Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman cover the chilling detention of Khalil Mahmoud, a Columbia grad student who simply participated in campus protests and is now facing the full weight of the corrupt Department of Justice under the command of Donald Trump. There is some encouraging pushback in protests at Tesla dealerships and unruly GOP Town Halls, and they encourage progressives to fight back now before the authoritarianism hardens.
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Well, we'll move very, very quickly away from the good into the bad.
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And Nick, I... I think I speak for both of us when I say there are no days off anymore.
Every single episode at this point is keeping track of just a growing and mutating list of fuckery.
But on the flip side, then, that means every day is Friday for the Friday news dump, right?
It's like every day is Friday now.
So, all right, great.
All right, everybody.
We've got to talk about a disturbing escalation that has happened over the weekend.
On Saturday night at Columbia University with the student housing there, Mahmoud Khalil, one of the leaders of the Gaza protest at Columbia University, a holder of a green card, was arrested as his eight-months-pregnant wife protested and was herself an American citizen threatened with arrest and detainment.
Since then, Khalil has seemingly been lost in the system.
There are rumors that he has been moved to Louisiana with possible deportation.
His lawyer, his wife, haven't necessarily known where he's been.
This has also kicked off.
We didn't know what the Trump administration was going to say about this.
Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, With power that he doesn't have, an authority he doesn't have, has said that they're going to start revoking visas and green cards of people who are, quote, pro-Hamas, whatever the hell that means.
The President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, has weighed in, saying, quote, Following my previously signed executive orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a radical foreign pro-Hamas student on the campus of Columbia University.
This is the first arrest of many to come.
He says that he's going to work with universities across the country in going after pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.
Many are not students, they are paid agitators.
Nick, this is an escalation of something that we saw coming, something that we have heard that they were going to do, and yet watching the United States of America disappear, a person with legal constitutional protections is infuriating and also just beyond disturbing.
Chilling.
It's chilling.
It's exactly what we've seen in other countries that are taken over by authoritarianism.
And the question then that you have is why?
Why him now?
Why is he the first?
Right?
They clearly didn't have any background on him because they didn't do that much research.
They had no idea what his status was.
They thought he had a student visa.
They're like, well, your student visa is revoked.
You're coming with us.
And he goes, what are you talking about?
I have a green card.
Oh, well, that's revoked, too.
Like, basically, over the phone, they're calling people and trying to make all this happen at once.
You know, it's just indicative of the fact that they don't care enough to have any sense of, like, the things that you're not supposed to get wrong.
Like, I have to imagine if this gets to court, which it better get to court, as soon as they present the evidence of them not even knowing whether he has a green card or whatever, or a student visa, like, they're just going to dismiss this case, like, and say you're free to go and you can sue, you know, the ICE people if you like.
You know what I mean?
But that's the question, is why did they pick him?
I almost feel like they might have picked him because it was easiest to find his address.
Well, I mean, I think that there might be some validity to that.
I also think it doesn't hurt that he is a Palestinian.
And I think it's very, very clear at this point that the Trump administration, and again, we're talking about authoritarianism here, which is how these people work.
They look for divides and weaknesses.
In this case, what we're watching is the beginnings of an authoritarian program to deport people, to disappear people, which is a hallmark of authoritarianism throughout time.
Every regime does this.
They'll throw them into a maze of bureaucracy that is tuned and designed in order to disappear people, in order to torture them, in order to deny them rights and protections.
But Nick, it's taking advantage of the liberal, progressive, nascent left coalition and what happened last year, especially during the student protest of the atrocities in Gaza.
And they're basically making a bet at this point that the fact that Khalil is Palestinian, the fact that he is engaged in these protests, and the fact that there has been that schism within the liberal coalition, that...
People aren't going to push back on this thing.
That a lot of people are going to say, you know what, good riddance.
You know, they're not worried about it.
And over time, they can continue to encroach.
And in the old analogy of the boiling pot, just turning the temperature up over time.
And we cannot allow that to happen.
This is a red line in the sand.
And there's no going back if we're going to continue down this road.
Absolutely, because there's no reason to think that they wouldn't stop at just Hamas-supporting rallies.
They could go into the gay marriage.
And by the way, Hamas-supporting is like fighting in their territory.
This was a Gaza protest.
It wasn't a pro-Hamas protest.
Right.
And by the way, I am officially anti-Hamas.
I think that they have forfeited their right to have any dominion over anything going on in Gaza as a political party.
But I certainly can't tell anybody that they can't.
You could march in favor of Hamas.
Like, that's supposedly legal in this country.
We have people with Nazi signs and Nazi flags marching around the United States of America.
Right.
I think it's horrible, and you heard some really incendiary things on Columbia's campus, and I sort of...
I shook my head at that, but I also said they deserve protections of the Constitution to be able to do that, and then hopefully learn a little bit more about stuff.
Maybe they don't want to support that, but the point being is that it is chilling and scary, especially when they're saying this is just the first.
They're going to get more people, and that's...
This is, you know, people want to try and just sort of poo-poo this and say, oh, it's just a one-off and whatever.
But not only is it they're threatening to do it more, but it's going to try and dissuade more people from having these rallies.
And so, in theory, what, and this might be part of the plan of the White House, is great.
Let's get more people out there who are really upset about this vocally doing this.
They'll just come to us.
We'll be able to deport them from the rally itself.
Like, that might be what their thinking is.
Well, I think there's a lot to unpack in that.
First things first, I find it absolutely disgusting that Trump came out and said this is the first of many and took responsibility for this.
But we're actually lucky that he did that.
The ability of our press to really sort of talk about this and really give it the gravitas that it deserves and to treat it the way it should is not...
It's going to be a lot of independent media.
It's going to be a lot of progressives and leftists like ourselves who are going to showcase this.
And the fact that Trump took responsibility for it and bragged that he was going to do it more, that's actually good in actually mobilizing people and making them understand what's occurring.
The next part of this is...
A lot of the damage was done during those protests.
Those students were brutalized by police.
They were brutalized by right-wing mobs who attacked them out in the open in concert with law enforcement.
And I have to tell you, and I want to remind people because maybe they memory hold this, a lot of liberals came out in favor of that brutality.
They came out and supported it and said, you know, good riddance.
In fact, a lot of people even cheered it on and even hoped that it would get worse.
And maybe that even some of these students...
Could possibly be killed in the process.
It was a disgusting moment.
That has dissuaded people from protesting.
It's dissuaded people from stepping up, going out in the streets, and it's part of a large, quiet intimidation that's taken place.
As law enforcement has been armed to the teeth, they become a domestic army that goes out and takes care of these people and is part of the authoritarian project.
This has been building for a long time.
The last thing I want to mention on this unpacking is this, Nick.
We talked about this last week, which was Columbia University was being targeted by the Trump administration.
They had $400 million in federal funding taken away.
And by the way, do not cry for Columbia University.
They have a $14.8 billion endowment, and it's growing.
So on one hand, that's bad enough.
The next is what Columbia did, which said immediately, we will cooperate with the Trump administration in all of this.
It's likely that they worked with the Trump administration in order to facilitate this arrest of Khalil.
We'll find out whenever more details come out.
Well, I just want to say that this is part of the institutional administrative capture that I've been talking about, which is we are going to see the institutions throughout the country get in line and help the authoritarian project as it happens.
And again, we're being herded into a place, and once that gate gets closed and we do not have the ability to protest or else we might be disappeared or sent to El Salvador or Guantanamo Bay, that's when things start getting incredibly hairy.
And the time to stop it was yesterday, and the other time to stop it was yesterday.
Right.
And they're attacking the soft targets, right?
It's easy to go after the universities threatening hundreds of millions of dollars of funds, revoking it from them.
I do feel like, even though the endowment is so large, that money that they were using at Columbia was for very specific purposes that helped the student body, which...
Go away.
I don't think that they're going to take it from the endowment and then replace it and then continue those programs.
They might, but it just feels like they're just going to be like, sorry, the government's not giving us that money anymore.
It's too bad for all those groups that were getting that and benefiting from it.
But this notion of the order they're going through, I actually...
Ran it through chat GPT. I said, read Project 2025 and then outline the list of things that they're doing that's exactly like that.
And it was staggering.
They're following this exact playbook.
This was exactly part of it, which tariffs were the number one thing and then protesting and cracking down on protests.
You know, this is, interestingly enough, protests on college campuses.
Is it fair to say that they were a lot more impactful during the 60s?
I mean, I think they've been impactful overall.
I mean, we've talked about the fact that these are laboratories of popular dissent and also the beginnings of leftist thought, anti-capitalist thought.
I mean, we look at that time period and we see it because a lot of people and, you know, the history on this is really, really twisted.
The reason why the protests on college campuses were so effective was because there was a military draft that was going to go after them and the people that they knew.
And eventually that was taken care of by getting out of Vietnam and also FBI and CIA-led programs, as well as the beginning of individualistic capitalistic consumption.
So the whole point here is we could have a full-blown movement at this point if they hadn't have been cracked down on and if we wouldn't have turned our backs on them and if people hadn't been.
We could actually be watching something completely different right now if we would have realized that, yeah, this was something that deserved protest and did deserve a movement of its own.
For sure.
And the Vietnam War itself was also the last step of that where they were going to be sent off to fight in that war as well, which is the draft, basically.
That doesn't exist now.
And so the counterpoint to what you just laid out would be...
Let them have their protests.
They'll put their things on social media and that will die out anyway because eventually perhaps the momentum will just fade after enough time.
Yeah, I mean, you either let it grow or you let it fade.
You see what happens as opposed to having people go in and crack skulls and hurt people.
I mean, that's what is supposed to happen within a democratic society.
Yeah, so my point was if I was trying to figure out a way where I'm, gosh, God forbid I'd ever have to have a mindset of like Trump.
But, you know, I think his mindset is rooted in some other era of time long ago where all of these – he even used the word agitator, didn't he?
I think they said agitator, which is right from the graduate and right from, you know, the counterculture in the 60s.
I would argue that they're making it worse.
If their ultimate goal is to try and tamp down this protest and this movement against the government, they're doing a lot worse by doing what they're doing now, arresting people and keeping in the news and making it more of a thing.
Khalil is now going to be a cause to celebrate.
Again, I'm praying because, again, the Justice Department is now under the control of the White House.
So it's conceivable that he doesn't get his...
Stay in court.
He'll be out of the country before they have a chance, and then at that point, how are you going to get that going if you can't get back in and pursue that case?
But you could argue that if they just let them do this and have their things, it wouldn't cause as much of an uproar, and they would be able to continue doing what they're doing anyway.
And people wouldn't have to suffer the way they're doing that.
Now, your reaction looks to me as if you're upset that I would even consider the fact that protests on campuses wouldn't have an effect.
Well, no.
I mean, if we are going to have some sort of a movement against this thing, that is one of the places where they would take place.
I mean, you and I, we went rounds on the protests last year, and there were different reasons for that.
But, like, if you are going to have something that actually pushes back, you have to at least have some sort of a youth movement.
That's the way these things take place.
And I just want to say a couple of things very, very quickly just to put a bow on this before we move to the next topic.
If he is deported without his day in court, we're talking about a possible death sentence.
We're talking about a person who would be targeted if they were deported.
We are also, and I don't think it's a coincidence here, that we have a lot of Zionist groups that are creating basically targets within the U.S. college system in order for the Trump administration to go after them.
And they are openly just talking about this and congratulating Trump.
When you take a look at all of these things together, you can't help but recognize that this is a growing authoritarian system.
And I don't care if our listeners, if they are absolutely disgusted by student protests that are protesting the atrocities in Gaza.
If you don't agree with it, that's totally fine.
But you either believe that these people have a right to protest and the First Amendment is actually a thing or you don't.
And if you don't, you might as well line up and say that you don't and stop walking around talking about espoused principles.
Like, the matter that actually took place here and the cudgels that are being used, pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas, enemy of the state, whatever it is.
Those are the same rhetorical cudgels and weapons that were used to get rid of all leftists and immigrants back in the early first Red Scare, that were used to go after people during the War on Terror and during the 1960s, 1970s, you name it.
This is an ongoing project, and quite frankly, this is something that we should all be standing up for.
What's interesting in mind, real quickly, would be that it's so singularly targeted at Palestinians and this pro-Hamas notion of getting people, because they had signaled that they were going to crack down on college protests.
And then you had to start thinking, well, are they talking about the government and Trump specifically?
The fact that they're going after Palestinians is some notion that there's a connection between Netanyahu and Trump, where is Netanyahu...
Getting him to do that?
Is Trump so buddy-buddy with him?
He's just like, ah, you know what?
I'm going to do you a solid, BB. I'm going to start kicking out people who are pro-Hamas just, you know, for shits and giggles.
Like, I don't know what that is evidence of, but it's got to be something of an entrenchment there that's troubling.
Well, it's hand-in-hand.
I mean, it goes back to the thing that we're always talking about when it comes to the Republican Party and Trump and Russia.
They're part of the same project.
And I'm not talking about Israel.
I'm talking about Netanyahu.
I'm talking about the other international authoritarians who are openly corrupt.
And by the way, they use nation states like Israel and the United States of America and ideas of patriotism and Zionism, whatever it is.
They use those as covers for what is actually taking place here, which is...
Hurting people, exploiting people, and counting your profits at the same time.
And for the record, this doesn't just end with college protesters.
That's just where they see an opening for it.
Next up, we're talking about naturalized citizens.
They've already made that abundantly clear.
They've already talked about it.
They've already said that is coming.
What we're looking at here is part of a project that works both ways.
It's reciprocal.
And as it marches forward, those ties are only going to grow.
All right, on the same sort of wavelength, Nick...
We also saw the Trump administration go after the law firm of Perkins Coie for their work with the Clinton campaign back in 2016, which has shut off access to federal buildings and personnel, which more or less has neutralized the law firm.
It's once more a type of lawfare.
And if that isn't enough in true fashion, just like Trump had said when it came to protesters, he's already said there are plenty other ones, quote, bad firms that need to be gone after.
This is exactly...
What Trump was saying that Biden and other Democrats before him were doing with lawfare and they've just sort of let the dogs loose on this one.
Oh, yeah.
And really, they're targeting Perkins Coeys because they're the ones who took up the Steele dossier and started paying him.
They were part of the nexus there.
So he says there's many more.
No one else was involved in the Russia, Russia, Russia stuff.
By the way, can we just clear this up?
I texted you before.
I got into this bizarre conversation about Russia, Russia, Russia.
That is simply him echoing Marsha, Marsha, Marsha from the Brady Bunch.
Why is that?
Is that not clear to everybody?
First of all, to walk into that demented hall of mirrors and to walk out unscathed is almost impossible.
But yes, that is true.
Because the dude was like mid-20s when that episode comes out.
I think that's old for someone at that era to be watching the Brady Bunch.
That's what's weird.
Even weirder.
Talk about arrested development.
That's where Trump lies.
But at any rate, this notion that they're going to pull apart that.
Law firms are supposed to be able to represent whoever needs representing.
And let's not forget that there was a Republican law firm who had originally hired Steele to do the stuff against Trump.
I don't think they're going to get any dings on this or any kind of access taken away.
This is really problematic, again.
And this sounds just like the id, just like cold revenge on probably a small group of people.
It's trying to make it seem like it's going to be alive, but I have a feeling it's going to be very targeted to just anybody who participated in the Russia investigation.
Yeah, and the thing is, this isn't going to end with Perkins Coie.
And to understand politics as they actually take place, there are entire ecosystems that are built around our political systems.
You have one law firm after another that works with political candidates and political parties.
This is open season to basically say anyone that works with Democrats, anybody who works with anybody that Donald Trump even perceives as a political enemy, that they are going to be targeted.
On top of that, though, Nick, there is...
There's another layer to it, and it's about escalation.
It's about constantly growing this thing out.
These law firms are being intimidated so that they don't represent people that Donald Trump doesn't like and considers his enemies, so that they won't hire people who are going to work within their organizations for causes and ideas that Donald Trump and people around him dislike.
And on top of that, at the next level are NGOs, the non-governmental organizations, which have been getting relentless heat from Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and MAGA and this entire group of assholes.
That is...
For how we're probably going to start seeing the government go after NGOs and start going after nonprofits and these institutions that are out there, which, by the way, were created mostly in order to take care of the things that the government wasn't taking care of, to lobby for those things, to carry out programs that the government no longer wanted to take care of.
So you're going to start seeing that net that is going to start being shredded, and this more or less is sort of the opening salvo of a much larger assault.
Right.
You actually used the term earlier, a large, quiet intimidation.
I'm not sure quiet is even the right word to describe this at this point, right?
Intimidation seems to be the word of the day across all facets of what the government's trying to do, and it's exactly what they did in Germany, right?
I mean, listen, you can condemn people who are innocent Germans for not stepping up to the Nazis and trying to stop that, but you could also have to recognize that there was a huge amount of intimidation that was going on daily that would scare normal folks from wanting to engage.
Well, and that whole process, and I'm glad that you brought it up.
I've been talking about this over on my Substack, Dispatches from a Collapsing State.
One of the things that occurred, and I always try and bring this up because the way that we view authoritarianism is completely skewed.
It's mythologized by conventional history.
There's this idea that, like, in an authoritarian society, there's a gun trained in everybody's head, right, or some sort of implicit threat against them.
When people like the Nazis or the fascists or other authoritarians take over, they go into these institutions, including higher education, including law firms, including all these different sort of bodies.
And they basically go in and they're like, hey, there's a new sheriff in town.
And you're going to go along with us.
And there is an implicit message, which is the people who go along with us will profit and they'll be safe, and the people who don't are going to be destroyed.
And so what happens is you make an example out of one university, like Columbia, you make an example out of one law firm, like Perkins Coie, and all of a sudden the rest of them are like, holy shit, we don't want to deal with this.
And then instead of being put in the spotlight...
They go along with it and they start to, you know, capitulate and advance.
And we're seeing that take place.
And quite frankly, Nick, I just want to remind people, we are only, we're less than two months into this thing.
And it is going gangbusters at this point, how quickly and how aggressively they are at doing institutional administrative capture.
Right.
And you can also think the connection is not only are they going to capitulate and go along, because if there is a group of people who are completely risk-averse, it's lawyers, right?
Lawyers and universities, for the record.
Just to go ahead.
For the top.
And so they won't take clients that would have any whiff of any kind of controversy there.
So now you're talking about the first thing we spoke about, where this guy, Khalil Mahmoud, needs a lawyer.
Well...
Are they going to want to represent them?
Are they going to be the next in line if they represent him in a court of law to try and get him out of the deportation that they're going to put him through?
That's a real concern because these are the citizens that need representation and need brave people who are going to step up and give them that and win in court.
Whether they do win in court now is a whole other situation as well where there seems to be enough judges that haven't been turned yet, but that's going to change as we go further.
And they're being intimidated as well.
Them and the people around them, their families, their communities, they're being targeted as well, being told that violence could be visited upon them.
They could possibly be impeached.
God knows what else could possibly happen.
In a regime like this, you know, we were talking, you know, about Mahmoud Khalil.
We were talking about Perkins Coie.
Like, one thing that happens in all of this, Nick, is they don't need a reason to go after people, but they'll create the reason.
You know what I mean?
Like, we even saw, oh God, I've memory-holded this guy, the mayor of New York City.
Why have I forgotten his name?
Yeah, Eric Adams, this completely corrupted asset of the Trump administration, you know, he was talking about this extra-legal detainee deportation process with Khalil, and was like, oh, he had a gun, he had to go.
There's no proof that there's a gun.
They're talking about pro-Hamas, like, feelings or whatever.
They'll just manifest something, then say that he has ties to Hamas or whatever.
You know, when it comes to Perkins Coie, they have access to all this information in the government at this point.
They're ransacking it.
They'll create a reason to go after these people.
They'll create a reason to impeach judges like it is completely rigged top to bottom.
What's fascinating about this is remember when we were having the hand wringing episodes after 9-11 about how much the government can spy on us to make sure that we are safe.
I think you and I were, and a lot of other people were, and others were just like, yeah, absolutely, this is necessary.
But yes, I do remember that.
There were some abuses.
But it wasn't systematic like this.
This is what people were really talking about, I suspect, when they were worried about letting the government be too involved in our data and what's behind the scenes.
And so here's the real abuse.
I mean, listen, we can argue that there was lots of abuse going on in 2002, 2003, up until the war.
But it's now coming to fruition years and years later.
Well, for the record, just because you just brought up something essential, this is what I keep talking about when it comes to authoritarianism and neoliberal global authoritarianism being a boomerang.
Because those abuses were taking place in the United States of America, but they were scant compared to what was happening around the world.
And as those systems were being created and being done on other people where we couldn't necessarily see them or know about them, because they were being disappeared, Nick, they were being shuffled around an authoritarian administrative system and being sent to black sites and being tortured and being terrorized and having no rights whatsoever.
Like, eventually this was always going to come back around.
It just so happens that it took a while to get here, and the construction of it is absolutely terrifying.
And just reminding me, did you see that they're trying to sell a whole lot of federal real estate and a lot of buildings?
Yeah, and they revealed a CIA black site.
And there's a theory about why that happened, because they're looking for the term black.
And they just assumed it was about black people?
I mean, that's as legitimate as any other theory I'm hearing, especially because we talked about how the Enola Gay was removed as a picture because the word gay is in there.
I choose to believe that, which actually makes me...
I have a point I wanted to make.
I thought maybe we would get through a show without talking about him, but let's just call him Doge.
Doge, they don't have any attention to detail.
No.
And they have no regard for human life.
So if you mix those two things, right, that's really where we're in a lot of trouble.
And that sort of encapsulates, I think, the authoritarian state, right?
There is no...
Someone like Elon Musk...
I just saw this movie, Mickey, 16, 17, 18. And, you know, they just basically create this guy so he can go out and be a guinea pig and sacrifice every time they need to check something.
And this is sort of what Elon Musk is like, right?
They don't care about anybody, individuals at all.
They're willing to sacrifice millions of people if they can get enough data points to then somehow, in their minds, improve whatever the situation is.
Yeah, and that's the unfortunate nature of this thing, is not only is it cruel and brutal and anti-human, it's also sloppy and stupid.
And that gives us some opportunities to resist it and fight back against it.
We're very lucky.
I was having a conversation earlier today with a friend of the pod, Danielle Moody, and I was talking about how lucky we are, how obvious they're making it.
Not just Elon Musk being front and center, but like I said, Donald Trump taking full accountability.
He didn't need to.
He really did not need to come out and make that comment about Khalil.
But to go ahead and say, not only did we do this and not only are we doing this, we're going to do it a lot more.
We're very lucky that they're that stupid.
But at the same time, Nick, it's just like handing over a deadly weapon to somebody who doesn't care what happens to anybody else and also just sort of wielding it without any concern or any forethought whatsoever.
I'm almost picturing the next time they do that, if it's tipped off or they know enough of a protest comes to literally, physically prevent ICE from removing somebody to an off-site.
Khalil is now in Louisiana.
Well, we think he's in Louisiana.
Well, I mean, that makes sense to me, to get him as far away as possible from his home and from anywhere he has support.
I have to tell you, Jared, and this is terrible, when he's there that far away, he might not be in the country anymore at this point.
I think that's probably what you were trying to say.
Yeah, we have no idea.
You know, because at the very least you think, okay, they're going to have him in a holding cell in Manhattan or somewhere, you know, nearby where he is and where he can get legal representation or whatever.
The fact that they've already done that, if that's true, is really chilling.
And it's, again, it's the intimidation factor, but it's the blatant disregard for the laws.
And, you know, we don't even know what the Supreme Court would do in a situation like this, right?
I would like to think that they would uphold the Constitution, but I have no idea.
Yeah, we're back to praying to the patron saint of Amy Comey Barrett.
Right.
If you don't know how bad it is.
But by the way, speaking of good news, Nick, we've been talking about the building backlash and things are gaining some momentum and we have some positive things to discuss here.
The popular backlash against this, you can start to see signs of it throughout culture at this point.
We're seeing massive protests around the country, including in Washington, D.C. We're seeing just normal people showing up on their Saturdays and Sundays to protest at Tesla dealerships and in order to carry out a boycott against Tesla.
And by the way, if you've looked at Tesla's numbers lately, they are...
Abysmal.
We've also seen a consumer backlash against Tesla in which people are using it as a popular rallying point.
On top of that, GOP representatives who have been holding their town halls have been so bombarded by people of both political stripes, Republicans and Democrats, that several of them have been leaving early.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has told his members to stop holding these town halls, and the right has started pretending that all of this is paid agitators and paid actors, paid for by George Soros and the NGOs and all that good stuff.
But Nick, what we are seeing is an urge in this country to push back against these things, which if you're looking for any signs of optimism at this point, it's that this is wildly unpopular and that the people are willing to get out there and fight this thing if only somebody will help them fight it.
I agree.
It is encouraging.
It's great to see the Tesla protests.
The destruction of property tends to become a lightning rod here, right?
Where we're having protests, things get out of hand, and Teslas get burned.
Parenthetically, I just checked the stock prices.
We haven't looked at it in a while.
Are you aware?
Can I just give the context here?
In the past month, it's down almost 37%.
Listen, I'm a humble man.
I have to assume that that ain't great.
No.
And Dow Jones is down as well.
But here's the only problem with this.
Are you with me?
Are you sitting down?
I can't wait.
This is all part of the plan.
See, okay, I understand where you're coming from.
You're worried the protests are just going to lead to crackdowns, and that's where it's going.
But what are we supposed to do?
Lay down and play possum like James fucking Carville says?
No, I'm sorry.
And I'm speaking parallel to this in a way that's too cryptic.
I'm sorry.
Part of the plan, by the way, but the social unrest is part of the plan as well.
But I think that crashing the stock market and tanking the economy, which is, you know, because what you're saying as far as when we're talking about...
I've been very vocal about that, yes.
Yeah, like the Dow, all those things going down is a reaction to, A, the general sentiment in the country, but also the economic factors, which will also lead to unrest and protests, and the town hall stuff, which, you know, wasn't it back at some point, I thought, in our lifetime, if you were to go on a nationally broadcasted show and pretend...
Or say something like, these are paid protesters, you couldn't say that unless, or at least the host would not allow you to say that without severe...
No, that has been normalized.
And again, I don't like giving free advice to Republicans, but going around and saying that the people who voted for you and people who vote for you aren't real and that they're paid actors, that's not a great avenue towards getting reelected.
It's just not.
But also, is it safe to say that if you are a congressman, for instance, governing a wide swath of people in a big area of a state, it's safe to say that some of your constituents did not vote for you and are not on your side politically, and yet they're going to go to a town hall, not paid.
I mean, I don't know.
The bottom line is, if you're going to level that kind of charge, then you better have receipts.
You know, and you better be able to prove that or else you're shut off and they cut off your mic and they kick you off that show never to return.
But the point being that I was just sort of making was I worry that, you know, obviously Trump has so much debt.
You know, and even if you want to say he's already made a lot of money off of crypto or whatever, he might not have pulled it out yet.
So if he's got all this debt and it's accruing and their interest rates continue to go up, it makes it more expensive.
So that is why you can't have a president who's got hundreds of millions of dollars worth of debt because he's going to manipulate the market.
And here's the thing is, you know, he could say one tweet could crash the market or give a big dip.
They could all buy that on that.
And then he can't control the Fed.
And that's that's supposed to be how it works.
They can't make them lower the interest rates.
He could tank the economy, which would trigger the Fed lowering the rates in some hope of averting catastrophe, right?
That could be what's happening.
I mean, Nick, when you say it that way, it doesn't sound great.
And a reminder, we have the most blackmailable president and the most blackmailable oligarchical coup-carrying-out guy ever.
Right now, in charge.
And by the way, we'll talk more in a second about some of these nefarious tech plans that they've got.
They definitely want to tank the American economy.
And for the record, you just said one tweet could do this.
Trump going on Fox News this weekend and acknowledging that there could possibly be a recession.
And what have I been saying, Nick?
The best case scenario might be a recession.
That might be the best case scenario about what's going on right now.
It's already caused the economy to freefall.
Well, if you look around, though, this popular discontent, it's only going to grow as these things get worse.
I keep saying there's always an equal and opposite reaction to an authoritarian movement seizing power and carrying out their agenda.
Nick, we could sit here and talk about damage to property all day long, but I think it's undeniable that setting fire to Tesla charging stations in Europe, Teslas are being destroyed and set on fire.
We've been seeing videos of yachts being set on fire.
I mean, police are having to be called to Tesla dealerships in order to protect private property.
Those things, when mixed with the popular dissent that we're seeing going into these town hall meetings, going to these protests, I mean, Bernie Sanders is on his Stop Oligarchy tour right now, and they're getting multiple thousands of people at each one of these.
The one that took place this weekend in Warren, Michigan, had to be moved multiple places to accommodate people.
Eventually, 10,000 people in that small place came together for this.
People are desperate for something.
There is a will here.
And I would go ahead, as a leftist, go ahead and point out, class consciousness is growing.
People who are realizing that this is an oligarchical coup that is dressed up in a faux populist movement, people are starting to understand that the rich are getting richer and that they're destroying the social fabric of the United States of America and trying to do it around the world.
I think that this is a reason to be optimistic.
Yeah, I mean, the only thing I'm worried about then is, okay, great, we have the technology and the connection of people, like, you can create...
Your own, you know, environment, your own area to live in, your own police, your own whatever.
But that can be exclusionary as well.
That could quickly turn into a really bad experiment.
But, you know, I'm already envisioning like California being that way.
Like California is going to be its own oasis that has to stand up to all these things and be a place where you can, you know, they have the kind of governing that you want versus what's going on in the rest of the country.
I love it when we always bring it back around the California corner.
That brings us to the last segment, which is...
Something I've been keeping an eye on, and I was very upset to see this show up in Wired, a report by Carolyn Haskins and Vittoria Elliott reported on, quote, startup nation groups who are in talk with the Trump administration to create what they're calling freedom cities.
Prospera, the Frontier Foundation, and a whole bunch of other tech assholes are trying to create these little breakaway special cities.
Possibly on federal land that would be free of government oversight and regulation.
And folks, what are they wanting to do there?
You know, just sort of unregulated human experiments, libertarian dystopian shit, creating nuclear power facilities without regulation in order to power AI programs, gene therapy, total corporate control.
And here's the bad news, Nick.
The Trump administration...
Not only are they having these meetings, they're very excited about the idea, and Donald Trump has already pledged to support a couple of years ago.
So this thing, it seems like something that they're going to try and make happen.
I mean, it just shows you how desperate people can be, right?
To get anywhere else but where they are and have a, you know...
By the way, I think it's a distinctly American thing, or maybe it's not, but it seems to me, where, you know, the dream of getting out of where you were born, right, and leaving that and getting to a better place, right?
I think the reason why that dream is so prevalent is that because so many people are born in shitty situations, right?
That's sort of the issue there.
And here we are, another thing where it's like people long for some other sci-fi version of life that would obviously be better, but I can't imagine what those experiments are going to be and how inhumane it would be without any regulations or anything.
Yeah, it just makes me think about another group of people who put together a bunch of unregulated human experiments and how that turned out.
A few notes on this, Nick.
First of all...
I've been following this for years now, this whole, like, libertarian Peter Thiel tech oligarch bullshit.
This idea of creating a network state which would move beyond the nation state, that way there wouldn't be any sort of regulation or oversight, and also getting rid of pesky things like representative democracy and democracy in general.
A lot of this, by the way, Nick, is patterned after Chinese special economic zones.
Which are little carve-outs that the Chinese government has created in order to facilitate sort of their dictatorial controlled capitalism.
And it's very weird looking at it now that what they're trying to create here is another such circumstance, which is there will be cutouts within the United States of America that are under control, much like fiefdoms, you know, almost like attack feudalism, so to speak.
And I have a little bit of inside information on some of this when I've been talking to multiple sources that these right-wing think tanks and institutes that I'm always talking about, which are controlled by the wealth and oligarchical class, they're already trying to find the legal justification for this.
And I know it shouldn't surprise anybody.
They're looking at the Supreme Court.
They're figuring out the right case to bring.
And quite frankly, they feel like they've got a pretty good road to it at this point.
Well, imagine this, because I actually was intrigued by this notion of having these, because let's just say you met somebody or a family, and they align perfectly with what you believe politically, right, and ethically and all those different things.
That's great.
And then imagine if you met, like...
A hundred families.
And they all exactly lined up and like, gosh, wouldn't it be great if we could just live in an area together and have these laws that we all agree with and have this community run that way and have these different, you know, support groups and support we can have like that, build our own government in a way and have it, which is sort of like what happens in America.
Wouldn't that be something great?
Wouldn't you want to have that?
Wait, are we moving into a compound outside of Waco, Texas?
So I guess the natural inclination is to assume that if you were to create something like this, you'd obviously want to have a wall around it, perhaps, right?
Because you don't want to have people who don't want to live that way in there with you.
I suppose it rapidly becomes corrupted and problematic, but in some respects, when we're having these conversations and you look across the aisle and hear how different...
We are and how different we believe this country should be run.
It feels that way anyway, right?
Well, there's never going to be any kind of integration there.
So let's just create our own areas.
And if we can make it as big or small as we can to live the way we believe that the country should be run.
Well, OK, so a couple of things here.
First off, the old idea was the Peter Thiel idea that they should create floating island nation states.
That was the old idea.
And why was he considering doing that?
Because I don't know if you've looked around.
The world has been settled.
There's not a whole lot of free real estate anymore.
All of a sudden now the plan has changed to going onto federal lands or taking over the United States government in order to create these special zones, right?
So the plan has evolved at this point.
And by the way, you know where would be a good place to do this?
Someplace like Greenland.
It would be like a really great place to try and pull something like this off.
Huh, that's really strange.
They would have access to the resources that they want.
They would have the free real estate that they want.
I don't know.
I'm just spitballing here, Nick.
It's a weird thing that's going through my head.
But the entire point is, we've been told for years, you can't change things, right?
This is where you are.
These are the institutions that we have.
And for the record, I'm a leftist.
I have a much different idea of how things should run.
I have a much different idea of how these things should be organized.
I've been told that it's dangerous that I want to try something different, that I want to try new methods.
The same people who have been screaming that it's wrong to try new methods, Nick, wouldn't you believe it?
They get in power.
Oh man, we really need to try some new things.
And what is their idea?
Company towns!
Fiefdoms!
Feudal!
And anybody who has studied any of this understands that once you get into corporate town, once you get into a company town, once you get into a fiefdom, once you get into a feudal land, you know what they do?
They don't let you leave, Nick.
They don't give you a lot of opportunity, and also they control you economically and politically and culturally.
These aren't economic liberation zones.
They are aspiring authoritarian zones that are to the tune and the favor of the corporate tech oligarchs that we've been talking about and warning about now for years.
Yeah.
I mean, the farther we get away from the 50s factory towns or the 40s factory towns, which, by the way, were created because...
Conditions need to be bad enough where people are willing to uproot themselves from where they were living and settle somewhere new and go work at a job where you're going to basically die at after decades and decades of working there.
In some weird way, that was actually looked up to.
People wanted that.
I wanted to have a job.
Well, they didn't have a lot of options, for the record.
They didn't have a lot of options.
Right.
And so we're kind of in the same situation here where they're trying to make it where nobody has any options, and then you'll be able to fill these positions easily because where I am now, the material conditions are so bad, I need to do something else.
It's all very, very concerning because, again, you have these rich people that don't have any concern for life.
Individual human life.
And so whatever they can do to make their bottom line go up, they will do.
They don't care.
At some point, the United States did not seem to stand for that.
We did not have leaders that believe that.
Kennedy comes to mind in theory because of his ability to stand up and not get engaged in a nuclear war with Russia because he believed in the sanctity of human life for both sides.
Anyway, so I don't think we have that anymore.
I would make the argument that we had a veneer that we didn't believe in that.
Like, we had a short little time span there after World War II up until the rise of neoliberalism in which at least the consensus was that you were supposed to do something different.
But what happened behind the scenes, Nick?
You had the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the FBI, all of these different consortiums that were going around the world.
I don't know, disappearing people so that their families couldn't find them and taking them to places where you could never know where they were.
We also went ahead and worked with dictators around the world who took care of special little cutouts like this.
We helped things like apartheid, which of course birthed us Elon Musk and where we're at.
The problem was that we had this duality that we never figured out, that we actually needed the veneer more than we needed what was happening behind the scenes.
Right.
That's another good point.
So, you know, the veneer is important, right?
Like, remember that democracy only exists in so much as people choose to believe that it exists.
And as they slowly kill that off and more and more people don't believe that we're in a democracy, then we're not.
You know, that's it.
And I don't know what that meter is right now, but it's got to be on the way down.
The meter is low.
Yeah.
The meter is very, very low.
All right, everybody, just a reminder.
These are really important things we're talking about.
We're not doing this just for the fun of it.
Go out and talk to people.
Organize.
Get the people in your workplace.
Get the people in your community.
Get them all on the same page and be ready because we're going through so many red lines at this point.
All right.
We're going to be back with The Weekender on Friday.
Remember, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Support the show.
Keep us editorially independent.
You'll be able to listen to The Weekender episode.
In the meantime, you can find Nick on Blue Sky and Nick House when you can find me at J.Y. Saxton.
