It Could Happen Here Weekly 180
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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where the ancient leftist adage there is power in logistics has finally been realized by one Donald Trump. I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me is Gare. How are you doing, Gare? Just another great day in America. It's great. It's great. They're arresting judges. It's a good time. It's great. Something that Mia has probably called for before, but under different circumstances. Hey, look, have

Have I ever publicly called for the arrest of a judge? I'm not sure I have. Maybe, probably not, because, like, arresting power itself is a little bit problematic. Hashtag problematic. Yeah, I mean, this is a carceral solution to this, Garrison. Like, we kind of have to be using carceralism to solve the problems of the carceral system.

Sure. Speaking of carceral systems, there is the economy that we're all living under, which is also quite literally a carceral system because so much of it is based on prison and slave labor and various crimes across the world. Now, I have good news and I have bad news about this. I don't remember what the good news was. So we're only getting the bad news, which is that, well, the good news and the bad news is that the system that we all grew up on, the economic system that has, you know...

supported us our entire lives or not supported us for our entire lives the thing you know the system that encompasses everything we have ever known is fucking dead it is dead as shit the economic system that existed literally at the end of last year does not exist anymore it is right now in the process of dying

And the thing that is emerging has not emerged yet, which means we get to go to the Gromsey quote where he says this is the time of monsters. The Chinese century. My favorite Gromsey. Gromsey. Whatever. Gromsky? How do we say this guy's name? Gromsky? Gromsy. Gromsy? Gromshy. See, you fucked up too. Yeah. My favorite Gromshy quote. We're entering the Chinese century.

Look, okay, so here's the thing. I, on a fundamental level, think that Gramsci is like the harbinger of the entire retreat of the 20th century left. So I hate him, and therefore I refuse to say his name properly. Also, we're going to get into a little bit about why the Chinese century is going to also be a complete shitshow for them too, but, you know. The Canadian century. I don't know. Finally, the Yugoslavian century. Yeah.

With God Emperor Mark Carney in charge, he will usher in a new era of Canadian progress and global supremacy. As climate change worsens, the Canadian economy will suck up all of the dependency and resources from the U.S. in the late 20th century. And finally, we will have a Tim Hortons in every country in the planet. I'm so excited for us to finally get our first war between two countries with Tim Hortons in it.

That will be exciting. So there is a story that we have told on this show many, many, many, many, many, many times. And it is the story of the structure of the modern world economy, the birth of neoliberalism, the ascendancy of free trade, the decline of the US as the world's great manufacturing power, the collapse of the power of the global working class.

And the generalized ascension of capitalism and this specific form of capitalism as a structuring force of the world system. It is a story of how structural forces and contingent choices, technological changes in class wars, domestic politics and grand international maneuvers and international relations built a political and economic structure that ruled the world for half a century of American hegemony. And we are going to tell a very, very abbreviated version of that story for one final time because that's

That world... Well, don't say final, because you'll probably do this again in two years, but okay. The world that we were all born into, that world is fucking dead, and Donald Trump has killed it. And this is how it died. Garrison. Yes. In the beginning, there was war. Sure. In the ashes of a continent ripped by the flames of fascism, two armies stood triumphant over a new world...

One of them, unfortunately, was the United States, and the second one, unfortunately, was the USSR. Now, it's also worth mentioning that very briefly, both the French and the British assumed they would also be like superpowers, and no, jokes, washed, failed, failed powers, 0 out of 10, absolute dipshits, destroyed.

Now, oddly enough, Japan walked away with more power than either of those countries. Yeah, yeah. A little bit odd considering the conditions that led to this happening. Well, you know, I mean, but the actual shift here, though, and this is, you know, this actually is a lot of what this episode is about, is that

The thing that World War I or World War II did was, and World War I also did this, but was fundamentally break the power of the old world empires, right? Because the world had been ruled for several hundred years by various combinations of the French, the British, and the Germans, and, you know, to some extent, like, Spain, but Spain was sort of gone, right? But, like, those old world empires had been what had structured everything in the world.

And at the end of World War II, that suddenly wasn't the case anymore. And the product of this was that if you look at the places in the world that had the largest remaining industrial reserves, right? I mean, there was obviously some industrial production in Latin America, particularly Argentina. There was some Chinese manufacturing belts that were run by Japan in China that weren't destroyed. And then there was the entire manufacturing power of the United States.

And this meant that alone among countries, right, the U.S. was in the most dominant position, like one of the most dominant positions of great power has ever been in, even though there technically was a second great power, right? They had an unbelievable percentage of the world's total manufacturing power. We had an unhinged percentage of the world's total gold reserves. We had, I guess, like the second largest army in the world. But, you know, we were significantly more technologically advanced than the USSR, and

And this had a bunch of extremely weird consequences because there was really no way for the amount of like concentrated industrial power the U.S. had to go but down because we controlled so much of the world's wealth and so much of the world's manufacturing capacity that the only thing that could ever possibly happen was that the rest of the world would catch up.

And this was the thing that was actually necessary. And this is something that was, that was spurred on by the American industrial class, right? Because they suddenly had all of these like Jeep factories you're trying to make cars out of, and they needed people to buy the cars. And the only way to do that was to rebuild Europe and to rebuild Japan in order to sort of rebuild these places as markets. And so for like a very brief time, and this is the sort of like golden age that all of these Trump people and all of these like weird dipshits like hearken back to was this like hard time of like unmatched American power and

But also, it was a time in the world economy where you could have multiple powers industrializing at the same time without it being zero-sum. And that just was not going to last. Because at a certain point, and this is accelerated by things we've talked about in other episodes, like this attempt by a bunch of what were called the non-aligned movement, or sort of the G77, you know, also like the third world movement, a bunch of these countries that were non-aligned. So you have like Yugoslavia, India, Russia.

Pakistan, which you can immediately tell how this alliance is going to shit because these two countries are like in the same alliance, right? Like, you know, this is like Tito's Yugoslavia is in this with like Saudi Arabia. These countries sort of like economic strategy was to create something that actually is in a lot of ways kind of like what Trump is trying to do, which is like using their control of resources. Although, again, the resource the US has now is like money and

Basically took all of the fucking world's resources. Right. But using that to develop your own local industrial basis so you can have your own local manufacturing economy. And this is something that like a lot of countries pursued this. Like Venezuela pursues this. Like Bolivia pursues it. This is something that like everyone kind of across the political spectrum is trying to do in like the 60s and 70s and through the 80s.

But the thing is, it's destroyed by the second thing that's sort of a model for what these people are trying to do, which is what Reagan was able to do to the American economy in the sort of 1980s. And what Reagan is able to do is Reagan actually does something that sounds really bizarre now, but he was actually successfully able to temporarily for about maybe like six years, six or seven years, was able to actually like dramatically ramp up American like industrial production.

And like was able to do the whole sort of like we're bringing the jobs back to the U.S. But the thing is, the way he did this was not the way the Trump administration is doing it. Right. What he did was on the one hand, he blew a smoking crater in the entire world economy. And that, Garrison, will sound familiar to you because these people are trying to blow a hole in the American economy. Right. Like you have seen this. Yes, I have seen the stonks in the trade trade.

And the shipments, yes, I am. Yeah, but even like Elon Musk would like post about this, right? Like very deliberately about how he wants to destroy the economy so that there could be like a brief economic hardship and then a golden age, right? Necessary hardship will have to endure for a short period of time to then reach the like utopia which is surely around the corner. Yeah, and it's interesting because when serious people have to defend this, like Fox, okay, I say serious people, and I'm saying Fox News because like

Semi-serious. Look, look, here's the... When serious clowns have to defend this. Yeah, I know, have to defend this, right? Like, okay, you know, we're not dealing with, like, you know, we're not dealing with, like, intellectual titans here, but, like, when someone who is mildly more intelligent than Elon Musk has to defend this, it is Reagan they point to, because Reagan... And Carter was also ahead of hand in this, but Reagan does this thing called the Volker Shock, right? Like, working hand-in-hand with Paul Volker, who's the head of the Federal Reserve, which...

Notably, Trump just spent a bunch of time threatening to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and then had to back off on that because all of the markets were like, this is our fucking Rubicon. Like, we don't give a fuck about any of the other things. Well, I mean, we kind of give a fuck about the other things you'd be doing. But like, if you fire the head of the Federal Reserve, like, we're going apeshit. But like, you know, the Fed and Reagan worked together in order to do this thing, which is jack interest rates to just like unhinged levels of

causing everyone else's debt in the world to become like unbelievably unsustainable to repay. This like annihilates most of the world's economies. This also creates like a double dip recession where the U.S. has like almost 20% unemployment. But he's able to write this out specifically because like this thing actually benefits a bunch of sections of the American capitalist class. Like if you are someone who holds debt, right, this is fucking great for you.

And this is something very different from what's happening right now because nobody is winning the trade war. Like, everyone is just having the very worst time they've ever had. It does seem like a globe of losers. Yeah. But the thing that Reagan does that actually allowed him to temporarily restore the profitability of a lot of American manufacturing, and there is still a lot of American manufacturing, we'll get to that in a bit,

But the thing he was able to do was the thing that Garrison, I was threatening at the beginning of the show, by the time I am done doing this pod- like, maybe not this podcast, but by the time I finish doing It Could Happen Here, when I, like, die on the battlefield in 15 years, everyone will be able to fucking explain the Plaza Accords and the Reverse Plaza Accords because they are the central thing that got us all to this fucking place.

Which is that Ronald Reagan goes to Japan and goes to, like, West Germany, and the subtext of what he's saying is, like, you are American military protectorates, and because you are American military—Japan, by the way, is, like, the great industrial power of the 1980s, right? And through the 90s, like, they are, like, the defining—like, they are the thing that everyone thinks about China today, right?

Like, if you want to find every argument people make about China from the entire political spectrum, like, all the way from, like, people on the one hand going, like, this is, they're going to destroy American hegemony, to people on the other hand being, like, this is what socialism is. You can find all of those same arguments people made about Japan in, like, the 80s. But, you know, what Reagan forces these countries to do is to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar, right? So the dollar is suddenly worth less, and because the dollar is, like, worth less relative to other international currencies, it makes U.S. manufacturing more competitive, right?

And this, like, temporarily restores American technological production. But then they have to reverse them because that nukes the entire Japanese economy and the Japanese economy becomes an entire thing of real estate speculation.

Which, you know, I know you may be too young to remember what happened the last time that we based the entire economy on real estate speculation, but it didn't go great. That's not true. Also, you're like a few days older than me. Come on. That's unbelievably not true. I am over half a decade older than you. Is that real? No, that can't be real. Yeah. We'll talk about this afterwards. I don't think that's true. Let me pull up my Mia Wong docs file to check. One sec. Ugh.

While Garrison checks to be a long docs file, the economy that is built up from all of this though is an economy based on a few different things. One, it's based on an entire network of global supply chains with very, very minimal tariff barriers between them. It is based on the doctrine of free trade, which is

you know, not really free, but obviously like the ways that these were written structurally benefited the U.S., right? Like the U.S. is allowed to do all of this shit for like it's corn production that no other country is allowed to do. Like all of the market tampering that all these people scream about is just what the U.S. does with corn, right?

But, you know, the entire economic system was based on being able to cheaply produce different components of goods in different countries, assemble them and then move them across the world cheaply in order to sort of avoid the localized power of workers movements. It is based on the U.S. running a series of bubble economies. So the tech bubble, the housing bubble, et cetera, et cetera. And it is based on the U.S. dollar and the bond as like the fundamental aspects of like as the world reserve currency, the fundamental thing that drives the system.

And when we come back, we will talk about this literally all exploding and what it's going to do for all of you, which is not good. Yay. Okay, we are back. Now, one of the things that have in a lot of ways locked the system in place was that because of the way that these manufacturing networks are set up, right? Because they're all so interlinked, because they're all...

dependent on like exploiting differences between production capacity and like labor costs in different countries. They are all so interconnected that if you try to pull one thread out of it and do a major change to the system, the entire thing is at risk immediately. And this meant that there has always been an enormous structural incentive to keep things the way they were, even if everyone can also already like realize that they're kind of fucked up.

And this dates all the way back to, like, things that most people largely have forgotten about. But, like, Obama, for example, ran on renegotiating NAFTA. And he never, like, intended to do that. But, like, even if he had, the moment he got into power, you know, like, Trump renegotiates NAFTA too, right? But he renegotiates NAFTA and it's just, like, the same trade deal? Because...

For a long time, right, if you were going to run the capitalist economy in a functional way, the only thing you could possibly do was run it the way it had already been set up because there were so many structural factors about how the system of production works that this is the only way you could run it and still, like, have the economy not explode. But now, we have finally produced a group of men so stupid that they are unconstrained by the structural limits of the economy.

And this is where we get into the LeBron of turf tariffs that we're on right now. And we get into something that is very important to understand about this, which is that this shit is not about economics, right? In a sense that you or I will understand that this is none of this stuff is about like we want the economy to grow. It's this is not something that like really any of the major sectors of capital want to

Because it is just nuking this whole thing. And this is why you've seen a split between even Elon Musk has like openly criticized the trade policy, even if he's been sort of hedging it. We've been seeing this is this widening rift. And we talked about this in the last executive disorder where like different factions of the Trump administration were literally trying to like isolate Trump from like Navarro, who's the guy who wants to do all of the all of the tariff bullshit. They've been, you know, literally try to get him alone in a room so that they can they can implement their trade policy.

But the actual underlying urge here is completely ideological, right? It is this idea that, like, if you run a trade deficit with a country or if you are buying things from a country, they are ripping you off and you always need to be selling more things than you're buying, which is just, like... So, okay, on one level, like, this is just so fucking nonsense that, like, attempting to explain why it's bullshit is kind of pointless, right?

But we're going to do it anyways because someone fucking has to somewhere. And this actually does also reveal something about the way that money has always worked under these systems. Okay, so before we get to like what this is going to do to the entire world economy, we need to talk about

Garrison, do you know what balance of payments is? That sounds like something I would ask my accountant about. Yeah, so this is technically an accounting thing, right? But the balance of payments of a country, it is like a leisure thing, right? But it's the measure of their accounts, right? In terms of all of the money coming out of the country and all of the money coming into the country. That's like trade balance stuff, right?

And the balance of payments is actually very important for a lot of countries because specifically most countries in the world need to buy things in a currency they can't print. And this has always been the structural limit of things like modern monetary theory, which talks about how like your country's ability to like have things isn't constrained by just like the pure money supply of your country as long as you're buying things in your own currency, right? Like the purpose of money is the thing that move assets around, right?

But inflation isn't a product. I mean, like, yeah, okay, if you just, like, hammer the fucking printer button, right? Like, yeah, you can cause hyperinflation, but substantively, because money is something that is a production of the government, because it is literally government debt, right? It's not a commodity in the conventional sense where you have to, like, figure out how much of it there is, and there's, like, a limited supply of it, and you have to, like, manage the limited supply to make sure the economy doesn't explode. You can just use the money that you have, and you can use, like, deficit spending effectively, right?

To continue to circulate goods around the economy. The problem is if you have to buy something that is not in your currency, that's where you need trade because you need to find a way. So, you know, I'm going to take an example that we're going to come back to later, which is Bolivia, right? If you are Bolivia, you need to get American dollars. You can buy like gas, right? So people can like fucking fuel their cars.

And the problem is you can only buy oil in American dollars. So you have to find something to export to a place where you can get American dollars for it. And in this sense, balance of payments actually matters enormously, right? And balance of payments is also just like a function of all of your trade deficits and all of your trade surpluses sort of combined, right? But think about the US. This is a notable thing. Everyone uses the dollar to buy shit. There's like nothing that you can't buy with the dollar, right?

So, for the United States, none of this shit matters. At all. None of the balanced payment stuff. It is completely irrelevant. Like, literally, completely, totally, and utterly irrelevant. Right? Now, if you are like Bolivia, and you run out of dollars, then what you have is a spiraling economic crisis where people fucking suddenly can't buy food because no one can buy oil, so no one can move things around, so the entire economy literally collapses. This is a very, very, very common mode of economic collapse. But,

you know, none of the, none of the things that the right is talking about, like in terms of like, Oh, you have like the United States has like a trade deficit with China. It's like, yeah, great. That means that we're buying things from them. Like the, the one good Rand Paul quote ever was like, yes, I have a trade deficit with my grocery store. And that's fine. Yeah.

Mia goes full Rand Paul on the podcast today. Yeah, I know. But the thing is, it is very, very funny that Rand Paul is now complaining about this because it's like, well, yeah, I don't know. If all of you motherfuckers hadn't spent all this time fucking palling around with Alex Jones and the Klan, we probably wouldn't be here right now. This is your fault. This is definitely... The Tea Party does have a sizable chunk of the blame here.

Yeah, like that's the thing. This is all of your fucking fault. Lock them up quick. Zero to ten. Zero to ten. Get them out. Get them out. Get them out. Now, do you know what else we need to get out? Get out of stock. Oh. It's these products and services. Yeah. Get them out of stock. Get them out of stock while you still can. While we still have an economy.

We are back. Now, again, as I was saying, like this attempt to make the American economy function in a way that it has trade surpluses with every other country. And also and this is also important. These people don't think that like services are real. And a lot of what the U.S. exports is services. But because they're all these really weird like because they're all fascists. Right. They all have this all of this weird ideological shit about masculinity and about the favoring of the concrete over the abstract.

Because the concrete is, like, masculine. It is, like, it is the nation, right? Like, this is, like, steel workers and people who fucking hammer coal out. Like, this is what masculinity is. This is what nationalism is. This is what men are supposed to do. Yeah, you have the materialists on the evil side, and you have the post-materialists on the... Well, no, okay, so this is... A long time ago, I did a bunch of episodes called Class and the Culture War.

And one of the points that I make of that episode is that one of the arguments that the Canadian Jewish Marxist historian Moish Pistone makes about what the Holocaust was.

Was this attempt to pit the concrete part of capital against the abstract part of capital, right? Where the concrete part of capital is like the nation and the worker and the factory and like the boss, right? And all of these like concrete things were pitted against the like the quote unquote abstract part of capital, which is to say like quote unquote like Jewish financiers, right?

And all of the sort of like weird collection of like modifiers that gets associated with like, you know, the rootless cosmopolitanism, like the globalism, like all of this shit. Right. And what the Nazis did was embody all of that stuff into just the figure of the Jewish person. And his argument, and this is arguing about like sort of structural anti-Semitism and what the Holocaust was, was that like that was what the Nazi revolution was.

that's what the liquidation of like, and this is how Pissow describes like liquidation of the Jews. This is what, this is what the Holocaust is, what the genocide was, was their attempt to destroy the like abstract part of, part of this thing by pitting it against the concrete part of this thing. And this is what these fucking people are also, are also doing in their own way, right? Like, yeah, they're just doing it with like the price of eggs or like the availability of housing. Right. And you know, and it's also with noting like these people are like unhinged anti-Semitic, right? Because this is all part of the same ideology. They just sort of like,

They're doing the shit in different ways, and they haven't, like, yeah, I don't know. Like, if these people are in power for, like, a decade, we might just get this, right? Where they're literally doing the Holocaust again. But, like, we're not at that point yet. We're at the point where, like, this kind of, like, under, like, this kind of fascist understanding of the nation and masculinity and, like, the concrete versus the abstract and, like, these figures can be, like, embodied in, like,

This is also what the administration is doing with immigrants, right? It's like passing them in that role of the abstract, like the foreigner, the national, the anti-national. Those things are what is causing our economic problems, our housing problems. And then you have other instances like with Mexico and Canada where they tie in the trade war with this fentanyl thing.

being like, you know, like immigrants are bringing fentanyl over the border and we're using tariffs as a negotiating tactic to stop fentanyl. So like they're bringing in even more like aspects regarding like immigration and tying it directly to like our trade wars with these, you know, massive, massive countries, some of our most important trading partners. Yeah. And this is causing an interesting split because Trump's like political coalition, right?

has a bunch of kind of different kinds of fascists in a lot of ways where like trump and navarro and like i mean trump is instinctually pro-tariff and like he can be talked out of it because again this guy's brain like we saw this thing in the last administration like the last person in the room with him can convince him of basically anything but you know those people are structurally committed to like this specific version of masculinity and there's a lot of portions of the right that are and that are committed to like this trade policy is like the america first american nationalist thing

But like someone like Elon Musk isn't that committed to this. And like even a lot of the people who are like the inner circle sort of like Yarvin, like tech fascist, right? Are like, okay, but hold on. Like we make all of our shit in China. So like, you know, and this is why like Elon is coming against the terrorists because like, yeah, they're going to fuck him. Like because he has to import stuff and export stuff from China because that's where a bunch of his production facilities are. Right.

And once you get out of the circle of that kind of tech fascist, and the tech people are the people who are the most closely aligned with this administration, and in turn, all the sectors of capital tech is the most closely aligned one.

But, you know, you can get out into like places like fucking Walgreens and Walmart. Right. And these are also like like the Waltons as a family are like traditional backers of the right for ages and ages and ages. Right. They've been backers of far right causes. They also don't want this because also their entire supply chains work through fucking China and work through moving a bunch of commodities around. And the further out you go, when you start getting into like actual finance capital, these people are fucking terrified because they're looking at this and like, holy shit, we're about to lose all of our goddamn money.

And the consequence of this is that all of this stuff is shaping out in a sort of political battle in the administration over who can get Trump in the room last to try to figure out how the economy is going to work. But the problem is, and I have been vindicated in this in the very brief amount of time between when the episode on Friday came out and when we're recording this.

There are no negotiations with China. Like they haven't started. There's no process for starting them. Trump does keep lying about starting negotiations. And he's just lying about this. Right. Chinese government says, no, we have not started negotiations. It's like, no, there's no negotiations. Yeah. And there and again, like structurally, there can't be negotiations because there's no actual way for the U.S. to like not have a trade deficit with China.

Like, there's no way you can do that. And that's the thing that'll satisfy these people. So, all of this means that the economy is fucking dead, right? This sort of, like, free trade economy we've all grown up in that functions off of, like, you know, like, fucking drop shipping and all this cheap production in a bunch of other countries and, you know, like, assemblies of a bunch of different, like, goods in different places and the U.S. is, like, the economic center of the world is just fucking gone. Now, one of the reasons I started writing this episode in the first place

is that I have read so much fucking analyses of these goddamn turf tariffs, and do you know how many of them, for a single fucking second, considered what this was going to be like for anyone who doesn't live in the United States? What the fuck is wrong with people? Why does nobody fucking care about a single goddamn person who lives outside the United States?

I have read so many fucking analyses of this fucking shit. I have read these things from the business papers. I have read these things from fascists. I have read these things from the center left. I have read these things from leftists. Do you know how many of these things have said anything about actual fucking people who do not live in the goddamn United States? Fucking none of them. Every once in a while, you'll get like, this will be bad for the economy of China.

And this is, this is a catastrophe because the people who aren't going to be most affected by this when, when the fucking turf tariffs from liberation day come back into effect over the summer are the working class of Sri Lanka. This is going to be the fucking apocalypse.

For a bunch of people who have been going through hell for years and years and years and years. It's going to be places like fucking Bolivia, which is already facing a dollar crisis and is struggling to import fuel. It is going to be places like Bangladesh. It is going to be places like Vietnam, which is, you know, structurally in a better position than a lot of the rest of these countries, but like fucking won't be in a structurally better, like that one's a structurally better position when it has like 90% goddamn tariffs on it.

And yes, the U.S. is going to be real fucking bad, right? Everything is going to cost a lot more money. All of us are going to have a lot less jobs. People who are in jobs are going to make a lot less money. There is going to be a lot of people fucking homeless. There is going to be a lot of people who can't get fucking food. It is going to be a catastrophe. And also, at the same time, the U.S. is going to look like fucking fully automated luxury gay space communism compared to fucking Sri Lanka.

This kind of sort of wrote American nationalism that has consumed the brains of basically this entire goddamn country on a level so deep Americans don't even fucking think about it. Like, is the reason why we fucking have all of this bullshit in the first place?

And this is why, like, in like four fucking months, literally no one in the entire country's social security is actually going to show up because a 19-year-old grouper doesn't understand SQL because nobody in this fucking country gives a single shit about anyone who lives outside of the country enough to try to do a single goddamn word of analysis about how this is going to affect everyone. Because

Because the death of the global economy will be felt here. It is going to be felt so much fucking worse everywhere else on goddamn Earth, and I am, like, I am losing my fucking mind at the extent to which everyone is just fucking refusing to engage with this completely. This has been me being unbelievably fucking angry because, like, I don't know, a bunch of my family doesn't live in this country, which means I have to deal with the fact that, like, everyone else who lives in another country is a human being who's exactly the same as fucking we are?

And this is a thing that nobody else appears to want to fucking deal with. I am losing my shit. Please, God, stop talking about the tariffs as if they only affect the United States and aren't mostly going to be borne by everyone else. I didn't write a transition for this, but, you know, I will transition out of this by, again, going back to the fact that all of the reason this is going to be so bad is that the global economy is based on

On, you know, a combination of resource extraction and a combination of logistical supply lines that all rely on there not being 100% tariffs on goods imported to the US. And when this shit goes through and when the rest of the tariffs go through and make it, you know, the thing that's happening right now is an attempt to avoid this stuff is everyone, you know, and something like Nintendo has been talking about, right? Where they were like, okay, our plan to avoid the tariffs on China is to move a bunch of our production into Vietnam.

And that was happening anyways before the tariffs because of sort of rising labor costs in China and, you know, a whole bunch of sort of factors like that. But none of that shit, none of that stuff that's like to sort of like keep the current global economy on a lifeline is going to be able to function once the tariffs on basically every country on earth go into effect.

And there's a second problem here, which is that, okay, so what is the new economy going to look like? These people, like the people running like the administration, right? Like people like Navarro and people like Trump and a lot of the sort of like right who is driving the policy thing here think that this, that the production that's happening everywhere else in the world will just be replaced by the US. And there was a trap that people fall into with Chinese economics. And I do this too sometimes because it's, you know,

it's a fast and easy way to think about the Chinese economy. And it's not accurate. Well, it's not like, it doesn't capture the full picture of what's going on. But the way that people think about the Chinese economy tends to be that the reason that things are made in China is because labor is cheap there. Because either, because of the culmination of exploitation and poverty. And that's true to an extent, right? But the actual sort of genius from capital's perspective of capital's return to China was that

From a capitalist perspective, the Chinese workforce, and this continues to be true 30 or 40 years into the transition, is highly educated and highly skilled. And the education was paid for not by capitalism, right? It was paid for by the sort of socialist system. This combination of things, of a highly educated and an increasingly highly skilled as they've been working these jobs, means that there is an extremely high skill migrant labor population

that knows how to do a bunch of shit like circuit board assembly and stuff with chip assembly, right? That is vital to making electronics. And the US does not have a couple of hundred thousand migrant workers that you can just have and exploit and not pay healthcare costs to, to know how all of the chip manufacturing shit works, right? There are people in the US who know how to do some of these kinds of things,

But we're talking, you know, even though the U.S. does have a manufacturing economy and it is very high tech, it is not on the scale of these things, right? And the second big reason why things are produced in China, and this is the reason why production didn't all shift out of China after 2011, when there were huge protests there and huge riots there over labor conditions, is that

there is an unbelievable amount of like capital outlet, like physical factory infrastructure that is in China that you can't easily just move out to another country. And this is, this is the basic things like the power grid functions, right? And you can't really easily replicate that. And you can't just have this thing that there's all these people want to do. We're like the U S will just suddenly, you know, have all of these factories, right. And we'll suddenly like all these things will just like come back and miraculously like,

there will be all of these jobs because like who the fuck is going, like, we don't, we literally, we don't have the technology for this. Well, not so much technology, but it's like,

Who is going to build all of the factories, right? Like, the factories don't exist here. The interlinked technical systems for them just don't exist here. You don't want to switch to costing $50,000 available in 10 years, pre-order now? Sorry, no, available in 20 years? I forgot about the environmental impact surveys. Yeah, iPhone, iPhone, 20 years. Yeah, but like, you know, and like a lot of this is because, and like, you know, you're hearing a lot of reports now of like small business owners who are talking about like,

Yeah, it's so much easier to work with Chinese manufacturers. It's impossible to work with American manufacturers.

And part of that is just exploitation, right? Like, yeah, there's a lot of things that, like, there were, like, labor conditions that are very common in China that do happen in the U.S. but are much easier to do there. But also, like, I don't know, like, China has, like, an entire network of, like, the ability to basically do this sort of, like, pop-up light and medium manufacturing that can, like, retool itself really quickly. And the U.S. doesn't fucking have that, right? Like, we do have a bunch of manufacturing in the U.S., right? Like, that is the thing that we have.

but it was largely pushed into like the suburbs to get rid of sort of like the masses of workers that arose in cities like detroit to like atomize them right and this is actually like also happening in china right now weirdly like china has been pivoting to a service economy for a long time but think of this thing as a service economies a lot of that shit is like also like drop shipping production right but like you know there's no actual way for you know for like capital outlay costs and things like that like there's no actual way to replicate the conditions in china that make it a

like an effective like source of global production in the u.s or even in like a country like india like there's just not the infrastructure there to do it and there's not the sort of like migrant labor population it's not the sort of things that you need and what this means right now right is that like there is not a future lined up to replace the one that we're in right now we literally don't know what this is going to do because no one has ever bothered planning this shit out

Because this is just like taking a sledgehammer to fucking everything. Like, they are trying to extract the copper wires from the house, and in order to do this, they, like, you know, A, because they think that's how the economy works, is they extract the copper wires. And B, their plan to extract the copper wires is to blow the house up with dynamite. And, you know, no one's ever done an environmental impact statement on what if you blow the house up with dynamite, because why the fuck would you do that?

Right. Sometimes the police do that. It's true, it's true. But I guess the U.S. is the world's police force. There you go. No one has planned for this. But the second thing is there isn't another model of capital waiting in the wings in the way that there was when the sort of Reaganites did this to the economy. Because the Reaganites had an entire ideological apparatus. They had a...

like a functional way for the economy to work and be worse and be more exploitative. But there's nothing behind this, right? There's just a vision that literally cannot work. And so the place that I want to end as, as we head into the end of the economy and as you know, I like, I've been trying to grapple with what is it going to look like after this is that if we just don't know things in the supply chain are going to break that we have never thought about before.

like medical systems are going to start breaking down, right? The supply chains for like, like really, really basic goods that we don't even think about the production process of is going to start breaking down because it relies on being able to cheaply import one very, very specific kind of like, I don't know, like ball bearing that's made in one factory and suddenly costs like 400 times as much as it did before. And we don't know what that's going to do.

And this is on the one hand, absolutely horrifying, right? Like this is going to mean an unbelievable amount of suffering for people across the world.

But on the other hand, there is no plan, right? They don't have a fucking strategy. And that means that the future of the global economy is up in the air and it's up to us to make it a fucking better one, right? It's we either drive these people from power and we destroy the basis of their power on such a fundamental level they can never return to power, right?

Like, we just fucking kneecap them. We physically seize all of the fucking assets and all of the things of the productive capacity that they have that has been allowing them to do this, and we make sure they can never get it again. We make sure that we fucking control it. And we either do that, or we all get crushed for a generation, and we enter a period of just unmitigated global suffering the likes of which only a few people in the most hideously war-torn parts of the world have experienced today.

I, for one, am very excited to see the anarchist-liberal re-globalization alliance finally fighting in the streets of Seattle to regain globalization full circle. You know...

I will point out, the reason they all called it "alter globalization" and not "anti-globalization" was that, like, one of the original things... A lot of them did say "anti-globalization" A lot of them did, right? But like, a lot of their argument was like... The West Coast team certainly did. This is true. But like, it's also true that, like, one of the arguments they were making was that, like, neoliberal globalization meant that people couldn't move to places

But capital could and the thing that they want was a world where people can move between things and like fuck capital What the fuck like eat shit, right? And that's a world that we can build right we we can build a world where fucking nobody gets arrested by the immigration Gestapo We're like there isn't a fucking line on the ground that dictates whether people can disappear you to a concentration camp And that is also globalization Right, we just have to fucking do it

Anarcho-clintonism. One day, we can look at a beautiful world. Look, if Bill Kristol can admit the radicals were right, all of these other motherfuckers can come around. We've been right all the- we've been right the whole fucking time. Fuck you assholes! It's a strange- All of you broke this world, and it is now our job to put it back together, and you fuckers are going to back us, or we are all going to be killed by fascism. Those are the terms. Deal with it. It's a strange world we live in. Sigh.

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Visit TopShelfCountryCruise.com to join the pre-sale for free. No deposit required. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. And I'm here to ask you if you can imagine a world where national borders don't define our identities. This internationalist idea has historically been known as cosmopolitanism. And it has some deep roots, including, interestingly, some connection to anarchism. And of course, that's what we're seeking to explore here today.

I'm joined once again by the one and only... It's James. James Stout. Thanks for having me, Andrew. I'm excited about this one. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to have this conversation. Are you familiar with cosmopolitanism? Yeah. And like, I guess the more broad sphere of anarchist internationalism is something...

I'm very interested in, right? Like we had an interview on the show maybe two weeks ago, a few weeks ago, and people hear this with people explicitly calling themselves internationalists fighting in Myanmar. Of course, I've spent time in Rojava and with internationalists there. So like internationalism is something I'm really interested in. For sure. For sure. I think it's a very compelling and inspiring idea, especially in a world that lacks many of those ideas.

At its core, cosmopolitanism is just the belief that all human beings belong to the same shared moral and political community that transcends national, cultural, and political boundaries. In the book Cosmopolitanism, Ethics in the Will of Strangers, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah describes cosmopolitanism as, quote, "...two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism."

One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin, or even the more formal ties of shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life, but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance.

People are different. The cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences. Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life. Whatever obligations are to others or theirs to us, they often have the right to go their own way.

So basically, we have obligations to others beyond just our immediate affiliations, and that human diversity is something to be valued, not just tolerated. So it's not the idea of assimilating all of humanity into one singular culture or society or government. It's the idea of recognizing and embracing the diversity of humans, but recognizing our shared affinity all the same.

There are a couple different versions of cosmopolitanism. There's moral cosmopolitanism, or the idea that all humans have equal moral worth. There's political cosmopolitanism, the idea that global governance or international institutions should supersede national borders. And then there's cultural cosmopolitanism, which is the blending and exchange of cultures through migration, trade, and shared histories. But cosmopolitanism, fully embraced, has...

I would say an inherent tension with power, especially nationalism, the state, and capitalism. And while it's true that liberal cosmopolitanism relies on global institutions like the United Nations and reinforces hierarchies, anarchist cosmopolitanism envisions a world where solidarity, cooperation, and mutual aid emerge from below, through free association, rather than being imposed from above.

So today we'll be unpacking the history of cosmopolitanism, how anarchists have engaged with the topic, and why it remains somewhat of a battleground today. The term itself comes from the Greek cosmopolites, which means citizen of the world.

The earliest articulation of this idea is often attributed to Diogenes of Sinope, a Cynic philosopher who, when asked where he came from, simply replied, "I am a citizen of the world." According to Martha Nussbaum, Greek Stoics like Zeno of Citium, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius expanded on this idea, arguing that humanity shares a universal reason and should live in accordance with nature, not artificial divisions of state or tribe.

Of course, many of these philosophers didn't have any issue with patriarchy or slavery in Greece, so there is some inconsistency in their concept of a shared humanity. Yeah, it's who counts as human, I guess, isn't it? Like, it's pretty bleak. Indeed. But let's fast forward a bit. During the Enlightenment, we see a more structured political philosophy of cosmopolitanism emerging. Immanuel Kant was one of its most famous proponents.

In the book Perpetual Peace, Kant imagined a cosmopolitan condition where individuals, not just states, had universal rights, and where a global federation of free republics would ensure peace and cooperation. However, his vision of cosmopolitanism still relied on legal structures and state-based governance. Another nightmare thinker associated with cosmopolitanism was Denis Diderot, who criticized colonialism and argued for a cultural exchange free from that kind of domination.

He also argued against monarchy, the church, and aristocratic privileges as they were obstacles to a truly free and universal human community. Which then brings us to the French Revolution, which brought these ideas into the real world. Revolutionaries declared the rights of man and of the citizen, which proclaimed universal rights beyond national or social status.

But the revolution soon became entangled with nationalism, particularly under the Jacobins, who suppressed dissent and waged wars in the name of France. Meanwhile, the Haitian Revolution provided a different example of liberation in practice. Enslaved Africans, inspired by the French Revolution's rhetoric of liberty and equality, revolted against French colonial rule and established the first free black republic.

The revolutionaries, led by Toussaint Louverture, argued that liberty was a universal human right, not one limited to European citizens, and declared Haiti a refuge to all enslaved persons. But despite its radical implications, the Haitian Revolution was largely ignored or outright opposed by European powers. Their so-called "enlightenment" only extended to Europe, ignoring our racial and colonial realities.

We also see in this time the emergence of nationalism, which on the one hand promoted self-determination for all oppressed nations, but on the other hand saw the nation-state as a superior form of political organization. So anarchists were among the earliest critics of nationalism. Pedro of Pradón, for instance, rejected both the nation-state and centralized cosmopolitan governance, instead advocating for federation,

a frequently misunderstood concept that refers in anarchist literature to a decentralized network of freely associating individuals and groups working in solidarity. Similarly, Mikhail Bakunin attacked nationalism as a tool of ruling elites, arguing that states use national identity to suppress class struggle and international solidarity.

Bakunin did back national liberation movements, but he understood the danger of nationalism as a force that often replaces foreign rulers with homegrown oppressors. Instead, Bakunin promoted anarchist internationalism, where workers and oppressed peoples across borders would unite against both capitalist and state powers.

By contrast, the Bolsheviks would eventually develop the idea of socialism in one country, and the ever-paranoid Stalin would famously deride Jewish intellectuals as "rootless cosmopolitans". This of course aligned him with the rest of Europe's nationalists in their anti-Semitism, inaccurate caricaturization of cosmopolitanism as opposed to cultural identity or sovereignty, and rabid defense of national borders.

Honestly, I would not be surprised if Trump or Putin used some equivalent to rudeness cosmopolitanism today. Yeah, yeah. I did see, it was like a pro-Trump account, I guess. Consciously or unconsciously paraphrasing Stalin this week. So that was great. Really? What did they say? It's like, how many divisions does the judge command? Yeah.

Which is a, I think there might be a quote from Stalin, if it's not a quote, it's a paraphrase, right? But in this case, it's a reference to the attempts by a district court judge in GC to block the rendition of people to El Salvador who were accused of being members of various gangs, Tren de Aragua and Mara Salvatrucha being the two main ones.

Yes, they're just being expelled. What's the connection to Stalin, though? The quote, how many divisions does the judge command? Let me, I'm pretty sure, how many divisions does the Pope command was the Stalin quote? That's right.

So like it's referencing this idea that like might makes right. And like that, you know, if you have the power of the state, then you're not accountable to morally or even even within the confines of the state, like separation of powers that we're supposed to have in the US. Right. Like if you have the monopoly on coercive violence and you're no longer constrained by those things. Right. Yeah, I see. I see.

So of course anarchists oppose all those things. They oppose what is happening now and they oppose what was happening then. You know, from its inception anarchism has been an internationalist movement, rejecting the artificial borders imposed by states and championing global solidarity. Unlike Marxist internationalism, which has often relied on the centralized structures of the first, second or third internationales,

Anarchists emphasized decentralized horizontal networks of struggle that connected workers, revolutionaries, and stateless peoples across continents. The anarchist Saint-Émire Internationale, which ran from 1872 to 1877, was one such network, as discussed by Lucien van der Waal and Schmitt in Black Flame. That group explicitly rejected nationalism and state power.

And throughout history, anarchists worked to bridge linguistic, cultural, and national divides. From multilingual anarchist newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as La Protesta in Argentina, Der Kampf in Germany, and Le Liberté in France, through transnational syndicalist movements like the Industrial Workers of the World, which organized workers across race, nationality, and language in the early 20th century,

and including contemporary mutual aid networks, where anarchists coordinate across borders to support refugees, disaster relief, and indigenous land struggles. Anarchist networks, contrary to popular belief, often extended beyond Europe into North Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where anti-colonial and labor struggles intertwined with anarchist thought.

If you're curious, by the way, about the anarchist histories of Egypt or the rest of Latin America, you can check out my series on it right here on the It Could Happen Here podcast. And if you've listened to that series, you'll know that because anarchists were constantly persecuted, exile became a defining experience, which further reinforced their internationalism. Folks like Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Erich Oman Atesta moved across continents, spreading anarchist ideas and connecting struggles.

Malatesta in particular was basically a common San Diego. He touched multiple continents over the course of his life. So by the late 19th century, anarchists like Rudolf Rocker developed an alternative to both statist nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism, which sought to balance cultural diversity with global solidarity from below. Rocker argued that people should be free to maintain their cultural traditions without being bound to the state or nationalist identity.

So, liberal cosmopolitanism was pushing a global order through state-led interventions, international institutions, and legal frameworks. And while this form of cosmopolitanism has led to some gains on people in human rights, international refugee protections, and anti-genocide treaties.

Well, for one, we see the failures of these institutions in practice daily. And for two, they ultimately reinforce the state power that creates so much harm rather than dismantling it. The UN and the WTO often uphold the interest of powerful states above and before their international laws and obligations while sidelining grassroots movements.

While liberal cosmopolitanism sits on its hands waiting for elite-driven reforms to the system, anarchists engage in direct action to support migrants and other marginalized folks without waiting for such reform. I have to give a shout out here, of course, to the No Borders Network. And also a shout out to the work that you do, James, on the side. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. There's obviously a lot more people than me doing it. Of course. So the sad part is, even if it started with some noble ideal,

The concept of liberal cosmopolitanism today doesn't so much manifest in the freedom of people, but more so in the freedom of markets and money, the globalization of markets and money. So we will bring McDonald's and Netflix to your country, but you can't come to our country or we'll kill you. Yeah, that's about it. It was really interesting to like,

The moment I sort of became aware of libertarian left politics was in the early 2000s in the context of the movement against the G8, as it was then. And at the time, it would be referred to in the legacy media as anti-globalization. Right. Which I don't think it ever was, right? By definition, it was very global. You had people from all around the world attending these protests and rallies and speeches and such.

Like it was a very global movement. The problem was not with globalization, cosmopolitanism, internationalism. It was with the nature of neoliberal capitalist globalization, which let capital move and stop people from moving. Exactly. It's about opposition to just

the free reign of exploiters across the globe. Yeah, exactly. We let people take their money and employ people at lower wages, but God forbid those people ever want better for themselves or attempt to come somewhere where they can materially benefit themselves doing the same labor in a different nation, for instance. Yeah. And to be honest with you, I've never really been a respecter of borders. I think they're just... I think they're really, really...

blatantly foolish imposition. I don't even think you need to be a radical to see the issue with this idea that your spawn point has to determine your entire future. That some people in the past could cut up the earth and then decide where you can roam freely.

I think anyone, I see it a lot more from people who are not by any means radical or even on the left, like within Europe, right, within the Schengen area, which the UK has decided to remove itself from for reasons that are largely racism. Like we could move freely. When I grew up, my

My identity and experience was much more European than necessarily British, right? I could go for the weekend to Spain if I wanted to, or France, and flights were cheap then. So I did. Like, I used to get on Friday night, take a train to Belgium, race my bike in Belgium, and come back on Sunday night, like, very, very often. And, like, you see it here, too, in San Diego, where, like,

The border is just a line and a delay. But for most people, we're a very binational community. Unfortunately, the one way that that manifests itself is that the cost of living in San Diego compared to the average wage is vastly disparate because we have this overpressure valve where people can't afford it here. They can live across the border where the cost of living is cheaper. And that allows people to exploit working class people in both contexts, sadly. Right.

Yeah, as you mentioned the UK, by the way, I'm not sure if you've heard the news, but Trinidad has recently been imposed visa requirements by the UK. For fuck's sake. Yeah. Really? Yeah, so I mean, thankfully, we still have Schengen area access. Yeah. But just recently, the UK was like due to the usual excuse, people abusing the asylum seeking system. They've now removed our visa exemption.

So our colonizers have now decided that, you know, we don't want you to move freely in our country. We want you to pay. And visas are not cheap. They're never cheap, especially when there's no guarantee of them being accepted. It makes it all the more frustrating. Yeah. And like this just comes after the British government attempting to deport Afro-Caribbean migrants who came as part of what we call the Windrush Generation, which is just one of the most disgusting things

And like, yeah, it just wanted one of the most venal and pathetic things I've ever seen a government do. These people who the UK asked to come so that it could rebuild this economy after the Second World War. And then taking advantage of the fact that at that time there was no process for regularization and trying to deport these people who have lived their whole lives in the UK. It's just horrific. Yeah, it is. It's horrific. It's frustrating.

It's infuriating really. Yeah, yeah, it makes me really angry. Like if we didn't have the Windrush generation, not that like you need like popular music to justify their existence, they're part of our community and they should be able to stay, but we wouldn't have punk music if we wouldn't have ska music. Like so much of what is like integral to even like quote-unquote British culture actually came from these people because they are British and they belong there just as much as anyone else. Yeah.

I used to teach a class about music and colonial culture and colonialism, which is why that comes to mind. I actually missed an opportunity to go to the UK earlier this year. I didn't want to pay the cost to fly to go at that point in time. And now I deeply regret it because I'm like, I could have gone earlier.

Honestly, I think if you're the UK and your country has stolen so much, like, I think the UK has the least right or justification out of any country. If you had to concede that a country should be lost, I don't give any country that concession.

But if you had to give that concession, you could be last to receive that concession as far as I'm concerned. You don't get to go and roam across the entire planet and then shut yourself off. Yeah. You don't get to go and steal and pilfer from across the world, shuffle it all into your national museum, and then...

block people from access yeah yeah it is just like it's just the most clear and pathetic like two level standard or whatever you know like it's i mean the uk has a very i'm sorry you didn't get to visit in one sense and i'm sure we have lots of listeners who are in the uk every time i'm home i feel this like profound sense of like post-colonial melancholy that

the UK, it's just sort of, it's getting worse and worse and worse. And the way Britain is responding is with our government blaming everyone else and like trying to strip the state for parts. Yeah, like stealing everything they can. Just mess. Yeah. Yeah. I think another frustration for me as well is that it's not so much the country itself, although I would have loved to have visited like Scotland and, you know, Wales and that kind of thing. But,

And all the stuff there is to see in London. But the biggest frustration for me is that it's a connection point. You know, when you impose a visa like that, you block people's connections to other areas. We're in the few direct flights outside of this hemisphere today.

you know, to the European and African hemisphere is through a flight to the UK. And so by adding that in position, it's like, it's like the world feels like it's being closed. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. More and more. Where there was almost a time in the recent past where it felt like, oh, the world was opening up to people, you know, with the internet, the rise of the internet. And then you had, you know, the introduction of things like, like the Schengen Agreement, our access to the Schengen area was,

fairly recent I think it was 2015 we got that access yeah okay but to go from that point to like just so quickly you know the tide shifts to now this extremely hostile environment

global order towards something as fundamental as the movement of people. Yeah, it's definitely, we definitely are entering like an era where things are becoming more closed off again than many of us grew up with, right? Many of us, you know, most of my

experience I can remember was being able to move freely through Europe and that's not the case anymore for British citizens. Yeah, like it's getting visas and everything else is getting harder and harder to move around the world and despite the internet somewhat connecting us, like our physical mobility is certainly much more limited. Indeed.

I think the idea of cosmopolitanism, getting back to it, I think it's valuable. I think, you know, the idea that we have obligations to others beyond just our immediate affiliations, right?

is important, you know, that human diversity is something to be valued, not just tolerated. That's fantastic. Carl Levy, an anarchist scholar who wrote two pieces on cosmopolitanism that I'll link in the show notes, has argued that anarchism's history offers a third way between the hierarchical globalism of liberal cosmopolitanism, which relies on state-driven global governance, and exclusionary nationalism, which weaponizes identity and borders, often in service to the far right.

And that third we that anarchism presents, not third we in the sense of fascism, but third we in the sense of anarchist possibilities, is a kind of federated pluralism.

It's a web of self-organized groups that interact freely without a central authority. This vision isn't just theoretical, we've seen it in recent history through anti-globalization protests, the Occupy movement, the Square movements in Egypt, Spain, and beyond. And though flawed, they show the potential, not yet fully realized, for diverse place-based struggles that remain connected through mutuality and transnational solidarity.

We have to avoid the sort of abstract universalism that can be found in cosmopolitan thought. We must incorporate decolonial struggles and crown cosmopolitan practice in the voluntary cooperation of people, acting in solidarity across differences. Ultimately, the question isn't whether anarchists should engage with cosmopolitanism, because they always have. The real question is how anarchists can cultivate a cosmopolitanism that is truly liberatory.

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Dark Woke is back. Ten more years of liberal supremacy, bankers in control in the great nation of Canada.

This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by James Stout. We are discussing the 2025 Canadian election, which I maybe slightly exaggerated in the opening there. But the election did happen yesterday or two days ago, whenever you're listening to this. I was up all day on CBC and

on elections.ca checking in on all the charts and all the stats to see how this how this kind of upset election went and oh boy did it go

James, how much do you know about Canada and elections? Both of those things are things that I have some knowledge about. I've been to Canada twice. That's good. A fellow Commonwealth member. I guess, yeah, we are both citizens of the Commonwealth. So there we go. Does Canada have the queen on the money? Queen is dead. Dead queen. Queen is dead. But yes, we do have queen on money. Queen on money. So that's another thing I understand. Yeah.

We have a parliamentary system like, like, uh, yeah. Like in, in, do I, do I say England or like Britain or UK? It's the, uh, it's the United Kingdom, I think would be the institution. The parliament. Have fun with that. Uh, Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Well, we have one of those too, but it's less confusing because it's just one country. We don't try to be three countries like you and the UK, Britain and England do. We're a continent-let, a mini-continent. That's what we're going for. We've left Europe. We're on our way to the Caribbean slowly. Oops. Yeah, luckily, Canada's doing just fine. Yeah.

debatable but certainly this election has has gone probably slightly better for global stability and stopping the advance of far-right populism than certainly what it looked a few months ago yeah

For people who don't know, yes, Canada has a parliamentary system. People do not elect their prime minister directly. They elect the MP in their district, which is called a riding. It's a first-past-the-post system, so whoever gets the most votes in each riding, they get their representative sent to parliament. The party with the most representatives, they take control of the government.

And that is who the prime minister is. And the next prime minister of Canada will be Mark Carney, who assumed the prime minister role like last month, winning the liberal election after Justin Trudeau resigned in January.

And before we get into some of the results, at first, a little bit of an election kind of background. So liberals have been in power for nearly a decade, slowly getting less and less popular as the cost of living has risen.

Last election in 2021, the Liberals kept their minority government, but the leader of their party, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, continued to decline in popularity. By the end of 2024, his approval rating was just 22%, or a net negative 52. Conservatives were up 25 points in the polls. It was a near certainty that they would sweep the next election.

Trudeau announced his resignation on January 6th, kind of the January 6th of Canada, if you think about it. Former banker Mark Carney won the party election in March of 2025.

Carney quickly called for an election to write off the peak of anti-Trump sentiment sweeping across Canada. This was following Trump's talk of annexing Canada and the global trade war and tariffs directed at the American neighbor upstairs. Next door? I don't know. Yeah. Downstairs? South? No, from America it's up. Oh, I see. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Got it. Understood. Which is maybe a northern standpoint, but who cares? Now,

Now, this election or an election would have happened by October 2025 regardless. But calling it early was a smart move by liberals as this was the first time in three years that they had led in the polls. Support for other third parties like the Kebukwa Bloc and the National Democratic Party, the NDP, had slowly been shifting towards the liberals. And we saw this in the results Monday night.

At this point, the Liberals are projected to win 168 seats, falling barely short of the 172 majority.

There's still, as of time of recording, still a possible path for them gaining a majority government, but it's fairly unlikely it'll probably be a minority government. The conservatives have won 144 seats, the Bloc Québécois 23, and the NDP a measly seven, with the Green Party snagging one. Liberals also secured the largest vote share in

43.6% of the vote compared to the conservatives, 41.4%. Though because of a vote efficiency, basically how spread apart certain votes are, this has still led to much more seats for the liberals than the conservatives, right? If you have more conservatives voting in a district that's going to go conservative anyway, those extra votes don't necessarily

mean there's going to be more representation in Parliament. That's the vote efficiency idea. Yeah. First past the post, it is a very bad system. As electoral systems go, it leads to an awful lot of votes not counting for any representation. Like,

For instance, the Garrison Davis party could have 51% of votes in all writings. I could be there at 49 and I would get zero MPs. Hey, sounds fine. Sounds fine by me. Garrison Davis in control. Well,

Well, this is kind of what happens in Canada. The election system in Canada is pretty swayed towards the Liberals because of how much more dispersed they are versus, you know, most conservative supporters in the Western provinces, Saskatchewan, Alberta, a bit in BC, and a growing presence in Ontario. But yeah, the Liberals kind of always get a bit of a boost in the election. Now, we did have record high early turnout in Canada, 7.3 million people cast their vote early during Easter week.

The full turnout is higher than it was the past few elections, but it matches pretty much to the 2015 election. So to get a majority government, you need 172 seats. This allows you to not have to worry about like no confidence votes, which trigger new elections. And you don't need to work with other parties to pass legislation.

Now, this will probably be a minority government with the libs having to work with a small number of remaining NDP and block seats to run the government, which one could consider a good thing in terms of being pushed maybe towards some better policies rather than just like liberal supremacy. But it also means government will be more unstable and it kind of gives the conservatives more room to wiggle. So it's definitely a mixed bag.

As reporting first came in for Atlantic Canada, it showed that this would be a tighter race than what the Liberals were hoping for. During election night, it seemed Conservatives were on track to pick up two seats in Newfoundland, though in the end, the Liberal incumbent barely kept their seat, beating the Conservative challenger by 12 votes in Terranova, the Peninsulas.

The Libs did fare much better in Quebec, though. They flipped 11 seats. This was the best performance by liberals in Quebec in years. Now, conservatives gained some seats from the liberals in Ontario under Doug Ford, with conservatives flipping seats around the Toronto suburbs.

One of the biggest stories of this election was just the complete NDP collapse, the progressive kind of democratic socialist new democratic party. They're currently projected to lose 17 of their 24 previously held seats. The NDP basically gave Carney this election. Jagmat Singh lost his seat. That's the leader of the NDP. He lost his seat to Wade Chung, a liberal, and stepped down as leader on Monday night.

Part of what makes this such a big setback for the NDP is that because they failed to win at least 12 seats, they actually lose official party status in Parliament. Parties have to win at least 12 seats to be recognized as an official party in the House of Commons.

Official parties get to have offices in parliament, extra staff. They get to ask questions in legislative sessions and can sit on committees. Now, the NDP did previously lose party status in 1993, winning only nine seats in that election. But this performance was slightly worse, hitting only seven. So this is going to be a big shakeup. The NDP is going to have to be forced to rebuild again.

which is maybe necessary based on kind of a degree of NDP stagnation the past decade. They're kind of caught in like 2017 politics, in my opinion, though Singh did lead them to pass some significant legislation. And progressive policies do have a degree of popularity in Canada. The NDP was polling about the same as the Liberals just three months ago.

The movement that we're seeing is from NDP voters scared of Polyev and Trump, so they moved to Carney to avoid splitting the left vote, as Carney was seen as more capable of beating Polyev than the NDP leader Singh and certainly Justin Trudeau.

Now, funnily enough, some of this quote-unquote strategic voting actually did end up splitting the vote in a place like BC and specifically Vancouver, which recently has gone strongly NDP. But this year, the conservatives were able to snag three seats because enough previous NDP voters ended up going liberal in an attempt to gain a liberal majority.

But that resulted in neither the NDP nor the liberal candidate actually individually getting enough votes to win the riding.

Let's talk about vote share compared to the last 2021 election. So liberals did fairly well this election, especially compared to previous ones. They gained over 10 points compared to the last election in 2021. Conservatives also didn't do badly, actually. Like they actually did okay. This certainly wasn't the result they were wanting, but they did not do bad. They gained over seven and a half points this race.

Reliable conservative voters still voted conservative, and they were able to siphon off some support from other parties, with conservatives doing slightly better than what polling predicted, but a lot of very close races across key districts.

Now where all those extra votes or vote movement is coming from is all of the third parties. The Green Party and the Bloc Québécois both dropped over a point. The far-right People's Party dropped four points and the NDP dropped 11.6. Huge, huge losses for the NDP. Most of those voters probably going liberal, although some may just not have voted.

One of the more interesting parts about this election is that the conservative party leader, Pierre Polyev, lost his parliamentary seat.

He lost to liberal Bruce Fanjoy by about 4,000 votes. Oh, damn. 4.6% of the vote. So this is going to probably cause a bit of an upset in the Conservative Party. There might be some internal conflict over whether Polyev should continue as party leader, though he did not step down from that position during his concession speech Monday night. James, do you have any thoughts here before we pivot to ads? It wouldn't be such a, like...

seen as such a humiliation for the conservatives if it wasn't for all the polling until maybe like a couple of months ago right yes the reason why it's such an upset is because they were like destined to win as almost like divinely written into fate uh like three months ago and the fact that they they fumbled this is gonna be like a massive like historical footnote not even a footnote this is like a historical topic is is how conservatives fumbled this election

Yeah, like people, the thing is the liberals won despite people having been pissed off with them for a long time and wanting something different. Yeah. Yeah, because people were just like mad at Trump. And we will talk more about the background of the lead up to this race and those dynamics that James mentioned in the next segment after these ads.

Okay, to talk more about the lead up to this race and Trump's influence on this election, I talked with Lance from the Serfs, a fellow Canadian who talks about politics just as much as I do. So here is that interview that I recorded just a few hours before the polls closed in Canada.

Hey, my name is Lance. I run a number of different channels, usually under the banner of The Surf's. There's YouTube.com slash The Surf Times and at The Surf's TV on most other social media. I cover news, politics, internet slop, usually from a dumpster fire-like perspective. And you're Canadian, importantly. I am as well. Yes. I am Canadian, but I have been resettling.

resigned to living in the States for quite a while. I actually just had some Canadian family visit me and they kept making fun of me for living in the States. Specifically because the States are trying to, you know, take Canadian territory seemingly. So now I'm getting a lot of hate from my Canadian family members for living in America, which is interesting.

I was going to say, this has got to be a scary time to be living in the United States as a Canadian citizen right now. A little bit. I am dual, but we'll see how long that matters. So I want to talk a little bit about kind of the background of this election, because I think this is maybe the most interesting Canadian election in the past 10 years, specifically because of how much the results have always felt inevitable, but the actual results have like flip-flopped.

Three months ago, four months ago, I'm sure that me and you may have predicted probably something resembling a conservative sweep. Not to put words in your mouth. Well, minority or majority government led by the conservatives, no question that that was where all the major polling was trending. And then the exact opposite on this rollercoaster election in both directions. I think it's pretty easily explainable, especially to your American listeners, that

who might have been wondering what was happening. Essentially, the country had a combination of burnout on Justin Trudeau and the person who replaced Justin Trudeau, Mark Carney, effectively took the number one campaign. It was the actual campaign slogan of the Conservatives away from him immediately after being crowned the new leader of the Liberal Party, which was, "'Ax the tax.'"

which is what, you know, fascist millhouse we call Pierre Polievre over here. That was his big campaign promise. The conservatives were going to ax the carbon tax and that had a lot of people excited. A lot of people didn't like Justin Trudeau and then along comes Mark Carney and he takes both of those things away from the conservatives. He's not Justin Trudeau and he axed the tax. And so they had to kind of completely reset. And this was before the wild card of Trump shows up, which of course now is, is scary, not only Canada, but the,

the world, I would say. Like, most countries now are kind of having to completely reset how they think and want to do geopolitics into the future because of his policies. Well, and I know, like, a decent chunk of the Alberta economy is now in great jeopardy because they can't sell Fuck Trudeau merchandise.

Which was propping up their entire economy outside of the oil. Yeah, well, if you ignore the oil, which will probably be fine. Yeah, I guess we talk a little bit about kind of what led to this universal hatred of Justin Trudeau in like the past, like, like five years, just like ever so briefly.

Yeah, for conservatives, a lot of it really became increasingly more intense with COVID. And I think internationally, there was an association with very basic safety protocols and tyranny. So I guess some people, the United States and Canada, both saw the idea of wearing a mask or having to wash your hands as some form of dictatorship akin to some of the worst war crimes ever committed on any population. That

made a schism happen where the sentiment kind of really started accelerating towards less of, you know, blaming Trudeau for everything, kind of like Obama that used to be a joke, like, ah, Trudeau, to actual fuck Trudeau merchandise and the idea of, you know, Trudeau being an enemy of the state and a communist dictator. That was on the right side of things.

On the left side of things, everyone got burned out from Trudeau because of the performative progressive politics of his entire character. He was very vocal about standing up for a lot of issues that on one end he would pretend to care about, such as Indigenous rights, land back, stuff like that.

And then he would be suing the survivors of residential schools in federal court to try and prevent them from getting too much money from the federal government. So there was a lot of Trudeau seems to performatively enjoy being perceived as someone who's enlightened and progressive and trying to steer society in a good direction, where his policies are effectively exacerbating wealth inequality very rapidly, because that's effectively what you get with neoliberal centrists, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, like, to go back to that COVID thing, like, I was in Calgary in, like, spring of 2022. And I was getting, like, made fun of in, like, bars and clubs for, like,

for like wearing a mask at that point in time. Like, and that is, that is Alberta. But yeah, no, that was definitely like strong. We certainly saw degrees of that here in the States as well. But yeah, you know, it's a little bit of that like general anti-incumbent sentiment was growing so much last year, which, which you saw levied against the Democrats in the States and certainly against the liberals and the way that the liberals in Canada have kind of been able to

maneuver away from that in the way that like the Democrats haven't is super interesting. It's not necessarily like replicable, especially for U.S. politics, but it still is interesting. I guess like on the conservative side, their leadership changed in 2022, right?

Yeah, I think so. It was it was 22 or 23, but I believe it was it was around then. That's when Pauli there became leader of the Conservative Party, which is like, you know, closed ranks and like coalesced the past 10 to five years or so. And they've been they've been gaining a large or had been gaining, you know, a large degree of popularity the past two, three years.

not necessarily because of who their party leader is, but because they are simply not the liberal party. At least that's kind of what it seemed like to me. Cause like approval ratings for Paul of error has never been like great, but the conservative party has still been gaining popularity at least previous to the past few months. Yeah. I don't want to play, you know, give the far right any kind of kudos or points, but I think from an analytical standpoint, something that people should realize is that within the last I

I'd say a year and a half or so, Pierre was really, really effective at doing faux populism in a way that a lot of people were starting to get very worried about. And that he was starting to speak a lot about the working class, you know, the housing crisis in the country and the fact that the liberals are out of touch elites who only care about enriching themselves. And, you know, obviously you'd have a lot of the right wing kind of nebulous terms like woke ideology being tied into that kind of stuff.

But he was for a long time kind of starting to gain a lot of ground and traction as more of a moderate style conservative who was concerned with helping the working class, which is astonishing considering the man is a lifelong politician.

That is who he is. He was making fun of people like the leader of the Social Democrats here, Jagmeet Singh. He was making fun of him for just working for a pension and not even caring about the people or the working class. The man has never marched with the union. I'm talking about Pierre. He's never marched with the union. His voting track record is decidedly anti-worker. It's decidedly exacerbating wealth inequality. He's worked his entire life to make houses more expensive. But

marketing and branding really work, especially like, you know, there's compilation clips of him saying things that are JK Rowling tier in terms of both their nonsensicalness, like talking about how electricity is crafted by harnessing the power of the lightning bolts into the wire that the electrician holds up. Like,

Very cool. Yeah, very cool. Thor-like powers. I'm on board, but unfortunately, that's just not how we usually generate power in this country. But it works on some people. They like to see a man who fakes owning different kinds of wood and tools. You know, like a Tucker Carlson-esque, I've got a wood shop in my back, and it's like that

Well, no, I think this is the first time you've ever seen that lumber, sir. But as you know, again, some voters, they really started... His rebranding in that respect actually worked pretty successful for, yeah, the last year and a half against Trudeau. Yeah, he had a pretty substantial makeover the past few years to make himself like...

presentable in this way. Yeah, very Carlson-esque, very Ben Shapiro goes to Home Depot and gets some wood. Yes. Definitely pulling from that vein, although maybe a bit more successfully. At least from my perspective, it feels like the degree to which

Pierre kind of hitched himself to like the Trump populist wagon the past few years, especially like with like sentiments like growing in like the Western provinces that kind of mirrors some of the Trumpian rhetoric. That type of stuff was getting popularity. And now because he put, if not all his eggs, but some of his eggs in the Trump basket, this is like backfired in like popular opinion.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Those have gotten closer, but... I think it's one of the biggest reversals, or if not the biggest reversal in Canadian political history, which was the dominating lead they had from having an almost an assured majority to now perhaps losing to a liberal majority, which again is unheard of. Yeah. One thing that people are also kind of missing is that he also really closely started associating himself with Elon Musk.

Prior to Elon Musk kind of being the de facto leader of, you know, the US or whatever you want to call him, the real president of the United States. But he's had a number of rallies and on the record praising Elon Musk prior to Elon Musk. This was pre-Elon Musk overt Nazi era, kind of more just like Nazi light era. Covert Nazi era. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

But around that time, Pierre was asked, like, what do you think about being endorsed and praised by Elon Musk? And, you know, he started making jokes about how his kids want to go to Mars. So that's pretty cute. And started talking about how he wants Elon Musk to build more factories and plants in Canada. Well, that's all really coming back to hurt him now because the very idea of there being...

a stronger Tesla presence in the country is decidedly rejected by the populace. Like, you know, the protests that are going on in the United States against Teslas are going on here as well. Maybe not as large scale or perhaps as fire based, but a lot of them are occurring here. And so like that, I think, is also really hurting them. So there's been this really funny, strange political dance that's kind of happened in the last couple of months where everyone is trying to say Trump loves you more.

It's like a circular firing squad. Like at one point, the conservatives were trying to market themselves to saying Trump was making fun of Pierre in this clip. So look, he hates Pierre more. And then it was like, oh, no, no, no. Look, he's talking a lot of smack about Mark Carney. He hates Mark Carney more. So that that has actually become a very strong dynamic of the Canadian election is who exactly does Trump like more? And that's not going to be good for you if it turns out you're the one.

I guess I'd like to talk a little bit now at the end here about Mark Carney himself and kind of what this means for like the Liberal Party. He was the governor of the Bank of Canada starting in 2008. Then he became governor of the Bank of England and managed them through the Brexit fiasco. Brexit was not his idea. He was not pro-Brexit, but he just happened to be holding the reins of the Bank of England during that time period. Returned to Canada in

uh has served as like an informal advisor to trudeau and now is the is the leader of the liberal party

He's a very, I don't know, he tries to project this sense of he's a reasonable man, which in some ways is. He's kind of boring. He works in banking, right? He's not overtly charismatic, but he doesn't have the youthful, bumbling presence of Trudeau. He seems kind of basic. I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's a good way of putting it. Yeah, you're totally right. I mean, we're talking about a lifelong banker. I mean, he's even worked for Goldman Sachs. He has a, yes, a very long and sordid, well, I mean, in some view, it depends on your worldview, right? If you were a person who thinks that

The solution going forward, especially in the face of actual manifesting fascism, is more neoliberal policies, austerity and measures. Then you might be very, very excited to perhaps get your own, like, honestly, Joe Biden style election here, where we are once again going to be choosing center to center right economic policies that are going to

undoubtedly exacerbate wealth inequality more. They are not going to solve the housing crisis. The housing crisis of Canada, while it is portrayed constantly as complex, really goes down to fundamentally there are a lot of houses, but there are also a lot of houses being built in luxury markets that most people can't afford. Speculation is not addressed. And so speculation usually gets blamed on foreign investors, which in turn kind of brings up the whole immigration fears, which are very successful. But

With Carney, I mean, I don't see anything dramatic. Not only did he axe the carbon tax when he was in power initially, and that was, again, I think strategically to remove the power the Conservatives had on that policy. He also is getting rid of the capital gains tax, which, again, is just going to be funneling more money towards the ultra wealthy in Canada. So the problem for me is that if anything, I'm happy that Pierre, it looks like he might not win. I don't know what

by the time people are listening to this, what the results are. But I also recognize that this does not solve these crises. We're simply putting band-aids on a pause before, you know, finally a Trump of our own gets elected. And then, yes, people after the fact start realizing, oh my God, he's doing a lot of the horrifying things that he promised he would do. He's actually trying to enact Project 2025. All these terrible things are happening. Well, I mean, if this was an election where it looked like Pierre was going to win, I would say,

He is going to follow through on all of the aggressive measures and more that he's promising right now, which include, you know, suspending the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to people that he deems should be worthy of receiving freedoms, specifically because like Donald Trump, he wants to begin silencing people for their speech in relation to protesting against Israel and their genocide of Palestinians, especially if you are an immigrant or someone on a student visa program.

And these policies, you can see they're a disaster after the fact. And people, I think, wake up to them like Americans are right now when they realize Trump's actually doing it. But, you know, make no mistake, it doesn't require, you know, too long of the increase in wealth inequality for people to look for an answer because they're not being listened to by the Libs or the liberals here. No, it is interesting that how much this election has almost mirrored the American two-party system with the...

block kebukwa as well as the ndp like probably most likely uh right this is before the results but probably going to be losing seats to both the liberals and the and the conservatives and like i think like a big part of this election i think is similarly looking back at the past 10 years is how much i think the ndp has frankly fumbled and probably needs to do a major overhaul to really regain trust in the voters and yeah it's going to be tough because i think like

for the progressives in Canada, it's kind of been convenient for the liberals to have a minority government because then they need to work with NDP. And they've gotten a lot accomplished to be, to be fair to Jagmeet Singh and you know, the, their, for American listeners, the social democratic party of Canada, they accomplished some great things working in a minority government setting, including a pharma care program, including a,

federal feeding program for children, a school lunch program, you know, working on paid family sick leave and extending it. So they've done a lot of good in sort of enacting progressive policies, but it's the Liberals who are also equally as good at taking credit for all the things that people have come to really like, such as having dental care for the first time and having cheaper pharma care and stuff like that. Thanks to Lance again for talking with me about the Canadian election.

It's time for one more ad break and we'll come back to discuss the future of the Canadian government. OK, we are back. Let's talk a little bit more about Trump's undue influence in the 2025 Canadian election, because it is a little bit odd for a foreign leader to be exerting this much influence in the votes of, you know, a separate country.

Now, this was an election that was previously about liberal stagnation and wanting change in economic policy. This was kind of leading the conservative popular support the past two, three years. And very suddenly, this whole election changed and it became about who Canada trusted to oppose Trump.

And who Canadians wanted to be like the face of Canada in this new global trade war and this fight against a hostile neighbor. And Trump did not help this. On election morning, Trump released a statement basically endorsing himself as the leader of Canada. Oh, great.

Saying, quote,

of the United States of America. No more artificially drawn line from many years ago. Look how beautiful this landmass would be. Free access with no border. All positives with no negatives. It was meant to be. America can no longer subsidize Canada with hundreds of billions of dollars a year that we've been spending in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is a state. Man, Trump, the border abolitionist.

This is the rhetoric that really produced a liberal victory. And Trump did kind of back off this stuff in the past few weeks. And it's very funny to see him go like full throttle the morning of the election in case anyone was like on the fence about whether they really was worrying about like Trump. This just, this is like such a crazy Hail Mary. And we can see this in some polling stats.

On Trump's inauguration day, the Conservatives in Canada were leading 44.8% in the polls compared to the Liberals' 21.9% and the NDP's 17.6%. But as Liberals searched for a new leader and as Trump took office, the Conservative lead slowly started to slip.

The president began referring to Canada as the 51st state, called the prime minister, quote unquote, governor, and threatened to impose huge tariffs to stop a non-existent fentanyl smuggling crisis through the Canadian-U.S. border. By April, the conservative lead had fully flipped over to the liberals, who rose to 44% in the polls, conservatives falling to 37%, and the NDP around 8.5%.

And these are pretty close to the final results. This number is very accurate for liberal support. Conservatives got a little bit more than 36% of the vote, and NDP got a little bit less than this 8.5. This is according to data from CBC and Abacus. This was very much a leader's election, meaning that one of the biggest factors driving votes was who people wanted the prime minister to be.

And Mark Carney is much more popular, despite being kind of an unknown figure, which kind of actually helps in popularity. Carney was so much more popular than Polyev. The past three months, Carney has steadily gained in popularity, getting 46% approval, whereas Polyev has slowly declined in popularity. I talked about this a little bit with Lance, but...

the degree to which he's aligned himself with this like anti-woke, like far-right populism rhetoric really bit him in the ass these past few months. He would have done fine against Trudeau, certainly. He was really riding off that like anti-incumbent wave, but he is not like a loved figure across Canadian politics, even among some conservatives.

The two most important factors driving Canadians' vote, according to Abacus, was reducing cost of living and dealing with Donald Trump. Younger voters seemed to be more focused on cost of living and changing policy, around 57% of voters 18 to 29, while older voters, around 56% of boomers, were more concerned about stopping Trump. The very first topic in the Canadian Prime Minister debate was tariffs and U.S. threats to Canadian sovereignty.

This is seen as like a very real issue up there. And like hatred against the U.S. is genuinely growing. Like people are very upset. Canadians are very upset about what Trump and the U.S. has been doing. It's being seen as like a genuine, like intense betrayal. The Buy Canada movement's been gaining a lot of support with people trying to only purchase Canadian products.

And this has resulted in a real cultural moment in Canada, united against the United States. It's genuinely remarkable. Like the, like the, uh,

Canada and the US have always had pretty good relations. Well, not always. Well, ever since that one incident. That one time everyone fell out. Things have improved. What's also remarkable is that this seems to be having an effect on Australia as well. I don't know if you've seen that. I think I saw an ad the other day that just said, Dutton wants to make Australia like America. Straight up, this is our Trump and he will align with Trump. It's incredible.

The degree which Trump doing this global trade war has catalyzed negative sentiments around this far-right populism, global wave that we've been seeing, has really been a boon to neoliberal hegemony the past few months. You'll see, I mean, obviously, I take voter interviews in legacy media with a huge pinch of salt, right? Yeah.

it's pretty easy to find someone who wants to say what you want them to say. And often, you know, certainly some of the U S voter interviews have just been ridiculous, but like,

people saying, oh, I just want to go back to how it was. Like, I want to go back to the things that we're used to. And obviously Trump is threatening that for a lot of people and like in a very negative way. And so you, and as Garris has said, like the politics of personality is becoming more important, like voting specifically for individuals who they think will have like the negotiating ability or just bravery or like whatever it is to stand up to Trump, right? Yeah.

And, like, in Canada, I think it's less personality-driven. Like, actually, Canadians are very against personality politics. Yeah, I guess. It's more, like, cultural.

competency-driven. And this is where Carney was really able to succeed. It's because he's not a compelling personality, but he is a professional. And that is why he was elected. Carney helped Canada weather the 2008 financial collapse better than almost any other Western nation. He is genuinely good at his job of being a neoliberal bank economy guy. And specifically, with these tariffs, this is the guy that you want to...

handle this global trade crisis because this is like what he has done his entire life. He's never been elected to office before. He is just an economy guy. And we saw this in like head-to-head matchups with Carney versus Polyarv

certain things like finding common ground to solve a dispute where Carney was 12 points ahead, standing up to a bully. Carney's eight points ahead, managing household expenses. Carney, six points ahead, sitting beside you on a long airplane flight. Carney, six points ahead, uh, captaining a ship through a rough storm. Carney, five points ahead. That's what you need is you need a seafarer and,

Only five points ahead on seafaring. Hosting the best party, Carney, one point ahead. And we'll see. This is reminiscent of that, like, was it like Tim the Plumber shit from like the Bush-Palin election?

the people I would want to have a beer with. Well, the funny thing is the conservatives are still better in those types of physical things, like putting out a kitchen fire. Polyev is up two. And putting up a shelf. Polyev's up six. Those are the only two ones measured where...

The conservative candidate edged out the liberals is putting out a kitchen fire and putting up a shelf. But all other things like solving disputes, standing up to bullies, managing expenses, household expenses, Carney came out. I'm going to read a few lines from Carney's celebration acceptance speech here. And I'm just going to read them and not play clips because he blends English and French and that's going to be annoying. No offense to our French speakers out there. Garrison. It's going

of annoying to play for a podcast. It's not going to do it for the Kivuac crowd. Quote, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. These are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us. That will never happen.

We are once again at one of those hinge moments of history. Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. The system of open global trade anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect, has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades, is over.

But it is also our new reality. We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves and above all, we have to take care of each other. When I sit down with President Trump, it will be to discuss the future economic and security relationship between two sovereign nations. And it will be with our full knowledge that we have many, many other options than the United States to build prosperity for all Canadians.

We will strengthen our relations with reliable partners in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. And if the United States no longer wants to be in the forefront of the global economy, Canada will. Unquote.

And yeah, this is the type of rhetoric that's going to be, I think, successful in Canada right now and probably in the next few decades is Canada is going to try to take the spot that America used to used to hold as like the center of global power, especially with climate change, with, you know, crop crops slowly, slowly needing to be moved north.

I think as global warming progresses, Canada is in a spot to be like a new emerging world power. And with the degree to which America is just kind of giving up that role under Trump, someone like Carney is very interested in gaining that degree of superiority.

Now, I'm going to read a few comments from our listeners who I asked to send over their thoughts on the Canadian election. And yes, this is a limited sample size. It's based on the politics of people who listen to this show. But I still think there's some interesting points here outlining what's happened in this election. Quote,

Mark Carney might not be far enough left for my tastes, but he immediately made gas cheaper, a tangible improvement for my broke ass. And with the way he's been polling, I'm settling on voting for him to keep the conservatives out with their stated anti-woke agenda, parenthesis, bigoted. Not like I have much choice. I would have loved to be pickier about my vote, but I don't feel confident in the NDP or the Greens to come out on top of the cons.

Another person said, quote, I can't believe the country seems to be rallying around a neoliberal central banker in the face of American fascism. But our resentment to the U.S. seems to kind of override all other political considerations. So much of the way this election is panning out is a display of our culture's profound inability to take necessary risks. We're

This is something I've seen other people express, is like,

With this kind of Obama-esque, you know, serious man in charge, this like return of neoliberalism, will this just set the stage for like the material conditions for someone like Trump to emerge in the next 10 years? This is a fear that I've seen people express. I don't think it is an inevitability because this is not America in 2012 or 2016. This is Canada in 2025. The world is different. But I can understand this fear. Yeah.

Lastly, I'll read from one other commenter from Blue Sky, quote, I understand the drive to keep the conservative party out of office, but I'm also terrified of what the liberal party will do to this country if they can keep campaigning on that very basis in perpetuity. It's good that we will probably avoid the worst. It's terrible that progress is on hold until the conservative party is no longer a contender, which could take decades. I

I also do not expect the Liberal Party to meaningfully change the conditions that are pushing voters towards reactionary politics to begin with." So kind of a similar sentiment there. I think the role for progressives in Canada right now is either to rebuild the NDP or infiltrate the Liberals, probably rebuilding NDP in most cases because they are going to have to have new leadership and seriously reevaluate their strategies going forward.

James, any notes here, I guess? Yeah, I think, like, I guess kind of to echo what a lot of those people said, like, in the US, we had

biden for four years right essentially because he was elected on not being trump and he was able to get away well he thought he could get away with more than he actually was able to get away with as it turns out uh electorally but like we were admonished to vote for the person who wasn't trump right and what we got is open air detention for migrants what we got is inflation what we got is a genocide in gaza right and this fear that a lot of other

nations in the global north, like these neoliberal economies are feeling, is going to lead to lots of that, like, yes, we need a serious man. We need a statesman to stand up to Trump. And that's going to reinforce a lot of that neoliberal orthodoxy. And that's going to make it very hard to make any meaningful progress through electoral politics in those countries for the next few years. We

Which sucks. I think this is why some people are excited about the minority government, although it is less stable. Yeah. They could be swayed by some more of the progressive agendas from the NDP because they'll need NDP or bloc cooperation to run the government. Yeah, they can't do what Biden did, which, like, I mean... Also, like, Carney isn't Biden. Like, and the Canadian Liberal Party is not necessarily the, like, American Democratic Party. Like, they are... They're different...

Stefan Gaza is different. The Canadian liberals have restricted arms trades and arms deals to Israel the past year. Carney has not thrown trans people under the bus the same way some Democrats have the past year. These are different people. I think Canada is a different country than the United States. For now, Garrison. And I think what we can see here is that this Canadian election, although it was close,

it still was a rejection of Trump-style politics. Most Canadians do not want Canada to go the way of America. There's been a subset of Canadians, especially in Alberta and Saskatchewan,

who have been trying to push for this like mega style like Canada first rhetoric and and this was denied I think you are seeing more support for conservatives under Doug Ford with this more like moderate conservatism I think that's something to like watch out for more but like this this Trump style of politics was was rejected across the country here and and and Carney was able to figure out a way to make people trust him to be

be a genuine combatant against Trump and usher in a new golden age of neoliberal trade in the face of Trump's chaotic and anti-market sentiments. Hopefully it does put an end to this tendency among liberals, especially in the US, but also in the UK, to feel that they need to engage on right-wing culture war talking points and, I guess, quote-unquote, give some ground.

Like we've seen that in the UK, right? With like really transphobic shit coming out of the Labour Party. And like, I would hope that like people can see where this leads to and that they're not going to vote for liberal politicians who are going to throw trans people under the bus. And like that will be like a deciding factor in their support. But I guess that's just my hope right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and frankly, a better Liberal Party or a Liberal NDP coalition would be willing to engage with the idea of taking trans refugees from these extremely hostile countries. Asylees, yeah. Which is something they've not publicly talked about. But as things get worse in the States, we will see. So yeah, that is what I have to say as a Canadian who lives in the United States.

My thoughts on the Canadian election, you know, it could have been worse. It is odd to see Canada almost accidentally replicate America's two-party system. So even if this was a rejection of Trump's top politics, this climate of fear did result in...

replicating America's two-party system, which is kind of interesting. The amount of which like the third parties lost support with support going just towards conservatives and liberals. That is the, you know, one of the big stories of this election. The NDP blowout, one of the big stories. And Polyev losing his seat, I think, is at least, at the very least, a nice cherry on top for this election.

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absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now at ChumbaCasino.com. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW group void where prohibited by law. 21 plus terms and conditions apply. Whoa! Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about, you know, it happening here, which is what we all, what we all, you know, we know what's happening. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and the it being rebellion and the here being a galaxy far, far away. And the now being long, long ago. For this episode. Yeah, we are. These are our Mayday episodes and nothing could make more sense on Mayday than talking about...

Andor, the new season of the show Andor. If you're not familiar with Andor, it is a Star Wars show. And if you don't like Star Wars or you just don't like the Disney Star Wars, if you've not enjoyed a Star Wars since you were six, this is not that kind of thing. This is a treatise on how revolutions do, can and should work, written by people who have a deep bed of knowledge, including a degree of on the ground knowledge of what some of this looks like.

And it is an immensely important piece of media to be getting out right now. And we'll start by saying, Disney, evil, bad corporation. I'm not saying pay them for Disney+.

torrents exist. Yeah, raise the black flag. Raise the black flag once again. I don't care how you get this. And you know what? I'll say this. I suspect the people making Andor don't really care how you get this. This has been the most financially successful show in generations. Fuck it. Don't pay Disney money if you don't want to. I have no issue with that. I don't know whose login I'm using, and I haven't for years. Garrison can vouch for that.

Just watch it. Be like Cassian Andor and liberate Andor season two from Disney and watch it however you feel comfortable doing so. Yeah.

Yeah, use your F movies, use your whatever. Yeah. This is a podcast about the current season of Andor, which is coming out in three episode blocks every Tuesday. The second three episodes, so we're now up to six episodes, came out yesterday as we record this, Tuesday of this week. And there's two more weeks of Andor coming. So this episode, we're going to be talking about episodes one through three. We should probably start with a little...

If you haven't watched it, go watch it. Just watch season one and then you can watch season two and listen along with us. If you're a crazy person who's not going to do that,

We'll summarize season one for you, which is that there's this guy who grew up on a planet that was destroyed by the empire. He essentially like lived as a hunter gatherer until, you know, the war came to him and he was forced out of his home and grows up very angry, is taken in by some people who are kind of like petty criminals and petty criminals.

Almost petty rebels, you know, but not in the rebel alliance sense, just in that, well, we're going to commit some crimes around the edges and try to get by. And the show is about this guy getting inducted into a revolutionary organization run by a man named Luthan that is very, that is simultaneously very centralized around him and also very decentralized in that it's primarily him arming and getting information and attempting to direct the

that are themselves autonomous and often in conflict with each other, which is very realistic to how things like this start. On a historical level, everything that's happening in Andor is based in real history. Tony Gilroy, who is the showrunner, has stated that the kind of bank robbing years of Joseph Stalin were one influence behind this.

But there are a lot you can see. And in fact, there's a little bit of Portland at the end of season one. There's a number of things that have influenced this show. A lot of moments in history. The IRA, some of the IRA, like post Al Qaeda, like prison. Yes. Resistance, rebellion, violence.

Yes. For how terrorist cells like form underneath. And also very explicitly, he talks about this in an interview like the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan. It's somehow on how this one. Yes, was an influence on this. Yes. So that's all to set this up. We're now going to talk about what happens in in episodes one, two and three of season two. You want to summarize some gear? Yeah, let's start with the first episode.

So undercover rebel agent Cassian Andor steals an experimental TIE Avenger, crashes it on a jungle planet, and then finds himself in a sectarian split between this other rebel cell who just had like a disastrous operation. Their leader got killed, so no one's really sure who should be running things. They capture Cassian because they think he's an Imperial pilot, and he tries to negotiate with them as their infighting continues. Meanwhile, Imperial intelligence agents...

converge to develop a plan on how to squash potential resistance on the planet Gorman as they plan to extract calcite minerals from the planet's core, potentially endangering the stability of the planet. To build the Death Star, by the way. Yes, to build the Death Star. Yeah, so what's happening is these minerals are necessary to collect the system that makes the Death Star's big planet-destroying gun work. But at this point, basically no one knows that.

in the Imperial like intelligence. Yeah. And they're being told that it's part of like an energy independence project. Mon Mothma, the Senator from Chandrila, who eventually becomes a rebel leader in the star Wars movies is helping to plan the trad cath wedding for her daughter, uh, against my mother's own wishes. Uh,

And she runs into some difficulties with someone who helped her clean up some of her financial blemishes to help finance the rebellion. So this is most of what happens in this first episode. We have some of Andor's previous comrades from Planet Ferex are on this farming planet, and they're nervous about a potential inspection. So I guess...

specifically, do we have anything we want to talk about on this first episode? Yes. I want to talk about the scene where they talk about clearing out Gorman because when they talk about mining it for this mineral that's necessary to make the Death Star, they're talking about basically doing deep fracking at the core of the planet and

That is going to make it uninhabitable, right? Like they're basically tearing out the core of this world that produces high quality textiles, right? Like it's a famous kind of a luxury goods exporter. That's really all they make. There's these spiders there that make a nice kind of silk.

That's what the planet does. And it's got this population of people who are used to being given a lot of autonomy because they make this very, this nice, this like luxury product that all of the rich people like, right? So that the folks running the Republic and in the early years when there was still more, the empire was still more on the Republican side, still people didn't want to talk with them too much.

because they make a luxury good, right? There was a massacre there kind of early on in the empire when Tarkin landed a cruiser on a bunch of protesters killing them. But other than that, it's been pretty quiet for a while. There is like a small and not super competent or armed rebel cell starting up on the planet.

And they have this big meeting, the Empire does, where everybody gathers at a castle with the guy who's in charge of building the Death Star to talk about how to clear off this planet.

The meeting itself and this part of the episode is based off of the Vance Conference, which was a conference held in 1942 by Reinhard Heydrich and kind of managed by Adolf Eichmann to plan the Holocaust. This is where they actually sat down and talked about how are we going to build death camps? How are the death camps going to operate? How will we evacuate people to the death camps? All of that, right? There was a meeting. A bunch of guys showed up. There are minutes of the meeting.

Tony has stated, if you've watched, there's a great TV movie. It's like 20 years old at this point called Conspiracy. It stars Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich, who was the architect, who was like the guy running the Holocaust initially. It stars Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann, an incredible Eichmann, by the way. And this scene is deeply influenced by that movie, right? There was another German movie also that like the movie with Branagh was based off of, but Tony Gilroy has said that that movie was an influence and that this is based on the Boncey Conference.

And there's a couple of lines that are almost word for word. One of the big differences is there's a point at which they bring in a couple of PR agents who are outside of the empire. That's like an outside PR corporation. The propaganda arm. Yeah, well, I think they're an outside contractor who does marketing normally and is doing propaganda, if I'm remembering right. I think they're part of the Ministry of Enlightenment is what they call it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Incredible name. They have some of the best bits from this meeting. Their job is to put out propaganda that makes the Gormans look arrogant and unloyal and bad to everyone else so that when they're massacred, no one will care. Quote, hasn't there always been something a little arrogant about the Gorn? Yes. Very good. It's very good.

Yeah, they talk about how they create false news stories and influence public opinion to be weaponized in favor of the Imperial project. The Ministry of Enlightenment stuff is very good. The other line I really like is from Dedra, one of the main characters from the previous season, who is this female ISB agent. And she's sort of being made the Eichmann of the Gorman project. And she talks with Krennic, Ben Mendelsohn's character,

Like about how propaganda really only gets you so far. And instead, what they will need to work on is actually like controlling the Gorman resistance from the inside. Like you need to count on rebels to do like the wrong thing at the right time. So about like astroturfing,

some kind of insurgency that can actually, in the end, service the empire's interests. And like, this is what she's talking about for her project being is actually like helping to influence the way that the resistance operates on the planet instead of just focusing on like public opinion and propaganda and like military might. Yeah. What I really appreciate about this scene is the degree to which it shows, number one,

How information is siloed in a situation like this, how people are on a neat like this room is informed at the start. Whoever your boss is, if they're not in the room, they don't know about this. Yeah. And you don't tell them.

This is the tightest of closed circles. We are doing a genocide, and we're not talking about it to other people. They report directly to the emperor. No other people beneath the emperor knows what's happening. And even the emperor doesn't really know all of the details at this point. And this is like, the people are cutting out the director of imperial of the ISP. They're cutting out the director of imperial intelligence. They're cutting off Grand Moff Tarkin.

Like they're cutting out like the most important people in Star Wars have no idea. Like it's not even clear to me that Vader, I mean, Vader probably knows, but like there's no fucking mention of him at all either. Yeah. He can read minds. So I assume he's been able to like glean some things, but he's not a part of this. Not involved in any of this shit. Cause he's not a Death Star guy. Yeah. And again, this isn't like a massive population. So they're viewing this primarily as like a PR thing.

So both you need to get out messaging that these people are arrogant and bad so that nobody supports them when we start killing them. And we need a terror cell that can be trusted to carry out attacks against the empire that will justify what we need to do. Right. So that that's the point of this meeting. It's very well shot. It's very well done. I'm

There's a lot of understanding of like just history in it that I appreciated as a Holocaust nerd. That's a bad way to frame it. But yeah, that is a bad way to frame it. Yeah. Nope, nope, nope. Anyway, if you've watched these episodes and you loved them and you found that scene chilling, go watch Conspiracy with Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci.

Oh, the tooch. The tooch. The tooch playing Eichmann Garrison. Damn. All right. Let's go on a break and then come back to talk about episode two. Yeah. We're back.

Did you guys know Stanley Tucci, super pro-Palestine? That's cool. Oh, nice. With an actor like that that I've really enjoyed, I always am like white knuckling it when I decide to Google that. And I was pleasantly surprised with the Tucci. All right. That's what I got here. Let's do episode two. The Empire arrives on this farming planet to complete inspections.

on Coruscant. Our little slimy weasel, Seryl Karn, keeps rising through the Imperial ladder at the Bureau of Standards. Mon Mothma's financial schemes to help secretly fund the rebellion start coming undone as one of her backers or like... The guy who's moving the money around for her. Yeah, he's helping her wash her money. One of her collaborators, Tay Kola, starts to kind of back out or ask for...

Ask for some assistance and is getting erratic in his behavior as he's going through a divorce. And is making kind of vague threats about, well, maybe I'll talk to someone about what I know, right? Yeah. If I don't get something out of this relationship, I might be forced to do something else to ensure my safety and financial security.

Meanwhile, Cassian is still on this jungle planet held captive by these sectarian leftists who start firing at each other and totally, totally break down. A literal circular firing squad. It's beautiful.

They go full Red Army. Japanese Red Army, thank you very much. Japanese Red Army. And Cassian barely escapes over the course of this multi-day conflict with the remnants of this rebellion cell. Let's talk a little bit about this leftist infighting plot point. Yeah, this is something I've never actually really seen depicted in any kind of mainstream media.

thing, which is something that happens in real movements, which is that when movements suffer serious setbacks or when, you know, and we see this more commonly in real life when sort of like, you know, the tide of a movement falls and everything starts falling apart. And these are people who just got absolutely obliterated in a battle, their leader's dead, a bunch of their comrades died, and

One of the things that happens in this is that this is when social movements devolve into infighting. You know, and this is what was happening inside of like the American left roughly from 2021 to 2024 was you got this giant, really vicious cycle of infighting because this is what happens when there's no longer a threat to hold everyone together. And people have this tendency to...

Because they've just lost, right? Everyone's trying to process the emotions of their defeat, of the really serious psychological damage that they've suffered in these battles.

people lash out at each other because it's easier than trying to fight an enemy that has just defeated you. And, you know, there's a complicating factor in this, which is that, like, you know, these are also the periods when, like, rapists tend to get ran out, right? And when, like, abusers in the scene tend to get ran out. But on the other hand, it turns into these really, really nasty sort of

Sometimes they're sectarian, sometimes they're just sort of like, you know... I never liked this guy. People are getting in trouble for being bad. I'm gonna just accuse this guy of some shit. Personality conflict stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and this is something that happens like every time there's a cycle. I mean, I remember this. God, like, I mean, you see this shit in scenes. Like, from like 2013, 2014, there was like a huge cycle of this. There were kind of cycles of this in like 2019 when things were kind of falling apart by ISIS. This is just like...

something that's a reality of social movements that you don't ever really see depicted. And the other thing I think is fascinating about it is because Andor is the person who's watching it, right? Andor has no idea what the fuck is going on with the internal dynamics of this group. No, no. My pay is famous. Yeah. He knows who the leader is because Luthen's team has been supplying them with weapons. Yeah. But they don't know about the internal structures of each of those groups for OPSEC reasons. No, and the leader's dead. Yeah.

Like the leader got killed in this ambush, right? You hear about her. She's named in the first season, My Pay. She's one of when Forrest Whitaker in season one gives that very famous rant where he's talking about all, because he's the anarchist militant leader, and he's talking about all the different groups. They're separatists. Human cultists. Human cultists. Galaxy cultists. They're lost.

All of them. Only I have clarity of purpose. He talks, he names my pay along with the other different. So she's clearly a fairly well-known, I think she's a, a Republic restorationist kind of person. Um, so basically a social Democrat militant leader and her groups just gotten fucked and she is dead. So he knows of them, but he doesn't know them. Yeah. And because of that, you, you get, you get, you get, you get two things at the same time that I think are both really important. One is,

is that you get to see what this kind of like infighting looks like, right? Like, like actually depicting television, you get to see what happens when, when movements fail and when people start to invite. And two, you get to see what it looks like from the outside, from Andor's perspective, where he's looking at these people and he's like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? All of you guys are,

clowns. These are fucking children. I'm doing a serious job. This is also a thing that you get. This is a real movement dynamic where it's like, you're watching people who after 2020 or something, you've been through your first movement and you're in your first movement cycle collapse, right? If you've been doing this for a fucking decade and you're watching all these people do this shit again and it's just like,

Oh, God fucking damn it. Like, the kids are, like, you know, they haven't been through this before. It's really traumatic, and they're doing all this, like, completely incomprehensible bullshit, which is also, like, on the outside, if you look into this, as someone who's not part of one of these scenes, and you're seeing all this drama, it's just like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Like, why are you doing this? And the fact that you're getting all of this, like, in a fucking Disney show is fascinating.

It's it's it's why I mean, and it shows the depth of knowledge and the the the sheer amount of understanding that the people writing this have of how movements go. Again, it's granular and it's to a degree like based in some real experiences that some people on this team have had. Like you, you don't understand stuff like this otherwise. Yeah.

And as this group is like interrogating Cassian trying to figure out who he is like they keep trying to dig into like what rebel group Cassian is like a part of and like who he's working with and he's like refusing to give them this information because that's good security culture. Yeah. And they're like but you know who we work with and he's like yeah you shouldn't have told me that. You shouldn't have said that. That was bad. Yeah.

Very, very good stuff. And it's, oh God, it starts, you know, we didn't say this with episode one. Episode one starts with another beautiful Cassian speech when he's, because he's infiltrating as a TIE fighter pilot, this base where he's stealing an experimental craft.

And there's a young woman there who's like a technician who is his in right and who is clearly just made her break with the empire. And she like meets him briefly. She's like, sorry, I know I'm not supposed to look at you. I'm not supposed to talk to you. And he like grabs me like, no, this is what it's all about is the moment of connection between us.

Where we both, after all of this being frightened and alone in the dark, we're together and we know that we're doing something. This is everything. This is the moment you find yourself. Yeah, you become yourself. And this is another thing. That was the moment in this season where I was like, oh, okay, so the people are...

it's still the same people. And it's like, these are people who are just of the left in a way that you don't really ever see. Even with like old communists who are writing stuff. It's like, I have given this speech to people like dozens and dozens of times. Like, this is a thing that if you do this work, like you have literally given this speech to a new person about like, yeah, like this is the reason why. And like, it's just fucking, I'm just like, my mind is blown that this shit is just like appearing to,

in mass media where people who aren't from these movements are just like encountering this? And the reason why, again, when I say Andor is like historically profitable, after the first season, every year afterwards for a couple of years, the number of people watching it increased, by which I mean each year after it came out, more people watched it than had watched it in the year it came out. And that doesn't happen.

Yeah. It simply is not how television works, which is why Disney was like, here is a quarter of a billion dollars make and or season two. And this is the first time Star Wars is like visually looked good in like a decade. Yeah. Oh my God. And it looks incredible. It looks gorgeous. It's gorgeous. There's so many super long, like tracking shots this season where they're going through like massive sets with, with all like, like singular, like one takes, uh,

And all the previous Star Wars shows are filmed on these digital sound stages with LED screen backgrounds. But you cannot achieve this level of in real life fidelity on a digital background screen. These are huge sets. Specifically, the Shandrila set is like...

As you walk around like Mod Mothma's like Senate estate or whatever for this, for this trad cath wedding that we'll talk more about in the next episode. Yeah. Just like really, really like excellent craftsmanship going into this. Yeah. Just beautiful. Okay. Speaking of beautiful set design. All right, we're back. Let's talk about the finale of this little three episode arc.

Cassian's trying to contact Luthan and learns that his friends on the farming planet are actually being subject to some kind of Imperial inspection. He's advised to not go there, but of course he does anyway to check on his friends as is Star Wars tradition, a la Luke Skywalker in episode 5.

People on this planet are trying to evade this inspection by forging emergency work orders, but their scheme falls apart. They might have been ratted out by one of the top guys running this silo, and imperial officers arrest and interrogate people for not having proper work visas. And the people on this planet are Cassian's friends, right?

from season one who he lived with, like the guy who was effectively his big brother. Brasso. Yeah, Brasso. The guy who hits the cop with the brick in the finale of season one. You're goddamn right he bricks a cop. And then Bix, who is his girlfriend, partner type person kind of off and on. And then because of her connections to him gets horribly tortured in season one.

Yeah, and as well as young terrorist Willem who throws a pipe bomb into a crowd of stormtroopers in the finale of season one. So these three are in hiding on this farm planet and are now in trouble because these imperial inspections and immigration officers are...

their tale. On Shandrila, Mon Mothma talks to Luthen who's there for work because he's like an artifact, like a dealer. But she tells Luthen that the guy that they were working with to help Mon Mothma secretly fund the rebellion is showing some erratic behavior and may need to be bribed to keep quiet.

Luthen, being smart and serious, knows that no, no, no, no, no. You cannot simply bribe this man into silence. This man needs to get taken out right now. You need to close this. Look, he brought in the cops. Like, he brought in the fucking cops. Like, he threatened them. He has to die. That's the way these movements work. He's threatening to snitch. This guy needs to get dealt with immediately.

The other plot point that I don't think we'll have much to talk about, but is very excellent, are slimy weasel Cyril Karn and his new abusive girlfriend, Dedra, have...

Uh, have Cyril's wonderful mother over for dinner in just a fantastic, fantastically uncomfortable scene in less happy occurrences as the Imperial officers investigate and search this farming planet. One of them tries to sexually assault Bic.

inside their little RV home. Bix kills him, and eventually Andor arrives with a TIE Avenger, takes out this Imperial battalion, and Bix and Andor and the kid are able to escape, and Brasso unfortunately dies in a high-speed speeder chase.

It's like a believable move someone would make under fire. But like, man, there's tall fucking grass. Just drop. Go to the ground. Don't get on a motorbike while you're above the fucking crops. Like, get on the ground. Hide. Hide. It's a stressful environment. It's a realistic fuck up, right? It sucks, but it's realistic. People do stuff like that all the time in gunfights. Yes. So it's one of those where I was like, no! But also like, yep, yep, that's what happens.

One of the things that isn't really being talked about with this show, but I think is very important, is that it is absolutely unflinching in its depiction of patriarchy. There's the sort of obvious horrifying scene of this ice guy, increasingly over the course of this thing, just dying.

Going from like, hey, if you like date me, you can not get deported because we have to maintain. I know you're illegal. And that's fine. We know we need a bunch of you. We're not here to arrest everyone. Right. Because we need the crops from this planet. But I am going to arrest some people and I can make sure it's not you if you go on a quote unquote date with me.

Yeah, and then, you know, and it just escalates from there and she just straight up like sexual assault, right? And this is really, really, I mean, obviously it's jarring because it's, you know, like it's an onscreen depiction of an attempted sexual assault and then she like does a fight and she kills him, right?

But this was also very, very jarring to a lot of people because people are very, and this is a Star Wars thing too, they are very used to seeing fascism depicted through its own self-perception, right? People are very, very used to seeing fascism as something that is strong, that is order, that is discipline, that is dangerous. And the problem is, the reality of fascism is that like,

A lot of it is just a bunch of dipshit rapists who are, like, pretending to be those guys. Yeah. And, you know, and this is one of the things Andor's always been very, very good at, is you saw this last season, right, with Dedra, who is, her thing is that she is, you know, the very common American archetype of the cop who breaks all the rules to get the job done. And then, you know, and then, like, that's how she is first introduced, and then you see what that actually looks like in public, which is, you know, she is

just straight up torturing Bix with like the screams of an entire, the death scream of an entire species.

And that's season one. Yeah, yeah. That's that's that's that's season one. And and what's powerful about this is something and or also doesn't. So the prison break episodes is like this, this fascist self-perception, right, of the sort of strong order, discipline, unified thing that is just propaganda. They are not actually like that behind the scenes. Right. It's just these fucking incredibly violent, like petty losers doing this fucking shit.

And then, you know, I mean, the other thing about about the sort of patriarchy side is that you see this on the other side with with one moth was like, you know, her sort of like money cleaner who's who's like her old friend take home and like like literally is is demanding that like mom off but have sex with him in order for him to keep keep doing this money washing shit.

And this is also something you see in movements all the time, which is, like, guys with resources using their access to resources to force themselves on women, like, in the movement. And this... And, you know, and there's, like, a third dynamic here with take-home-a, which is, like, another thing you see all the time in movements is guy going through a divorce who goes completely off the fucking rails and starts doing shit that dangers everyone and, you know, starts doing sort of, like, weird predatory shit. And I think...

I don't know, there just hasn't been much analysis of like, yeah, this is, these are all ways, things that like, if you have been in movements, you have experienced patriarchy in all of these ways. You have experienced cops doing shit to you. You have experienced stuff from inside the movement. Fuck, a big part of how the,

The major organizations that were dismantling the Green Scare were taken down was through members of these different groups who had been doing direct action who were misogynists, right? That is always an easy way to break into and shatter a movement is find the guy who's got that going on about him and turn him. Yeah, and you have that on one hand. On the other hand, with the cops, this is a very, very common... Cops just...

sexually assaulting people for fun is like a thing that they do all the fucking time and same thing with ice because i mean this is obviously like i don't think you said it right like this this is just literally one-to-one they're doing ice raids in star wars yeah and the heroes are the people who like and or coming back with a tie fighter blowing them up right like you know yeah also i do want to on someone's later note i do want to point out that like

This show also quietly has had the most realistic lesbian relationship in all of Star Wars. Yes, it does. This season, it's like, oh, someone on this crew is a lesbian because they have depicted my culture perfectly, which is the rich girl lesbian and the broke, non-white gorilla lesbian who came from nothing, whose family was killed by the Empire, get together as an intense item, dream an operation together.

And then the moment the operation is over, their broke girl was like, fuck, this was a bad idea. And now they keep running into each other and movement things that are like, they're sort of avoiding each other. And one of them is still perfect depiction of lesbian culture. Incredible. No notes. Love the lesbian rebels. I'm happy for them.

Incredible. Yeah, it's beautiful stuff. The quality of the writing, like everyone was worried who loved Andor season one, like, oh fuck. How could they possibly compare with season one? And it's just getting better. It's just getting better. They did it again! They fucking did it again! They did it again. Somehow! You crazy bastards, you did it again! The thing I want to close on was with this wedding, which is

There's a bunch of really fascinating things about it. One is that, okay, so on the very non-subtle level, like, they are cutting back and forth between everyone dancing to this, like, sort of upbeat techno thing. Like, they're cutting back and forth between, like, Mon Mothma dancing at this wedding and, like, the ice raid that's happening. Which is, like, you know, this is the level of political subtlety that you need to be working on with the American people. You have to just be, like, I'm hammering you over the head with the point, which is, like, all of you motherfuckers are going to brunch and, like...

The ice raids are happening. Well, that is an aspect. I think it also proves there... You can operate in that zone because Madame Othman is still a very important figure for starting the rebellion. She is not just a useless lib, right? She's critical. And you have someone like...

like Luthan, who can put on nice clothes, can do this persona and extract intel at this party. In one of the previous episodes, he's like talking with this guy who introduces his son who is in the Imperial Navy. And he was talking about like a recent operation on a planet. And Luthan was like, oh really? Tell me more. And like, it's like, you can still extract information at these like places where power is like,

and exchanged. Yes, they are still bad, but if you are like an aspiring rebel, you can use these places to your advantage. But no, there absolutely still is this juxtaposition of, yeah, this like, you know,

riotous party with this horrific ice raid. And yeah, the material conditions in these people's lives is very different. Even if Mon Mothma's doing good stuff, still as an imperial senator, her everyday life is very different from someone who's having to hide from ice agents. Now, the other thing, though, that is going on in this scene, it's not purely...

These are the wealthy partying as these nightmare raids go down. The other thing that's going on is Mon Mothma is emotionally accepting this guy who was, was my lover for a long time and who was a dear friend of mine is going to be killed. And I have accepted the necessity. And the only thing for me to do right now is to get so drunk that I can't feel it. Yeah. Is to do drugs, drink and like dance. Yeah.

That's how you exist under like the horrific conditions that the empire forces you to live under. Yeah. Yeah.

And there's this fascinating thing, and I noticed this especially watching back season one, if you go back and watch the scenes and you look at the way it's lit, you look at the way that there's just this stark white light coming through the windows. This is not how it's lit in season one, right? This is a very deliberate choice. Almost everyone else who does this scene would do this sort of warm, rich, golden lighting, because that's how you do these fancy wedding things.

And this, the way that it is lit is the same way that they're lighting all of the, like, the stark white imperial corridors. And there's this very, you know, it's working on, like, all of these sort of, like, levels of, like, visual metaphor of all of this just, like, oh, yeah, this is also imperial space, right? And everyone here is operating either, like, regardless of what side they're on, they're operating, like, in imperial terrain in this sort of, like,

thing as Asma Motha also was just dealing with like her kid becoming a trad cath and like trying to talk her kid out of being a trad cath and her kid fucking loses her shit at her for being like hey maybe you shouldn't do this like weird marriage thing when you're like a child like 12 year old marriage yeah yeah I think I think there's a place I want to end on is there was a really interesting thing where like the Disney account that

like just posted a video on like i think it was on twitter that was just one like one hour of mothma dancing yeah and there was like a fascinating reaction to this of like like because on the one hand it's like oh these people like who i know uh victoria zeller who's a uh trans writer who i follow who i probably be talking to on the show at some point soon uh had this thing but like oh yeah like they're also there's just going to be weddings that are like based on this shangri-la wedding thing in like like two or three years we're going to be seeing this yeah

And there's this interesting dynamic where, like, on the one hand, you have the people who are just completely focused on the aesthetic, and then on the other hand, you have the people who are like, oh yeah, I, like, this is fucking me getting just absolutely fucked up as, like, all of the fucking horrors play out around us and having to, like, deal with and fight all the fucking horrors while, like, all of the people around me are just, like...

kind of just completely checked out. And I thought it was just like fascinating watching that sort of play out on, on social media and on like in real life, like this, you know, they're being very, very literal about how it works and it's working. I'm seeing people do it. Yeah. The last thing I do want to mention, uh, is just a big shout out to Cyril, to Cyril Karnes, uh, Italian Jewish. Oh yeah. Um,

Oh, yeah. The best the best villain in Star Wars. Darth Vader ain't got shit. Not nearly as scary as Cyril Karn's mother. No, I would take him in a fight over her any day. However, one of the interesting parts about this little like like dinner party is how Cyril Karn's like FBI agent abusive girlfriend. The moment Cyril is out of the room.

she takes control of this mother using all of her imperial interrogation and intimidation tactics. And it's like, no, no, no. You don't understand how this relationship is going to go. I am in charge here. I will dictate when Cyril can see you, how...

I will dictate how your relationship with your son is going to go because like Cyril is like my like pet. Like I run everything and things will go according to my wishes. See, I had a very different interpretation of that. Really? Because number one, she is not on board. She's going to be doing things

part of the Gorman genocide. She doesn't like the plan. She doesn't like that she's involved. This is not what she wants to be doing. She wants to be hunting Luther. Yes, agreed. And I think part of it is that she doesn't like, and I think this will become increasingly clear. She's not thrilled that Cyril's going to get involved in this shit because it's dangerous.

what i thought they were kind of showing we haven't seen her like abuse him i don't think we've seen her be mean to him other than like initially when before they were dating she didn't take him seriously until he saved her life well i don't know he's like a weird stalker beforehand he is a little bit of a stalker and she is like i think you can absolutely interpret some of some of her behavior as a like as like a degree of like emotionally abusive as a fascist couple like

Before they're dating, maybe? I don't know. Fascist for a fascist couple. I think there's elements, including the earlier scene of them in the apartment, where both of them are very uncomfortable around each other. They're awkward people. One of the things I appreciated about this is that she is a monster. We see her doing exclusively evil things.

And then Cyril, because his mom is so cruel to him, does the most relatable thing anyone does in this show and goes and lies down on his bed and has a panic attack in the middle of their dinner. And that's when she says, look, bitch, this is how shit's in it. She's being a good girlfriend in that moment. She's getting his mom off his back. I definitely interpret this scene differently. She did also threaten to arrest his uncle. His uncle's a dick! Ha ha ha!

She does threaten to send his uncle to forever jail. Yeah. No, I can see how you would read it that way. I think I definitely do interpret this scene a little bit differently. Yeah. And I think the beauty of good writing is this ability to look at this relationship in multiple ways. What I like about the way the Empire is written is that they're not caricatures, but not in a way where they're being like, well, the Empire's got a point. But in the way that like, yeah,

These are people, and I understand how folks, why folks would want to be a part of this system outside of just like the cruelty that it does. Like Partagas, who is like the leader of the ISB section that we're watching, is a really good boss. He listens to his subordinates. He tells them when their ideas suck. He does not spare their feelings.

but he's, he rewards initiative and he's willing to like be proven wrong or argued with like when people are forceful against him and make a good point, he's like, all right, well, let's try it. And I love showcasing that in the same way that like, if you talk to people who worked hard,

for like work for companies like Raytheon, they'll be like, yeah, it was a nightmare evil that we were making and like a very healthy working environment. And that is often the case with some of the most evil organizations on the planet. Like people who are very good at managing people often wind up

like that's what makes fascist systems so dangerous it's not that everyone in this is incompetent it's that there are sometimes people who are very good organizers and very competent leaders who wind up in these systems and that's part of what allows the evil to happen the point of andrew or the point of star wars is that also you could out organize them and beat them so let's

Message of hope. Yes, yes. I mean, fundamentally, the show is very hopeful because the Empire, number one, we know the Empire falls, but number two, we're seeing...

We're seeing like why, right? Which is this attempt to control everything that inevitably creates more fires than you can put out. Yeah. The tighter they hold their grip, the more systems will slip through their fingers. Yeah. Yep. Which is the line from the theory twink in season one. Yeah. And I think what makes the Ender so special is this does fill in this gap of like,

When we jump into like a new hope, you have this fully like complete like rebel Alliance, right? It is, it is an Alliance of different rebel cells that have come together to do like a, like a large scale military action. It takes a lot of buildup to get an Alliance of rebel cells. Yeah. A whole bunch of like individual, like rebel terrorist cells have a,

usually have a very hard time working with each other. Yes. And it's very hard to get them to coordinate. Yeah. And Endor is the story of watching these, like, many different cells slowly start to figure out that maybe it would make more sense if we worked together. Yeah. Instead of just doing random small crimes and, like, hits on individual planets or Imperial processing plants. The ability to see these cells come together is what makes, I think, Endor so special. And for the rest of the season, we're going to move forward

forward a year at a time all the way up to the beginning of Rogue One more than we do have the completed Rebel Alliance. So I'm excited to watch that develop. Yep. Alright, well, see you next week.

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Welcome to

Sorry. Garrison. Wow. I interrupted you. We have a whole thing that we've been doing. We have been. We have been. This is the first episode that started differently in like 12 weeks. You're right. You're right. Why don't you introduce erectile dysfunction or whatever we call this? That's not what it's called. This is It Could Happen Here Executive Disorder, the weekly newscast where we cover...

You know, everything happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by...

federal, no, New Mexico State Magistrate Judge. New Mexico Municipal Judge. Municipal Judge Robert Evans. That's right. Neil Wong and James Stout. We're covering the week of April 24th to April 30th. Yes. And we're sponsored by HIMSS. Not yet, but hopefully. When they release them, we will accept their contract money. One day.

Robert, what's going on with your fellow judges? I want to get to that, Garrison. Some very important news just dropped from the Real Raw News Twitter account. Oh, boy. Sharing what you don't want shared, 107,000 followers. Special forces that accompanied President Trump to the Pope's funeral arrested Biden for treason afterward, but it turned out to be a body double. So...

Breaking news! Turns out Sleepy Joe still has a trick or two up his sleeve. Patriots not in control. What a beautiful world people must live in. I desperately want to live in the world where, like, Joe Biden is a Saw Gerrera-type rebel figure, like, tricking special forces with body doubles hiding in the mountains. Yeah.

They call him Joe the Jackal for a reason. They have him locked up in a Vatican vault where he's scheming his return. He just stole a nuke from Fort Leonard Wood.

Oh, boy. He's in a tiny submarine making his way to Cuba right now. I guess, you know, speaking of the Pope, Trump himself has announced his running for the Pope ship. Why not? Let him have it. Let him have it. We will keep a close eye on that. Let him have it, but make Stanley Tucci do whatever job Stanley Tucci had in Conclave. Make him the Libby Cuck Cardinal. Why not?

That's right. That's right. Speaking of judges who actually exercised a great deal of personal courage, there have been two cases in the last week or so of judges being arrested and charged by the Trump administration with crimes that are all related to aiding and abetting undocumented immigrants, right?

I'm going to start with the case of Hannah Dugan. Hannah Dugan is a Wisconsin – she's a Milwaukee County circuit judge. She was sworn in in 2016. So she's – I wanted to say she hasn't been doing this very long, but no, that's literally like nine years. So she's been doing this a spell. She's 65 years old. And on March 12th, there was a fellow, Flores Ruiz is his last name. He's 30 years old.

who was arrested after basically there was a confrontation between him and his roommates for him playing loud music. He was confronted for this on March 12th, and he allegedly fought with a male roommate in the kitchen. A woman, I'm not sure if she was a roommate or just there, tried to break them up. Two women eventually did. One of them got elbowed in the arm, allegedly, by Flores Ruiz. One of them was struck, allegedly,

while trying to break them up. It is unclear to the degree to which I'm hearing a lot of people like I went to the centrist subreddit to see something like, well, a serial abuser of women. That's not really what he's being accused of. There was like a fight between him and another guy and it got chaotic. One person elbowed in the arm

I'm sorry, I don't consider that serious domestic abuse unless it's part of a pattern. If it's literally he was fighting a guy and other people swarmed in and one of them got elbowed, I don't know about this woman that he's alleged of striking. To what degree did he haul off and punch her? Or was it again, there was this chaotic struggle and several people got struck in the middle of it?

it, right? This isn't like great, but this is certainly not the evidence that has been provided by the state here in this case is not that this is a serial domestic abuser of women. It's a guy who was involved in a chaotic fight with a roommate and a couple of other people, right? So he's being charged with misdemeanor domestic battery as a result of this. He faces up to nine months in prison and a $10,000 fine on each count if convicted and he has not been convicted and is innocent until proven guilty.

So he went up in front of Judge Dugan literally a few days ago when we record this. And while she was in the midst of like having this like court meeting, basically, I think this was kind of like a pretrial deal, right? Where they're kind of like setting the ground rules of things. She finds out that ICE is in the courthouse and that they are looking for Flores Ruiz.

And so she gets really angry because based on what Wisconsin has stated, like the actual like law in the state, they are not supposed to be interfering in actual court proceedings.

And part of the reason why is that the courts don't want people to be dissuaded from dealing with their state level court issues by the fact that ICE might pick them up. It will stop people. It will make people go on the run. It makes it very difficult to enforce law and order. And I also like victims, right? Like I've heard at least of some makes it difficult for victims to get any sort of justice. Yes. Yeah.

The FBI affidavit describes her as getting visibly angry when immigration shows up and she leaves the bench. Right. And she retreats to her chambers and I think confers with another judge. And she and that judge then approach the arrest team inside the courthouse.

The affidavit describes her as having a confrontational, angry demeanor. She basically keeps saying, show me your fucking warrant. Right. And they don't have a quote unquote real warrant. Right. They do not have a criminal arrest warrant. They have an administrative warrant, which based on the actual law, they do not. She does not have to let them in. Right. That is not the way these things fucking work. Right. Into the courtroom to like interrupt the proceedings on the strength of this warrant. Right.

She tells them to speak with the chief judge, and she leads them away from the courtroom, right? Once she sends him to the chief judge's office, this is where the thing that may in fact be criminal behavior comes in. Dugan goes back into the courtroom and says something along the lines of, wait, come with me, and then takes Flores Ruiz and his lawyer through the jury door into a non-public area of the courthouse, right?

This is not normal behavior. And ICE is alleging that this is interfering with the duties of federal agents, right? That she's basically hiding an undocumented immigrant who is being actively tracked by ICE, right? And that that is a federal crime. And so that is the situation, right? When it was found out that this was happening, the FBI and ICE arrested her. She has since bailed out. She is facing several federal charges, right?

And it's kind of unclear where this case is going to go. In terms of her initial behavior, she was absolutely legally in the right. That administrative warrant did not give ICE the right to interrupt the court proceedings. She led them to the chief judge. That was all entirely within the law.

We're going to learn how the law adjudicates what she did afterwards, right? Taking these people to because it's not illegal to lead people through a back door. It's not a crime to tell people to leave this way. But what may be adjudicated as a crime is that by doing this, she was helping to aid and abet the escape of a fugitive, right? And that is the argument that the federal government is making here.

They didn't leave the building at that point, right? Because in the charging documents, then an ICE agent gets in the elevator with them and decides not to detain them at that point for some reason. Yeah, I believe that's what happened. And that part of it is why I think they picked this case, because they thought it was close enough, on the edge enough...

that they could charge a judge. And I think that is the purpose of this more than going after this. And that's why they've been going to these courts is they have been looking, they've been shopping for a situation like this, right? In part because one of the first things that happened is the Wisconsin Supreme Court suspended Judge Dugan.

Right. Because she's been charged with two federal counts. And this is a normal thing. If a judge gets accused of federal crimes, you would in normal terms want them to be suspended because those crimes are probably something like they were selling children to to a child prison, which is a thing that happened to Trump. Pardon the judge is responsible. Right. You would want those people not trying cases while while this was going on. But.

But what's going to be done here and what's already being done here is that judges that are friendly to and sympathetic to undocumented people and who are not gigantic pieces of shit. And Judge Dugan comes out of a of a public defense background. This is somebody who defended people like the defendant in this case in her previous life as a lawyer.

And I think acted with tremendous courage in this situation to try to protect somebody. Very brave. They are going after her because number one, they want to chill other judges from doing this. And number two, they can keep her off the bench, right? And assume she will be replaced with somebody worse or that they will just clog up the system either way of which works in their favor. So it's...

It will be unclear how things are going to work out in this case. I can't tell you legally what's going to happen. That could go either way. I can tell you, and I think this is a very important point. It's a point Jared Yates Sexton, who's a scholar on fascism,

made online about this particular case is we shouldn't give a shit if she broke the law. She did the right thing. These people are doing the wrong thing and they need to be stopped. Right? And that is my overall stance. What she did was heroic and we should support her

and fuck these people i don't know yeah yep yep i don't have a complicated take on this solidarity with the wisconsin judiciary or at least one of them at least one of them yeah i have a friend who knows her and says she's a very nice person and her actions in this case certainly would seem to suggest that she's a very nice good courageous person yeah and like just to there's conceivably like a person listening who thinks that i know these deportation things are okay i don't know if you are

Fuck you. Why? This isn't for you. Go away. Yeah, we're not making a podcast for you. You know what? Put rocks in your pockets. There's bodies of... Whatever. Even if you fucking like the deportation for whatever reason, you should be able to understand that doing this in courthouses is bad. If a...

let's just take an example, right? Like if a woman who is undocumented is subject to domestic violence, going to testify in court could lead to her being deported. Like this is fucking bad. It could subject her to even more violence from the state, from wherever she's trying to flee from. Yeah. To being detained with people. Yeah. Yes. If you believe in the judicial system, right? Like this stops it functioning. Also, I want to say this too.

If you're purely coming at this from a perspective of like, well, I'm still a law and order guy. This also vastly endangers Wisconsin police because if every undocumented person who gets accused of a crime knows that, well, the instant I'm accused, I'm going to be sent to a fucking concentration camp, might as well start shooting. Right. Yeah, that's why you don't see very many of these things happening in states where people regularly carry firearms. Yes. So again, yeah.

You know, that's all I'm saying. That's not my primary concern, but I'm going to make that point. Yeah. What about the other like weirder case of the New Mexico case? The judge in New Mexico. Yes. So now back to my fellow New Mexico municipal judge. Actually, I think he was in a judge magistrate. Yeah. County magistrate. Yeah. So he and I basically the same. So there's this guy, Nancy Kano, who's a former police officer. His wife was a cop. And Joel Kano, who was the Donna Anna County magistrate judge.

These two are really, you wouldn't have expected what happened from this group. These two are a cop and a judge couple. Radical lefty lunatics. Who are wealthy landlords who own at least eight properties. And they hire three men to do like, you know, contracting work. And those men included a guy, Cristian Ortega Lopez, 23 years old, right? Who is a Venezuelan migrant. Right.

And first off, because these are cops or a cop and a judge, they like check his papers, which say do not deport, right? Like he is in the system. Not subject to removal. This person is not subject to removal, right? Those are on his papers. They check his papers. These three guys work for them for a while and develop a close relationship with the Canos to the point that they refer to them as the boys. And when they get kicked out of their apartment, they let them live with them.

I think for free or at least for a nominal fee. And as they describe it, they came to consider them part of the family. And there's like photo evidence of that and including photo evidence of them, like going to the gun range together as like a family day at the gun range and shooting. And like this guy, Ortega Lopez, like posts pictures of these people and these like family outings on his Facebook. Like they really do seem to have all been very close. Yeah.

Earlier this year, ICE comes for these guys, the boys, these three dudes who are living on their property in a small guest house on the Kano's property. And they allege Ortega Ortiz to have been a member of Trin de Agua. And it's based on – and I hate most of the reporting on this because it's all just like the alleged gang member, alleged Trin de Agua member. And you look at it and say, well, he has tattoos and there's pictures of him with guns. Pictures of him with guns.

That are legally owned by Americans at a gun range. Yeah. He's a 23-year-old guy coming to America. Like, there's a high correlation with those people and people going to a gun range. Yeah. Nothing illegal with that. But they're like, a gang member. Photos of guns on his Facebook. Oh, my God.

So these guys get arrested, right? And it's initially, and this is like a month or so ago, big scandal. Kano resigns from his position as a magistrate, right? And gets permanently barred from serving as a judge in New Mexico because these guys had been on his property. Even though, again, there's not any evidence that I have seen anywhere that he actually did anything illegal at this point. Now, here's where things get problematic. At this point,

The boys are being, you know, the government is treating them as people who are here illegally and they are trying to kick them out and they are accusing them. These three guys are being involved in Trinidad. At this point.

Nancy Kano provides them with legal assistance in complying with the procedures of their pending immigration cases, right? Which shouldn't be illegal. She's literally helping them abide by the law, right? But there's some other things. So Joel Kano, this is where this guy turns from like,

Fucking married a cop. He's a landlord. He smashes Ortega Lopez's phone. He admits he's admitted that he's done this. This is not an allegation with a hammer to stop ice from getting it. So first off based illegal, super illegal, super illegal, but not like a good person act. I would argue. Um, uh,

Secondly, Nancy tries to help – and this is, I think, a grayer area – tries to help Ortega-Lopez delete his Facebook account. And I don't actually think there's any evidence of him doing anything illegal on there. I think it's just they knew the photos he posted of him not breaking any laws would be used as an argument that he had.

I think that that's defensible in court, although they will allege that it's destruction of the evidence. They may win on that. Breaking the phone is a, you know, that's going to be a tough one for them. That's just going to be a tough one for them. Now, the Kano's are currently being charged and they have been released. They can't leave the county.

There was the prosecutors were attempting to have them separated so that they couldn't talk about the case. But thank God the judge ruling was like, they're married. They have a constitutional right to be together. You don't get to do that. But obviously they have to like hand in their passports, any guns they'd had, which they seem to have already done. The good news is that these are rich people, right? Like the judge even makes a comment that like, these are the wealthiest people I've ever had in my courtroom. So they have the resources to fight this. And, uh,

Again, fucking politics making strange bedfellows. Critical support to the landlord-judge-cop couple who tried to protect these immigrants. I don't know, like...

Whatever. They did the right thing, you know, in my opinion. Again, not the legal thing. And I'm not urging you to follow them in breaking the law. I'm making it very clear it is illegal to break the phone of somebody that you know the police are looking for because they've been charged with crimes. That is a crime. I'm just saying I think what they did was out of love and brave. Anyway, that's what I got to say. Speaking of love, I love these ads. Mm-hmm.

All right, we are back. I am now going to discuss a, I believe the word is a flurry of executive orders that happened the past week because there was a ton. This was a huge week for actions through executive order.

We've tried to summarize a few of these that have like or a few orders that have come in the past few months. But but yeah, definitely the ones that happened last week are much more notable. And I will go through them one by one, starting off with an attempt to possibly repeal large sections of the Civil Rights Act. Trump signed an order to, quote, eliminate the use of disparate impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.

Disparate impact is a legal theory that seeks to address discriminatory policies that on their face may appear neutral but actually continue decades old like discrimination and segregation. This order from Trump revokes presidential approval for Title VI anti-discrimination regulations from the 60s and 70s and orders all agencies to quote, "deprioritize enforcement of all statutes and regulations to the extent that they include disparate impact liability."

The order calls for the Attorney General to quote, "initiate appropriate action to repeal or amend the implementing regulations for Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964." Cabinet members were also instructed to review all pending investigations, civil suits, consent judgments, permanent injunctions, and government positions that rely on spared impact theory. That includes Title VII and VIII of the Civil Rights Act, which protects equal employment and fair housing.

This is kind of part of a larger attack on civil rights in general. Obviously, the past few months we've seen this with DEI stuff. But last week, the DOJ essentially closed its existing civil rights office, re-signed a dozen senior career attorneys, curbed investigations into police misconduct and violations of voting and disability rights.

Plus, the Education Discrimination Division is now being directed to protect women's sports. And the Immigrant and Employee Rights Division was told to investigate companies that, quote, unlawfully discriminate against U.S. workers in favor of foreign visa workers, unquote.

So that's how they think they're going to be defending civil rights is by keeping trans girls out of sports and going after foreign visa workers. Basically, they're trying to turn federal civil rights infrastructure against those whom they were meant to protect in the first place. The next order kind of outlies something I'm calling cop nation. It's called, quote, strengthening and unleashing America's law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent civilians.

This is kind of like a proto martial law order. It's what you would do beforehand to strengthen police, but not actually like declare martial law. It's setting kind of the path towards that or at the very least, like strengthening law enforcement to the degree to which it like butts up against what martial law would be.

The order calls to, quote, Unleash high-impact local police forces, protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by state or local officials, and surge resources to officers in need, unquote.

It directs the Attorney General to create a mechanism to have private sector law firms provide pro bono legal defense to police officers who, quote, unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law, unquote. So this tries to make it harder for police to be held accountable for civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending qualified immunity to the criminal realm.

According to Business Insider, quote, following previous executive orders targeting a number of elite firms, nine law firms have agreed to deals with the president and collectively agreed to provide $940 million in pro bono legal services to support the president's policies, unquote.

This order also calls to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training, and strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as to, quote, seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers, promote investment in the security and capacity of prisons, and increase the investment in and collection, distribution, and uniformity of crime data across jurisdictions, unquote.

The Attorney General is directed to review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on to local or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions. And then finally, quote, Attorney General and Secretary of Defense in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement and

and shall determine how military and national security assets training non-lethal capabilities and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime, unquote. So moving more military and national security resources over to state and local law enforcement.

and directs the AG to go after state and local officials that obstruct criminal law by, quote, prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties necessary for public safety or unlawfully engage in discrimination or civil rights violations under the guise of DEI. Do you want to discuss anything with this, you know, anti-ACAB executive order here and what it might actually, like, do in reality besides, you know, expanding, like, legal protections for cops?

I mean, I think the worrying one to me is that they're very explicitly talking about using military national security assets like in the U.S. against Americans. The thing right now we're doing is like to prevent crime, but like I think very obviously everyone has looked at this and immediately gone like part of this obviously is about like

Trying to defeat any attempt to even moderately reform the police. But a lot of it is also like, yeah, they're expecting giant protests this summer. Yeah. And they want to be able to use military assets here. And what they're doing with this, the Secretary of Defense is developing a plan to use military assets, presumably against protesters. Either that or, you know what I mean? Like specific thing here is like used to prevent crime, which is just like the deployment of the US military against like us. Yeah.

Right. That's, I think a pretty cut and dry. They are developing the apparatus through which they are going to attempt to deploy the army against like us citizens in the U S. Well, and it's also specifically like empowers like individual police officers, um, against any like perceived restrictions that like local or state officials might be putting on. Yeah. And like, I think that's what makes it more super worrying for me. It's like, it's like enabling like the police state aspect of like the,

of the executive branch saying, hey, like individual cops, we support you more so than whatever like local jurisdiction you are like under. And if the local jurisdictions try to like restrict your ability to like, to do violence, restrict your ability to do your job, we are going to help you to make sure that you have the legal and like physical capacity to continue your job as you see fit. We will throw the high dollar lawyers that we have threatened into prison

working for us at these states and municipalities. Both to defend your individual actions and then also go after the people in charge of you. Both of them. It's more like CPD black site shit. Nazi gang shit. They're just shooting people

Yeah, like that's the kind of shit, the torture. The data sharing, I think, is something people should be aware of. That seems to be what I would imagine will be funding for more federal fusion centers and then equipping them with like homeland security assets, intelligence assets that are already used outside the US like that.

is concerning, especially in a climate of migration crackdown, right? This data sharing will help them further target migrants. Well, and this relates to another executive order for protecting American communities from criminal aliens.

Basically, it targets sanctuary cities. The Attorney General and the DHS Secretary will publish a list of sanctuary jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration law, and federal funds to those districts will be suspended or terminated. And if those districts remain sanctuary districts after officials have been notified of their status, then necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures shall be pursued to, quote, end these violations.

Section 1 of this order lists several federal criminal laws that they say are being violated by these sanctuary districts, including, quote, obstruction of justice on lawfully harboring or hiring illegal aliens, conspiracy against the United States, and conspiracy to impede federal law enforcement. Assisting aliens in violating federal immigration law could also violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, unquote. So they're even wrapping in RICO here for state and local officials who are trying to protect

immigrants in their communities. There's a few other executive orders I want to mention, including one that requires professional truck drivers speak English. I think this is actually just to mask the consequences of the tariffs with the fact that a lot of truck drivers are losing their jobs. Yes. So this is to hide those layoffs or try to force people to get laid off if they don't speak good enough English or to create pretext to have these layoffs be justified as we see the shipping industry slowly collapse because of the tariffs. Another

Another order that's just more frustrating, I guess, to me and like worrying long term about the future is, quote, advancing artificial intelligence education for American youth. And I'm actually going to play a video here of Trump signing this order.

This next executive order relates to artificial intelligence education, sir. You've obviously done a lot in the artificial intelligence space already. The basic idea of this executive order is to ensure that we properly train the workforce of the future by ensuring that schoolchildren, young Americans are adequately trained in AI tools so that they can be competitive

in the economy years from now into the future as AI becomes a bigger and bigger deal. That's a big deal. Because AI is where it seems to be at. We have literally trillions of dollars being invested in AI. And somebody today, a very smart person, said that AI is the way to the future. I don't know if that's right or not, but certainly very smart people are investing in it heavily.

This clip is super interesting to me because it demonstrates just how little Trump knows what's really going on. This is the first time he's seen this order. He has to get explained what it is before he signs his name on it. They're just handing him these things and he's just signing papers. He is not dictating which things he actually wants to happen.

He just gets handed stuff and there's cameras on. He's like, hey, this is to help AI with kids. And you're so smart about AI, Mr. President. He's like, yes, I am, as he signs his name. The actual text of this order is really freaky. Quote, by fostering AI competency, we will equip our students with the foundational knowledge and skills necessary to adapt and thrive in an increasing digital society.

James, how do you feel about that as an educator yourself?

Probably 50% of my time in the classroom right now is trying to explain to people where they shouldn't copy paste the assignment into chat GPT.

And like every year for the past three or four years, we have dealt with like bots, like students in my class who are not real people. I've dealt with more and more and more use of AI. It's from people who I think like the folks who are coming through my classroom now, like many of their like high school years when they should have been getting good solid, like writing tuition were during COVID lockdowns. Right.

And so like, I'm not entirely blaming like the folks coming through my class here, but it is. It's a fucked situation that's only getting worse. It's fucked. It's like I've been educating people for nearly two decades. Like I've never come across anything this bad.

It is fundamentally damaging people's engagement with education and their ability to learn. It's giving them permanent brain damage. It is life-altering their ability to think in a way that may never be recoverable for a lot of people. I don't want to be a boomer. It's not. There's data on this. The AI companies have... Microsoft has data on this. It damages people. It needs to be banned. And finding...

Good solutions for that. Writing assignments that AI can't write. It's not that hard. Before people come into my mentions saying, oh, you can use this to detect AI. I can detect it because the assignments it submits are shit.

The problem is that people keep using it because, as Robert said, that they're running out of options, right? And they're like really committing to this. The end of the order directs the Secretary of Education to provide grant funding to, quote, improve educational outcomes using AI, including but not limited to AI-based high-quality instructional resources, high-impact tutoring, and college and career pathway exploration, advising, and navigation, unquote.

I mean, sadly, like these federal and to an extent state level to like diktats, I guess, do impact what you're supposed to put on your syllabus. Right. Like especially for like high school students, these can genuinely impact students.

what high school teachers are supposed to teach. It changes a little bit once you get to the university level, and I guess we'll see how this goes, but this genuinely could have a very damaging impact on, and it already has had a damaging impact on the US education system. Yeah.

I have one more thing I want to read here. This is actually a presidential memorandum, not an executive order. But this calls to investigate Democrat and grassroots funding platform ActBlue, alleging, quote, schemes to launder excessive and prohibited contributions to political candidates and committees, unquote. ActBlue has been the target of conspiracy theories for years, starting with James O'Keefe. And Elon Musk has recently targeted ActBlue with, quote,

Bizarre conspiracy theories on how Ash Blue functions and is used to funnel money to Antifa and George Soros money getting moved over to all of these Tesla vandals. Crazy stuff. But specifically, Trump's

is calling the Attorney General and Treasury Secretary to, quote, investigate allegations regarding the unlawful use of online fundraising platforms to make straw or dummy contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees and to take appropriate action to enforce the law, unquote.

I think this whole thing beyond trying to, you know, harm the Democrats ability to like win elections in the future as a form of like election meddling is also just like a big smokescreen away from a CNN investigation last year into deceptive practices used by political fundraising platforms Win Red and Act Blue, which found that the Republican platform had more than seven times the fraud complaints sent to the FCC than Act Blue during the period of 2022 to 2024.

with the fundraising platform targeting aging seniors who thought they were personal friends of the Trump family, with propaganda and emails that tricked them into signing up for recurring donations in what they thought was a personal correspondence to President Trump. It's a really worrying investigation. It'll be linked below.

Meanwhile, you have Elon Musk literally offering people millions of dollars to get people to sign up to vote and sign petitions, and yet they're going to try to investigate fraud in Democrat and grassroots fundraising, which I'm sure there is a little bit of. But according to this investigation by CNN, so much more fraud on the...

on the Republican fundraising platform. You know, there is actually one Democrat who we can verifiably claim did a bunch of weird fundraising shit and did straw donations from foreign donors, and it is Eric Adams, who is Trump's favorite Democrat. It's the one guy who actually did it. Trump is personally keeping out of prison. Oh, God.

Anyway, that is the flurry. We're going to go on one more break and then come back to close out on some immigration and tariff updates. Hell yeah. We're back. And wait, what's that? Do you hear the dulcet tones of an angel? Casper. Casper.

We're going to get to the rest of the Clash catalog. We've got four years. Yes, yes. I'm really looking forward... Desecrating the temple. We're working on a cover of Lost in the Supermarket where there's just nothing in the supermarket because of the tariffs. That's tough, that's tough. It's actually very easy to find my way around in the supermarket now because there's nothing on sale.

All right, what's actually happening with the turf tariffs? I'm just going to start by reading Trump's incredible cope about why everything's going to shit. This is Trump. This is a truth from True Social. This is Biden's stock market, not Trump's. I didn't take over until January 20th. Terrorists will soon start kicking in and companies are starting to move to the U.S. in record numbers.

Our country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden quote overhang. This will take a while. Has nothing to do with the tariffs. All caps. Only that he left us with bad numbers. But when the boom begins, it will be like no other. Be patient. This is Biden's stock market. Yeah. So the reason he's saying this is that so today we got a report that.

the U.S. for the first quarter suffered the first actual economic contraction of the economy since 2022. And that basically there was like one quarter in 2022 where it contracted and then it basically since the lockdowns it's been expanding. We are probably already in the recession. And the other thing that's very important to note here is you're seeing a lot of reporting about this being a contraction and a lot of the reporting will talk about how

Like, yeah, this is because people are like rushing to do their all their imports right now before the tariffs hit. The thing is, right?

This economic contraction is like before the actual substantive impact of the tariffs hit. So this is just the beginning of like the rolling economic collapse that all of these turf tariffs are going to generate. There's been a little bit of movement in the sense that like, okay, so when I last talked about sort of the declines in like shipping tariffs,

from China or just shipping in general. It was mostly like sort of, I don't know what you'd call them, shipping industry trade press. This has hit like the mainstream press now that, you know, some of these indicators are showing 60% import drops from China. And it looks like China is maybe kind of starting the preliminary things to figure out how to figure out negotiations and that they've been, the Chinese government has been going behind the scenes and talking to a bunch of

high-profile American companies and has been quietly repealing some of their 125% retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. on very specific goods. We'll see what happens there. There hasn't been more movement than that. What is also very interesting is that, obviously, a bunch of prices are just increasing already in places like Temu and Xi'an. And Amazon was going to have a counter that showed how much additional money you were spending because of the tariffs.

And they announced they were going to do this. And then President Trump got on the phone with Jeff Bezos and yelled at him. And then Jeff Bezos said he wasn't going to do it. But this is also an interesting thing because we're actually starting to see cracks between Trump and people like Bezos, the tech people who really have been his closest base of support for this entire project in terms of like

large-scale sectors of capital. It's been these people who have been backing him. And I think as the stuff continues, we're going to continue to see rifts between them and the Trump administration over shit like this because...

You know, like, people get really, really... It's something we've talked about a lot in episodes we've done on pricing and inflation is that people get really pissed off when prices go up. And that's a way to, like, you know, this is a problem for these companies because this is a way you lose sort of brand loyalty. And that's, like, how everything goes to shit. And Trump has to... is doing all these deflections to be like, it's not actually the tariffs that are doing this because people are going to be really pissed about this and...

Yeah, I don't know. Welcome, welcome to quarter one of the recession. This is going to be the best quarter of the economy for a long time. Yay! Woo! Tariff talk. Okay, so let's close out with immigration update. I'm just going to run a few, speed run a few of these and we'll get a little deeper into some of them. The New York Times is reporting that once again the Trump administration is separating, has separated a child from a

their parents jesus fucking christ yep a federal court denied the government's motion to dismiss a first amendment challenge to its policy of deporting pro-palestine anti-genocide activists um so that allows the case to go ahead right so it allows a first amendment challenge to be mounted which is a good thing right given that this is like their policy right now is a frontal assault on the first amendment for people who are not citizens and

In the Abrego Garcia case, both sides agreed to a seven-day pause in the discovery process after the passing of sealed motions. Then on Tuesday, Tuesday this week, the DOJ filed another sealed motion.

We can speculate and you will see people speculating if you go on to the Blue Sky or Twitter or whatever. I don't think it's beneficial to do that in this case. Right. What we should be focusing on is that a man is in a prison camp who did nothing wrong. Yeah. It doesn't matter. The justice system is continuing to fail him because he is still there. And so are hundreds of other people.

The experimental, quote, national defense area in New Mexico. So we spoke last week about the Roosevelt Reservation, right? And they are starting this militarization of the Roosevelt Reservation with an area in New Mexico. And we've seen the first charges that are filed against migrants. According to Washington Post, at least 28 people have been charged or added to their charges a penalty for violation of security regulations. In addition to them being charged with entry without inspection, right?

Hegseth visited the area this week and he talked about how they were going to post signage in English and Spanish to indicate that crossing the area would be trespassing on U.S. military property. Increasing numbers of migrants over the last few years have not spoken either of those languages. It doesn't seem to be something they've accounted for here. The U.S. attorney for New Mexico allegedly, according to the post, quote, can't wait to begin charging people who cross.

So that's great. And so it does seem that they are using this, as we talked about a week or so ago, as a way to quickly charge and then deport people who are entering the United States between ports of entry. In other court news, a judge in Colorado placed a tentative restraining order on the use of the Alien Enemies Act there without 21 days of notice in a language the person understands, advising them of their right to bring a habeas challenge.

So that means if someone is going to be removed under the AEA, they have to get three weeks of notice and that notice has to advise them that they have the right to bring a challenge. And then as opposed to what they're doing right now, which is deporting people extremely quickly. And this was upheld by the 10th Circuit. So that's in place there.

It'll be interesting to see how many of them are able to bring. Still, bringing a habeas challenge is complicated. It can be expensive and requires a lot of legal time. And I know most lawyers who work in immigration are overwhelmed currently. Yes. In California, a judge has ruled that CBP can't carry out warrantless stops and arrests after the ACLU filed a suit in response to the CBP sector's operation Return to Sender, which

which happened in late 2024. So people, this is one of the things that people may have already forgotten about, but in December of 2024, CBP started detaining residents, migrants, laborers outside a Home Depot, a grocery store, and at road checkpoints up in California's Central Valley, right?

People are thinking the Central Valley is a very long way from El Centro. What are they doing up there? I've included a map of Border Patrol sectors in the sources today so people can see. But although the El Centro sector only spans 71 miles of linear border, it goes a lot further north. So that's what they were doing up there. The judge in this case, who is U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer Thurston, said, quote,

You just can't walk up to people with brown skin and say, give me your papers. There's some very good reporting on this in CalMatters, which I've also linked in the sources today. Notably, I looked through the order today, the court order, and one of the things we get is kind of a vision into how Border Patrol is expediting these deportations. So I'm going to quote from that order here.

quote, once Border Patrol agents transported the people they arrested to the El Centro station, they would, quote, extract voluntary departure agreements from as many people as possible without explaining the consequences. This is all, this is the plaintiff's contention, which is ACLU, right? So we've seen this a lot, right? Like we saw it in the case when they detained a citizen in Tucson not so long ago, that they're trying to get people to sign these documents, right?

Sometimes, in most cases I believe, you're not actually signing a physical document. You're signing one of those little pressure pad screens, and you might be given an iPad to read the document on, but you don't get a chance to look and flick through the document and then sign a physical copy of the document. The injunction that happened here only applies in the Eastern District of California.

The judge also ordered Border Patrol to record all arrests and stops and report them within 40 days. The government argued this would be too burdensome, which is odd because they're already required to do paperwork when they arrest or stop someone, right? But that was a rule by the judge. Despite this, though, the El Centro sector has still been carrying out operations way north of the land border, including recently outside a Home Depot in Pomona.

So this is CBP, not ICE, right? People are familiar with that distinction. But at least in the Eastern District, they can't be stopping people now without warrants. So that's a good thing from the courts, I guess. Those are, I know we've got a long episode today. Those are the most important immigration things that I've come up with this week. I'm sure something will happen between us recording this coming out. But yeah, that's what I've got for you.

The last thing that we'll mention is that Mohsen Marawi, the U.S. green card holder who was arrested by ICE at his citizenship interview, has been released from ICE custody as of April 30th by order of a Vermont judge.

This is really the first piece of good news we've had in relation to Trump's crackdown on Palestinian protesters and student protests. So yeah, Madawi's case will still continue, but he will not be in ICE custody for the duration of this case. And I think we saw in the Mahmoud Khalil case, the judge has ordered that New Jersey is a correct jurisdiction for that case to proceed.

So that offers a possibility of the same, but it's essentially the same charge that both of them have, right? Or the same reasoning for trying to remove them. So hopefully we will see a similar result there. We'll be following up on both these stories as they progress. But that does it for us today here at It Could Happen Here. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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

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