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- [00:02]
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- [01:00]
DJ Dramos
Stay Farming DJ Dramos from Life as a Gringo no Making smarter financial moves today secures your financial freedom for a successful tomorrow.
- [01:09]
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- [01:15]
DJ Dramos
Be something that slows me down right as I did with repairing my credit. You know, hiring somebody to do credit repair for me. That was a gift that I gave myself that allowed me to then, you know, get my first apartment.
- [01:29]
State Farm Advertiser
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- [01:30]
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- [01:31]
DJ Dramos
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- [01:37]
DJ Dramos
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- [01:55]
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- [02:04]
DJ Dramos
Thanks.
- [02:05]
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- [02:35]
Robert Evans
Cool Zone Media hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
- [03:01]
Garrison Davis
Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong. It's the start of a new week, so let's start preparing for what these next few months are going to look like in the wake of Trump's election victory last week. So one thing I was thinking about, after the results kind of rolled in and seeing everyone's reactions online, you have a, you know, a mix of people going full doomer, some people trying to get hopped up on Hopium, some people on Copium. Right. Just trying to, like, find any psychological way to survive. And for me, kind of the way I like to survive is just through information. So this episode, we're going to get into how we see life for trans people under a second Trump term based on both what he's done in the past, what he's promised to do in the future, and I know in, like, the days after the election, like LGBTQ like crisis hotlines all saw a massive spike in people calling in to the point where some people just were even unable to reach someone. And I understand this is a very scary moment in time. And as much as it might not be fun to hear about how things are all going to get worse, there's also some misconceptions. And I think there's also a degree of power in actually being able to reasonably ascertain what things could look like instead of just kind of feeling it out and just going purely on vibes. So to kind of start, I guess I'll mention some things that Trump did in his first term that then got undone by Biden, which will probably just end up being reinstated. We don't know these for sure, but that's like a decent guess. So one of the first things Trump did when he got into office is he rolled back an Obama era memo directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination.
- [04:45]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And that, by the way, discrimination protection is a constant theme in this episode. It's going to get a lot worse.
- [04:51]
Garrison Davis
Trump later went on to ban trans people from serving in the military. He also went after trans prisoners, making it so that trans people usually would need to be housed in prisons and jails according to their assigned sex at Birth, which is, of course a very dangerous situation for people incarcerated, specifically trans women.
- [05:10]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And I think there is good reason to expect that treatment there is going to get worse. There's been, you know, we'll get into this more later in the episode, but there's been a real focus on incarcerated trans people getting health care. Yeah. And this is one of the things that's kind of ambiguous as to how Trump could go about trying to stop these people from getting health care. So the thing about providing health care to trans people who have been incarcerated is that they have to do it. It is something that is required by the Constitution of the United States. The Eighth Amendment holds that there is a ban on cruel and unusual punishment. And withholding medical care is so obviously a form of cruel, unusual punishment that even staggeringly right wing supreme courts have been like, no, you actually have to give people medical care in prison. So this is one that's going to be a little bit difficult for him to do. I don't know, he might find some way to do it. This is one of the ones where there's a real potential for it to get worse. And we simply do not know enough about what the legal strategy is going to be here to say for sure.
- [06:14]
Garrison Davis
But it's also worth mentioning, like, people have had to fight for access to healthcare in prison. Like, it's not something that comes easily. Like, people have had to sue to make sure that they get the health care that they are legally required to receive. And we can just assume that that process will probably be slightly more difficult under a second Trump term, like it was under a first Trump term than it may kind of currently be now. So that's kind of one shift in how things might be slightly more challenging.
- [06:42]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And I want to also mention, so that analysis, and a lot of the analysis, the policy analysis that I'm going to be doing going forward is heavily indebted to trans policy expert Corrine Green, who we've had on the show a couple of times before. Amazingly, she was one of the people who ended up working on compliance for that lawsuit where Kamala Harris tried to keep trans prisoners from getting health care. And she came in and, like, had to, like, ensure that the state of California was doing it and they weren't. So that's something that has been fought for and that's something, I mean, the trans community is small enough that that is the thing that has specifically been fought for by people who I consulted to make this episode. So. Yeah, these, these, these rights have been dearly won. And it's going to be very hard to protect them if I'm doing something where there's, there's something about policy implementation. Assume that I talked to Corinne about this and that's why it's accurate. And while I'm doing this, I want to plug a couple of the projects that she works on. But there's something you can do very immediately right now before we get into all of the terrible stuff that's going to happen, which is you can donate to the Trans Income project, which is a project that supports trans people and trans sex workers in particular, which is a lot of trans people and supports them by just giving them direct cash transfers. They do some other work too, but yeah. And direct cash transfers are one of the most effective ways that you can help trans people. And if you give money to this organization, there'll be links in the chat. You can help do this. So let's get into how things are going to get worse. Unfortunately, Trump administration, Congress and state legislatures have an enormous amount of power to make everything worse. We're mostly going to be focusing on what Trump and Congress can do. Well, we'll get into the legislators a bit at the end. So there are a lot of levers of state power and sort of policy techniques that Trump can pull here to make things worse. We're going to go roughly from easiest to hardest to pull off. So the first lever is federal funding. Probably the easiest place that this lever can get pulled is in the education system. Trump can unfortunately fairly easily implement what amounts to a don't say trans ban on a federal level by threatening to withhold federal funding for any school that doesn't mandate things like misgendering and dead naming students. And ban, and this is something he's explicitly talked about, is like banning anyone in classes, any teachers, from talking about transitioning at all. He's also threatened to have teachers who talk to students about being trans, like, investigated by the Department of Justice. We'll get more into the Department of Justice investigations in a bit. He's also used an explicit threat, the same threat of cutting state funding to stop schools from letting kids use the right bathroom in the locker room. It's also possible he will do that through Title nine. But there's a lot of ways that he can do this very easily that are probably not going to be able to be stopped. And this is going to get extremely bad very quickly. Another sort of avenue that he has is, I guess, what do you call, like the Hyde Amendment for trans people? So for people who don't know what the Hyde Amendment is. The Hyde Amendment is a writer that bans federal spending on abortion. It's been like modified. It's not like the 100% ban that it used to be because now there's like exceptions for rape and incest and stuff life of the parents too. But it is a very, very effective Republican tool. It's actually also Joe Biden helped implement that that's been used to limit access to abortion. And we already have seen the start of these kind of things even under Biden. There was a version of this, of a kind of height amendment for trans healthcare that was an attempt to get the DoD to not be able to spend money on trans healthcare. That, that's already a provision that's been tacked on to like one of the most recent spending bills that went through because Joe Manchin like defected and joined the Republicans to get it onto one of the spending omnibuses. And that was again just for the Department of Defense. We are very likely to see versions of these attached to every single spending bill that explicitly say that government funding cannot be used for trans healthcare. It will definitely be used to do to say you can't use it for trans healthcare for minors. It is possible this will be expanded to adults. We don't know. It depends how far there's sort of anti trans, I don't know, derangement goes. But that, that is a real danger. And this can also be expanded to refusing to allow Medicare and Medicaid to pay for anything at a clinic that does trans healthcare, even if the money isn't funding the health care. That's also possible. That would be absolutely catastrophic for the medical system. Even just a government ban that, you know, prevents things like Medicare and Medicaid and like government healthcare from covering transition in the first place is a disaster. But if they go further and prevent clinics who provide trans healthcare from taking Medicare and Medicaid, that's bad enough that I think that is in terms of what is the thing we most need to be worried about right now. I think that's the worst possible thing that can happen very quickly because it.
- [11:41]
Garrison Davis
Could basically pressure medical clinics into refusing to offer any kind of gender affirming care because it would threaten their just base ability to operate as a medical clinic. Taking Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera.
- [11:51]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, this is something I talked about a bit in our Agenda 47 episode on this. But this is, this effectively creates like Sophie's Choice for these clinics because it's either you treat trans people who have private insurance Right. Or you can treat like people who have, who are on Medicare and Medicaid. So it's like, okay, either, either you let trans people get fucked or you let like every poor person or old person in the US like eat shit. So there aren't good options here for that.
- [12:20]
Garrison Davis
How do we think something like this would be implemented? Like, is this an executive order or does this have to go through Congress?
- [12:25]
DJ Dramos
So that's the other part about this that's very bad. The way this is being done is these things are attached is what are called writers to spending bills. So any spending bill the Republicans put in front of the House, they will have this provision in it. Right. And the really big problem for us is that spending bills usually get passed now out of this thing called Senate reconciliation. And the thing about Senate reconciliation is that you can't filibuster them. So these can just get rammed through really, really quickly. And there's not going to be enough opposition in the House to stop it either. So, I mean, some of this stuff probably could be done with executive orders, but it's quite possible you won't even need that because it can just be rammed through in spending bills, which is.
- [13:07]
Garrison Davis
A little bit harder to undo, from my understanding.
- [13:11]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, yeah. Executive orders can be overturned by the next guy, whereas getting these provisions out is going to take a long time. Yeah. You know, this is another issue that we have. The map for the Democrats retaking the Senate is terrible in 2026, and it's bad in 2028, too. So I still don't think this is being recorded Friday. I don't think we still actually know what their majority in the Senate is going to be, but it's a lot. And also we know that Joe Manchin is willing to vote for stuff like this because he's done it already. So this, this is probably coming quickly. It basically depends on how good their policy people are, which, who knows. But, yeah, this is not going to be difficult for them to implement and it's going to be extremely damaging.
- [13:55]
Garrison Davis
Well, that was a lot. Let's take a little bit of a break and when we come back, take another look into what life could be like under a second Trump term.
- [14:14]
DJ Dramos
We are back. So the threat to trans people does not only come from Congress and the President. One of the things that's almost certainly going to happen very soon is there is currently a case about a trans healthcare ban for minors in Tennessee in front of the Supreme Court. It's called SC Us. We are almost certainly going to lose this. Not Losing this requires a bunch of extremely unlikely things happening, and this is very, very bad. What Scrimmetti vs. US is probably going to cost us is trans people as a group being protected by the 14th amendment. So the 14th amendment is supposed to provide everyone equal protection under the law. The way this has been interpreted is that if you're passing a law that directly targets a group, there are certain levels of scrutiny that have to be applied to it to see whether or not it's discriminatory and can, like, be allowed to proceed. What's probably going to happen here is that trans people aren't going to be held as protected at all, which means that the 14th Amendment will not protect us from things that are unbelievably, obviously discriminatory, like trans healthcare bans for youth, which is, again, literally the same procedures that are happening for trans children are done to CIS children all the time. And it's fine.
- [15:26]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [15:27]
DJ Dramos
So this is very obviously discrimination. We're probably going to lose it because the Supreme Court is full of a bunch of the worst people in the entire world. It is technically possible that Gorsuch defects and drags someone else over and we get a thing that says we have intermediate scrutiny. That would be the best win we could possibly get on this. It's extremely. It's unlikely. We're probably going to lose it. And this is also going to overturn the landmark case, Bostock vs Clayton county, which is the one that rules that you can't discriminate against trans people based on gender identity.
- [16:00]
Garrison Davis
Specifically for, like, employers as well.
- [16:02]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, for employers. This is specifically for employers. So what? We could very well be about to lose. And again, this is another thing that's very high likelihood because this case is already in front of the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court hates us. We could be about to lose employment discrimination protections now, to be fair. And I think most trans people who are listening to the show know this. I don't know how many CIS people understand this, but the level of trans employment discrimination in the workplace is unbelievable.
- [16:27]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, this isn't really enforced at all. Yeah, it's pretty bad.
- [16:31]
DJ Dramos
It is something that right now is technically false. Possible to do, and you're not allowed to just straight up say it, but, you know, like, there is a reason that the unemployment rate for trans people is like three times as high. No, it's. I think it's. Yeah, I think it's about three times as high as the rape versus people. Right. We don't have great data. There's some data from The Trans longitudinal survey from 2022. But the full report isn't out yet. But what I will say is that the trans level of unemployment, unemployment right now in the US Is very low. The level of unemployment for trans people is 1936 Great Depression levels. And this is before we lose these, these protections. It is also worth noting this will not overturn like state level protections. So if you're in a state that like has specifically banned it, you will have some more recourse. But we're losing 14th Amendment protections on.
- [17:18]
Garrison Davis
A federal level would basically allow explicit employment discrimination.
- [17:23]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [17:23]
Garrison Davis
If, if someone's trans, it's possible that.
- [17:26]
DJ Dramos
Case goes like marginally better for us and that doesn't happen. But it's hard to see how that would happen. The lawyers I talk to will say this is not a, this is not a legal opinion, but they seem to think that this is how this would go and the policy people seem to think it'd be going the same way. Yeah, there's some other things that can happen. Trump has been promising. We're going to get federal investigations into clinics that provide gender affirming care, also into hospitals. You know, there's going to be enormous legal harassment. This has already been happening on a sort of lower level, but from sort of individual lawsuits and state attorney generals. But this is going to be happening with the full backing of the Department of Justice.
- [18:02]
Garrison Davis
You can look at like what Texas has been doing the past four years.
- [18:06]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [18:06]
Garrison Davis
With them investigating not just clinics, but also like parents of trans kids.
- [18:10]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, parents like individual healthcare providers. He was also pledging to investigate like the companies that make hormones. So that's bad. There's also the Department of Justice has been making some incredibly half ass attempts to try to go after some of the healthcare bans. That's all going to stop. They're just going to give all that up. There's also a bunch of bills that could be passed depending on the Democrats willingness to filibuster them. So Trump has called for a ban of trans people, like playing sports that correspond with their gender. And that may well pass because the Democrats are cowards and the Republicans are going to have a large majority in the Senate. Yep. Trump has also pushed for a ban on gender affirming care for minors, including HRT's hormone replacement therapy, which is like one of the main ways you transition. And puberty blockers. That one is less likely to make it through the Senate. But it also, again, depends on how cowardly the Democrats are and how much they decide to cave. And this Is the moment that there is another thing that you can do. And you should start doing this right now, which is this is the moment right now to start pressuring your congressperson about this. Like, start calling them, start pressuring them and start making sure that they don't fully sort of turn on trans rights. This is something that you can concretely do right now, because these people need to understand that there are consequences for turning on trans people, because if there aren't consequences, they're going to do it now. Trump has also called for a ban on recognizing trans people at the federal level on, like, all identification documents, things like that also would outlaw non binary markings on passports and stuff. That would also be really bad. That's also something that probably requires a law. And that's again, another thing. Call your congresspeople, like, pressure them now. Start doing it now. Do not wait until he's actually in office.
- [19:56]
Garrison Davis
And like, all of these issues are things that public opinion has been shifting on greatly the past, like, two years. Yeah, these things used to be much more kind of seen as like, yeah, this, like, makes sense. This is like a humane and reasonable effort to include a group of discriminated people. And now we see in a growing number a majority of people polled on this issue do not support these measures. They don't support having the ability to have your gender marker match your gender identity. They don't support your ability to participate in public life. And that is the result of an intentional misinformation campaign. And essentially like a hate crime campaign and a hate speech campaign that has been going on for the past, like, four years because Republicans knew that they already lost the battle on, like, regular gay people. So. So they moved on to the next subjugated class. And that's something we've talked about for a while. And this is like something that is shifting. So you have to actually verbally express to your representatives that this is something that you actually do care about. Otherwise they will look at these, like, general polls and be like, oh, I guess this isn't popular anymore and shift and cave on it. They need to know that their constituents actually do care about these things if we want these things to not get passed through Congress.
- [21:05]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And it's also worth mentioning that a lot of this people just don't know anything about, about trans people because we're like 1% of the population right now. Part of the reason the Republican campaign is working is that people are susceptible to being told things about trans people and believing them. But that also works for us. Right?
- [21:22]
Garrison Davis
It Goes both ways.
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DJ Dramos
Part of what's been going on is that, like, we haven't had the kind of giant advocacy push outside of some trans people, but we have no money, we have no resources, and we need there to actually be large, widespread and vocal public support, because otherwise all of the stuff that's happening here is going to get even worse. And you know, the worst. And we could get very, well, the worst case scenario things which are full bans for adults. That's a thing that they could pass through Congress, but right now they don't have the support for it. Yeah. However, comma, as Garrison is going to get to, there are signs that the Democratic Party is deciding to throw us under the bus. Yeah.
- [22:02]
Garrison Davis
Not as steadfast on this issue than what we would probably prefer.
- [22:07]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And on the state level, I guess the important thing for the state level is that once we lose 14th amendment protections, it's going to be so much harder for there to be legal challenges to any of this. And this means we're going to see a proliferation of these state level bans on healthcare, even sort of marching ahead of where the federal government is.
- [22:25]
Garrison Davis
Let's have our last break, and when we come back, we will close the episode by discussing Trump's focus on trans issues during his campaign, as well as things that you can start doing, like right now to get ready and prepare for these next four years. All right, we are back. During the last few months of Trump's campaign, his team shifted away from the key issues of the economy and immigration in their national election ad efforts and specifically honed in on trans issues as a wedge against Kamala Harris and the Democrats in general. The infamous Kamala is for they them ad being the prime example of this. According to a PBS report from October 7 to October 20, Trump's campaign and pro Trump groups spent an estimated $39 million on anti trans ads. And Trump ended up spending more money on these ads than on housing, immigration and the economy combined. This was his main focus in his final ad push. Specifically after the September debate. A new report from journalist Casey Parks using data from Ad Impact, shows that Republicans spent nearly $215 million on anti trans ads this election cycle. And this figure does not include cable or streaming ads. This is just network tv. And these anti trans ads weren't just focused on the presidential election. Other Republicans in various Senate races picked up on the success of these anti trans ads and used them in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Now, initially, some thought that maybe this would be a repeat of 2022, maybe this extra focus on this small group of the population wouldn't lead to kind of electoral successes, pointing to how a similar strategy failed during the 2022 midterms. But then Election Day came and we saw that there was a degree of success, or at least these did not hurt them in any substantial way. And Republicans won many of these Senate races on anti trans campaign messages. I'm going to quote from an article in the New York Times called Trump and the Republicans bet big on anti trans ads across the country. Quote, the Kamala is for they them ad was rated as one of his campaigns more effective in September in some Democratic testing. According to results reviewed by the Times, Republican strategists said the focus on transgender women and girls in sports had been particularly effective with a key group of voters the party had hemorrhaged support from in recent years, college educated women. One of the things you see in the focus groups is that the moms get really visibly angry on this issue, said Jim McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who works for Mr. Trump and other Republican campaigns. Quote, it's a fairness issue. They don't want their daughters to lose a scholarship and they don't want them to get hurt, unquote. The enthusiasm for this issue kind of lines up with what me, Sophie and Robert saw at the rnc where anti trans statements consistently got the loudest applause. Though some state level Democrats like Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Tom Sulzi of New York as well as some other DNC advisors have jumped onto the blame game, citing trans issues as if not the reason, then a reason. Democrats just completely fumbled this election, claiming that the Democratic Party is far to the left on trans issues than the average American. But largely the Dems were not out campaigning for trans people like Loud and Proud the selection cycle. Oh, trans issues were intentionally pushed off stage at the dnc and the Harris campaign tried their hardest to sidestep this issue, giving vague non answers on whether trans people should be able to receive healthcare by just stating that her administration would quote, unquote, follow the law and invoking states rights type framing. And I see this as just a massive failure to confront an issue that Republicans have like slingshotted into the spotlight. And it shows a failure to do things because it's like the right thing to do, not just necessarily for some like electoral gain.
- [26:32]
DJ Dramos
Well, even on a strategic level. Right. We saw this with border policy too. Right. Where Democrats adopted the Republicans border policy and then they lost.
- [26:40]
Garrison Davis
Exactly.
- [26:40]
DJ Dramos
And it's like, yeah, if you just agree or refuse to contest them on their Core issues, then that's what people are going to believe. Because people have a tendency to believe what their elites are telling them. You can't defeat these people's ideology by just agreeing with it or side stepping out of the way of it. That just lets it spread.
- [26:56]
Garrison Davis
And I think this is going to be proven to be like the biggest mistake Democrats made this election cycle. Like, you can't just cede territory to the right based on a massive disinformation campaign, which is exactly what the Democrats did on immigration and crime and they showed a willingness to do that on trans rights. Now, even if some of these people, Democrats included, claim to not like hate trans people individually, they have allowed questions around access to bathrooms, sports, and government funded healthcare to be used as a wedge against trans rights as a whole and the ability for trans people to be able to exist in public life. To close, I think we should have just a brief discussion on what people can do specifically during these next 75 days and even in the months after, like what people can do to prepare for some of the worst aspects of this, specifically on the healthcare front. Now, we did a series of episodes a few years ago on DIY hrt. There are both pharmaceutical and homebrewed options for hormones that can be ordered online. Now, since that episode, home brewed distribution networks have spread throughout the United States. There's probably one already in whatever city is closest to you. Now, access to those networks does require a degree of like, in person community. And I know that can be challenging. You can certainly do organizing online on Discord. You can certainly find trans people on Discord. That can help you learn where pharmaceutical grade estrogen can be ordered online. But that type of online organizing will only get more dangerous under a Trump term, especially if the legal status of these hormones change. So I will always emphasize the importance of in person community. And it might just take like learning if there's a trans band in the city you're in, going to some shows, learning where trans people go, where trans people gather, Is there community picnics? Is there book fairs? Is there zine fairs? Like, is there like even gaming conventions? Right, Just places that there, there might be a number of trans people gathered and talk to them about being trans, talk to them about the issues that you're facing. It might take a few months to like gain trust and become friends, but that's just how friendships work anyway. And that can be challenging. And there may not be something like this in a city super close to you, which is why online connections are useful. And sometimes it might require a little bit of travel. Now what we can do, at least right now, is stockpile things in case things get harder to maintain or produce. There's multiple forms of these hormones that can be stored and I do believe that there will be some form of homebrewed option that will most likely continue to exist even if prescribed hormones get restricted. And a part of why I emphasize kind of doing this in person as well, especially if you're a minor, that will just get more dangerous to do under a second Trump term. I will point people to the website DIYHRT Wiki. It's currently the best information source on dosing, testing, how to find supplies and options for ordering hormones. Now, because changing legal paperwork on the federal or state level often takes a while, if that's something that you want to do, now is the time to start. There's still 70 days until Trump takes office and some of these changes could start being put into effect. You should absolutely apply for a passport. Now. Depending on many variables, it may be advantageous to have your legal name and gender marker match whatever you more easily pass as rather than your gender identity. Now I understand why this is less than ideal. And if you think that this might just inhibit your transition progress and push you further back into the closet, especially if the option of changing your gender marker on federal documents just like goes away during the next four years, then people should just go ahead and get that stuff changed asap. But it's something to reflect on and consider. Lastly, I want to mention something about personal safety. Over the course of the past week I've heard from friends around the country experiencing a spike in antiqueer and misogynistic violence. Chuds, frat boys and just asshole men have been way more willing to just to openly harass queer people out in public. Some of this I think is just Trump supporters, quote unquote celebrating the election results. But once Trump takes office, I expect this type of harassment to start slowly increasing as chuds feel like they can get away with more just open misogyny, homophobia, racism, et cetera. I know a lot of people have been talking about or posting about buying firearms and firearms is one of the last things you should buy in a panic. This is a very careful and calculated choice you need to make about your own personal safety, your own mental health, your own willingness to carry and train with a gun. This is its own topic. But I do recommend buying and carrying pepper gel for basically all queer people and women. It's a great self defense tool. It spreads less than pepper spray so you're going to be less likely to just spray yourself. Saber is a good brand. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for your friends. Mia, do you have anything else you want to add?
- [32:09]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, yeah, two things. One, people have been asking for book recommendations, so we're giving them to you. We're only giving to you at the.
- [32:14]
Garrison Davis
End of the episode.
- [32:15]
DJ Dramos
You got to stay around. And I think something that's good to read in this moment on trans issues is Julia Serrano's book Whipping Girl. I've had Julius Serrano on the show before. She is one of the most important, I mean, honestly, like, feminist theorists of the last like of this century. And there's a new addition to Whipping Girl that's come out recently, and it is one of the fundamental sort of texts to understand the experience of trans femme people in this country and why things have gotten the way that they've gotten. So, yeah, go read Whipping Girl. It's spectacular. And then I want to plug one more thing that you can give money to. So, I mean, again, another very effective way for CIS people to support trans people is give them money, because all of us are unbelievably broke all of the time. Another place you can give money to is the Trans justice funding project. We'll have that in this too, when they give out grants to other just like, trans groups who are doing organizing or doing other kinds of sort of support work, mutual aid, et cetera, et cetera. So that's money that just goes directly to trans people. Yeah. And then obviously, as we've said, this is the forces, people part of the episode. After our. After our four trans people part, go call your congresspeople. Go pressure them. Go show up to their offices and make it extremely clear that it is unacceptable to write off trans people and that they need to be willing to successfully stop these writers and successfully do whatever they can to jam up the works to make sure that the Republicans cannot pass bills that will harm us even more than the things that they're already going to do.
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- [37:09]
Robert Evans
Hello everyone and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans and you know, along with all of our other correspondence, I'm looking forward to what we can expect from the Trump administration, which is a broad and far reaching question given the ambitions that Trump and the others who I think will be involved in this new administration have already expressed. And the elevator pitch theme of today's episode is what's going to happen in Gaza once Trump is president again? Will things get better or worse? Obviously the expectation is worse. I think that's where certainly the safe money goes if you're putting money on this. But the short answer to that question is no one fully knows. Now the first thing that I did when trying to prepare for this episode was track down as many articles as I could that included interviews with Gazans about their expectations, and those expectations were largely negative, but a little more mixed than you might expect. A Reuters reporter interviewed Abu Osama living in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. He called Trump's election a quote, new catastrophe in the history of the Palestinian people, adding, despite the destruction, death and displacement that we have witnessed, what is coming will be more difficult. It will be politically devastating. This essentially agrees with what a Palestinian from Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Ahmed Jarad, told Al Jazeera, quote, trump and Netanyahu are an evil alliance against the Palestinians and our fate will be very difficult, not only in the fateful issues but also in our daily concerns. This is a sad day for Palestinians. Trump will endorse Netanyahu's free hand regarding the possibility of the return of settlements to the Gaza Strip and even the displacement of large numbers of Palestinians outside it. We hoped to return to the north and now all of our hopes have been shattered and unfortunately Jarad's fears here have been immediately proven well founded. On November 6th, as the rest of the world reeled from Trump's victory, IDF Brigadier General Itzek Cohen told Israeli reporters, there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes. Humanitarian aid would only be allowed to enter through the south. His justification was that there are no more civilians in the north. Reporting from the Guardian interviewed several international humanitarian law experts and the members of that likely dying field described Israeli actions here as war crimes. The forcible transfer of civilian populations and the use of food as a weapon are supposed to be banned. Despite this, we can safely assume that there will be no serious consequences as a result of any of this. Now, the timing of this announcement was predominant and it is not unreasonable to suggest that Israel might not have been as bold as they're currently being if Harris had won. Another Gazan, 70 year old Dr. Zaki Hilal told Al Jazeera. It is true that American administrations do not differ in supporting Israel, but some are more severe and more intense than others. Like Trump, you can find numerous Gazans expressing feelings along these lines if you read long enough. But you will also find a number who feel like what's coming won't be worse, or at least won't be very different from what they've already endured. Jihad Malacca, A researcher at the Palestinian Planning center told Al Jazeera he does not expect Trump's administration to be wildly different from Biden's in this regard. Trump uses rough tools and Biden and the Democrats resort to soft tools, but the politics are the same. Biden did not make any decision in favor of the Palestinians and was unable to achieve a ceasefire. He did not change the reality of the decisions of his predecessor, Trump at all. The positions of the two administrations regarding Israel are the same and identical, and they put its interests above all other considerations. You can also find some Gazans who see a sliver of hope in Trump's new administration. Reuters spoke with the owner of a grocery store in Gaza, Khaled de Souso, who told their reporter, I think Donald Trump, if he wins, he promised the Muslim people in America to stop the war in Gaza. We hope that happens, and it's not necessarily absurd to hope that there may be some positive effects here. Trump has said many horrible things about Palestinians. Obviously, several weeks before the election he had a phone call with Netanyahu that may have been a violation of the Logan act, although laws don't really matter anymore. Here's how Slate.com summarized what happened in that call. According to Trump, the Israeli leader said he disregarded President Joe Biden's warning to keep troops out of Rafah in southern Gaza, a decision that resulted in the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a shootout in the area. Trump also said Netanyahu asked him for advice on how to respond to Iran's missile attack on Israel, to which Trump said he responded, do whatever you have to do. Now that's a dire sign and it is impossible to imagine that a new Trump regime won't restart the sale and shipment of specific munitions that Biden banned for export to Israel. This July, Biden halted the shipment of 2,000 pound bombs to the IDF because, quote, they cannot be used in Gaza, Gaza or any populated area without causing great human tragedy and damage. Now the fact that munitions like this will very likely be used is hideous and I think it's extremely unlikely that we do not see an immediate rise in the death toll. But at the same time, Israel's extant acts have caused great human tragedy and damage. The munitions they have have already been responsible for calamitous death and destruction on a fairly wide scale. So where's the cause for any optimism on this at all? It comes from Trump's own self interest. As Khalid de Sousso noted, Trump ran promising to end wars. This means he does have some vested interest, even if only in his own ego, in forcing Netanyahu to draw things to a close in short order. And there is indeed reporting that Trump has told Netanyahu to wrap things up by January so that he can take office with an end to the conflict and ideally use that as a way to kind of bolster his early popularity and gain some political capital for the other sweeping changes he wants to make Now. The fact that Trump is pushing Netanyahu on ending things in January doesn't mean a sudden peaceful ceasefire. For one thing, nothing is going to happen in the months between then and now to reduce the level of bloodshed. And almost every likely theoretical ends with Israel massively escalating violence and using new, more destructive weapons before bringing an end to their campaign. But it does mean that Trump might be able to pressure Bibi to bring things to an end. There's a good article on this in the BBC. No guarantees Trump will give Netanyahu all he wants Now. In that piece, Mideast correspondent Lucy Williamson writes. Donald Trump's first term in office was exemplary as far as Israel is concerned, said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. The hope is that he'll revisit that, but we have to be very clear sighted about who Donald Trump is and what he stands for. Firstly, he said the former president doesn't like wars, seeing them as expensive. Trump has urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly. He's also not a big fan of Israel's settlements in the occupied west bank, said Ambassador Oren, and has opposed the wishes of some Israeli leaders to annex parts of it. Both of these policies could put him in conflict with far right parties in Netanyahu's current governing coalition, who have threatened to bring down the government if the prime minister pursues policies they reject. Michael Oren believes Netanyahu will need to take a different approach with the incoming president. If Donald Trump comes to office in January and says, okay, you have a week to finish the war, Netanyahu is going to have to respect that and we'll continue talking about what this means. But first, here's some ads so it is possible that we will see a quick end to the violence in January and perhaps a quicker one than we would have seen under Harris. That's the best case scenario, and not necessarily the likeliest one. And I should reemphasize here, that best case scenario still means that we will probably see a massive escalation in violence as the IDF seeks to force more people out of northern Gaza. And in the conflict with a large slice of Gaza permanently wrenched from Palestinian control and handed over to Israeli settlers, there is no version of what comes next that is not a calamity to the Palestinian people.
- [45:56]
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- [45:56]
Robert Evans
The signs from within the Israeli government on what a new Trump administration means for them are certainly bullish, you could say, and reading these tea leaves provides very little fuel for optimism. Itmar Ben gvir, the minister of National Security, posted yes with several S's and an emoji of a flexed bicep in a post on social media when the first good return started coming in for Trump on the day of the election itself and a sign of confidence in the coming results, Bibi Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yov Gallant, who had been his primary point of contact with the Biden administration, and it's harder to imagine a much more direct sign of what he once did do than that now. I've struggled to present the sweep of possible results of this, and it bears reiterating that the bulk of predictions from Gazans who are plugged into the politics of the region are incredibly negative. Ahmed Fayad, an independent researcher in Israeli affairs who currently resides in central Gaza, told Al Jazeera that he felt Trump's influence would be entirely negative, adding that Trump was a, quote, more dominating figure than Biden and his influence would allow Netanyahu to, quote, conquer Gaza. Amidst the weakened Palestinian front and absence of any Arab unity and solidarity, the whole Palestinian cause faces its worst threat yet. Now what does bear watching is the degree to which Bibi might face threats from his own right flank. Netanyahu himself is almost certainly on the side of doing what will please his patron Trump all the more, and that would be forcing a quick, violent end to the fighting and taking northern Gaza as the spoils of war. But this might bring him into conflict with radicals on his own side who can't be placated by anything but what they would see as total victory. In the event Netanyahu feels pushed, it is not impossible that he will wind up in conflict with Trump. This has happened before, as Bibi's sense of self preservation led him to Take actions that enraged Trump. The best example of this took place in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. If you want to think back to those happier days, Bibi was again the first world leader to call and offer Biden congratulations on his victory, as he was with Trump. This is a habit for the man who, among other things, is an expert at toting for favor with US Leaders. Trump was livid and he spoke out about this, telling Israeli journalist Barack Ravid that he believed that he had saved Israel from destruction and in response, Netanyahu had stabbed him in the back. I'm going to quote now from an article in the BBC. Mr. Trump accused Mr. Netanyahu of congratulating too quickly Mr. Trump's successor, Joe Biden, on winning the 2020 US election. Mr. Trump disputed the election result, though his claims were never upheld. The first person who congratulated Joe Biden was BB the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with. Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake. He was very early, Mr. Trump said, like earlier than most. I haven't spoken to him since. Fuck him. I actually don't know that he said fuck the the actual text of the article says expletive him, but I'm assuming he said fuck him. I think that's probably a fair assumption for me to make. Now, some evidence does suggest that Trump and Bibi don't personally get along, as that quote I just read implies, certainly not to the degree that Netanyahu and Biden once did. Once. I should say this may hinge partly on the fact that Trump really only believes in himself and his own benefit, whereas Joe Biden was a strong and committed believer in Israel and was willing to take actions against his own political self interest in furtherance of that belief. And we've all seen where those actions got him. Just last December, Trump attacked Netanyahu at an early campaign rally in New York, saying Bibi had, quote, let us down by pulling Israeli support for the operation that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleiman at the last minute. He also criticized the Israeli leader for not being prepared for Hamas October 7th attack. Now, I want to be clear here that these divisions between both men are blisteringly unlikely to mean anything that approaches relief for the Palestinian people, at least in the near term. The immediate and probably long term future of Gaza is much bleaker today than it was a few weeks ago. The Guardian recently published an article interviewing former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. He predicted Trump would give Bibi a Blank check for aggression, which might invite the possibility of open war with Iran. Now, that's the kind of thing that can lead one to panic, especially when you assume a guy like Panetta is privy to a lot of inside information. We may not be, but I'm actually not really sure that he is. I don't see any evidence from this article that Panetta is speaking from direct personal knowledge about extant plans to carry out an attack. Instead, he quoted Trump's description of the call that Trump had had with Bibi before the election, telling Netanyahu, do whatever you have to do. So Leon may just be working from the same information the rest of us have and coming to a somewhat different conclusion. I'm not as sure as he is about an imminent attack on Iran because Trump campaigned heavily on ending wars. And while I don't credit Trump as a particularly honest man, I do think he sees his personal benefit right now in being able to portray himself as a peacemaker. In part because he has so much domestically he wants to do and so much else internationally he wants to do right. Expending a bunch of political capital, dealing with the kinds of protests and unrest and even anger from his base that a war with Iran would mean, especially once it gets bogged down in the kind of violence that would come with that. He may not and likely doesn't see that as being of benefit to him.
- [51:49]
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- [51:49]
Robert Evans
That doesn't mean it will never happen. It doesn't mean his calculus won't change. I do foresee some situations in which Trump might decide that his personal benefit is in there being a wider ground conflict with Iran that US Forces get drawn into. You know, we'll talk a little bit about some of the possibilities around this, and we're getting outside of the realm of kind of established fact at this point point, but I do think it's worth considering some of this. But first consider these ads. So when we talk about the possibility of a ground conflict with Iran, starting between Israel and Iran, but almost inevitably drawing in more US Forces, the known unknowns and unknown knowns in this situation are pretty staggering. If I let myself analyze every possibility, my mind can go to some dark places. Trump sees war with Iran as a negative now, I'm quite sure, but how would he feel about it in the wake of, say, a Musk centered plan to end the Federal Reserve and tank the dollar in the wake of the changes that all of his immigration policies would make on the price of food, depression era levels of inflation and unemployment returning to the United States and the attendant social unrest that that would cause. If Americans find themselves on the verge of food riots, perhaps Trump would gam war being the best distraction he could manage. It's certainly not impossible now. I don't know how useful it is to bury myself in theoreticals and probabilities. The known threats are dire enough and they demand full time awareness in order to attempt to counter and endure. So instead of spiraling, I want to leave you today with the words of another Gazan, Mohammed R. Mosh. He's a journalist who wrote an article for MSNBC right after the election titled My Family and I Survived the War in Gaza. We Know Trump's America Won't save Us, and here's Mohammed. For us, the election of Donald Trump isn't just a blip on the political radar or a shift in foreign policy. It's a challenge to sustain existence while the world seems intent on erasing us. It's about surviving 77 years under occupation and over a year of ongoing genocide. The very genocide I barely survived last December when my family and I, including my elderly parents and three year old son, were buried under the rubble of what was once our home after it was struck by an Israeli fired US missile. The date, December 7, 2023. Our bones were crushed between layers of concrete and twisted metal as we spent hours in the dark, buried together and praying to be pulled out in one piece. The trauma of that night in both its physical and emotional toll, of my son's small, fragile hand clinging to mind, comes back to me now as Trump prepares to take power once more. I've seen how American political leaders toy with the idea of change, how they dress up their campaigns with grand ideas about peace and justice. Yet each president brushes off our reality. Barack Obama promised hope and change we could believe in, yet we got more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging unyielding support for Israel, leaving us to live through even more horror. Vice President Kamala Harris, niceties included no concrete promises to protect Palestinians, but she did pledge to continue financial support for Israel. And Trump's bluntness as he promises to come back swinging reminds us not to hold out hope for change. So, you know, not much optimism here, but I do really recommend reading that article that MSNBC published. You know, it's bleak but important, especially given the fact that, you know, we may be soon entering a world where it would be harder for people like Muhammad to express their feelings and their truth to an audience. I don't think it's unlikely that a clamp down is coming on some of these things. It's hard to say how extensive it will be, but there's a threat that, you know, Israel and their backers see in the way that public sympathy has built so quickly for Gaza in a way that wasn't present with a lot of previous stages of violence between Israel and Gaza right now. This is the result of a lot of videos spreading on social media. It's the result on Void Voice of voices from Gaza getting out and getting to people in a way they really hadn't before. And so one thing that does worry me greatly when I think about what's going to happen in Gaza under President Trump is not just what's going to happen to the people living there right now, but what's going to happen to their ability to tell their story, to get information out to the rest of us. That is very much an open question at this moment, but it's certainly one that should be on your lips, and it's one that we will be investigating here at Cool Zone as long as we're able to continue doing that. Until next time, I'm Robert Evans. We'll be back tomorrow and every other day reporting on you Know the World.
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DJ Dramos
Thanks.
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- [60:10]
DJ Dramos
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that that's about trade policy now. I'm your host via Wong. This is amazingly going to be the fun one of all of these episodes. It's about tariffs. So it's going to be a long week.
- [60:24]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [60:25]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. That was the voice of the singular Garrison Davis, the one, the only.
- [60:30]
Garrison Davis
Yes, hello. I'm excited to hear about tariffs. It's tariff talk here on it could happen here. One of my favorite, favorite topics I guess now.
- [60:40]
DJ Dramos
All right, Gary, putting you on the spot. What is a tariff?
- [60:43]
Garrison Davis
It's basically googling tariffs. No, a tariff is when Trump says China's bad, so he makes China pay extra money to sell their goods to Americans. And luckily China pays for all of it and the American consumer gets off with a boosting economy. That's at least what I've heard.
- [61:08]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. So unfortunately for everyone, I don't know, I mean, I guess, I guess there's some accelerationists who are probably really excited about this.
- [61:15]
Garrison Davis
Most certainly the way.
- [61:17]
DJ Dramos
The way this actually works is, okay, so the government sets up a tariff, and that means if anyone is bringing a good into the US they have to pay the tariff on it, and that money goes to the government. So, okay, there's been a long history of tariffs in the US this was a huge domestic policy thing, particularly in the 1800s. That's really fucking boring. The incredibly short version of it is that the thing about tariffs is that especially like tariffs on a specific sector is that they're good for you manufacturing that thing, kind of mostly. And they're bad for anyone trying to buy that good because it's now more expensive. So Trump's plan, and we're going to get into a bit more detail about this because there's parts of Trump's tariff plan that everyone seems to have forgotten about for some reason that I don't know why they've forgotten about. But the basic plan is to impose something like a 10 to 20% tariff on all goods that enter the US from anywhere. There's specifically one for Mexico, but the numbers on what the Mexico tariff is changes every time he opens his mouth. Sometimes it's like 25%. There's one where it's like 250%.
- [62:22]
Garrison Davis
Of course, two interchangeable percentages.
- [62:25]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And then. But for China, it's supposed to be a tariff of somewhere between 60% is the most commonly cited number. But he's also said 100% tariff.
- [62:34]
Garrison Davis
Once again, basically the same thing.
- [62:36]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And so part of what we, unfortunately, the rest of us who live in the normal world have to do is figure out what is actually going to happen if we get, for example, 20% tariffs on all goods entering the US and a 60% tariff on goods from China. So the first thing you need to understand, I think most people kind of get this now, but the thing about a tariff is that you pay for it. So the way that it works in general is that this is just an additional cost for the company that's doing that, that's doing the, like moving the good around. Right. And so they are almost always going to just pass that cost directly on to you. Obviously, sometimes. And we've talked about pricing the way that pricing works a lot on this show, companies tend not to want to raise prices, largely because of their effects on consumer happiness and brand loyalty and stuff like that. So sometimes people will just eat shit on it. But if you're talking about a 60% tariff like you, the 60% tariff is going to be paid for by you.
- [63:32]
Garrison Davis
So that means that Anytime we buy something that's either from Mexico or China or any of the other countries that this will be applied to. The easiest way for these, for these companies to get around the tariff is just to pass off the cost to the consumer.
- [63:46]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And it's actually worse than that because. And this is something I don't think people really understand. When you think about global trade. Right. People tend to think about trade as something that happens between countries. And this is something that was an old dream, like the anti globalization movement. People sort of understood this and kind of don't. Now, trade doesn't actually really happen between countries. Most trade is one company, an international company moving a resource from one country to another. Right. So trade is fucking Amazon moving something from a warehouse in one country to a warehouse in a second country. Right. Now, I've seen a lot of people, and this ranges from very, very serious sort of news sources and economists trying to sort of just directly model what the price increases are going to be. I've seen people be like, oh, your shirts are going to cost 60% more, or physical video games will stop existing because they're too expensive. And who gives a shit? Why are we even trying to do sectoral modeling of the impacts of this? If you try to impose a 60 to 100% tariff on goods from China and a 20% tariff on all goods into the country, the economy will collapse. I don't know why everyone is pretending that this won't fucking happen. We're going to get into it a second. I guess the reason why people are pretending this is happening because the way they're doing the modeling kind of assumes that it won't, which is baffling, incomprehensible nonsense.
- [65:07]
Garrison Davis
Well, and that's especially amusing because the seemingly biggest issue this year around politics has been inflation, which has impacted every country around the globe. The US has actually weathered it decently well, although there's been a catastrophic failure in communicating that and listening to the actual complaints from, like, people on how they're still struggling with rising inflation. But still a big reason why Trump was elected is because he simply is not Joe Biden.
- [65:34]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [65:35]
Garrison Davis
And he's not from the Biden Harris administration. And there's this perception that he will be able to fix the economy, he will be able to get around inflation, lower prices, when seemingly his main economic proposal will lead to what's probably going to be an economic collapse if it happens in the totality of which he proposes.
- [65:53]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And there's, there's another element of this right when I Say that the likely result of Trump actually trying to implement his tariff policy is a global economic collapse. There's another part of this that everyone seems to have forgotten, and I don't know why they've forgotten this. I guess it's because nobody actually reads any of the things that Trump puts out on his website, which is true.
- [66:09]
Garrison Davis
No one actually reads that stuff. It's not. Especially his own supporters. A majority of his own supporters do not pay attention to, like, Daily News.
- [66:17]
DJ Dramos
Yes. And now I remember this because I did an episode about these tariffs, like, six months ago. And one of the things about this, he has a thing called Agenda 47.
- [66:26]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [66:26]
DJ Dramos
Which was his agenda for what he's going to do when he takes power.
- [66:29]
Garrison Davis
Which no one has cared about. And now everyone is going through and posting policy proposals from, like, fucking two years ago with the headline, breaking News, Trump Announces new plan. You're like, no, he hasn't.
- [66:39]
DJ Dramos
These are old plans.
- [66:40]
Garrison Davis
This stuff is, like, 2 years old. He's been openly talking about all this.
- [66:44]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [66:44]
DJ Dramos
For ages. And one of the important parts of this. I'm just going to read this quote, because it is a part of this has been ignored by every single fucking analysis I've seen from, like, fucking the center for American Progress, who obviously were going to screw this up to, like, Stanford's labs. Like, everyone who's been writing about this has just ignored this part, which is, quote, quote. As one of his top economic priorities, President Trump will stop the flow of American jobs overseas by passing the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act. Under the landmark legislation, if any foreign country imposes a tariff on American made goods that is higher than the tariff imposed by the US President Trump will have the authority to impose a reciprocal tariff on that country's goods. Okay, so what this would do, again, is that any country that has a tariff already or imposes a tariff, and this is important, if we get into a trade war where countries start imposing tariffs on each other in retaliation for their other tariffs, which is what happened when he did this trade war with China in, like, 2018, 2019, that means that we're also going to impose a tariff, which means that the tariff rates don't stay at 10 to 20%. They cyclically spiral upwards.
- [67:44]
Garrison Davis
That's just like an escalating series of tariffs.
- [67:47]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And the thing is, right, the policy proposals that they have on his page are like, well, okay, we're going to do this through, like, a presidential act. Right. But the thing is, the President actually has really, really under. Under a number of different acts, has extremely Wide discretionary authority to set tariffs as long as he can basically sort of like cobble together some kind of bullshit excuse for it. And at that point you're relying on the Supreme Court to stop literally anything that Trump does. Like they don't give a shit. Well, I mean, I don't know, maybe, maybe someone will like go up to like Clarence Thomas and go like, hey, if we do this, like importing new, like, like windshield wipers for your RV is going to cost $10 million more or whatever. But like there's, there's no shot of this stuff getting stuff. And the thing is, right, the reciprocal tariff stuff, he could just do this through his existing tariff authority. He doesn't actually even need to pass something through Congress, which should actually be, I think, tricky for him, but he doesn't need to.
- [68:39]
Garrison Davis
Do you know what we need to do right now though, Mia? Just badly, badly cut to a bunch.
- [68:44]
DJ Dramos
Of companies that are going to be absolutely fucking eviscerated if this goes through.
- [68:49]
Garrison Davis
That's right. Donald Trump stands for anti capitalist action. He's going to destroy free trade. So enjoy these ads when you still can. Okay, we are back. Mia, let's hear how Trump is going to perfect the capitalist economic system by a series of escalating tariffs that will destroy the economy and in doing so providing the opportunity for Marxists to seize power and change the world economic system.
- [69:20]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, so I'm going to read another quote from that same Agenda 47 thing.
- [69:25]
State Farm Advertiser
Quote.
- [69:26]
DJ Dramos
For example, food items like cereals or other preparatory goods are tariffed at 32.9% by India, 19.5% by China and only 3.1% by the U.S. india applies a tariff of 25.3% on transportation equipment while the U.S. only tariffs. Those goes at 2.9%. Now those exact numbers are debatable, but it doesn't matter because these, these are going to be Vibes based ones based on how pissed off Trump is at a country.
- [69:50]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, Trump is usually a vibes based guy.
- [69:53]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [69:54]
Garrison Davis
Especially when it comes to the economy. Especially when it comes to like these numbers he's pulling out like between 60 to 100%. He doesn't know what any of those numbers means. He's just thinking of a number and saying it out loud.
- [70:05]
DJ Dramos
And the thing about all of these things, right, even just the base 20% or let's, let's go to the lowest numbers he's talked about, which is a 10% tariff on all goods and a 60% tariff on Chinese goods. Right. That in and of itself blows A smoking crater in the world economy. And none of the assessments that you will read are talking about this. One of the things that they will mention that is true, but they're not getting to the importance of is that this affects stuff that's made in the US because the thing about things that are made in the US Is that they're made from components that are from elsewhere, because that's how international supply chains work.
- [70:41]
Garrison Davis
Oh, wait. Even though we have, through tariffs, moved all manufacturing of Toyota into the United States, you're saying that still some of the materials are not all solely made and produced within the country and it actually requires on foreign trade.
- [70:55]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And part of the problem I think of, like, okay, so if you logically think out the conclusions of what that means. Right.
- [71:02]
Garrison Davis
First mistake that you're trying to solve this problem through logic, you will.
- [71:06]
DJ Dramos
But here's the thing, right? Obviously Trump is not going to think through this. Right. But I kind of expect people who are, like, writing about this for a living to do mildly better than this.
- [71:16]
Garrison Davis
And possibly some of the people that he, like, hires onto his cabinet and team maybe, but we'll see.
- [71:20]
DJ Dramos
Well, no, I'm not talking about, like, his critics.
- [71:22]
Garrison Davis
Oh, sure, sure.
- [71:23]
DJ Dramos
One of the numbers you'll see all the time, the center for American Progress has this line about how the tariffs will function as a tax that cost the American consumer like $1,700 a year. Right.
- [71:32]
Garrison Davis
Which was the line that Kamala used pretty often.
- [71:34]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [71:35]
Garrison Davis
Framing his tariffs as like a sales tax.
- [71:37]
DJ Dramos
This is fucking horseshit. The only way you can think that the net effect of this would just be a $1700 tax is if you don't understand how the economy works at all. Right? So I went through and read this, and the way that they model it is just by, like, they find the, like, net dollar value of imported goods and then apply a tax to it and then try to figure out, like, how much of those goods that the average person would buy in a year and then increase the price. But, and this is something that's very important at the end of the analysis, right? At the very end, there's a little section where they say that they assume this would have no other effects on the economy. This is unbelievably fucking stupid. I cannot emphasize enough.
- [72:15]
Garrison Davis
Can you explain why that doesn't make any sense?
- [72:17]
DJ Dramos
So, okay, so here's the thing, right? Prices go up now people can buy less things. What does that do to the economy? Well, it slows its growth rate, right. Companies start to go out of business and we're going to get into more of the ways that this plays out in a second, right? But a bunch of people in a bunch of places fucking lose their jobs because suddenly the reduction in consumer demand means that there's a fucking reduction in necessary production. And this has cyclical effects throughout the entire economy as more and more people fucking lose their jobs. And also the thing about those people who lose their jobs is that that also fucking reduces demand because those people are now even less able to afford the stuff that's been increased by inflation prices and this spirals through the entire world economy. In order to understand what exactly this is going to do, I think we need to understand why, you know, because like if Kamala Harris, I don't know if it makes any difference in the election, but Kamala Harris walks on the stage and says this is going to cost you $1,700. She does not walk on the stage and say this is going to cause an economic collapse, right? And I think the reason that happened is because we've gotten into this place where nobody fucking understands how the economy works at all. In a way that's even worse than it was even in like the 2010s, because in the 2010s, I think people sort of had a vague understanding that the thing that was happening to the economy was uberization. Whatever you call it, was the expansion of gig work, right? There was sort of an understanding and a focus on the very sort of low level parts of the economy. Like what are you, a poor person doing for your job, right? How does your income work? And not purely on these sort of like high finance or in the case of what's been happening here, everyone has been unbelievably, completely focused on like, like the chips act and like state led industrialization and all that stuff is fucking bullshit. It basically hasn't done anything yet. It's not going to do anything for like a decade. And it's not mostly what's going on in the economy. I've been holding my tongue on this for years, but the people who have been writing about the economy don't understand how the fuck it works. Because they've been completely myopically obsessed with the idea that we're in this new era of state capitalism. And no, like the actual thing that's been happening in the economy. And I think if you are like a person who buys stuff, you probably understand this. But for some reason this has never made it to like economists or like people who fucking write about the economy for a living. Is consumer to manufacturer sales. So this is stuff like Temu, this is stuff like Shein who Shein. I mean, invented. It's a strong word. But they're one of the first people who sort of popularized this model. Right. And this is a thing where you have a platform that lets people nominally buy directly from the factories or from the people who are producing fruit. And these factories aren't producing goods until basically either people order the goods or analytics tells them to order it. So they don't have a lot of the problems that other distribution bottles have. You have a bunch of goods sitting in a warehouse, you just don't have that because you don't start production until your orders come in, your analytics come in. The theory here is you can reduce costs by eliminating the middleman. But course a new kind of middleman emerged and that is the dropshipper. Oh God. So the drop shipper is just someone using the consumer to manufacturer pipeline. Right. The platforms that are supposed to let you, the consumer, sort of just like buy directly from a thing and cut out mailmen. It's just someone doing that, but then turning around and selling you the result. And this has become just utterly fucking ubiquitous in the American economy. It's sort of like an integral part of the American scam economy now too, as the American economy has been increasingly sort of riddled and consumed by scams and riddled and consumed by sort of like people trying to capitalize on some fucking meme or some political thing. You have all these people doing dropship T shirts, right. Where they can immediately come in and sell all of this stuff, these short.
- [76:06]
Garrison Davis
Lived trend meme based either fashion or even goods. You can talk about the amount of content creator merch that is all funneled through these dropshipping companies.
- [76:17]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And it's also what's been. It's the thing that's enabled fast fashion to function in the way that it is right now, Right?
- [76:23]
Garrison Davis
Absolutely.
- [76:23]
DJ Dramos
And this has become what consumption is in large swaths of the world is from this sort of like direct to consumer dropshipping shit, right?
- [76:32]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [76:33]
DJ Dramos
Now the thing about these dropshipping things is that their profit margins are really, really low. They don't make that much money. And in fact a lot of these things like hemorrhage money until they've basically, you know, they do the thing that Amazon did, right. Where like you lose money for a million years, but then eventually you have enough market share that you start making money again.
- [76:48]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. Because you make it so all your competitors basically can't function because you have Prices that are so low. And then when you're the only one in the game with a sizable power influence, you can raise prices and then you make tons of money. Also, the Uber model, although Uber still isn't profitable.
- [77:03]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, well. So, yeah, Uber will never make any money. Right. But the other thing here that's important is that. That, you know, so the margins of a company like temu, right, which is like, probably the biggest of these sort of companies now, are low. But TEMU technically has tech money. Like, they have money to back them up. Right. You know, who doesn't have an unbelievable amount of just, like, capital sitting around that they could just instantly pull from if suddenly there is, I don't know, a 60% fucking price shock? Oh, wait, it's all of the fucking manufacturing. You know, like tiny manufacturing firms that these dropshipping things use to produce all their stuff. Right. That infrastructure is very fragile. Its margins are very bad. And, oh, guess what happens to that shit if you impose 60% tariffs on it, right?
- [77:45]
Garrison Davis
It just shuts down. Because that's the easiest option, right?
- [77:47]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And you know, and presumably, I think one of the other parts of this would be part of. Part of the reason that this has been happening is that a lot of this stuff isn't being imported, like, under tariff loopholes. But, like, that loophole is not hard to close, right?
- [78:01]
Garrison Davis
What tariff loopholes are you referring to?
- [78:03]
DJ Dramos
Oh, yeah. So I talked about this, the Tembu episode. There's loopholes on American tariffs where if you're bringing stuff into the country that's below a certain value, it has to be above $600 or something to trigger a threshold to activate the tariff supply into it. So people just ship a bunch of 1 billion boxes individually that are $599 to go under the thing.
- [78:28]
Garrison Davis
So you're saying I can still maybe buy my new sonic the Hedgehog PS5 game, though? That should be fine. I'll be totally good.
- [78:36]
DJ Dramos
Oh, God. Okay, so the other part of this that's important, right? So this is the kind of. I don't know if news the right word, but this is the kind of recent part of the economy that's incredibly dependent on Chinese supply chains, right? That gets just liquefied if these tariffs go through. These are enormous companies that are going to just eat shit. And those companies eating shit have these sort of effects we talked about earlier, right? Which is it causes people to get fired, it causes growth collapses, it causes cyclical decreases in people's ability to buy things, and then also, like, demand decreases because people can't buy things. But this is like the new school supply chain stuff, right? Temu is a product of really the last six or seven years and it really only functions the way it does now and lasts about 4. But the previous two eras, supply chain logistics, right, which is sort of. Walmart and Amazon are both also almost completely dependent on Chinese supply chains, right? Yeah, There's a good JD Supra article which is a. They're like a business intelligence website, right. You know, it talks about how Walmart imports 70% of all of its goods from China. Yeah, that tracks 70% 7 0. Right. And the reason that it works like this is because Walmart's entire business model, all of their supply chains, all of their logistics, everything that they do, right. Was was designed basically hand in hand to be integrated into Chinese economic production. And you can't just move that shit instantly. Right. And this is also true of something like Amazon, right? We're at Amazon, like 63% of independent sellers on Amazon, this is from the same source, are Chinese, right. So what you're dealing with is vast parts of the American economy, right? The parts of the American economy that where you interface to buy things are based on goods that are suddenly going to have like 60 to 100% tariffs stapled onto them. Now the thing that people have been talking about as the like, oh well here's the thing that will happen instead of like, instead of the thing that's pretty obviously going to happen if this stuff happens, which is just the economic bubble we're in, Pops, and everything starts to go to shit. People have been like, oh well, this will just accelerate the shift of production of goods out from China. And like I've been talking about this for like a fucking decade, right? Like the journal Chuang, which is something that I talk about a lot that I recommend people read talking about this for literally ages and ages and ages. So people have been trying to move production out of China for ages. I mean like one of the first big attempts to do this was in 2011 when there was. There's a series of riots in China and people tried to move production of goods out of China and they couldn't do it. And the reason that they couldn't do it was because is you have to find a country that has both a relatively skilled and educated labor force and also has the infrastructure to be able to match Chinese production. And so we're talking about things like they have to have a functioning electrical grid that is stable enough for production to function. And this rules out an enormous number of countries, and it's just really, really hard. And yeah, Chinese capital hasn't moving away from its old centers and the program or Delta to places like Vietnam. Right? But. And this is the fucking big one, right? A lot of. A lot of what's been happening for people have been talking about this thing called quote, quote, unquote, decoupling, which is. Which is this the separation of the US And Chinese economy so that they're not like, intertwined with each other. People think this is good for ideological reasons, or they think it's just something that's happening, and it's not. It's not happening. You know what else isn't happening? It's us not plugging these products and services.
- [82:00]
Garrison Davis
I think we do legally have to plug them. So here they are. Here's the plugs for the products and services.
- [82:16]
DJ Dramos
All right, now that you've decoupled yourself from your money to buy these products and services, let's talk a bit more about why decoupling is fucking bullshit. One, and I've been. Something I've been saying on the show for years, people have this sort of fantasy that what's happening is that that, okay, instead of making your thing in China, you make your thing somewhere else. And this means that American companies no longer have the supply chains running through China. That's not what's happening at all.
- [82:38]
Odoo Advertiser
On.
- [82:39]
DJ Dramos
On the financial front, what you have is actually increasing integration as. As China attempts to sort of like, you know, has. Has been lifting restrictions on the ownership of different types of corporations to make it easier for foreign owners to actually come in and invest and put capital in China, right? The second thing that's happening is a lot of these supposedly, like, we're cutting China out of the supply chain things have been. And a bunch of Chinese companies starting to set up production in Mexico. Now, the thing about that, right, if Mexico was supposed to be the fucking panacea for getting us out of these tariffs, remember that Trump was talking about 200% tariffs on Mexico, and that's the country that's supposed to like, fucking get us out of this mess by, like, oh, it'll be fine because, like, production will just shift away from China to, like, to where, Like, a lot of the assumptions I was reading was, like, people were talking about, oh, the production will, like, 25% of production will shift to Canada. It's like, no, it won't. Canada doesn't have the fucking production facilities to do this. Like, what are you talking about?
- [83:30]
Garrison Davis
Like, Canada doesn't have the population to do that.
- [83:33]
DJ Dramos
No, it doesn't. This is the sort of problem, right? You know, on the one hand, you know, China has been deindustrializing for a decade and a half now, right? And kind of slowly. But there's a percentage of the population that's working in manufacturing has been steadily decreasing for years and years and years and years. But the problem is that when you move production out of a place, you actually have to have a second place to produce it. And there just haven't been. Right. Like it's pretty easy to move low end manufacturing. This is what's been happening, right? Like really cheap garment stuff, for example, has been, has been moving to places like Bangladesh and Vietnam for a while. But once you start getting into the stuff that China produces like the most of, right, which is things like fucking cell phones, sort of mid tier commodity production that gets way, way, way, way, way harder.
- [84:16]
Garrison Davis
No, but the CHIPS act will save us. Mia. I heard it from everyone on the television.
- [84:20]
DJ Dramos
I just got. This is the sort of thing about this, right, is if you look, if you read the analyses that people are doing of this, they just sort of assume that you can just like, oh well, like naturally a bunch of the consumption that Americans are doing will stay the same because they'll go buy goods that aren't produced in China. It's like, okay, like where are you finding these goods from? Like what production facilities are you just like suddenly that have just been like sitting there fallow or just suddenly going to like appear out of nowhere? And the answer is that's not going to happen. And it's not going to happen partially because they don't exist and partially because again, the immediate consequence of this is a massive economic collapse. China's economy has already been slowing for the like basically. I mean it's been slowing since like 2008.
- [85:01]
State Farm Advertiser
Really.
- [85:02]
DJ Dramos
Well, I guess 2011 kind of. But it's especially been slowing in the past two or three years because of sort of COVID restrictions stuff and also just the kind of lackluster rate of returns on their own. Like they had their own version of the 2008 housing bubble and that's annihilated an unbelievable amount of money because it turns out investing in real estate doesn't work as is basis for economy. But that's the thing, right? If the Chinese economy fucking goes down, right? That's like that's 17% of the world's GDP. 17, yeah. Of the total GDP, right? And it's like the economy isn't national in a way where you can have an economic collapse in another country and just, just in just a country that's that large and ignore it. And the thing I want to close on, and the reason we know that this is true, is that it is actually possible kind of to restart American domestic manufacturing. Right. Reagan was able to do it in the 80s and Reagan did it through this thing called the Plaza Accords where he basically, he didn't literally put the prime ministers of Japan and West Germany at gunpoint, but he basically put them at gunpoint and forced them to increase the value of their currencies so that the US currency would devalue, which would, which makes it like a more competitive export economy. And this actually brought back American manufacturing for a while until it had to all be reversed under the Clinton administration and the reverse Plaza Accords because the problem was when you sort of nuked the zero sum manufacturing of a country like Japan, their fucking economy didn't work anymore. And in order to sort of bail out the Japanese economy and stop just a sort of world rending economic collapse, that would have just like tore the absolute shit out of the economy, the US had to fucking re. Increase the value of its currency and lose its whole domestic production base. Right. You can't actually increase a production base in the world right now without decreasing it somewhere else. And that has sort of staggering ripple economic effects for the entire global economy. Which is why even if Trump's plan worked somehow and didn't immediately cause an economic collapse by like the direct effect on American consumers, it would cause another economic collapse by the effect on fucking people in China. So.
- [87:06]
Garrison Davis
Well, Mia, I think you might be overreacting, acting here a little bit because at least food will be available. Obviously I, and I learned this on X. My main source for news is that agriculture is almost all done in the States, so we should be fine. Like we'll still be able to eat food, right? I say, staring into the voice.
- [87:27]
DJ Dramos
No, you can't. Because unfortunately the thing about American agriculture is it's all fucking mechanized agriculture. The thing about mechanized agriculture is that you need the mechanized part and that's all fucking produced either in other countries or the John Deere fucking like tractor factories in the US are all unbelievably reliant on a bunch of parts that are made overseas.
- [87:49]
Garrison Davis
So also, we do import a great deal of food.
- [87:52]
DJ Dramos
Oh we do, yeah. Even just talking about the food that we produce here. Right. Like that's also gonna be fun.
- [88:00]
Garrison Davis
I wonder where your strawberries in November are coming from?
- [88:04]
DJ Dramos
Oh, curious. Yeah, yeah.
- [88:07]
Garrison Davis
I think the other thing to keep in mind here is that this is only one aspect of how Trump will impact the economy. Obviously, his immigration policies could serve a similarly large financial problem if a whole bunch of agricultural jobs suddenly kind of vanish and farms and other processing plants just go out of business due to a lack in workers.
- [88:29]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [88:29]
Garrison Davis
And even some people on Trump's team have started to acknowledge this, mostly Elon Musk, who has openly said that Trump's term will involve some, quote, temporary hardship. So between tariffs and mass deportations, like, even people on his team know that this is going to damage the economy, especially in the short term, if not the, like, forever term.
- [88:51]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [88:52]
Garrison Davis
And yet he was still elected as the economically viable candidate.
- [88:56]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And I think the last part we should say, and this is that it's not that you can't, like, fucking obliterate a giant portion of the American economy and still come out extremely popular because you've crushed the American working class like that. That's what Reagan did. Right. Like, Reagan and the Volcker shocks did this enormous. I mean, just put a crater in the American economy in Reagan's first term. Like, they're skyrocketing, unemployment, just like real, real sort of economic devastation. But the thing about the Volcker shock was that the way he blew up the economy was really, really good for people who, like, fucking owned assets, like people who owned bonds, people who held other people's debt. It was great for those people.
- [89:37]
Garrison Davis
And the burgeoning investment economy, which now kind of dominates our entire economic system.
- [89:42]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [89:42]
DJ Dramos
And it was incredible for those people. And so it was fine. But the thing about this economic collapse, that this is also going to just absolutely fuck up the days of a bunch of extremely wealthy and influential capitalists. So including, by the way, Elon Musk, who Teslas are produced in China. Like, he has a gigafactory. He's a gigafactory in Xinjiang. So we'll see if Trump actually is able to implement this stuff. I think he's able to on a policy level. It's just politically, can he actually do these tariffs?
- [90:09]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, it's unclear. It's also unclear what exact numbers he's going to run with. A 10% tariff will still be bad, but it's Nothing compared to 100% tariff. I think Trump, by and large just says whatever comes into his head without thinking through the actual logistical ends of what he's saying. And I think most Trump's supporters do not take him literally as a person. At least they don't take what he says necessarily literally all the time. They take him seriously, but perhaps not literally.
- [90:35]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. So we'll have to see how this actually plays out. If it does play out in the ways that Trump has said that it's going to play out, it is going to just unbelievably tank the economy in ways that absolutely suck. So yeah, that's happening here in the future, maybe. That's the name of the podcast. Right.
- [90:58]
Garrison Davis
So stock up on your PS5s now before they get harder to buy and it'll be fine. Yeah, there'll be nothing else bad that happens to the economy as long as you have your PS5s.
- [91:09]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, people always want fucking books at the end of episodes. So I'm just putting books at the end of episodes. This is my plugging Chuang C H U A N G We'll put it in the description. It's a bunch of stuff about Chinese economics. Mostly it's a sort of economic history of originally the socialist period and the transition to capitalism. But it also has a bunch of very, very good stuff on trying to understand the Chinese economy. And so if you want to be about 10 years ahead of like guys who write for the economists, if you read Chuang, you will end up being like 10 years ahead of those guys. So yeah, great stuff.
- [91:58]
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DJ Dramos
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DJ Dramos
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- [94:26]
State Farm Advertiser
Good job.
- [94:27]
DJ Dramos
Thanks.
- [94:28]
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- [95:01]
Mia Wong
All right, welcome to It Could Happen here. And what it is today is me, James and Mia Wong. Hi, Mia.
- [95:08]
DJ Dramos
Hello.
- [95:09]
Mia Wong
Hi. What we are here to talk to you about today is something else which despite my positive tone of voice, is sad and depressing. Yeah, yeah, it's just a lot of that. And like, we don't want you to be too sad. It doesn't bear moping around, you know, like, we've got time to get organized and that's what we should be doing. And also like, just get out and go outside and see your friends and do things that bring you joy. Like we'll work out how to get through it somehow, you know, like, yeah, I think it's really easy. And I found myself doing this Stay at home and be sad but don't. Like, I went out with some friends for a hike on Friday and I feel so much better So I would advise you to do that. Maybe you're listening on your hike. That would be fun. Actually, I think if I was hiking, I would. I would skip this one and listen to the birds and, you know, enjoy the outdoors.
- [95:56]
DJ Dramos
Well, I mean, you know, if you want the ideological framing of it. The ideological framing of it is that morale is a terrain of struggle.
- [96:04]
Mia Wong
Yes.
- [96:05]
DJ Dramos
And it is very easy to lose if your morale is absolutely terrible.
- [96:10]
Mia Wong
So, yeah, we got four years. We can't be moping around. We will get through it. We will find ways to make it better. And part of the way we do that yet is keeping our morale up and doing things that bring us joy. The thing that brings me joy is talking about Rojava, the autonomous administration of north and East Syria. We're going to talk about that today because we're talking about Donald Trump's foreign policy in his second term. His previous foreign policy was a pretty mixed bag. And he bombed the shit out of the Islamic State. Right. Cool based. He also bombed the shit out of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi civilians. Not so cool. Also, we should note, not so different from every other president this century. Bombing civilians has been pretty much the through line of American foreign policy in that part of the world for a very long time, in particular under the Trump administration. I want to talk about. There was a single US strike cell called Talon Anvil. I think they were mainly like, CAG guys from what I read. So Delta Force guys, Army Special Forces guys who were making these decisions. They hired an office building in Syria, and these guys were constantly looking at drone feeds and various other information and then calling in strikes on various targets. Right. I'm not sure if they had the CAG guys in the, like, watching computers. I'm not entirely sure on, like. Well, they didn't have someone else, who knows, but. But this strike sale dropped more than 120,000 bombs and.
- [97:40]
DJ Dramos
Jesus Christ.
- [97:41]
Mia Wong
Yeah. The amount of ordinance we dropped on Syria is insane. It circumvented. Procedures are in place to prevent civilian deaths. In order to do so, they had embedded lawyers who were supposed to approve the strikes. But these lawyers tried to raise the alarm that some of these strikes were reckless. They weren't hitting things that were actual targets. And they sort of ran into an organizational brick wall at some point. Pilots even refused to engage targets because they didn't think it was Jesus. Yeah. Which is not usual.
- [98:13]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. That'd be pretty fucked for a fighter pilot to be like, no, I don't think I've ever heard of that before.
- [98:20]
Mia Wong
No. So I found this out in, I think it was the New York Times. New York Times did a pretty good investigation, which we linked in our sources. And, yeah, it's like a throwaway line, but I would love to hear more about that. It could have been a drone pilot, too, which is slightly different gig, I guess, if you're sitting north of Las Vegas there flying a drone, kind of a different scene. So in the battle to defeat the Islamic State, thousands of innocent people lost their lives. As we reach the end of that battle, Donald Trump, who was president at the time, personally called Erdogan, who's the president of Turkey at the time. In late 2018, Trump asked Erdogan, if we withdraw our soldiers, can you clean up isis? That's a quote. According to an unnamed Turkish official interviewed by Reuters, Erdogan replied that Turkish forces were capable of the mission, quote, then you do it. Trump told him, and asked his National Security advisor, John Bolton, who was also on the call, to, quote, start work for the withdrawal of US Troops from Syria. What this resulted in was US Troops pulling out from some locations in Syria. Right. Local people threw tomatoes out them. Even worse than the tomatoes was the fact that it gave NATO's second largest army, which is Turkey, of course, free rein to attack the autonomous administration north and east Syria, which it did in 2018 and it did again in 2019. Those two operations to claim considerable ground in Syria cost countless civilian lives, continue to perpetrate human rights abuses, to rehabilitate people from ISIS and other jihadi groups as Turkish Free Syrian Army. And they killed some people who were people I care about, and I continue to care about the cause of Rojava, or autonomous administration in northeast Syria, very deeply. And it really fucking sucks to think about the potential of the US Abandoning those people again. Not that Biden has done very much.
- [100:15]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [100:16]
Mia Wong
Now, I think this anecdote of what Trump does with Erdogan tells us a lot about his approach to foreign policy, which is he really sees it as very transactional, which isn't that different from everything else he does. I guess he's a very transactional person, and he seems really only to be concerned about what he can get out of it. So in this case, I guess he wants to say he bought U.S. troops home from Syria. He's anti war. This is one of his things, he says now. But he's prepared to also, in the case of the bombing, he's not so concerned with civilian casualties as long as he can claim that he was the one who defeated isis. Obama couldn't do it. He did it. And he did it on a pile of civilian remains. And also using chiefly the Syrian democratic forces, not U.S. forces. There were U.S. forces on the ground. They were engaged in combat, but in minuscule numbers compared to SDF, who lost 15,000 of their children in a battle against ISIS. And I think Trump would be very willing to admit that he's transactional. Right. That's kind of. His brand is like America first and fuck everyone else. So I think he'll probably be similar in this term.
- [101:28]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [101:28]
Mia Wong
He will act unilaterally. He'll pivot whenever the fuck he feels like it. He will continue with his affection for strong men and dictators all around the world. But a lot of stuff has changed since Trump's first term. I think it's illustrative for us to think about how he will engage with things that have changed. So what has changed? There's a much larger conflict between Russia and Ukraine now, and that conflict has seen massive and overt support, both from the USA and from the rest of NATO. There's been a revolution in Myanmar. I suppose he doesn't know that.
- [102:01]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, I really doubt. Well, maybe some of the, like, weird pro coup memeing from the right got to him.
- [102:08]
Mia Wong
Yeah, perhaps. Or like. I mean, the parallels between the coup and Myanmar and January 6th are pretty obvious. If January 6th took the landing, it looked a lot like that, except that it was a military party, not just a political party. The Islamic State doesn't exist as a territorial entity, but it very much does exist as a terrorist group, which continues to and has actually increased its activity this month with sleeper cells, continued suicide bombings, continued attacks, and the SDF continue with their anti ISIS operations. Without U.S. support, those would be harder. And so we have to ask, I guess, on what Trump's going to do with these things. And I want to look at a few different issues and pick apart what Trump said on his campaign website, pick apart what he said on the campaign trail, and then look at who he's appointed so far. We're recording this on Tuesday, the 12th. So if someone gets appointed before you hear this, that's why we've missed them out. So I guess to start with Trump's foreign policy, we should talk about his number one peer competitor, which is China in his eyes.
- [103:14]
DJ Dramos
Right.
- [103:14]
Mia Wong
Not a big China appreciator. So I looked at his campaign website for this, which really has some just incredible use of capital letters. He just fucking does what he wants. It's wild to see. So, chiefly, one of the things that he's been on about for a while now is tariffs on Chinese made goods as means of foreign policy.
- [103:32]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. We talked about this last episode.
- [103:35]
Mia Wong
You will have heard about tariffs at this point. So as we previously mentioned.
- [103:40]
DJ Dramos
Right.
- [103:41]
Mia Wong
He's talked about these tariffs. These tariffs would cost a lot of money and they would increase the cost of you going shopping.
- [103:47]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And they would probably destroy vast swaths of the global economy.
- [103:51]
Mia Wong
Yes.
- [103:52]
DJ Dramos
Both the Chinese and the American economy just sort of implode.
- [103:56]
Mia Wong
And then all these countries in Africa and, you know, Myanmar, for instance, exports a lot of these rare earth metals to China.
- [104:03]
DJ Dramos
Right.
- [104:03]
Mia Wong
And a lot of countries in Africa do, too. Aside from the economic aggression, his stance on Taiwan is weird, which is normally where we would expect to see the most physical friction between US and China. Mike Pompeo has pressed for the USA to formally recognize Taiwan before, which would be a step. There'd be a pretty big swing. Trump, on the other hand, seems to want Taiwan to pay the United States for. Of being its ally right now.
- [104:33]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. Then this is like one of his big sort of foreign policy principles is like, try to get people to pay him for stuff because that's sort of the only way his brain works. But I mean, remember, he did this with NATO a lot where he had this whole line on NATO that, like, NATO should be, like, paying us because people, like, they're not spending enough on defense, so we're, like, paying all their defense budgets. This is like one of his kind of.
- [104:55]
Mia Wong
Yeah, it's been his, like, hobby horse.
- [104:56]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. Like, floats around in his brain, sort of colliding with its walls.
- [105:00]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [105:01]
DJ Dramos
An empty space. Yeah, yeah.
- [105:02]
Mia Wong
Like a ping pong ball. Ironically, like, in the time that Trump's been out of office, Russian aggression has led NATO members to spend more on defense.
- [105:11]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [105:12]
Mia Wong
Rather than Donald Trump lambasting them. So one of his big themes is that Taiwan should pay the United States. But it would seem very unlikely that he. If he. He's not going to abandon Taiwan, I don't think, because it gives him a place to grandstand on China.
- [105:26]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And also, like, you know, I mean, one of the things about Trump is that one of the best ways to sort of influence him is just get a world leader in a room with him alone.
- [105:35]
Mia Wong
Yes.
- [105:35]
DJ Dramos
But unfortunately, well, fortunately for us, Trump does not speak Chinese and she doesn't seem to like him very much. So.
- [105:45]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Yes. We won't be here. We won't be joining the PRC anytime soon. China along with Russia. Right. The two countries we've spoken about most so far. Both make big plays in Africa. Russia has rebranded what was Wagner as the Afrika Corps. And they're sort of providing support to regimes that lack enough legitimacy to exist otherwise. Yeah, they are like sort of classic mercenary shit. Like, is your state illegitimate and does it lack the capacity to do the violence it needs to maintain itself? Don't worry. Here are some psychopaths from Russia.
- [106:18]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [106:18]
DJ Dramos
And there's a lot of people, I think, because like a lot of these sort of, of governments will kind of like do their, like put a red beret on and start doing their anti imperialist cosplay. And then you like read the, like the fine print of the contracts they've signed with like Africa core. A thing that like you expect to be spelled like Africa and core with a K, like K O R P S. And it's like, oh, okay, so like they've signed away a bunch of the country's midw rights and like they've signed away a bunch of these specific minds to these, to this mercenary groups. It's like, oh, okay, so this, this is like also, this is also just imperialism. It's just new management.
- [106:58]
Mia Wong
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's just different imperialism. And China has big plays in Africa too. Right. Like, I've personally seen a lot of Chinese owned mines in Africa. Chinese roads in Africa. China does also like offer infrastructure, kind of. China does a kind of quid pro quo. It doesn't come in like with the violence like Russia does. It comes in with the, we'll build you a hospital if we can have all your natural resources. US Policy in Africa is pretty much to stop those two countries getting too much influence. The Biden administration is as many liberals are. Right. Like, there's actually not that much difference between what Biden and Trump will do in Africa. The difference is that Biden is smart enough not to say it. Trump's ability to do anything useful in Africa is going to be masked by his massive racism. Like when he says things like shithole countries. It becomes a lot harder for the US to do anything in Africa that isn't tinged by that. Right. Like, that doesn't make that sort of imperialist ambition more obvious. US politicians rarely talk about Africa. They rarely campaign on what they were going to do in Africa. And so pretty much the only things we're going to hear from Donald Trump about Africa, I would imagine are going to be when he lets his racism out. That will have results for US credibility.
- [108:10]
DJ Dramos
Also, my guess is we see intensifications of sort of US Drone strikes, particularly in the Horn and we see, like. Like, all of the stuff that Biden is doing, but worse and killing even more people somehow.
- [108:22]
Mia Wong
Yeah, I would imagine that we will see these more aggressive drone strikes, especially against, like, Islamist groups in Africa. The US has special forces deployments in a few places in Africa, which it will probably maintain, I would imagine. Like, I don't think those are, like, things that Trump would. He wouldn't see any benefit from stopping them, I guess, and it may not.
- [108:41]
DJ Dramos
Even know about them.
- [108:42]
Mia Wong
So, yeah, I think we will see little change in Africa would be my guess.
- [108:47]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. Mildly worse.
- [108:52]
Mia Wong
Talking of mildly worse, Mia, the thing that makes these podcasts mildly worse is our obligation to pivot to advertisements, which we must do now.
- [109:00]
DJ Dramos
That was a great one. We've been holding out on you for three years to get you the good ad pivots anyway.
- [109:07]
Mia Wong
Well, there it is. That's what we've got for you. All right, we're back. So I want to talk about Europe. As you've heard in the tariffs episode, right? He wants to put tariffs on European goods. The European Union is going to slap tariffs right back on American goods. That doesn't really help anyone. It will make exporting from the USA very, very hard. One thing that the USA might stop exporting is weapons to Ukraine. It's a little unclear. Trump, he called Zelenskyy the greatest salesman on earth, but has also claimed that he can personally end the war in 24 hours. I don't think that means he will be deploying himself to the Donbass like a Gundam, but he claims he can do this. With his negotiating skills, this seems unlikely, to put it mildly. I don't think that it would be possible to end this war in 24 hours if both sides declared peace right now. Getting communications to their frontline troops would be a challenge in 24 hours in some places.
- [110:11]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [110:12]
Mia Wong
So the way I interpret this, and I may be wrong here, is that he is likely to leverage the support that the United States gives to Ukraine in order to force Zelensky into an unfavorable settlement, which would achieve his goal of a being able to say he stopped giving American money to Ukraine, which has been a big talking point for the like. Every time you start with the western North Carolina right after the hurricane, all these Republican sort of talking points were like, oh, well, all the money's in Ukraine, so we can't have fucking MREs for people in western North Carolina. FEMA has no money because we sent Ukraine some M4s. This is very silly, right? It's not A zero sum game. It's not really a reasonable critique, but it's one that Trump has kind of managed to stick in the culture wars. His base seems to see the money going to Ukraine as directly coming from things that would otherwise be going to them, which he would benefit from if he could bring this war to a close. Right. J.D. vance has mentioned a demilitarized zone in between Russia and Ukraine, which. Yeah. Who's going to minister the dmz?
- [111:23]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [111:25]
Mia Wong
Do we really want this? Are we going to have troops there like we do in South Korea? When was a career rather? 1950s, 70 years. Right. I don't think that's really. That's really what they want.
- [111:36]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. The thing about DMZ is no one actually likes them.
- [111:38]
Mia Wong
No, they suck. It sucks.
- [111:40]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, they're awful.
- [111:41]
Mia Wong
It's just a bit of land that you can yeet weapons over at each other. Like, especially in like modern warfare. They're not that effective at stopping two people fighting. Right. But very funny that North Korea will be 2 for 2 on DMZs in wars. It has been involved with huge dub for them. He essentially seems to be advocating for exactly the peace settlement that Putin has proposed, and that has been rejected multiple times. Several sources I've seen suggest that Trump has spoken to Putin quite a few times since leaving office. His plan for Ukraine certainly seems closer to the Russian one than the Ukrainian one. The Ukrainian one being stop invading us and go home. And the Russian one being, well, we'll just keep all the stuff we've taken so far and then add a buffer zone in between and Ukraine can keep whatever's left of its country. Right. What's interesting to me is what other NATO members will do in the event of the US Reducing its aid. I would suspect that they will try and step up and meet that gap. It might also result in the US put certain restrictions on its aid. Right. How it can be used, where it can be used, crucially. Right. They don't like Ukraine using things to attack in Russia proper. They don't mind them using them to attack Russian forces, but not, not within Russia. I did see a picture yesterday of a. I think it was three guys from Rogue, I think it's called, which is a unit within the international legion who had been killed within Russia. And they had a lot of like 84s and things like that. Right. Like US anti tank weapons. But the United States doesn't want Ukraine using the long range artillery and stuff. It's given it to yeet projectiles at Moscow. I can see A situation where if the US Draws down some of its aid, European allies of Ukraine might not place some of those restrictions on their aid. And that could lead to some interesting complications for Russia. Right. If Ukraine is more affected, like if they get more aid from Europe and Europe doesn't place restrictions on the aid, they could potentially strike Russia within Russia, which is not going to be good for Putin. It's probably not going to be good for bringing. I mean, unless they can deal some really crippling blows, it might not be good for bringing the war to an end, but maybe it will. They've done some pretty effective things with not a huge amount so far.
- [114:01]
DJ Dramos
I don't know, maybe they'll get lucky on a strike on the Kremlin or something.
- [114:04]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just one. Like, I mean, yeah, I'm sure that would be their strategy if they didn't have. If they didn't have restrictions would be to just keep pounding places they think Putin might be.
- [114:16]
DJ Dramos
This is the history of Russian warfare. Dumber things that have happened and have lost Russia wars.
- [114:21]
Mia Wong
So, yeah, yeah, a lot dumber than that. So, yeah, I don't think that Ukraine will be screwed if the US Pulls out. I do think it will be a lot harder for them.
- [114:30]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [114:31]
Mia Wong
And, you know, that's something. There are a lot of US Citizens still fighting in Ukraine. It would be pretty devastating to abandon Ukraine. And I think also just from the sort of stopping Russian aggression standpoint, it's much better to stop it here than somewhere else. But, yeah, we will see. I guess European countries are really ramping up their defense. But right now, the US Is like the heart of the military industrial complex, and Europe really can't keep up with the US Production. Of course, the US Being the heart of the military industrial complex does mean that a lot of Trump donors will probably be able to leverage some of their donations to his campaign. And so. So we might not see as much of a drawdown of aid to Ukraine as we're worrying about here. Mia, talking of launching things from a long distance at a very small target, I would like to launch These advertisements from iHeartMedia's advertising department directly to your ears. Here you go.
- [115:36]
DJ Dramos
It's all so bad. As we were recording this, it's come out that the new Secretary of Defense is going to be Pete Hegseth, who's like a Fox News guy who doesn't believe germs are real.
- [115:47]
Mia Wong
Yeah, this guy who has not washed his hands in 10 years. Great.
- [115:52]
DJ Dramos
I mean, at least he might die.
- [115:53]
Mia Wong
Of COVID Yeah, I Was going to say he made. Wow. Sorry. That hair is really something.
- [115:59]
DJ Dramos
Oh, that's not good at all.
- [116:01]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [116:02]
Garrison Davis
Wait, what?
- [116:05]
DJ Dramos
On June 14, 2015, Hanseth accidentally hit a West Point drummer with an ax while filming a live team segmented. Honor flagged it. Oh, his Wikipedia is incredible.
- [116:18]
Mia Wong
Let's get that link pulled up. All right, this video is unavailable. All right. No, we're finding this video that nothing disappears from the Internet. All right, here we go.
- [116:42]
Garrison Davis
My God.
- [116:44]
Mia Wong
This is just clown. Like I need to write. Listen, if you were hit in the dick and balls by an axe thrown by future Defense Secretary Beat Hex, please contact Cool Zone Media. I heart media media dot com. I hope the VA is paying for this man's benefit.
- [117:12]
DJ Dramos
This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen someone do. Like, in the course of reporting for this show.
- [117:18]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Like, very funny. Again, please contact us. I hope you're okay. Service related injury. Yeah. So that's Pete Hegseth, right. Future SecDef, also former Reservist who deployed to Guantanamo, was an infantry platoon leader at Guantanamo. I think he also deployed to Afghanistan in 2012. And previously he'd also deployed to Iraq. He did two voluntary deployments, or he's in two locations in Iraq at least. So he's hit the greatest hits of US foreign policy in the last 20 years. I guess he's made his career as a Fox News pundit.
- [117:56]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, he's just like a right wing ghoul.
- [117:58]
Mia Wong
Yeah. I mean, in the last Trump administration, when he was punditing, he advised Trump had been considering pardoning several war criminals and did pardon several war criminals. Right. And Hegseth was one of the people who, A, he talked about it on Fox News while he was advising Trump to do it, and B, he was advising Trump to do it.
- [118:17]
DJ Dramos
Jesus Christ.
- [118:18]
Mia Wong
Yeah, you can read up about the Trump pardons of war criminals.
- [118:21]
DJ Dramos
It's bad enough that a guy was getting turned in by his own Special Forces unit. Like, do you know how bad. How like, fucking hideous the shit you have to do.
- [118:29]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [118:30]
DJ Dramos
Is for like, for like your own guys in a Special Forces unit to be like, holy shit, we have to stop this guy.
- [118:37]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [118:37]
DJ Dramos
Like, it's awful.
- [118:39]
Mia Wong
Yeah. I mean, you should look up Clint Lawrence's stuff as well. Like L, O, I, N, C, E, if you're interested in this stuff. He was convicted, I think, of two murder counts for ordering his soldiers to fire and unarmed people. And then. Yeah, the other one was a Green Beret named Matt Galtschin who was also charged with the murder of someone in Afghanistan, someone who had been making IEDs. So, like, I think we can see where this guy is going. We've just found this out as we're recording for context. Like, that's quite troubling.
- [119:10]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [119:11]
Mia Wong
His other two foreign policy appointments that I've seen so far have been less so. Look, I'd say less so. Marco Rubio's a turd. Right. I think we all know that I share very little with Marco Rubio on Turkey and Rojava. He is good. He is not a fan of Erdogan. He's in contact with Gulenists. He kind of puts Turkey in the Brits box.
- [119:36]
DJ Dramos
He's a Gulen.
- [119:37]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Which leads us to the very funny idea of Marco Rubio ordering a drone strike on Eric Adams.
- [119:44]
DJ Dramos
I mean, well, here's the thing, though. Gulen's dead now, so there's a secession crisis of who's going to head up. And I'm posing it's Marco Rubio, the.
- [119:54]
Mia Wong
Gulenist, anti Pope Marco Rubio.
- [119:56]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [119:58]
Mia Wong
That could be very good for Rojava at least. Right. The big concern among those of us who care very deeply about Rojava has been that Trump will abandon them as he did in the past. Right. And so I guess we're looking for glimmers of hope. And I think Rubio kind of oddly, weirdly, was one compared to. I was expecting more of the hegthest, like Fox News commentator type people in foreign policy positions, because Trump fundamentally doesn't care about foreign policy. And it's an area where he can kind of give something to those kinds of insane far right commentator types. He also did appoint Mark Walz. I think it could be Walls. He's one of the first Army Special Forces guys to serve in Congress, maybe the first as a national security advisor. Walls is a member of the Kurdish Caucus in Congress. So again, positive for Rojava. Talking of Army Special Forces, there's one more insane Trump foreign policy proposal that I want to discuss.
- [120:57]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [120:58]
Mia Wong
And that is his desire to use the United States army in Mexico. I'm just going to read from his campaign website here. President Trump will take down the drug cartels just as he took down isis. He will impose a total naval embargo on cartels, order the Department of Defense to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership and operation, and designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and choke off their access to the global financial system. President Trump will get the full cooperation of neighbouring governments to dismantle the cartels or else expose every bribe and kickback that allows these criminal networks to preserve their brutal reign. He will ask Congress to ensure that drug smugglers and traffickers can receive the death penalty. There's a lot there. The way that Donald Trump helped defeat isis, this was exclusively by bombing things and with some small contributions from U.S. ground troops. But we don't really have a partner force in Mexico like that. And I think especially with the new administration in Mexico and especially with Trump proposing 100% tariffs on Mexican goods, we're unlikely to find one. Which leaves the very strange kind of prospect of US Troops carrying out, like, unapproved, undeconflicted hits on Mexican nationals in Mexico, which, like, it's an act of war. Yeah, you are invading Mexico is what you're doing. I should point out that BORTAC under Biden did shoot one Mexican national this year who was. He was holding up migrants with a gun.
- [122:31]
Garrison Davis
He was.
- [122:31]
Mia Wong
He's rubbing him with a gun. It wasn't a place where I've been dozens of times where they shot him. And there didn't seem to be much fuffle about that. But that is not invading Mexico.
- [122:40]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, like, if they're invading Mexico, like, you know, as close as American, Mexican sort of security cooperation has been, and as many people as that's killed from like the Mexican side, like, that's. Oh, boy.
- [122:53]
Mia Wong
Yeah, like, it remains to be seen how much of this actually happens.
- [122:56]
DJ Dramos
Right.
- [122:57]
Mia Wong
Mexico has a new president, the United States has a new president. They're not exactly politically fellow travelers, I'll say that.
- [123:03]
DJ Dramos
But yeah, I mean, I will say, like, AMLO and Trump got along, like, decently well, largely off of AMLO's anti immigrant policies. But I don't know if that's going to work with Chime Bomb.
- [123:14]
Mia Wong
And in the final year of amlo, like, they definitely, they did a lot to help Biden with effectively enforcing US Border policy by deporting people south. People I spoke to in the Darien series have been sent south again this week. But Biden's had actually some pretty high profile cartel arrests within Sinaloa cartel. He's destabilized that cartel. But those happen within the US they didn't send teams into Mexico. And the way that the US has traditionally got hold of cartel leaders before is for them to be arrested in Mexico in cooperation with Mexican government forces, be they police or military, and then extradited them to the US for trial. That doesn't seem to be what Trump is proposing. But again, like the bombastic rhetoric and the reality are sometimes very different.
- [123:59]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [124:00]
DJ Dramos
I have some vague memory that last time he wanted to, like, send Special Forces guys to do this, and his advisors were like, what the fuck are you talking about? We can't send people into Mexico.
- [124:12]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Look, just to be real, those organizations have reach inside the United States, and that would be an extremely messy situation.
- [124:20]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [124:21]
Mia Wong
And, like, the way this would have to be done. Right. I, like, I don't think you can do this with drone strikes. You have to do this with boots on the ground. And that's going to be contrary to what he's promised to do, which is not risk more US Soldiers. Lives, lives. Who knows what this will actually look like.
- [124:36]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. My guess is he will find a way to get the maximum number of civilians killed.
- [124:40]
Mia Wong
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
- [124:41]
DJ Dramos
The Wood himself.
- [124:42]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [124:42]
DJ Dramos
Like, it's. That's probably going to be the result of this.
- [124:45]
Mia Wong
Yeah, exactly. And I think as we sort of wind this down, like, civilian deaths are probably going to increase. Right. He's never shown himself to be unduly concerned about those things. He doesn't see that as a problem. The second thing the US Will lose is what Joseph Nye called soft power. Right. Which is like the power to influence people without projecting force. Cultural power. Cultural capital, as Bourdieu might have called it. Really getting heavy on the university shit at the back half of this episode. The US Lost a lot of that in the first Trump term. Right. And it will lose more of it in the second Trump term. Some of that is, you know, the US Maybe shouldn't be influencing, and the US has had some pretty malign influence around the world. You can listen to a song called Washington Bullets to learn more about it, but it will mean that there will be a space for other bad actors. Russia, China. Russia has not shown itself to be any more concerned with human rights, and probably less so than the United States went in its time in Syria. It's been an unmitigated disaster for the Syrian people. The Russian cooperation with the Assad regime, we do not need more of that around the world. The Wagner Africa Corps deployments in Africa have been horrific in terms of human rights, and this will open more spaces for that. So, yeah, I mean, it doesn't look great, this SecDef appointment. Maybe we'll learn more about that in the coming days, but that doesn't look great. There are some bright spots for a Java, I guess, or some glimmers of hope there, which is a nice thing. Trump's policy on Gaza fits with this general model of, like, he wants to end conflicts. And the way he sees of doing that is doing away with any restraint in terms of civilian casualties. And so the way that he went after ISIS was to just say bomb them all. I can see him doing the same thing in Gaza, right? Just saying, like, he wants to claim that he bought an end to the war and he doesn't care how many bodies he's standing on when he says that.
- [126:43]
DJ Dramos
Yep.
- [126:44]
Mia Wong
Same thing in Lebanon, obviously. So, yeah, these are not great things. These are things that we will have to deal with for decades to come, whatever happens. And I guess the way that you can do something here, like my little glimmer of hope, it's like you can reach out to people all around the world and let them know that, like, even if America's foreign policy is shit, you're not. I have sat in Rojava and I have seen them taking the children to the hospitals and I've watched the US Soldiers sit in their bases and do nothing. And like, it didn't help, really. I didn't. I wasn't able to do very much. Couldn't even give blood. But I was able to be there with them and maybe that meant something. And like, you can, you can do little things to show your solidarity around the world because there won't be much of it coming from the government.
- [127:46]
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DJ Dramos
A kid could explain it. Sometimes business software can't talk to other programs, but Odoo, funny word, has every program from CRM to HR to accounting in one platform. It should cost a lot, but it doesn't. So you should use Odoo because they save you money.
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- [130:16]
DJ Dramos
Thanks.
- [130:17]
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- [130:49]
State Farm Advertiser
What up, y'all? Welcome to It Already Happened here because this was the goal of this show was to tell you that things was probably gonna happen here. And then it did. I am not one of the normal hosts, as you can tell. I am your friendly cousin that shows up every once in a while during the holidays. And if your cousins are anything like my cousins, which means we're immediately going to get in trouble because parents are going to blame you since I'm the cousin because it's not my fault because I'm the guest. Anyway, we want to talk about some stuff that like, in some senses is a bit absurd to talk about because like the American understanding of pan ethnic terms and demographics are just.
- [131:34]
DJ Dramos
Oh, God. Absurd. Yes, Right.
- [131:36]
State Farm Advertiser
It just don't make sense. Like nobody in the group identifies as what the group is called, but that's still the group, right? Y. I recommend a book called why Fish Don't Exist. It's a great book. I am here with the brilliant, brilliant Mia Wong. What's up, Mia?
- [131:55]
DJ Dramos
It's. It's. It's all happening. It's. It's all happening here and it sucks, but at least I'm getting great intros. This is the best, best one I've ever gotten.
- [132:04]
State Farm Advertiser
Best, best interest. That's what I come for. You know what I'm saying? Like, I come for us to like, be able to have pancakes for breakfast, you know, because your cousin's here, you know what I'm saying? So you get to have like pancakes for breakfast and you know, stay in your pajamas longer. Like, it's great when your cousins are here.
- [132:19]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, yeah.
- [132:20]
State Farm Advertiser
Anyway, so let's do this. We want to talk about. Well, the thing is, like, I don't know if y'all have. Have admitted. I admitted this on our show that like, we kind of had to have an all hands on deck discussion here as to like, okay, let's get organized. Like, let's figure out what we're gonna say as a network and kind of brainstorm things to talk about. Cause I'm pretty sure like a lot of us are still like, wait, what the fuck?
- [132:48]
DJ Dramos
Just.
- [132:49]
State Farm Advertiser
I'm sorry, what? Like, you know. Yeah, and us holding down the DEI section of Cool Zo, you know, we are the diversity, equity and inclusion over here. Figured. You know, there were some things that were super shocking around some of the data that was. That was coming back from the exit polls as we thought about, like, okay, so who actually voted for who and how much? And so we kind of wanted to talk about the Asian vote, right?
- [133:19]
DJ Dramos
Yep.
- [133:20]
State Farm Advertiser
Which is again from the intro, it's an absurd oh yeah.
- [133:23]
DJ Dramos
Category to say that we're gonna get into that because.
- [133:26]
State Farm Advertiser
Oh boy, Totally. Yeah. The Latino vote, which is also equally as absurd as a category. And yeah, just where some of the sort of marginalized groups, like some of the numbers that were in some ways shocking, I will say, as far as holding down the black man section, I am very proud of us for eventually coming back home. Right. And voting in the upper 80% for the black woman, you know, which was encouraging. Now granted, our number of how many of us voted shrank immensely, you know, but either way, we just wanted to talk about those things. And I think one caveat for me, I would say, and then I'll turn it over. I think, Mia, like, you know, you can take it on from there is I am in fact a black man. So I think I can speak from a certain level of experience. Obviously not. Not the experience of every human. Right. But I can speak from a certain level of experience. Now, as we talk about the Latino vote, I am in fact newsflash, not Latino. You know what I'm saying? My wife is from east la, but obviously proximity is not the same as being a member of. So keep that in mind as we discuss these things. So let me turn it over to. Turn it over to me. You.
- [134:46]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, and you know, this is one of these. You're talking a bit about the sort of category and coherence here.
- [134:53]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [134:53]
DJ Dramos
And like one of the things about the way this is aggregated is that. So Asian Americans as a whole went about 5% to the right in this election. But that doesn't capture what was going on because every part of the demographics were just sort of flying in every direction.
- [135:11]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah, yeah.
- [135:12]
DJ Dramos
And unfortunately most of the actual right wing pull was very specifically from my people, which is to say Chinese Americans who went right. In staggering numbers.
- [135:23]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [135:24]
DJ Dramos
I don't know, I'm not really surprised by. Because this has just been the way that sort of specifically Chinese American communities have been shifting for the past, I mean really like eight, 10 years, but particularly intensifying since 2020.
- [135:40]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [135:40]
DJ Dramos
And so if you look at sort of where these things happened, the biggest ones were New York and LA and places like Seattle had some shifts, but I think New York in particular, New York and LA in particular are important for this because a huge part of the reason that this happened was the sort of crime panic stuff.
- [136:01]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [136:02]
DJ Dramos
And the crime panic didn't 100% start with Chinese Americans, but it's one of the earliest sort of incubators of this entire thing. So the sort of trajectory of this is that in 2020 you have this sort of like whole Stop Asian Hate campaign. Right. And you know.
- [136:17]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [136:18]
DJ Dramos
You have all this race, like, sort of like racist, like incitement of violence.
- [136:22]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [136:22]
DJ Dramos
And you get sort of 2 responses to it. Right. There's the kind of like liberal ish response which is Stop Asian hate, but it's kind of vacuous and doesn't, doesn't really have any political like content at all. All it's kind of vaguely anti Trump, but like there's not much there. And then there's the right wing response. And the right wing response is just. Okay, like we're just going to blame black people for this.
- [136:46]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [136:47]
DJ Dramos
And that's like fucking horseshit. It's like, no, it was almost everyone, which is getting killed by white people.
- [136:52]
State Farm Advertiser
Because that's almost all. Yeah.
- [136:54]
DJ Dramos
The way racial violence works in this country, right? Yeah, but, yeah, but unfortunately, you know, this was an area where the left kind of have just did nothing. And if you look at the left response, you know, there's some people who did stuff, right? There is, you know, like some sex worker orgs, like Red Canary Song did some great work. But most of the rest of the American left saw this and was like, okay, the thing that matters here and the actual problem with anti Asian violence is that people are criticizing the Chinese government too much and that's what's causing this. And so we need to defend the ccp. And this is just, politically, this is fucking radioactive to like 80, 90% of fucking Asian Americans. Because there's a sort of, sort of combinations of factors, right? You have, on the one hand, you have sort of immigrant communities where most of the shit doesn't work because you're dealing with people who were like, I don't know, were fucking sterilized by the government because the CCP decided to do Malthusian fucking population control.
- [137:56]
State Farm Advertiser
Have no love for the ccp. None whatsoever.
- [137:59]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, yeah, right. And then this, this is all. This is too reductive, even with Cubans. But it's like, this isn't something where you can just sort of brush this away with like, oh, all of these people were like reactionaries from Taiwan or something like that. It's like, no, like a lot of these people came here very recently and there are, you know, there are sort of Tibetan communities. There's people from Xinjiang here.
- [138:16]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [138:16]
DJ Dramos
And all of those people, like all of the sort of pro CCP shit is radioactive. And that's what was coming out of the American left. The same thing with like, sort of with, with the Hong Kong movement, right, where there was like, like, you know, there, there was this really broad consensus among sort of American social democracy. You know, you're sort of like people who were like marginally left of Bernie. Right. That that stuff was all CIA stuff and it was bad and that you should support the tcp, you know, I mean, there are some tenant organizers who do good work we've had on the show, right? Like there, there are, there are people trying to organize these communities. But like the mainstream left was just like, fuck it, we don't care. We don't give a shit about you. Like, the important thing about you being killed is that we can defend this fucking state that we like.
- [138:57]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [138:58]
DJ Dramos
And so what happened to the Stop Asian Hate thing is that it got folded into the crime panic. Because the product of this was both the sort of right wing, we're going to give you anti black racism as your, like this is going to be your solution, quote unquote, to this. And the sort of stop Asian hate, like mainstream sort of liberal thing. Both just fed directly into carceralism.
- [139:18]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [139:19]
DJ Dramos
And you know, so you started like, it turned into this rallying cry for like hate crime bills and then like increasing police presences and you know, like the fucking cops were like all over the place where this shit was happening and you know, didn't do anything because they're cops. Right. Like facts, all of this fed into. It went sort of seamlessly into the crime panic where you could just feed all of these people the sort of, the sort of memory of the fear and the anger over like Asian people getting killed and you could just lump that in with crime. And then these communities also. And when I say these communities, it's kind of important, important here to do like class breakdowns here too. Because a big part of what's happening here is an alignment that I think like, if the Republicans could be like 15% less racist or figure out how to channel the racism against one target at a time, a lot of these people would have fucking fled right in the first place. Because.
- [140:14]
State Farm Advertiser
Yes, that's what I was going to say.
- [140:16]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, yeah, it's like rich people, professionals and like small business owners. It's like, well, yeah, of course those people are like unbelievably sort of turbo hardline reactionaries. It's like, yeah, those are the guys who are like shooting at people from the rooftops in fucking LA in ID 2. Like, yeah, like these same people in China, like in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, like these are people that if you were on the left, you would just be fighting every day. But you know, they kind of have been lumped into the Democratic Party because of the just unbelievable racism from the Republicans. And now the sort of crime panic stuff has finally given them this thing where the Republican deal is basically like, okay, if you're okay with sort of being anti black with us, if you're okay with massive expansions of police presence, you're okay with us running on that. Right. And also on anti homeless politics. That's been a huge, extremely effective thing, particularly among business owners. I mean, I remember, God, I think I've told the story on air, but back when I was in Chicago, there was this library in Chinatown that I used to like. You know, it was next to a bunch of shops and so you could Sort of you could get bakery food and you could go sit at these benches. And I came back to them in 2020 and the benches literally had a, had a thing drilled into the table, threatening to arrest you if you sat at them for too long.
- [141:24]
State Farm Advertiser
Gosh.
- [141:25]
DJ Dramos
Right, and this was, this was like 2020, 2021.
- [141:27]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [141:28]
DJ Dramos
So you know that, that the sort of anti homelessness stuff had started really, really early there and it's just hideous. And you know, these places have swung to the right, they're electing Republicans and they're doing it because this kind of like Asian American, petite bourgeois, like small business class and some of the sort of richer tech people, et cetera, et cetera, are swinging really, really hard to the right.
- [141:50]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah, man, that actually connected so many dots for me. Like, first of all, like, even to like the anti homeless thing, like, you know, you start seeing that weird middle of the bench, arm rail.
- [142:01]
DJ Dramos
Yep, yep, yep.
- [142:02]
State Farm Advertiser
You know, like, well, it's like that's so you won't lay on it, you know, that's why you did this. But like, I hope what I'm about to say is not a trope, you know what I'm saying? It's just, it's because of like the proximity that I've had with the Asian community in the sense that my stepmom's Filipino, you know, all the DJs, I've all worked with, all these just hip hop. At some point in the 90s, the Filipinos took over, you know what I'm saying? So like, that's been a lot of ways our community. But I found that, you know, the like proper Asian and the jungle Asian thing, where it's like pinning on your relationship with the United States is almost even if you identify as Asian, cuz you sit down, 10 Filipinos, like half of them going to say they Pacific Islander.
- [142:42]
DJ Dramos
Yep.
- [142:42]
State Farm Advertiser
You know, the other half gonna say they Asian, the other half gonna say they Asian Pacific island and then, and then my lord, Cambodia right next to him, who are all in Long beach and they're Crips, you know what I'm saying? So like that sort of world, like they were with us, you know, as far as, like they were just a part of our community. Whereas the sort of northern kind of proper Asian world, like it's cities is like Alhambra, Monterey Park. This is very California stuff. But they stuck to themselves.
- [143:08]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [143:09]
State Farm Advertiser
You know, and they, they saw a lot of the American thing as like, this is pragmatic, like we're here to win. Like, you know, like, so when you started having the Asian hate thing, like, it's almost like now that you say it, it's like we just tied that community up into a bow and then handed them to the right.
- [143:30]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [143:30]
State Farm Advertiser
Because this all happened at the same time as, like, the anti affirmative action.
- [143:36]
DJ Dramos
Yep. You know, Although I do wanna say in the anti affirmative action stuff, because I think people mischaracterize what's going on with that. Asian Americans as a whole and as subgroups support affirmative action.
- [143:46]
State Farm Advertiser
Yes.
- [143:46]
DJ Dramos
Very consistently. Every time they're polls, there's like 60% support for it, right? Yeah. But there's like 40% of these fucking dipshits who are like, yes. I don't know. You know, like, my sort of like, classic age response to this is like, I fucking did it. I was a terrible student. I fuck. I got into the University of Chicago. Like, you dipshits in a fucking. Study harder. Like, you're not. The reason. The reason you're not getting into these universities isn't because, like, black people are being allowed in. It's because. Because you suck. Like, fucking skill issue. What the fuck is wrong with you? But, like, there was this, like, class, you know, this sort of class.
- [144:18]
State Farm Advertiser
That's what I was going to get to is this class distinction in the sense that from a black perspective, it was like, yo, we rallied for y'all over the, like, stop Asian hate thing. You know what I mean? And then to come back around and see this again from a class perspective, because kind of the same thing happened in a lot of ways in the black community. Because the reasoning as you say that. That's why I say it all makes sense. The reasoning is the same. Like, the system is not for me, so I'm just gonna get mine. Damn the community.
- [144:51]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [144:51]
State Farm Advertiser
You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm just gonna go get mine, you know? And so again, in the black community, for those that swung right, it was just like. Like, in some senses, they're like, well, I know y'all are fucking racist. Like, you know what I'm saying? So I'd like, as far as, like, the rights, like, I know you all with the left. It was more like, you're just gaslighting me.
- [145:09]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [145:10]
State Farm Advertiser
So. Well, if you're just going to gaslight me and I already know that you hate me, well, fuck it. I'm just going to get mine, you know, and that becomes the thing. But as a community, like you said, you know, in the same way, as far as, like, the beef between, like, the, you know, the historical la Riots like Chinese and Korean communities. While their parents were on this, on the roofs of their, of their shop shooting at us, they kids was breaking into the. They was with us like you was breaking into the same stores we was breaking into. You know, so that, that class distinction was something that made us kind of be like, bro, like, don't you understand? You'll never be one of them. They'll never really love you. You know, And I feel like even that sort of like appeal would lurch this group even further to be like, don't tell me who you are, don't tell me what they're. They're giving me what I need, you know? So, yeah, like, I never thought about tying all that together and being that it being like a specific, a Chinese lurching. Wow, I never thought of that.
- [146:09]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And okay, you know, you know what else sells products that are from China? It's these products and services support the podcast.
- [146:17]
State Farm Advertiser
We sell products from China.
- [146:30]
DJ Dramos
And we're back. So I think that there's one more thing I want to make sure I get to about the Chinese American stuff before we move on. And that's one of the things you kind of brought up earlier was the insularity. Because part of what's going on here too is that there's a lot of Chinese immigrants and people who you get communities that are speaking like, they're usually Cantonese or Mandarin. And in a lot of cases it's like you'll get these very, very small, tight knit communities with people who are speaking like a provincial dialect that's like semi incomprehensible to other people. Right. Because it's like effectively its own language. And one of the problems here, and this is one of the places where the left shit the bed wasn't doing good organizing. Right. And the consequence of this is that in these, a lot of the things that were getting put out in these spaces, the media is all unbelievably right wing, right? There's Miles Guo who whenever, God, like 12 years from now when I finished a lab leak episode, which is going to be. He's going to be a big part of this was he was this Chinese billionaire who defected to the US then came here and ran 1 trillion scams and is currently going to prison for like, I'm pretty sure he was the guy whose boat Steve Bannon was on. When Steve Bannon got arrested by the post office cops.
- [147:48]
Garrison Davis
Let's go.
- [147:49]
State Farm Advertiser
Just varsity level bad guy.
- [147:51]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was issuing passports from like a fake government in exile that he set up. He's running every scam in the entire world. But he's also, you know, he's also one of the people who started the whole lab leak thing.
- [148:03]
State Farm Advertiser
And he.
- [148:04]
DJ Dramos
So he was flooding the like all sort of Chinese language media with this hardline right wing, sort of pro Republican, hardline, anti China stuff. And then you have a very similar thing coming from the Falun Gong who are everywhere, in any, every Chinatown. There's Falun Gong guys everywhere. They're posters, they're people. So they're a cult. They run Shen Yu. They run a newspaper called the Epoch Times, which is just a pure fascist propaganda outlet. And those things kind of just like devoured the entire Chinese language media ecosystem. And it wasn't good before because like there were also a bunch of other weird right wing groups. Like part of the problem here too is it's possible for in sort of Asian American community for you to have two people who in a, by American standards have identical politics. Right. They, they're identically right wing on things like racial politics, on their like anti crime stuff, you know, who are incredibly sexist and like homophobic, but they absolutely fucking hate each other because one of them is a pro CCP Chinese nationalist and one of them is an anti CCP Chinese nationalist. Wow.
- [149:10]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [149:11]
DJ Dramos
But this, this kind of like, you know, what's been able to kind of weld that shit together is this sort of like Republican anti black tough on crime campaign combined with all of this sort of media sphere stuff.
- [149:24]
State Farm Advertiser
Wow. Yeah. You know, it's shades rebellion all over again. Like just that. At least you're not them.
- [149:29]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [149:30]
State Farm Advertiser
You know, and yeah, like the simplicity of that right wing message of just like, here's all your problems, all your problems are those fools and I'll just get rid of them.
- [149:39]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And we can solve this with more cops and Donald Trump.
- [149:42]
State Farm Advertiser
We just solve it with more. Yeah. Yeah, man. So for my end I looked at the black and Latino vote. I can run through the black one pretty quick because it wasn't as interesting of a story and also because, you know, we did an episode with Garrison Hayes from Mother Jones on like black conservatives and Trump voters. And I think ultimately it comes down to the fact of like the Franz Fernand thought of like, okay, what is liberation? Like, what is freedom? And is it, you know, my ability to flourish without any hindrances or is it a collective ending of suffering, you know what I'm saying? So like, in other words, it's like, like this plantation would be better if I ran the big house, rather than being like, burn the fucking big house down because there shouldn't be slavery, you know what I'm saying? So that sort of approach to again, the reality of why know the system's not for me in a lot of ways. That's what's interesting about the understanding of it. So when you would look at somebody like a black person, like, why would you vote for this racist man? And it's like, well, the same reason I would vote for every other racist man, you know what I'm saying? Like, which find me one that you know. So like that attitude is already there. So, you know, obviously all of us would push back and say that like, well, you choosing yourself is also a vote against yourself and is destroying your community. Clearly it's never worked. At some point, you know, which I'm sure y'all can relate to. It's like I feel two ways when I see like black people, specifically black men, sit at this table because I'm like, I can imagine the first joke that you kind of let slide that was like, ah, it's kind of weird. But I don't know, it's not, it's no big deal. I'll get over it. Maybe they didn't mean it, you know, and then that joke gets more and more intense and then all of a sudden you sitting in a room and they cracking jokes about Haitians eating pets and that Puerto Rico's attract, you know what I'm saying? It's like it didn't start there. It started with you accepting and just being like all lighten up. And at some point somebody said something to you and you made a face and they went, dude, just. It's a joke, man, it's a joke. Come on, bro, you know me. You know me, right? You've had that, you know what I'm saying? And I know that happened a year ago and now look at you, you know, so like, eventually the point I'm making is like, at some point you are going to have to lay down all of your identifying factors to be able to stand stay at this table. Table. And I hope that 30 year fixed mortgage was worth it. So the black story is that is like what is going to get us the financial or get me specifically minds the financial freedom that the Democrats kept promising but never gave to us. But that's like I said, that's a much less interesting story in my opinion than, than the Latino vote, which we could talk about after this break. Woo. All right, so we're back now 64% right. Of air quotes. Latinos voted right wing this year. Now. Now I feel like this. Well, I don't feel like I know this needs a lot of unpacking because first of all, what the hell is the Latino? Yeah, right Is the first question that you have to ask. And essentially I think I've come to the fact that what America means by that is you were colonized by Spain, so in some way you kind of speak somewhat Spanish, unless it's Brazil, in which case you were colonized by the Portuguese, right? So it's like you don't even know what you mean. Mean, like y'all don't even know what you mean.
- [153:35]
DJ Dramos
It's sort of, it's staggering that like one of our primary demographic categories was invented by a coalition of like, Maoists and like, like Vietnamese Marxist Leninists that fell apart immediately the moment that China invaded Vietnam. And that's only our second most incoherent democratic category.
- [153:53]
State Farm Advertiser
Like, it's completely incoherent, Right? So you have. Exactly. You have my wife, my life partner who is born in la, but she is a first gen. She grew up in southern Mexico. She is first gen Mexican. But she's like, I identify as indigenous and it's. And it's true. She is like, even when we did the DNA test, if you believe in that stuff, she's like, but you could just look at her and I'm like, you're Incan. Like, you know, saying just. I just. You're looking at her and she's like, yeah, you're right. Like we are. Are overwhelmingly vast majority of her DNA is indigenous. So for her, if you check a demographic box, it's like, are you, are you Hispanic? She's like, why would I identify with the colonizer? So no, I'm not Hispanic. Like, they're the colonizer, right? Whereas you ask a Puerto Rican or a Cuban or Dominican, they say Hispanic, but they just mean it differently. One, because the island was called Hispanola, you know what I'm saying? So, like they just mean something totally different. And Dominicans is black as hell, you know what I'm saying? And then what about a Cuban? The way that they relate to America is also incredibly different. Especially because I'm pretty sure y'all room knows is if you could touch dry ground, right? And that really just had to do with the fact that we just ain't fuck with Castro. So the way that they relate to even immigration is completely different because. Because if you could make it to the soil, if you could make it to Florida, You a citizen. So they just didn't go through the same things that people from Central and South America went through to be able to become a citizen. And on top of all that, California, Arizona and Texas is Mexico. So like, so some of them ain't immigrants. They was here like the border move. We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us. So you put all that together mixed with a group of people who might be ninth generation Mexican, that people that don't speak Spanish, the no sabos, as you call it, like, won't even speak Spanish, you know what I'm saying? That like, you love all these people who speak so many different languages and have so many different understandings of who they are and you just call them Latino and then you get this number. But if you're willing to accept the absurdity of it, then we could talk about the actual, like what actually happened here. And what you find are two things that are, seem so reductive. But as you look at the exit polls and even like interviews that I, that I personally conducted, if you set aside the person that has been just cooked by just the right wing information, like set that person aside, that is just, you've just, your brain's been cooked. Like, you set that aside and you look at this. There are two very reductive things that just continue to just be true. One is Latin America is very religious, it's still Catholic, and machismo is a big part of their culture. And it just, it seems so reductive. But it's, but it's what happened. You know, this is still a very patriarchal culture. And you know, as anecdotal and as running joke as it is that like if you have a Latina daughter and she's bringing. Because again, they're very traditional, that's why I'm saying I'm using cisgender things. It's like you bring a boy over, your grandma, all your theas are watching, you make him a plate. You have to go over there and make him a plate and sit it in front of him or you going to be judged. This is just the culture, you know, so it's no surprise that that is not going to play into how you vote, right? And then secondly, the religious thing in the sense that like this actually like really blew my mind. And a couple interviews I had, I wanted to talk to specifically Latina women because I was like, it just seemed as though there was just a triple layer of shit you'd have to swallow to be able to go this route right and my main question was like, what was the non negotiable? And was there a line that Trump and by extension the Republican Party could cross? Like, where's the line? What is the too far line? Right. And they landed on a few things. It was, it was crazy. Like, after talking to three different women, they all kind of landed on the same things. It was abortion.
- [158:33]
DJ Dramos
Yep.
- [158:33]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [158:33]
State Farm Advertiser
They were like, at the end of the day, this is untenable. And to which I pushed back where I was like, well, Trump's not anti abortion. And what they all said was like, we could deal with the 16 week, like, I could deal with the 16 week thing, obviously, because again, they are women and they're not completely pills. They're like, we understand that there are situations that happen. Right. That just are untenable. And then the next thing that they said was like, which was the part that like, really just kept putting my brain in a pretzel was we are really big on anti sex trafficking. And the idea for us on this, knowing that, like, okay, so the right wing stole that. Like, they don't believe it. They stole that concept and they wrapped everything around it. Right. But one of them mentioned how she couldn't vote for Hillary because she heard rumors about child stuff and she's. I mean, she's referring to Pizzagate, you know.
- [159:34]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, yeah.
- [159:35]
Mia Wong
This is Q of which I was.
- [159:37]
State Farm Advertiser
Able to push back to be like, well, that was, you know, it was debunked, like, and she was like, I just don't want to. I just don't like, I just don't like how they move. I don't trust Bill and how he behaved in the Oval Office. And it's like, you're looking around like, are you?
- [159:51]
DJ Dramos
They were both on Epstein's played, like.
- [159:53]
State Farm Advertiser
What she even said. She was like, but the Epstein thing. And I'm like, well, they're all, I don't, I don't understand the. I don't understand how you don't see this connection. Yeah, right. And to which they both said, oh, no, we see it. You're again, find me someone that's not. Now nasty is.
- [160:14]
Robert Evans
Is their answer.
- [160:14]
State Farm Advertiser
Find me someone that's not corrupt. Find me someone that's not nasty. At least he's going to save the babies was the thing. And then the next question I had about them was the anti immigration thing, the borders, Right. And we're talking to people who are 1 and 2, some of them three generations removed. And one of. One of them gave me an example of a family member's in law who got deported. 50 years old, got deported from something they did when they were 19. He's like, it's tough. Like, this was a hardworking man who's done his best, who, you know, has done everything they could, and it's got to. So I asked her, like, yo, do you think that. So do you think that that's unfair? She said, no. She was like, our family waited in line. Our family did everything they needed to do. We fought. We came to this same thing. We came to this country because we believed in the dream, and we fought for it, you know, and we. And we did it right, you know, obviously, like, with the Mexican, like, sort of like, work ethic of, like, no excuses, just work. We don't. We can't stand for no cheaters. We don't believe in stuff like that. You have to work for yours, right? And we come here. There's no cuts in front of the lines. There's no shortcuts. You do the work right, and if you cheat, you go to the back of the line. That's just what it is. So she's like, he's talking about criminals. I'm not a criminal. He's talking about criminals. Yeah, you know, that's not me. I'm. I'm a hardworking citizen, you know, so that sort of mindset. And then she said, at the end of the day, we came for the dream. I'm here to work, you know, and if I put in the work, if my family puts in the work, we succeed. That's what this country's for. You're fucking it up for all of us. You cheating the system is fucking it up for all of us. And so that sort of, like, I can swallow the racist shit because I don't give a fuck about you anyway, because I already know you don't give a fuck about me. I'm just here to get mine. So for them, at least according to the way they're explaining it, is like. Like, the prejudice line is not a line they worried about. That's something I've already accepted, you know? But what is a line is, oddly enough, treatment of women and the treatment of children and the ability to flourish. And then lastly, for the men, it's what we know. Like, just the manosphere has cooked our kids. They just cooked them, you know, and it dovetailed so well into the Latino machismo and even on the black shit. Like, I knew we were in trouble when the hood niggas was running around here saying they was finna vote For Trump. Cause it's. Cause they understand it. It's like, you either get on or get out. Like, I'm here. I'm gonna get with my. You either for me or against me. This is what we doing. You know what I'm saying? Right. I'm gonna let you be, you know, as derogatory as this is, like, I'm gonna let you be a man. You go fight what you gonna fight. And the Democrats are gonna turn your sons into daughters. I don't. That, like, that's the. That's the thought. You know what I'm saying? It's like, okay, well, well, fuck it. Let's just get ours. You know what I'm saying? That simplicity of a message, it just resonated. While you have. Which didn't bother me, but you have somebody like Obama coming in there like somebody's uncle, basically. Like, you young N. S need to turn, pull up your pants. Pants. Stop acting like thugs and get in line. You know what I'm saying? It's like, all right, okay. You know, to me, I don't bother me because I'm like, well, yeah, you're somebody's uncle. Like, you are that. Oh, you. Of course that's how you talk, you know, but the street dudes is like, look, man, I don't need this. Like, I don't need this Harvard grad, like, pretty ass, like, rich to tell me what it's like. You was never out. You weren't out here. You wasn't in the trenches. You know what I'm saying? Like, you're a millionaire. I don't like you. I. You barely want to. Oh, because you could hoop. Oh, so you like basketball. You one of us. You know what I'm saying? So I just think that, that, like, you've already got yours. So let me get. Mine is like, at the end of the day, was so appealing to this particular demographic, and it just made sense. So that's why they voted that way.
- [164:27]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, and I think there's. There's sort of, like, angles of this too, that connect with what was going on with Asian Americans partially. Also, the religion angle is a thing that isn't talked about enough and also isn't talked about enough with Asian Americans, like, particularly Chinese Americans. There's a whole bunch of. How do I explain this in a way that, you know, the sort of like, zeal of a convert shit where, like, the first generation converts are the most nuts.
- [164:53]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [164:54]
DJ Dramos
So that's like a huge portion of Chinese Christians or these, like, first generation evangelical converts. And so you get these just like really terrifying, ferociously right wing stuff that just kind of eats everything around it. And I think the second part is, I think there's an interesting distinction here too, because I think there's a kind of differing parts of the story ness of the kind of like, we came here to work thing, because that was the Asian American thing from maybe 20 years ago and the last 10 years, and especially post 2020 has been people realizing that it's not real and that you work, you work, you work, you work. And this is actually also, funny enough, exact same thing happening in China with sort of different political results because it's less. It's, you know, you're not dealing with the same kind of sort of immigrant culture stuff. But the Chinese American version of this was like, okay, we need to figure out who to blame for this.
- [165:52]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [165:53]
DJ Dramos
And they were like, well, yeah, okay, it's because of like all of this crime shit and because like, people aren't going to prison for 1 million years. And like, I see a black person and there's like a homeless person who I have to like walk past every day. This is the reason why, like our fucking dream died. And that was a really sort of appealing message to people. And it's the same kind of thing with the people who went for the affirmative action stuff where it was like, the people who, you know, are like, in all seriousness, like, we're running into kind of like, oh, no, there actually is a sort of wall that you hit where it doesn't matter how hard you work. Like, there's only so many spots in university, there's only so many totally, you know, there's only so much so far you can go. And hitting that wall drove a bunch of people. Right.
- [166:37]
State Farm Advertiser
You make a good point, you know, and I imagine the same sort of reaction to that within the Chinese community is going to be the same with ours where it's like, okay, you gonna learn that you are not welcome to that table. You know. Yeah, they will always choose themselves. And you know, you could dress yourself up, you know, and just to the degree for which you can alter all identifying factors. For us, it's like to the degree for which you can remove your blackness is to the degree for which you're welcomed in this table. But at some point you can't take it off. Yeah, it don't rub off, you know, know, dress your kids up, you know, that was like, for us, with respectability politics, like, teach your kids to speak proper English and dress them up and don't let them wear hoodies. Okay? Good luck. You know, like Jay Z seminal work. Look, O.J. said, I'm not black, I'm O.J. okay? Like, you know, it's just. Yeah, they will never accept you. The world you're trying to get into will never accept you. And this step towards trying to be accepted by this world is working against you and everyone else behind you, you know, but this is America. You can vote however you want to vote.
- [167:51]
DJ Dramos
Well, And I think 2020, like, for us was that moment, right. Where like, you know, everyone kind of got knocked out of the, you know, whichever way you sort of frag fragmented politically. It's like that's when you got knocked out of the sort of Obama multiracial dream.
- [168:05]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [168:05]
DJ Dramos
Was when you realized that, like, all of this fucking progress you've made isn't going to stop people from killing you in this.
- [168:09]
State Farm Advertiser
Yes.
- [168:10]
DJ Dramos
And the reaction to that was like. And I saw this on the left where like a bunch of people fracked, basically splintered off and became like hardline Chinese nationalists because they were afraid and they were like, okay, well, you know, here's this thing that we have, this, like, strong state that will protect us and we just have to fight for it here. It's like, well, that didn't work. Right. You know, and then you have a lot of other people who started to recognize that this wasn't going to happen. Right. That, like, the thing that they had bought into was a lie. But the part of it that they believed, they were just like, well, okay, if we can just like fucking get the black people out of here and, like, we can get the cops in. Yeah, you know, we can go back to living in our fucking fantasy world.
- [168:46]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [168:47]
DJ Dramos
And that's been just the sort of dominant response to it. And I don't know, it's bleak, but it's not something that can't be overcome. But it's going to require, like, it's going to require organizing and it's going to require the left to not be about. About fucking making white people feel more anti imperialist, which has been what fucking politics towards Asian Americans has been. And until that shit gets jettisoned, like, you're gonna keep seeing this shit accelerate.
- [169:18]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah, man. Has there been any. I don't know if the right term is like vision casting among this community, because, like, I say that to say, albeit a very small, very small fraction of voices, but among some of the black thinkers is like a serious consideration of pursuing, like, creating a third party of just like. But let's like, take it serious this time. Like, for real. For real.
- [169:46]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [169:46]
State Farm Advertiser
You know, like, there's, you know, it's. Like I said, it's very small and, like, obviously, like, my grandchildren will probably be the ones to see any sort of beginnings of that actually taking root, but it's still like, you know, people are. That's some of the things that are being talked about right now. Like, we should, like, really, like, really consider it. Is there anything like that going on?
- [170:07]
DJ Dramos
No. Like, and this is. This is also part of the problem is that, like, the Asian American intellectual class is, like, one of the most bankrupt classes in the entire country. There's nothing. It's a wasteland out there. Like, it's. Oh, my God.
- [170:21]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [170:22]
DJ Dramos
Like, it's. It's so bad. It's. It's like all of the art in the media, the culture, and the sort of analysis is all I've talked about on this show a decent amount. But it's all wrapped up in this sort of, like, oh, you too can, like, integrate and become a small business owner. And those people, you know, the people who believe that and people who did that don't actually have any interesting ideas. Yeah, they have. They have the incredibly narrow ideas of their class, and the incredible narrow idea. Incredibly narrow ideas of their class are completely useless for the sort of task we have ahead of us. Yeah, and.
- [170:50]
State Farm Advertiser
And it's kind of working for them.
- [170:51]
DJ Dramos
Yeah, I mean, it's working for them. It's just.
- [170:52]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah, it's working for them.
- [170:53]
DJ Dramos
It isn't working for anyone else.
- [170:54]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah, exactly.
- [170:55]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. And like, God, like, I don't know, like, the people who are supposed to be, like, Wesley Yang, who was supposed to be, like, the great sort of, like, new Asian intellectual is now this just completely cooked right winger. Like, some of. Some of the people have been, like, turning on, like, some of the, like, the big podcasters have been, like, turning on trans people. And I'm just like, well, fuck all you guys.
- [171:14]
State Farm Advertiser
Like, eat shit, basically.
- [171:17]
DJ Dramos
So, yeah, it's. It's a. The situation's bad. It's also. The fragmentation is so powerful because you're dealing with so many kinds of, like, linguistic lines and lines between people who've been here for 10 generations and people who just, like, walked off the boat yesterday. There's, you know, and so the fragmentation, I think, helps prevent a more coherent sphere. But, like, it's. It's bleak out there.
- [171:42]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah, man.
- [171:43]
DJ Dramos
It's the prognosis.
- [171:45]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah. You know, obviously, like, the black queer community is obviously incredibly vibrant and strong and organized. And you know, at least from the part of the intersection that I'm a part of, you know, the voice coming out of that space of like a lot of times of like very much prophetic and like, you know, very much like truth telling that you hear from again, like, you know, black queer community is like, from my perspective, they continue to be like, like five steps ahead of us.
- [172:15]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [172:15]
State Farm Advertiser
You know, of like where we need to go as, as a, as a people.
- [172:19]
DJ Dramos
Yeah. This was like the sex worker orgs for us. But then because this is another thing with left just kind of shit the bed. Right. Like, this is the thing with Bernie where Bernie voted for Sister Foster. Right. And there's never been a reckoning about that at all.
- [172:33]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [172:34]
DJ Dramos
And so, you know, like the stuff that could have come out of that just kind of never did. And we never got the kind of integration, the kind of politics that we could have had if people had been like 5%. Well, not 5%, it would require them to move their positions a bit. But like, if people had actually cared about sex workers, we wouldn't be here.
- [172:57]
State Farm Advertiser
Right now, but totally different story. Yeah.
- [172:59]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [173:00]
State Farm Advertiser
Well, that was informative. This has been. I don't know, how do I just. How do we describe what this has been?
- [173:08]
DJ Dramos
Well, Mia, you know, I think I close with this. Right. Like, this situation isn't hopeless.
- [173:13]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [173:13]
DJ Dramos
Right. There's been a lot of good tenant organizing going on. Like, there's a lot of kinds of stuff that can and do work. It's known to the grindstone time. Right. It's time to lock in. It's time to organize. And these communities can be organized.
- [173:27]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah.
- [173:28]
DJ Dramos
We just haven't yet. And you know.
- [173:30]
State Farm Advertiser
Yeah. To your point, like for me, like all information is helpful. Like if somebody's lying to you, it's good information to know that this person thinks that that's something worth lying about. You just told me something about yourself, the fact that you think that that's worth lying about. So I say all that to say this understanding, a better understanding of. It's hard to reason with somebody when they hungry. So just a better understanding of what do these communities actually prioritize? What do they actually value? And obviously like you know, the Dems and unfortunately even the left was just like just swinging a miss, guys. Like this type of thing, like you said, is not hopeless. It's like now there's an understanding of like, okay, so you value the hustle. All right, well, let me tell you in the ways for which the choice you just made is working against your hustle, you know, like, or now. Here are ways for which you can, like you said, nose to the grind and accomplish these goals in a way that's not so detrimental to the people around you. Yeah, you know, I'm with it. Like, I'm not hopeless either. I think that we just need to think about our word choice and what hills we willing to die on and be like, this is what we meant when we said this.
- [174:48]
DJ Dramos
Yeah.
- [174:50]
Robert Evans
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
- [174:56]
DJ Dramos
It Could Happen Here is a production.
- [174:57]
Garrison Davis
Of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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