True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 454: Dogecau
Aired: 2025-04-28
Duration: 01:42:46


=== A Lot of Feedback (07:18) ===

[00:00:00]  We could just put audio actually.
[00:00:02]  We got a lot of feedback on that last gold open.
[00:00:04]  Oh, yeah.
[00:00:07]  You know what?
[00:00:07]  Fair enough.
[00:00:08]  Fair enough.
[00:00:09]  You know what?
[00:00:09]  I wasn't happy with it either.
[00:00:11]  You know what?
[00:00:11]  Let's just put, you know, we'll conclude this.
[00:00:13]  We'll include this and we'll put an audio clip here to appease the people.
[00:00:17]  Oh, I'm sending this to my.
[00:00:19]  What are you doing to a podcast to your mother?
[00:00:21]  Not the one, like one that Brace and I do.
[00:00:23]  If you came out of my pussy and you said, and 22 years later, you, you know, while not paying attention at your little barista job, you hit me with an eye message.
[00:00:38]  Hey, check out this podcast.
[00:00:39]  I'm sorry, I'm blocking and I'm taking, you're out of the will.
[00:00:42]  But in that case, you'd be your own grandfather.
[00:00:44]  Yes.
[00:00:45]  I'm my own grandpa.
[00:01:12]  Maybe your ding-o came out of your pussy No, We have a lot of feedback.
[00:01:18]  We have a lot of feedback on the dingo things.
[00:01:21]  People don't like me saying dingo.
[00:01:23]  I don't think that's the browser.
[00:01:25]  I think, no.
[00:01:26]  I've got a lot of private messages about them.
[00:01:28]  They found it.
[00:01:28]  They just don't touch it.
[00:01:29]  They didn't think it was.
[00:01:30]  Our beautiful dingos.
[00:01:32]  People, you know, people, I forget about this, but people listen to this while going to sleep.
[00:01:36]  I thought you were going to say this.
[00:01:37]  I forget that Australians exist.
[00:01:40]  I'm sorry, I do.
[00:01:41]  We should be so lucky.
[00:01:43]  I have something that I need to say.
[00:01:45]  Indeed, Need.
[00:01:46]  First thing, I'll just get it out of the way.
[00:01:47]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:48]  Hello.
[00:01:49]  I'm Brace.
[00:01:49]  I wasn't ready for that.
[00:01:50]  Hello.
[00:01:51]  I'm Chris Jung Chomsky.
[00:01:52]  Hello.
[00:01:53]  And this is Dronan.
[00:01:54]  Okay.
[00:01:54]  Bye-bye.
[00:01:55]  So, real quick, I just want to say something because this has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about today, but I need to say my piece because I saw something that greatly upset me and I need to air my grievance, which is that I saw someone online, I believe it was an abundant, that was, I don't know if you guys saw it, but there was a very poor Tesla earnings call this past week.
[00:02:24]  Yeah, so I cut myself, as many listeners know, and I do it when something bad happens.
[00:02:28]  I don't know how to regulate my emotions.
[00:02:30]  And as you can see, all over my arms.
[00:02:33]  Yeah.
[00:02:33]  And inner thighs, which I'll show you guys.
[00:02:35]  No, please.
[00:02:35]  That's okay.
[00:02:36]  But and this abundant was saying, like, isn't it so sad that Elon in his like terrible like Trump folly, following his like, you know, he gets, he gets the anti-woke mind virus.
[00:02:51]  And now he's just ruined, sullied this like great American industry titan that is Tesla.
[00:03:00]  And I will not abide by this like liberal haziography.
[00:03:04]  Tesla is a fake company and it's always been a fake company before, during, after Elon's insanity, which has always been there.
[00:03:12]  It just wasn't, you know, it's like shingles.
[00:03:15]  The anti-woke mind virus.
[00:03:16]  It was in there.
[00:03:17]  It was already there.
[00:03:19]  Good shingles reference.
[00:03:21]  Thank you.
[00:03:22]  I had shingles once.
[00:03:23]  We guys both have shingles right now.
[00:03:25]  No, that was the most insanely painful.
[00:03:28]  Because also, if you don't know what it is early enough, why would I know what chicken post?
[00:03:32]  It's chickenpox for adults.
[00:03:34]  It's the chicken pox virus.
[00:03:35]  Yeah, but like if you have, but it was like, you know, if it's stress or like terrible, something can like, you know, awaken it.
[00:03:42]  Have you guys got chickenpox as adults?
[00:03:44]  No, you haven't.
[00:03:45]  No, you have it as a kid and it stays in your body.
[00:03:47]  Dormant.
[00:03:48]  Dormant.
[00:03:48]  Thank you.
[00:03:49]  Immature.
[00:03:50]  And then, you know, you can have like an immune response and it kind of like wakes up.
[00:03:54]  I didn't know what was going on.
[00:03:55]  I was just like, whoa, I have like a weird rash on my arm.
[00:03:58]  So an apt metaphor.
[00:03:59]  Thank you.
[00:04:00]  But I didn't, anyway, you can't do anything about it if you don't catch it quick enough.
[00:04:04]  And so you're just like stuck with this like week of insane nerve pain.
[00:04:07]  Anyway.
[00:04:08]  Elon's repulsive personality was something that he advocated.
[00:04:10]  I'm just saying that you can't, you don't get to, you don't get to like no jail out of, no, no, out of, what is it?
[00:04:21]  Get out of jail free.
[00:04:22]  Thank you card here.
[00:04:24]  I'm so mad about this because you don't get to go back to your position.
[00:04:28]  All those liberals love Tesla so much until they couldn't.
[00:04:32]  It's true.
[00:04:32]  And now they want a way out to love Tesla again.
[00:04:35]  And I'm saying, no, no, you can't.
[00:04:37]  And I will insist upon it.
[00:04:39]  You insist away.
[00:04:40]  So I looked at those earning reports, earnings reports, like Matrix style, which is like a bunch of numbers going on with the call on.
[00:04:47]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:48]  I have like speakerphones.
[00:04:49]  Wraparounds here that I do it with.
[00:04:52]  And I noticed that the money that they did make wasn't from selling cars.
[00:04:56]  It was from selling EV credits.
[00:04:59]  No way.
[00:05:00]  Yeah, it was.
[00:05:00]  I wish that I could listen to something explaining this to me in great detail for many hours.
[00:05:06]  I do.
[00:05:07]  I have great news for you.
[00:05:09]  True and on, the greatest show.
[00:05:10]  Why are we advertising our own podcast right now?
[00:05:12]  True Non, the greatest show on earth.
[00:05:13]  Episodes one, two, three, available.
[00:05:15]  You know what?
[00:05:16]  People always, what's the episode number?
[00:05:19]  Where can I find that?
[00:05:20]  Guess what?
[00:05:20]  You can go to podcast.whatever, the truanon.com.
[00:05:24]  Who knows?
[00:05:24]  You don't want to hear your URL.
[00:05:25]  You're hearing it.
[00:05:26]  They're not clicking on it.
[00:05:27]  You can just go to Google and fucking search it.
[00:05:29]  That's another thing.
[00:05:29]  It's just Google Truanon plus whatever you want to hear about.
[00:05:33]  Nitto, you know, China.
[00:05:36]  Any of these things.
[00:05:37]  Just Google it, man.
[00:05:39]  You know?
[00:05:40]  Why are we both looking at him?
[00:05:42]  I don't know.
[00:05:42]  Because we wanted him to say the URL, but he's not going to say it.
[00:05:45]  You said it right.
[00:05:45]  Podcast.trunon.com.
[00:05:47]  Go there.
[00:05:47]  Anyway, I'm just no, if you see someone trying to pass that bullshit out, no, you say, no, no, no, always fake company, forever fake company.
[00:05:54]  We're rolling coal.
[00:05:56]  You know, it's a real fake company because it had that earnings call and now the stock price is through the roof.
[00:06:03]  Through the motherfucking roof, these people.
[00:06:07]  I mean, we should probably cover this in an episode, but it'll be too old news by then.
[00:06:10]  Elon getting those screenshots.
[00:06:11]  The thing that's weird about this moment is that like the only safe bet in the market, this is not financial advice.
[00:06:17]  Gold.
[00:06:18]  Is fake bullshit.
[00:06:21]  Meme stocks, fakery, anything that's just like a hype machine, junk.
[00:06:25]  So what would you say that people should invest in?
[00:06:28]  No, no, no.
[00:06:29]  I'm being serious because, I mean, this is not financial advice, but because like the market can't adequately price real companies because no one understands actual risk right now.
[00:06:40]  So everyone is just like pumping fake shit.
[00:06:44]  Because the risk of it being not real is already priced out.
[00:06:48]  Like if you actually make something.
[00:06:49]  Like everyone already knows that Tesla is bullshit.
[00:06:52]  And like you, they were already expecting a bullshit earnings report because they know that it's a fucking bullshit company.
[00:06:57]  And so its stock price isn't even related to any of that and it can't be affected.
[00:07:02]  Like what the fuck is this world that we live in?
[00:07:05]  I'm Googling best stock right now.
[00:07:07]  Nvidia, Tesla, and ooh, Google.
[00:07:10]  Google.
[00:07:11]  Well, you could use all those to find out more about Truinon.
[00:07:14]  Palantir?
[00:07:16]  Apple?
[00:07:16]  Palantir is through the roof.

=== Rubio On Citizenship Offer (15:39) ===

[00:07:18]  GameStop?
[00:07:18]  Oh, God.
[00:07:19]  Oh, my God.
[00:07:20]  Do not get in on this stuff, by the way.
[00:07:22]  I'm just like, keep your money safe and close to your heart.
[00:07:24]  And in gold.
[00:07:25]  That's the only thing is you should just buy gold.
[00:07:27]  That's what money represents.
[00:07:29]  Just keep your money and money.
[00:07:30]  That's, I'm always saying that.
[00:07:32]  We have a lot to talk about.
[00:07:33]  We do.
[00:07:34]  I don't.
[00:07:36]  We're going back to the news.
[00:07:37]  We're going back to reality.
[00:07:38]  We're coming back to the present day.
[00:07:39]  And I got to tell you, Liz, I am not loving it.
[00:07:42]  No.
[00:07:43]  It is a fact, a verifiable fact that every stupid cocksucker that we've talked about for the past five years, for some reason, despite being from all different parts of the world and different industries and different, you know, sexual predilections and things of that nature, they have all come together to form a international-based Bitcoin meme.
[00:08:08]  I am become meme.
[00:08:09]  Website, you know, mafia, correct?
[00:08:13]  And they are in charge and in power.
[00:08:17]  And not only just in charge and in power, but accumulating more power as they are in power.
[00:08:22]  I want to talk about a little meeting that went down at the White House, which is where the president lives.
[00:08:29]  He lives there, huh?
[00:08:30]  In the residence, yeah.
[00:08:32]  I find that to be a bit gauche.
[00:08:34]  Well, it's like a different part of the.
[00:08:36]  I know, but don't you think that like the president should keep an apartment?
[00:08:39]  No.
[00:08:39]  Well, it is kind of an apartment in a house.
[00:08:41]  That's true.
[00:08:42]  I guess it is true, yeah.
[00:08:43]  Because you don't have to deal with a commute.
[00:08:44]  Because they can wake them up and they could be like, Mr. President, no one's calling you back.
[00:08:51]  You live at work.
[00:08:53]  Mr. President, G still hasn't called.
[00:08:56]  Let's tell everybody he has.
[00:08:59]  The President of the United States, Donald J. Trump and his little gay coterie hosted.
[00:09:06]  I mean, I'm just speaking facts here, JD and Rubio, hosted Bukele, Naeb Bukele, the president of El Salvador.
[00:09:15]  I don't know why you go to El Salvador.
[00:09:17]  El Salvador.
[00:09:20]  El Salvador.
[00:09:22]  What was that?
[00:09:22]  Like April 14th?
[00:09:24]  So about Friday the 20th.
[00:09:27]  No, that would be almost two weeks ago, really, by the time this episode comes out.
[00:09:32]  It's April 25th.
[00:09:35]  Subtract 14 from 25, and that's how many days it is.
[00:09:38]  But you know what?
[00:09:39]  It's 11 days, six days, a week ago?
[00:09:42]  You're right.
[00:09:43]  Regardless.
[00:09:44]  She gave me a look like I was wrong on my math, but I'm like, that was 11 days ago.
[00:09:50]  Trump and his little group of sort of fat-jowled catamites met Bukele in the White House.
[00:10:00]  Actually, I want to go back further on that.
[00:10:03]  Remember when Donald Trump won the election to be the United States President of the Americas?
[00:10:07]  Yes.
[00:10:08]  He appointed this guy, Marco Rubio, mostly known for being Latinx, but also phone parties.
[00:10:16]  And this is something you can Google, phone party plus Marco Rubio, and you will get results as the Secretary of State.
[00:10:22]  And Marco Rubio sets off on a little tour of Latino America.
[00:10:26]  He goes down, or Centralo America.
[00:10:29]  He goes down to, I believe his first stop was Panama.
[00:10:35]  Obviously, you got to check out the canal.
[00:10:37]  Make sure there's no Chinese there.
[00:10:38]  No Chinese balloons.
[00:10:41]  Ooh.
[00:10:42]  Ooh, okay.
[00:10:44]  Panamanian Chinese balloons.
[00:10:46]  They should send Anna Hendrix down there.
[00:10:48]  Christina?
[00:10:49]  It's Christina.
[00:10:50]  Who's Ana Hendricks?
[00:10:51]  That's Anna Kendrick.
[00:10:52]  Who the fuck is she?
[00:10:53]  Different actress.
[00:10:54]  Yeah, she's more of a musical theater kind of girl.
[00:10:56]  I'm good.
[00:10:57]  Send Anna Hendrix down there or whatever.
[00:11:00]  The lady with the big titties down there blocked that thing.
[00:11:02]  No Chinese can go through.
[00:11:04]  But so he goes to Panama, and then after that, he goes to El Salvador.
[00:11:08]  And this is actually, I've mentioned this in the show before because this, I've got to be honest, this pissed me off because this is actually where, and this didn't happen before the election, but this is actually where, I don't think it did at least.
[00:11:19]  Naeb Bukele raised at first the issue, not even the issue, the offer of El Salvador to take not only criminals of, you know, not American citizens, so migrant criminals, but American citizens and put them in maximum security prison in El Salvador.
[00:11:41]  So, this is what Rubio said at the time.
[00:11:43]  This is like one of his first duties of Secretary of State.
[00:11:45]  This is what he said.
[00:11:46]  Very productive meeting with Salvadorian president Naim Bukele.
[00:11:49]  I should say this is on Twitter.
[00:11:50]  So, at Naim Bukele.
[00:11:52]  Excuse me, not on Twitter, on X, The Everything App.
[00:11:56]  His commitment to accept and incarcerate criminals from any country, including from violent gangs like MS-13 and Trendaragua, will make America safer.
[00:12:05]  In an extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country, President Bukele offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents.
[00:12:18]  Excuse me?
[00:12:19]  I'm sorry.
[00:12:20]  Also, I do want to say, yeah, no other country has offered that because it's insane.
[00:12:26]  You're like, why would Belgium be like, hey, we have a prison if you guys want to send anyone.
[00:12:31]  Who would offer this?
[00:12:33]  This is not an offer that one generally makes.
[00:12:37]  So, you know, listen, I'm no genius here, but generally, countries have their own penal systems where they incarcerate people who, not only their own citizens who commit crimes in the country, but oftentimes citizens from other countries who may be in their country for whatever reason that commit a crime when they're.
[00:12:52]  They're usually incarcerated in the place where the crime, or at least in the country where the crime took place.
[00:12:58]  No, it's a pretty basic tenet, mostly followed all over the world.
[00:13:02]  It should be noted, though, that right afterwards, ABC, this is from ABC, and it's not attributed to anybody, but this is from an ABC article on it.
[00:13:10]  After Rubio spoke, a U.S. official said the Trump administration had no current plans to try to deport American citizens, but said Bukele's offer was significant.
[00:13:19]  The U.S. government cannot deport American citizens, and such a move would be met with significant legal challenges.
[00:13:25]  Well, it seems that those last two clauses are actually not in agreement.
[00:13:30]  You either can't deport them or there's going to be significant legal challenges that then could be successful and you can't deport them.
[00:13:37]  Yes, exactly.
[00:13:38]  You know, I have to say, there's also a word there.
[00:13:42]  I mean, who, what U.S. official, first of all, but also no current.
[00:13:46]  You got to stop granting people anonymity for just this kind of bullshit.
[00:13:50]  I know.
[00:13:50]  This is like, come on.
[00:13:51]  Hey, put your money where your mouth is.
[00:13:53]  Dox yourself.
[00:13:54]  I mean, what if this is like a health and human services guy?
[00:13:56]  Be like, no, I don't think they're going to do that.
[00:13:58]  You know?
[00:13:58]  Well, who knows?
[00:14:00]  No, it's probably someone, you know.
[00:14:02]  So on April 14th, that was back, I think, I guess in February, but on April 14th or January, maybe, Trump and Bukele meet at the White House.
[00:14:09]  And it's a very, very friendly meeting.
[00:14:11]  In fact, I watched the whole thing on C-SPAN.
[00:14:13]  I got to be honest, it's always humiliating when you do this.
[00:14:16]  It's half of the thing is Trump just taking questions about whatever.
[00:14:21]  Oh, I know.
[00:14:21]  And Bukele kind of just sitting there like, oh, okay.
[00:14:23]  Bukele's suits are crazy.
[00:14:25]  Slim fit.
[00:14:27]  Extremely slim.
[00:14:28]  I would say tight.
[00:14:29]  And always with the t-shirt, right?
[00:14:31]  Always with the t-shirt.
[00:14:32]  That's that new thing.
[00:14:33]  Black t-shirt, navy.
[00:14:34]  Like, you look fucking stupid.
[00:14:37]  Well, I think it's like everyone is trying to look like a Premier League manager or something.
[00:14:41]  And I find it a little like, let's go back to some real suits.
[00:14:43]  Well, in his defense, so Bukele obviously is Palestinian descent.
[00:14:50]  We'll talk about Bukele more later, but he's a Palestinian descent from a Central American country.
[00:14:55]  So he's, you know, got the Latino flavor in him.
[00:14:59]  Those are Slim Fit suit guys.
[00:15:02]  They don't need to be, though.
[00:15:03]  That's all I'm saying.
[00:15:04]  I know, but that is kind of like, that is sort of, it's, he wouldn't be the only one doing that, is all I'm saying there.
[00:15:11]  Slim fit suit with a t-shirt or whatever, like a shirt underneath it that isn't collared.
[00:15:16]  That's kind of, I mean, I'm just saying that's, that's not uncommon there.
[00:15:20]  So Bukele, I mean, they're both sucking each other's dicks there.
[00:15:24]  Bukele tells him, we've heard you have a crime and terrorism problem, and you need help with, you know, we're a small country, but we'll do that for you.
[00:15:32]  And he's also like, Trump, dude, we've imprisoned thousands.
[00:15:36]  I say that.
[00:15:37]  We've imprisoned thousands, but we've liberated millions by imprisoning thousands.
[00:15:43]  And Trump's like, oh, that's a great line.
[00:15:44]  Can I use that?
[00:15:45]  Et cetera, et cetera.
[00:15:46]  And Bukele says, actually, well, here's the thing here.
[00:15:49]  You got 350 million people.
[00:15:51]  And in order to liberate them, well, you got to imprison some.
[00:15:55]  I'm like, you got this little guy coming up here, going on TV and being like, you need to arrest.
[00:16:04]  Get out of here.
[00:16:05]  Yeah.
[00:16:06]  Stay out.
[00:16:07]  Borders closed.
[00:16:10]  What is this crap?
[00:16:11]  You got this fucking guy, Marco.
[00:16:12]  And I'm not being racial here, but you got this guy, Marco Rubio, coming over here.
[00:16:17]  Illegal immigrant dad from Cuba, shot JFK, our president, by the way, at the time, comes over here, gives birth to this son who spends all his youth gallivanting in the phone in Miami.
[00:16:30]  And you got him going down to fucking El Salvador and being like, hey, you know, negotiating with this other fucking cadillo, being like, where, you know, maybe we'll send some of our guys.
[00:16:41]  Our guys are our guys, brother.
[00:16:43]  I don't care if he's the Green River killer.
[00:16:45]  He's staying in our prison.
[00:16:47]  This is crazy to me.
[00:16:49]  And, you know, this is this, and it leads to something that Trump has kind of been saying since the beginning of the presidency, which is, you know, actually, we've got a lot of homegrowns here.
[00:17:00]  That's what he started calling me.
[00:17:02]  What is that grandpa ass terminology?
[00:17:06]  Homegrown.
[00:17:06]  We got some homegrowns here.
[00:17:08]  What the fuck is that?
[00:17:10]  Where did he pull that out?
[00:17:12]  Who says that kind of shit?
[00:17:13]  Is that like a Stephen Miller thing?
[00:17:15]  Like, who says homegrown?
[00:17:16]  I'm guessing the etymology comes from like homegrown terror.
[00:17:19]  No, no, I get that, but homegrown?
[00:17:21]  We got some homegrowns around here.
[00:17:23]  It's like, yeah, like 1940s cowboy or something.
[00:17:26]  I'm a homegrown woman.
[00:17:28]  It's kind of unkneak.
[00:17:30]  It is a little, but again, in black and white.
[00:17:34]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:35]  And he, so, you know, he's like, we got these homegrown criminals here.
[00:17:38]  He's given a number of quotes on this.
[00:17:41]  One of them is saying it.
[00:17:42]  He keeps saying, he says, we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways that hit elderly ladies in the back of the head with a baseball hat.
[00:17:48]  Again, what is this?
[00:17:49]  A cartoon from the 1950s?
[00:17:51]  Check this out.
[00:17:51]  They hit elderly ladies in the back of the head with a baseball hat bat when they're not looking.
[00:17:56]  And then there's the like little ring above their head.
[00:17:58]  And she's like, ooh.
[00:17:59]  He fucking sucker punched me, dude.
[00:18:01]  I wasn't even looking.
[00:18:03]  They're absolute monsters.
[00:18:04]  I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.
[00:18:07]  He's given numerous quotes like this where he's like, we've got these.
[00:18:10]  I think it's like he really is talking about the people who push people on like the fucking.
[00:18:14]  Yeah, he's reading the New York Post.
[00:18:16]  Yeah.
[00:18:16]  He's talking about the New York Post.
[00:18:17]  This is all New York Post stuff.
[00:18:20]  But, you know, Levitt, what's her name?
[00:18:22]  Christine Levitt?
[00:18:23]  Catherine Levitt?
[00:18:24]  What is her fucking name?
[00:18:25]  You're being fucking, I don't know.
[00:18:27]  Kaylin.
[00:18:28]  Is it a Kaylee?
[00:18:30]  Kaylee Ann.
[00:18:30]  I don't know.
[00:18:31]  She looks simple, huh?
[00:18:33]  A little easier on the show.
[00:18:34]  Caroline.
[00:18:34]  She does look like a Kaylee Ann.
[00:18:36]  What's that little, what's that fucking bovine woman they had last time?
[00:18:40]  The Huckabee?
[00:18:42]  Huckabee.
[00:18:42]  Oh, yeah.
[00:18:43]  Oh, God.
[00:18:43]  She was a simple one, huh?
[00:18:45]  Well, she's a real homegrown.
[00:18:47]  She's a real homegrown little kid.
[00:18:48]  Caroline Levitt, she said something.
[00:18:50]  I don't have it right in front of me, the quote, but she was asked about it from like someone in the press corps.
[00:18:56]  And she was like, you know, it's something that we're looking into.
[00:18:59]  He's mentioned it and we're looking into it.
[00:19:01]  And if it's, you know, we don't know the legality.
[00:19:03]  And someone was like, well, I'm pretty sure that would be illegal.
[00:19:05]  And she's like, that's why we're looking into it.
[00:19:07]  Yep.
[00:19:09]  I want to say this right here.
[00:19:12]  This is genuinely very offensive to me that the government, that anyone in the government could be fucking just banning about the ideas of sending criminals down to El Salvador to Seacot.
[00:19:25]  And I want to say that for a number of reasons.
[00:19:26]  One is like, yeah, I guarantee if they do try to do this, which I, you know, who knows, right?
[00:19:32]  But certainly Trump has said numerous times that he'd like to do this.
[00:19:35]  This is like, this is one of his things, like maybe like the Canada thing, maybe like the Greenland thing.
[00:19:40]  I don't know.
[00:19:40]  That he just like is clearly actually in his head and not like just something he kind of says sometimes.
[00:19:46]  He got caught on a hot mic, which who knows?
[00:19:48]  I love a hot mic.
[00:19:49]  I know I love a hot mic too, but who knows how planned that is talking about this as well.
[00:19:53]  And I just want to say, not happening.
[00:19:56]  It's fucking insane to even put this forth.
[00:19:59]  And I'm not trying to fall in that trap where you're like, oh, Trump is doing this outrageous thing.
[00:20:03]  I'm just saying, this is genuinely like a disturbing development for me.
[00:20:10]  If they do try to do this, and again, we'll get to this more a little later.
[00:20:13]  But if they do try to do this, I'm sure they will send like our sickest freaks down there.
[00:20:18]  What are they like looking at like Hannibal Elector?
[00:20:20]  He literally thinks there are like 50 Hannibal Ectors that we need to get out of like county jail as if they're not in our own super max, which by the way, like our own Super Max prisons are fucking crazy themselves.
[00:20:32]  But we're going to get all the Hannibal Ectors out, which are also not just in Supermax, but are roaming like the, you know, the F train stops looking for old ladies.
[00:20:46]  We're going to get all these Hannibal Electors and we're going to ship them out.
[00:20:49]  And then millions will be safe and liberated.
[00:20:52]  It just is, it doesn't really, I'm not really getting this.
[00:20:55]  I do think that there is going to be.
[00:20:57]  Because you can see the Libs kind of focusing on this too.
[00:20:59]  They made a gamble with the fund the police thing was not a good one for the Libs, for the Democrats.
[00:21:05]  They were not, they did not do well there because they didn't do anything.
[00:21:08]  And then things just also got worse.
[00:21:11]  And so I think that there's going to be like a big law and order push, a bipartisan law and order push.
[00:21:18]  I mean, there is already.
[00:21:19]  There is already.
[00:21:19]  At least in local and localities.
[00:21:22]  Because, you know, it sort of aligns with a lot of Democrat stuff too, or like with the sort of realignment of the Democrats.
[00:21:29]  But if they do try to do this, I mean, this is just, it's outrageous.
[00:21:33]  Well, we should say they are already doing it in the sense that like on a federal level, what this means is that they are using a lot of this as pretext to kind of say like, oh, we're doing this, like, we're saying all this crazy stuff, which makes you feel almost a little bit better about the crazy stuff that we're actually doing because it's to,
[00:21:48]  you know, either who we call, you know, illegal immigrants, who we say are illegal immigrants, or, oh, maybe they're, you know, maybe they're, you know, kids with visas, or maybe they're on work visas that can be canceled, or maybe soon they're, you know, actually permanent residents, but it's not so permanent, is it?
[00:22:06]  When you look at the byline, when you look at the fine print, it's not really.
[00:22:09]  And you see that kind of slow creep, right?
[00:22:12]  Exactly.
[00:22:13]  I mean, they're already like, there's, there's a couple of things going on here, right?
[00:22:16]  Like there's, they're doing this with the Trenda Aragua and like the terrorism or like the terrorism designations that like MS-13 and TDA have been given.
[00:22:27]  And then they're also doing this stuff with like the deportations with like the students, right?
[00:22:31]  And like yanking the visas.
[00:22:32]  It seems pretty clear that the thing they're going to try next is denaturalization, which is a little trickier, but it's like this is a pretty slippery slope until you get to American citizens, right?
[00:22:44]  And then like once you get to American citizens, we're already so far down the line at that point that kind of all bets are off.
[00:22:50]  Like you're placing your faith in Donald Trump and these and Kash Patel or whoever else.

=== Bukele's Family Influence (06:55) ===

[00:22:58]  Christy Noam, who, by the way, whoa, I can't even, I can't.
[00:23:02]  Is it Christie or Kirsty?
[00:23:03]  It doesn't matter.
[00:23:03]  I always mention that.
[00:23:05]  It does not matter.
[00:23:06]  It's the same name.
[00:23:07]  It's not.
[00:23:07]  And people who are Kirsty will get really mad at you if you call them Christie and vice versa.
[00:23:12]  It's the same name.
[00:23:13]  She spells it with an I at the end though, yes?
[00:23:15]  Oh, yes.
[00:23:15]  You know, could see that a mile away.
[00:23:17]  But I want to talk about this little snake, Bukele, for a little while here.
[00:23:22]  Yeah, we got to talk about this situation in El Salvador.
[00:23:24]  So we've talked about Bukele before.
[00:23:27]  But like years ago, and in the context of crypto, He's been mentioned over the years.
[00:23:33]  Bitcoin Beach.
[00:23:34]  Bitcoin Beach.
[00:23:35]  I think Bitcoin Beach is real.
[00:23:36]  And it's over.
[00:23:38]  I know.
[00:23:38]  Well, I know.
[00:23:39]  We'll talk about that.
[00:23:40]  I know.
[00:23:40]  It sucks.
[00:23:41]  So Bukele's family history is kind of interesting.
[00:23:44]  And this is actually, it's weirdly true all over parts of Latin America that, like, how do you say this delicately?
[00:23:53]  So in some places, like the United States, people of a certain persuasion often occupy positions of power that are maybe statistically difficult for some people.
[00:24:11]  You're doing a lot of gesticulating.
[00:24:14]  You can see why.
[00:24:15]  Like in America, there's a lot of very powerful Jewish people, despite being a minority.
[00:24:20]  This is the first time I'm here.
[00:24:21]  Okay, I've just, I've heard this.
[00:24:22]  I've read this before.
[00:24:23]  But it's weird, like over in like Latin America and the Caribbean, there would be like countries where there's like, like Haiti, I think, has like the rich families are like Lebanese.
[00:24:35]  And it's weird.
[00:24:36]  Like there'll be these like sort of like small diaspora groups of like, you know, like from like other tiny countries or areas that kind of occupy like a random group of Maltese.
[00:24:50]  I don't think the Maltese have really made it off the island.
[00:24:53]  Well, I'm just there.
[00:24:55]  There's like a secret race that is the Basques, the Maltese.
[00:24:58]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:24:59]  There's a lot of these were like, what's going on here?
[00:25:02]  What is you?
[00:25:03]  Yeah.
[00:25:03]  You know?
[00:25:04]  But Bukele's family is Palestinians.
[00:25:06]  His paternal grandparents were Christian immigrants to El Salvador from Palestine.
[00:25:11]  I guess that would be, I think it was in the early 20th century.
[00:25:14]  And it was before the establishment of Israel in 48.
[00:25:18]  His father, weirdly enough, though, actually converted to Islam and practiced polygamy.
[00:25:26]  He say something, Liz.
[00:25:30]  I don't know what to say to that.
[00:25:32]  Would you judge someone you were friends with if they did that?
[00:25:37]  Yeah.
[00:25:38]  Okay.
[00:25:38]  So, yeah, he practiced polygamy.
[00:25:41]  And the family had money, right?
[00:25:43]  I mean, Naeb is one of 10 children.
[00:25:44]  He's got a bunch of half-brothers, as you can imagine, with the polygamy thing who are all in his cabinet.
[00:25:49]  We're going to talk about his family a little more later.
[00:25:51]  All in his cabinet, unofficial and sometimes official positions.
[00:25:54]  He went to a fancy bilingual school.
[00:25:57]  A bunch of classmates there also now in the government.
[00:26:01]  He got into politics because he was doing advertising for FMLN, the Farabundi Marti Liberation Front, which is like the left-wing party there.
[00:26:12]  They were a coalition of five different parties that fought in the El Salvadoran Civil War that formed into one party with these different sort of factions within them.
[00:26:21]  They are not doing well right now.
[00:26:23]  He eventually put himself forward as a mayoral candidate in a small town outside the capital.
[00:26:30]  He actually does pretty well in that position.
[00:26:32]  But, anyways, back to the back to the parties, actually, for a second.
[00:26:34]  The biggest two after the Civil War were the FMLN and Arena, which really kind of represented the two big sides of the Civil War.
[00:26:42]  The Arena had a bunch of people from the old regime in it.
[00:26:45]  FMLN had a bunch of different guerrilla groups that had sort of, with the accord that ended the El Salvadorian Civil War, become a like a political party.
[00:26:53]  And Arena's pretty hardcore right-wing, we should say.
[00:26:55]  Definitely.
[00:26:56]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:57]  So he's a pretty popular mayor of this small town, and he eventually runs for and wins the mayoralty for San Salvador.
[00:27:03]  That's like the big motherfucking city there.
[00:27:06]  While he's the mayor of San Salvador, he comes into conflat, conflict, conflict, conflict.
[00:27:11]  You know, he's not.
[00:27:12]  Perhaps he had a conflab and it turned into a conflict.
[00:27:15]  Exactly.
[00:27:16]  Well, conflab isn't even the word.
[00:27:17]  It's a confab.
[00:27:19]  Oh, my God.
[00:27:20]  No, no, no.
[00:27:21]  No, keep it in.
[00:27:22]  Potato, potato.
[00:27:24]  And he's like, fuck you guys.
[00:27:26]  I'm going to start my own party.
[00:27:28]  And, well, he actually tries to join other parties, but that's too much to get into.
[00:27:32]  His party is called New Ideas.
[00:27:34]  And I will say, that is such a European, in fact, kind of almost Israeli name for a party.
[00:27:39]  I mean, it says what it is right there.
[00:27:40]  New ideas.
[00:27:41]  It's right in the name.
[00:27:42]  What do you guys have?
[00:27:43]  Oh, you got new ideas.
[00:27:44]  We're called new ideas.
[00:27:45]  That is just like what political parties are named after.
[00:27:48]  Fucking Macron-ass name for a party.
[00:27:50]  What I like in Europe is when they have political parties that are like dedicated to pensioners.
[00:27:54]  Like, I like really good single-issue parties that get into parliament.
[00:27:59]  His brother.
[00:27:59]  The Labor Party.
[00:28:00]  The Labor Party.
[00:28:01]  Yeah.
[00:28:03]  Just kidding.
[00:28:04]  His brother's Xavier.
[00:28:06]  Probably Javier.
[00:28:07]  Javier.
[00:28:08]  I don't know how to pronounce these words.
[00:28:09]  Xavier is the leader of New Ideas now.
[00:28:13]  So Bukele becomes president of El Salvador in 2019, although he does not control the legislature.
[00:28:19]  That is now completely changed.
[00:28:21]  He almost totally controls.
[00:28:23]  I think he's got like 57 out of 60 seats.
[00:28:26]  So he actually kind of does what is known popularly as an autogolpe or a self-coup.
[00:28:32]  You love saying that.
[00:28:34]  Because I can do it.
[00:28:35]  Against the wall in 2020, which I think we've talked about in the show before.
[00:28:41]  It was like a big deal at the time.
[00:28:43]  He sends these soldiers into the legislature.
[00:28:45]  He's like, you guys got to fucking vote for this shit.
[00:28:48]  He was getting like a package for security, security, but like for like new, I think it was like new weapons and equipment for the armed forces and the police.
[00:28:58]  Since then, though, he has completely remodeled the entire political system of El Salvador.
[00:29:03]  He has replaced the Supreme Court with loyalists.
[00:29:07]  He has gerrymandered the country from like all these different, I think it was like 200 seats or whatever, or maybe it was 200 territories.
[00:29:12]  But anyways, now there's only 60 seats in parliament.
[00:29:15]  He's changed the way that votes are apportioned.
[00:29:18]  So like even if Other parties get like a lot of votes in a raw sense.
[00:29:24]  The way that the country is gerrymandered, his party is still able to just like get almost every seat in parliament or the Congress.
[00:29:31]  He's taken out massive, massive loans and vastly expanded the power in the executive.
[00:29:37]  In fact, I mean, the entire country is really just centralized into everything leads up to Bukele.
[00:29:44]  And Bukele's social media accounts.
[00:29:46]  Yes, yes.
[00:29:48]  He also, and we've talked about this on the show before, you know, he had a truce with the gangs.

=== State Capture and Mafia Contracts (15:03) ===

[00:29:53]  A pretty like he had to make one.
[00:29:56]  Yeah.
[00:29:56]  Yeah.
[00:29:57]  And, you know, I'm not defending Bukele here.
[00:30:02]  This was not something that he invented, right?
[00:30:04]  Like, he was not the, he's not the first politician in a country with a large criminal.
[00:30:10]  No, that's what I mean when I say he had to do it.
[00:30:12]  It's like the situation was out of hand, and the only way to bring any kind of stability was to make a kind of like devil's bargain with a bunch of criminal organizations.
[00:30:23]  And so the one that obviously everybody knows about listening to this is MS-13.
[00:30:29]  So MS-13 started in, I think it was LA in like the 1990s.
[00:30:33]  Yeah.
[00:30:35]  They are very famous for their scary face tattoos, which I got.
[00:30:40]  That's like what people know about them.
[00:30:42]  Well, I always wanted to, I'm like, if I was starting a gang, right?
[00:30:46]  And like you'd think you'd kind of lay low.
[00:30:49]  You don't want to do it on the face.
[00:30:51]  That's what you'd think.
[00:30:52]  You know, it makes you feel like that.
[00:30:53]  But nowadays, everyone's got face tattoos.
[00:30:56]  I know.
[00:30:57]  There's that guy with Zan Frank, you know what I'm talking about?
[00:31:00]  Yeah.
[00:31:00]  What?
[00:31:02]  I actually follow on Instagram.
[00:31:03]  He seems to be a father now.
[00:31:05]  It was a guy who got Anne Frank tattooed on his face.
[00:31:08]  Dude, imagine you're a little baby and you look up and you're like, da-da-da.
[00:31:11]  And he's got fucking Anne Frank on half his face looking down at you.
[00:31:14]  Imagine you're having sex with him to have a kid and you open your eyes in the throes of ecstasy.
[00:31:20]  Your eyes are, you know, open.
[00:31:22]  He's just really into Neutrumoco.
[00:31:23]  And Anne Frank is looking down at you.
[00:31:27]  That's scary.
[00:31:28]  That's weird.
[00:31:29]  That's not good.
[00:31:31]  But, you know, they're fucking, I don't want to like downplay the, I think that, you know, Bukele can be tough to talk about for some people because like, I don't know, tough to talk about, but like, it's, it is like one of those things where like El Salvador really was completely unsafe in large parts, right?
[00:31:49]  Like huge areas were like basically no-go zones.
[00:31:52]  You get robbed there.
[00:31:53]  Like you couldn't go out and it's an arco-state.
[00:31:54]  Well, it's still kind of an arco-state, but in a different way.
[00:31:56]  Not centralized.
[00:31:58]  But it was, it was, it was really like, it's not, you know, one of those things you can be like, oh, what are people complaining about?
[00:32:04]  It's a real thing.
[00:32:05]  Yeah.
[00:32:06]  And MS-13 really is a fucking brutal, brutal gang.
[00:32:13]  Bukele makes these deals with them, including like, you know, getting inclined, including sending his like head of prisons into the prisons and being like, hey, here's some cell phones, here's some prostitutes, please support my party.
[00:32:28]  I mean, let's talk about what a deal is.
[00:32:30]  It's not like, and now we have peace.
[00:32:33]  It's like, no, I'll scratch your back.
[00:32:35]  You scratch mine.
[00:32:36]  I mean, come on.
[00:32:37]  This is what the state coming into contract basically with the mafia looks like.
[00:32:44]  Yeah, I mean, it's yes, exactly.
[00:32:47]  That fell apart in 2021.
[00:32:49]  And in 2022, he announced a state of exception.
[00:32:52]  It fell apart, I should add, because they sort of ambushed or arrested a bunch of gang leaders who were supposed to be like, I think, meeting for a, I think they were going to go to a meeting with them.
[00:33:03]  Anyways, they ended up arresting all of them.
[00:33:05]  The gangs went on a rampage throughout the country.
[00:33:08]  And he announced, which I think he was trying to precipitate, he announced a state of exception, which is what it's called, state of emergency, basically.
[00:33:15]  Curtailed all basic democratic rights, freedom of assembly.
[00:33:18]  There's no warrant arrest.
[00:33:19]  Detainees don't need to be told the reason they're arrested.
[00:33:22]  Government can intercept any communications.
[00:33:24]  Detentions without any charges at all.
[00:33:26]  The time, you know, usually it was 72 hours.
[00:33:28]  Now it's 15 days, but pretty much forever.
[00:33:31]  People can be arrested for having tattoos or gang-related clothing.
[00:33:34]  And as a result, El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world, over 100,000 people now out of a population of 6 million.
[00:33:42]  Well, I think, you know, before we get a little bit more into Seacot, which we need to talk about, which is, of course, the major super max terror prison that the U.S. is sending its, I don't know, its illegal immigrants to through contract with Bukele, which, by the way, we also, what is this contract?
[00:34:05]  Does anyone have the details on it?
[00:34:07]  So the U.S. has this $6 million contract with Bukele, which seems, I got to be honest, really cheap.
[00:34:13]  Yeah, that's nothing.
[00:34:14]  It's nothing to house, house, to imprison people that the U.S. says are members of gangs.
[00:34:25]  And it's a one-year contract, but renewable.
[00:34:29]  And from what Bukele has said, I mean, but from what, I think it's mostly Bukele, though, has been like, these people are not getting out again.
[00:34:38]  I don't know if that's going to be true for the Venezuelans that are sent there, but it's definitely true for the El Salvadorians that have been sent there.
[00:34:43]  Well, we'll talk more about Seacott in a second.
[00:34:44]  I do think it's useful for us to do a little bit of go back a little bit and just give a tiny bit of political history that kind of led to Bukele because, you know, he kind of came in and was able to convert El Salvador's like fragile neoliberal democracy into what is just a militarized autocracy.
[00:35:06]  Yeah.
[00:35:07]  Those words are kind of funny, but that's kind of what's happened.
[00:35:10]  And I think in some ways, maybe not proving to be a model, but it will be a familiar story to people.
[00:35:16]  And I think that's kind of important context for understanding Bukele a little bit.
[00:35:20]  So you mentioned the Civil War.
[00:35:23]  Should say, you know, that went on for about 12, a little over 12 years.
[00:35:28]  You had the FMLN versus the Arena, I mean, the U.S.-backed dictatorship, but what became the Arena Party.
[00:35:37]  That ends in a stalemate.
[00:35:39]  Like literally no one wins, right?
[00:35:41]  There's no clear quote-unquote winner.
[00:35:43]  It ends in a stalemate that's negotiated by the UN.
[00:35:46]  In 1992, there's peace accords.
[00:35:48]  And there was like a big UN investigation.
[00:35:50]  It shows that there were like 75,000 people were dead, 10,000 were disappeared.
[00:35:55]  But like FMLN accounted for like less than 5% of the people dead.
[00:36:04]  This was like a, like you mentioned, a guerrilla coalition of peasants, labor, students.
[00:36:09]  It was what you imagine a kind of left-wing insurgent movement against a dictatorship in Central America would look like.
[00:36:18]  So during the peace accords, that strips the military of power, which is an important thing to note.
[00:36:24]  It installs a kind of fragile liberal framework.
[00:36:28]  Through this, both inequality and the previous like oligarchy persist.
[00:36:33]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:36:34]  I mean, it's kind of like classic.
[00:36:35]  Like there's huge landowners, a lot of peasants there.
[00:36:39]  I mean, there's no, yeah, it kind of just ends the civil war without actually like getting any gains for the country.
[00:36:48]  There's no like revolution to actually unseat.
[00:36:52]  Everything just kind of pivots, right?
[00:36:53]  So those old landowning families are now pivoting into finance and commerce, right?
[00:36:58]  The economy remains export dependent and extremely linked to the United States.
[00:37:04]  So the 90s to the 2000s were just a period of extremely violent neoliberal restructuring out of this.
[00:37:13]  The Arena Party, which was founded by a desk squad leader, we should say, they ruled for 20 years, or about 20 years.
[00:37:22]  The FMLN then basically tries to transition, or they do transition from this sort of guerrilla coalition into a more stable institutional political party.
[00:37:32]  And they're able to make some like small local gains, but they kind of become, like you said, there was this kind of ragtag coalition of these like five different parties that they kind of bring in and they try to kind of make concrete in a way.
[00:37:47]  So the arena era means massive privatization, deregulation, trade liberalization.
[00:37:54]  They like shift everything to these free trade zone factories and remittances become the kind of like economic pillars of the state.
[00:38:03]  This should sound very familiar to people.
[00:38:06]  Actually, El Salvador has the highest amount of GDP that comes in through a remittance system.
[00:38:10]  It's 25%.
[00:38:11]  Which was a really key part for Bukele's Bitcoin push, by the way.
[00:38:16]  Yes.
[00:38:16]  And also, it's interesting too that Bukele, I mean, obviously, a lot of those people sending back remittances are in the United States, not all of them legally.
[00:38:26]  Bukele doesn't really raise that when he comes to the U.S.
[00:38:30]  So during this period, like all public sector jobs are gutted.
[00:38:34]  People are increasingly pushed into what everyone loves to call informal labor.
[00:38:40]  Or if they aren't just trying to like do piecemeal informal labor work, they just bounce to the U.S.
[00:38:47]  Yeah.
[00:38:49]  So if we want to like flip it on in the U.S. during this time, right?
[00:38:52]  I mean, you mentioned MS-13 starting in the 90s.
[00:38:55]  Yeah.
[00:38:56]  Right.
[00:38:56]  In the U.S., in the 90s, we start like deporting Salvadorians en masse because of this.
[00:39:04]  A lot of them end up bringing back that kind of like prison gang culture to El Salvador.
[00:39:10]  And in the vacuum that Arena has created after like 20 years of like violent neoliberal restructuring, all of the gangs flourish.
[00:39:20]  The party responds by throwing everyone in jail, mass incarceration, violent policing, and all of this state violence then pushes these sort of like nascent gangs into real sophisticated criminal enterprises.
[00:39:34]  I mean, you see the same thing happen in Mexico, right?
[00:39:36]  Where like with gangs that mostly were focused on, let's say, crime work, you know, smuggling, killing, et cetera, et cetera, become like semi-legit, kind of in the mafia way.
[00:39:47]  Not legit legit, but like end up controlling like large concerns or making a bunch of money from like protection rackets or things like that.
[00:39:54]  I mean, that's one thing that like the gangs in El Salvador really made a lot of money from is literally just charging people protection, like mafia style.
[00:40:01]  Totally.
[00:40:02]  So as this is all going on, I mentioned this, but FMLN makes all of these sort of big gains in local elections.
[00:40:09]  And it all reaches ahead.
[00:40:12]  Like the chaos can't continue.
[00:40:13]  And so they're finally able to win power nationally in 2009.
[00:40:19]  Maurizio Funes, a former progressive journalist, he gets elected.
[00:40:24]  And this becomes like a very clear rejection of the post-92 neoliberal order.
[00:40:29]  But, and again, this will sound familiar, governing is basically impossible because of a few external and internal constraints.
[00:40:39]  So it's this time people might remember Obama kind of subtly threatened the entire region by doing the coup in Honduras.
[00:40:46]  That kind of sends a chill down a lot of spines in Central America.
[00:40:52]  The Obama admin also kind of threw out that, you know, hey, we might cut some aid, we might revoke certain immigration protections if you go too far with some of these reforms you want to do.
[00:41:05]  Still, they do attempt some progressive reforms.
[00:41:08]  They're able to pass this like massive healthcare program that's modeled after the Cuban, the great Cuba model.
[00:41:17]  They have modest protections passed, like kind of social protections passed, but they're really blocked a lot by the right, which controls the legislature and the Supreme Court.
[00:41:29]  And it's interesting at this time, too, like.
[00:41:31]  Everyone's also still trying to negotiate with the gangs.
[00:41:33]  Yes.
[00:41:34]  Like every side of the political spectrum in El Salvador is like treating the gangs like they are, like a big political factor in the country.
[00:41:41]  Because they are.
[00:41:42]  They are.
[00:41:42]  Yeah.
[00:41:42]  And so you have people, I know, from every political party being like, you know, vote for us, do this to these guys.
[00:41:50]  It's a fucking mess.
[00:41:53]  Yeah, totally.
[00:41:54]  So the FMLN has to make a kind of coalition with Ghana, which is a new party of arena defectors, but it's a right-wing party.
[00:42:05]  And they have to, you know, they have to make all these concessions.
[00:42:08]  They trade cabinet positions and give them, you know, some economic wins in order to maintain just some of the progress that they've attained over the years.
[00:42:19]  But by 2014, the financial crisis, the global financial crisis hits Latin America and none of this becomes like tenable anymore.
[00:42:28]  This is where we get a lot of the collapse of the pink tide.
[00:42:31]  I mean, I think this is well documented.
[00:42:33]  But it's important to note that during this moment, the collapse of Venezuelan oil also, that's a huge catalyst here.
[00:42:40]  Okay.
[00:42:40]  That fucked a lot of people up.
[00:42:42]  Yeah, it totally drained the political and fiscal capacity to like continue a lot of the social funding that these progressive programs depended on.
[00:42:51]  And so the FMLN found themselves in this familiar conundrum of like, oh, we now have to defend an untenable status quo.
[00:43:00]  Right.
[00:43:01]  So they shift to this sort of like protect the gains message, which if you are a listener of TrueNON, you know, it doesn't work.
[00:43:09]  It doesn't work out.
[00:43:10]  People don't care about protecting the gains.
[00:43:12]  People want more.
[00:43:13]  Yeah, it doesn't work.
[00:43:14]  And this is where Bukele enters the scene, right?
[00:43:16]  Because he is able to ride a wave of anti-establishment anger and position himself against both FMLN and ARENA, right?
[00:43:27]  He is the populist outsider.
[00:43:29]  He's slick tech, meets Uber Evangelical, let's be real.
[00:43:33]  Yep.
[00:43:35]  He's able to then consolidate support among the working and middle class, evangelicals, and disillusioned FMLN voters.
[00:43:43]  Like, seriously, does this sound familiar?
[00:43:46]  It's the same fucking story everywhere.
[00:43:48]  I mean, what he does too, and like he pulls in basically the deep state or like shadow military, narcos, parts of capital.
[00:43:58]  And he does this while being like, the former political system is corrupt.
[00:44:01]  I'm promising something new.
[00:44:04]  And he presents himself as the only alternative.
[00:44:07]  And he wins.
[00:44:08]  Yeah, decisively.
[00:44:09]  Yeah, he wins.
[00:44:11]  And so now he governs.
[00:44:12]  And you mentioned, you know, he governs as a family man.
[00:44:15]  He family does.
[00:44:16]  You know, his brothers are his de facto advisors.
[00:44:20]  Javier, he's running the new ideas party.
[00:44:24]  He, like you mentioned, he installed a bunch of his, like, literally his schoolmates.
[00:44:28]  His schoolmates are all in the cabinet and major secretary posts.
[00:44:33]  So now he's ended basically all social welfare spending.
[00:44:37]  Instead, he spends lavishly on public relations.
[00:44:42]  Like literally social media spectacle is now a major domestic investment.
[00:44:46]  And you see these, the slick videos of Seacot.
[00:44:51]  You look at these like Instagram, like fucking drone Instagram reels that he does.

=== Lavish Public Relations (03:55) ===

[00:44:56]  The drone camera industry in El Salvador has to be, that is what your safe investment is right now.
[00:45:04]  Because my God.
[00:45:05]  It's crazy.
[00:45:06]  It's insane.
[00:45:07]  And these videos.
[00:45:08]  So they like bring like YouTubers out, like guys who will be like talking about GameStop or whatever.
[00:45:15]  They bring them out to Seacot and it's always the same video.
[00:45:18]  They always like bring them out and they're like, oh, the security here is so crazy.
[00:45:22]  And they like bring them in front of the same cell of like MS-13 people.
[00:45:26]  Yes, you always see them behind.
[00:45:28]  Tattoo gang face people that they bring Christy Noam in front of.
[00:45:34]  It's all the same fucking, it's the same.
[00:45:36]  Can I say something really quick about her face?
[00:45:39]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:45:40]  I just don't understand why you spend as much money as you do on whatever she's injected in that thing, which I obviously you can look at the face.
[00:45:49]  She didn't spend enough, like she didn't spend the right money.
[00:45:52]  But, and not, she's got these like pock marks all over her skin.
[00:45:56]  And I'm like, babe, get the microneedling.
[00:45:59]  Buy a package.
[00:46:00]  Oh, she's.
[00:46:00]  That will literally, that will work.
[00:46:02]  It will work.
[00:46:03]  Those are track marks from Philler.
[00:46:05]  No.
[00:46:07]  I'm telling you.
[00:46:08]  But instead, she's just like, keeps inflating the thing.
[00:46:11]  And I'm like, you got to deal with the foundation before you dress the walls.
[00:46:15]  The reality is this, Liz.
[00:46:18]  Christy Noam, you will never be Nancy Mace.
[00:46:22]  Nancy Mace.
[00:46:23]  Nancy Mace has got to take the top off.
[00:46:24]  Oh, yeah.
[00:46:26]  I'm just saying.
[00:46:26]  Oh, yeah.
[00:46:27]  Babe.
[00:46:27]  Oh, let's see him.
[00:46:29]  Stop.
[00:46:30]  What?
[00:46:30]  That's what she wants to do.
[00:46:31]  Nancy Mace is.
[00:46:32]  She's wearing the bachelorette-esque gown that she wore with what's.
[00:46:37]  50 selfies of herself a day, maybe.
[00:46:39]  With spawn?
[00:46:40]  50 selfies of herself a day.
[00:46:42]  It's insane.
[00:46:43]  Does she have an OnlyFans?
[00:46:45]  Does she sell content?
[00:46:47]  Are we slut-shaming Nancy Mac?
[00:46:49]  I'm not.
[00:46:50]  I'm genuinely asking.
[00:46:51]  Why?
[00:46:52]  I bet she would make a lot of money.
[00:46:54]  There are so many.
[00:46:55]  Every single thing is a picture, a video of her, another picture, another video.
[00:47:00]  Fucking.
[00:47:01]  This is the same selfie twice.
[00:47:02]  Oh, this is a selfie.
[00:47:04]  Showing off the girls.
[00:47:05]  Oh, yeah.
[00:47:06]  But the girls are.
[00:47:08]  None of my business.
[00:47:09]  I just, I think the gown that she picked out for whatever gala she was at, horrible.
[00:47:17]  These, you do not have friends.
[00:47:20]  As they would have told you, babe, don't wear that.
[00:47:23]  So you've mentioned before how, like, getting a lot of facial work done makes 20-year-olds and 45-year-olds look the same.
[00:47:29]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:47:30]  Check this out.
[00:47:31]  That's a patented true and on thesis, by the way.
[00:47:33]  I checked out, though.
[00:47:34]  Getting a lot of facial work done makes 50-year-olds and 70-year-olds look the same.
[00:47:39]  Interesting.
[00:47:40]  Because Nancy Mace could be 70 or she could be 50.
[00:47:43]  And that's the fact.
[00:47:44]  You know what?
[00:47:45]  I feel that way about Demi Moore.
[00:47:47]  Demi Moore is the same.
[00:47:48]  Who looks great, but also weird.
[00:47:51]  She looks weird.
[00:47:52]  It's scary.
[00:47:53]  There's a movie about that.
[00:47:55]  Yeah, I didn't see it.
[00:47:55]  I didn't see it.
[00:47:56]  Not a chance.
[00:47:57]  But I'm saying, but your point to, like, you know, yeah.
[00:48:00]  But Demi Moore looks feline.
[00:48:03]  She kind of looks fine.
[00:48:03]  It's the faceless.
[00:48:04]  The faceless is too much.
[00:48:05]  Let it droop.
[00:48:06]  Let her droop.
[00:48:07]  No, people are going a little too tight.
[00:48:08]  Let it sag.
[00:48:09]  Nancy Mace's face looks like beautiful.
[00:48:13]  No, it's like an AI-generated, it's like not quite right.
[00:48:16]  Also, the veneers are a little aggressive.
[00:48:18]  And the eyebrows are kind of crazy, too.
[00:48:20]  Nancy Mace is a crazy ass name.
[00:48:22]  Nancy Mace, attorney.
[00:48:24]  I'm like, Jesus.
[00:48:26]  But like, Nancy Mace sounds like she's going to host hard copies.
[00:48:30]  Look at this picture.
[00:48:31]  This is kind of a pornographic picture, no?
[00:48:33]  I'm telling you, she's always got those things out.
[00:48:35]  Just the rictus grin is like this one.
[00:48:39]  Yeah, the grin is bad, dude.
[00:48:41]  Look at the grin.
[00:48:42]  Oh.
[00:48:43]  But I think she's beautiful, maybe.
[00:48:45]  She looks beautiful.
[00:48:47]  And I don't mean this in a sexist way, even though this is about to be a very sexist sounding sentence out of context.

=== Golden Bachelorette's Smile (06:27) ===

[00:48:52]  But I'm not.
[00:48:53]  She looks better with her mouth closed.
[00:48:56]  She does.
[00:48:56]  She looks better with her mouth closed.
[00:48:57]  It's the veneers.
[00:48:58]  She might not be able to close the mouth.
[00:49:00]  She looks stupid with her mouth open.
[00:49:02]  Yeah, she might not be able to close the mouth because it's got a kind of a Mr. Ed situation.
[00:49:06]  She doesn't really close the mouth.
[00:49:07]  She looks great when she was in military school or whatever that her dad got her into.
[00:49:11]  Whatever, the Citadel.
[00:49:14]  So, Bukele.
[00:49:16]  She should do the Golden Bachelorette.
[00:49:17]  Wait, is she married?
[00:49:18]  Can I do the Golden Bachelor?
[00:49:19]  How old do you have to be to be the guy in Golden Bachelorette?
[00:49:21]  You got to be in your golden years.
[00:49:23]  The best thing about Golden Bachelorette is the men.
[00:49:25]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:49:26]  Because they're all bonding over, like, you know, if they lost their spouse or if they're divorced.
[00:49:33]  She's there no more.
[00:49:33]  It seems that she's divorced.
[00:49:34]  She's sweet.
[00:49:35]  She's divorced.
[00:49:36]  They're all like, they all become friends.
[00:49:38]  It's a story about male friendship.
[00:49:40]  It's a great show about male friendship.
[00:49:41]  She make every person be on that show, every kind of age.
[00:49:45]  Let's get back to this.
[00:49:46]  I do want to say something real quick about Bukele, because if we're going back, so the social media thing, part of the Bukele brand is the narrative is that he is this like evangelical savior battling, like oh, i'm battling the gangs, the NGOS, all the pesky journalists, foreign meddlers going after them and all of the like instagram.
[00:50:13]  Realification of the thing is like part of maintaining this political brand.
[00:50:20]  You know it's important to note like most of his pr statements are in English.
[00:50:25]  Yes, That's a big thing there.
[00:50:27]  Not only are most of his PR statements in English, like most of his sort of branding seems, except for some of the evangelical stuff, but even that kind of serves a dual purpose, is like squarely aimed at like not just the American consumer, but a specific brand of American consumer.
[00:50:43]  So, you know, one of the first ways we started mentioning Bukele, one of the first ways we started mentioning Bukele in the show, imagine I said that sentence, but I sounded smarter when I said it, but had the same meaning.
[00:50:54]  One of the first ways we started mentioning Bukhari on the show was in the context of Bitcoin, right?
[00:50:59]  And that is really even more than like the anti-terror stuff that he did.
[00:51:06]  That is like how Bukele's main message throughout his presidency.
[00:51:10]  I'm the Bitcoin brother.
[00:51:11]  You know, he's like, CoinDexter lived there for a bit, right?
[00:51:15]  Remember when he walked on stage at the Bitcoin conference?
[00:51:17]  Oh my God.
[00:51:18]  Yes.
[00:51:19]  I mean, he is, and I'm telling you, this guy is like his whole family.
[00:51:23]  I've heard that actually one of his brothers is like a real deal.
[00:51:27]  Like Bitcoin will change everything.
[00:51:29]  Like Takey's taking both the pills kind of guy.
[00:51:32]  All the pills.
[00:51:33]  Bukele.
[00:51:33]  Also, they all take the pills.
[00:51:35]  Yeah.
[00:51:35]  I think.
[00:51:36]  But Bukele's like, Bukele's like social media presence used to be almost exclusively him just like pointing out that like, oh, we're buying the dip, right?
[00:51:44]  Like, yeah.
[00:51:45]  He was like distinguishable from me.
[00:51:49]  Like, what are you doing online?
[00:51:51]  What does that mean?
[00:51:53]  You just thought I was going somewhere else, but where did you think I was going?
[00:51:55]  Let's move on.
[00:51:57]  Interesting.
[00:51:58]  Okay.
[00:51:58]  Well, anyways, Bukele is like his, he used to be like, we're buying the dip.
[00:52:02]  You know, oh, Bitcoin's doing great.
[00:52:03]  We love Bitcoin.
[00:52:06]  And then after the state of exception was announced, that started being mixed with like videos of the armed forces.
[00:52:13]  And now it's almost like exclusively like a law and order guy.
[00:52:17]  Yeah.
[00:52:18]  Kind of thing.
[00:52:19]  Well, this is important because, you know, we have to say the economic situation in the state has deteriorated.
[00:52:27]  I wouldn't call them, I don't think anyone would say like El Salvador is technically insolvent, but you don't want to make that distinction.
[00:52:34]  Like when you're already saying that things aren't good, you know?
[00:52:38]  I think you call them kind of like day-to-day sort of like paycheck to paycheck situation.
[00:52:44]  Like there's a very thin line between stressed and distressed.
[00:52:47]  You know what I mean?
[00:52:49]  So the country's debt has ballooned.
[00:52:51]  They have, you mentioned this, but they have one of the heaviest debt loads of all of the dollarized emerging markets.
[00:52:58]  Dollarized.
[00:52:59]  What does that mean, Liz?
[00:53:00]  I mean, I think that happened in 92 part of the accords, or 91, maybe, but they adopted the dollar.
[00:53:08]  Yes.
[00:53:08]  The US dollar.
[00:53:09]  So they literally can't print their own money.
[00:53:11]  Yes.
[00:53:12]  And because of that, they have very thin FX reserves, making the situation really precarious.
[00:53:21]  This is why remittances, you know, family transfers, like we talked about it, it's 30% of GDP.
[00:53:27]  What's 30%?
[00:53:28]  Yeah.
[00:53:28]  So it is one of the world's highest.
[00:53:30]  And it's the major way that they're able to keep dollars coming in while their capital markets are basically shut because their credit is so fucking bad.
[00:53:40]  Yeah.
[00:53:41]  So, I mean, this was also one of the big ways that they were trying to, Bitcoin was a big part of this, of trying to get more dollars into the country.
[00:53:48]  It's the ultimate hedge, as you often call it.
[00:53:51]  You might remember that this was another, you know, our friend Millet was also trying to get a lot of dollars in by getting crypto.
[00:54:02]  Yeah, by kind of using crypto as a way of kind of, you know, as, you know, exchanging.
[00:54:09]  The thing is, is that the way that Bukele governs also like hurts their international ratings.
[00:54:20]  Interesting because, you know, his whole thing I thought was like, I am like bringing business back.
[00:54:24]  We're making the country safe.
[00:54:25]  No, by being like crazy, like erratic and autocratic, like I mentioned, credit ratings cratered, international loans, that starts hanging in the balance.
[00:54:35]  Like you're, the country is basically shut out of mainstream bond markets, which makes all of it really difficult.
[00:54:42]  And when Biden was president, R-A-P-Sleep B, when Biden was president, like the relations between the two countries were really bad.
[00:54:50]  Yeah.
[00:54:51]  Like really, really bad.
[00:54:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:54:52]  I mean, there was freezes, it was sanctions.
[00:54:55]  I mean, there was like, and again, this is a country that is dollarized.
[00:54:58]  Like they are there, their money is our money.
[00:55:02]  And it's not great if they're like, the U.S. government is starting to pay attention to individual ministers in your government.
[00:55:07]  So Biden sanctioned actually two members of Bukele's government for negotiating with MS-13 so they'd support New Ideas Party, his vice minister of justice and the head of the prison system in El Salvador.

=== Emails and Micro Payments (06:45) ===

[00:55:19]  Like I mentioned, you know, they gave gang members cell phones and prostitutes.
[00:55:23]  Who knows what the gang members did for them?
[00:55:25]  I have a feeling it was not just voting.
[00:55:28]  But let's talk, we got to talk about the most famous thing he did, which was not the probably now Seacott is, but until recently, the most famous thing that Bukele was known for, which is making Bitcoin legal tender.
[00:55:41]  Now, fans don't know this.
[00:55:43]  Neither do the haters.
[00:55:45]  But Liz, Young Chompsy, and myself explored moving to El Salvador when COVID restrictions hit and we could no longer record the podcast.
[00:55:55]  I'm so happy we didn't do that.
[00:55:56]  Me too.
[00:55:58]  But no, they, they, it's so funny.
[00:56:01]  So many people I feel like did stuff like that.
[00:56:03]  They like moved out of the country.
[00:56:05]  I just want to say I hate the digital nomad thing.
[00:56:10]  Shut up.
[00:56:11]  Check this out.
[00:56:12]  What if you answered emails from Pattaya?
[00:56:15]  Shut up.
[00:56:16]  Give me a break.
[00:56:17]  Also, I'm sorry, but then just like turning your life, like becoming an influencer about your life as a digital nomad and being like, look, I do yoga on a mountain, but also I have email job.
[00:56:29]  Like, shut up.
[00:56:30]  Go away.
[00:56:31]  If I'm your project manager.
[00:56:32]  Get out of my algo.
[00:56:33]  I'm your project.
[00:56:34]  Is it product or project manager?
[00:56:35]  Is that both?
[00:56:36]  They're different.
[00:56:37]  If I'm either of those and you are like, hey, I'll get to your email in a sec.
[00:56:42]  I have a surfing lesson off the coast of Rowatan.
[00:56:45]  Fired.
[00:56:47]  Fired.
[00:56:48]  We need to hunt the digital nomads.
[00:56:50]  You know, like how the how the USSR like ended, and this is controversial, but, you know, some people's nomadic lifestyles, right?
[00:56:58]  We need to do something like that for the digital nomads.
[00:57:00]  It's a modernization program.
[00:57:02]  This is what ICE can do.
[00:57:03]  Out into the world.
[00:57:05]  ICE agents leave the country.
[00:57:07]  Round up our beautiful office workers and send them to Kava.
[00:57:12]  You are never escaping.
[00:57:13]  You're going to eat the Chipotle bowl, you little cocksucker.
[00:57:16]  That's it.
[00:57:16]  You're eating the fucking bowl.
[00:57:18]  No rice for me.
[00:57:20]  rice for me i just just the fucking i've never had a chipotle bowl in my life never Never will.
[00:57:24]  But whatever they have.
[00:57:25]  Just the greens, please.
[00:57:27]  Hey, how about a base of greens on my bowl?
[00:57:30]  That's your life.
[00:57:31]  You try to escape your fucking emails by going surfing?
[00:57:34]  No.
[00:57:35]  Get out of the water, you fuck.
[00:57:36]  Get in the fucking office.
[00:57:38]  Get in your fucking chair.
[00:57:39]  It's ergonomic, dude.
[00:57:41]  Oh, you can sit in their ergonomic chair.
[00:57:43]  Answer the email.
[00:57:44]  You chose this life for yourself, man.
[00:57:46]  Nobody made you answer emails for work.
[00:57:48]  You want to be a real nomad?
[00:57:50]  Start killing people you meet in the hostels and taking their identity.
[00:57:53]  That's what you got to do.
[00:57:54]  Oh, I want to live a little bit.
[00:57:56]  I want to live a little bit outside the country.
[00:57:58]  But you know what?
[00:57:59]  I still want to answer an email every once in a while.
[00:58:00]  No, you got to build a hut, motherfucker.
[00:58:02]  Build a hut.
[00:58:03]  Poison someone.
[00:58:04]  Seduce a widow.
[00:58:06]  What the fuck are you doing?
[00:58:08]  All these people live these pathetic lives and then they try to gussy up the surroundings, right?
[00:58:15]  By being like, oh, well, I'm doing this from like, I'm doing this from a hostel.
[00:58:20]  I'm not getting a little bit of 19-year-old ming later.
[00:58:23]  It's like, that's not your, that's your fucking, that's your idea of adventure.
[00:58:27]  Kill.
[00:58:28]  Go out in this world and kill and take what's yours.
[00:58:32]  But these people can't do that.
[00:58:33]  I got to answer the email.
[00:58:35]  I got to go on the surf lesson.
[00:58:36]  I got to go to the nightclub.
[00:58:38]  These people are decadent pigs.
[00:58:41]  ICE, get out there, go get them, bring them back in chains, and never take the chains off.
[00:58:47]  We need people to answer emails.
[00:58:49]  So he made Bitcoin legal tender.
[00:58:52]  And boy, can you imagine, Liz?
[00:58:54]  You are living in El Salvador.
[00:58:56]  You sell pupusas from a cart, which Bukele has just made illegal because they had a huge crackdown on street vendors.
[00:59:03]  And you're like, I need some money.
[00:59:05]  And the government's like, check this out.
[00:59:06]  We're giving you $20 for the Bitcoin.
[00:59:08]  Yeah.
[00:59:08]  You're taking that immediately out of the Bitcoin wallet through the Bitcoin ATMs and spending it, which is precisely what everybody did.
[00:59:16]  Yeah, it didn't work.
[00:59:17]  In fact, you know, you mentioned he banned the street carts because they want to, you know, bring in real estate developers to kind of make build a billion malls, even though what there's no one, there's no businesses.
[00:59:32]  They're bringing Kava to the Kava balls.
[00:59:35]  Spit green.
[00:59:36]  He also pulled back on the Bitcoin stuff just this year.
[00:59:40]  Liz, that was because of the fucking globalist IMF came in there and was like, it is true.
[00:59:45]  The IMF made them change it.
[00:59:46]  Yeah.
[00:59:47]  And they had to as a condition of a loan.
[00:59:49]  In February of this year, they quietly removed Bitcoin as a leader.
[00:59:53]  Very quietly.
[00:59:55]  You know, I mentioned the remittances, and part of his pitch for making Bitcoin happen was he was like, oh, you know, there's all of these like parasitic wire transfer services and these banks that are taking all these commissions.
[01:00:08]  But like they, he just wanted to take the commissions in Bitcoin.
[01:00:12]  You know, I think that like it's sad because there is a very long tradition of great Latin American financial experiments and, you know, our horrible Western capitalists using Latin American poor people as you know, rats, laboratory rats for these like weird financial instruments.
[01:00:38]  Like you have the micro loans in the 80s, the micro credit in the 90s.
[01:00:41]  There's these mobile wallets that all these fucking tech companies were pitching and then deploying in the 2010s.
[01:00:48]  And now you have crypto.
[01:00:49]  Like you see it all over in Africa too, obviously.
[01:00:54]  And at each of these, like in literally in all of those scenarios, they all were kind of pitching it as like, oh, we're banking the unbanked.
[01:01:04]  You're always hearing that.
[01:01:05]  Yeah, we're banking the unbanked.
[01:01:06]  It was like, oh, no, you're trying to capture these informal economies that were created by U.S.-led liberalization policies.
[01:01:15]  And now you're trying to plug them into global capital flows without actually giving them any kind of social structure to, you know, live off of.
[01:01:27]  I mean, it's like the cycle of new Western instruments grafted onto the same unequal structure.
[01:01:33]  And it gets stress tests on the region's poorest populations.
[01:01:37]  And surprise, it doesn't work.
[01:01:38]  They always say this in Africa too.
[01:01:40]  They're like, we're doing micro loans in Ghana or whatever.
[01:01:42]  We're doing always micro loans.
[01:01:44]  Every fucking college graduate in from like 20, I would say 2004 to like 2011 was like, after, you know, I majored in political science and now I'm going to go work on a micro loan program in Africa.
[01:02:00]  And what do you do?
[01:02:01]  You just go around stuffing like a 50 in people's like shirt pockets.
[01:02:04]  You're like, you know what?

=== Mass Trials in El Salvador (08:02) ===

[01:02:05]  You'll get me when you get me.
[01:02:06]  Yeah.
[01:02:06]  What is that?
[01:02:07]  What is that?
[01:02:08]  It's crazy.
[01:02:09]  Just, yeah, there needs to be a war.
[01:02:21]  So, Bukele stopped being the crypto president and started being the, how do I make this transition good?
[01:02:29]  The crypto president and started being the crazy president.
[01:02:34]  There we go.
[01:02:35]  Instead of being the crazy president, like I mentioned, right?
[01:02:39]  He takes out this loan.
[01:02:41]  He gets the motherfucking at gunpoint when he sends the fucking soldiers into Congress.
[01:02:48]  He gets his military all rocking with rifles, you know, like nice rifles.
[01:02:52]  He always says that we got good guns now.
[01:02:56]  And declares a state of emergency in 2022 and does this massive, massive, massive operation with a massively enlarged military and locks up like, I think it was 80,000 people.
[01:03:10]  So enter Seacot.
[01:03:14]  So CCOT, which we actually talked about, I think like a couple episodes ago, is El Salvador's newly constructed mega prison.
[01:03:21]  It's built to house 40,000 people and it opened in 2023.
[01:03:26]  And I will say it is a wonderful physical manifestation of the state of exception that is, by the way, still ongoing in El Salvador.
[01:03:34]  It is renewed every single month by a Bukele-controlled legislature.
[01:03:38]  It's actually unknown exactly how many people are boarded in there.
[01:03:41]  The best estimates are from around 15 to 20,000, which the math-inclined among you might realize is about half or less than half of 40,000.
[01:03:51]  So it's about half empty.
[01:03:54]  The prison's in a rural area.
[01:03:55]  It's guarded, according to a hype beast YouTube video that I watched from a visiting YouTuber by 600 soldiers.
[01:04:02]  There's signal jammers for about a mile, like in a radius around the prison, which is, you know, if you're doing a mega prison, I guess you'd do that.
[01:04:10]  And so, you know, no cell phones work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:04:14]  The prison is actually composed of eight giant cell blocks guarded by or surrounded by, ensconced by electric fences, guard towers, and then a giant sort of concrete wall describing the perimeter.
[01:04:27]  I love saying that.
[01:04:28]  God, I got to say that.
[01:04:29]  I've never said that before in my life successfully.
[01:04:31]  Describing the perimeter.
[01:04:33]  You love that?
[01:04:34]  I just, you know, it's one of those things you read, but you're like, I'll never be able to say that.
[01:04:37]  And then sometimes you're podcasting and it just comes into your head and you're like, the concrete fence describes the perimeter.
[01:04:43]  But now I've said it too many times and I'll probably never say it again.
[01:04:46]  Security procedures are very intense to get in.
[01:04:50]  I do believe them on that.
[01:04:52]  But it's interesting.
[01:04:53]  So I read, and then listen, this is no defense of OAS, Organization of American States.
[01:04:59]  But I read, and I think you did too, like a pretty long report that they did about conditions within Salvadoran prisons.
[01:05:07]  And I read another, I think it was a Human Rights Watch report about Seacot in particular.
[01:05:11]  You know, I used a lot of information for this, but there's not really that much out there.
[01:05:17]  It's pretty new.
[01:05:18]  It's pretty new.
[01:05:19]  Yeah.
[01:05:20]  Also, yeah, it's pretty new.
[01:05:21]  There's really not that much out there that's like differs from each other.
[01:05:24]  Basically, everything says the same thing.
[01:05:27]  However, in some sources, Seacott is said to hold pretrial detainees mixed with like, you know, people who are convicted.
[01:05:34]  And then in other reports, like in the New York Times, recently it said it held convicted criminals and made no mention of pre-trial detainees.
[01:05:42]  Now, why that would be bad is like, imagine you are a pre-trial detainee, right?
[01:05:47]  Normally in America, you'd be in jail for that.
[01:05:50]  Even if, you know, you're a murderer or whatever, you're in jail.
[01:05:54]  And then once you get convicted, you go to prison.
[01:05:56]  And the equivalent of that would be like, say, I, you know, had a couple of high knees and got behind the wheel of my Rivian and I hit a woman.
[01:06:09]  No, a lamp.
[01:06:10]  Why do you have to hit a woman in this?
[01:06:11]  Couldn't it be just like a lamppost?
[01:06:13]  I ran over.
[01:06:15]  I ran over beautiful woman.
[01:06:18]  Nancy Mace.
[01:06:19]  I ran over.
[01:06:19]  I hate Nancy Mace.
[01:06:20]  There was a long time ago when you did this extended bit about Bukele and Bitcoin.
[01:06:24]  There was a whole thing about driving around and hitting women with your car.
[01:06:29]  Really?
[01:06:29]  No, you were like, I think it was a Coindexter thing because I was thinking of it the whole time you were doing.
[01:06:34]  Wow.
[01:06:35]  This is like muscle memory.
[01:06:36]  Wow.
[01:06:36]  Go back to the archives.
[01:06:38]  When I was in my Rivana.
[01:06:41]  I would have a Rivian.
[01:06:42]  And it was a Bugatti.
[01:06:44]  I like saying Riviani.
[01:06:44]  It's another funny word to say.
[01:06:46]  Rivian.
[01:06:47]  But say it like, right?
[01:06:48]  And you hit somebody, you kill someone, whatever.
[01:06:50]  You do anything.
[01:06:51]  Or steal something.
[01:06:53]  And they put you not in jail.
[01:06:56]  They put you in like San Quentin or Pelican Bay to await trial.
[01:07:02]  Like it's, you know, it's a totally different thing.
[01:07:06]  You know, you're actually, because you could be just innocent.
[01:07:09]  And they would have you in there with like people who were declared guilty by the state.
[01:07:14]  So that would be pretty big, but it's unclear, even in the first place, what conviction actually looks like in El Salvador at this point in time, anyways.
[01:07:22]  Because what they do is they have these giant mass trials, right?
[01:07:25]  They'll put like 500 people on trial.
[01:07:27]  Oftentimes, the first time you meet your lawyer is at the courtroom.
[01:07:32]  A lot of these trials are done via video link only.
[01:07:35]  So you may never meet your lawyer in person ever.
[01:07:38]  And, you know, I'm sorry, like 500-person mass trial, like, okay, you're declared guilty by a jury or a judge.
[01:07:49]  Like, what the fuck does that mean?
[01:07:51]  It means nothing.
[01:07:51]  You know what I mean?
[01:07:52]  That's a rubber stamp for the state.
[01:07:55]  But though, I will say, like, regardless of whether it has Salvadoran or pre-trial detainees or not.
[01:08:02]  It actually does have pre-trial detainees because almost all the people that were sent from the United States are pre-trial detainees because they have not gone, most of them, and none of them have gone through a conviction, have gotten a conviction in El Salvador.
[01:08:17]  Or El Salvador.
[01:08:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:19]  I mean, some of them may, I think they were in jail in the U.S., but like none of them have been convicted in El Salvador of a crime, but they're in that system.
[01:08:27]  Right.
[01:08:27]  Right.
[01:08:28]  So there are no visitors.
[01:08:29]  That's the famous thing about it.
[01:08:30]  Your family and friends cannot ever visit you under any circumstances.
[01:08:34]  Prisoners are allowed in some instances to speak with lawyers via video link in special rooms.
[01:08:39]  Now, that is, you know, in the U.S., supposedly, they're not supposed to listen.
[01:08:44]  I would assume they are, but they're not supposed to listen to you talk to your lawyer because it's privileged confidential information, you know, client lawyer privilege.
[01:08:52]  In El Salvador, they're just like, you go in this room, you talk on the video link.
[01:08:55]  Yeah, we're not listening.
[01:08:56]  Like, they are listening.
[01:08:59]  The Venezuelans sent there, actually, because, you know, they sent like 250, I think more at this point, Trenda Aragua, alleged Trenda Aragua members there.
[01:09:08]  They actually have lawyers that were hired by the Venezuelan government.
[01:09:12]  They hired like a Salvadoran law firm.
[01:09:15]  Those lawyers say that the government of El Salvador and the legal system there has just ignored all their letters being like, can we talk to our clients?
[01:09:23]  Can we do something here?
[01:09:24]  They just have, like, completely stonewalled them.
[01:09:26]  So I think that's a glimpse of, like, the system is, like, it has some of the trappings of a legal system, but it really is just, like, it's not.
[01:09:33]  It's a rubber stamp to like get the barest sort of legitimacy out of this stuff.
[01:09:38]  There's no TV or radio.
[01:09:40]  They sleep on bunk beds that go up to the ceiling.
[01:09:42]  The lights are on 100% of the time.
[01:09:44]  They're allowed outside of their cells for 30 minutes of calisthenics per day in the cell block, but not outside the building.
[01:09:51]  So they don't go outside under any circumstances.
[01:09:54]  Prisoners' heads are shaved every five days.
[01:09:57]  I was reading the L P. Why?
[01:10:00]  I don't know.
[01:10:01]  I feel like that's for social media.
[01:10:03]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:03]  Social media humiliation thing.
[01:10:05]  Yeah.
[01:10:06]  But yeah.

=== Filthy Conditions Inside (02:32) ===

[01:10:07]  That's fucking crazy.
[01:10:09]  I was reading El Pace's article about a reporter visiting, and he says, he says this.
[01:10:15]  Sunlight doesn't filter through any crack in the sea cot.
[01:10:18]  The inmates completely lose track of time.
[01:10:21]  There are no clocks, nor are there any needs.
[01:10:24]  Days and nights are nothing more than a uniform mass of suspended time.
[01:10:28]  The outside world resembles a distant planet on which those inside will never be able to land.
[01:10:35]  So it's worth noting too that Seacott is not the only prison in El Salvador.
[01:10:40]  There are others, older ones, where the conditions are actually significantly worse.
[01:10:45]  I was talking to somebody who was involved in politics in El Salvador yesterday for about an hour or around an hour, kind of like running some of this by her to see if it was completely off base.
[01:11:00]  And she's like, actually, I would rather be in Seacot than most of the other places because most of the other prisons that they have them in, there's like no food.
[01:11:07]  There's filthy water.
[01:11:08]  You like, you know, you shave or you like bathe the same water that you drink out of.
[01:11:14]  Like, it's like bad, bad conditions.
[01:11:18]  There's actually been something in the neighborhood of 200 reported deaths in custody since the state of exception was announced.
[01:11:25]  And the woman I spoke to, Hillary, she told me it's actually likely double that at least, right?
[01:11:32]  That's not surprising.
[01:11:33]  Yeah, no, not at all.
[01:11:35]  And like, some of the people have found the signs of torture.
[01:11:37]  Some, a lot of them died from medical neglect.
[01:11:41]  It's funny.
[01:11:42]  I actually, I, I really late at night the other night, I watched, have you ever seen the movie Kiss of the Spider Woman?
[01:11:46]  No.
[01:11:47]  From 85.
[01:11:48]  It's really good.
[01:11:50]  But I think it's about an Argentine prison.
[01:11:53]  And I was just like, geez, and the water thing kept coming up in that, like drinking filthy water.
[01:11:57]  And I was like, God, man, like, I don't know.
[01:12:01]  It's, that's, that's like something that's like, they have, like, there's, there's American prison or like prisons in the U.S. that are like really, like, especially state prisons in the South that are like fucking hell holes.
[01:12:11]  But like, in a lot of these, like, people don't eat unless their family brings them food.
[01:12:15]  You know, it's like shit like that.
[01:12:17]  And your family, like, they still get to see you.
[01:12:19]  They get to drop off like a parcel that has like some food in it.
[01:12:22]  And like, maybe it'll get to you.
[01:12:25]  This is Seacot, though, is like a little more professionalized, but still, I mean, it knows they're like, and then, and they have, I've also seen videos of the hole, like the, like, solitary that they have in Seacot.
[01:12:36]  And boy, is it medieval.

=== The Courts as Stalwarts (07:01) ===

[01:12:39]  And this is the place that they're sending people that the U.S. government is alleging are gang members to.
[01:13:00]  So one thing, I know that I'm being like Trump derangement syndrome about this.
[01:13:06]  I want to be clear.
[01:13:07]  But like when Trump keeps saying that they're exploring the legality of sending people there, like it's obviously baldly illegal, right?
[01:13:17]  Like, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is like cruel and unusual punishment.
[01:13:20]  Like, you can't send people to a, I mean, you can.
[01:13:27]  And I did it in like Guantanamo and all these black sites in Poland, but like they are all over.
[01:13:32]  But you clearly can't send American prisoners there.
[01:13:36]  We've never done anything like particularly like that before.
[01:13:39]  There have been Americans that have been housed in overseas places that are overseen by the U.S. Right.
[01:13:46]  That's technically, I mean, the thing about Guantanamo and all this place is that they're always technically on U.S. soil.
[01:13:52]  Yeah.
[01:13:52]  But they have floated that with, I believe they floated something with CCOT where they had talked about like leasing it back to El Salvador.
[01:14:05]  No shit.
[01:14:07]  But I feel like I read that in passing and maybe I'm not getting that right.
[01:14:12]  But that is like a way to get around some of that stuff.
[01:14:15]  And you could see, you know, you can kind of see the dots there.
[01:14:18]  But I think, you know, I mean, for so many reasons, it's a crazy escalation.
[01:14:26]  And it seems absurd to actually like entertain, to be honest.
[01:14:32]  But then at the same time, you see all of this stuff, how it's building and how it is kind of, it has its own momentum and everything seems to be sort of spinning out of control.
[01:14:40]  And a lot of these, I mean, look, like Congress like doesn't exist anymore, right?
[01:14:46]  Yeah, you never hear about it.
[01:14:47]  You never hear about it ever.
[01:14:50]  Ever.
[01:14:52]  And these sort of, you know, the institutions, the liberal institutions are in retreat into the courts.
[01:15:02]  And none of that is really holding against a lot of these arguments.
[01:15:05]  It is in some.
[01:15:06]  You know, I saw like there was that ruling, I think it was this morning or yesterday, that the way that they were kind of blanket denying student visas based on like petty charges, like DUIs and stuff, which was obviously, by the way, like, what's crazy is it's clear that that's all being flagged by an algorithm, which we don't seem to be talking about.
[01:15:31]  Isn't Palantir the one that's making it?
[01:15:33]  I don't know.
[01:15:34]  I don't know if they're making that one, but Palantir is making some anti-woke McKinsey.
[01:15:39]  They are doing anti-woke McKinsey.
[01:15:41]  That is what it is.
[01:15:42]  But Palantir is allegedly working on some algorithm.
[01:15:45]  But they always seize they're doing shit like this.
[01:15:47]  But they're allegedly working on some like algorithm for, I think, DHS to flag this kind of stuff.
[01:15:52]  But the courts kind of like, you know, there was a bunch of case, there was a bunch of judges granting stays.
[01:15:59]  And finally, there was a decision that was like, no, you can't do that.
[01:16:02]  That's a poor reading of the statute, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:16:06]  So you see that there's some gains and there are these fights, ongoing fights and back and forth, but that's kind of all that's left.
[01:16:15]  And you see this in a lot of other states, right?
[01:16:19]  Like, I don't know, we were talking the other day and it, you know, the situation in Brazil kind of reminds me where the courts then become the only, like, basically you have the courts and the central bank as these last stalwarts of liberal democracy in the face of not an authoritarian power grab, but like really popular, like a populist.
[01:16:44]  I don't know, I guess it's authoritarian, but I, you know, I'm reaching for these words because it's, I don't know exactly how to describe what's happening, you know, but it is like, you know, we should say like Bukele is extremely popular.
[01:16:56]  Bukele's like, like, ratings are probably some of the highest in the world.
[01:17:00]  Yeah.
[01:17:00]  And they're like legitimately popular.
[01:17:03]  Like, I mean, it brings no one any pleasure to say.
[01:17:07]  I'm sure it does actually bring quite a few people pleasure to say.
[01:17:09]  But like, Bukele's got like 80, 90% ratings.
[01:17:12]  Yeah.
[01:17:13]  And yeah, you know, you mentioned that like an example about Brazil too.
[01:17:17]  And like Brazil famously has a very active higher court system.
[01:17:22]  Sure.
[01:17:23]  And, you know, you mentioned the Supreme Court and the central bank.
[01:17:28]  And, you know, we sort of see this like similarity happening in the U.S. Bukele actually dealt with it.
[01:17:34]  It was kind of one of the first things he dealt with in El Salvador was he changed the way that the courts worked and installed loyalists.
[01:17:42]  But like, it's interesting when these like relatively, in like a raw sense, undemocratic institutions, you know, like in terms of like, you're not electing the Supreme Court judges, right?
[01:17:54]  Sure.
[01:17:55]  We don't even have terms.
[01:17:57]  I know.
[01:17:57]  Ours is like a supremely undemocratic system.
[01:18:00]  Fucking psychotic system.
[01:18:02]  But these sort of become like the bulwarks of liberalism.
[01:18:06]  These like these institutions that came out of liberalism, right?
[01:18:10]  But like are not necessarily democratic institutions in like a, in a pure sense.
[01:18:16]  And I'm not like a political scientist here.
[01:18:18]  I'm just, you know, calling balls and strikes as a, we're just, you know, we're just a couple of baseball fans calling balls and strikes.
[01:18:24]  But but they become kind of the bulwark and they end up having to like kind of go down like an alternative path of like semi-liberalism, right?
[01:18:33]  By like outlawing certain candidates or like ordering the arrest of people.
[01:18:39]  Well, this is what, so, you know, thinking about Brazil, like, you know, during the Dilma coup, like what ended up happening was it really strengthened the judiciary while vacating a lot of power from the executive.
[01:18:54]  And so then when Lula comes back, he is completely, you know, his hands are tied.
[01:19:02]  And now he's got a Congress and a central bank that are kind of doing their own thing and a really powerful court system.
[01:19:11]  And that was what was so complicated about the moment with Bolsonaro, because on the one hand, you're like, this guy is a nightmare that needs to, that is doing like untold destruction to the state.
[01:19:24]  And at the same time, it requires you to then throw your support behind this like liberal institution that not that is like becoming illiberal through its own power grab and trying to kind of be the bulwark of liberal democracy.

=== Controversy Surrounding Netanyahus (09:40) ===

[01:19:41]  Do you know what I'm saying?
[01:19:43]  Yeah, it's almost that it's that same sort of cycle that El Salvador was in kind of before Bukele.
[01:19:49]  Yes.
[01:19:49]  Right.
[01:19:50]  And so it's this familiar place where suddenly you're stuck having to defend these things and in doing so, strengthening them against your own purpose.
[01:19:59]  Yeah.
[01:19:59]  I mean, you see the same thing kind of like the cracks appearing in the EU.
[01:20:03]  Yeah.
[01:20:03]  Like with this too, you know, like with what happened in Romania.
[01:20:07]  And I think really, I actually don't know that much about this.
[01:20:11]  So I might be talking a little bit out of my ass here.
[01:20:14]  A little bit with Le Pen too.
[01:20:16]  Oh, with them jailing her?
[01:20:18]  Yeah.
[01:20:18]  She jailed her.
[01:20:19]  Or not jailing, but like disqualified.
[01:20:22]  Whatever they're going to do.
[01:20:23]  Politically jailing.
[01:20:24]  I thought that they were going to like, it was, yeah.
[01:20:26]  I thought there was some.
[01:20:27]  Is it for like misspending money?
[01:20:29]  I'm sorry.
[01:20:29]  She's afraid of it.
[01:20:30]  But that's the whole thing, right?
[01:20:31]  So then look at Trump, right?
[01:20:33]  Yeah.
[01:20:33]  The whole, you know, the whole thing with all the fucking, you know, they tried their darndest, and I'm like, your darndest stinks.
[01:20:41]  The darndest is, well, that's the big difference, right?
[01:20:44]  Is like in America, and this is, this is, we've been saying this, is the true one online.
[01:20:49]  You can't, what is, what is it you always say when you do something badass, Liz?
[01:20:54]  You always say, if you come at the king, which you refer to yourself as, you best not miss.
[01:20:58]  You best not miss.
[01:20:59]  Sure.
[01:20:59]  But it's these people, like, they don't even, they're not even trying to like really hit.
[01:21:03]  Like when they got Trump with the fucking Stormy Daniels PBH, like with the, like the Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels shit, all these, like, he's a 42-time felon.
[01:21:15]  Okay, he's not in prison or shot.
[01:21:17]  So guess what?
[01:21:17]  He's going to win.
[01:21:18]  And I'm not saying, you know, I'm not saying I'm not advocating for anything here.
[01:21:21]  I'm just saying like that's the political reality of it.
[01:21:23]  Right.
[01:21:23]  Like the when you got him on fucking contracts.
[01:21:27]  It was like about fucking money.
[01:21:29]  Like stop.
[01:21:30]  And the Atlanta shit.
[01:21:32]  I'm still horny to jail Trump.
[01:21:35]  This lady starts fucking her fucking employees.
[01:21:37]  That's so crazy.
[01:21:39]  Crazy.
[01:21:39]  Keep it.
[01:21:40]  Keep it zip time.
[01:21:41]  Talk about like sabotaging your career.
[01:21:44]  Boy.
[01:21:44]  You need to get your ass in psychoanalysis.
[01:21:46]  Yeah, you need to go.
[01:21:47]  You got some shit to work out.
[01:21:48]  Go be a judge and, you know, maybe, maybe try like maybe like a district court.
[01:21:53]  Or she's a lawyer, a prosecutor.
[01:21:55]  Maybe try Juno, Alaska.
[01:21:56]  I still think that she is fun there.
[01:22:00]  But yeah, like it's, it's all that it does is just like, like, that's the thing is, is people like Bukele are willing to go the distance, right?
[01:22:08]  And the liberals aren't willing to really go the distance yet.
[01:22:12]  They will a little bit, but yet.
[01:22:15]  But I think it's like a, like, we have this sort of imbalance where like these, and everyone, by the way, is claiming to be like the biggest fan of democracy in human history.
[01:22:23]  Everybody in the world.
[01:22:23]  Oh, you got it.
[01:22:24]  Like, you know, Bukele talks, he's like, you know, I love democracy.
[01:22:28]  Sure.
[01:22:28]  The last question, I watched the Tucker interview he did, which, boy.
[01:22:32]  I legit forgot about Tucker Carlson, by the way.
[01:22:35]  You just said Tucker, and I was like, Tucker, it took me like a second to like get him in my mind.
[01:22:40]  I was kind of surprised.
[01:22:42]  Like, he's not.
[01:22:43]  Because isn't his show on X?
[01:22:46]  Like, that's a good question.
[01:22:47]  I think he wised up and like, I think he wised up and is now on other platforms too.
[01:22:52]  But, but, like, I watched his Bukele-Tucker interview, and Tucker kind of asks him, like, are you, how long are you planning to be president for?
[01:23:00]  Like, there's the last question.
[01:23:01]  He's like, five years.
[01:23:03]  But Bukele also just like he got his legislature to change the laws to where actually the legislature can really easily change the Constitution.
[01:23:12]  And so why would they need to change the Constitution?
[01:23:15]  Obviously, we know why.
[01:23:17]  Or, you know, he's got 10 brothers or whatever.
[01:23:19]  He's got 10 family, like 10 siblings and friends.
[01:23:23]  And friends.
[01:23:23]  So obviously, like, that cartel is going to be in there for a while.
[01:23:28]  But, you know, it's interesting because this is like not to not to be whatever about this, but like, this was like kind of what, like, the shit that made Carl Schmidt famous, right?
[01:23:38]  It's like, who is like the guardian of the Constitution, right?
[01:23:42]  He's got this argument with this other guy.
[01:23:43]  I can't remember his name, but like, you know, is the constitutional court the guardian of it or is the sovereign the guardian of it?
[01:23:49]  And Schmidt's idea was it's the, it's the, it's the executive, right?
[01:23:53]  It's the guy who's like in charge of the country because he's the person who can be like, he can, he can say if things are, you know, he's got the army.
[01:24:01]  The sovereign decides.
[01:24:02]  Exactly.
[01:24:03]  And like, I think we're actually really seeing that put to the test in all these different fucking countries.
[01:24:09]  I mean, look at Israel, right?
[01:24:10]  I mean, Netanyahu, when he came back into power in 2023, right?
[01:24:16]  One of the first things that he decided to do was the judicial reforms.
[01:24:20]  You know, all in all these different ways, but like, and, you know, we've covered this in the show before.
[01:24:25]  Israel does not have a constitution, but it has like what's essentially a constitution.
[01:24:30]  It's just like not really codified as such.
[01:24:34]  You know, funnily enough, like one of the things he was trying to change was to make the judge appointments to like the Supreme Court more akin to the U.S. one, like have them be political appointments.
[01:24:46]  And this was like a huge controversy there, right?
[01:24:48]  Like there was all these like giant, giant protests.
[01:24:52]  Some of them turned into riots.
[01:24:53]  There were reservists saying they weren't going to fly their fucking planes.
[01:24:57]  And we're not going to, until we have a more democratic government, we're not going to kill any more kids.
[01:25:03]  By the way, that is so fucking crazy.
[01:25:06]  So fucking crazy.
[01:25:07]  You live in Israel?
[01:25:08]  That's crazy.
[01:25:10]  Can you imagine?
[01:25:10]  No.
[01:25:11]  You wake up tomorrow.
[01:25:12]  I'm in Del Aviv.
[01:25:13]  Get real.
[01:25:14]  I'm out of here, brother.
[01:25:15]  Get out of there.
[01:25:16]  Get out of there.
[01:25:17]  If you're in Israel listening to this, get out of there.
[01:25:19]  That place seems crazy.
[01:25:21]  Seems crazy.
[01:25:22]  I mean, there was these massive, massive protests.
[01:25:25]  Yov Galant.
[01:25:26]  The defense minister was fired for coming out against them.
[01:25:30]  Feels so quaint.
[01:25:31]  I know Biden.
[01:25:34]  We criticized them more for that than we did for like, you know, the firebombing of refugee tents.
[01:25:41]  Netanyahu is also in trouble for corruption at the same time.
[01:25:44]  10-7 saved their asses, but it was really like coming, looked like it was.
[01:25:50]  Yeah, it did.
[01:25:51]  And I think that maybe, maybe he knew it was going to save his ass.
[01:25:57]  I mean, I would say that Haaret seems to say so.
[01:26:00]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:26:02]  But, you know, there is this like, you can see the same impulses from Netanyahu, right?
[01:26:08]  To be like, I'm actually the one that decides here.
[01:26:11]  And now, look, Israel is in this like weird state of exception, right?
[01:26:15]  Where it's like a, you know, there's like kind of, well, I mean, there always is martial law in like territories it administers, but like there isn't like, I don't think they're taking Netanyahu out of government, right?
[01:26:26]  Like he's, he's going to be in charge there.
[01:26:28]  And so like you see in El Salvador, this really advanced form of this, but all over in this sort of like U.S. especially kind of like triumvirate, El Salvador, Israel, the U.S., these like wars between the executive and the legal apparatus, right?
[01:26:47]  And, you know, in El Salvador, the legal apparatus was apparently very weak.
[01:26:51]  In Israel, it's a little bit stronger.
[01:26:53]  And there's sort of like a more is more loyalist.
[01:26:56]  In the U.S., it does seem like it's the like the main thing that it's it's liberalism's redoubt, right?
[01:27:03]  Like it's like everybody's sort of putting their hopes into that.
[01:27:06]  And then, you know, Trump goes and they arrested that judge this morning.
[01:27:10]  Yeah, they just arrested a judge in Milwaukee, a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge.
[01:27:15]  The FBI came in, arrested her on charges of obstruction of immigration arrest.
[01:27:22]  And they say that she was like intentionally, I mean, this was what Kash Patel said, right?
[01:27:26]  He came out and he had his little, his little puffed out chest, little fucking cocksucker.
[01:27:31]  And he's like, fucking like, you know, she misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, allowing the subject and the illegal alien to evade arrest.
[01:27:42]  She drew a tunnel on the wall and they ran into it.
[01:27:47]  Yeah, but they said that she like intentionally was like trying to protect someone from being arrested from ICE.
[01:27:53]  And, you know, the FBI went in and arrested a judge.
[01:27:58]  That's a huge escalation.
[01:28:00]  It's an escalation.
[01:28:01]  It is.
[01:28:02]  It is.
[01:28:02]  And I think that like we've seen, especially from the rhetoric coming from like Elon or whoever else involved in this, like one of their main enemies now is the judiciary, which is so funny because I'm like, I thought you guys were like packing this shit.
[01:28:13]  Dude, how are you like federalist society motherfuckers for like decades?
[01:28:17]  Literally since like the 50s.
[01:28:19]  Yes.
[01:28:20]  You've been working on this project.
[01:28:21]  I'm like, did you not win?
[01:28:23]  I don't really pay that much attention to the courts unless I'm in one.
[01:28:26]  Maybe they're not aware of like who's running things.
[01:28:29]  Well, I mean, I talked to a high, very high-profile barrister recently.
[01:28:34]  A Brit?
[01:28:35]  No, a lawyer.
[01:28:36]  I don't know.
[01:28:36]  Isn't Barrister just like a lawyer but with a wig?
[01:28:39]  That would be in the UK.
[01:28:40]  I know, but, you know.
[01:28:42]  Maybe in Canada they call them that.
[01:28:44]  I don't know.
[01:28:44]  Oh, God.
[01:28:45]  Oh, they do make them wear the wigs.
[01:28:46]  But they do have the wigs there.
[01:28:47]  Some of them wear the wigs.
[01:28:48]  Yeah.
[01:28:48]  Yeah.
[01:28:50]  But the, I was talking to him.
[01:28:53]  He was like, yeah, I mean, even a lot of conservative judges are pretty unhappy with what's norms.
[01:29:02]  Exactly.
[01:29:02]  You know, they're sort of obsessed with their own power there.
[01:29:05]  But it's interesting because, I mean, also, like, you have to think of the question, like, what if a Democratic majority in some way does want to repeal liberal democratic institutions, right?
[01:29:20]  Or like.

=== Due Process Debate (13:24) ===

[01:29:22]  You mean like a popular?
[01:29:23]  Popular.
[01:29:23]  Yeah.
[01:29:24]  What if there is a popular movement to like to against liberal democracy?
[01:29:29]  God, I wish there was one that was backing me up.
[01:29:31]  But like in this instance, right?
[01:29:33]  Like Bukelle has a mandate from the country to and as part of that mandate, he has dismantled like large parts of it.
[01:29:41]  He's gone after also like NGOs.
[01:29:44]  Like he's, it was one, I can't remember the guy's name, but he, he, you know, he like jailed this NGO guy.
[01:29:49]  He's basically they're doing their version of like a RICO Act charges against unregistered NGOs and labor unions, shit like that.
[01:29:57]  But he's also now denying everyone's registration.
[01:30:00]  And so, you know, you can see where that's leading.
[01:30:04]  It is, I mean, what happens, right?
[01:30:06]  Like there isn't really, I don't know.
[01:30:10]  I think it's, it's, it's a, it's an interesting situation, we'll put it like that.
[01:30:14]  And I don't know how successful it will be here.
[01:30:18]  Well, it depends on what we're talking about.
[01:30:20]  But like, you know, all of the tools in the state's toolkit are there and they have been there for a long time.
[01:30:30]  And they're being activated in new ways by new power.
[01:30:35]  And so it's hard because it's hard.
[01:30:38]  It's hard in some ways because you're like, yes, the groundwork, like even the, you know, every day there's a news story about DHS, you know, using some new surveillance or whatever.
[01:30:48]  It's like, we've been hearing about this since fucking motherfucking Snowden.
[01:30:51]  Yes.
[01:30:52]  And yet now we're seeing, now we're seeing what that looks like, right?
[01:30:56]  Now it's not just that it's Google and Meta like selling you a bunch of like boner pills or whatever because of what they catch you looking at on your iPhone by the way.
[01:31:10]  Now, you know, it's much more serious.
[01:31:12]  Yeah.
[01:31:12]  Right.
[01:31:12]  Now it's denying, now it's a way to deny you entry back into the country or cancel your green card or your student visa because you attended a protest, which they can see from like GPS or from Instagram posts or whatever, whatever, whatever it is.
[01:31:28]  Right.
[01:31:29]  And so like all of this stuff that people have been kind of like, you know, talking about for a very long time in all different ways are now being put to the test because you have people in power who are like, yes, the sovereign decides.
[01:31:46]  We are going, we are looking at what is available to us and we're going to fucking use it.
[01:31:52]  Yeah.
[01:31:53]  I mean, you think about this, like going back to the war on terror, because I think that's sort of like a little bit of the framework I've been looking at this stuff through, too, especially because of the now very, very popular usage of terror as a appellation for either migrants or.
[01:32:11]  Many people warned about, they said using this, you know, constantly reclassifying people as terrorists, different violent acts as terror.
[01:32:22]  Like this is a bad, this is a slippery slope, right?
[01:32:26]  Yeah.
[01:32:26]  Because you're setting all of this sort of popular precedent for this use that can be then, you know, very blanket.
[01:32:33]  I know, that's why it's so interesting to me to hear people talk about like, I mean, you really, this is some shit you hear online.
[01:32:40]  But you see it a lot, right?
[01:32:41]  Where people are like, you know, I don't give a fuck about due process for some illegal immigrant or whatever.
[01:32:46]  It's like, okay, well, that's not like, obviously, like, you're either stupid or you're like doing that to piss people off.
[01:32:54]  But like, I don't care about due in the abstract.
[01:32:57]  People don't care about due process.
[01:33:00]  But JD Vance fucking said that.
[01:33:01]  Yes, exactly.
[01:33:02]  The vice president basically said that.
[01:33:04]  Or he's like, they have due process.
[01:33:05]  But he was lying.
[01:33:07]  Yes, yes.
[01:33:08]  I mean, I mean, like, like the Venezuelan hairdresser guy, right?
[01:33:12]  Yeah.
[01:33:14]  Andre, I think it's Andre Romero.
[01:33:17]  With like the two tattoos that he have.
[01:33:18]  Like, like, the, the.
[01:33:19]  Wasn't it like an autism tattoo?
[01:33:21]  No.
[01:33:21]  Well, I think it was another guy with an autism tattoo.
[01:33:23]  I think he had, I think he had like crowns within like that.
[01:33:27]  Oh, yeah.
[01:33:27]  Yeah.
[01:33:27]  It was like the Real Madrid one.
[01:33:30]  I think he might have had something like that too.
[01:33:31]  I don't know.
[01:33:32]  But it was shit like that.
[01:33:33]  But but but it's funny because you mentioned football.
[01:33:39]  So the like the way we calculate like if someone is in a gang, if they're not like proven to be in a gang some other way, is like, okay, do they have these tattoos?
[01:33:47]  Do they have like Venezuelan soccer team gear on?
[01:33:52]  Do they have like this and this and this?
[01:33:54]  Until they sort of like they give you enough points, and if you have enough points, bam, you're in Trenda Aragua.
[01:33:59]  And this guy is just like, okay, well, there's no due process for this guy.
[01:34:03]  And people are like, well, that would never happen to me.
[01:34:05]  You can't be saying that, right?
[01:34:07]  Because that's like that.
[01:34:08]  I mean, you can, and people do, but like, it could happen to you.
[01:34:12]  And like every tool that the state gains, they don't give one up.
[01:34:16]  You know, these people talk about like, oh, you know, we're so over-regulated.
[01:34:19]  We're so overregulated.
[01:34:20]  We need to cut 10 regulations for every new one we put in.
[01:34:22]  They're never talking about like cutting any of this national security shit, even though I don't know about you, but I certainly don't feel any safer in the fucking 24 years since 9/11.
[01:34:33]  You know, we have all this shit, and the government never gives any of it up.
[01:34:38]  It just gets worse.
[01:34:39]  And like the real ID shit, even what the fuck is that?
[01:34:43]  But also, like, you know, just to like be clear, like, you don't decide who's a criminal.
[01:34:48]  The law does, and they're the ones in charge of the law.
[01:34:52]  Like, that, what is a criminal is a, you know, is a legal fiction that is determined by the people in power and can change and shift.
[01:35:03]  And we're seeing that literally right now, as all of the universities are, you know, looking opening up investigations into students for signing on to op-eds at school newspapers.
[01:35:16]  I mean, it's an interesting dynamic too, because one of the things Trump did right when he got into office is pardon all the January 6th people, right?
[01:35:24]  And like, whatever about that aside, you know, it's funny, like the government presumably is supposed to change or does change, you know, with some regularity who, what political party is in charge here.
[01:35:42]  And it's like, okay, well, if you build this tool and you just pass it on to your successor, they're going to use it against the people that they deem enemies, right?
[01:35:50]  And so like, what is a criminal and what's not a criminal like is very much changing before our eyes right now.
[01:35:56]  Once again, it hasn't, you know, before.
[01:35:58]  It's not the first time this has happened by any means.
[01:36:02]  But to me, I guess, because I'm somebody who's like, you know, I'm a neutral player.
[01:36:07]  I'm a liberal.
[01:36:08]  I'm a conservative.
[01:36:09]  I'm, you know, whatever will be that will give me a bunch of people.
[01:36:11]  You're a bitch.
[01:36:13]  You're a lover.
[01:36:13]  You're a sinner.
[01:36:14]  You're a saint.
[01:36:15]  I'm all these things.
[01:36:16]  You will not feel ashamed.
[01:36:17]  I will feel a little bit of shame.
[01:36:19]  But, but, you know, like, this shit freaks me out, man.
[01:36:22]  Like, I don't want to go to fucking jail.
[01:36:24]  I don't want to go to El Salvador except, you know, riding on a wave of Bitcoins.
[01:36:31]  Now they got rid of the Bitcoins.
[01:36:33]  I know, but I could still go there on my Bitcoin earnings.
[01:36:37]  God.
[01:36:38]  Oh, it's not legal tender.
[01:36:39]  Never mind.
[01:36:39]  I'm not going there.
[01:36:41]  But, but, you know, it's like, I don't, I, I don't want these things to be like these tools that they're building or they're like refining to be like continued to be used by the government.
[01:36:51]  I don't like, I'm like a libertarian.
[01:36:53]  I'm a libertarian.
[01:36:54]  I don't like the government and I don't want them to have any of this power.
[01:36:58]  But it seems like, I don't know, I guess it seems like there's a few new laws, one of which is it's illegal to say anything bad against Israel, which is completely insane.
[01:37:12]  And I think that really we are heading towards, and I don't know if we'll get there, but I think we're heading towards like a constitutional crisis and like a showdown between the administration and whatever court really like whatever, whatever the administration does that like becomes too egregious and whatever court kind of gets in the way of that, I think that the aftermath of that will be really decisive.
[01:37:35]  Yeah, I don't know.
[01:37:36]  I feel like we haven't really seen what the state is capable of.
[01:37:43]  Yeah.
[01:37:43]  And it's a frightening preposition.
[01:37:59]  I keep thinking about homegrowns.
[01:38:02]  Homegrowns.
[01:38:03]  A little bit of homegrown.
[01:38:04]  Isn't that a kind of weed?
[01:38:06]  I don't fucking know.
[01:38:09]  Homegrowns.
[01:38:10]  I'm looking it up.
[01:38:11]  That sounds like it.
[01:38:13]  Like there would be like a weed startup company called like Homie Grones.
[01:38:16]  Homie Grones.
[01:38:17]  No, it's all just kind of hizars.
[01:38:20]  And it'd be in like bubble, like millennial bubble font and in a tin and be like homie grounds.
[01:38:25]  The Chad GPT has to ban the White House rapid response account from using its image generating services anymore.
[01:38:31]  Is it still doing that?
[01:38:32]  It's still doing that.
[01:38:33]  And it's that freak-looking guy.
[01:38:35]  What's his name?
[01:38:36]  Steve Chung.
[01:38:37]  Ladies and gentlemen, if you're driving right now, I want you to look up Steve Chung.
[01:38:40]  Oh my God, his Wikipedia picture.
[01:38:42]  Looks like a damn henchman.
[01:38:44]  Look at the Wikipedia picture.
[01:38:46]  Oh, my God.
[01:38:46]  Oddjob.
[01:38:47]  He looks like Odd Job.
[01:38:48]  I'm sure he is doing, is affecting that on purpose.
[01:38:53]  Get this fucking pudgy face freak out of my government.
[01:38:57]  Of course, he's from Sacramento.
[01:39:00]  Yeah, his career, political campaigns, and UFC.
[01:39:04]  Jesus Christ.
[01:39:05]  Trump 2016 campaign in transition.
[01:39:07]  Oh, interesting.
[01:39:08]  Oh.
[01:39:10]  I am sick of these fucking people.
[01:39:13]  I'm so sick of these fucking people.
[01:39:14]  That guy's 42 years old.
[01:39:18]  Jesus.
[01:39:20]  Yeah, I'm just, I'm sick of so much.
[01:39:22]  And I'm sick of these, like, I'm sick of these liberals too.
[01:39:26]  Which ones?
[01:39:27]  All of them.
[01:39:28]  I am sick of liberals across the board.
[01:39:33]  This world is in chaos.
[01:39:36]  It is in absolute chaos all the time.
[01:39:40]  And I'm sick of it.
[01:39:41]  I just want to have a normal life.
[01:39:43]  But these people, the economy is always in chaos.
[01:39:47]  All these ups and downs.
[01:39:48]  You never know if you're going to keep your job or lose your job or if money's not going to be worth anything.
[01:39:52]  Oh, the fucking government's always in chaos.
[01:39:54]  You got this, this party and the other party and this party and the other party always in there.
[01:40:00]  The fucking social fabric is in chaos.
[01:40:03]  People, oh, we're doing a mass shooting.
[01:40:04]  Oh, no, we're all fucking on the Snapchat.
[01:40:06]  Oh, Harry Sassan is getting too many DMs for girls.
[01:40:11]  By the way, free him.
[01:40:12]  Free him.
[01:40:13]  He did nothing wrong.
[01:40:15]  And, you know, it's just, it is complete chaos.
[01:40:20]  And all these people promising law and order, all they're doing is either they're either causing more chaos or they're banking a little bit of law and order and we're getting a chaos even worse five years down the line.
[01:40:32]  I know, it's not real law and order.
[01:40:33]  It's not real law and order.
[01:40:35]  Which is why we should say Truanon is, you know, we are a real law and order podcast.
[01:40:40]  We really are.
[01:40:41]  We believe in law and order.
[01:40:43]  We want to fix this world, man.
[01:40:45]  There's a lot of sickos out there.
[01:40:47]  There are.
[01:40:48]  And we should, you know, it's too chaotic.
[01:40:49]  We need some order around here.
[01:40:51]  Some fucking order, you know?
[01:40:53]  We need to sanitize.
[01:40:54]  We need a society that has some fucking sanity for once in this century.
[01:41:01]  Some people need to go to jail.
[01:41:03]  Some people, I'm sorry.
[01:41:04]  Some people need to go worse than jail, but I won't say it.
[01:41:07]  Prison.
[01:41:08]  Public episode.
[01:41:09]  Yeah, they need to go to prison.
[01:41:10]  Double jail.
[01:41:11]  But I'm sorry.
[01:41:12]  A lot of people.
[01:41:13]  I think a lot of this is why when all these people insider trading is happening now?
[01:41:17]  I've never seen anything like this.
[01:41:21]  There's so many.
[01:41:22]  There's no prospect for any kind of regulation of it, by the way.
[01:41:27]  It's a fucking free-for-all.
[01:41:28]  It's a free-for-all.
[01:41:30]  We need some law and order around here.
[01:41:32]  This economy, this stock market, which, by the way, I got into via this Reddit, subreddit called GameStonks or whatever a few years ago.
[01:41:41]  I put all my money into it.
[01:41:43]  And guess what?
[01:41:43]  The White House, who I thought were GameStop guys, they're bringing these JP Morgan fat cats in there and they're telling them we're going to do something funny with the market.
[01:41:52]  And these guys are making a billion dollars.
[01:41:54]  I'm making nothing.
[01:41:56]  Well, the market ripped today.
[01:41:58]  It's what?
[01:41:59]  Is that good or bad?
[01:42:00]  Yeah, it went to the moon.
[01:42:02]  It went to the were mooning?
[01:42:04]  I think we were.
[01:42:05]  I haven't tracked since we started.
[01:42:07]  It's 419, so who knows?
[01:42:09]  Regardless, I'm saying this whole thing is unfair.
[01:42:14]  And it's just, what I don't understand is why there's, and all these people who said they were against it, even these so-called left-wing types, they fucking, everybody folds.
[01:42:25]  Everybody folds.
[01:42:26]  There's a bunch of, nobody, nobody remembers how to act like a man anymore.
[01:42:31]  It's crazy.
[01:42:33]  Well, we need to get some law and order around here.
[01:42:36]  But until then, I'm Liz.
[01:42:38]  My name is Brace.
[01:42:39]  I'm producer Young Chomsky.
[01:42:42]  And this has been Truanon.
[01:42:45]  We'll see you next time.