Trump has decreed it’s the Gulf of America, and Google agrees, at least for US users. Rep Buddy Carter has introduced HR 1161, the Red White and Blueland Act of 2025 to rename Greenland. And then, of course, there's making Canada the 51st state.
Pay attention to shit like this: it's a magic spell.
Trump is speaking in the old language of the Discovery Doctrine. That’s what we’ll excavate today.
Show Notes
Zizian Killing Spree and Arrests
Zizian leader denied bail
Roko’s Basilisk and Zizian beliefs/practices
Feb 2023 Community Alert about Ziz on Less Wrong
Project 2025 Observer
Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny — Richard J Miller
Trump calls Canada a 'very serious contender' to become 51st state
H.R.1161 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): Red, White, and Blueland Act of 2025
DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM Aime Cesaire Translated by Joan Pinkham
Biography - Burnum Burnum - Indigenous Australia
The fight to 'free' the Aboriginal flag
Common Methods of Annexation | Snohomish County, WA
Doctrine of Discovery: How the 500-year-old Catholic decree encouraged colonization
Speech Acts (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Mexico's President Sheinbaum threatens to take legal action over the Gulf name change : NPR
How Canada planned to invade the U.S. (and vice versa)
Poilievre says Canada is broken
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This is Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveler Podcast.
The Amateur Traveler Podcast is about the love of travel.
It's about where to go and why you should go there.
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I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remski.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and we are all also individually over on Blue Sky.
Sky.
I know that's where I spend most of my time these days.
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So...
Trump has decreed it's the Gulf of America.
And Google agrees, at least for U.S. users.
Representative Buddy Carter, Republican of Georgia, has introduced H.R. 1161, the Red, White, and Blue Land Act of 2025, to rename Greenland.
And here's the man himself from the Oval Office.
Amazing things happen to Canada.
So the question was about his future intentions towards Canada.
But his answer sounds like something has already happened.
Like the 51st state thing is already a thing.
Now pay attention to shit like this.
It's a magic spell.
Amazing things happen to Canada.
You can almost see him waving a wand.
Why would we pay $200 billion a year in subsidies to Canada when they're not a state?
You do that for a state, but you don't do that for somebody else's country.
So I think Canada is going to be a very serious contender to be our 51st state.
So that dollar amount is total bullshit presented now hundreds of times by Trump and surrogates as fact, as if countries are lining up for the boon of being saved by the U.S. There was obviously a delay in implementing those tariffs.
I spoke to Governor Trudeau on numerous occasions, and we'll see what happens.
But it just sets up so good for them.
You hear that reporter chuckle when he says Governor Trudeau?
If that was some chud from Newsmax, fine.
Have your fun.
But if it's some legacy guy, big mistake to laugh, because Trump is weaving a spell here in the old language of the Discovery Doctrine.
That's what we'll excavate today.
And excavate is a good word in this context, because Trump's doctrine of discovery is all about rare earth.
But first...
Listeners have probably by now come across the story of the Zizians.
It became quite prominent in mainstream news coverage over the last week.
The broad strokes involve an apparent cult from the Bay Area now implicated in six murders across three states.
What makes the group unique is that they're mostly transgender with backgrounds in computer science, and they initially found one another online on hyper-intellectual message boards associated with rationalism and concerns about the dangers of AI. The leader of the group, Ziz Lasota, was arrested on February 16th.
She's a 34-year-old trans woman with a BS in computer engineering who interned both at NASA and Oracle and started a blog in 2016 that would end up attracting the followers now involved in the group.
Two others were arrested with her in Maryland.
They were all dressed in black, armed, and wearing gun belts containing ammunition.
Lasota had radical vegan views.
She calls non-vegans flesh-eating monsters.
And has posted in support of the idea of Nuremberg-style trials from meat-eaters that would happen after the singularity.
Ziz identifies as an anarchist and tried but failed in the past to establish a fleet of boats on which she and her followers could live rent-free to focus on their big philosophical ideas about how to change the world.
She successfully faked her own death.
So to be able to live outside of the system, this just gets...
Wilder and wilder.
This was in 2022 by supposedly falling off a boat in the San Francisco Bay, and there was a massive search for her, and they were trawling the bay.
It's very Scientology, like the Sea Org.
I guess it's their own version of it.
That's right.
That's right.
Now, after this episode, the group, and they're very much still alive but now disguised in a blonde wig, Ziz, rented space in a makeshift trailer park with little access to electricity and running water in Vallejo, California.
And here, a dispute in 2022 over months of unpaid rent would end up with their landlord losing an eye and having a samurai sword driven through his chest.
Yeah.
After having shot and killed one member of the group as they were attempting to kill him.
Now, that man, his name is Curtis Lind, survived the attack.
But he was then stabbed to death in November of last year, right before he was set to testify about that incident.
A few days after that murder, two other members of the group were involved in a Vermont shootout that resulted in the deaths of a Border Patrol agent and another one of the Zizians.
The shootout followed several days of surveillance by Homeland Security due to reports that the two were armed.
And dressed in black tactical gear when checking into a hotel.
And then the guns that were purchased by one of the associates arrested with Zizla Sota, who was also suspected of murdering her parents in Pennsylvania, by the way, back in 2022, a month or so after the samurai sword incident.
So this is a complicated and sensational story.
But there's a little background here about how we seem to have gotten to this point.
In the early years of her blog, Ziz and her friends participated in a community organized around Elisia Liudowsky's website called Less Wrong, as well as an organization called the Center for Applied Rationality.
Both of these were hubs for people interested, as they still are, for people interested in science-informed rationalism and being more aware of how logical fallacies and cognitive biases affect our thinking.
So many in this community are also interested in what's called effective altruism, which is a movement that tries to use evidence and reason to discern the best ways to help others.
And that's somewhat controversial.
Some effective altruism proponents are also involved in animal rights activism.
So we see perhaps the vegan connection.
Now, Yudowsky...
He had also been involved in AI research and development, but he became increasingly concerned that AI poses existential risks to humanity, and he speculated about the potential necessity of halting AI development and destroying rogue data centers with military airstrikes in this op-ed he wrote for Time magazine in 2023. One of the topics that was debated in the forums associated with the Center for Applied Rationality and Less Wrong Is this
wild thought experiment called Rocco's Basilisk.
And this basically postulates the evolution of an AI superintelligence with godlike powers to reach back into the past and create simulations that torture those who have failed to participate.
Oh, wow.
So it's just a loop.
Yeah.
If you didn't help in my creation, I'm going to punish you.
And then I suppose you will have helped in my creation.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
Through simulations.
So this gets hyper, hyper abstract.
And the thought experiment was rejected by Yudowsky, but the idea seems to have created some panic within those communities, especially amongst those linked to Ziz.
Participants in those forums became concerned with the ideas that Ziz would bring into these discussions.
For example, as I mentioned before, she called non-vegans flesh-eating monsters who had created a hell on earth for animals.
And she saw animals as having the status of persons.
So meat eaters should therefore be punished for their actions.
Ziz also advanced a theory, and this is where it gets really even more fascinating and wild, that...
Two halves of the brain, the two halves of the brain that we each have, contain two distinct gendered identities which want to kill one another.
And she created this method called unihemispheric sleep in which one eye is kept open and stimulated while the other eye is closed and that side of the body is sort of going to sleep.
Supposedly, one side of the body and the brain, according to this theory, can sleep while the other is still awake.
And this exercise is meant to reveal the reality of actually being two people in one body, and thereby to lead eventually to the state that Ziz claims herself to inhabit, called being double good.
In reality, unihemispheric sleep likely disoriented and sleep-deprived vulnerable new recruits, thereby giving Ziz greater influence over their beliefs and their behaviors.
The executive director of the Center for Applied Rationality, this is someone named Anna Salomon, has said she was never more viscerally afraid of anyone than she was of Ziz.
And so the group was eventually barred from that organization after concerns were voiced on the forum about them potentially gaining access to weapons.
And in 2019, Ziz and three others were arrested for blocking the entrance to a CIFAR retreat while dressed in black robes and wearing Guy Fawkes masks, you know, like the anonymous people do, yelling slogans associated with the beliefs that I've just been detailing.
And that was the first of what has now become a string of escalating encounters with the legal system.
So back to the present Ziz.
Ziz and her accomplices were denied bail in Maryland last Tuesday.
And another member appeared in a California court on Friday on murder charges.
There's links in the show notes for listeners who want to go deeper and try and make sense of all of this.
But there are several aspects of the story that are fascinating in terms of our beat.
This does sound like a cult, a group in which the leader has developed a practice called unihemispheric sleep, which may amplify their power and influence.
Vulnerable people who don't fit in with mainstream society are drawn to the ideas and the mission of an intense and eloquent leader.
So far, all of that is very familiar in terms of cults and gurus.
Yeah, tracks.
But the first unique piece is that the outsider status of members in this case has to do with gender orientation.
And that is also the site of this indoctrination technique of sleep deprivation and an amplification of internal conflict.
And this then overlaps with a kind of political extremism around diet and anarchist rejection of social norms.
The twist in the tale is how an interest in rationalism and effective altruism can, over time, give rise to an obsession with this hyper-abstract science fiction theology about a malevolent god-like future AI that must be stopped.
Then there's the shootout with Homeland Security, and that suggests a terror group kind of profile.
But all of the other chaotic, violent events seem to be more about interpersonal grievances.
And they happened across three states without much seeming planned coordination or political message.
What do you think about this, Matthew?
I mean, it's a very, very strange story.
And I just want to say, first of all, I think it's really good that we're beyond the brick-and-mortar retreat center phase of cultic organizations.
Because, I mean, one thing is these folks seem to be so online and otherwise bohemian that their numbers would likely remain very small and the body count limited.
I am pretty worried that their transness will intensify the ongoing purge of trans people now coming from the top of the culture.
But on the other hand, I don't think anything is about to slow that down.
I mean, to the extent that that is even a factor, and I mean, who knows?
There's so many other things going on.
Yeah, it does add an unfortunate kind of...
Yeah, and I'd say that if a dominant culture spends 10 years telling millions of trans people that they're insane destroyers of the culture, a few might start acting the part.
I mean, who knows?
And we do see here heavy doses of black and white apocalypse utopian thinking.
Unihemispheric sleep sounds like Ziz was reading Julian Jaynes and dialing up the binary symbolisms and tensions to 11 to reinforce the bicameral hallucinatory mind where the genders are battling, the natural brain is battling with AI. It does have an internal logic to me, and if I had zero filters on the insanity around me, I don't know, honestly, what I would be up to.
So I see things like this increasingly as symptomatic rather than extraordinary.
Like, there's a pocket of folks who, for whatever reason...
They have just attenuated.
They've soaked in the purest forms of the era's anxieties, and they're just mainlining them.
And as you point out, there is a cultic structure at play where a charismatic individual can really be at the center of things.
But honestly, if you put the themes aside, we're describing this behavioral chaos, and it's actually not that different.
These days, from me imagining, like, Musk, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Pete Hegseth, all in the same cyber truck, loaded up with drugs, like, flooring it to the Canadian border, except, like, they have world-conquering power.
So, you know, those are my thoughts.
Also, did you see that Musk tweeted on Sunday that we are on the event horizon for the Singularity?
So I was thinking like, maybe Ziz will meet him there and put him on trial or something.
In 2024, we did 10 episodes or so on Project 2025.
Julian, you and I were actually discussing it back in 2023 on a show.
And we did not stop the landslide.
That has come about.
If you'd only been a little bit more detailed, a little bit more urgent in your reporting, if you'd only read the 900 pages twice or three times.
I know personally that I have a sort of visceral reaction when I'm seeing these social media posts of people or news organizations that are going into Trump-leaning counties and cities and talking to Trump supporters who are like, we didn't know this was going to happen.
And there's been a lot of them in a month.
And I was working.
I'm going through my own emotions on this topic because I really don't want to be the told-you-so person.
But I will say it's my immediate reaction.
Now, that doesn't mean I have to publicly act it out and I don't.
But I also think it's something beyond schadenfreude because the reality is we knew, and I think a lot of people knew and recognized, that this movement of Project 2025 is coming for everyone.
And so it's not like we can say, aha, told you so, and now you're going to suffer.
No, we're all suffering from this, and it's only going to get worse.
So before I get into the focus, which is called the Project 2025 Observer, just wondering how you guys feel about the rollout of Project 2025 so far.
I mean, I think what you're describing, Derek, I'm experiencing it too, and it's this...
This real disconnect between the actual policy agenda of the administration coming in, which they broadcast for everyone to read, knowing that very few people were going to read a 900-page document and try and make sense of it.
The disconnect between that and the performative politics of MAGA. And, you know, of course, Trump saying, I don't know anything about Project 2025. What are you talking about, right?
That's a big, I mean, it's emblematic of our time that policy takes a second place to theater.
And, you know, they're doing exactly what they said they would do.
I had no doubt that they would move quickly.
I've been saying this to everyone I've talked to about it, that the first hundred days are going to be very quick, but I couldn't have imagined that it would be this forceful, this destructive, this sort of just brute force, you know, blunt instrument stupid.
And being done via executive order, which of course is why they're able to do that.
And then using the completely illegitimate authority of Doge to sidestep Congress and the courts, I'm devastated and anxious and disoriented.
And my heart really breaks for all of the sincere and qualified government employees who are being summarily dismissed and they're being smeared as corrupt and wasteful and, you know, whatever else, political activists by these absolutely sadistic goons.
And, you know, I wake up thinking every day, there are things happening right now that will negatively impact so many people for years to come, and they are undoing so many crucial services in a system that was already lacking, but we're going to find out just how much worse it can get.
I think this transition will live in infamy.
If and only if there are still history books written once it's finished.
History TikToks.
That's what we're going to have it on.
I have some thoughts, Derek, but I wanted to pick up on what you said about being careful around I told you so and schadenfreude.
Yes, there is a really crude version of, yeah, well, you're all going to suffer now.
You were so stupid.
And we see that in discussions, post-electoral discussions and so on.
But like, there's also, there are other shades of not schadenfreude necessarily, but I told you so manners that I think we might want to pay attention to because I don't think they're helpful.
Like, I think it shows up when sometimes I'm even impatient with people, right?
Like, any, I think it's very easy.
In social media contexts especially, to convey the impression that somehow the person that you're trying to convey good information to just hasn't gotten it and that they're irritating you.
And I think we really got to pay attention to that because it really doesn't help anything.
It really extends the kind of acrimony that's at the heart of social media that is part of this whole sort of...
You know, era and where we find ourselves in our condition.
Well, I think some of the Schadenfreude too or like Schadenfreude adjacent kind of emotional reactions, it really is people like us wanting to say, oh, you thought it was only going to be for, you know, the illegal immigrants and the trans people that you think are weird.
Well, it's actually going to affect you and your extended family and all of us.
Yeah.
I mean, your question was about...
Project 2025, Derek, and I think to me it really shows that a coup needs several fronts and faces and tones and aesthetics to crystallize around what we were talking about last week with Paxton describing this uneasy but also effective coalition that ends up being at the heart of the fascist fever.
And at this point, we have these simultaneous but also consecutive methods and discourses going on, you know, and we can track it back to, I'm going to miss some, but like Rush Limbaugh on the rise of do your research, rage baiting, the Tea Party, Pat Buchanan, outsiderism, evangelical white grievance.
And then LARPing on something awful that, you know, Dale Buran told us all about and how the chans lead to a full QAnon deployment on Facebook.
And then we have the techno-fascist dreams of Curtis Yarvin and his acolytes, the MAGA rally movement.
Project 2025 is nested in within all of those other discourses, including the Maha movement that, you know, brings the mamas on side.
And then Trump is this...
I think in some ways it feels to me like Project 2025 is the most coherent and dependable discourse of the bunch.
It's like their Bible.
And they can be apostates.
They can break the rules.
They can break the commandments.
But they'll come back to it just by virtue of its textuality and comprehensiveness.
It's like an anchor.
I'm sure it's like a touchstone amidst all of the chaos and gives them a sense that they have a plan beyond their own...
I wonder if it keeps Elon moderately focused as he stumbles around in a K-hole and wanders away from his four-year-old at public events.
I wonder if he was in a K-hole with a chainsaw.
That would be very dangerous.
Was it running?
Or was it just a prop?
I think it was just a prop, but who knows?
I want to give a shout-out to John Ganz's book, When the Clock Broke, because you invoked both Rush Limbaugh and Pap Buchanan there in that list.
I'm constantly reading Ganz's work, and it's sort of like showing how we kind of always skip over the 90s as a moment of what is going on now.
We really focus on the 60s, 70s, and 80s especially.
He picks it up in the 90s, and that's what the book is about.
But back to the Project 2025, if you are overwhelmed at what they're doing, where it comes from, and how and if it relates to that document, A user, someone over on Patreon and a few other platforms named Rustic Gorilla has created the Project 2025 tracker at project2025.observer.
It's linked to in the show notes.
They list 34 agencies and the number of Project 2025 objectives attached to each.
So just for example...
In that document, USAID has six objectives.
They are 100% complete now.
The Department of State has nine objectives, 89% complete.
The EPA, 13 objectives, 46% complete.
The FCC, three objectives, 0% complete.
So they're kind of lagging in a few of them, though.
Oh, boy.
Rustic Gorilla lists detailed project objectives along with the sources of progress and the exact page it's written on Project 2025. So this person is doing a lot of work here.
And it's a wonderful example of citizen journalism.
It's the perfect link to share with people to let them know what's going on.
It won't make any of this less egregious, but at least you'll know...
This or that defunding, mass firing, or destruction of an agency was part of the Heritage Foundation's plan or not.
And we can see how Trump is implementing it in real time via the links.
I also want to note, we are an independent media company.
You can support Rustic Grill on Patreon, where he, or they, I don't know who it is, I should say, publishes deep dive articles on topics related to the Trump administration.
Or you can do what I do.
You can buy the person a coffee.
There's a link for that.
And both links are featured in the header and footer on their project 2025.observer websites. Comedy fans, listen up. I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your cue. Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone. You
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Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast with Benjamin Boster.
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That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
Okay, let's not think at all about Trump for a few minutes, because fuck him.
And also let's reach for some post-colonial perspective.
In 1950, Aimé Césaire, he's the Martinique poet and politician, he remarked that fascism was the imperial boomerang of the colonial period, that Hitler and Mussolini had done to their people what they would continue to do in the colonies.
And a lot of colonized people and theorists have known and talked about for a long time what it means to have imperial spells cast on them.
They've never sugar-coated what tyrants have always been up to, and they've always had creative ways of facing it down.
And that's why I want to introduce you...
Both and our listeners to a guy named Burnham Burnham.
On January 26th, 1988, I was 17 years old and I read about this in the papers at the time.
Burnham, he's 53 years old.
He's this...
Burly dude with a long snow-white beard, and he's standing in the sand under the cliffs of Dover, and he plants the black, red, and gold flag of the First Nations peoples of Australia, and he also unfurls a declaration on this nice parchment paper, and it's handwritten in this old-timey cursive that he probably learned in residential school, and it begins like this.
I, Burnham Burnham.
Being a nobleman of ancient Australia, do hereby take possession of England on behalf of the Aboriginal people.
In claiming this colonial outpost, we wish no harm to you natives, but assure you that we are here to bring you good manners, refinement, and an opportunity to make a kumpartu a fresh start.
An Aboriginal face shall appear on your coins and stamps to signify our sovereignty over this domain.
Okay, so this guy is a television actor at the time.
He's a vociferous Indigenous rights activist, and he's taking the piss out of the British Empire.
But specifically, he's mocking something called the Doctrine of Discovery, which had governed his body and his life right down to his original Australian-given name.
So Burnham Burnham means great warrior, but he adopted this name as an adult from the Wurundjeri, which is one of the nations that he discovered he came from.
But he was raised under the name of Harry Penrith and was one of Australia's stolen generation.
He was kidnapped into a residential school at the age of three and taught that his black skin was bad.
Now, I'll return at the end to some of the details of his satire, but at the heart of it, he's saying that the colonial impulse is built...
On an absurd narcissism that believes in magical language practices, that by naming a thing as you please, you actually change its reality.
And yet the thing that he's satirizing, right, it's the imperial kind of instinct.
You sail up to the shore, you plant your flag in the name of your king or queen, who have been anointed, of course, by the one true God.
And what backward heathen native people could have any grounds to object with that?
Well, they don't have flags, Julian.
They don't have coats of arms.
They don't have, you know, feather quills, right?
Yeah, and even more to the point, they don't have the kind of superior firepower that a colonizing force has.
And this was not just a Christian European practice.
We know that the Mongols, the Chinese, the Ottomans to name but a few ruled massive areas for hundreds of years.
It's easy to forget that just a little over 100 years ago, World War I was fought between enormous empires built by entitled conquest, like the type that's being referred to here.
And then World War II was about resisting Hitler's agenda to build another by invasion and genocide.
So this is what to me is so terrifying about how we now have people with no respect for the post-war institutions that have worked to perpetuate democracy.
As imperfectly as it has been via strength and alliance against dictators like the now emergent Putin.
Yeah, who, like Trump, positions himself as a populist.
I'm just going to throw that in there because you pinged World War I. Yeah.
Now, about Trump and naming things, we know he's a financially bankrupt bullshitter who's woven an illusion of wealth by rebranding his name basically decade by decade.
He's a huge fan of language games.
He's always tagging opponents with these fuck-you nicknames like Little Marco and Lion Ted, Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe.
He's got a knack for the punchy two-word combo.
So the most recent one is Governor Trudeau.
And we understand via Josie Reisman his neo-kayfabe technique that politics is a game that's real.
It is reality that's gamified.
You tell the story you want to hear and you see if people bite, and then you bite them with the story by making it happen.
Now, when he and his toadies make declarative statements that sound batshit, you know, this is now going to be the Gulf of America.
It's now going to be red, white, and blue land.
Canada is now going to be the 51st state.
Like, we can have an instinct reasonably to laugh it off.
We were talking about this in editorial, like whether this is a new iteration of Freedom Fries, and it might be.
Like, you don't know.
That's the neo-kayfabe part of it.
But then if we listen to Caroline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, on why the White House has chucked the AP out of the Oval Office pool, she says this.
I was very upfront in my briefing on day one that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable.
And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America.
And I'm not sure why news outlets don't want to call it that, but that is what it is.
The Secretary of Interior has made that the official designation in the Geographical Identification Name Server, and Apple has recognized that.
Google has recognized that.
Pretty much every other outlet in this room has recognized that body of water as the Gulf of America.
And it's very important to this administration that we get that right, not just for people here at home, but also for the rest of the world.
So many of us heard this, but did we really hear it?
Because I think if we think she's just lying or spreading misinformation, we might not be getting it when she says it is a fact.
She's adding to a series of what are known as declarative speech acts that are intended to change the reality and legal status of a thing, in this case, a territory.
It's not just psychological.
It's not just repressive.
It's not just cultic.
It's not Orwellian.
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final, most essential command.
It's not even solely reliant on 20th century authoritarianism.
Trump's obvious expansionist aims, his racism, the way he heaps scorn on shithole countries.
And his penchant for making things real by speech and performance alone, this is something that's really common in the venerable European tradition.
And Derek, so you've got this thing on discovery doctrine.
What's the 101?
Right.
I became interested in what's known as the doctrine of discovery shortly after I moved to Oregon in 2022. It's the fourth state I've lived in, and every state I've always taken some interest in the history of the region.
But I decided moving forward.
I really wanted to know as much about the state in the Pacific Northwest.
So I've been reading a lot of history books about the ecology and about the politics.
And amazingly, one of the first things I found out is Oregon is the only state that was founded with black exclusionary laws that were written into the state constitution.
I could unpack this over the course of episodes, but the TLDR, slave-owning and black-hating whites from the South saw the temperature shift as abolition grew, and they fled to the West Coast, not necessarily to own slaves, which was actually illegal in this territory, but to be as far away from black people as possible.
And yes, there was some slavery here, and black people did live here to take part in fur trading and logging industries well before the state was founded.
The law gave them a few months to relocate or they were subject to public lashings.
That didn't last long, but then there were a few other amendments.
So it was actually on the books for nearly a century that blacks were not allowed here.
Now, while the Oregon Trail lives in the American mind as a romantic period of discovery, the actual background is really complicated.
Now, you had the aforementioned racists, but you also had farmers who realized the Dust Bowl middle of America wasn't cutting it for their career and sustenance.
You had a whole host of religious missionaries.
Enthusiastic East Coasters who fantasized about the pristine Pacific Northwest.
It was really presented as a sort of utopia in the literature, the newspapers at the time.
You also had a whole host of foreign interests.
The British, French, Spanish, and Russians all had land claims here.
And of course, you had the Chinook people, including the Multnomah and Clackamas tribes, and you had the Klamath tribes.
So the growing American empire would use the doctrine of discovery to force all of them out.
Now, as much as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are remembered as brave explorers, They were first and foremost businessmen.
They were sent by Thomas Jefferson to expand American interests.
And in order to justify his crusade, Jefferson needed the law to codify his conquest.
He found it in the Supreme Court, whose members borrowed liberally and literally from European discovery laws.
Here's the historical gist.
When white Christian men discovered, that's in quotes, new land, they granted themselves sovereign and property rights if the people already there were not Christian or white.
These laws date back to the actual Crusades when the Pope claimed his church had a divine mandate to civilize everything and everyone.
And in 1434, Papal Bull, Pope Eugenius IV said the church had to convert infidels because they don't share a common religion or law.
They lack social intercourse, money, metal, writing, and European-style clothing, and they live like animals.
This is why everybody has to read the first opening section of Dawn of Everything, where all of that's turned on its head, right?
Yeah, yeah.
People aren't socialized or they're not civilized or whatever.
They don't have trade.
They don't have trade.
They don't clean themselves.
They don't house each other properly.
All of that's turned on his head.
I could spend an hour now talking about...
Pre-colonial agriculture in the Pacific Northwest and how a lot of the wildfires we're experiencing right now are because the Europeans thought the natives were doing it wrong.
Yeah, exactly.
We got to move on.
So among other conquests, such as the Cape Verde Islands and sovereign territories like Castile and Lyon, the Papal bulls were used to justify Christopher Columbus's expedition and the subsequent colonization of America.
Fast forward four centuries and the U.S. Supreme Court codified Portuguese discovery doctrines to exploit the indigenous and kick out foreign interests from all throughout America.
Officially, it was introduced into U.S. municipal law by Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in the 1823 decision Johnson v.
McIntosh.
And it basically declares that private citizens cannot purchase land from Native Americans, but all good if the government seizes it.
The rationalization for this law is that the indigenous need protection from the oppression of others.
But in this context, the others were the French, Spanish, everyone, not the European colonizers who were now running the US government.
Now, this all might sound like ancient history, but it really is not.
I read a book in my research called Native America Discovered and Conquered by Arizona State Law Professor Robert J. Miller, and he points out that some of these discovery laws are still being used in the 21st century.
They remain on the books even today.
So he writes, The doctrine is still...
Miller points out that as recently as 2005, and his book was written about 2012, so there could be newer instances of this, but he cited, he showed that discovery was cited in a case called City of Shirelle v.
Oneida, India, Nation of New York.
And this is a Supreme Court case that ruled that the Oneida Indian Nation could not regain tribal sovereignty over land it had repurchased to build casinos on.
The Oneida Indian Nation purchased that land in the 90s.
They were using casino profits and they wanted to claim sovereignty.
But the city argued that the land was not to be tax exempt.
Now, the court found that the unilateral reestablishment of tribal sovereignty would be impractical, and it would burden state and local governments.
And they cited discovery to do that?
Yes, correct.
So this is the nation trying to repurchase its own territory.
We don't know the treaty status of any of that, but the town is just getting in the way and saying it would be too much of a bother.
And by the way, Discovery is there.
They repurchased it, so they owned it.
But when they claimed sovereignty so they would be tax-exempt, that's when it went to court.
Yeah.
And Discovery was used in that time to block them from being tax-exempt.
You can have the land, but Discovery says that we have to tax you for it.
Yes, correct.
Correct.
And I want to point out that in this book, he also cites a number of Canadian...
court battles where the indigenous people won because your government was actually a little bit more like, oh, we should make amends here while the US government was like, no, we're going to keep the 15th century Portuguese laws on the books here.
Yeah, we're good.
We're good.
So the colonial laws around discovery afforded colonizers four main benefits.
First, they have a preemptive right to control and regulate sale of Indian lands.
They control all trade and commercial activities between Indians and the colonists.
Their intervention allegedly benefits tribal nations in order to help them progress to a civilized state, and they are allowed to exercise sovereign authority over Indian nations.
I should also point out that Richard J. Miller is Native American and has family ties So he's writing from both historical and research and academic perspective, but also personal experience.
How did they gain such rights?
According to them, by winning the Revolutionary War.
Of course.
How did the Europeans implement it?
Well, this is great.
Great, as in horrifying.
Lewis and Clark handed out American sovereignty tokens to tribal leaders along the Oregon Trail as they were traveling.
The original inhabitants, the native people, thought they were just getting strange tokens.
But the American government was actually assigning leaders to already established groups, saying, we're going to deal with you when we come back.
So later, when they returned, those token holders were considered the men to negotiate with, and when they failed to achieve their ends by negotiating with them, they then took them to battle.
Now, woven into this history is the colonizer concept of terra nullius, a land that is null or void.
They believed falsely that indigenous people didn't know how to minister to the land, and so they would manage that.
They used biblical decree, which blinded them to the fact that other people also hold property rights.
Oregon State University professor emeritus William Robin writes in a great book called Landscapes of Promise, quote, Americans held a transcendental belief in their mandate to reorder natural systems.
That also ties into the agriculture stuff that I pointed out a few minutes ago.
Now, I also found this clip from a mid-19th century Vancouver, Washington newspaper.
And for those who don't know, Vancouver, Washington is just a two-minute bridge over the Columbia from Portland, so it's very close.
They wrote, quote, So why do the colonies want this land so badly?
A message is resident then, as with today's current administration, what we're going through.
Money and power.
The coast was as close to China and the lucrative fur trade as they could get.
And the land was also perfect for certain forms of agriculture, fishing and timber, all of which became huge industries here.
And that is how the doctrine of discovery was implemented in America.
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Okay, I want to pick up on some of the oldest threads of what you laid out, Derek.
The OG oligarchs who wanted a legal framework to cover their asses with a veneer of Christian morality, you know...
That goes way back to the pre-Crusade era, and it supplanted older and more honest forms, I guess, of annexation or land theft, which would include conquest by battle, making actual treaties, occupation or squatting, or more gradual forms of integration or digestion.
But all of those methods take time, they take resources, they take boots on the ground, they take commitment and sustained patriotic fervor from a supportive population.
But we always, throughout history, have lazy narcissist tyrants who want to take shortcuts, and the doctrine of discovery is really made for them.
Now, the Roman Catholic Church's blessing on the doctrine of discovery isn't just a byproduct of their own colonial and evangelical aspirations.
I would argue it's also baked into the fabric of its epistemology, because the central ritual of the Catholic faith...
Involves a declarative speech act that's purported to transform bread and wine into flesh and blood.
Like, this is a deeply held, deeply rehearsed belief that reaches into present-day and modern-day brains.
Even my own, like, from the time that I, as a young boy in the Catholic Church, understood what the moment of transubstantiation was supposed to be.
I would get this full-body shiver every time the priest raised the host and uttered the words, this is my body, and then the altar boy rings the bells.
Like, if I went back to Mass today, I think this would still happen, actually.
I would feel that shiver, and it's part of what I hear when I see rando MAGA followers talk about Trump in almost mystical terms.
So that language has also extended into Congress.
Like, I've heard a number of representatives say things like, he really is a special type of leader once in a century, once in a lifetime.
Now, the church doesn't have a monopoly on declarative speech.
Like, we are all doing this all the time.
We have always had oral contracts, pronouncements of marriage, enacting laws, dubbing knights, swearing in cabinet members, baptisms of children, swearing to be truthful in court, pronouncements of innocence or guilt.
The sentencing of criminals.
These are all done through the power of speech.
And at this moment, like, there are kids in the schoolyard down the street from me who are claiming territory or their order in the playing order of a game by yelling, called it, right?
It all works on the same principle of the magic of speech.
And the linguists break down...
These general sort of declarative acts into locution, illocution, and perlocution, or the sounds that are made, the intentions behind them, and the outcomes.
And with discovery doctrine and similar declarations, we see the power of them to the extent that those three divisions are collapsed together.
So the sound, the intention, and the outcome are singular and instantaneous.
And so I guess I wanted to ask some questions of you guys about this because I'm interested in whether Trump is just exploiting some weird thing that we're all doing all the time anyway.
And I guess a question to get at that would be, what exactly is the difference between a declarative speech act, like I pronounce you or by the power invested in me as president, or I sentence you, and a magical spell?
Like what's – like is he just sort of hacking something that is innate to us?
Well, you're listing a set of traditions and conventions that over time have then come to be backed up with like court documents and various forms of bureaucracy that make them legal.
But I think when I hear the press secretary defending the fact that it's – it's a fact that it's called the Gulf of America and you hear Trump saying the different things he's saying.
I see a lot of that as a smokescreen, as a sort of hypnotic misdirection or something, you know, some way of putting you in a trance.
hacking into these conventions that you're referring to around language and its power, but really not having power over the real world, except that it distracts us from...
Or until it does.
Or is there a bridging mechanism where...
Where, yeah, there's a smokescreen, but then the way the language is used becomes the foundation for how the legal issues then become litigated.
Yeah, I mean, I think more there's the cultural and the media reality that if you repeat a lie enough times, more people think it's true.
Does it become true?
No, it's still a lie.
But more people may think and act as if it's true.
But then you do still have the machinery of legislation.
Everything that goes along with that.
When you ask the question, the difference, I don't see one.
And I think of the Los Angeles yoga community, for example, because I know vision boards were very big.
And a vision board, you just throw a dozen, 15, however many things on a board.
And if one of them happens, you say it was the board that did it.
You ignore the 14 that didn't actually happen.
Yeah.
Okay.
So here's the second discussion question.
Has MAGA primed followers?
For this kind of slight of speech with free speech fetishism.
Because it seems to me that a potential endgame of, well, I should be able to say what I want without consequence, is actually the more aggressive statement of whatever I say should be recognized as real.
Yes, next question.
The one thing I always think about free speech, what's missing in the argument, is just simple responsibility.
There's an old sort of saying that is what I'm saying.
It might be true, but is it kind?
That's a good heuristic in this sense because entangled with this question of free speech absolutism is also the question of just simple morality.
I can say these things, but as soon as it becomes something that I don't agree with...
All bets are off.
And I think that, yes, I think they have been primed for a long time, but also primed in such a way that you have to be part of that in-group to take part in that speech.
But if you're not part of that in-group, those same rules don't apply to you.
Yeah, and there's been this bizarre inversion of...
Free speech, you know, in the way that it's talked about in the culture and especially online and in the culture wars, which is that it is shifted from we don't think speech should be prohibited if we disagree with it.
We don't think speech, if the powers that be disagree with it, to speech should not be prohibited if it's false and harmful and really damaging to other people.
And that's a massive distinction that somehow got lost in the shuffle.
I should be able to say whatever I want without consequence.
Yeah, that's not the same as free speech, right?
Free speech is actually I'm then free to say, no, you're full of shit.
No, you're lying.
No, I disagree with you because I think that's going to lead to all sorts of people being discriminated against and harmed.
That's the whole point.
That is the biggest problem that I have with how social media operates, Julian.
No, I don't agree with you.
And that is such an important part of discourse that is completely flattened in the absolutist arguments.
Yeah, and I would also add here, Matthew, because it's sort of hovering in the background, like all of this declarative speech theme that you're running with, it also relates then to performative speech, right?
Absolutely.
And to Judith Butler.
And then the question that you're asking also relates to the topic of how we use language around gender orientation and identity as well, right?
And whether or not saying...
That a trans woman is a woman, therefore means it's true, and whether or not misgendering people with pronouns.
So that's all been in the mix as well, is this battle over political language.
I think the last question I have, we are not qualified to answer, and I'm trying to figure out who can help answer it.
But it's really around, what does the acquiescence of the tech companies around language changes imply?
Could it have legal implications on maritime law or shipping that suddenly a part of the world is calling it the Gulf of America?
UN conventions hold that a nation's territorial rights extend.
12 nautical miles from its shoreline and that should limit Trump's ability to rename the entire body of water.
Scheinbaum in Mexico has already vowed international legal action, but I wonder if, yeah, I just wonder what the role of technological acquiescence is going to be, especially as we see this fascistic corporate technological merger.
It's only an extension of government power in this sense, because I think it was Mother Jones about a decade ago wrote an article about the battle for the North Pole.
President Obama recently did a Netflix nature special where he actually talks about this as well, because as all of the ice is melting, a whole bunch of countries, predominantly Russia, but also the US, also China, are claiming shipping lanes on land that previously was actually solid land.
And they're just going ahead and barreling through it with these icebreaker ships.
So I would believe that if you have the technological prowess to change the maps, that only gives you more fuel for that type of argument as to why you should own this or that shipping lane.
Yeah, I mean, it's an issue.
Interesting question.
One of the things that I've been observing, and I'm sure you guys have noticed this too, is that...
Heads of state of other countries, so Mexico, Canada, Denmark, and then Macron just recently, their whole way of dealing with Trump is to just sort of hold their center and kind of smile wryly with a twinkle in their eye like all of this bullshit and then reassert like, okay, you can say these things, but here's what's actually going on in reality.
And I think one of the things that is...
Potentially incredibly scary is when it starts crossing the line into the place where they're kind of holding their ground around what is real and what is true gets met by the brute force of Trump and his cronies.
Well, speaking from Canada, I can say that people are on edge.
You know, we're not sure when the tariffs are going to hit or how hard that's going to be.
It's going to wreck a lot of things.
Trudeau was caught on a hot mic saying that Trump's, you know, he's after the minerals, cobalt, potash, uranium, obscure rare earths that we don't even know what they're for, but evidently Trump's people do.
We all know that that's the endgame.
And there's a concern among us in the left here in Canada that...
Leadership will actually fend off the trade war by agreeing to mine those minerals more extensively here by being even shittier about First Nations treaties and ecological guardrails, which of course is the wrong thing to do.
I think Zelensky is in the same position in Ukraine where he's saying, well, yes, we can make mineral deals, but there have to be security protections.
I'm sure they don't want to give up mineral rights.
Meanwhile, the CBC has taken to interviewing military historians on cross-border relations between U.S. and Canada since the War of 1812, including the 1930s U.S. war plan read to invade Canada, which was a response to our own 1921 plan called Defense Scheme 1. But all of that is super obsolete, I think, given that Trump can activate a million army reservists with one executive order and we can put up about 95,000 troops.
It's also abstract because the cross-border capturing of cities, I think, is unnecessary in the Musk era.
My speculation, and by the way, I can't believe I'm talking about this.
Like five years into this podcast, I'm talking about, I just said the cross-border capturing of cities is unnecessary in the musk air.
I'm like, what fucking podcast is this?
My speculation is that thinking...
In boots-on-the-ground terms is not relevant, given how bloodless Musk's actions have been so far.
It's much easier for me to imagine somebody like our conservative leader, Pierre Poiliev, getting in as PM and handing the government passwords over to Jordan Peterson's Doge affiliate squad, and then suddenly one morning the healthcare system gets turned off.
On the bright side...
All of this has meant that Poiliev is tanking in the polls.
He's sharply down by double digits.
Maybe it's because he spent the last few years saying shit like this, which the Liberal Party has featured in a campaign ad, which is pretty good.
Canada is broken.
It's not the Americans' fault.
It's our fault.
We're stupid.
Everything in Canada is broken.
Canada is broken.
Everything is broken in Canada.
Everything is broken.
I think Canada would be much better off being a 51st state.
Wait, now hold on a second, Matthew.
Is that a montage of different moments in which he said that?
Yeah, he spent years bringing up that line.
And the Liberal Party has a point because it's hard to suddenly be a Canada First patriot when you've sponsored the trucker convoy and you've been acting like a little bootleg shitheel like that.
But he hasn't been leaning into that line in about three weeks now, and that's a silver lining.
And this is a silver lining as well that it's among our boomers that he's doing the worst, which is a total reversal because they were the soft targets for this kind of rhetoric during the QAnon period, but they actually also kind of remember what patriotism means.
But I want to wrap up with this.
I want to get back to Burnham Burnham because he had to find his adopted but ancient name through research.
It really does mean great warrior.
But the sound of its name had been silent for generations.
And throughout the colonized world, folks who want to reconnect with their roots, they have to dig through the wreckage of exploitation and appropriation to re-envision themselves and to recreate the past so they can re-imagine the future.
So when I do things like visit the Ojibwe Cultural Center on Michigang land of Manitoulin Island, There are posters on the walls, and they're in English.
And the posters are for language and writing classes in Ojibwe.
And when I go to the powwow, I see kids learning their first lessons in regalia.
And this one time I saw a granny taking metal baubles, probably made in China, out of a Walmart bag to sew onto a little girl's jingle dress.
And so my point is that we're all in the consideration of what it means to preserve who we are.
And, you know, that involves our values and ways of caring for each other.
And Indigenous people know that this isn't purely a defensive project and that you don't have time for purism when you're trying to survive.
So I'm really inspired by people who have survived by reimagining and recreating dignity from whatever is available.
And I think everybody can learn from that because they know that defensiveness is not enough.
They know that you have to assert yourself, that it's not just about refusing the language that somebody like Trump imposes, but it's also about telling your own story and telling it louder.
And fighting their magic with a kind of your own.
And so I wanted to end with Burnham Burnham and a bit of a laugh, seeing what else he had to say that day in Dover.
And Julian, maybe you can read the rest of his take there.
We will teach you how to have a spiritual relationship with the earth and show you how to get bush tucker.
Oh yeah, bush tucker, by the way, means forage nuts and berries from the wild.
We do not intend to souvenir, pickle, and preserve the heads of 2,000 of your people, nor to publicly display the skeletal remains of your royal highness as was done to our queen Truganini for 80 years.
Neither do we intend to poison your waterholes, lace your flower with strychnine, or introduce you to highly toxic drugs.
Based on our 50,000-year heritage, we acknowledge the need to preserve the Caucasian race as of interest to antiquity.
Although we may be inclined to conduct experiments.
by measuring the size of your skulls for levels of intelligence.
We pledge not to sterilize your women, nor to separate your children from their families.
We give an absolute undertaking that you shall not be placed onto the mentality of government handouts for the next five generations, but you will enjoy the full benefits of Aboriginal equality.
At the end of 200 years, we will make a treaty to validate occupation by peaceful means and Is this guy Brian Johnson?
He's going to live 200 years to make sure the treaty's signed?
