News Brief: The First Ten Million Years of the Second Trump Presidency
Daniel and Jack chat about the eventful millennia that have passed since they last convened... Features Cantwell News! Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
There was this guy who's like, you know, well, government agencies, they get tax breaks for hiring minorities.
It's like, what are you talking about?
No, they get tax breaks for...
No, no.
Government agencies don't pay taxes.
No, no.
They do.
They get tax breaks.
That's how it works.
And Sam Seder just looks to Cameron and is like, I don't know what to say to that.
Anyway, he's been talking about it on the majority report lately.
It's like, you know, all the different people.
And I watched, like, Tim Pool last night.
What the fuck?
Yeah, no, it really is.
How do you think anything works?
What are you talking about?
That's not how that works.
That's not how anything works.
Yeah, no, exactly.
It's, you know, they get tax breaks.
How do you think they don't pay taxes?
You think the government pays tax to the government?
Yeah. What?
My god, the Internal Revenue Service's tax bill must be huge, because the amount of money they take in...
Oh my God.
We're back.
It's an episode of I Don't Speak German.
I don't really know what kind of episode it is.
I don't know whether it's going to be mainline or news brief or any one of the other overcomplicated categories that we've been evolving.
It's just an episode.
We'll find out.
But the main thing is that it's here.
You're listening to it.
And I'm here.
But really, the most important thing is that Daniel Harper's here.
At least I hope he is.
Daniel? Unless I've been hallucinating the build-up to this.
Daniel, are you there?
Well, there's no way I can verify for you that you have not been hallucinating.
But on my end, at least, at most, one of us is hallucinating.
Actually, we both might be hallucinating.
It's possible.
But we are apparently communicating clearly.
So I think we have to make the assumption that we are not.
And the audience can tell us if this comes out coherent or not, I guess.
That's true.
That's true.
The audience will be able to give us independent verification, so thank God for the audience.
The long-suffering, long-waiting, very patient, I hope, audience who are back after all this time.
Again, I hope.
Daniel. How have you been?
If you want to talk about that.
I mean, things are...
I put this on Blue Sky and I put this on my Patreon or whatever, but I did break my ankle at the end of January.
And so I've been out of work for a little while because I work retail and can't walk.
So, you know, it's one of those things.
And, you know, things are getting better.
I have a follow-up appointment in about a week from the time of recording, and hopefully I will be able to return to work shortly.
I've been applying for new jobs, and so things have been both up and down for me.
And I just want to take the opportunity to thank all the people who have helped me support myself on Patreon, because otherwise I would have had no income whatsoever and would not have been able to pay any of my bills.
But anyway, so that's how I've been.
And believe me, during this process, I have still been listening to podcasts and doing the research and doing all the work, but I haven't been able to record for...
For just reasons of pain and just drug addledness.
But we're back.
We're coming back, for sure.
Whereas I have also had the drug addledness, but without any of the excuse of having broken any parts of my body.
So, yeah, here we are with, I believe, to kick us off, before we get into a sort of general chat about the, you know...
The second Trump administration so far, we have, I believe, some Cantwell and maybe even the last ever Cantwell news.
Is that correct?
I mean, I doubt this will be the last ever Cantwell news, but, you know, it is Cantwell news, and everybody loves the Cantwell news.
And this is a couple of weeks old at this point, but, you know, we might as well cover it just in case people didn't see it, and at least we can kind of give our...
Give her two cents on it.
So, since our most recent, like, kind of full nine-guest-numbered episode, which was a Cantwell episode, the fact that he was going on Grindr and, you know, talking to gay men really did not go over well within the Nazi community,
as you can understand.
Really? I can't imagine why not.
Yeah, no.
What's the thing about that that gave them pause?
The thing is that he was doing it for the worst possible reasons, and these people have no understanding of...
It's just like, you're going on Grindr and you're talking to trans people and shit.
It was literally like...
It's just the most...
They're just a bunch of emotional boys who...
Yeah, have grown up and they, you know, want to commit genocide.
And it's just, you know, it's one of those, like...
Yeah, yeah.
Sometimes it's not any deeper than that.
Sorry, go ahead.
It tells you everything that they're not able to keep up with the subtleties of Chris Cantwell.
Chris Cantwell, exactly, exactly.
No, I agree.
I mean, Cantwell is on his own lane, and I think that's what makes him so entertaining, regardless, you know?
Um, is that he, he is just, he, he's got his own little like psychology thing going on.
Um, and so, so anyway, um, as his audience continued to dwindle, he spent less and less effort doing his podcast.
And, you know, I'm not going to complain as someone who is, you know, has taken breaks from this podcast over the time, but you know, we try to like make an entertaining show and we like try to only come in when we have something to say.
Whereas Kent will, you know, used to have a, like, a thing of, like, I'm going to do, like, three two-hour episodes a week, like, and take live callers, and he thinks of himself as this brilliant radio professional, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, as his listenership dropped and as the donations stopped coming in, he...
Started giving less and less of a shit about doing his podcast.
He would take shorter episodes.
He would take days off.
I think he was still doing the members-only show, but he was definitely really phoning it in for the last six months or so.
And then it was either right before or right after the Trump's inauguration.
He kind of did his last show.
He didn't announce it was his last show.
He just stopped doing episodes and put up on his Telegram channel something to the effect of after a couple weeks, it's like, I'm not gone.
I'm coming back.
I'm coming back better than ever.
He talked about, I've got some new ideas about how to rebrand myself, about how to make a new show that's going to get people back involved and that sort of thing.
Basically, it was radio silence.
I've always been on the philosophy of Once these people stop podcasting, you're not my problem anymore.
Please, Chris, keep me out of my misery.
It's fine.
Stay off the radar.
Everybody's happy.
Stay off the radio, stay off the podcast, and I don't have to pay attention to you anymore.
At least it makes me happy.
I would donate to you to keep you off the radio, honestly.
I would not actually do that, but you get where I'm coming from.
And then, just a couple of weeks ago, he ends up in legal filing.
He's in some legal shenanigans.
And we don't really know the details yet.
It seems a little bit vague, but apparently he's been charged with misdemeanor accounts and a felony account of strangulation.
And I think initially it was because...
It's at the halfway house where he was living, where he's been living since he was released from prison.
And so it was like, well, maybe it's a domestic dispute, maybe it's a partner of his, but it seems more likely that it was, at least from what I know about Cantwell, it seems more likely that it's someone that was bothering him in the halfway house.
Again, we don't know the details unless and until this goes to trial or unless until we get more details, we're not going to know anything.
Yeah, Cantwell was apparently strangling someone.
And normally I would not just take the cops to their word, but also, like, this is Cantwell.
This is Cantwell.
As little as I trust the cops, I trust the cops more than Cantwell.
It's just the reality of it.
So there's an article at The Independent that will surely be in the show notes that you can go and read.
But he gave an interview to The Independent.
He's like, you know, He goes, I didn't strangle anyone, he argued.
People who are trying to cause legal problems for other people know that they can escalate a misdemeanor to a felony by saying strangulation occurred.
And so it's just the same old bullshit.
Like, if you remember his felony conviction back in 2021, he was, you know, it's like, I didn't extort anything from this guy.
I was just, you know, it was just like...
Locker room talk, effectively.
That's kind of his argument.
It's just what you do to get somebody to leave you alone.
He just thinks of himself as a tough guy.
He's just like, no, I didn't struggle with that person.
I merely had my hand around his neck.
I don't know.
He doesn't say that in that many words, but he's like, this is New Hampshire, not North Korea, and I have every right to physically remove someone from my home when they refuse to leave upon being ordered to do so.
He said the person refused multiple verbal commands to leave while raising his voice to disturb neighbors and escalate the conflict.
I used the absolute minimum amount of force that I could remove a trespasser who physically resisted my attempts to remove him.
And I'm telling you, even reading those words, I'm like, I know I can hear that in Cantwell's voice.
I have listened to so many hours in Cantwell.
That is, it is so, like, that is, you know, nobody, this is exactly what he said.
I promise you, this is Cantwell, 100%.
We don't know the details.
It's kind of written in copies as well, isn't it?
It's written in cop lingo.
Well, it's like this kind of libertarian language is kind of how I think of it, because he's like, you know, he's like, he refused multiple verbal commands to leave while raising his voice to disturb neighbors, right, and escalate the conflict.
It's like, he, like...
I was aggressed upon, and therefore I get to respond.
He violated the non-aggression prison.
Exactly, exactly.
And then he proceeded to the vehicle.
Exactly, exactly.
And every time Chris Cantwell gets in trouble, he uses this same kind of logic.
And it really is like, and I don't know the situation, but somebody was hassling your girlfriend, somebody was hassling you, somebody, you know, who knows?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But that doesn't mean you get to, like, you don't.
And this is like the libertarian logic, right?
It's like, you know, if somebody steals my toe, I get to pull out my pistol and shoot him in the face because he aggressed, you know, the non-aggression principle, etc., you know?
He aggressed upon me and therefore, you know, it's his fault whatever happens to him, etc., etc.
And this is the logic by which this man, like, he truly lives his life by this logic.
And at least, or at least that's how he justifies himself after the fact.
But, you know, I've seen video of the...
Almost shooting incident he got into many years ago, and it seems like this is just the logic that he goes by.
And, I don't know, it's just one of those...
I don't know.
There's a line that I read in a true crime book about the prison system.
One of these trashy paperbacks that I read.
I read it in 2002 or something.
It was probably from the late 80s or something.
And it was about people who were in supermax prisons or whatever.
And it's a line from a prison guard.
Some guys are on a life sentence.
They're just doing installments.
And that's kind of how I feel about Chris Cantwell at this point.
He's really doing a life sentence.
He's just doing it in installments.
He gets out for a while.
He keeps his nose clean for a while.
And then he's going to get himself back in trouble because he doesn't know how not to.
It's almost sad.
Again, I actually don't wish the horribleness of the American prison system even on Christopher Cantwell.
I mean, it's one of those things where if maybe there was better social support, if maybe there was a way of reaching out to Chris Cantwell, although Chris Cantwell is so in his own head at this point that I don't know he can be reached at this point.
Yeah, no, it's...
Anyway, again, we don't know the details.
We don't know really what went on.
Solidarity to the victim, if that's a thing that, you know, matters in this situation.
Again, we really don't know what was going on.
We could have been another Nazi buddy of his or something.
Exactly, yeah.
So, you know, I mean, we really do not know anything about this, and so I'm not going to, like, speculate.
But, yeah, that's Cantwell.
So... He's probably going to go back to trial at some point.
I don't know.
Molly Conger of Weird Little Guys, which is one of the best podcasts you're ever going to listen to.
If you don't know about Weird Little Guys at this point, you probably have not been listening to this podcast in very long.
I found out from her, because she follows up the court file, and his name is flagged.
And so she knew.
So, I found out from her even before the news article came out.
And she's actually quoted in this news article.
So, yeah.
So, I guess we'll find out from Molly or, you know, whatever kind of what's going on.
But, yeah.
So, again, thanks to Molly for everything that she does in that regard.
And go listen to weird little guys.
So, yeah.
Cantwell News wrapped up for now.
For now.
Cantwell is but one part of a wider world.
I mean, he's a big part of our world, you know, in terms of what we do.
He's a big part of what we do because he's entertaining and that's what brings in the bucks, right?
Yeah, the bucks.
He's a very minor figure in terms of the actual horribleness that's happening in the world today.
And I think that's what we're going to talk about.
But one thread in the weave.
Yeah. So here we are.
God knows how many days into the second Trump presidency.
How are you finding it?
I mean, your impressions, Daniel.
Your marks out of ten.
How do you think he's doing?
I mean, in terms of...
Are you going to grade him in terms of how I think he's doing, in terms of what I would want him to do, or in terms of, like, what...
This is already too complicated for me to understand.
I'm sorry.
You've lost me.
Sure. Well, I mean, there's this thing that, like, historians do where they, like, rank presidents and, you know, it's like, you know...
Oh, yeah, yeah.
When historians rank presidents, it's always, like, based on their domestic accomplishments and it's not, like, based on, like, a moral value or a, like...
It's just how effective were they at, like, getting things done, etc., you know?
And I always find that sort of, like, analysis, like, I mean, you know, I get why historians do it, but I also find it, like, really, like, empty and meaningless to, like, to do rankings like that.
I mean, I guess it sells headlines or whatever.
But I guess what I mean is, like...
It's just one of those things people are going to do.
You have a list of guys who all did the same job.
You're just going to, you know, you're just going to have people that rank them.
They like to rank, like, you know, Abraham Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents.
Freed the slaves.
God, what's the name?
Andrew Jackson.
Sorry, Andrew Jackson.
I kept thinking Andrew Sullivan.
Very different guy.
Andrew Jackson, one of our greatest presidents.
Enslaved a bunch of people.
To compare these things, it's like to say, well, how effective were you as an administrator?
How effective were you as an executive?
And just to sort of strip every value away from it except sheer You know, like, effectiveness just always seems like a really, like, it's, like, very bloodless, but also, like, kind of bloodthirsty at the same time, because it's, like, you're both, like, denying, like,
the reality of the historical circumstances, and, you know, it's just, like, well, you know, the greatest president of all time would be the one who sets off World War III.
It's, like, oh, well, he killed everybody, so, like, you know, you win, buddy, you know?
It's, like, anyway.
By that standard, what I think Trump should be doing, he's doing, again, zero out of ten.
In terms of how effective he's being, he's much more effective.
I remember when we did the Trump wins episode, we did that beginning of November of last year.
I was kind of on the fence in terms of how effective is he going to be.
I was like, well, he's going to be more effective in the second term than he was in the first.
He's got more people who support him around him.
He's got a Supreme Court.
It's going to support him and all this sort of thing.
And the thing that I remember saying is, you know, this Department of Government Efficiency thing is going to be, it's really unclear, like, what that's going to be.
Is that going to be, like, a little, like, a little project for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, where they're going to, you know, write up a report and, like, turn it in?
Because they're not going to have, they're not going to have, like, actual government power.
They're not going to be in a position of power within the government.
And then it turns out, no, that was...
That's kind of the big surprise for me, is just how much people with actual authoritative political power, who are in positions of authority, who have laws behind them, have just sat back and let this guy, let Elon Musk,
just tear his way through the government and just destroy so much stuff.
I am pretty cynical at this point, and I did not expect it to be this bad in terms of just how much Doge was going to be able to get accomplished.
I mean, I'm actually kind of flabbergasted by it.
I've come to accept it, and I kind of understand why it's happening, but that to me is the big story.
It's just like on day one, Doge is just coming out and just eviscerating, eviscerating stuff on no legal authority.
When you've got like a 19-year-old named Big Balls who is like, I'm quote-unquote, auditing the, you know, major financial institutions and major parts of the government, you know, and like just crushing like things because he doesn't know how to read COBOL.
It's, I mean, it's like, this is, this is, this is just like, there are like lifelong civil servants who are supposed to be in charge of this.
There are people who are, you know, like responsible adults who have actual enshrined legal authority.
I, I, again, I find myself pretty cynical.
I did not expect that.
I, that is, that is like the one big surprise to me is like, it is, it is worse than I thought it was going to be just based on Elon Musk and Doge.
Yeah. So I believe in our, in our Trump wins episode, we were talking about this and I believe the phrase kids table came up.
Right. I don't think we necessarily said, Definitely that that was our opinion, that Musk and Ramaswamy were being given the kids' table by the side of the adult table.
But I think we at least raised that as a possible way it might fall out.
And I think we talked about the ways in which internal divisions would gum up the works.
And really, you're absolutely right.
What you've seen is just Musk rolling the whole thing up before him.
He has just bulldozed.
And it's quite something to see because the man is completely, you know, he's a fool.
He's completely devoid of charisma.
He has no idea what he's doing.
But just through sheer force, I think that culture is just so hardwired to worship and cringe and bow and grovel before wealth that that's just what it is.
It's just, you know, he's just assumed power.
And essentially he's...
At least by some measures, he's kind of just, it's like a co-presidency.
And, you know, he's got Trump dancing to his tune in front of cameras.
You know, he's got Trump doing essentially Tesla adverts for him.
I mean, almost literally.
Yeah, pretty much literally, yeah.
Like, ad reads.
He's literally like, the cost of a new Tesla is $118,700 or whatever.
Like, it's, I mean, it's...
It's bizarre.
You had the absolutely bizarre, grotesque White House press conference thing where Trump's just sitting there at the Resolute desk and the irony is that he looks like a little kid at the kids' table.
I was using that phrase.
While Musk is the one standing up and giving the meeting to the journalists while his little toddler wanders around the White House and then He wipes his snot on the Resolute desk and goes up to Trump and apparently tells him,
you know, you're not really the president, fuck off, and stuff like that.
And Trump's just sitting there and taking it.
But we had a thing just happen recently where you have this thing called the United States Institute of Peace, which is some sort of non-governmental organization.
This is the point of the thing.
It's very much not a governmental organization.
Doge just rocked up there one day.
And they said, you can't come in.
And they came back and somebody at some point called the cops because Doge would try to get into this building.
Even granting the idea that Doge has some sort of legal authority to go into government organizations, the premises of government organizations, and just do what they want in there, even granting that, which they're doing that regardless of whether they have the right or not,
But even granting that, they can't do that with this organization because it's not a governmental organization.
It's connected to the government.
It's got government funding, but it's not a government organization.
So they come back, and they're trying to force their way in.
Cops get called, and the cops basically just let them in.
Because the cops perceive Doge and Musk and all that, the forces of Trump stroke Musk, as just the authority that must be obeyed.
So they basically seed the situation to the
Everybody just perceives Musk and his organization as having this overriding authority.
And was it Tim Snyder that said the don't obey in advance thing?
That's precisely what they're doing.
They're just obeying in advance.
Hello everybody, Jack from the Future popping in here to correct myself because the account that I just gave of that event, while overall basically accurate, is also inaccurate in some details.
Most particularly the fact that the cops turned up in the middle of the situation because they were sent to make sure that Doge had full access to the United States Institute of Peace by the Trump Justice Department.
So that makes it...
Even worse than what I said.
Anyway, back to the episode.
I think it's really one of those things where people are just terrified of Trump.
I think people, especially at that level of government, kind of understand Trump is a vindictive asshole, and he's going to come after everybody who pisses him off.
And he's got like tens of millions of people behind him at this point.
If Trump and Musk are, you know, tight at the hip, then whatever Musk wants, Musk is going to get.
And, you know, that's the, I mean, it's just, you know, again, for me, it's just one of those things of, you know, all my life, you know, the Democrats have like, you know, well, we have norms and we have rules for a reason.
We follow the rules because, you know, and these guys, I mean, Trump and Musk both are just, they're just knocking the chessboard over.
They're knocking the checkerboard over and just, you know.
It doesn't matter anymore.
We're just going to do what we want.
I think one thing that's interesting is that if you look at what's actually been accomplished so far, it's been mostly, not entirely, but mostly us things.
It's all been, you know, we're cutting out the regulators that will affect Elon Musk.
We're cutting out the regulations.
That, I think, is an under-discussed aspect of this.
He is very deliberately, you know, He is serving his own conflict of interest.
Right, exactly.
He's attacking people who were tasked with investigating him or overseeing him and his business dealings very definitely.
Basically just doing that openly, but basically not hiding it now.
And less so, and this is less true in the last two or three weeks, I guess, but less so.
It's certainly like the immediate thing was, you know, Musk is kind of like driving the car.
He's doing it.
It's all kind of like...
Like, Musk has set in the agenda, as opposed to, you know, the sort of the stuff that, like, Trump ran on, like the deporting all illegals, quote-unquote, you know, and all that sort of thing.
Which, again, more of that's been happening lately.
But it is interesting that at least, you know, I think I did a thing on Blue Sky about this, is, like, you know, talking about, like, this kind of interesting economy is that, like, really what's been accomplished so far has been mostly, like, Musk's priorities as opposed to Trump's.
And so it's almost like it's hard to even...
I call this a Trump priority because ultimately what he's done is just allowed Musk to go in and raid the piggy bank.
And again, that's less true now than it was a few weeks ago.
I think that's the big takeaway from the first two months to me is the degree to which Doge has been a much larger force and a much more insidious force.
We always knew it was going to be insidious, but the fact that it's been just...
Almost completely unopposed is surprising to me.
It's surprising.
And, you know, this is going to have...
Musk is...
I've said this many times.
Musk is completely pilled.
He is an ideological fascist at this point.
And in the same sort of vein, at least in some ways, as Cantwell.
He's swallowed the entire sort of libertarian...
Bonkers dogma about the state and all that.
This is a concerted attack upon the ability of the state to administer society, to be regulatory.
And the effects are going to be...
I think it was the Washington Post, it might have been a different paper, that did a kind of estimate of the effects of these cuts to international aid programs.
USAID, you know, there's plenty of things to criticize.
But we're talking about potentially several million people across the world that are going to die because of this funding being cut off, this aid funding being cut off.
This is going to kill millions.
I mean, it already has.
Yeah. I mean, even just killing PEPFAR, which is the thing that's preventing infants from getting AIDS in Africa.
Yeah. It caused tens of millions of deaths over the course of...
I think the AIDS programs is one of the big ones, if I remember rightly.
Yeah. I mean, just that one.
And that's like, you know, that's a George W. Bush program.
Like, you know, I've called George W. Bush the worst president of my lifetime many times on this podcast.
And, you know, like that's...
That's the thing he gets credit for.
I'll give him credit for that.
Bush did a great thing there.
And it's just been cut completely.
And that's the thing.
I've been listening to a lot of more mainstream right-wing news.
Megan Kelly, I said this to Jack before we started the podcast, but Megan Kelly is kind of my obsessive interest right now.
But you hear this from Tim Pool, you hear it from Jack Posobiec, you hear it from talking heads on Fox News, etc., etc.
It's this idea that they're just cutting out waste.
They're just auditing these government processes.
Maybe they cut some stuff they didn't need to cut, and we can bring that stuff back.
And it's like, no, this is not, like, we're doing an audit.
It's going to take six months.
We're going to, like, look at, you know, where the money is going and kind of determine.
No, they're just, they're cutting off the spigot.
They're cutting off the funding for everything immediately, and they're doing it, like, immediately.
And yeah, we could talk about what USAID has to say about, like, American soft power and, like, you know.
To what degree?
That's a CIA cutout or whatever.
I think that's a bullshit talking point.
But, you know, we could talk about that, right?
And the degree to which it's the velvet glove by which the U.S. government engages with the world.
But, again, we're talking about tens of millions of lives that are going to be lost because of this.
And it's unconsciously evil.
In terms of the budget, You're not making a dent in the budget, dude.
I think Wired did this.
I think Wired has been one of the great news sources of the last two months in terms of actually tracking this stuff day by day.
I can't remember where I saw this, but there are journalists who have looked into how much money have they actually saved.
You know, what goes up on the Doge website versus, okay, well, what did this actually cost and how much is it really going to save us?
And it's like, they're saving jack shit.
I mean, you know, salaries, like the entire, like if you killed, not killed, but if you got rid of every U.S. government employee, including active duty military members, like if you just killed all that salary and you just don't pay those salaries anymore, that's like 8% of the U.S. government budget.
Like, you're just like...
Killing the NIH, killing NSAID, or USAID, killing all these little penny programs in terms of what they mean in terms of the U.S. government budget, it's pennies on the dollar.
It's literally pennies on the dollar.
It means nothing in terms of actual government waste or whatever.
Meanwhile, Pentagon budget's going up, because of course it is.
The great peace president, the anti-war president, he's making noises about.
And I think he really means this.
I mean, we were talking about sort of previous presidents and who's considered great and so on and so forth.
I think Trump genuinely sees himself as like...
An expansionist, imperialist, conquering 19th century president.
I think he sees himself as an Andrew Jackson.
I think he sees himself as a polk.
I think he is actually thinking in terms of military expansion.
I think he's going to try to take the Panama Canal.
I think he's going to try to launch military incursions on Mexico and maybe even Canada.
He's making noises about Iran.
He's bombing Yemen.
And of course, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, the great principled anti-war candidate, she's backing him to the hilt and trying to get other people to join in, of course.
Yeah, so what are we even talking about here?
Yeah, no, I will say, like, the single thing, I'm just like, this is the thing that, like, it just...
It means nothing in the scale of things, but the single dumbest thing that he's done that just rankles on me personally, that just puts my teeth on edge, is the Gulf of America.
I just think that's the single dumbest thing.
And that's the thing.
That's one of those things where even early on in the first few days, it's like, well, what does Trump have the authority to do by executive order?
Biden changed the name of Fort Bragg to, I think it was Fort Liberty.
He changed the name of Mount McKinley to Denali.
This is actually, presidents have the authority to do this.
It's basically, the president can issue an order to the USJS, the US Geographic Information Service.
I think that's what this stands for.
But he can issue an order, and this is the new name for this.
This is what we're, in all our official documentation, this is what we're going to call it.
Trump absolutely has the ability to rename the Gulf of Mexico for the purposes of official documents.
He can rename it the Gulf of Melania if he wants to.
The Gulf of Trump.
The Gulf of Barron.
He can definitely name it whatever he wants because that's actually a thing the president gets to do.
Now, we can argue about whether that's a thing that the president should get to do, and I think that's probably not something the president gets to do.
But, you know, I think it's a good thing that when Joe Biden renamed Matt McKinley Denali, I think that's, you know, I applaud that.
You know, it's literally a gesture.
It's literally, you know, words over substance.
But, you know, at least it's words.
But for Trump to literally turn all of that back and then also to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and just like, I'm calling it the Gulf of America because it's our Gulf.
And then suddenly, The entire right-wing apparatus starts calling it the Gulf of America.
And if you don't call it the Gulf of America and you're in a journalistic outfit that is not going to call it the Gulf of America, you don't get to ask questions to this president anymore.
It's both completely stupid.
It's just so stupid to call it the Gulf of America.
It's just so bad.
But it's so insidious.
It really is.
It's just...
Using his own authority.
He's just saying, like, you're going to call it what I want you to call it, or you don't get to be in the room.
You don't get to be a part.
And it's like, it's just like, who's going to obey and who's not going to obey?
And that's just kind of the reality of it.
And, you know, I can pull up Google Maps right now.
And because Google Maps goes off of, in my country, Google Maps will go off the USJS designations.
They, you know, almost universally do that for their mapping.
And so if I pull up Google Maps and, like, Scroll into the Gulf of Mexico.
We'll say Gulf of America right now.
It's just so stupid.
I'm sorry.
That's the one that rankles on me more than anything else because it's just so asinine.
It's just so like what a 10-year-old would do is to just name it.
It's just so indicative of so much of the rest of the nonsense that Trump is doing.
And it's just so petty.
It's so vile and so petty and so stupid that it has to be called the Gulf of America.
Sorry, I'll get off this horse.
But I just had to talk about that.
It's so ridiculous to me.
I think it's a really good marker.
I agree.
We've got very insidious stuff happening.
We have the essentially black bagging of Mahmoud Khalil.
Oh, yeah.
Which... That's, you know, not to downplay for a moment the specific case, because it's a horrible injustice to him and his family, and it's obviously aimed at a, it's aimed at the,
apart from being aimed at him, it's aimed at the Palestinian Gaza solidarity movement.
Right. And it's also a trial balloon, you know.
It's been very obvious.
I mean, this is why you try to strip.
This is why they're going after birthright citizenship and stuff like that.
If you can strip one citizen or person entitled to legal rights of those rights, then do that to anybody you want.
That's what this is about.
This is the classic frog in the pan, you know, with the temperature turned up.
And they've gone for somebody that...
A lot of people, even people on the sort of liberal centrist left, will not want to defend because they do not want to defend the Gaza protests.
A lot of liberals and centrists went along with the slander of the protests at the universities.
In the Gaza Solidarity Movement, they went along with the bullshit talking points about it being bullying of Jewish students and anti-Semitism and stuff like that, and you're a Hamas sympathizer.
That's pretty mainstream in the Democratic Party, that sort of thing.
You protest this stuff, you get told, you know, go back to China or, you know, go back to Hamas or whatever.
So they've picked a soft target, which is very difficult for their...
Or sensible opponents to argue with, even based on their own ideas.
And you see that in the interview that Chuck Schumer just did, where he basically just battered it away by saying, oh, I don't know about the case.
Well, if he broke the law, then it's fine.
If he didn't, then he shouldn't be.
That's what you get from Chuck Schumer.
And then he's supporting the...
The massive cuts of government funding to Colombia.
I think the Trump administration is also cutting huge amounts of money to Penn and other universities.
And specifically with Schumer, it's on the grounds of the protests, of the Gaza solidarity protests.
So it's working.
It's working.
And they're essentially collaborating with him.
And you see that, of course, with the advancement of the CR bill in the Senate.
Same thing.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, what you see here is, like, it's much more targeted.
It's much more effective.
It's like going after this one protester.
You go after him.
It's a test case.
And once you can prove you can do it to Khalil, you can do it to anybody.
Because they're effectively saying, well, you're a foreigner.
You're not an American citizen, which he is not.
And you're engaging in, quote-unquote, terrorist acts by supporting him.
He has a green card, to be clear.
He has a green card.
He has an American one.
So he has legal protections, and what's been done to him is completely extra-legal.
I know you know that.
No, no, no.
Absolutely. I agree.
I agree.
I agree.
I have not looked deeply into the case, but, like, yes, I understand completely.
But they make an example.
And ultimately, the point is to, like, ignore those fine distinctions.
The point is to, like, say, you're a foreigner.
You're not an American.
I found you engaging in, quote-unquote, terrorist activity.
We get to define what that means.
You're gone.
You know, or we can prosecute you, or we can deport you, or we can do whatever we want.
And it's just a way of, like, setting the, like, legal status.
And, like, the courts are, you know, I don't know.
Khalil, the case, I'm really hoping that, like, the courts will step up and do something about this.
And, you know, we'll, like, I don't know if it goes to the Supreme Court, what's going to happen.
You know, ultimately, that's kind of the big question is what happens when all this shit gets to the Supreme Court in six months.
But, you know, and then what happens if Trump just decides to ignore the Supreme Court?
That's another question, of course.
But, like, you know, there are, ultimately, you know, if the courts, like, don't stand in the way, if they just kind of let this happen, it just sets it up for, and then suddenly, like, tens of millions of people are subject to the exact same logic.
And I think one of the most disquieting things I've seen is, I don't know if you saw this, the video of the quote-unquote MS-13 members who were flown to this You know, open-air prison, or not even open-air prison, this concentration camp.
Yeah, I was going to raise that next, because that's a perfect example of what you're talking about.
The guys who are supposedly, there's no evidence of it, supposedly members of this, I think it's supposed to be some Venezuelan drug gang that Trump keeps talking about, but he can't pronounce the name of it.
and they've been, again, essentially black-bagged completely extra-legally and sent to this famously brutal prison in El Salvador, isn't it?
And, you know, the judge ruled that they couldn't do that and they just pretty much openly defied the judge's ruling.
And they're getting quite a bit of pushback from judges here and there.
Like, you know, a judge blocked the spending freeze way back and then another judge blocked the military trans ban.
It's happening quite a bit.
And they're obviously...
They're obviously barreling into a confrontation with the courts, with the judges.
They're going full out in an ideological assault on this judge.
The GOP members are talking about getting impeached.
And they're just defying the court's ruling on this.
You know, those guys, you know, no trial, no hearing, no evidence.
They've done anything wrong.
They're gone.
They're in that prison in El Salvador.
It's done.
Well, and based on, like, oh, they have, quote-unquote, gang tattoos, like, which...
That means nothing.
Your Secretary of Defense has a fucking neo-Nazi tattoo, Donald.
But he doesn't speak Spanish, so it's fine.
Yeah, no, I mean, I swear that video, I'm assuming you saw the video, where they take these guys down, the flight lands, and they take them out, and their chains are shackled, their ankles to their knees.
The video that half the House GOP masturbated to.
Yeah, I saw it.
Exactly. Yeah, no.
I mean, and you look at that and it's like, I saw that.
This is like the opening sequence of like a really great movie about a prison break.
It's like, you know, I think this is like how fascist ideology kind of works in a certain way.
It's like, you know, they look at those movies and they think, no, the guys with the Trenchians and the masks who are like, you know.
Holding the scum in chains.
Those are the heroes.
And it's like, hmm, I don't think so, Tim.
It's not the way it works.
You're thinking of the same thing I'm thinking of.
Tim Pool, during the Black Lives Matter protests, when he famously said, you know, well, when we were kids watching movies like V for Vendetta, the guys that were black-bagging protesters, they were the bad guys.
But isn't it ironic that now we're grown up and it's really happening and they're the good guys?
Well, I was referencing an American sitcom called Home Improvement with a character named Tim the Toolman Taylor.
Oh, I see.
He has an assistant named Al Borland.
It's a terrible TV show, but there's a great series of video essays that's behind the paywall right now.
Anyway, it's complicated.
But anyway, it's been on my mind lately.
But Al Borland, whenever Tim would do something really stupid.
Al would kind of go, I don't think so, Tim.
Sorry, that was my reference there.
But no, you're absolutely right.
Again, this is how fascist ideology works.
I was listening to something yesterday about this guy who used to be a member of the Hammerskins.
And the Hammerskins was an on-the-ground fascist movement.
And they took their name and they took their kind of from Pink Floyd's The Wall and the crossed hammers, which was completely made up for The Wall, right?
And it's supposed to be a parody of fascist ideology.
It's supposed to be, you know, but they took it as, no, we're going to do this for real, you know?
And that's kind of part of the problems of even doing media depictions of this kind of fascist stuff.
It's like, because they just think it's cool and they'll just take the imagery for themselves.
Yeah, I know.
Why do they do that?
They've done that over and over, haven't they?
Pepe the Frog is...
Exactly. It's over-simplistic to say, well, fascists can't create art of their own because, of course, people are people and fascists are people and people can create art, etc.
But you really do, when you find the really potent symbols, they're almost always taken from a source that does not derive its source from fascism.
It comes from another place.
And in particular, they use sort of anti-fascist art.
They use, you know, or non-fascist art.
They often use those depictions.
They mine those depictions for the imagery that they're going to use in their propaganda.
That's exactly what's happening with that video, you know?
When they did the...
You know, mass deportation, ASMR, whatever it's called, where it's like the clinking of chains and being like...
And it's all about this dehumanization of these people, you know?
And look, we don't know what any of these individuals have done, right?
Maybe that's a really bad dude.
All right?
Let's just assume.
Okay, he murdered 13 people.
He raped his cat.
Like, whatever, right?
That still doesn't justify this kind of behavior.
It doesn't justify this kind of, you know, state violence done upon this person, you know.
Yeah. If we have to lock this, you know, if this person needs to be locked away for the safety of others, I mean, that's certainly a conversation we should have.
And I, you know, as a prison abolitionist, I have problems with that, but I could agree with that, you know, in the short term at least.
But even if these people are the worst of the worst, it doesn't justify this kind of propaganda because –
Ultimately, what these people do is they stand in for every brown-skinned person.
That's the point, you know?
Well, it's not even the point, is it?
What they did or didn't do is not the point.
That when they raise stuff like that, it's...
I mean, firstly, they're lying or they're making stuff up or whatever.
But they're doing it to make you forget about the point.
The point is not what they may or may not have done.
If they did something, then yeah, they should get...
If you did something or you didn't do something, you should get due process.
That's what due process is.
And that's the problem.
They didn't get due process.
And if they can take due process away from them, they can take it away from anybody they want, which is why they're doing it.
We were just talking about...
Cantwell, you know, we were saying, you know, we wouldn't wish the horrors of the American prison system on anybody, even Cantwell, and I agree with that.
You know, if Cantwell needs to be somewhere where he can't hurt people, and we know that this guy is dangerous and poisonous and he does hurt people, yeah, sure, but he shouldn't be deprived of his legal rights in the process, and I wouldn't use the horrors that the man is responsible for as a way to justify that.
You know, that's the issue, isn't it?
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
I mean, you know, and, you know, it's like, well, you know, they didn't go after your family, they didn't go after your daughter, they didn't go after your wife, and it's like, you know, that doesn't fucking matter.
Like, you know, it just doesn't matter, you know, like, I don't know, like, it's just, it's bigger than that.
It's bigger than that, you know?
I understand why, you know, for instance, I understand why Lake and Riley's family have the view that they have on You know, on Trump and Trump's crime approach and stuff like that.
I understand.
That's why we don't put the family of the victim on the jury, you know, with all due respect.
Yeah. That's why.
There are plenty of mothers and mothers and children of people who have been subject to this kind of violence, you know, who do not believe in this sort of thing, you know, who do not go that way.
And so, like, you know.
If we're going to make decisions based on Lincoln Riley's family, as horrible as what happened to Lincoln Riley, let's not deny that, right?
As horrible as that is, the thing that you're trying to do in response to that is to take every person who fits a category of that person who did that crime, a person who might possibly commit that crime, and submit those people,
millions and millions of people, to Horrifying state violence.
It is the Gaza-Israel thing.
We can say that the actions of Hamas on October 7th were horrific.
If they are subjected to civilian populations, and a lot of that stuff was exaggerated, but even if we say all that is true, even if we say every single bit of it is true, that doesn't mean you get to carpet bomb Tumian people.
It just doesn't, you know, it's completely like, and it is just this, you know, I don't know, this is just a fundamental disconnect with people.
Let's take an actual sort of left approach.
I mean, even to, you know, I'm slightly hesitant to bring this up because this is an actual person who suffered an actual crime, you know, and died, and it's horrible.
But I'm not trying to exploit her memory.
Lake and Riley, if we're talking about her, far more than illegal immigration.
The problem there is misogyny in rape culture.
We're not talking about all men, regardless of the right-wing propaganda about what people on the left think about this, we're not talking about all men being held responsible for that crime.
Right. Exactly.
We're not.
And that's certainly much more a proximate cause than immigration status.
I completely agree.
Um, and it would also be a crime to like blame every man.
And I say that not just because I'm a man, you know, like an American man at that point, you know?
Um, yeah, no, I mean, it's just, I think the thing that I run into like is in the public consciousness, it's like the, the actions of, you know, the actions of a single individual, like that person is savage.
That person is, you know, has committed a crime and deserves whatever comes to him and the actions of a state, the actions of.
Yes. The actions of, like, well, you know, that is inherently civilized because, like, well, we have rules and we have norms and, you know, we made laws about this and, well, you broke the law.
And so, like, you know, the violence of the state, the violence of the system doesn't rise to the same furor.
You know, it's just like, well, that's just the way the system works, you know, the shrug, as opposed to the actions of, you know.
Even the worst individuals, you know?
And it is, like, you know, but, you know, the U.S. government, like, I'm an American.
The U.S. government operates in my name, you know?
And I don't consent to this, you know what I mean?
You know, we have to see these things as equivalent, or not even equivalent.
We have to see the actions of a government, like, enforcing, like, mass violence across, like, whole swaths of people in order to, like, prevent even horrible crimes.
That's a million times worse.
It's just so much worse.
And, I don't know, it's just so hard to get people into that headspace to think of it that way.
They garner a certain amount of support by going for those emotional things that they can get people to agree with because they feel them.
When Trump says stuff like...
Oh, these people, they're not even people, they're animals.
And the left don't like it when I call them people, when I call them animals, but they are their animals.
He's going to get an awful lot of support for that in the public.
I don't think majority support.
I don't think the majority of people feel that way.
But he's going to get a lot of support for that position.
It works.
That sort of rhetoric works for them.
And it's because...
I mean, all sorts of reasons.
One of the reasons is that people live in a media culture that systematically, you know, hypes up crime and simplifies it and decontextualizes it and dehumanizes the people that commit it.
And, you know, saying that they should be treated as people is not to excuse the things that violent criminals do.
It's just to point out that they are, in fact, people and not animals.
And they do, in fact, have human rights, regardless of what they've done.
But, you know, the media culture that people live in, Yeah, no.
I agree.
I mean, and some of the stuff that's being done to these detainees or whatever, I wouldn't even do to an animal, you know?
Like, it's just, you know, if you did that to a rabid dog, people would immediately see the cruelty, you know, which is interesting, right?
You know, is that people would see more empathy for For a dog than they would for someone who was put in this terrorist category.
I don't know.
It's just so vile to me.
It's going to get worse.
It's just going to get worse.
This is the beginning of it.
Frankly, the Democrats are not standing in the way.
By and large, they simply are not.
We have a few who are in.
yep there are a few there are a few yeah there are a few who have really kind of stood up and been brave and you know as many problems as I have with AOC I hope she primaries the fuck out of Chuck Schumer come in that time and I hope
she wins that would that would that would be
decade for me, honestly, you know, um, questionably as a, you know, Similarly, you know, Bernie Sanders, somebody I've lots of criticisms of, but he is, he's leading, he's, he's leading a popular fight back.
He's going to, um, uh, red areas and he's, he's, he's, he's doing the populist left rhetoric.
No, it's not.
But he's doing it without backtracking on Gaza.
He's doing it without backtracking on trans rights.
You know, it's as good as it gets.
At the moment.
I mean, Tim Walls has said some stuff in the last couple of days.
Yeah. Which was, you know, and it's very clear.
Tim Walls keeps saying Medicare, Medicare, Medicare, and he keeps on saying for all, for all, for all.
He just needs to join those two bits.
I mean, but it is very clear that, like, you know, and this is a criticism.
I mean, look, we can do this criticism.
I'm just going to do this briefly.
It's very clear that Bernie and AOC and Tim Walls and all these people, once they were in the Biden team, once they were in the warm hug of the club, there were certain things you don't criticize.
And everybody went with the program.
I don't think that's okay.
I don't think that's okay.
But now that they're out of that, now that this is done, I wish they had spoken with their big boy and girl voices at the time.
That would have been nice.
But I understand how you make that decision.
You know, I've never been in that place to have to make that decision, but I understand why you make that decision.
What I care about is what you do now.
What I care about is, like, moving forward.
And, you know, Tim Walsh, like, he was picked as VP, and he had, like, a couple of weeks where he was coming out and breathing fire.
And then, you know, like the Harris campaign, and I'm sure that was hugely, you know, the Biden team, you know, just sort of like, you know, enforce a certain like regularity on it.
And like, he toned it down and he got really boring and stupid for a while.
But like, you know, if Tim Walz keeps talking like he's talking now, like I'd support him for 2028.
No question.
You know, like, you know, and like Tim Walz is not my politics.
I mean, what he did in Minneapolis in 2020 is unconscionable.
But like, you know, it's about the best we're going to get at this point, you know, you know.
I'm not putting my hat behind a candidate, and we don't endorse candidates here for obvious reasons, but...
We don't endorse electoral politics for reasons, but there are things that these people could be doing.
And I think that the Schumer bit, and I don't know if we need to talk in detail about it and the continuing resolution.
I don't have the details in my head.
No, I think the gist is clear.
I think the thing with Schumer, I think that really what's happening and the immediate response from I think that's a good sign.
I think, you know, again, even in the last couple of days, maybe Chuck Schumer being a dipshit, maybe we bring some life into some people and maybe we start to see some kind of difference.
I'll believe it when I see it at this point.
You know, that's kind of where I land on that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
But, you know, at the other end of the spectrum, to the people we've been talking about, you have Gavin Newsom, who has started up his own podcast.
And his guests so far have been Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon.
And they've been very amiable chats where they've agreed about a whole lot of stuff.
So we're really seeing Mr. Newsom's true colors, I think.
I think a lot of people have seen those colors for quite a while, but I think they're now pretty undeniable.
There are a lot of people who would have gritted their teeth and voted for Gavin Newsom up until a few days ago, up until a week ago.
And I think that's just completely cut now.
It's hard for me to imagine that he's...
As a presidential candidate, I think he's done, honestly.
It would be hard for me to imagine that you get to do that.
And then maybe he runs as a Republican.
Maybe that's the thing.
Maybe that's the future.
Well, I was going to say, I can see him doing a Tulsi, you know?
Yeah, no, no.
I mean, that's entirely possible.
But, you know, there was a kind of big thing of like, Newsom is the next big thing, at least in kind of US politics, in terms of like, you know, thinking, you know, down the line, another, you know, five or 10 years, it's like Newsom is clearly like setting himself up.
And I think this is just, it's just, you read the room wrong, dude.
Like, you know?
Yeah. there is this division among the
You know, it's the same divide, you know?
And it's hard to put numbers on, like, exactly what those percentages are, but, you know, like, you know, the people who lean more Bernie and the people who lean more Hillary.
And the Hillary people have always kind of just taken the day, have always just kind of won the day, and they just get to be in charge because they have the money behind them for other reasons.
Newsom is just following that playbook.
It's just like, okay, we're just going to, you know, we're going to, you know, we're going to sidle up to Len Chaney.
We're going to do campaign speeches with Len Chaney instead of, like, supporting, you know, the left side of the party.
Newsom is following with the James Carville advice, you know, and they're going to throw transport on the bus to do all that sort of shit.
And ultimately, you know, time's going to tell about, like, how effective that's going to be.
But, like, you know...
Well, their poll numbers are through the floor.
You know, the big...
Democrat plan is to wait until Trump gets so unpopular and, you know, just let him make himself unpopular and then the midterms come along and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And, you know, with Schumer, it's specifically, well, you know, his approval rating is this low, but we need it even lower and then we can pounce and stuff.
It's like, well, your approval rating's even worse.
This isn't working.
This is not working.
And it's worse.
It's worse because you're not fighting.
But, of course, you'll never get them to see that because it's just absolutely a faith position for those people.
They go right, they run on the right, and they lose.
And the conclusion isn't running on the right was bad.
The conclusion is always we need to go further right because we were too left.
They do not have the mental capacity to conceptualize anything else.
Which is what they've been doing for longer than I've been alive.
I mean, that goes back to the Vietnam War, if not earlier.
You punch a hippie.
That's just how you get elected in democratic politics, is punch the fucking hippie.
It's always been vile.
It's just, you know, yeah.
Anyway, we should probably talk about that Zelensky meeting, at least briefly.
Oh, God, yeah.
Which was just another moment of...
Just what the fuck?
Well, I mean, if DOGE is the kind of epitome of domestic policy and sort of like internal stuff, what the U.S. government does internally, even though the USAID is obviously externally focused, etc.
But, you know, if DOGE is sort of like knocking the beams out from the ceiling of the American experiment domestically, then that meeting with Zelensky was doing that.
In terms of U.S. foreign policy, I think.
That and the tariffs.
But, you know, I think that Zelensky meeting, and I mean, just talking down to Zelensky, like, you know, treating him like an errant child who is, you know, who needs a spanking.
And you haven't said thank you even once in this meeting, you know?
Yes, he has.
And if you watch the full meeting, they had a very pleasant exchange.
I don't want to say productive meeting or whatever, but there was a back and forth, and then suddenly it was time to strike.
And really, I think this is where Trump's personality kind of gets in his way.
The thing I think that really set him off was, Zelensky says, right now it's us, but one day it will be you.
You have these oceans separating you, but one day it will be you who is subject to this.
And Trump said, no, we're America.
We're strong.
I'm Trump.
Trump is America.
It's never going to be us.
And that seemed to be the moment in which things really fell apart.
The consequences of this...
He dared to suggest that, you know, Trump might ever have to face weakness, you know?
Right. Or that America, or Trump himself, and I think Trump sees himself as like this kind of, you know, in some way, this, you know, visage of America, or this icon...
Oh, yeah, no.
This is, this is what, I mean, we've talked in the past about Hitler.
We talked a bit about Adolf Hitler when we did the...
Big guy in fascism.
We talked a little bit about him when we did the Downfall episode and we talked a bit about the Kershaw biography.
One of the big things, one of Kershaw's themes in that is that Hitler came to just see himself and Germany as basically the same thing.
Just psychologically, he just saw himself as like the human instantiation of Germany.
I think Trump absolutely just thinks he is America.
He just, you know...
He just thinks, he thinks America is like this big mech suit that he wears.
And when he moves his arm, America moves its arm in sync.
You know, I think that's just how he feels.
Right, right.
Well, no, no, no, I absolutely agree.
And, yeah, I mean, he sees himself as that, like this sort of American exceptionalism, which is like a Trump exceptionalism, right?
Yeah. It's like, well, it's never going to come to us because we're strong.
It's never going to come here because...
Well, we're going to take the Panama Canal, and we're going to own Greenland, and we're going to annex Canada, and we're going to, you know, and he's, like, and we're going to have, like, and there are ways of, like, you know, there are ways of, like, thinking of this in terms of, like, instead of this kind of, like, you know, U.S.-led rules-based order,
like this post-World War II rules-based order, we're going to have, like, realms of, like, polarity, like a multipolar world in which, like, China has its sphere of influence, and the U.S. has its sphere of influence, which would basically be the Americas, and then...
Russia has its sphere of influence, and we'll kind of like, but like, and maybe, you know, if you, you know, again, I am no, I am no Hollyannish person about the, you know, the horrors of like, what lies underneath the rules-based order,
especially in terms of like Central America and Africa, et cetera, in terms of Central and South America and Africa.
But I'm not sure that a world in which The U.S. is exerting colonial influence across the Americas, and leaving Europe to its own devices to combat Russia is a more stable world.
I don't see that as a positive outcome.
As bad as the U.S. is, I think China and Russia would both be worse.
I don't know if we have any tanky listeners, but fuck off.
You know, no.
I think there are numerous examples, both in history and in present day, of Russia and China actually worse than the U.S. on these things.
As bad as the U.S. is, and I'm not defending the U.S. history of these things.
I'm just saying, as bad as that is, it's not going to be better without the U.S. inserting this role here.
I think really what, and this is why I think this is a big upheaval, is You know, Zelensky goes away, and what he's going to do is he's going to start making, he's going to get supplies from Europe, and he's going to make ties with Europe, and, you know, they're going to build a nuclear program,
you know?
Europe is starting to show signs of realizing that it's going to have to start sort of rethinking, you know, the Western imperialist alliance, you know, the most obvious manifestation of that being NATO.
For decades now, has just been inherently Atlanticist.
It's just been Europe and America, just inherently.
Europe is starting to, you know, I'm no admirer of Keir Starmer.
I thought the way he came to grovel to Trump and he'll have an invitation from the king to come and visit Britain again.
It's a great honour.
It made me sick.
And, you know, they're slashing benefits in this country.
They're going to throw millions of people.
Basically, onto the rubbish dump.
Disabled people, people on benefits, unemployed people, they're going to starve because of this filthy, evil government.
Keir Starmer understands, devoted imperialist, as much every Labour leader, Labour Prime Minister has always been.
He clearly understands, as do many people in Europe now, that a realignment is taking place, and Europe is going to have to start thinking about how to I don't know.
It's just like...
Everything is ashes.
Everything is flames right now.
Yeah. And on top of that, we have...
I mean, the big difference, of course, between a Democrat and a Republican administration is that the American government now has a coherent foreign policy over Ukraine and Gaza.
Under Biden, they had essentially reversed positions in both places.
You were supporting the...
The resistance in one place and the aggressor in the other.
Now the American government is just supporting the aggressor in both places.
And the ceasefire in Gaza just pretty much...
I mean, it's clear now from what they've done that it was pretty much a trap to lure people back in so that they could finish the job.
Because they're just slaughtering people again.
It came back after the ceasefire in Gaza.
Absolutely. Another terrible, surreal...
This sounds like something that only could happen in a...
The broadest of political satires is the, you know, we're going to turn Gaza into a beachfront property.
We're going to have resorts, beach resorts in Gaza.
There was this AI-generated thing of Gaza, and it's like the Riviera, the Middle Eastern Riviera.
That's it, yeah.
You're going to build your Riviera on the bones of two million people.
It's just...
Yeah. God, it's just so disgusting.
Well, I mean, that's what they were going to turn Auschwitz into a sort of, you know, a model town, a showcase town of the new German Greater Reich.
It was going to have like spas and shopping centers and holiday camps.
And yeah, it was going to be a wonderful place.
And it would have been built on, as you say, the ashes and bones of millions of people.
Nowadays, the American president just says that openly about Gaza.
I mean, and again, so much of the U.S. is also built on the graves of, you know, millions, at least, you know, hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of people.
I mean, so, you know, it's a center colonial project, ultimately.
It is.
You know, let's, let's not, let's not play hypocrisy here, but, you know, to be that, to be that blatant about it, it's just like, it does, it does feel like a, you know, a new, like a new level of horror to me, you know, it's just like, you know, and this is just, it's just, it's just what we do every day now.
It's just, you know, every day you open up your blue sky feed and this is, this is what's happening.
Yeah, and there's always jokes to be made about it, and the people making the jokes know that the jokes are terrible, but what do we do?
There's this overpowering feeling of helplessness.
But there is a protest wave in America.
There is quite a large protest wave in America, but it all feels dispersed and disconnected, and it's not gaining any traction.
The one thing that has given me a certain amount of hope in recent days is the massive explosion of protest in Europe.
We have in Hungary, Romania, and Serbia, we have a massive protest movement on the streets.
And it is...
I mean, there's national complexities and political complexities to it, but it is basically a response to that same triangle that is currently in the process of taking over the United States, the triangle of corruption, authoritarianism,
and austerity.
And that shows the way, I think.
But whether or not that way can be followed in America remains to be seen.
But that's the only thing that will do it.
The Tesla protests and the fact that, you know, people like spray painting the Cybertrucks and, you know, spray painting Dixon's Cybertrucks and stuff.
Like, you know, it's a much smaller scale thing.
It's not the same thing, but it's like it's in the same.
I mean, Tesla stock is in the toilet right now.
And that's the bulk of where, like, Elon Musk's personal fortune comes from.
If Tesla crashes hard enough, Elon Musk is going to, like...
He has to do, like, a marching collar shit.
You know, he has to, like, he's, you know, it's going to, it will hurt him in the place where it will actually hurt him.
And so I think, you know, anything you can do to, like, abolish that brand legally with due process, et cetera.
And Trump is, you know, don't think for a moment that he doesn't care about that, because he absolutely does.
No, no, he doesn't.
Trump is, you know, he's steering the United States economy towards an artificial crash, an artificial recession.
And again, don't buy any of this stuff from people that will tell you, oh, they're doing that deliberately because they want to institute the shock doctrine.
Okay, maybe some of the wingnuts around Trump are thinking that.
I don't say not.
But, like, the big monopoly capitalists that gambled on Trump in order to get what they wanted, Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos and so on, they do not want a global recession.
Trust me, they do not.
Right, exactly, exactly.
Yeah. I feel like, you know, I feel like we know our audience.
I hope we don't have a whole lot of people in our audience who are, you know, kind of thinking in that kind of conspiratorial way.
But, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
We see that.
And I hear you.
Look, if you want to have a conversation about that, I'm happy to have a private conversation.
But still, I think that stuff is silly.
Ultimately, billionaires are going to billionaire.
And as much as I admire The Shock Dodger as a concept in a book, that's not really what's happening here.
These guys want to do this thing.
I don't think Naomi Klein holds that it is.
I think that's a misuse of her Right.
Agreed. Sorry, I was just talking.
It's fine.
I think that's all I have for right now.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I think that'll do.
I mean, there's more.
We could keep going on for more, but we've been going on for like an hour and a half.
I think we've done enough for now.
I don't know.
People have kind of messaged me or kind of, not DMed me, but tweeted at me as wanting us to kind of talk about this stuff more.
And this stuff is easy to produce.
I don't have to do 10 hours of prep work in order to produce an episode about some dipshit that 40 people have heard of.
And so if you want us to cover this stuff more often, then we can.
I just don't know that this is the best use of the platform, necessarily.
So please let us know what you think.
Do you want more of this?
Do you want us to come in and talk about current events?
I'll speak for myself.
I don't know.
Jack can speak for himself.
These are easy to produce.
This is the easy stuff.
We didn't come in with a plan.
We were just following the news.
We could do the Somewhere News thing of picking three news stories and talking through them.
Let's steal somebody else's format.
That's fine.
The one thing I saw was that Rogan had Daryl Cooper on his show.
Daryl Cooper, who we talked about in a previous episode, who was the Holocaust denier, a pseudo-historian that was interviewed by Tucker and was mutuals on X with J.D. Vance.
Yeah, he was on Rogan.
And I got this little itch at the back of my brain that thought, that could be an episode.
I could watch that and get some clips and talk about that.
And then I thought...
Are you actually volunteering to do that, Jack?
Do you want to take my job at this point?
You did Jimmy Doerr, that was fine with me.
I've got some more official episodes.
I've got them creaking up.
Hypothetically, I'm going to be walking again soon and the pain is going to be less.
I've got some personal life stuff going on that when that's good and done with, then it's going to be a lot easier to come back a little bit more full-time.
I think until then, I think we will keep doing.
I know we've got another episode where we're going to be recording in the next day or two.
We're coming back and we keep promising, we're back, we're back, and then things happen and we're not back.
But the plan is to...
At least ease our way back in and do more stuff, because I think people have been asking for our input on this stuff.
We've got concepts of being back.
Let's put it that way.
We have illusions of being back.
We're doing our best.
We are.
Well, you are.
Okay, so thanks, Daniel, and thanks for listening, everybody, and we will see you again very soon, as long as there's no massive snafus.
With a really interesting interview, which, as Daniel says, we'll be recording in the next little while.
But thanks for listening to this, and stick around, because we're not finished.
