamines. Then they would drive back to the front in new, brightly colored Mustangs and Dodge Chargers, the trunks full to bursting with so many machine guns and rocket launchers they could only be closed with bungee cords.

The guns and rockets were useful at a distance to soften up enemy positions in the impossibly dense Warren-like urban environment of Mosul's old city. In every building on every block, the fighting terminated with door-to-door, room-to-room battles, where the most useful weapons were hand grenades, combat knives, and pistols, in that order. I don't know if any of these guys were at that point that I met them capable of feeling what you or I would recognize as fear.

These were the men and boys whose bodies formed the cutting edge of the fighting against ISIS in Mosul. On occasion, when they kidnapped ISIS fighters, some of them committed war crimes with the ease and with as much thought as you and I give to breathing. This is bad, of course. Unforgivable. But I've never really given much thought to judging them for it. Where would I even start? A thing I've come to understand in my travels is that human beings are capable of contorting themselves into the most incredible shapes in order to fit into the times they're forced to live in.

This has been the story of our entire long journey on this earth, and if there is one reason our species has survived above all the others, it is our capacity for infinite variety in infinite contexts. We can make ourselves into anything if we're given the right incentives, and to an extent you can't judge individual humans without judging the incentives the world we collectively create presents for them.

We evolved and we still live in a world where trauma and pain are inevitable. And those of us who survive the worst things that life can throw at us tend to become addicted, sometimes to the cause of the trauma, but nearly always to the people we experience it with.

This is why the cast and crew of Roar often reported feeling almost addicted to spending time among these gigantic predators, and it's why many kept coming back despite being repeatedly maimed. Roar happened because the core cast and crew exhibited radical empathy for roughly 140 large cats and for each other, and almost exercised zero critical judgment beyond that point.

Now, I will understand if you still feel that nothing could justify the decision of two parents to risk their children's lives in such folly. And I know this essay is supposed to be my ultimate enduring optimism about mankind's potential. And I'm going to get to that. But, you know, we still live in 2025. So first, here's ads. So here's my best step at explaining why I find Roar inspirational.

There's a scene about three quarters of the way through this movie after roughly an hour straight of watching the Hedren Marshall family and their friends get repeatedly mauled for real by giant cats. And in this scene, John Marshall finds a dirt bike and engineers a scenario that I am certain has never happened before or since in the history of this planet.

He rides away from the home where his family is trapped and draws several dozen lions, panthers, and tigers away by making them chase him. The cats assume this is a game and repeatedly try to murder or maim him. But he continues, building up speed in an ever greater tale of the most lethal killing machines to evolve on this planet.

You can see from the look in John's eyes in this scene that he has no idea if he's seconds away from death. It would have been physically impossible to stop or control this number of giant cats. The only reason this number and variety of lions, panthers, and tigers would ever have existed together at any previous point in world history would have been across a distance of thousands of miles of rugged wilderness.

But thanks to Tippy and Noel's insane dream, and thanks to the deranged and utterly unjustifiable commitment of many of the crew and their family, a moment of utter novelty occurs, where this singular assortment of big cats watches as a man fleeing in terror from them on a dirt bike

does one of the sickest jumps in film history and lands directly into a river and then keeps riding until he is charged by a juvenile African elephant, which the Edrens also kept on their property.

In its uniqueness, this moment has to rival, if not exceed, the moon landing. After all, considerably more men have stepped foot on the moon than have achieved what John Marshall does in this scene. Although some of that may be due to the fact that it is extremely illegal for anyone today to even try.

And this is why I encourage you to watch Roar, my dear friends, during the dark times. Not because it's a good movie, but because it reveals what is best about humanity. What piece of art could better illustrate the infinite possibilities within us? If a group of human beings can learn to live among lions and tigers, despite the constant guarantee of severe injury, without really understanding why, is it so mad to think that perhaps we too can transcend the barbarities of our age and become something better, or at

or at least something far stranger than money-grubbing fascists. I don't know how we escape the darkness that seems to encroach a bit further with each passing day, but I do know this. If we can make war, we can do anything. ♪

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. And if you've ever felt the weight of letting go of people, past versions of yourself, or the expectations placed on you, this episode is for you. Lizzo opens up like never before about self-love, transformation, and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore. Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing. It's true.

The Grammy goes to Lizzo. I think it's also hard when the things that you stand for are the same things that you're being scrutinized for. The weight that is no longer on me is not just fat or physical. I released so much to get to this point. And to be honest with you, I don't feel like I've expressed myself fully in the last two years. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking. It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed.

It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story. This is my friend Daisy.

Listen to my friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. ♪

Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.

This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levitown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.

Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, dickless version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless Dickless Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only.

Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless with me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where here is the rapidly encroaching rise of fascism. My name is Mia Wong, and one of the major vectors of fascism that we have been covering on this show has been the increase in just effectively straight-up black baggings by ICE and Immigration's enforcement in general. We have spent a good amount of

time covering a bunch of different angles of this, but there is another incredibly distressing angle that we have not covered as much yet, which is their targeting of labor organizers. And with me to talk about that is Mark Medina from Portland Jobs for Justice and the Coalition of Independent Unions. And yeah, Mark, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. So one of the most pressing sort of blackbaggings that's happened fairly recently is ICE's kidnapping of Alfredo Juarez de Ferrino, otherwise known as Lalo. Can you tell us about sort of his work and the projects that he's been doing and Familias Unidas por la Justicia? Yeah, so it's been a very disheartening and

Scary couple of weeks since this happened because this opens up a new path for the state to go after organizers, to go after workers and the most underprivileged in our society in a way that I suppose we all expected. But now that we see it, now that we see it happening, now that we see it happening to people that we know in our community.

It's becoming apparent. There is no turning back from the idea that we have to be able to take this on headfirst. We as activists, as organizers, have to look at this and then see it as an actual thing in our day-to-day that we have to combat and incorporate into our organizing. So maybe it might be a little helpful to start off with a little bit of a backstory on Females Unidos Páellas César. Yeah. Yeah.

So the union has its origins going back to 2013. The area in which they organized the Bellingham, Northern Washington, Whatcom-Skagit areas has a very particular type of immigrant community there. Lelo himself is of Mixteco background. There's a lot of indigenous Mexican populations in the region. It's also one that has long roots. A lot of these people go back generations, have been here for quite some time.

This area also happens to be a very particularly with the non-Hispanic population, particularly the white population, a very conservative, particularly conservative for the area. Yeah. It's one of the very few areas in the Northwest that Donald Trump came to visit. It's an area that has had repeated attacks on the immigrant community. And so it's in this context that workers are organizing in 2013 for this first demonstration.

independent unions. And two, it's important to mention the independent part of it. A lot of the organizers from the start of this, of the union, came from a tradition of the United Farm Workers in California. Some of them worked with Sessab Shabbos in the heyday of the United Farm Workers.

And in the years and decades since then, since the Delano boycotts and other things, there's been a growing rift of what the next steps should be. And I think that for a lot of farm workers, because they don't organize under the general labor law that we have for most workers, there is a sort of patchwork system for how farm working organizing happens in the United States that's dependent upon different states and legislatures.

And for the most part, with the exception of only two states, farm workers don't have the same kind of protections that regular workers generally in the society have for union recognition, for collective bargaining. Only Washington and New York at the moment, I believe, have laws that allow for elections for farm worker unions. And there's a very particular reason for that being the case. Farm workers were excluded from the Wagner Act for having general labor rights.

In the 1930s, because precisely it was seen as immigrant labor. Yeah. And immigrants were not seen as meriting the same rights as white Americans in the same way that domestic workers were removed because I was seen at the time as black labor.

So it has its roots in racism. And yeah, and that's something that, you know, like you can tie that exclusion, like there's a straight line between that and Japanese internment, which also to a large extent is just, is about land seizure and this sort of like fusion of racism, specifically racism in the farming sector with tax and labor rights and with this desire to just sort of

seize literally the land and labor from non-white people yeah yeah so it's a long and bleak history no absolutely and i'm sure your audience is is well aware of a lot of these subject matter it is a bleak history and it wasn't until groups like the united farm workers in the 60s and the 70s that they began to create the possibility for something new for the hispanic community

It was United Farm Workers that built not just a lot of solidarity with other immigrant groups in the California area, but they also built a sense of pride and identity and belonging for a lot of communities. I grew up in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers murals are everywhere. You know, me and my friends would often joke that Cesar Chavez is like the patron saint.

in East Los Angeles, even though it's nowhere near Delano. And there's a reason for that. I think that a lot of us looked up to the United Farm Workers. We looked up to the farm worker union movement and we saw in them our heroes, our modern day heroes. We saw them, we saw people who said, be proud to be brown. You know, there's a courage that comes from that history. The union movement that then sprung up in 2013 in the Bellingham, Northern Washington area,

was coming out of that milieu. They understood that background, they understood that history, but they also understood that there was very little organizing in the region. There was a lot of fear in the region. It's very difficult to organize farm workers. To have access to a lot of these areas, you have to cross just private property for quite some time before you reach the first farm worker.

And it becomes very, very difficult to have organizing happen. And it's intentional that way. The rise in farmworker unions that happened in the 60s and 70s had a massive plummet by the time that we get into the 90s and 2000s. And so these workers had heard these stories, had heard about this legacy, but had been essentially dealing with increasing frustration, racist behavior by bosses, lower and lower pay,

And the use of certain types of immigrants to try to scab their jobs. It'd be the capitalist class using one type of worker against another type of worker, pinging them against each other. Yeah.

It's in this context in 2013 that this union starts to form. They go public at that time period. They call for recognition and they start taking action directly. And they organize this years and years long boycott campaign to gain recognition, to get the employer to start bargaining.

And after years and years of this and court battles and the employer trying to lay everyone off and hire certain types of newer immigrants coming in to replace all of them, pitting one worker against another, all these types of maneuvers. By 2017, these workers win a contract.

And the philosophy of the union since then has been not just to grow this union, but also for them to be able to stand on their own two feet. Their idea is that they are very proud of their independent nature of that union. They're not part of, you know, the AFL-CIO. They're not part of the United Farm Workers. They're not part of any other organization. You know, when I spoke to some of their leaders last year, one of the things that came to mind was,

They brought up a quote from Eugene Debs, the notion of like, if we were to lead you into the promised land, someone else would just lead you out. And the notion of their union is we have to be able to stand on our two feet. We can't rely on anyone else because if we, if they promises things today, tomorrow they'll hold something over us. That's the notion that farm workers lead this movement and lead this union.

is an incredibly powerful statement of what working class people can do. The kinds of workers that everyone else kind of looks at, they could never do it. These workers could never handle this kind of level of struggle and couldn't do this kind of organization, have built one of the most powerful independent farm worker unions in the West Coast.

Lelo, Alfredo Lelo Juarez, was a founding member of this union. He was a farm worker starting at the age of 12. And since then devoted his entire life to organizing, to helping workers, to being the kind of person who commits himself to the work of making the world a better place than he found it.

You know, at 25, he is significantly younger than me. And when I think of people who I look up to, who I think of, wow, when I grow up, I want to be someone like that. I think of Lalo. I have met Lalo many times over the years. He's a very soft spoken, very thoughtful type of person. And yeah, I think that the labor movement owes him a bit of a debt now. It is time that we as a whole stand up for him.

Yeah, we are going to go to ads, regrettably. And then when we come back, we are going to start talking, I think, a bit more about the repression. We are back. So obviously, this is a part of the story that you've been telling. The sort of capitalist class out in Bellingham and, you know, the sort of, I mean, this has been true of the broader capitalist class since this kind of organizing starting, like, has been trying to break these unions this entire time. You know, that has been a major focus of everything that they've been doing.

And, you know, what we're seeing right now seems like a massive sort of escalation in the degree of repression. So, yeah, can we talk about the recent blackbagging of Lalo and yeah, and sort of what happens and where we go from there?

Yeah. The weaponization of the state to go after immigrants and go after activists is, I'm sure to your audience as well known, is nothing new. And it no-knows party affiliation. The Democratic administrations have been doing this to immigrant communities and have been using it to silence political activists. The Trump administration, however, is now doing this on a level that is...

at least to a lot of us, unheard of in the modern day, which is to go after specific union leaders in the labor movement, to go after civil rights leaders. You've seen this happen also when it comes to Palestinian rights activists around the country. The idea is pretty simple. It's to silence the loudest voices, to cut the leadership from the movement. On March 25th, Alfredo Lalo Juarez was dropping off his

His girlfriend at a nearby farm for work and was accosted by ICE agents as he was exercising his rights or what he thought his rights were at the time because of the regime. Who knows what your rights are? Yeah. They broke his window. They dragged him out of his car. You know, this was obviously a very traumatic incident.

But also it was a real shock to the union, to C2C, the community group that works with the union, and to the local Hispanic community in the area within hours of that.

workers, organizers, community went to move to try to carry a response, knowing that time was of the essence. He was then taken to a localized facility. He's now since been moved to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. A large rally of hundreds took place calling for his immediate release. What we know now, seemingly, is that at the very last minute,

apologies, I forget the exact day, but it was within a couple of days of the kidnapping. Lello was pulled off. He has an automatic stay of deportation in place. At this point, no longer has any legal authority to remove Lello. This came at the last minute. He was in line for deportation and was removed at the very last minute. However, while this is good news,

This is not good for someone's personal health and well-being. These are massively cramped facilities, underfunded facilities. There are horror stories around the country of the conditions in some of these places. Every day that Lelo is stuck behind these prison walls is an injustice to our movement. The thing it immediately reminds me of is...

the story of Thomas Paine, who was slated to be executed in the French Revolution, and they didn't execute him because his door was open, so they didn't see the slash line on the cell that was supposed to execute him. And then the next day, the reign of terror ended with the coup against the Jacobins. It reminds me a lot of that, but on the other hand, here's the thing. We have gotten the stay of the deportation, but we have not brought down the reign of terror yet. So...

Yeah, and I would hope it doesn't have to wait four more years for that one. Yeah, good Lord. Good Lord. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's let's talk a bit about so I mean, obviously, you know, what we're seeing here and this is, you know, the connection that you made is we're seeing just on a sort of broad scale, the use of the state and of the sort of black bagging and of these deportations as a way to target organizers from Palestine to labor organizers. That's only going to expand as this goes on.

And I think something critical about, you know, one of the first things you were saying here about the fact that they're targeting sort of the loudest voices in the community. And I think a big part of this is that they know that their position isn't as strong as they're making it out to be. Right. Like they have just detonated a nuke across the entire economy. They are systemically going through and individually fucking over every single group of people who are supposed to be their base. Right.

And I think part of what they're doing is they're trying to spread sort of raw terror and spread fear and, you know, and, and attack the critical infrastructure of organizing because they want to make it look like resisting them is impossible. Yeah. And that's just not true. They,

they can be. Yeah, absolutely. I think that oftentimes, particularly fascistic power wants and needs to present itself as inevitable, as overwhelming and impossible to defeat. In part because it's meant to hide the ultimate weakness of some of these powers. The actual power that these farm workers showed against the Sukuma farms when they went on strike and boycotted for years and years and years out in the fields,

talking to workers for years and years and years, it showed that no matter how powerful some of these companies are, some of these CEOs are, that the power of workers overwhelms and the power of solidarity overwhelms. And they know that going after leadership, going after some of the most, some of the bravest people in our movement,

is a way of trying to hit the movement at the knees and trying to convince folks that struggle is impossible. But I think it is important to remember that what we're doing, the struggle now, the response, this is how we show the population, the world, you know, our communities, that they are not inevitable. It is not inevitable.

insurmountable. And so by taking action, responding to the kinds of fascistic behaviors of the state, we show how feeble the state can be at times, even when it seems its most treacherous and awful. Yeah, and I think a lot of times when we win fights,

it can be very, very hard to actually see our victory because we don't see the world that could have been if we didn't fight. And that's the thing I think about with the first Trump administration. Between the first Trump administration, they absolutely wanted to be doing this kind of shit. And they were able to do a lot of terrible stuff, but they weren't able to sort of go this far because of the kind of mass mobilizations that shut down a lot of the kinds of things that they wanted to do. And I think that's a kind of victory that is hard to kind of like...

Because all we see is the suffering that did happen. And we can never see an image of all of the people who got to continue living their lives because we stopped them. And that, I think, is another sort of powerful tool here. But also, we do have an opportunity now.

to make sure that we can beat them right here and right now in a way that's very, very publicly visible. And there's a question mark about that in my mind because my entire adult life, I've heard stories of the state repression against union organizers in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s. You hear the stories if you're an organizer about all the violent eras.

and how hard it was in the past. And we forget that a lot of that does continue on. It's just not where you would imagine it, where a lot of American workers imagine it. And so they don't see it in their shops and their factories and their unions.

But this right here is an attack on the labor movement. Had this been the head of, you know, the electricians union, the head of the SEIU, had this been an attack on what a lot of Americans would view as the mainstream labor movement, this would be headlines. The fact that it isn't shows and that there's been so much work to try to get attention to a union leader being picked up and kidnapped by the state.

should be you know a blaring red light on the labor movement to take action immediately yeah i hope that what we're doing is the first steps of that because you know this is one of those moments if you know they went after the trade unions unionists and i was not a trade unionist well they're going after the farm workers i am not a farm worker it isn't incumbent upon us morally to stand up for one another at this point in time yeah and i think there's been a real kind of

real cowardice and a real sort of appeasement of power and a real sort of demonstration of where a lot of these unions politics are i mean we saw we saw the way that the teamsters like leadership just i mean just you know openly went to speak at the rnc right we've been seeing uh the uaw which traditionally has had better like immigration politics in the last few years than a lot of these other sort of mainstream unions but it's also been sort of going to bat for trump's tariff like

I've been calling the turf tariffs tariffs because of the wages of transphobia. But, you know, they've been going to bat for like the turf tariffs. Right. And that, I think, is part of why they've been sort of unable to, like, respond to this moment and why they've been unable to respond to the past fucking 50 years of moments, which is that, like, if you're if you're sort of like labor politics is rooted in this sort of like American nationalist, like American jobs for American workers stuff.

And it's not actually based in the power of workers and the power of workers everywhere, then you're going to lose. It's not just sort of reactionary politics, although it is. It's also bad politics, and we're seeing it right now. Yeah, and I think that the history of the labor movement has been an interesting one in my adult life because

I'm a pro-labor as they come. However, the history of the labor movement in the modern day has been a fascinating one. It is one that when it came to large strikes, was at its nadir at the mid and late 2000s. I think at one point, it was just over a dozen strikes, over 2,000 workers. And you compare that to the height of the labor movement in the 40s and the 50s when it was in the hundreds. And you had strike actions all the time. And that is what built so much of what we call the middle class for some.

And it was this really historic moment at the time. And we're in a historic moment now where I think the labor movement for so long from that point has been trying, workers from the rank and file have been trying to kind of reshape the labor movement in the thoughts and the ideas of the new. But it comes with its own regressive setbacks and it comes with its own shortcomings of leadership. You know, the teensters making statements around immigration rights issues.

was a very unfortunate thing to be said in the modern day, the modern context. I think that

you know, other unions seemingly looking to, you know, circle the wagons rather than take the risks that need to happen in this current time has really shown a lack of imagination from some of the mainstream unions. And the thing is, I hope for the best for them. I want them to succeed and I want them to get better because the world is a better place for having these large unions. However,

If the independent movements, the independent unions, like Familias Unidas por la Justicia, like these other unions in the region, that can be the kind of canary in the coal mine, the kind of labs of experimentation, that can be the first people out to do some of the most radical and interesting and worker-centric type of movement building and messaging.

I think there is a reason why it was the Coalition of Independent Unions here in the Pacific Northwest that came up with the notion of having Trans Day of Solidarity, this idea of patterning contracts together to have inclusive and protections for trans workers and having that be a thing that unions take up together. I think that it's incredibly notable that it's groups like Familias Unidas o La Justicia

that carried out this long, years-long boycott and created a model by which other workers in the region could not just organize themselves, but organize themselves on a low-cost, member-led, democratic model. I think it's important to see that sometimes the large unions have to start looking at some of the radical pragmatism that comes from the necessities of these smaller independent campaigns.

Yeah. And I mean, before we go to ads, I think the last thing I want to say there is like, you know, the other option they have is to do the option of what the unions did in during the rise of the Nazis, which is like during the rise of the Nazis, the unions fell in line, right? They fell in line because they were scared and they thought that they could fucking win benefits from it. And, you know, it saved some of them. Like there were a few of those people like just became Nazis, but the

the rest of them got fucking liquidated anyways. So those, those are your options, right? You, you, you either stand and fight now with the independent unions or you become part of the regime and eventually get liquidated when, you know, Trump and like fucking two and a half years signs executive order that says unions are illegal or whatever. Yeah. And what does that do at the end of the day? Even if it saves you, even if you're the head of some of these like larger unions and by working with the administrative, uh, the administration today, uh,

By selling your soul, by selling the movement out, you give up the moral high ground of our movement, of our working class democratic movement. You give it up for another generation. Then when workers, when people like myself growing up and looking at images of the United Farm Workers, there are similar, I presume there are similar people in the United States growing up who look that way up to the United Auto Workers, who look that way up to the Teachers Union.

What happens to those children, to those kids, those young people who want to be the next leadership, the next era of the labor movement? They will not look at us as having the moral high ground. We give that up. We give our role in history, our moral role in history to fight for the working class when we do things like this. Yeah, and what you become instead is just another extension of the state. You become one of the national syndicates in Francoist Spain. And what that does to you is people don't look at you

in a generation as a labor movement, they'd look at you as just another arm of a fascist regime. And it doesn't have to be like that. It really doesn't. Yeah. I take no pleasure in saying this. I take no pleasure in saying this. But it's an unfortunate reality, and hopefully the turnaround can come from anywhere. It can come from unexpected places, and I hope that there is one. And things like solidarity for Lelo, I hope can be a small link in the chain that moves the pendulum right back into the direction of

an ethical and moral superiority that comes with fighting for working class folks. Yeah. We're going to take an ad break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about what we can do for Lilo right now. As, as you were listening to this, we are back. So let's talk about both the operation. I mean, just immediately the plans to sort of put pressure to free Lilo. And also then I guess we'll get into sort of more broadly, the kinds of fighting that we need to be doing in order to resist this. Sure. Sounds good.

So, like I mentioned earlier, in the immediate aftermath of Lalo's kidnapping by ICE, workers in the region began organizing. And unions came together in support of Lalo and helped rally in front of the detention center in Tacoma.

Now, what we're trying to do is trying to spread the word further. There are other communities, particularly here on the West Coast, that can stand solidarity, that should stand in solidarity. And when we heard this go down, activists within the CIU asked themselves, we can't stand idly by while a leader in our movement is kidnapped by the state. We need to take action. And so we did. And the point was to move as quickly as possible to try to build a larger voice

for Lello while he is in detention. So there is a good number of activists here in the Portland area. We can be of service to the Farm Workers Union. You know, we have a strong core of independent unions here in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in the Portland area. We can do what other unions are hesitant to do, which is take action immediately and stand firmly with our brothers and sisters, our hermanos y hermanas up in northern Washington.

So what's happening is the call from the union is workers individually, for people individually to call into the attorney general in Washington state and call to the release of Lello.

Also calling the new governor up in Washington state to call for the release, bring a wider attention, making known that this person is someone who is important to the community, cannot be spirited away to another country where they are not from, where that is not their home and taken away from their family, the community and from the good work that they do. Yeah.

And the other thing that we're trying to do is we're trying to get local officials to also use their voice to maximize the pressure, to give more attention to this issue. So that's the call so far. This rally that we're having in front of City Hall on Saturday, April 12th at 2 p.m. is the beginning of what we hope is a larger campaign that will not end until Lelo is free.

And until these raids stop attacking the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest, you know, just because we in Portland, you know, are not farm workers because we don't work with farm workers because a lot of the workers who work here and maybe never met a farm worker, it does not mean that we should not stand shoulder to shoulder and arm in arm and support the farm workers union up in northern Washington to the hilt.

And this begins this fight of building that kind of level of solidarity. It begins by showing up for them, doing what they can't do. Right now, they don't have the resources to go state by state and city by city to bring attention and awareness to one of their leaders being attacked.

But we can do it. And if we can do it, we should do it. It's a moral imperative that little be free. Yeah. And so, I mean, statistically, there are a lot of you in Portland listening to this show, but statistically, most of you are not in Portland. Are there other things that people in the rest of the country and I guess the rest of the world? I know I know there's so some of you statistically don't live in the US. Yeah. Are there other things that people in other places can do to put pressure on?

specifically for LELO, but also just can do in their own communities to, you know, I mean, put pressure to stop these raids? Yes, absolutely. So this is very similar, I think, to the CIU, the Coalition of Independent Unions, this Coalition of Independent Unions here in the Pacific Northwest. It was trying to do and is trying to do with trans-EU solidarity. The idea is we are trying to make this work here in the Pacific Northwest. And if it's useful, if it's good, if people are paying attention to it,

then we can export this to other cities and other areas to bring more attention to these causes. And so with that, when having any ironing contracts together, particularly on this one issue of transgender healthcare and trans inclusive language and contracts and codifying that between unions and having that a demand of labor movement that they not walk away from this, we want to also do the same thing with this fight for freedom for the farm workers union and their leaders.

and workers everywhere, and the attacks will come soon enough, I suppose, I would imagine, from this regime in Washington. If this works, we want workers in other cities to start assisting the farm worker union, taking up the call of action, and fighting for not just Lelo, but whoever comes afterwards, because there will be Lelos in the future, unfortunate as they may be,

So if this works here, if workers hear more updates, we would hope and we would love if workers elsewhere, if organizing groups elsewhere, would want to take up this fight and bring attention to the cause. Hell yeah, yeah. And I think there is a lot of, you know, potential in sort of mobilizations. There's a lot of potential in...

Getting people to understand that this stuff is happening and there's a lot of potential in cross-union organizing. And also, and I will say this too, because like, you know, obviously, statistically, like there are a large number of people listening to this who are like union staffers, but also like most of you are not. That also doesn't mean that whatever kind of organizing that you're doing doesn't overlap with this and doesn't have capacity that they can bring to bear to stop the entire deportation regime that we're facing right now.

And that's something that you have to do both on the level of solidarity, on a moral level, and also on a strategic level, because again, he's going to come for you too. So yeah. Yeah. You know, without making it too personal, like I know level personally, I have met a little many times over the years. He's a fantastic person.

The reason why a lot of us as organizers, why we do this kind of work to begin with, is because we believe, as bizarrely as it may be, that we could be a link in the chain that makes the world a better place, that we can leave the world better off than we found it. And we also believe in what we're doing because when we look at people who have been attacked by corporations and attacked by the state, we feel a moral compulsion to help.

And what I would say to folks who are outside of Portland, who are hearing this story, who hear the calls to call the attorney general in Washington state and demand that they will be released to follow up with the union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, further direction on how they can assist and potentially holding their own rallies and support in solidarity and bringing attention to the issue.

I would hope that they do this. Imagine if Lelo were your brother. Imagine if Lelo were your cousin, your father, your friend. Act as if they were them. Because it requires that level of empathy.

to have the kind of solidarity that we need in order to fight this fascist regime and everything that it does. It is easy to say, I will wait for someone else to do the work. I will, someone else will come along and it'll get resolved that way. No, if you don't do the work, it just will not get done. And so we have to go in every day as part of civic engagement and assisting the working class as part of our daily routines and using the kind of

the kind of sense of moral necessity and of immediate action it requires that you would do for someone that was close to you. Because this person is you just by another name. This person is your family, even if you've never met them. We are all in this together as working class people. And if we start coming up with boundaries and reasons for why we shouldn't stand up for one another, those reasons then become excuses for everyone else.

So I would hope that when people hear this, they look and see the struggle of this person and they can imagine what would happen to them in the future. And they say, I would want someone there for me in my corner, in my time of need. So I will be there for them in theirs. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of this line from Peggy Seeger, who wrote an anti-fascist song called Song of Choice. And one of the verses that's always stuck with me.

Today the soldiers took away one, tomorrow they may take away two. One April they took away Greece, but surely they will never take you. And, you know, I mean, that's the thing that people in the 30s woke up to, right? Is, you know, if you're in this country, then this is the thing that you're waking up to now, is that, yeah, the soldiers are taking people away.

And every day they're taking away more and more people. And one day you wake up and they've taken entire countries. And the only way that you can stop this is by making sure that the action that you're taking is not just waking up and going back to sleep, right? You have to take a stand. You have to fight because no one is coming. The only person who was coming for these people, the only person who was coming for the people coming next to them, and inevitably the only people who was coming were

to save you when they come for you is going to be you. And, you know, there, there are enough of us to stop them, right? There always have been. That's, that's always been a thing about fascism is that it relies on us not fighting them. It relies on us, on our passivity. It relies on us not caring enough about the people that they take first, you know, to sit back and do nothing and think that we can wait. And you can't, you have, you have to start right now, right?

And you have to stop them before they advance any further. And you have to roll back what they've already done. And this is our opportunity to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think this is that encapsulates the sentiment perfectly well. Yeah. Do you have anything else that you want to add before we head out? And we will put links to a whole bunch of things in the description to this. Yeah.

Yeah, I suppose to those that would want to know more about not just the struggle of the Farm Workers Union, but also the general experiments in independent unionism here in the Pacific Northwest, I'd highly encourage that folks take a deep dive and see that.

To organize your workplace, to have the kind of solidarity with your coworkers, you need not be dependent upon someone else and other organizations to come in and sort of rescue you from the mystery and drudgery of non-union workplaces. You can do it too. You can create, you have it in your head, in your own mind, in your own hands.

Yeah. The ability to organize, the ability to fight with your coworkers. You have the kinds of clever problem-solving skills that every worker has in order to combat the boss and create a better world than the one that currently exists. And also that when it comes to issues like standing up for this struggle now and struggles in the future. Yeah.

I would say you have it now, the creative capacity to, in whatever city you're in, to make connections, to build inroads with the labor movement, to build inroads with working class people, and to try to create those bonds that happen.

We here are trying to build closer bonds with city workers and farm workers out in the country. It's an important struggle because it's one that's going to be more and more important in the future. You don't have to wait for anyone else to tell you how to do that. You yourselves can show solidarity and work together to build those kinds of bonds now so that in the future, you can create working class movements that whether that takes the form of

collective bargaining or something else. Organizing for the common good is useful no matter in what legal capacity it happens. Yeah, and I mean, you know, one last point I want to add about that in terms of

looking at like you not needing help to do things like you know i i know a lot of the people who you know like are the organizers who are hired by places like the uaw like afl-cio unions right they're good people like they're good people they're good organizers they don't know anything that you can't learn like a lot of these people are just literally college students right who are recruited like from college campuses and are thrown with no training into organizing these things right

And, you know, and again, these are people...

who are just like stepping out of classrooms into these organizing scenarios with very minimal training and they've been able to do it. And if those people can do it, so can you. Like I know you, I know these organizers and the only difference between them and you is that they spent some time learning some things and then they apply the same tools, like they apply in some ways worse versions of the same tools that the independent union organizers use and they're all tools that you can learn.

Yeah, and if any of the people listening want to learn some of those tools, or need help with education and training, or just want to make connections and inroads with workers elsewhere, contact the Coalition of Independent Students and see how we can build these bonds together, because I think that we will problem-solve

how to defeat this regime one way or another. But I think that we, particularly in the independent union space, provide a unique possibility for how this can happen. Because since we are not tied to larger established contracts, we're not tied to

you know, jurisdictional disputes, we're not tied to a lot of the legacies of some of the larger unions, God bless them, we can create and fashion a labor movement that doesn't have to live by those rules. You know, if you imagine the idea of what it would look like to re-found the CIO in the 1930s, if you could imagine the worst aspects of the labor movement and excising them, and what is the best aspect of the labor movement that you would want to see, we can create that together today.

And today it takes the form of standing up in solidarity with LELO and Farm Workers Union up in northern Washington, not because we get anything from it, not because it's easy, but precisely because it is difficult and precisely because it is a moral compulsion on us to take action today for it. We don't have to wait for anyone to tell us what to do. As part of an independent labor movement, we get to decide our future and our fate, and we get to decide our struggles. Yeah, and if and when we beat them here, we can beat them today, we can beat them tomorrow, we can beat them the next day.

And one day, you know, we will have won one victory too many for them to hold on to power. And that's the only way forward. Absolutely. Fascism wants you to believe in a nihilistic perspective of the world. They want you to believe in which it is hopeless to fight back. They want you to believe just doom scroll forever and don't take any action and focus on yourselves and navel gaze indefinitely.

No, no, no. The way that you find out the kind of person that you are and the way that you build the kind of future that you want for yourselves, for your families, for your communities, for the people that you don't even know and never will meet, but you want a good life for them. The way that you do that is you take action now. You start organizing. You do what you can. You build what you can. That's how we do this. Like we said earlier, they want you to believe that the fight is already over, that the history has already been written.

They only say that because they know it's not true. And me and other people who talk like this, who are as optimistic and as hopeful and as fight ready, we don't believe this out of nowhere. We believe this because we truly do see that the better world is possible if we fight. Yeah. And I think that's a spectacular place to end. Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah. Thank you. And everyone else who's listening to this, go out and fight.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. And if you've ever felt the weight of letting go of people, past versions of yourself, or the expectations placed on you, this episode is for you. Lizzo opens up like never before about self-love, transformation, and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore. Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing. It's true.

The Grammy goes to Lizzo. I think it's also hard when the things that you stand for are the same things that you're being scrutinized for. The weight that is no longer on me is not just fat or physical. I released so much to get to this point. And to be honest with you, I don't feel like I've expressed myself fully in the last two years. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking. It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed.

It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story. This is my friend Daisy.

Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream.

It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.

This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carvel. This is Levitown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.

Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless with me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I want you to imagine a world where everyone shared a second language. Not because of imperial conquest, but out of a shared desire for unity and understanding.

That was the dream behind Esperanto, a constructed language designed to be the basis for global bilingualism. Long before I learned anything about anarchism, I spent some time trying to learn Esperanto. It had shown up on my Duolingo one day and it seemed like such a fascinating and simple project to pick up. I was enamored with the philosophy behind it so I generally spent a few months on and off trying to learn it. That was probably a decade ago at this point so I don't remember too much about it

but the connection was there. And it's really because I've been exploring this topic for this episode that I ended up going back and dabbling in some of it again. I've learned recently that there's actually somewhat of a connection between Esperanto and anarchism. So let's take the time to explore the origins of Esperanto, its anarchist connections, its flaws, and its future.

My name is Andrew Siege, and I'm here once again with... It's me, it's James again. Very excited for this one. Yes. You're familiar with Esperanto, right? Yeah, very familiar. I wrote about it a little bit in my first book and my PhD dissertation. Also, the last living person to participate in the Popular Olympics, which is what I wrote my book about, was an Esperantist, part of the Project...

of the popular front in Catalonia was to bring people together through sport. And then Esperanto is going to be this thing that would, as you mentioned, like bridge the gaps between people. Right. Yeah. It's a really inspiring project. And so I know you're probably going to know all of this information, but I do have to share it with the audience. Yeah, I'm excited. I never like really did a full rundown on Esperanto. It just appeared and I was like, holy shit, that's cool. So I'm going to learn a lot.

Sure. So Esperanto was first constructed in a little booklet in 1887 by Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the name itself comes from the pseudonym he took on to publish the booklet. He called himself Doctoro Esperanto, Esperanto meaning one who hopes, and hope really analyzed the whole project.

According to a BBC article written by José Luis Pena Redondo, he lived as a Polish Jew in the multicultural Russian Empire, in a time rife with racial and national conflict. He was trying to promote peace and understanding, and he saw an international language as a way to do that. With a flag of green and white, the colours of hope and peace, for his efforts, Zamenhof himself was nominated 14 times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

He genuinely believed that if we all shared a common second language, quote, education, ideals, convictions, aims would be the same too, and all nations would be united in a common brotherhood, end quote. Esperanto was created in a time when modernism was on the rise, and the idea of rationality and science was being used to quote-unquote optimize the world.

When it was featured in Paris' Exposition Universelle in 1900, the language caught on amongst the French intelligentsia, who saw it as more optimal in the messy and illogical realm of natural languages. Because it was so easy, all words and sentences being built from 16 basic rules that could fit on a paper, and the language lacked the confusing exceptions and special rules of other languages, it was once seen as the language of the future.

Esperanto made its full-fledged public debut in 1905, when Samenhov published the Fundamento d'Esperanto, which laid down the basic principles of languages' structure and formation. Esperanto was designed to be simple, logical, and accessible, drawn from the influence of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages in its construction.

The orthography is phonetic, so all the words are spelled as pronounced. And the grammar is so straightforward. There's a consistent word ending for nouns, pluralization, adjectives, and verbs. But although simple, it can convey complexity. There's a lot of suffixes you can add to give degrees of meaning, and there's room for compound words too.

Its European focus would be the target of criticism later on, but it actually ended up being picked up in some unusual places anyway. Zamenhof translated literature and wrote original verse, and after years of effort, there were speakers to be found across Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan. By 1908, the Universale Esperanto Associo was founded, and it could now find members in 83 countries worldwide.

There's also 50 national Esperanto associations and 22 international professional associations that use Esperanto. There's an annual World Esperanto Congress and more than 100 periodicals published in Esperanto.

Estimates range widely in terms of how many people speak Esperanto today. There are apparently a handful of native speakers, folks who were raised speaking Esperanto. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's really, really, really cool. Yeah. But L2 speakers are somewhere between 30,000, L2 being, you know, second language speakers, are somewhere between 30,000 to 2 million. According to Wilfrith's article on Esperanto anarchism,

There are tens of thousands of books in Esperanto and several hundred mostly small periodicals that appear regularly. Hardly a day passes without international meetings such as those of specialized organizations, conferences, youth get-togethers, seminars, group holidays, and regional meetings. There are several radio stations that broadcast programs in Esperanto, and Esperanto has even been used by couples of different origins as a family language.

It's cool. Funny enough, as with every language, even an aspiring universal language, it has since had its offshoots.

I saw on Wikipedia that merely a year after Zamenhof's creation of Esperanto, in 1888, Dutch author Jay Brackman proposed a few changes to the language, like combining the ending for the adjective and adverb, changing conjugations, introducing more Latin roots, getting rid of the diacritics, and so on. This language would be called Mundo Linco, and it was the first of many offshoots from Esperanto proper.

Even Zamenhof would try to reform the language at one point, in 1894, but it was rejected by the Esperanto community and eventually even himself. These reforms would later be used to develop Edo, another attempt at universal language with far less success. I also learned via Wikipedia that there was an attempt to make Esperanto more complex by introducing Cherokee components, called Polispo, created by a Native American activist named Billy Ray Walden.

Esperanto speakers continue to play with the language in all sorts of ways to this day. Esperanto is an evolving language, and Zamenhof himself is honored as part of this global Esperanto culture. They celebrate his birthday, the 15th of December. There are statues and streets and plaques remembering him worldwide, and even an asteroid bears his name.

At one point, according to the BBC article, there was an effort to establish an Esperanto-speaking land called Amikeho, which would have been a 3.5 square kilometre territory between the Netherlands, Germany and France. Yeah. Nice.

3.5 square kilometers. Yeah. Not huge. Yeah. It's like, how big? I know we've got a few of those little ones in Europe, you know? Yeah. A couple of micro states. It could have been another micro state, but the idea was very quickly squashed following World War I. Yeah. I know the Senate, the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union was like,

in its first Congress, like its foundational Congress, I suppose they were like, and everyone has to, everyone should try and learn Esperanto. Like that was one of their, like the things at the foundation of like what became probably the most powerful anarchist movement the world's ever seen. They were like, also, this is a big thing. Yeah. Yeah. Esperanto was really huge in the anarchist movement at a certain point. Yeah. But we're going to get to those connections soon enough.

I want to bring up this other interesting story. There was actually an effort by Esperantists, including a delegate from Iran, to get the language to become the official language of the League of Nations. But take one guess as to which country blocked that effort. Was it one of the Anglophone countries? No. Oh, wow.

The French. It was the French. There is not a state more invested in its language than France. Indeed. They have laws, I think, about broadcasting music and dubbing films and things. Yeah. The French government seemingly hated Esperanto. At least according to an article on Imp of the Diverse blog site.

They blocked its study in universities and public schools. And as the article quotes the opponents directly, quote, On September 10th, 1922, the New York Tribune ran a translation of a piece by the editor-in-chief of Le Matin, Stéphane Lausanne. Mr. Lausanne spent half his editorial writing about Esperanto. And I'm not going to do a French accent for this section, but just imagine like the most French Frenchman reading this.

that Finns or Albanians have favored such a propaganda is comprehensible. Their dialect has no chance of imposing itself on the universe. They need a second language, just as well Esperanto as any other.

but that French people or English or Germans could have let themselves be allured by this linguistic Bolshevism. That is far more extraordinary. It is nevertheless a fact that Esperanto, which was born 25 years ago and ought to have died through ridicule, continues to have disciples in Europe. Every year, in a different capital, they hold a congress, at which they are not very numerous, but where they make a great noise.

They get so excited that quite recently, the Minister of Public Instruction had to address a circular to all the French educational resorts to warn them against the danger of Esperanto. An article in the Washington Herald on that same day explained the danger, at least according to the Ministry of Public Instruction. The reason for this order, according to certain school teachers, is that teaching of a language as easy as Esperanto endangers the existence of the French language and thus the national solidarity of the country.

They contend that children will naturally take to an easy language such as Esperanto, and in that time French and English would perish, and that the literary standard of the world would be debased.

Furthermore, they argue that a national language plays a predominant part in maintaining national unity and point to Poland and Lorraine as examples. Esperanto is an artificial language of no real merit, writes one professor. It has no very definite origin, and while it aims to draw the scattered people of the world together, does it not rather tend to denationalization? End quote.

They're not wrong. Like France is like language. If you read like a peasants into Frenchmen is kind of the classic work on like French nationalization. But like in order to make people French, they did have to suppress like Basque and Breton and Catalan and other languages. Right. And make people go to schools where they learned French and conceived of themselves as French as a result of that. Yeah. Their imposition of national identity is,

was perhaps among the most successful in the world. Yeah. In terms of its earliness and its consistent enforcement. It shows like nations are always projects of the bourgeoisie, right? Like at least I would argue that. And so a lot of other people, but like the French example is one where we can see it more clearly than others. Like it's a state and specifically like a certain class within the state's project to enforce and continue to, uh,

perpetuate this narrative of nation. And, you know, they weren't the only enemies of Esperanto. And do you know that saying, judge me by my enemies? Yeah. Who else have we got? Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, and the Soviet Union also hated Esperanto. Gets cooler with everyone. The Nazis, they were nationalists and Zamenhof was Jewish. So his family was actually targeted and

and the language was banned and Esperantists were targeted and put in camps during the Holocaust which is really tragic yeah pretty fucked yeah his whole family was heavily targeted by Nazi Germany Franco associated Esperanto with anti-nationalism and anarchism which

True. Yeah, he wasn't wrong. So it was targeted for a while. Yeah. And the Soviets, while originally recognizing Esperantists, eventually reversed that policy under Stalin during the Great Purge and executed, exiled, or gulagged Esperantists. And as you can imagine, all that repression all at once kind of killed Esperanto's momentum.

Today, despite its goal of being a truly international language, Esperanto's global reach remains uneven. While it has made some strides in recent years, it's still underrepresented in many parts of Africa and Asia. The majority of Esperanto speakers today are in Europe, though its development outside of Europe deserves some attention, as Esperanto managed to leave a mark in China, Iran, Togo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But the response to Esperanto historically should give you an indication as to how anarchists must have felt about Esperanto. As an internationalist or anti-nationalist movement, anarchism was very supportive of the Esperanto project. Let me run you through the timeline courtesy Wilfeth's Esperanto Anarchism.

One of the earliest anarchist Esperanto groups was founded in Stockholm in 1905. The same year, the anarchist Paul Bertolot founded the monthly magazine Esperanto. Similar groups soon emerged in Bulgaria, China, and other countries. In 1906, anarchist Anarchist Nicholas founded an international association, Paco Libereco, Peace Freedom, which published the Internacia Sociaria Review.

By 1910, Paco Libereco merged with Esperantista Laverista Ro to form Liberiga Estelo, Star of Liberation, strengthening anarchist Esperanto networks. The 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam formally addressed the role of Esperanto in international communication. Subsequent anarchist congresses continued to pass resolutions advocating for Esperanto's use within the movement.

By 1914, these anarchist-Esperantist organizations had published extensive revolutionary literature, including anarchist texts, in Esperanto. Around this time, correspondence between European and Japanese anarchists became more active, facilitated by Esperanto. In Prague, Eugene Adam proposed the formation of Senescesa Associo Tutmunda, the SAT, or the World International Association. Unlike other Esperanto associations,

SAT rejected nationalism wholesale and sought to create a transnational, class-conscious workers' movement. To quote Why Is There an Esperanto Workers' Movement by Gary Mickle, SAT was not meant to usurp the role of political parties by engaging in political struggles directly, but was to be a cultural association engaged in workers' education, one that would help to break down national and ethnic barriers between workers by involving them in practical collective activities.

bringing workers into contact, freeing them from the shackles of nationalism. SAT's ideas, and especially the ideas of its anationalist faction, were an early statement of an idea that has more recently come to be known as globalization from below. So in August 1921, 79 workers from 15 countries gathered in Prague to formally establish SAT.

By 1929 to 1930, SAT had grown to 6,524 members across 42 countries, reaching its peak influence. The use of Esperanto flourished in German workers' movements between 1920 and 1933. By 1932, the German Workers' Esperanto League had 4,000 members, leading to Esperanto being called the Workers' Latin. But, as you can imagine, this was not to last by the time Hitler came into power.

The Scientific Anarchist Library of the International Language, or ISAB, was founded in the USSR in 1923, publishing anarchist works by Kropotkin and Anne Bordervoy in Esperanto. This also would not last the Great Purge. The Berlin Group of Anarcho-Syndicalist Esperantists greeted the Second Congress of the International Workers' Association in Amsterdam in 1925 and reported that Esperanto had become so integrated into their movement that an international libertarian Esperantist organization had formed.

This likely referred to the TLES, the World League of Stateless Esperantists, which later merged with SAT. Esperanto was also popping off amongst anarchists and socialists in Korea, China, and Japan. Liu Shifu, a key figure in Chinese anarchism, began publishing La Voz de la Populo, The Voice of the People, in 1913, the first anarchist periodical in China.

His work relied heavily on information from Internacia Sociale Review and helped popularize Esperanto in China. Japanese anarchists and socialists, as I mentioned, were among the earliest Esperantists in the country, but faced heavy persecution. And sadly, between Imperial Japan, Francoist Spain, Nazi Germany, and Stalinist Russia, the rise of totalitarian regimes leading to World War II largely suppressed the anarchist Esperanto movement.

After the war, the Paris Anarchist Esperanto group was the first to resume organized work, launching the publication Sench Tatano in 1946. Most anarchist Esperantists have since been organized within SAT, with an anarchist faction maintaining its autonomy. In 1969, this faction began publishing the Libera Sana Bulteno, later renamed the Libera Sana Ligilo. By 1997, SAT membership had dwindled to fewer than 1,500 members.

The initial radical vision of SAT was weakened by political shifts and the growing dominance of English as a global lingua franca. The early separation between SAT and mainstream Esperanto organizations was a response to bourgeois political neutrality, but it also contributed to its marginalization, and today the anarchist Esperanto movement exists largely as a niche within SAT. So what can we say about the role of Esperanto today?

Well, one of the more interesting currents I found within the Esperanto community, mentioned by Firth, is Raumismo, a philosophy named after the Finnish city of Rauma, where a youth congress in 1980 helped define this approach. Raumismo views Esperanto speakers as a kind of linguistic diaspora, a cultural group bound together by a shared language rather than a national identity.

Instead of focusing on making Esperanto a universal second language, Raul Mistos embraced it as just one language among many, valuing its use in literature, culture, and everyday communication without any grand ideological ambitions. But it's possible Esperanto can still play a role in facilitating exchange and collaboration between people of different linguistic backgrounds.

A German anarchist once lamented the barriers to international understanding, quoted in Firth's article. More or less in isolation from one another, we work and fight without engaging in exchange about our victories and defeats, and without supporting and encouraging one another. Intensifying contact above the regional level with people having similar ideas and aims should be an important component of our work in order to make effective active solidarity possible. End quote.

And that's the trouble even today. Linguistic barriers hinder international cooperation. Groups struggle to maintain foreign language correspondence, organize multilingual meetings, or find interpreters. Instead, communication tends to rely on chance. You know, someone in a group happens to speak a certain language that determines who they can connect with. But when those key individuals move on, those connections can end up falling apart.

So I get the appeal, I mean, wouldn't it be beneficial for these movements and for any interest group working across language barriers to have a relatively easy to learn, politically neutral means of communication? Major languages like English, Spanish or French don't fully solve the problem as they come with historical baggage and imbalances in fluency levels. Esperanto, on the other hand, provides a more equitable solution because everybody is starting from the same point.

Since it isn't tied to any one nation, it avoids the power dynamics that arise when non-native speakers must conform to the linguistic norms of dominant cultures. Unlike English, which often privileges native speakers and places others as perpetual learners, Esperanto fosters a more level playing field. English is treated like a global lingua franca right now, but a lot of people leave school without ever developing enough fluency to navigate an English-dominated world.

And English is not the easiest language to learn. Esperanto, regardless of whether it ever becomes a global standard, offers an alternative path.

It can help people overcome language learning anxieties, as particularly those who feel disempowered by traditional educational systems, and it can inspire an interest in language itself. If you've ever met an Esperanto speaker, you know that they are very passionate about linguistics, more often than not. Many of the speakers go on to study linguistics, language politics, or even lesser-known languages. It's also a great way to develop translation skills in a friendly, cooperative environment.

For monolingual English speakers, using Esperanto can be an eye-opening experience. It puts them in the shoes of those who never got to rely on their native language in international settings.

Rather than viewing Esperanto as a competitor to other languages, perhaps a more productive approach is to see it as a tool for promoting multilingualism, cultural exchange, and a more cosmopolitan mindset. Within the Esperanto-speaking community, opinions on its future vary widely. But one thing is clear. The question of how we communicate across linguistic divides is still very much alive, and Esperanto offers but one possible answer.

However, as I alluded to earlier, Esperanto is not without its critiques, as covered by Firth. Let's start with one of the most frequent critiques. Esperanto is an artificial language. Unlike the so-called natural languages, which evolved organically over time, Esperanto was deliberately constructed. But here's the thing. Since the rise of the nation-state, the line between natural and artificial languages has become increasingly blurry.

Many national languages, like standard German or standard French, have been shaped by deliberate standardization, legal regulations, and media influence. In that sense, every language is to some degree engineered. Authors, storytellers, and ordinary speakers continuously influence language development, meaning that Esperanto is not as different after all. It does continue to evolve.

And here's where I think James C. Scott had a rather negative characterization of Esperanto as a purely high modernist endeavor, as though all Esperantists sought to make Esperanto the official international language. In Seedmaker's state, he claims that Esperanto was created to replace the dialects and vernaculars of Europe, but such was never the case. It was always meant to be a language used to facilitate communication.

There is more than one motivation for Esperanto's use, and boiling such an exercise in human creativity and attempted connection down to just that status focus, to me, seems needlessly reductive. He also calls it, quote, an exceptionally thin language without any of the resonances, connotations, ready metaphors, literatures, oral histories, idioms, and traditions of practical use that any socially embedded language already had, end quote, which may be true when it began, quote,

but it's certainly not true now. With over a century of use and evolution, his analogies between Esperanto and planned cities also miss the mark for me. As Esperanto has clearly operated as a self-organized and grassroots movement for most of its history,

and has never really received the backing of states or their enforcement. It's a weird angle from Scott because normally he'd advocate for like what he calls like the anarchist squint right like and seeing history through a perspective of anarchism I guess or like an anarchist lens and I feel like this is very applicable with Esperanto like the only language which isn't inherently tied to any state or nation or ethnicity. Exactly. When I saw that I remember

I remember reading Seen Like a State some years ago and I've already glossed over that. But in doing the research for this, I ended up, you know, stumbling upon it again. And I was like,

Hmm. After reading the history, it's like, this wasn't quite accurate. Yeah. Yeah. That's a bummer. Yeah. Generally like Scott. Me as well. Yeah. Recently, some listeners very kindly, James C. Scott passed away earlier this year, as I'm sure you know, Andrew. Yes. But his library was donated to a local secondhand bookshop. And some folks, I asked online and they went and got me some books and sent them, which was really kind. So I have some of his books now. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Yeah.

There's another common claim about Esperanto, which is that it's Eurocentric, right? And linguistically, there's some truth to this. Esperanto originated in Eastern Europe, and it still carries structural elements that resemble Indo-European languages. The majority of Esperanto speakers today are European, and its vocabulary is largely drawn from European languages. However, critics who make this argument often suggest alternatives like English or Spanish.

languages that are just as, if not more Eurocentric in their historical and political reach. Esperanto, in contrast, has evolved through influence from non-European languages as well, particularly through its development in China and Japan. Its illustrative word formation, a feature more common in languages like Turkish or Japanese, and what some call the Hungarian period of Esperanto's history. So while Esperanto has European roots, its global evolution challenges the idea that it's exclusively European in character.

Another critique is that Esperanto is sexist. The argument goes that because feminine forms are typically created by adding "in" to a base form, like "laboristo" , the language assumes masculinity as a default. And while this is a valid concern, Esperanto differs from many European languages in a key way: it does not assign grammatical gender to inanimate objects.

A chair isn't arbitrarily feminine like in French or masculine like in German. However, in practice, gender bias can still creep in.

The basic form of a noun is often assumed to be masculine, even though Esperanto allows for explicitly male forms as well. Like in any language, reducing linguistic sexism in Esperanto requires conscious effort in how people actually use it. Yeah. That's an interesting one. We see this in Spanish too, right? With attempts to create gender-neutral forms. The presumptive masculine, or if you're addressing a mixed gender group, then you would use the masculine. But like,

People who are first language Spanish speakers can correct me. I'm sure you will on the subreddit if you want to. So like when I hear in English language media, it's referred to as Latinx, but like that's kind of a word that I struggle to say in Spanish. Like, is it Latinx or like, is it Latinx? And so there's this very kind of

clumsy gender neutral form, which seems to be easier to say in English and Spanish. Yeah. I've seen Latin used in some circles. Yeah. Latine. Latine. Yeah. When I speak to non-binary people in Spanish, that's what they prefer to use of this relatively small sample size, given that there are probably millions of non-binary Spanish speaking people. I haven't obviously spoken to all or most of them, but like

It's very interesting to see this outside critique of the language, which seems to also ignore an inside movement within people who are Spanish first language speakers to create a

organic, like gender neutral form. Yeah. Which could also happen in any language, right? Like, like just because Esperanto has a certain form doesn't mean that people within that language who don't feel represented by them can create forms within that language to better represent them. Exactly. And it's easier because you don't have like a government telling you you can't use it or whatever. Exactly. Exactly. Esperanto is and continues to be a grassroots movement. And that has actually been a subject of critique for some.

You know, perhaps one of the biggest critiques of Esperanto is that it never achieved its original goal of becoming a universal second language. Zamenhof, its creator, envisioned a world where Esperanto would bridge linguistic divides. But for many, learning a language that relatively few people spoke simply wasn't practical. But the rise of the internet changed the game for Esperanto. What was once difficult to learn and use daily has become far more accessible.

For example, Esperanto is actually one of the most overrepresented languages on the internet. The Esperanto Wikipedia has around 240,000 articles, putting it in the same league as languages spoken by tens of millions of people, like Turkish and Korean. Google and Facebook have offered Esperanto versions of their platforms for years, and language learning services like Duolingo have helped introduce it to a new generation of learners, like myself.

In fact, the people who developed Esperanto courses for Duolingo did so voluntarily, simply because they believed in the language's potential. Esperanto has fostered a unique online community, and there's even a free hospitality network called Pasporta Servo, where Esperanto speakers can stay with each other around the world. No money required, just a shared language and a common philosophy of global connection. Not everyone learns Esperanto for the same reasons.

Some people seek intellectual challenge, some want a sense of unique community, and others are drawn to its political neutrality. As communications lecturer Sara Marino points out in the BBC article, people engage in Esperanto for many different motivations, whether it's personal fulfillment, social inclusion, civic engagement, or just the simple joy of learning a new language. It's important not to reduce Esperanto learners to a stereotype. Their reasons for participating are as diverse as the language itself.

So, where does Esperanto stand today? It may never replace English as the global lingua franca, but perhaps that was never the point. Instead, it serves as a tool for promoting bilingualism, fostering cross-cultural connections, and encouraging people to think differently about language itself. And I think that is worthy of its own reward. That's all I have for today. All power to all the people. Peace.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. And if you've ever felt the weight of letting go of people, past versions of yourself, or the expectations placed on you, this episode is for you. Lizzo opens up like never before about self-love, transformation, and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore. Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing. It's true.

The Grammy goes to Lizzo. I think it's also hard when the things that you stand for are the same things that you're being scrutinized for. The weight that is no longer on me is not just fat or physical. I released so much to get to this point. And to be honest with you, I don't feel like I've expressed myself fully in the last two years. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking. It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed.

It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story. This is my friend Daisy.

Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It was just me.

It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.

This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levitown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.

Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless with me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.

This week, we're covering the week of April 3rd to April 9th. We have, we have recovered from the liberation day, fully liberated. Yeah. And now the economy is back to normal, right? Yes. Uh, everything's really good. Uh,

Everyone's 401ks have been normal. And stable. And stable. And stable. That's what's important. Just line go up. The economy runs from stability. I mean, one of the things the line did was go up. Yeah, the line's gone. Why should anyone complain? The line's gone in a few different directions this week. Among the different directions the line went...

Up was, you know, a portion of that time. Yes. Yeah. The only direction it hasn't gone is left, I guess, which, you know, we're waiting for that one. In related news, a dead cat can bounce. I don't know why they picked a cat for the dead animal to bounce to refer to that.

stock market term. I think this is a term that's new to Garrison, just judging by their facial expression. You don't know what that is? No. So basically, when a stock price for a company or whatever collapses, right, there will generally be, it will straight line down and then it will bump back up and it will look like it's rallying. But this isn't generally a rally. What it is, is that when people like

a stock. There's a point at which they have to like buy back a

the share like shares and that artificially inflates it briefly before it then begins to decline again so it's not a real it's the result of how short selling works that there has to be this thing that makes it temporarily look like it's rallying but that that's really not what's happening yeah yeah yeah no i'm familiar with this concept and they call it a dead cat yeah it's referred to as a dead cat bounce yeah i don't know why it's referred to as a dead cat bounce but it is because

Stockbrokers are not normal people. They're not wired right. These are Wall Street guys. One of them has probably done it. That's probably why it's called that. Yeah. Look, I've thrown a lot of corpses at a lot of things, and they don't really bounce. Speaking of corpses, Robert, you have some exciting news on the army. It's pronounced core, Garrison. Yes, yes. The good news is the army is going to be more lethal and efficient than ever before. What?

which President Trump announced while sitting in the White House next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had to take roughly twice the length of trip he normally has to take to go here because so many countries that he would normally fly over or stop in have arrest warrants out for him for all of the war crimes.

Oh, we'd love to see it. But, you know, it's not about the journey. It's about, you know, the people you journey to. And Netanyahu met with Trump, you know, someone whom he clearly feels very safe and, you know, dare I say loving with. And the two of them shared the most intimate bond that two elderly men who have committed war crimes can share, which is announcing a record budget for the United States military of $1 trillion. Wow.

Well, I should say Trump stated it would be in the vicinity of $1 trillion. Now, does that mean possibly that very little is changing about the military budget? Yes, it does. And we'll get to that in a second. Peg Seth, our Secretary of Defense, made a post on Twitter right after saying Trump is rebuilding our military and fast. He also really bragged about that trillion dollar amount and said, P.S., we intend to spend every taxpayer dollar wisely on lethality and readiness. Now,

Here's the thing. Trillion dollars, shitload of money. Current amount of funding allocated to national defense programs, $892 billion. So trillion dollars, about a 10% bump, right? For, you know, the national defense programs. But it's actually unclear the way in which he phrased things and the way in which we like talk about the funding for national security issues.

This could mean that basically the military will have pretty much the same, you know, something of an increase, but not a mass, not really a significant difference from what it has now. And there will be more money into other defense related programs. So this is not like as massive a thing as it might necessarily sound like.

I think one thing that's sort of significant here is like how this comports with the way a lot of the folks on what we'll call the shithead left had talked about where there was this discussion that Trump's actually going to be, you know, bad for imperialism and the war machine. And, you know, there was even talk as of a couple of months ago that they were going to like half the Pentagon budget. Like, you know, you know, all these whatever else happens, you know, it's worth it if the military budget comes down in this, you know, imperial way.

juggernaut of hell gets finally neutered. And these people are stupid. Just all of those people are always wrong. They were always going to just make the army bigger. They were always going to put more money in defense. They were always, always going to put more money into the hands of defense contractors. Like anyone who knows anything about these people or about how Republicans have worked knew that was going to happen. There was never any chance that they were going to cut the

the actual amount of money. Now, they're probably going to cut the number of people in the military because despite what Hegseth said, there's a lot of evidence that a shitload of this is going to go towards modernization. And in fact, armed services, each branch is being, armed services are all being asked to cut about 8% of their individual budgets in order to put money into modernization efforts, which, again,

Obviously, any military needs to regularly modernize different systems. But this is also a thing where if your country is run entirely by grifters and conmen trying to shotgun money to their political supporters who have a lot of money in different defense companies, well,

What this means to me is you are probably going to see them continue to trim numbers of actual troops and put more money into bullshit that gets a lot of money to contractors. Yeah, that's that is my expectation.

That is what I see happening more than anything here. We'll see. But I think a lot of this additional money is going to go towards buying shit that may or may not be useful. But the primary purpose of putting the money into that shit is because somebody who is somebody gets a VIG. Yeah. I mean, if we look at...

fascism as a concept too it kind of it has this troubled relationship with modernity but one of the things it likes to do is flex its new little weapon systems and toys and uh yeah we're gonna see some guys posing with some weapon systems that probably never get used right like probably some ai targeting shit stuff like that yeah oh yeah oh yeah the israeli does that yeah well we gotta find some way to reallocate the alleged

$150 billion in doge cuts, which is certainly a fake number. Absolutely a fake number. We may as well send over $200 billion more to the Defense Department. Based on early IRS filings, there's something like half a trillion dollars that we might be losing in tax income this year. So, you know, net, I don't think we're doing great. I should also note here, a big part of

The money that they're going to get for modernization is coming from cutting 50 to 60,000 civilian jobs, many of whom are veterans.

But also just in terms of like military readiness, guys like Heg Seth, who's primarily a push-up dude, and people who don't know anything about the military, see it as like, well, you know, the military, you just want as many door kickers as you possibly can. And you actually need very few of those guys. What you need a lot of is guys that can move things to different places and fix things when they break. Yeah.

and do a lot of the paperwork that's necessary to make both of those things possible, which is why you need those jobs. And cutting a shitload of them is not likely to increase readiness.

It's also worth noting that the U.S. Army is looking at a force reduction of up to 90,000 active duty soldiers. This is based on an article from April 4th, which is a significant reduction. And again, like we're not... Is that real? Yes. Why? Why are they doing a 90% reduction? In part because it's very hard for them to find new active duty soldiers. Huh. It is not easy to get people to do this. And...

It is not the priority of anybody in charge of anything to actually get more soldiers. The priority is to put more money into systems, AI, and all this shit. Like, I don't think they have a vested interest in actually helping with that. How are we going to take Greenland? With drones? Like, what are we doing? Yeah, probably. I mean, there's not a lot of people. That's probably how we're going to do it. There's not a lot of people in Greenland, Garrison.

Excited for the naval blockade of Greenland to kick off in about two months. Yeah, it's going to be great. Anyway, they're going to make part of why I think they feel confident trying to make, you know, they're calling this making the army smaller and more agile is because Trump is doing his best to make friends with Russia. And we're certainly not going to do whatever happens with Taiwan. The U.S. military is not going to be involved.

Yeah, we ain't going to go back for them. You know, his attitude is like, what do we need this for? We need an agile military that we can use to fuck with Greenland and Panama. Like, that's what we're going to be doing. Two very similar biomes where, like, everything is very similar. Yeah.

And there's a lot of people like, you know, the folks running Palantir who have an increasing amount of say in what happens to the military and, you know, what Trump does, who are basically advocating for like, we're going to have this whole kill chain automated soon. We barely need people. You can't trust people. You know how untrustworthy your generals have proved, Donald.

Cool. Well, I'm excited for some more Arctic camo surplus to hit the market once the Greenland situation is resolved. I'm excited to be fucking around wondering who a drone's going to kill next. That has been a really life-affirming experience for me, and I'm excited to have it again soon. It's going to be great.

Robert, you mentioned the IRS, and the IRS maybe get less money. So I want to talk a little bit about the IRS. I guess let's start with a little summary of this week's immigration news. This week, Chai Rachik, who is the person who runs Libs of TikTok, joined ICE on a raid. She is, shall we say, the Julius Stryker of our modern fascist movement. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I guess you're right. Damn. Sorry, I'm just... Yeah, no, I mean, I wasn't joking about that. That's the most direct comparison to that. Yeah, sorry. I just took a moment to reflect on that, and it's not a great thing to reflect on. It's really not. No, it doesn't make me feel good. Yeah, no. Other things that don't make me feel good are the 16 Minutes report that 75% of people sent to Secot had no criminal conviction, which seems to leave open the possibility of there being a crime for which it would be okay to be sent to a foreign gulag with no hope of return, which...

I don't believe is the case. I'm very disappointed at any reporting which focuses on guilt as if one could ever be guilty of anything which would make this justifiable. You can't. The government is also soliciting for proposals this week to massively increase migrant detention, which again is not surprising. We talked about this last November, but it's also not great. But where I want to focus today is on the IRS and the Abrego Garcia case that we spoke about last week.

So you will have seen some reporting that the IRS has said it will hand over information of people who are subject to criminal investigation to DHS or ICE, right? ICE being under DHS.

So they say what happened here is a part of court filings, a memorandum of understanding between ICE and the IRS was released in the MOU or in the court filing. Actually, they cite an offense of failure to depart the United States after being ordered removed. So essentially anyone who they're saying, like, you have to go right now that they could they could then ask for their tax return information.

Exactly what the IRS will disclose to ICE is covered by a big black redaction in the court documents. So we don't know that. The entire MOU is submitted, but there's significant redactions in it. One thing that's not redacted is that ICE has to hand over the person's name, address, and the crime for which they're investigating.

And it has to be a non-tax crime, not that that matters hugely. This is more limited than a lot of people have feared. And it's more limited than a lot of the reporting I've seen. It's possible that there's something else going on. I saw the acting director at ICE was going to quit over this. I saw that this morning.

But the fact that they have to have their address suggests that they couldn't locate them using the tax return form, which is a good thing. It is one less step towards fascism, I guess. I'm also aware of ICE having memorandums of understanding with other agencies to include HUD, Housing and Urban Development,

All of this is going to reduce the amount that migrant communities engage with the federal government to any degree, right? Contrary to what you might have heard, undocumented people do tend to pay their taxes. It's actually relatively rare for them not to do that. And this might change if the IRS starts handing over people's tax return information to ICE, right? Obviously, if HUD starts handing over people's information, that's going to lead to people not being as willing to take housing benefits and will be planning on living on the street, right?

On the other hand, Houston, the city in Texas, for those of you who aren't familiar, have I pronounced that right, Robert? Tejas? Yeah. I thought it was, I wasn't sure if it was Houston. Houston. Oh, Houston. Understood. It's Houston.

It's a place we just don't go. That's how I refer to Houston. Okay, beautiful. So this Texas no man's land town has turned over information, including addresses and license plates for people charged with driving without a license, even though some of this under Texas law is supposed to remain confidential.

so that's great they are also now making immigration detentions at regular traffic stops uh so i'm aware of one incident where a man was arrested after being stopped for a cracked wind screen and he's now in ice detention so that there was i presumably an ice warrant for this person that the houston police then acted upon i mean and this is this can just be racial profiling right like if they could just pull someone over and then send them to ice like

They're just going to start pulling over as many people that they don't want to be in Houston. Yeah. We already know that police departments have a tendency to pull over people who aren't white more often, right? And then if you give them this, that's just going to exacerbate that further. Again, it's also going to stop migrant communities interacting with the police in any way, right? This obviously has...

look, not a big police fan, but like in cases like domestic violence, right? Sometimes people need to go to the police to be safe and they're not going to do so. They think that means they or people they love will be deported. And this will have negative consequences, specifically in cases like domestic violence. And we know this. There is plenty of evidence for this. Nonetheless, this is continuing anyway. What's also continuing is our obligation to pivot to ads, which we should do now.

Okay, we are back. We're back. And it's time to talk about the Supreme Court. Do we have to? Yes, yes, we do, Gary. I think it's the biggest court. It's the big one. And they've been crushing it all week, just sending down decisions.

The two big ones, I guess, I want to talk about are a 5-4 ruling that it was vacating Boasberg's TRO. Boasberg being the judge who had initially told the United States government that had to stop sending people to sec court. And then the U.S. had ignored Boasberg and done it anyway. And then they had this whole court case about how they hadn't ignored him. And anyway, it was a secret, even though we're tweeting it. You can go back a couple of E.D.'s and hear about that.

In this decision, the court was unanimous in asserting that people removed under the Alien Enemies Act do have a right to due process, but that they have to bring a habeas petition. So, like, the reason they vacated the TRO was that the case shouldn't have gone to Boatsburg, right? That they should have brought this habeas petition. In practice, that's going to be very hard, given the fact that many migrants, even under the current system, even under Biden, most migrants who didn't speak English didn't have access to legal representation.

So this ruling is still pretty bad. The only thing the people in the court case wanted to stop was their rendition to El Salvador, right? It wasn't even like opposed to other forms of removal. It was specific to this El Salvador situation.

The court also sort of cited criminal cases as precedent, which is a very different thing. And it gives this very narrow ruling of the due process available to migrants, right? And it relies on migrants having access to a legal team, which could be expensive and complicated for them. So this ruling allows the Trump administration to send people to El Salvador as long as they have the quote-unquote right to due process, which is narrowly defined as

as something that not many people will have access to anyway? Yes, yeah, well summarized. You would need to have a lawyer on retainer to file your habeas straight away. So if that just doesn't get filed, then you are basically, in their view, forfeiting your due process and they can deport you anyway. Well, they can deport you anyway, yeah. I guess you have the right to appeal it by saying, I'm going to file this habeas petition.

But most people aren't going to do that. So in practice, they haven't explicitly ruled on this thing, right? The Abrego Garcia case, which is the other case, a Fourth Circuit judge required the U.S. to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. And then Chief Justice Roberts on his own issued an administrative stay. So he is effectively telling them that Fourth Circuit judge, you can't order them to have him return right now.

We need to take a timeout. We need everybody to get their evidence in order and then bring that to us. So that case remains ongoing. In the brief for that case, the government referred to Abdelkader Garcia as an enemy alien. But I don't think MS-13 is covered by the evocation of the Alien Enemies Act. I think it was specific to Trendi Aragua.

And then they also claim that they removed him under the Immigration Nationality Act, not the Alien Enemies Act. So none of this, I guess, is hugely surprising. We're seeing this sort of post hoc justification of what they did, which is kind of how they operate. But that case still remains ongoing. So we're still...

We're still going to hear that one, which presumably will reflect on the constitutionality of sending people to Secod. But like the fact that, yeah, they ruled the other case, right? The one that was five to four. It wasn't about whether Secod was legal. It was about whether Boasberg had the right to make a decision on this particular case. But,

Still not great. It looks like the Supreme Court is doing everything it can to avoid a face-to-face showdown with the executive branch because they don't want to deal with the consequences of ignoring them. We said before, maybe the only court that they will listen to is the Supreme Court. Well, if the Supreme Court doesn't make them, then they won't. So that's where we're at with that.

Not great. Not exactly great at all. Well, do you know what is doing great? The economy. And for more on that, I think it's time for Tariff Talk with Mia Wong. Wait, wait, wait. Tariff Talk?

Ah, yeah. Every day, every time we do it. The only band that matters. It's the only band that matters. The Narcissist Cookbook doing a very brief refrain from Rock the Casbah. The worst Clash song. By a wide margin. The only Clash song to have been played during Operation Desert Storm, which made Jostrom a cry. Oh.

A real catastrophe. You know what isn't a catastrophe? The economy. Yeah, how's it going? Ah,

So I just saw a wonderful chart where someone was like, ah, this is one of the eight best days the S&P has ever had. And every single other one of those days is like 1929, 1931, 2008. Yeah. 2020. Yeah. It's one of the best days for Mount St. Helens air quality. Yeah. Yeah.

It's so good. So, all right. The tariff situation as of 2.43 p.m. Pacific time on April 9th is that there is... Going good. It's going to be cool, guys. Don't worry about it.

Okay, so there is an 125% tariff on all goods from China. Is that bad? You know, there's a bit that I cut here where I was going to say about how, like, at 54%, I was like, we've entered the part of the map where it just says here there'll be dragons. At 125%, there's not even dragons there. They didn't even think to put that on the map as an unknown region. Yeah.

Hi, this is Mia from the future. It is now Thursday. One of the problems with attempting to do this episode is that we are learning the tariff rate from Twitter in real time. So it turns out that the actual tariff rate on China, as clarified by Donald Trump today, is 145%.

And also, it has become clear that the 25% turf tariffs on both Mexico and Canada are also still in effect. So, yay! In medical terms, it means what happened to the global economy is equivalent to you getting hit directly in the spine by an F-250 going 45 miles an hour. That's what's happened to the base of the global economy. Yes. And I mean...

It is very funny that a lot of people have been focusing on the bond stuff because you can just look at the tariff numbers and it's like, yeah, okay, seeing a 125% tariff on all goods from China and then looking at the bond markets to figure out if that's bad or not is like walking outside into a blizzard and being like, whoop, I need the weather map to tell me if it's snowing. What are we doing here? What are we doing here?

The reason I'll explain, like briefly, treasury bonds are the underpinning of every country, the entire global economy. Every single country has a shitload of money in U.S. treasury bonds because they are the most reliable thing. And what a treasury bond is, is you give money to the U.S. government and they say in a period of time you can take this out and it will have grown by a set percentage. Because...

Treasury bonds have been for the last basically a century so incredibly stable. This is where you put your money that you don't want to gamble. So you have money that is in stocks and stuff that can go up and down, but you also hedge your bets by having a bunch in this. And generally, treasury bonds are hopefully enough to about keep pace with inflation or beat it by a little bit. But usually the rate is not all that high because there's a shitload of demand. People are always buying treasury bonds.

When the treasury bond rate, which is the percentage you get back, raises, that may look good, right? They're like, wow, you can get 5% now if you put money into a 30-year T-bond. But what that means is that everyone is selling their treasury bonds. So demand is down and the rate is higher. And everyone is selling them because entire countries at a time are pulling their money out. Nations are pulling their money out of the U.S. economy. It's great. Yeah, and we are going to get

into how the Trump administration wants to fuck with that later. But first off, programming note, programming note, I am going to be from this episode forward referring to all of these as the TERF tariffs because fuck them and because these tariffs are in a large part also about a bunch of really weird fucking masculinity bullshit. So...

Excited for that. Yeah, and when you make most of your election ads being about trans people, and then the economy goes to the toilet, this is what was voted for. If you wanted transphobia, this is what you wanted. You wanted to lose your job. You wanted everyone to lose their fucking homes. Speaking of T-bonds, am I right? Let's skip over that immediately. No, let's... No. No one laugh at him. I'm gonna go away.

Okay, okay. So the most chaotic thing happening here, other than Robert randomly saying things, is that nobody knows what the tariff situation is going to be, even just on

on Friday when you're listening to this, right? Like you, by the time you were listening to this, there could be 200% tariffs on Indonesia. There could be 4,000% tariffs on Vietnam. We don't know. No, Trump could have dissolved the US dollar and we're all using the fucking whatever. Like, I don't, I don't know. Yeah. And like, you know, so, so it's all really unstable. We can talk about the other things that are still in effect. So there's a general 10% tariff

on all countries except for China are just supposed to have a general 10% tariff. There's also, per Megan Casella, who's a CNBC reporter, there are 25% tariffs on steel, aluminum, and cars. There's probably going to be more. He keeps talking about more tariffs, and it's like, who knows when they're going to happen, like maybe pharmaceuticals, semiconductors. But the Liberation Day tariffs, tariff tariffs, are currently on hold.

For 90 days, at least as of right now. Yeah, yeah. And the quote unquote reciprocal tariffs have been lowered to 10%. For me, at least, it's unclear as of recording on Wednesday. Trump said that this is in effect immediately. It's unclear if those 10% tariffs are also on hold for 90 days. No, I think the 10% ones are in effect right now, but it's really hard to tell because he's just saying shit.

Yes, it's very hard to tell. He ain't saying it, he's truthing it. Yes, sorry, he is truth socialing this information. That is how we have to work out the global economic future. It's based on posts on truth social. Yeah, so, okay, and one of the things that's been happening with the turf tariffs is that, like,

The media is just recording things as true that are just clearly, obviously a lie. So one of the ones that's been going around and that the media is reporting that Trump has said is that he said he's going to pause tariffs on countries that don't retaliate, except we know that's a lie because the EU already imposed retaliatory tariffs. But the EU's tariff rate is like

Already down to 10% just like everyone else. So we know that Trump is lying about his rationale for the rollback of the turf tariffs, right? And every single fucking media outlet is still just reporting it because nobody fucking knows how to do freaking reporting anymore. We should move to what this is going to do to the supply chain and...

To put this in perspective, when I learned about the 104% tariff on China, that was before it was 125%, where it's at now. I was writing an episode called The Old Economy is Dead, which will probably still be coming out on Monday. Again, that was the 54%.

percent rate I was writing a thing called the old economy is dead at a hundred and four percent like Things are going to break in the supply chain that only seven people on earth have ever heard of before Like entire sectors of the economy are going to be annihilated. We're going to see right now We're probably going to see everyone attempt to root like all shipping from China There's gonna be a massive effort to try to rebreed it through like literally any other country. Yeah, but again That's only a solution for like, you know 90 days

And again, it's not even clear that that can work. I mean, I'm already seeing a bunch of reports from businesses being like, yeah, we're fucked because, and that was at the 54% tariffs. And at 125%, entire industries are non-viable. Now, it's maybe possible that if it was just...

these tariffs and all Chinese shipping was able to be routed through some other country, maybe we would only have a regular economic collapse like a, like, you know, like an early 2000s tech bubble collapse and not like a 2008 one. But again, that's assuming that no more tariffs go into effect. Now, the problem is that

We went through this with the 90-day pauses on the Mexican tariffs and the Canadian tariffs. And then after 90 days, everyone assumed that they weren't going to go into effect again. They just went into effect. So the odds are that the absolutely catastrophic turf tariffs from Liberation Day are going to go into effect in about 90 days. That's probably what's going to happen. There's probably going to be some attempts to negotiate them down. But again, those absolutely catastrophic tariffs, which are going to just fucking annihilate the entire world economy, are probably going to go into effect

And, you know, part of what's happening here, right, is that the markets are doing this. They're like dead cat bounce. Right. And a lot of this is because they haven't actually stopped to think about, like, how much American manufacturing and contra every argument everyone is making about this. There is actually a lot of manufacturing still in the US, but all of it relies on Chinese imports and various stages of innovative stage of production. And they're fucked.

And I haven't even mentioned yet, by the way, the sort of capstone to all of this is that China is doing an 84% retaliatory tariff on all American goods, which is going to just fuck massive portions of American agriculture. We've talked a lot on the show about soybean exports. It's going to be absolutely catastrophic. We're going to go more into this on Monday. But, you know, the thing that's clear from this is that these people don't see the economy as real in the way that you and I do. Right. They simply don't.

You know, we look at the economy as something where we have to have a fucking job so we can go to work, so we can come home and fucking buy food for our families and pay our rent. And they think it's a fucking joke, right? They think it's a fucking masculinity signifier. And they think it's like they look at tariff rates and they go, this is just a number on a fucking page. And that's why the tariff rate is now 125% on China, because none of this shit is real for them at all.

Now, do you know what is real? No. The products and services that support this podcast. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We are back. Now, okay, one of the things that I've been seeing a lot of is there are a lot of arguments about whether there was some kind of plan here. Trump has claimed that he was going to roll back the tariffs all along. And no, he wasn't. No, he's just lying. He's just going by the seat of his pants. And I can prove that.

That there is no plan here. But moving on to the second thing that I want to talk about here, which is a speech given by Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Steve Mirren at the Hudson Institute. So this is again, the Council of Economic Advisors is a federal agency that is like their job is to provide economic advice to the president, right?

And their chair gave a speech where he argues, and this is something that like I, Jesus fucking Christ, we were talking about, okay, the fact that every fucking country on Earth has U.S. Treasury bonds. We were talking about this earlier, right? The status of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. This guy is arguing that that is actually a public good that other countries should pay us for. He wants to force countries to fucking pay taxes for

to the United States for holding U.S. Treasury bonds. And again, if any nation on Earth could pay to have their currency be the global reserve currency, there's no amount they wouldn't pay. Like, the degree to which this benefits you is ridiculous. Like, the fact that you want to charge other people for it is nuts. It is like, look, how this actually works, right, is that every single other country on Earth is...

is forced to buy American debt, which is what a bond is, right? Yeah. And this allows the U.S. to carry out even more spending without inflationary effects. Every single other country on Earth... Everything is based on this. Yes. It's all forced on other countries having to stockpile U.S. dollars...

Like, literally the entire global economy, the U.S.'s advantage in the entire global economy is that every single other fucking country on Earth needs U.S. dollars. Part of this is to buy oil, and part of this is, again, because the dollar is the fucking reserve currency, it's the currency that fucking trade is done in, and the asset that you hold...

is is like is the fucking u.s bond the anthropologist david graber called this in his book debt the first 5 000 years a tribute system that again every country in the world is forced to buy u.s bonds the u.s government has just like fairly explicitly like you did this during the reagan administration does this other times like has just fairly explicitly leaned on countries and been like you're buying a fucking a fucking bunch of u.s bonds now right like this is this system the status of the dollar of the world reserve currency

Is the entire lattice that supports and spreads the American empire. And these fucking clowns want people to pay taxes on the tribute that they are paying to us. This is not Donald Trump or Elon Musk, right? This is the guy these people brought in to be their economist, to do economic policy. Yeah. They're,

There is no limit to their stupidity. There is no rock of sanity upon which the tide of madness will crash. Everything we have seen, we have seen so far is just a prelude to an infinite abyss of stupidity. So mind numbingly incomprehensible. It will shatter our minds like a snowflake in a hurricane. You can no longer think to yourself. They cannot possibly be this stupid. They are thinking thoughts. Even gods cannot comprehend. They are attempting to drain the sea.

By shouting at the moon. They are trying to wipe their ass with pine cones. There is no five-dimensional plan here. There was not even a man behind the fucking curtain. There was only an infinite sea of cruelty, malice, and stupidity trying to drown us all for the crime of attempting to exist in the world we were born in. The reality of the men who rule the American empire.

Is this it is so terrifying that everyone from the most powerful ceos on the planet to the fucking day traders running the stock markets to broke leftist shit posters recoil in horror and try to construct meaning and some kind of like Anything any kind of strategy any kind of strategic reason why anyone could possibly be doing this because the existence of a plan literally any plan No matter how evil it is is preferable to this which is that the largest economy is

In the world, the most powerful empire the world has ever seen is being run by the dumbest people who have ever fucking lived. And they are doing this because they are evil and they're stupid. Yes. Yes. There's absolutely like, yeah, yeah. No, nothing else to say, really. I think one of the things that is underpinning this, which you can pick up on if you

are cursed enough to listen to enough of these speeches and enough of their talking heads and podcasts. It's like this reoccurring

trend in which these people really need to be victims in order to politically succeed, which is an accusation that's usually thrown against woke SJWs. But before the election, it was this idea that because of the Dem corrupt elite establishment, everyday Americans are victims of this hidden cabal of Democrats that are ruining everything. But now that these people are in charge of the United States,

The people who are victimizing us is just the entire world, right? The entire world is ripping off the United States by using our dollar, by doing trade with us. They are somehow ripping us off. Like, we are the victims of this global scheme. And it's hurting you, the average blue-collar worker, and it's making women adopt managerial positions. And this is what actually is the core of your oppression. And...

Even when they win, even when they control the country, they can't let go of this victim status. They have to have someone ripping them off in order to justify them doing just incomprehensible stupid power grabs. And it is very much linked to this masculine signifier. It's very odd. The way that people are trying to justify losing so much money in the stock market is by reposting a clip of some Australian women dancing on...

dancing on TikTok in like an office building and they're like, well, you know, tariffs are much better than having to deal with the women in the office. Am I right, fellas? Yeah, women having a job. This is how they justify it. At least we don't have woke. It's worth it

To not be able to afford food. If the woke is the global log house. Yeah. That's a deep cut. Long house is burnt down. Sure. Because the long house is burnt down. We're now exposed to the elements and all of our food store stores are gone and it's about to snow 18 feet. Yeah. But at least the long house. Yeah. The long house with your they them nephew in it that you hate and

owned you at Thanksgiving. It's gone. Shout out to your they-them nephew. Yeah, I guess what's nibbling? Nibbling is a correct non-binary appellation. In other news, last week, President Trump said that he would be quote-unquote honored

for the president of El Salvador to take U.S. citizens, which he calls American grown and born criminals, and put them into SECA, the Terrorism Confinement Center, which is essentially a prison work camp. Yep, that no one gets released from. Trump said, quote, why should it stop just at people that cross the border illegally? Unquote. Mm-hmm. But,

but it shouldn't start there. It shouldn't be there at all. And as James already mentioned, 75% of the immigrants sent to Seacott don't have a criminal conviction. These people are not criminals. Now, a few days later, the White House press secretary reiterated that this is something that Trump is seriously discussing, both publicly and privately. So,

So the president has discussed this idea quite a few times publicly. He's also discussed it privately. You're referring to the president's idea for American citizens to potentially be deported. These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation's laws repeatedly. And these are violent repeat offenders in American streets. The president has said if it's legal, right?

If there is a legal pathway to do that, he's not sure. We are not sure if there is. It's an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly as in the effort of transparency. Now, one of the last things we're going to discuss is an update on DHS and ICE efforts to deport students across the country. Me and James did an episode last week, which is still pretty relevant. But all of the numbers have increased dramatically since that episode.

As of Tuesday night, April 8th, 92 student visas have been revoked at California universities, 50 at UC campuses, and 36 at California State University campuses, with six more at Stanford. Also, as of April 8th, 50 student visas have been revoked at Arizona State University, with multiple students now in ICE detention. Lawyers for these students believe that upwards of 1,000 visas have been revoked across the country.

A map on InsideHigherEd.com shows 419 confirmed instances of student visas, or in some cases green cards, being revoked by Secretary of State Mark Rubio across 34 states. And as of Wednesday, April 9th, visas for 18 international students have been revoked at the University of Utah. These students and recent graduates received letters from the Trump administration instructing them to quote-unquote self-deport immediately.

At Utah State University, more than 30 students have been impacted, according to the university administration. Yeah, I'm aware of at least one UCSD student who was detained at the border and immediately deported. I'm also aware that UCOP, UC Office of the President, right, made a statement about the impact of service terminations across its campuses. But the UCSD Guardian, in a dub for student journalism, reported that UCSD convened an emergency meeting before this of faculty

And it knew about the revocations or the SEVIS changes, right? The revocation of their student status, right?

And it was reluctant to act because it hadn't received guidance from UCOP yet. So we're seeing this from a lot of university administrations, right? They don't know how to respond. I did see that the University of Arizona was helping fund some of the legal fees of their students, which is more than many universities are doing. As of now, there seems to be no pattern of prior arrests for the people who have had their statuses changed.

But in some cases, it seems that in some university systems, all of the people who have lost their status are either Chinese, Indian or from majority Muslim countries. One other thing I want to close out this episode on. So we have an episode out about this already. But one of the things ICE has been doing has been targeting migrant farm worker labor organizers. They have basically just kidnapped, like just straight up broke this guy's window in his car and dragged him out.

a guy named Alfredo Juarez, who's known as Lalo. Um, he is an organizer for Familias Unidas por la Justicia in, uh, in Washington. And there is going to be a protest. This will be Saturday the 12th. That'll be tomorrow as you're listening to this on Friday, um, at Portland city hall at 2 PM. Uh, organizers are also asking that you call the Washington attorney general to demand pressure be put on everyone to release him. Um,

Yeah, if you want to hear more about that, I have an interview with an organizer who works with them. And yeah, it's real fucking bad. The scale of repression has been increasing. It's not undefeatable. And this is a tangible thing that you can do to try to stop them. But yeah, it requires movement now. And yeah, do this now before it gets worse. Yeah.

To update another topic of the episode me and James did last week,

We mentioned that DHS was seeking input for installing a new program to screen the social media activity of people applying for immigration benefits for what they label as anti-Semitism. And this policy is now in effect. This applies to quote-unquote aliens applying for lawful permanent resident status, foreign students, and aliens affiliated with educational institutions. Possibly also people applying for citizenship benefits.

To quote the DHS Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, quote, there's no room in the United States for the rest of the world's terrorist sympathizers, and we are under an obligation to admit them or let them stay here. Secretary Noem has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism, think again. You are not welcome here, unquote.

The webpage for this new policy states, under this guidance, USCIS will consider social media content that indicates an alien endorsing, espousing, promoting, or supporting anti-Semitic terrorism, anti-Semitic terrorist organizations, or other anti-Semitic activity as a negative factor in any discretionary analysis when adjudicating immigration benefit requests.

So essentially this means that if you've posted anything that is in support of Palestine or criticizes the Israeli government, this will be now used against you if you are applying for a visa, if you are applying for a green card, if you're applying for citizenship and already live in this country as a permanent resident, lawfully so.

Just a wider net of social media surveillance. 404 Media put out a good article on Wednesday about a Palantir system that ICE is using to look for immigrants and people in this country, which allows them to select for specific attributes with a pretty intense filtering system. So yeah, this is ongoing and we will continue to report as such. Yeah. All right, everybody. Well...

Until next week, please don't go to an El Salvadoran prison camp if you can avoid it. We reported the news. There it is. Great. 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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