It Could Happen Here Weekly 172

Summary

Behind the Bastards - Episode: It Could Happen Here Weekly 172 Release Date: March 8, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of It Could Happen Here Weekly, host Mary Kay McBrayer engages in an in-depth discussion with John Cameron Mitchell, a retired officer from the Irish Defence Forces and author of A Life Less Ordinary. The conversation centers around the escalating conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), focusing on the recent capture of Goma by M23 rebels and the broader implications for UN peacekeeping missions.

Background on the Congo Conflict

Mary Kay McBrayer provides context by highlighting the recent takeover of Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province, by M23 rebels, noting the severe human cost:

[04:20] McBrayer: "It's a city of about a million people. I believe they're saying around 3,000 people have been killed in this operation."

John Cameron Mitchell elaborates on the historical tensions and the significant death toll resulting from the conflict:

[06:19] Mitchell: "In early 1960, there was an engagement between an Irish platoon and a large group of Beluba tribesmen... nine Irish soldiers killed and 26 Beluba's killed. And that was the first time that Ireland kind of had to deal with that kind of death overseas."

Evolution of UN Peacekeeping Missions in Congo

The discussion delves into the history and transformation of UN missions in the Congo:

Mitchell outlines the inception of UN peacekeeping in Congo in 1960 with MONUC, later evolving into MONUSCO and eventually MINUSCO:

[09:12] Mitchell: "MINUSCO is what we call an integrated mission... combining military presence with advisors on justice, policing, and governance."

He emphasizes the shift from traditional peacekeeping to a more multifaceted approach aimed at restoring rule of law, protecting civilians, and facilitating long-term recovery:

[10:07] Mitchell: "The three pillars of an integrated mission are the restoration of the rule of law, the protection of civilians, and the provision for long-term recovery and democratic governance."

The Force Intervention Brigade (FIB): Mandate and Challenges

A significant portion of the episode focuses on the Force Intervention Brigade, a unique component of MINUSCO with offensive capabilities.

Mitchell explains the rationale behind the FIB's formation:

[16:50] Mitchell: "The concept was to include an offensive capability for UN troops... Defence Intervention Brigade would do the heavy lifting, and then deploy rapidly to hotspots."

He discusses the operational successes, such as the swift retaking of Goma:

[18:54] Mitchell: "They retook Goma in less than a month, which was a significant achievement."

However, he also highlights internal challenges, particularly differing agendas among Troop Contributing Countries (TCCs), which hindered the brigade's sustained effectiveness:

[19:59] Mitchell: "So, there’s friction or it's not as efficient as it could be when TCCs have different missions."

Regional and International Factors Influencing the Conflict

The conversation shifts to the broader regional dynamics, notably Rwanda's involvement:

Mitchell delves into Rwanda's historical and ongoing role in supporting M23 and exploiting Congo's mineral wealth:

[12:12] Mitchell: "Rwanda has always projected force into the two Kivos... They are actively supporting M23."

He underscores the economic motivations behind the conflict, pointing to Congo's vast mineral deposits:

[13:35] Mitchell: "We’re talking about Congo having an estimated $23 trillion in mineral deposits."

Current Situation and Humanitarian Impact

As the M23 rebels advance, MINUSCO faces logistical challenges, leading to the relocation and evacuation of staff:

[10:38] Mitchell: "With the M23 Rebel advance, the mission is relocating most of its staff, evacuating others."

McBrayer relates the dire circumstances faced by civilians in Goma, emphasizing the repeated attacks and the city's vulnerability:

[15:55] McBrayer: "This is the fifth time that people have attacked Goma... it's been around 64 years."

Challenges Ahead: Future of Peacekeeping and Global Implications

The discussion concludes with reflections on the future of UN peacekeeping in the face of global geopolitical shifts, including the United States' increasing isolationism:

Mitchell presents alternatives to UN peacekeeping, citing African-led missions but expresses skepticism about their ability to match UN's integrated approach:

[25:57] Mitchell: "Europe and the US shouldn't be dictating how Africans govern themselves... There's so much vested interest."

McBrayer and Mitchell ponder the sustainability of peacekeeping missions amid dwindling international support:

[30:13] Mitchell: "Ideally, African problems should be solved by African nations... but it goes back to money."

Key Insights and Conclusions

• Historical Context Matters: Understanding the deep-rooted historical conflicts and external influences is crucial for tackling current issues.

• Complexity of Peacekeeping: Modern peacekeeping requires a multifaceted approach that goes beyond mere military presence, integrating governance and civilian protection.

• Resource Exploitation Fuels Conflict: Congo's immense mineral wealth continues to be a significant driver of both internal and external conflicts.

• International Support is Fragile: The effectiveness and sustainability of peacekeeping missions are highly dependent on consistent and aligned international support, which is currently under strain due to geopolitical shifts.

Notable Quotes

• "The concept was to include an offensive capability for UN troops as opposed to defensive or separation of warring factions. This was full on war fighting."
  John Cameron Mitchell [16:50]

• "Congo in its entirety was back in 1960 because in 1960, after getting independence, the Kivu and Katanga wanted to secede. That's what kicked off a lot of the conflict."
  John Cameron Mitchell [13:58]

• "It's time for Lord Intervention Brigade to downsize and eventually leave because the country doesn't want us here anymore."
  John Cameron Mitchell [22:55]

Conclusion

This episode provides a comprehensive exploration of the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the role and challenges of UN peacekeeping missions, and the intricate interplay of regional and international factors. Through the expertise of John Cameron Mitchell, listeners gain valuable insights into the complexities of peacekeeping in conflict zones rich in natural resources, highlighting the need for sustained and cohesive international strategies to foster long-term stability and peace.

Transcript

[Damien Hirst]

Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? Ow. Go slower. From Blumhouse TV, iHeart podcasts and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi and what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Mary I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, host of the podcast the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

This season explores women from the 19th century to now. Women who were murderers and scammers, but also women who were photojournalists, lawyers, writers and more.

[Damien Hirst]

This podcast tells more than just the brutal, gory details of horrific acts. I delve into the good, the bad.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

The difficulty and all the nuance I can find because these are the stories that we need to know to understand the intersection of society, justice and the fascinating workings of the human psyche.

[Damien Hirst]

Join me every week as I tell.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Some of the most enthralling true crime stories about women who are not just victims, but heroes or villains, or often somewhere in between. Listen to the greatest true crime stories ever told on the iHeartRadio app, Apple.

[Damien Hirst]

Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mark Seal]

I'm Mark Seale.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

And I'm Nathan King.

[Mark Seal]

This is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.

[Damien Hirst]

The five families did not want us.

[Nathan King]

To shoot that picture.

[Damien Hirst]

This podcast is based on my co host Mark Seals bestselling book of the same title. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Caan, Talia Shire and many others.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

The yes, that was a real horse's head.

[Damien Hirst]

Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is John Cameron Mitchell and my new fiction podcast series, Cancellation island stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently cancelled in the future we will all be canceled for 15 minutes, but don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancellation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies like bad touch football, anti racism, spin class and mandatory ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the council to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing. Karen, where have you Brought us Cancellation island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media.

[Nathan King]

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.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Hey, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's James today and I'm joined again by Kevin McDonald. Kevin is a retired officer from the Irish Defence Forces with some special forces and peacekeeping experience. Welcome to the show, Kevin.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Thanks. Thanks very much for having me. And just as a sort of disclaimer at the very start, any views or opinions that I expressed there. The opinions of a retired senior officer from the Irish Defence Forces can't be construed as being in any way the views of the Irish Defence Forces, nor indeed that of the United Nations. So I just wanted to put that out there before we get. Get into it.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah. Not. Not a UN or Irish Defence Forces spokesperson. Not that we've had many of those, I suppose, on our show. Kevin, we're here today to talk a little bit about the situation in Congo and perhaps more specifically, like, how the peacekeeping mission there has evolved and changed and sort of morphed over the years. So maybe just to begin with, I can give an idea that, like, this city of Goma, which is the capital of North Kivu Province, has recently been captured by M23 rebels. Would explain who they are. People who aren't familiar in a minute. It's a city of about a million people. I believe they're saying around 3,000 people have been killed in this operation, which is. I mean, it's a massive death toll.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

In a short space of time.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

It's very short space of time. Yeah. And some of the other stuff I've heard, like, at one point there was a prison within the city, which there was a jailbreak, and they think a hundred of the women who were incarcerated there were sexually assaulted and in some cases burned alive after the jailbreak happened. Thousands of Congolese military and police have surrendered. A contingent of, I believe, Romanian private military contractors were captured.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yes, Captured, surrendered. Either way, they. They went into Rwanda, I think about 300 of them, which is a significant amount of mercenaries.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah. Especially when you talk About Romania, which is not a, not a vast country.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yeah.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Understandably a lot of things are happening in the us People may have missed it and like I think people in the US just due to the nature of news, being quite navel gazing here, may not be as familiar with the conflict in Congo. Like if they know about it, it's from Warren's Evon songs or maybe from, maybe from a couple of films.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Lawyers, Guns and Money.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah. What's the other one, Roland? The Thompson Gunner. That's the, yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Law and the Headless Thompson Gunner.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

That's it. That's the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's talk then about the various United nations peacekeeping missions in Congo. They've been there for, since the 1960s, is it? On and off.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yeah. So the first mission in the Congo was onok in 1960 and a lot of people would say that that was the first UN mission. But as I think we discussed the last time, the first UN mission was full scale war in 1950 in Korea.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And that mission is still in existence. The unc, the United Nations Command. But I suppose speaking about, about the Congo specifically. So in 1960 there was 17 newly independent states of which 14 were from Africa, agreed to a call from the, from the UN to establish this mission in the Congo and Ireland answered the call as well. So we, we deployed. It was the first time that we deployed with the UN.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And we had a battalion there from 1960 to I think 1960 or whenever, whenever the initial deployment ended. And it was, it was a fairly tough, intense introduction to Peacekeeping. In early 1960 there was an engagement between an Irish platoon and a large group of Beluba tribesmen. And there was nine Irish soldiers killed and 26 Beluba's killed. And that was the first time that Ireland kind of had to deal with that kind of death overseas.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

So it was, it was pretty traumatic. And then in 1961, you've probably seen the film the Siege of Janitorville.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

But it recounts the, the true story of an Irish company under commoner Pat Quindlen. His company was 158 roughly strong. And they were attacked while they were at mass on a Sunday morning by a group of between 3 and 4000 Katanganese well armed soldiers backed up by French and Belgian and South African mercenaries. Yeah, they also had an attack helicopter and they had an attack chest.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

I think you had some of the old Rians in there as well at that time.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, unfortunately anything for a fight. But the, the, the Irish held out For I think over a week. And they didn't give up when they ran out of water, they didn't give up when they ran out of food. It was when they had no bullets left. They negotiated a surrender thanks to the skill of the officers and NCOs and men. Not one fatality on the Irish side.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Unfortunately, when they came home, because they had surrendered, they were treated like pariahs for years. It was seen like a state on the nation. Now if, God Forbid, they had 50% casualties that have been treated like heroes.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And it's only in recent years that they're getting the recognition that they should have got back in 1961.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

That's really interesting. I know they've been treated that way. It's quite sad to hear. Yeah, yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

It's a strange one. And a lot of the people that were, we'll say, shunning these officers and NCOs and men had served overseas. And like if the UN, they tried once to resupply them with ammunition from the air, but it wasn't successful. So if, if the UN had fully supported that company, they would have held out even longer. But I suppose that's, that's the way things, things go. So that's the first mission to the Congo. And I, I could be corrected. I, I think 64, 65, it might have sort of started to, to draw down then in 1999 after it was the first of the second war, the UN established monarch, M O N U C. And that lasted from 1999 until 2010 when it was renamed and re changed into manuscript. And the difference between the two is that MINUSCO is what we call an integrated mission. And the three pillars of an integrated mission are the restoration of the rule of law, the protection of civilians, and the provision for long term recovery and democratic governance. So it's combining, we'll say the force of a military presence, but also there's special advisors on justice, on policing, on governance, all that sort of stuff which you wouldn't have in a mission like unifil, which we discussed the last time.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Which is the earlier form of peacekeeping. So Manusco was supposed to have left the country in 2024, but they were given a, I think a one year extension.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And unfortunately with, with the M23 Rebel advance, the mission is relocating most of its staff, evacuating others. The difference between the two terms is, is very specific. You relocate within a country and you evacuate out of a country.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Oh, okay.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And I, I also note that the, some of the, the hybrid African Union peacekeeping operations. There was, I think, 13 South Africans killed in the initial stages of the, of the onslaught towards, towards Gomez. So that, that's kind of where we are with, with the, with the. I think at the, at its height within 2122, there was probably a strength of 20, 000. But if you think the DRC is the second largest country in Africa, it's vast.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And the 11th largest country in the world. Just the size is just phenomenal. So you can imagine what the Congo on this entire. No more than Sudan, but what the Congo in its entirety was back in the day.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, absolutely huge. Yeah, it's vast. It encompasses different climate zones, different ethnic groups as, as we're seeing. Right.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

200 main ethnic groups.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah, It's. It's a fascinating place. It's a place I've wanted to go for a long time. I spent some time on the Congo Rwanda border a few years ago, not, not so far from Goma, actually, like riding. Riding my bike around. And it's a very interesting place in terms of. Well, Rwanda is a very interesting place in terms of its relation to its neighbors. I think people will probably struggle to conceptualize. I actually saw somebody had posted on Twitter, somebody who talks about Syria mostly, like, how on earth is Rwanda invading Congo? And they had a, like a picture, you know, and the, the. The land mass of Rwanda. Rwanda's one of the smaller countries in Africa and Congo is obviously a vast country. Are you comfortable explaining a little bit of like the, The Rwandan involvement?

[John Cameron Mitchell]

It's, it's complicated and it goes back to the. Yes, it is the genocide back in 94. 94, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And the, the two kiva was north and south Kiva, which is on the border with Rwanda. There's a large amount of ethnic Tutsis. Congolese Tutsis.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

There. I think what Rwanda has always projected force into the two Kivos and Katanga because like, literally that, that's. That's where the money is. Of course, Rwanda would say they don't, but they are actively supporting and M23 and have.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And most of the M23, certainly the leadership would be ethnic Congolese Tutsis.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

So ostensibly, I think the, the raison death for, for Ramonda's involvement was to protect the ethnic Tutsis from Hutus that it had escaped from the, from the, the genocide. So it's complicated, but if you kind of park those complications and think of the money trail, it kind of leads to the True Kivos because 70% of the world's cobalt, I think, is kind of located between the two cables. And then you've gold, diamonds, all the other sort of rich minerals.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. Incredible wealth in Congo.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yeah.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

But I was reading that the. The estimated deposits in eastern Congo is something like 23 trillion. Like, it's, it's off the wall stuff.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

So it's no wonder it's become the battleground that it has essentially since 1960. Because in 1960, after getting independence, the Kivu and Katanga wanted to secede.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Back by Belgium. And that's kind of what. What, what kicked off a lot of the conflict in 1960. And the reverberations from that are still. Are still kind of being felt and being exploited because everyone wants to get a piece of the action, like all the surrounding countries, so. Yeah, I see. I think it was yesterday that the. They're planning a meeting, I think it's this week or this weekend to try and resolve the conflict. And this time they're going to try and include M23 in the, in the meeting rather than exclude them. I don't think they have a choice. I mean, they're heading down to book of USO.

[Nathan King]

Yeah.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

I mean, N23 have said that they're going for sort of the whole country now that they're not. You know, it's not. It's not a regional or like, you know, ethnic movement so much as a. And they will. M23 would say that they're not like, per se, ethnic separatists. Right. Like, I think they would claim that they're like a liberation of Congo force. And then you've Burundi supporting the Congolese government. You know, there's all kinds of, as you say, like, regional and international actors because of the wealth in Congo. And like, as Congo emerge from the drc, emerged from its colonial past. Right. It's always been destabilized by these actors, both regional and international, who wanted a piece of that mineral wealth. And then they've created and sustained these differences which have become. I think there's some evidence to suggest that, like, certainly that the, like, the ethnic differences have become more pronounced and more like, intransigent, I suppose, or like, you know, it's become more difficult for those ethnic groups to coexist over time due to decades of conflict. Right. And killing. And it's a very difficult situation. And it leaves people like the civilians living in Goma today in a terrible situation where, like, I think this is the fifth time that people have attacked Goma. Like, it's certainly. I think the last time was about 2012. Was it when the last time M23 took Goma?

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yeah. And that's. That's when the. Which we'll probably discuss later. The Force Intervention Brigade.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Retook Goma in 2013 in a relatively short space of time.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Compared how long it took to regained it very quickly.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. So I think we break for adverts now. I'd like to come back and discuss the Force Intervention Brigade because I think it's something that people ought to understand when we talk about peacekeeping. And we're back.

[Robert Evans]

Okay.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

So, yeah, we. You mentioned the Force Intervention Brigade, which is something a bit unique within peacekeeping. And there's a lot of, like, when people talk about peacekeeping, they'll be like, oh, why aren't they fighting? Why aren't they, like, going and stopping the things? And I understand why people ask that. So can you explain a little bit about what the FIB was and what it did?

[John Cameron Mitchell]

The concept of the Force Intervention Brigade was, I think, to my knowledge, it's the first UN mission that developed that concept. And they actually changed the mandate to include an offensive capability for. For UN troops as opposed to defensive or separation of warring factions. This was full on war fighting.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And what they had figured out because. Because the DRC is so big that the footprint, even with 20,000 troops, the footprint on the ground was not sufficient to say, as I said, one of the three pillars of an integrated mission is protection of civilians. And they were finding that very difficult. So they decided to use a concept of protection by projection rather than protection by presence. So not alone did they have the Force Intervention Brigade, they had the Joint Protection Teams and also an idea of a rapidly deployable battalion. So the idea was that the Force Intervention Brigade would say, do the heavy lifting, and then when hot spots would flare up, they could use either the rapidly deployed battalions or the. The Joint Protection Teams. So the idea was that rather than having static positions trying to protect people, they would go where. Where the action was. That was the idea.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Okay.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And in fairness, the FIB had artillery, mortar, snipers, attack helicopters, UAVs, special forces. They retook GOM in. I don't know the exact time frame, but it. I think it was less than a month. And one of the problems, and I think we touched on it the last time we spoke, and I think this is a specific problem to the. How the FIB didn't really keep going the way it should have, is that two of the main TCCs were Tanzania and South Africa. And they would have had slightly different agendas in terms of who they should and they shouldn't attack based on your government's position. Sorry, TCC is a true contrivance. Excuse me, I should have said that.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah. It's a sea of acronyms here. I've tried to avoid all the Congo. That is faction acronyms. But. Yeah, yeah, explain that a bit. Because when people think of the UN peacekeepers or troop contributing countries, the only time it comes on the news in sort of the global north is when people from, say, northern Europe or North America are part of these UN peacekeeping missions. So they think of people, British troops, American, Canadian, what have you in their blue helmets. Right. But the vast bulk of TCCs don't come from, from northern Europe. Right. In Africa, the majority of TCCs are other African countries. I think I'm right saying it's a majority. Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Like it, like here, here in, in, in South Sudan, most of the big battalions are Rwanda, Nepal, Mongolia, China. Generally speaking, in my experience in the Central African Republic and, and here, a lot of the battalions come from Africa, which, which is fair enough. I mean, it's, it's their continent.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And they should have a, they should have a stake in, in trying to foster peace and develop peace and, and help countries in, in less are more dire situations than they themselves perhaps are. So it's, I understand your point about different countries being aware of what the UN does based on, I take for instance, everyone in Ireland knows about the UN and they know about the Irish in Lebanon and in Syria and in Africa, I'm sure in the United Kingdom, because you've got a very small UN footprint.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Cyprus being one. And there's, there's a few you guys here, generally people in the uk. I'm sure you'll be able to enlighten me on this. Wouldn't have the exact same intimate knowledge or even interest in the un.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Because basically they don't have a big footprint. Deployable footprint.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah. And it's the same with the United States, I think. It's not something that people think about for the most part. And so like, there's this question of like, why doesn't the U.N. certainly, I think when people saw what happened recently in Lebanon, they were like, why are these peacekeepers? You know, where you had these peacekeepers? And we spoke about this in our last episode. Right. Being shelled, being shot at. You know, the people were asking why they weren't out there fighting. And there are a lot of reasons for that one being, that's not what they're there to do. But yeah, when we had this Force Intervention Brigade in Congo, they did some good things. Right. They were able to retake Goma. And for the people who lived in Goma, I'm sure that was very important like that, meaningfully improve their lives. But it also comes with these complications that you've addressed each of those troop contributing countries. You need everyone to be committed to the same mission, I suppose. And if your government is giving your armed forces one mission and that differs slightly from that which whoever's in command of the Force into Entry Brigade has, then we get friction or it's not as efficient as it could be.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yeah, I, I think I, I'm sure I mentioned it when we last spoke. It's. It's one thing developing a robust mandate, but if the, if the TCCs don't have the skills, the experience, the training, the equipment or the will to enforce the robust nature of that mandate, well, then the mandate isn't really worth anything, you know, so it's, it's kind of like, yes, the FIB was extremely effective for a while, until it wasn't. Now, whether that was a lack of will on the TCCS or on New York or mission leadership, I have no idea. But, but it was a great idea and it worked and then didn't work.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Plus the fact that the DOC wanted the mission to downsize and eventually leave, that added to the, well, should we really invest in something when we're going to pull out because the country doesn't want us here anymore? Which is, again, it's a fair point.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, right. No one wants foreign troops in their country. Right. You know, walking around especially, you know, engaging their own citizens. But I mean, it's interesting, I was watching a speaks the current president of the drc, Felix Tushi Saketi. I've tried my best to pronounce that correctly. It's not that disrespectful. He was saying that the international community is bordering on complicit in M23's advance because of the failure to do anything about it in a speech he gave this week. And it was interesting because it had previously been, like you said, for very understandable reasons, especially in the drc, which has this long and horrible history of colonialism. The terrible things done in the Belgian Congo, we've covered those a lot on Bastards, the show that we do. People can listen to that if they want to. But now he's asking for more help, which is also understandable because his military is 125,000 or so. A large number of that is not very combat effective forces maybe. And they've just been overrun in Goma in a big city, a city of a million people. So where do you think we go from here? We're at a very unique time in world history in which the United States is doing some things with his foreign policy. I mean, I won't really mince words about it. I think it's terrible. But if we talk about usaid, I was speaking to people on the Thai Burmese border last week who were telling me that USAID has turned off life support machines as part of its drawdown and that people obviously directly died as a result of that there. So the US is not necessarily averse to having terrible consequences to its. Whatever it's trying to do right now, which I don't really have a good word for. So look, where do we go from here with, with the US becoming more isolationist?

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Well, let's discuss for a few minutes the, the alternatives to UN peacekeeping. And there's a lot of them here in Africa. So you have the South African Development Community, sadc, the East African Community. There was a African Union Stroke, UN Hybrid Mission in DAR 4 unit, which is closing. There was a mission in Somalia. There is the Lake Chad Basin Multinational Task Force. There's the group of five for the Sahel. Then you had EU4, which was an EU force in Chad and in Mali and subsequently became Manur Cat in Chad and Manusma and Mali. Then you have the EUTM mission in Mali, which I was part of at one stage and another one in Somalia. And of course we have our mercenaries, you know, and when it emerged that there was over 300 of them allowed into Rwanda, I was reading the report that they were getting something like three and a half thousand dollars a month, whereas the DRC soldiers were getting maybe 300amonth.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

You know, and these guys were brought in to protect the mines because again, it goes back to money.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're protecting resources, not people. That's a different thing. So what if those, like those African led peacekeeping missions look like, like you talked about, these various, like international and regional groups.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

I think it's, it's certainly worth a try because the UN hasn't the ability, nor indeed the money, I presume, to keep doing these large, big missions. Like at one stage the three largest missions were Manusc, which we're discussing.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Manosa in the Central African Republic and Mina, which was in Mali. Mali's gone Drc is on the drawdown. Central African Republic is still there, but I've, I've noticed, I spent four years there and obviously I have a keen interest in the place, but there has been a big increase in, in anti. Anti French. It's a Francophone country.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Ant French and, And linked with a kind of an anti UN sentiment. No. The special advisor to the President is from Russia. Wagner had a big part to play when I was there. There were key players.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Most likely they're interlinked.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. I mean, and they've done some things which are horrific in terms. We've covered that as well with a friend, Derma, on the show. I did want to talk about this because the US is talking about withdrawing its sort of what we call, like, soft power assets right around the world. And I saw, like, I forget who it was saying, like, oh, the chips fall where they may. Well, it's very obvious where the chips will fall in this part of the world. Right. Like when I was in Rwanda, every fancy road in Rwanda, they call them Chinese roads because they go from the mines to the airport. Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Belt and braces.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yep. It's as naked a resource extraction project as you'll see right now. China also does the soft power thing. They'll build hospitals and these. You know, I forget where the quote comes from, but, like, every time you, the US comes, we get a lecture. And every time China comes, we get a hospital. This will reorient the way these countries, specifically in Africa, associate with the world. Right. With, with the US drawdown and the United nations not capable or willing of sort of doing these massive peacekeeping missions. And I think for very understandable reasons, groups like the eu, you know, it's best not to have large deployments of European armed forces in Africa for reasons that are probably quite obvious. So, like, yeah, we, we're likely to see. I mean, hasn't Wagner rebranded itself as the Africa Corps now?

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yeah. I'm not sure who's, who's running it now, but I'm sure the strings have been more closely pulled by, by Putin, as opposed to.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Having very loose control when Prigozhin was there.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

It was giving him like a standoff capability.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Right.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

This is just a pmc, nothing to do with me.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

But I, I, I would imagine after his drive to Moscow and the subsequent demise, I'm sure that whoever is running the Africa Corps is much more tightly controlled by the criminal. I would, I would imagine.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. It's like a British East India company kind of model, like a sort of proxy colonialism, but very tight, like you say. It's just almost just like a different badge on the same thing there. I think this is one of the things that won't get talked about in the next four years because the US Media will talk about the US a lot again. I mean, they always do. But I think people should be concerned about this, about the future for multinational peacekeeping in Africa and more importantly, I guess the future for. Or interlinked with that, the future for human rights in Africa. What do you see as meaningful ways that people can advocate for a future for Africa, which is not just another set of countries extracting resources and leaving very little for the people there? Which is something that has happened. I'm a British person. This has happened by British people for a very long time and other European people for a very long time. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't trying to stop it happening in the future.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

That's a, a difficult one to, to answer because. Yeah, ideally African problems should, in my opinion, be solved by African nations.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And that's the reason that the African Union and all these other ones that I, I mentioned, I think are an attempt to do that.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And certainly Europe and the US shouldn't be dictating how Africans govern themselves. They should be assisting in good governance, good policing, good judiciary. But it, it kind of goes back to money again because there's so much of a vested interest.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Like I heard a figure that M23 were getting $800,000 a month from some of the mines in, in Kivos.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, I can believe.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

So we'll get that kind of money floating around. A lot of people maybe don't want to sort things out.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And, and it, it may suit to, to leave, leave the mayhem there and use all these artisanal miners who are getting paid a couple of cents a day. And Rwanda has just got a big contract with the EU in terms of diamonds.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. I mean, that is the thing. Right. We can tell where this stuff comes from. Like that there is a, there is a means to, to try and limit the amount of these resources which can leave conflict zones in a way which benefits belligerent parties. It's where the markets for those resources are willing to do it. Right.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yeah. And everyone has a stake in the pie, whether it's the overseer of the mine, whether it's the company that owns the mine, whether it's the people that move the product from Kivu into someone neighboring country, and then ultimately the people that buy it commercially in Western Europe or around the rest of the world.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's not, you know, people think of diamonds a lot and I think people that there's been a kind of movement to purchase diamonds which are ethically sourced or to just not use diamonds to sort of move away from them as like a store of value. But it's also the parts in your mobile phone, isn't it? It's not, you know, it's not just like fancy engagement rings.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

This is it. Yeah. Are you willing to pay double the price for more ethical mining methods? Most people probably earn.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. That's the thing. Right. And especially when it's out of sight, out of mind for most people even compared to, you know, we obviously genocide of Palestinian people or the, you know, when we think about these other atrocities, right, like those have not remained out of sight, out of mind like because they're visible on people's social media. Because, you know, people in Palestine have phones and they can film and that's I think meaningfully changed the way like I wouldn't have thought American people would, would care about Palestinian people. I moved here in 2008 and you wouldn't have found much interest in Palestine.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

You wouldn't have expected them to promote ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, no, well, you wouldn't have expected that either. But the movement like to support Palestinian people at this from the grassroots and then also the government doing the exact opposite. You know, it's come from the bottom up. It hasn't come from like government advocacy. But we don't see that as much with, with certainly this part of Africa. Right. Like, and it's. I suppose it's contour's going to have like people in Congo maybe aren't able to access those global networks of like social media and maybe to share their stories, you know. And I think it's also a consequence of us in the media not reporting at all. You know, like I've for years tried to sell stories about Africa to American publications and at best they'll want a story about like the people who are starting like social enterprise, like European or North American people starting like social enterprises or like sort of beneficial companies. And I understand those have a role, but like you're not going to persuade me that there isn't a single African person of interest to you and that it's someone who came from North America, that it's the only relevant story to tell in Africa. And I've had this falling out with so many editors over the years that like, no, I don't want to tell that story. I want to tell a story about people from Congo. In Congo. About people from Rwanda and Rwanda.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

I live in a town towards the west coast of Ireland and there's a guy from there. What I'll do is I'll send you a link. But he's passionate about getting free education in Africa between online courses and online libraries. Obviously the more education you get, the better chance you have of having a better life. So yeah, I did go some stuff and I'll send it on to you and then you can figure out whether it'll be an interesting topic or, or whatever. But I just literally as we were talking, I was thinking of how one guy is trying to change conditions for younger people in Africa and trying to give it to them for free.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

That's it. Yeah, that's the key is like people doing it. One of the things that people did, which I thought was really great as an example, as a model is From October, about October 10th of 2023, I suppose people weren't going to school or university in Gaza and very quickly there weren't any universities in Gaza because they all got bombed. Right. The colleagues of mine in academic departments started putting on seminars and lectures that Palestinian people, be they displaced or still in Gaza, but with access to Internet, you know, still displaced, but internally displaced, could attend and continue with their educations. And I thought that was a really great like solidarity based way to facilitate access to something that people have had taken away from them through no fault of their own. By state aggression.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. There's a model for that. I mean, colonialism has done many terrible things, but it's given us a common language with a lot of our African friends. You know, you speak French and English, you can, you can do quite well. So like, yeah, there are things available and I wish people would. I know I don't think people should stop caring about Palestine. Of course I don't. But I do wish they would care more about people in Africa too because like, they don't deserve this any more than anyone else.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

I was born in 1960 when the first mission went to. To the Congo.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And it's been going on like I'm 64. It's been around 64 years.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

So no more than the, the, the problem with the Palestinians. I think some people, unless you have a specific interest in it or feel passionate about it, a lot of people just, I think, tune out. And to go to the next pronouncement from the White House, you know, it's like clickbait yeah. So I think it's a sad fact, but it's a factor, I think.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah, it's a shame. And like, you know, if there's one thing I'd like to do with my career, I'd like to spend more time in that part of the world and do more reporting. And I think we could do a lot with, as a media, with just explaining how life is for everyday people because people think about Congo in terms of, yeah, the, the M23 and the Congolese government and the Hutu militias and this and that. But the vast majority of people are just trying to get on with their day. You know, they want a better future for their children. And, you know, the fact that your mobile phone is cheap is maybe making their children's future worse. And that's something that we need to reckon with.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

And e. Cars.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the thing. People don't talk about electric cars. It's always, where does all that stuff come? And then even here in, in America, right where the US trying to mine lithium on reservations where, you know, the land, the little land it's left indigenous people to have sovereignty on is where it's now trying to do this very invasive form of mining. Kevin, you've written a book. So would you like to. As we wind down here, do you want to expand a little bit about. About your book? So if people are interested in your life and your time as a peacekeeper and an archaeologist.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Okay, so what, what started off as a lockdown project when covert hit back in the day, I decided I would write an account of my weird and wonderful life for my. Just for my family. And once you start writing, as you're no doubt aware, you start remembering. And suddenly I was at something like a hundred thousand words. And I thought, right, there might be a book in this. And I know obviously I'm opinionated about my own book, naturally, but it's not just a book about some random military guy waffling on about his, his military career. I've a separate career in mountaineering and a kind of a nearly separate career in archaeology. So it's, it's a mixture of soldiering, mountaineering and archaeology. As someone said it to me, it's a bit like Chris Bonnington meets Bear Grylls meets Indiana Jones, which is kind of a weird and wonderful way to do it. So the, the title of the book is A Life Less Ordinary, which this was a recruiting slogo in the 1990s for the, for the Irish Defense Forces.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Oh, I didn't know that.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

I think I, I think I sent you the link.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yep.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Yeah, if not, I'll do it.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, immediately.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

So all your viewers can, can order the book. You can only get it online at the publishers. It's not on Amazon, unfortunately.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, well, I don't know, maybe. Maybe for the best given the, the way tech people are playing the US Economy. Yeah, you can, you can get it online, you can get it sent to the United States if you're interested. I did. Thank you so much for your time, Kevin. Your insights today. I know we really appreciate it. Is there anywhere else if people want to follow you online, aside from the book?

[John Cameron Mitchell]

The book is probably the best ones or it's probably the best way to get in. I'm on LinkedIn and yeah, the normal stuff. Just Google Kevin McDonald and I should, I should come up. I was resisting for years and years and eventually I, I googled Kevin McDonald and I was surprised at the amount of Kevin McDonald's. There is a famous American act writing called Kevin McDonald.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

But I just as a small parroting shot when, when I was in Mali, I was researching the archaeology of Mali and the world expert on Malayan archaeology is a Professor, naturally, Kevin MacDonald. So I sent him an email and I said, by the way, I'm also an archaeologist and my name is Kevin McDonald. And he goes, my words, I'd be in Bangi or in Bamako in two weeks time. Let's meet up. So the two Kevin McDonalds, two archaeologists, met up in. In Bamakop to discuss archaeology.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

So that's nice when these things kept together.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Another one of my weird and wonderful stories.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Kevin. It's always nice to hear from you.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

You're more than welcome, Jim. Snakes.

[Damien Hirst]

Zombies.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Public speaking, the list of fears is endless.

[James Stout]

But the real danger is in your.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Hand when you're behind the wheel. Distracted driving is what's really scary and even deadly. Eyes forward.

[Damien Hirst]

Don't drive distracted.

[James Stout]

Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council.

[Damien Hirst]

Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here?

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Ow.

[Damien Hirst]

Go slower. From Blumhouse TV, iHeart podcasts and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he.

[Robert Evans]

Unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend.

[Damien Hirst]

And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi and what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Hmm.

[Damien Hirst]

Pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill conceived investigative hookups. Mama always used to say God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Now take a big whiff my bruh.

[Damien Hirst]

Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio.

[Robert Evans]

App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

[Damien Hirst]

To your favorite shows.

[Mark Seal]

I'm Mark Seal.

[Damien Hirst]

And I'm Nathan King.

[Mark Seal]

This is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.

[Damien Hirst]

The five families did not want us.

[Robert Evans]

To shoot that picture.

[Damien Hirst]

Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is based on my co host Mark's best selling book of the same title. And on this show we call upon his years of research to help unpack the story behind the Godfather's birth. From start to finish, this is really.

[Mark Seal]

The first interview I've done in bed.

[Damien Hirst]

We sift through innumerable accounts. 35 pages isn't very much, many of them conflicting.

[Robert Evans]

That's nonsense.

[Damien Hirst]

There were 60 pages and try to get to the truth of what really happened.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

And they said we're finished. This is over.

[Damien Hirst]

It only is not going to work.

[Robert Evans]

You gotta get rid of those guys. It's a disaster.

[Damien Hirst]

Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Caan, Talia Shire and many others. Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is John Cameron Mitchell and my new fiction podcast series, Cancellation island stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently canceled. In the future we will all be canceled for 15 minutes, but don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancellation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies, like bad touch football, anti racism, spin class and mandatory ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the council to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing. Karen, where have you brought us Cancellation island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and the people trying to put them back together again. I am today's guest host, Margaret Killjoy. Today is one of those episodes about people well, trying to put it back together again. Or I guess really an episode about people trying to stop them from making things fall apart. Because today I'm going to talk a little bit about the fight against the Mountain Valley Natural Gas pipeline. Last Tuesday, February 25, 2025, the last criminal trials from the campaign to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline were held in Pearisburg, Virginia. As you might have guessed, based on the fact that you've never heard of Pearisburg, Virginia. It's a tiny town nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. It's also the county seat of Giles County, Virginia, and it the town is home to almost 3,000 people. It's in the southwest of the state, right up against West Virginia Culture and geography, of course, both reject things like state lines, though governments are obsessed with them. For 10 years, the people of central Appalachia, on both sides of the imaginary line, fought against this destructive pipeline. Their campaign tied nonviolent direct action with lawsuits and public pressure campaigns, and they very nearly won. It took backdoor dealings at the highest level of power to force the pipeline's construction, with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin holding 2023's Inflation Reduction act hostage until President Biden personally guaranteed that the pipeline would be constructed, overriding all of the courts, activists and locals who'd blocked it along the way. Essentially, the ostensible Democrat Joe Manchin said, fine, I'll vote for your climate bill, but only if you fuck over the state that I represent. The pipeline, owned by Mountain Valley Pipeline, llc, was supposed to be built in a year. Thanks to the campaign against it, it took six and a half years to build. It was intended to cost the company $3 billion. It cost them more than twice that, which is not bad for a scrappy movement of mountain people, hippies and punks. It's not bad for a bunch of grandmas and college kids. I'll be covering the full campaign in more detail soon on Cool People who Did Cool Stuff. This podcast is instead about the trials. Twelve defendants went before the court that day, 11 of them facing felonies and serious prison time. In the end, none of them were sentenced to time behind bars, I am happy to say. A friend of mine invited me down to cover the trials. Twelve defendants, all in the same day, all in the same courtroom with the same judge. I said yes. West Virginia is a bigger state than its own map would indicate because there aren't freeways that run through it. So it takes a very long time to get anywhere. So I packed up my van and headed down on Monday night. That Night sleeping in my van, I had a stress dream about court where I'd forgotten to take off my knife before going through the metal detectors and spent a very long time talking to various cops about who I was and why I was there before being stuck outside the courthouse in a large crowd of protesters surrounded by a large crowd of cops. In that dream, someone who wasn't on either side stood up to give a speech, but too near an open flame and his clothes caught fire. Us anarchists. Again, I'm talking about my dream here. Us anarchists rushed to help him while the cops stared on with blank stares. We beat out the flames and held his burned body while the cops stared on with blank stares. We screamed for someone to call an ambulance while the cops stared on with blank stares. I like when my dreams lend themselves to obvious symbolism in this moment where the apparatus of the state is content to let all of us burn, whether in the fires of fascism or the fires of climate change. But I woke up disturbed nonetheless. With the sun barely over the horizon, I ate a quick breakfast and I drove the rest of the way up to the actual courthouse and the actual trial. Fortunately, at the actual thing, no one caught fire. I parked on a nearby street and made my way to the courthouse. I didn't accidentally bring a pocket knife, which is easy for me to do since I usually have three on me because I am a totally normal human. I did though, bring an audio recorder, which was equally forbidden in the courtroom. I went through the metal detector and surrendered my little bag with the zoom recorder. Later, Press came into the room and I tried to get my recorder back, but I was told that's real media. Without a press badge, I don't look much like someone who works for iHeart. I settled into a seat and waited for the proceedings. Ecodefendants and eco defenders both poured into the tiny, dingy courtroom. The ceiling had holes in it. The drywall was sagging. Appalachia is an extracted from region, a place from which wealth is gathered, not a place where wealth goes. We were reminded repeatedly that the fire code limited occupancy of the room to 89 people, and it sure seemed like they brought in as many cops as they could to limit our numbers. Many more supporters waited outside. Most of what I did that day was wait in the courtroom because most of the courtroom drama was happening behind closed doors as the prosecutor, the judge, and the eight or so defense attorneys all argued and fought over the details of plea deals. Most of these characters, judge, prosecutor, and lawyers were quite familiar to the People working with the movement. This was the last trial of many throughout the ten year campaign, which has relied heavily on nonviolent direct action since 2018. The prosecutor in particular, a guy named Bobby Lilly, was a well known figure. Usually when people say things like, the prosecutor was a clown, they're speaking figuratively. But Bobby Lilly, the prosecutor, is a balloon artist in his free time, and his Facebook is full of photos of all of his balloon creations. The rumor is that he clowned his way through law school, all right? Which, look, if I wasn't predisposed to not like this man because he was arguing for the imprisonment of people trying to save all life on earth, I would kind of think that's cool. But it does mean that there was a clown prosecution, and some people who were there to support. The defendants wore balloon animal hats to mock Bobby Lilly, though they were forced to leave those hats outside as no hats of any kind were allowed in the courtroom. Coming in that morning, we expected most of the defendants to take non cooperating plea deals they'd already agreed to. Non cooperating plea deals are deals in which the defendant refuses to cooperate with the state's investigation of other protesters. Basically, this means these are non snitching deals. A few of the defendants, though, were ready to take their cases to trial. I've decided to largely not use people's names in this reporting. Those names are a matter of public record, of course. But we are entering unprecedented times, and I don't see any particular advantage in making their names more public than they already are. But do you know what I do want to make public? The sweet, sweet deals offered by our advertisers. I love making those public. Here they are. And we're back. The charges against the defendants seem politically motivated. This isn't to say the defendants might not have walked onto pipeline work sites and disrupted activity there. There was certainly a coordinated campaign to do just that. But the charges against them were artificially inflated. I was talking to a supporter during one of the many long interludes in the proceedings who explained to me that nearly everyone on trial that day and a large percentage of all defendants throughout the course of the campaign were charged with felony misuse of a motor vehicle, AKA joyriding. To be clear, no one has been accused of hijacking construction equipment and riding it around. It's just one of the many charges levied at protesters in order to get their bail denied or inflated to tie everyone up in legal proceedings for longer and intimidate people into pleading guilty to lesser charges. These are similar to the kidnapping charges that a lot of protesters got as well. Despite that, well, no one was kidnapped during the course of the campaign, except, of course, by the state. Another supporter explained to me. Inflated charges has been part of the Mountain Valley Pipeline's legal strategy all along. The same as protesters look to tie the pipeline company up in court and delay construction, MVP's strategy seems to have been to drag out court cases and keep as many individual forest defenders caught up in legal jeopardy as possible. Of course, they shouldn't actually have the means to change people's charges, but if the fight against MVP has taught us anything, it's that the state caves to business interests every time. Most defendants from the course of the campaign have taken pleas that include suspended sentences so that they never do jail time as long as they promise to never try to save the world from fossil fuel infrastructure. It seems like MVP wants each person who catches charges to be out of the fight. But fortunately, Frontline's work is only a portion of the work involved in defending the earth. When someone told me that this was MVP's strategy to catch everyone up on charges, I wasn't really skeptical because it made sense. But I still had that confirmed for me in the courtroom. You see, a few lawyers or other legal representatives of MVP were present in the courtroom that day, standing at the back of the room, seemingly eavesdropping on the courtroom chatter. Word on the street was that part of their goal was to gather information for the ongoing civil litigation happening against environmentalists. But eavesdropping goes both ways, and one supporter I talked to overheard them talking to each other about how they wish they could drag these cases out even longer. Once court began, defendants went up one by one before the judge. Most entered pleas of not guilty with stipulation. This is, in essence, a way to accept a plea agreement without actually accepting guilt. So each person went up, pleaded not guilty with stipulation, and then was found guilty by the judge on their lesser charges. The process took three to six minutes per defendant. I tracked it. The defendants were there for arrests stemming from actions that happened between October 2023 and March 2024 from three different actions, all on nearby Peter's Mountain, a mountain which sits on the horizon of Pearisburg, Virginia, and which defies the border between Virginia and West Virginia. Most of the action from the campaign happened on either Peters Mountain or another mountain in another county, Poor Mountain. One action in October 2023, like I said, court has been dragged out for a very long time, was an action in which one person locked themselves to an excavator, while others were there in support. The supporters of the action were facing felonies too. Some of them a while back were rearrested at their own arraignments, given additional charges, and put into jail for days. It's not hard to imagine why the defendants were nervous in the courtroom that day, even though most of them had already sorted out their plea agreements ahead of time. The state is fickle, condescending, and unpredictable. One of the defendants that I talked to told me about their own case. The evidence supporting the charges against pretty much everyone was weak. But the evidence supporting the charges against this particular person were particularly weak. The state kept offering this person plea deals before anyone else. Will you be offering the same deal to my co defendants? The defendant kept asking. The state kept saying no. So the defendant kept refusing the deal. That defendant came to court fully expecting to stand trial rather than take a better deal than what their co defendants were getting. The big story of the day actually revolves around that particular point. At least one of the defendants who came prepared to stand trial last Tuesday wound up being offered much more generous plea agreements at the last minute because the state knew its case against them was flimsy. Those who accepted non cooperating plea deals were hit with suspended sentences, community service, and restitution. The details differed from case to case, but in general, people were given a year in prison hanging over their heads if they're caught breaking the law in the next year and have to spend between 50 and 100 hours doing manual labor. For Giles County, Virginia. I've been told this can range from something benign, like painting murals, to something intentionally humiliating like cleaning the toilets at the police station. The single biggest issue of contention was restitution. The defendants are being ordered to pay for the overtime costs associated with arresting them. One defendant, who was, I believe, arrested at a Moms against the Pipelines action, a woman who simply wants her children to grow up in a world with a habitable ecosystem, was in court last Tuesday to contest the restitution payments. This is, as I understand it, the only issue that was not fully resolved that day. The case the defense made was one that I found convincing, although of course I have a bias in that direction. Essentially, the defense's case was that people are not legally on the hook for the investigation of their own crime. That it would set a very dangerous precedent to have people have to pay for the cops time to arrest them. The prosecutor's argument was, and I, I rudely paraphrase here, yeah, but fuck these people in particular, that because There was a campaign against the mvp. Their crimes ought to be treated differently, and the same standard of the rule of law should not apply to them. Again, I'm paraphrasing, but that really was the takeaway that I seemed to get. The judge said he would need to consider the case law on the matter and would not rule on it that day. But you know what he would have ruled on if he was the judge of this podcast, he would have ruled that it is time for advertising. And we're back. The only case that actually went to trial, as I understand it, was for the only misdemeanor case of the day, a protester who was accused and convicted later at the end of the trial of spending a couple days living inside a length of pipe to prevent it from being buried in the earth. The full incompetence of the police was on display from the state trooper who didn't know what the word diameter meant when asked to describe the pipeline in question to the police, who admitted that they didn't actually bother watching the entrance to the pipe, so they didn't actually see the protester when they emerged from the pipe. In court, the cops said the protester came up to them to turn themself in and said, well, you're lucky. I'm honest. A large part of the defense's case was that the defendant had been denied the right to a speedy trial, which seems true to me. Misdemeanors in particular are supposed to move through the court system quickly and not drag on for a year. Because again, it seems quite likely that MVP has been working from the start to drag on court cases as long as possible. All the while the trial went on, supporters outside had a table set up in the parking lot with homemade food, a staple of this movement. As far as I can tell, the connections between the frontlines and their supporters built a very strong movement indeed. After the trial, an older local man gave a heartfelt thank you to everyone who had put their bodies on the line to protect the mountains he loves. And I went around and talked to people feeling a bit odd to be there as a stranger to the movement and as a journalist. Blocking pipeline construction through nonviolent direct action is simple in principle, but complicated in the details. The core of it is that you leverage your own safety in order to prevent construction crews from working. Since your own safety is what you're gambling with, it's, well, not safe. The idea is you put your own body on the line. In 1998, for example, an Earth First. Activist named David Chain died when a logger dropped a tree on him and killed him. And despite ample evidence that the logger in question had been aware of the protesters and had been threatening them, no charges were pressed against him. In 2003, an American anarchist peace worker named Rachel Corey was killed in the Gaza Strip when she stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer trying to stop the bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian home. Even when you aren't murdered for doing it, the work itself is dangerous, too. Shortly before I joined my first forest defense campaign in the Pacific Northwest, an activist named Horehound had just fallen to her death from a tree sit. And her absence was a tangible presence in every meeting in every forest defense camp for years after. So I don't feel like I'm speaking hyperbolically when I say that in that courtroom were some of the bravest people I've ever met who risked their lives to stop a clear and present threat against it. And again, I genuinely believe this is not hyperbolic to say a clear and present threat against all life on Earth. Climate change could very easily destroy every ecosystem on the planet. This fight is bigger than Appalachia. These forest defenders at this last trial knew that they would likely face felonies were they arrested, and they knew that people have died doing this work before them. And I don't want to speak to everyone involved's gender identity, but it seems likely that some of them were trans as well, and thus risking spending prison time in the wrong prisons, which is a particularly dangerous position to be in. I don't say this to try to scare people out of joining movements like this. I can name people who have died in nonviolent direct action campaigns, and occasionally people have served real jail time. But I've met thousands and thousands more who have saved wild places, who have built lifelong friendships, and who have proven to themselves that they are who they hoped they would be. I want to end this by reading two statements. One was written by one of the defendants and was posted onto the Appalachians Against Pipelines Facebook page on March 3rd. You can read the full statement over there if you'd like. Today we proved that codefendant solidarity works. We were able to see how different strategies against a stacked system play out. It is in the court's best interest for us to take a deal out of fear of trial. But today we showed that they are just as afraid of an uncertain outcome, and we can use that to our advantage when we work together. The people who went to trial or pushed it to the brink Got objectively better outcomes than those who took deals ahead of time. And those who took deals often had to struggle with changing conditions at trial, but still felt obligated to comply. I and another defendant held out, in part out of principle for people who had not been offered deals and in part to say, fuck you, Bobby Lilly, our prosecutor, who is a literal clown. My co defendant and I went to bat for another who was not offered a deal. At first, my co defendant was offered a deal, a rather nice one at that. But my friend said no. The clown blinked. My friend basically went to trial. Technically, they took a deal, but they basically started a trial. Prosecution made a motion to amend charges, but abruptly, the clown and his cop buddy left. They ran. They had no evidence. Another deal, which was even better, was offered, and this time I got one too. For me, it was good and in agreement. We took our deals. The one other person was offered an okay deal, but opted to go to trial with eyes open at the court's incompetence and crushed it. Little Bobby Lilly looked even more like a clown. Every deal that was offered only got better. Especially on the day of the trial. You don't have to accept the first deal, or the second, or the third, or the fourth. And when they try to pit us against each other, it is because they know we are stronger together. Initially, we were charged with conspiracy. The real conspiracy is between prosecutors and the judges, between the cops and the corporations. It is the conspiracy between your landlord and your boss to keep you exhausted and hungry, unable to fight back. It is the dictatorship of the billionaires to keep us bound to their world where they make and break their own rules. This is bigger than a 42 inch wide, 303 mile long ticking time bomb running through Appalachia. It is the fact that our lives are bought and sold by the large landowning class who were able to ram this project through under Joe Biden, despite the harm it'll cause because it will make them money as the world burns. Then here's another statement from the person who sat inside the pipe. And the statement is from last year. Winning looks so much bigger than just stopping this pipeline. It's a win through the community folks continue to build. It is a win because of the insane amount of skills that people have gathered and shared. It's a win because whether or not this pipeline ever has gas running through it, the legacy of resistance in Appalachia still lives. Extractive industry knows that they can't fuck with the communities here without going through hell. And we better not let them. Forget that many times in my life I have felt consumed by grief. Grief for all the places this pipeline has destroyed, for communities who continue to be ravaged by the state and industry, for the senseless violence committed against people and land every day, for friends and strangers forced into cages. But what keeps me moving is knowing that I feel such grief only because I have such deep hope and love for what could be and what we have the power to create, find or facilitate. Radical community Wherever you call home, Think about the things you are willing to sacrifice for people near and far. Dream of worlds that feel out of reach, because I bet they aren't as far away as it may seem. That's the end of the quote. And so yeah, though the criminal trials are over, the civil legal fight rages on. MVP is attempting to wield civil courts to silence its opposition. And if you want to help support that fight, which continues, you can donate to Appalachian Legal Defense Fund, which you can find probably by just searching for it. But you can also find it by going to Bit Lynch Slash app Legal Defense. All one word, no dashes. Anyway, that's it for the episode. I'll talk to you soon.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

Snakes.

[Damien Hirst]

Zombies. Public speaking.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

The list of fears is endless, but.

[Damien Hirst]

The real danger is in your hand.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

When you're behind the wheel. Distracted driving is what's really scary and even deadly. Eyes forward.

[Damien Hirst]

Don't drive distracted. Brought to you by N.N.H.T.S.A. and the Ad Council do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How Go slower. From Blumhouse TV, I Heart podcasts and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series Series Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend and Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi and what's the way to find a missing person. Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Hmm.

[Damien Hirst]

Pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill conceived investigative hookups. Mama always used to say God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Now take a big whiff my bruh.

[Damien Hirst]

Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio.

[Robert Evans]

App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

[Damien Hirst]

To your favorite shows.

[Mark Seal]

I'm Mark Seale.

[Damien Hirst]

And I'm Nathan King.

[Mark Seal]

This is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.

[Damien Hirst]

The five families did not want us.

[Robert Evans]

To sh that picture?

[Damien Hirst]

Leave the Gun Take the Cannoli is based on my co host Mark's best selling book of the same title. And on this show we call upon his years of research to help unpack the story behind the Godfather's birth. From start to finish, this is really.

[Mark Seal]

The first interview I've done in bed.

[Damien Hirst]

We sift through innumerable accounts. 35 pages isn't very much, many of them conflicting.

[Robert Evans]

That's nonsense.

[Damien Hirst]

There were 60 pages and try to get to the truth of what really happened and they said we're finished.

[Robert Evans]

This is over.

[Damien Hirst]

Not only is not going to work, you gotta get rid of those guys.

[Robert Evans]

It's a disaster.

[Damien Hirst]

Leave the Gun Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Caan, Talia Shire and many others. Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is John Cameron Mitchell and my new fiction podcast series, Cancellation island stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently canceled. In the future we will all be canceled for 15 minutes, but don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancellation island revolutionary rehab therapies like bad touch football, anti racism, spin class, and mandatory ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the council to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing.

[Robert Evans]

Karen, where have you brought us?

[Damien Hirst]

Cancellation island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Hello and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today and we have a very special episode in which everyone is a doctor. I will be leading the discussion, of course, as Doctor of Modern European history, but I'm joined today by Venkatesh Ramnath, who is a practicing pulmonologist, a professor at UC San Diego Health, medical director of several ICUs in rural and urban settings, and also the author of the Substack Be a Health Architect. Welcome to the sheriffing test. Thanks for joining us.

[James Stout]

Great to be here.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

I'm also joined by Dr. Kavehoda, a gastroenterologist and the host of our favorite medical podcast, the House of Pod of the Many.

[Mark Seal]

You listen to, I'm sure.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, what they might call a super user in the medical podcast space.

[Mark Seal]

You listen to more than me.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Most Importantly, Kaveh, of course, our friend. That's right, our resident doctor with a useful doctorate. So what we want to talk about today is Medicare and specifically some of the cuts to Medicare. More broadly, the. I don't know where you have to put this challenges in for people working in health care in the Trump administration. Right. We addressed specifically gender affirming care in a previous episode, but it doesn't start and end there. Right. That might be the thing that sort of the culture wars have been focusing on recently. But I want to talk more broadly about the challenges facing health care. So, first of all, would one of you care to explain Medicare for people who are not familiar? Some listeners might not be living in the United States or they might just not have encountered this yet in their life. So could one of you explain what this particular sort of type of health insurance is and how it's maybe more vulnerable than other types to federal government changes?

[James Stout]

I could take a stab at it. I'm not a health policy wonk, but I am a physician that has to deal with Medicare all the time. So Medicare, in sort of general terms is a type of health insurance that is provided by the federal government. It is almost exclusively for individuals above the age of 65, as it dates back to the 1960s with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program. And so since that time, there has been this blanket coverage for any individuals above that age, such that all their medical services or products, you know, whatever they need for their healthcare, is actually covered by the government. This is the federal government. Now, the interesting thing about Medicare is that there are different parts to it. There's part A, which is primarily for some essential services and includes hospital care. There's part B, which includes whatever physicians fees go into that health care. And then there's part D, which relates to pharmaceutical prices. So your drug costs. Yeah, it's not comprehensive in the sense that there's always something more that individuals need. But Medicare, for all intents and purposes, is the sort of standard and it should cover most of the individual's needs. Now, that said, the commercial payers, that is the other insurance companies that are not federally government sponsored, take their lead from Medicare. So a lot of the different payment rates or coverages and services, they all look to what the centers of Medicare and Medicaid services dictate as far as what is an acceptable reimbursement rate, what are the rules around what should be covered and what should not. So that's why Medicare is such an important entity for the United States.

[Mark Seal]

Yeah, I'll Add to that, they set the lead of importance here too. Because if we're talking about telemedicine, telehealth, how important that is to Medicare patients, to everyone in the country at this point, then if they are to cut it, if that happens, as I think we're probably going to discuss, if that goes away, then the other private insurance companies are going to follow.

[James Stout]

That's right.

[Mark Seal]

It could be across the board changes led by these changes in Medicare.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. So let's talk about those changes then. As you mentioned, right, there's this telemedicine, it's a waiver, right, that has allowed telemedicine to be funded through this for the last five years. I suppose it's going to expire by the end of this month, which is March 2025. If you're listening later, explain why telemedicine has been such a positive step in healthcare since, if you could, since 2020. And then what we're facing, if it's no longer funded federally, may I'll start.

[Mark Seal]

This one, but Venkatesh definitely want you to weigh in on it as well. Just to give a little background. Over the past five years it's grown quite a bit and it's gone from being kind of this emergency stop gap to a real cornerstone of what we consider modern healthcare. And now it's exceedingly common. Like over 75% of hospitals in the US connect at a distance via video conference or some technology to patients. And it's been popular on both sides. It's been popular on both sides of the aisle. When it first was done, as you mentioned, during COVID when they, they, they said, okay, we're going to peel back some of the restrictions on Medicare coverage for these telehealth things. It was considered like a victory, like one of the few good things to come out of COVID Yeah, both sides liked it. It was popular amongst patients, it was popular amongst medical providers. It was good for Republicans and Democrats alike. And as you mentioned, it's been kept going through being put in some bill or another since it was initially put in, I think as they called it in 2020. And it's been put in one bill or another to go with the funding. But then came this last December when Congress was going through their spending. It was only given this three month reprieve which is going to be up, as you mentioned, at the end of this month. And if it goes away, there's a lot of factors will go into a lot of them. But there's a lot of people older Patients, immunocompromised, patients who don't want to come into office, people with disabilities, people who can't get around that well, people in rural areas, which is really how it started. People who are going to be hurt all across this country. And at this point, the majority of people have had at least one experience or more in a year with telemedicine. It's become a part of a lot of people's lives. And if it goes away, you know, there's still gonna be healthcare as it is. I mean, it doesn't mean healthcare is going away, but it is gonna put a tremendous burden on patients and hospitals, for that matter, across the country.

[James Stout]

Yeah, let me add to that. So, you know, telemedicine has been around for a very long time, at least technically speaking. Right. I mean, you can go back to the 1970s. Even when you talk about the intensive care unit, which is where the sickest people in the hospital are, there are studies that come out of the 1970s. However, ever since people have had iPhones and been on Airbnb and everything else since 2007, that inflection point actually had a wave of opportunity that washed right into medicine. And as Kaveh is saying, you know, we have such a fragmented healthcare system that has, you know, folks living in rural areas, suburban areas, and urban areas, all of whom are at the mercy of what specialists may be there contracted at any given time for any given specialty. Now, telemedicine, as it's gotten more and more popular, has kind of leveled the playing field. I mean, you can be in a rural place, like where I'm sitting right now on the US Mexico border, or you can be in New York City, you know, one of the densest populations. But you may not have access to specialty expertise without telemedicine. With telemedicine, you can now have access, and I've seen patients love it. You can deal with the sickest of the sick, like I said, intensive care units, but you can also have outpatient experiences. And we've seen a number of different, you know, commercial opportunities that have leveraged that. But the point is that as. As we're hearing on this, you know, it's become sort of a standard operating procedure for how we deliver healthcare. And if you just pull the rug out from that, there can be some, you know, unintended consequences to that that are not insignificant.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. And, like, it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. Right. Like, if I think about my own experience with it, I was traveling recently and got Covid like a couple of months ago, and there was no need for me to go to a clinic and be around other people. Right. I just needed to contact my doctor and get some prescriptions and check in and like, it was so much better that I could do it in my pajamas from a bed rather than like having to get out. And I'm, I'm lucky I have access to a car. I can drive to the doctor's surgery. It's not that far away. I have a job that accommodates my schedule. But there are a million reasons why it might be very beneficial to people. So let's talk about you. You mentioned this before, but we have commercial insurers and like, people might think that this is limited to older folks or it doesn't affect them, or it's something that only impacts people who have Medicare. But as you said, Medicare kind of sets the standard for what is covered and what isn't covered. Right. So can you explain how this might end up resulting in just a massive, like a cliff? I've seen it described as a telehealth cliff.

[James Stout]

Yeah. So I mean, basically the, the sort of this convoluted way that we pay for services is it looks to one standard, even though some may argue how did that standard come about? But regardless of that, Medicare is the central authority that basically tells everyone this is what we should be doing and this is how much we should be paying for it. Now, the commercial insurers can decide to exceed that if they wish. If they say, have an employer whose employees they want to have a special contract with, that's fine, that's not restricted. But the bottom of what is considered a reimbursable amount is really set by Medicare. And so they move the bottom. And so if you drop the bottom, you can pretty much well assured in this, you know, in a capitalist, you know, sort of mentality that the cost should go down. Right. I mean, why should you pay more for something that you don't need to? Right. And we see that, we see that every year. Okay, Every year there's new technology, but the slightly older technology, which is again covered by Medicare, they move those reimbursements down. So whether it's a sleep study for someone with obstructive sleep apnea or difficulty sleeping at night, or it's some ophthalmology technology or it's some ultrasound machine, it doesn't really matter what it is. Medicare is always trying to minimize costs, which is understandable. They want to make it cost effective, but they are setting the lead. So everyone will follow what they do. That's kind of the way that our system is sort of set up.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Mark Seal]

You know, I might just add to that that aside from all the things we mentioned about it, how, you know, it helps people in rural areas, people with difficulty getting places or just really busy schedules, it also, you know, helps free up hospital beds, helps prevent emergency rooms from being overwhelmed. It leads to faster testing, it leads to a higher number of people that we can see. And in terms of its quality, we know it works well. And about 90% of cases of telemedicine to get the same outcomes if the patient was there in clinic. And that 10%, that's not, it's not clear that they're getting inferior care in most of those cases. So it's an effective treatment. And you could make an argument that it is cost effective in some ways too, particularly clearly for things like dermatology, pediatrics. These are things where it's clearly cost effective to have it. But even beyond that, it's not even necessarily, I think, a strong argument that we'll be losing money from it and that cutting it would help us in the long run. I feel like if we're being smart about how to manage American healthcare system and how to keep it afloat, telemedicine is going to be an important part of that going forward.

[James Stout]

I do want to add something here and I do want to be careful about the term because telemedicine and telehealth are not only sort of a catch all, but they're sort of used interchangeably. Right. And just like anything, you have to be specific about the term. So I think what we're talking about on this podcast is telemedicine in terms of a two way audio visual interface where you can have a direct face to face consultation or interaction with a practicing practitioner. Usually that's going to be a physician, but it may be a nurse practitioner or other physician extender we call them. But just to be clear, you know, telemedicine also extends to other types of devices like wearables, those things that they're either, you know, trackers that you can wear as your Fitbit or a sleep device, you know, that you can wear around. Those kinds of things are kind of put into the telemedicine bucket. And it's not clear to me, at least how that is going to change. I think April 1st is when the face to face coverage from a professional fee standpoint that is slated to end because they did liberalize it during the COVID pandemic and it's been extended, I think another year around that. And that will, that will definitely change the dynamic here. But it's not clear how much of it extends to other types of remote physiologic monitoring services and products.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Right. Yeah. So something like a glucose monitor or like.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Some other. Yeah. Which could be catastrophic for people. Right. If they don't get those. Those funded.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

We're going to take a little break for advertisements here. Maybe you'll get an advertisement for, for a glucose monitor or even insulin.

[Mark Seal]

Could only hope.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah, we can. Glad they're taking some of that money that they've made me bleed out of my wallet over the years and returning it to me in the form of podcast advertisements. All right, we're back. Let's talk more broadly about, I guess the changes in the legislative environment for healthcare might be a good way to put it. Venkatesh, you wrote an excellent op ed recently where you discussed you were one of the many recipients of the tell me five useful things you did at work this week email. I thought you wrote a really good piece about the varied and critical work that you do. Can you talk about what is the feeling among health care professionals, physicians, whoever you'd sort of like to speak. Speak as going into four years of possibly vastly reduced government spending and a sort of bizarre and haphazard cutting of the, of the federal bureaucracy that we're seeing?

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's a tough time, certainly. And coming out of the pandemic, this is not what really anybody expected. But, you know, the stresses have been mounting for quite a while. Right. Healthcare professionals are seeing and feeling more stress at work, whether it's the demands of the job, meaning that there are fewer resources to spend on a heightened number of patients with increasingly complex diseases or even just the questions that we are getting from patients. A lot of patients now are asking me really financial questions. I mean, literally the other day I had a woman who was unfortunately having septic shock and was faced with having to amputate her leg. And I was speaking with her husband because she was becoming more and more delirious. And he was just asking me about, well, I'm going to have to sell my house in order to fund what might come down the pike as far as being at home with services. And I was trying to, I was trying to kind of get an understanding of how he viewed his wife actually going through the thing that we're watching in the moment. But it's a preoccupation that has taken up a lot of space in the room. And it's now coming on to physicians to sort of navigate at least some questions and answer those questions around it. So that's a long way of saying that physicians and nurses and other healthcare professionals are feeling more and more stressful in a system that's just buckling. Right. And the last thing anybody needs is to be having to do more without really a clear understanding of the purpose around it. Right. And we are all for cost effectiveness. We want that to work. We also want to provide care irrespective of someone's religious, political, or other beliefs. And yet, you know, we have to work within a system that we kind of are not really understanding how they're approaching this issue. Are they with us or against us or somewhere in between? It's sort of a. It's a moving target. And so I think that's what's kind of sandwiched a lot of healthcare professionals, and we don't really know where to turn for some of the answers that we ourselves are looking for.

[Mark Seal]

I would add, also, you know, we're seeing this active dismantling of the US Healthcare infrastructure and our friends in the academic world in particular. It's a very stressful time for them. Who knows if their studies are going to go through, who knows if they're going to get their funding. Who knows what's going to stay, what's going to go in the next couple of years. There's a lot of concern over that, obviously. But even in the medical world, outside of the academic centers, I know a lot of doctors right now are concerned and they're concerned about what's going to happen to the state of our scientific community that helps us with new advancements in medical technology in the coming years. And it seems like, as Ventesh was alluding to, we're dismantling all our ability to follow, to study, to really closely track infectious disease in a time that is exceedingly dangerous across the world, with rising disease, tuberculosis in this country, measles in this country, in Uganda, there's Ebola again. There's threats all over the world. And this is one of the worst times I could think of to be in this moment of austerity, and particularly because so much of it seems unclear to us why. Why these things are being done. You know, is it all because of this ridiculous gender ideology? Do they actually think they're saving money with some of these things? It's a very unclear time. And of course, there are a lot of people in the medical world, doctors included, that are conservative or Republican voters getting into conversations with them about this is sort of a tough thing to do because like Fintesh mentioned, they like a lot of us, want to make sure we're doing this in a cost effective manner. Something we talk about and we have been talking about in medicine for a long time, particularly academic medicine, interestingly enough, which is really on the cutting board. It's academic medicine that usually talks about trying to be cost effective. What tests are we going to order? What labs do we need to get? How are we doing this in the most cost effective way? These are important things that are discussed and across the political spectrum in medicine. I think there is some concern even amongst some of the more right leaning doctors. But again, it's hard because they've gone this far down the road. It's hard to know when they're going to pull back. What's the line in the sand for them about what is maybe too far for this administration.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. And certainly like an area where we're seeing that right now is in like, like public health. Right. We don't really know like I'm going to Texas next week where there's currently a measles outbreak.

[Mark Seal]

Yeah.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Things that we didn't think that we might be seeing in this country again, we're seeing again. And like, as you say, it's coming at a time when like not just funding is unstable but also, I guess the basics of science have been somewhat politicized to a degree and people, I don't know if that's something you see in your practice, but certainly I was talking to a doctor friend who said half their clients are now declining vaccinations as I was there to get every disease that I could get. I have a lot of travel vaccinations, so I'm always getting new and exciting vaccinations. But you, I'm making up for some of the gap, I guess. But it's, it's, it's a really challenging time. Right. From, from that perspective as well. Like the culture around it.

[Mark Seal]

Yeah, that's right. I mean even here in the San Francisco Bay area, you know, I've seen more vaccine hesitation than I remember ever seeing before in the past.

[James Stout]

It's sort of a vexing question because I think some of this is, let's be clear, some of this is on our messaging, you know, as healthcare professionals. I mean there are more and more articles. In fact, there was a Wall Street Journal piece a couple weeks ago that was saying how patients are increasingly not trusting their doctors. And there are data to say that we don't communicate very well. Right. So there is that, and that's on us. And, you know, another op ed piece in the Boston Globe by Ashish Jha, you know, did a mea culpa around some of the things that public health. We did wrong. We got it wrong in Covid, where we didn't, you know, deal with some of the doubts and lack of evidentiary base for masking and some of these other things that basically hurt us in the end. So. So there's definitely that. However, you know, restoring the trust in health care professionals is sort of like a basic step to anyone getting their health care. I mean, I think people still go to their doctors. Most people still trust their doctor to some degree. And I think that that's at least a bright spot in where we are, because when we've lost that, I think we're really in trouble. I mean, it's slipping. But I think that there is a way to restore that trust. But it starts with. It just starts with a conversation. If someone has a vaccine hesitancy or they don't understand what's going on, that's the opportunity to open the doors to a dialogue. And I think maybe that's, you know, maybe that's the starting point for any of this. We all want cost effectiveness. We all want, you know, transparency. We also want to have choices that make sense to us, but let's not make it an adversarial confrontation. And I think that that goes for both sides.

[Mark Seal]

I would add, though, my. I agree with you on pretty much all of that. I agree that we need to have those conversations, even if they're difficult. We need to be able to look back objectively about things that worked and didn't work. But a lot of these sort of mea culpas that have come out about, like, you know, this is where we went wrong and why we lost trust, if I'm being honest, including that one from Ashish, Jad has a lot of, in my opinion, pick me energy. A lot of people who are trying to appeal to the incoming administration and be like, hey, look, I'm cool too. I'm not always about vaccines. And to me, that's just as bad, too. And I do think we need to have an honest conversation. And I do think we need to be clear about how we do science. Something we need to be able to explain, and you're absolutely right, which we didn't do very well, is, look, we are working with information we have at hand. We're doing everything we can. This information may change when it changes, our recommendations are going to change too. And that is tough. That is a tough message to get across because people don't like nuance like that. People don't like the uncertainty of that. People want to know yes or no? Absolutely. And sometimes it's hard, it's hard to find good communicators in science to do that. But that. You're exactly right. It is incumbent upon us as doctors who have a substack like yours, have a podcast like mine, who are academics, who have a reach to students and beyond to communicate these things. And even though it would be awesome if for the next four years my podcast was just about farts and poop, I know I have to do a lot of this stuff because I know how important this is now more than ever. So I totally agree. It's going to start with conversations.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

I think there's a big difference between this is the information we have available and we're doing our best with it. When we get new information, we'll do something different if that's what that information points to. And these people are acting out of malice to deprive you of your rights, which is sometimes what's been suggested by some people. And I think a good way to defeat that, as you say, is communicating around it. It is very sad that when I was doing the research for my PhD dissertation, first I wrote about violence in the anarchist builders union for my master's, and then I wrote about public health and popular Sport in the 1930s in Barcelona. And a lot of what you saw anarchists doing in Barcelona in the 1930s was talking to people about tuberculosis, educating people about tuberculosis, and explaining what tuberculosis was and where it came from. And like, that was in 1931.

[Mark Seal]

How far we've come, baby.

[James Stout]

Wow. Wow.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, it's great. There were some other things from the 1930s which have also made an unwelcome return. Tuberculosis is not the only one. There's also the Nazi salute in large public gatherings in the United States, which. Yeah, I know. Anarchists had answers for them both in the 1930s, and they're the same answers that apply now. I think people, like people will be distressed by this. Right. Like a lot of people of my age and younger, I guess it's folks a bit younger than me for a larger part. Like the pandemic was a life defining event for a lot of younger folks. Right. And it was a scary thing. It still is a scary thing. Like getting Covid still really sucks. And I know people who have long Covid and it's the thought of that is petrifying to me. People will be genuinely anxious now, right, at this potential dismantling of the public health apparatus. Like a rise in vaccine hesitancy, less funding for research such that if we enter another pandemic with some novel infectious disease, we won't be able to respond as fast. Right. The response to Covid for the criticisms of it, like the speed with which we had vaccines was amazing. Some of that came from Venkatesh's college at UCSD actually, or Salk, I guess, which is next door with free parking, which is nice. So what would you say to people, this is a thing I see more and more among folks who are friends of mine is real worry about infections, infectious disease, real concern about new variants of COVID or about the bird flu is one. Right. These other infectious diseases. I saw 50 people have died of as yet unexplained disease in Congo recently. What would you say to those people? Because their concerns are somewhat legitimate. Right. If we go into another pandemic, we're not going to be anywhere near as effective as we were in 2020 because of all these combination of reasons we've discussed.

[James Stout]

That's a hard question to answer. I would say, let me back up. I think that the COVID pandemic, yes, there are a lot of things that went well. The vaccine development was phenomenal, I mean, revolutionary. Who would have expected that to happen? However, it also just revealed how shattered our public health system really is in terms of messaging, even detection, spreading information, even the vaccine distribution was completely chaotic. Right. So I don't want to say that, you know, the public health response during COVID was some sort of paragon to be emulated or replicated. Right. So that said, though, Absolutely. I mean, you know, how are we going to handle a new era of this what if, you know, scenario where we don't know what virus is coming next? I mean, I'm seeing these days, I'm even seeing viruses that never caused the kind of respiratory failure in the past. They're doing it now, whether it's rsv, the respiratory syncytial virus, or even non Covid coronavirus, which should just give you a cold and the sniffles, and yet it's causing devastating pneumonias. So we're in a new era and antibiotic resistance is not getting any less problematic. So what do we do in this era? Well, I think awareness is the first thing. Okay, Awareness around. Yes. I mean, these diseases are transmitted from person to person. You know, we all know somebody who doesn't want to take a vaccine. I mean I don't think there's, that's a surprise to say we know of somebody or directly or maybe one degree of separation. Right. And I think you need to have those community conversations. You need to have one on one conversations. Yes, it's going to be uncomfortable, comfortable, but we gotta talk about it and talk to your healthcare provider about it. I mean, yes, you can look up stuff on TikTok, yes you could look up stuff on Google or you name your online resource, but you want to have a person that can actually understand from years of living in, living and breathing this stuff and also who listens to you as a human being in the same community or somewhere near abouts right to, to put together what the science says in some sort of meaningful way to you and not some anonymous, you know, resource that may or may not have all the, you know, all the data at their fingertips, you know, so, so I guess it still goes back to how does anyone find reliable information? Where do you go when you've got questions? Most people want a human being who's lived and breathed this with experience to help them navigate. I certainly see that not just as a doctor, but as a friend, as a family member, I mean, constantly, you know, they're asking me these things. And I would suggest that, you know, your audience may have connections, both personally but also professionally to those folks that can help them navigate, you know.

[Mark Seal]

And to answer your question from my perspective is a challenge because I think people should be concerned. In fact, I just, I did a two parter with one of the world's best virologists talking about the possible bird flu pandemic that could arise and all the threats that are out there. And so I do think there are some really significant serious risks to be worried about. However, I'm never going to say there's nothing that can be done about it. There's plenty that can still be done about it. I still maintain hope in the medical community for what we're able to do and what we're able to accomplish. And to echo what I think both of you guys have said or would at least agree with, there's a lot of changes that we can make locally amongst our small sphere of influence and then growing out from there in terms of getting vaccinated, in terms of wearing masks when needed, or at least looking at the data with an open mind and sharing good resources. Because one thing that the younger population is good about and what some of these people you're mentioning, James, is they're good at detecting bullshit online. And that's a skill that needs to be honed for medical literacy as well. And I'm hopeful that that's going to continue to improve. Maybe stupid optimism, but I do believe the younger generation is going to continue to be better at that than the older generation. And I think that will help battle a lot of the misinformation that's out there. But there are things that they can do, in fact, for getting back to the telehealth thing. For example, talking about telemedicine slash telehealth as Venkatesh sort of broke down in terms of it being cut at the end of the month. There are people that are really pushing against that, including Ro Khanna, who's here, a legislator here in California who's proposed a new bill. I haven't been able to see any of the details of it, but there are a lot, including Amazon, by the way. Amazon is one of like 350 companies that have written a letter to Congress to help push for this funding. So if you can call a congressperson, if you can do that, if you can keep bothering them, telling them how important it is, I think those are things that can help. So I think that's a good place to start.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, that's a really good piece of advice.

[James Stout]

If I could just follow up with that. I think part of what will help with the support for some of these programs is to take, you know, take us take a few minutes to think about what the other side is worried about.

[Damien Hirst]

Right.

[James Stout]

I mean, we all know about the excesses of certain online bad actors who are telemedicine. They use telemedicine to promote, you know, ADHD medications or other types of psychotropic medications, which was not, it was not supported and it actually caused harm. Right. So there are things out there that are excesses and somewhat harmful. And if we could as a community, sort of help frame the approach to dealing with some of those things and preventing some of those problems, then I think some of the support will kind of sort of show itself. I think the worry is if you open up the floodgates too wide, you know, human nature being what it is, it's going to encourage bad behavior. Not that anybody wants that, but there is something to be said about some scrutiny. Right. So if we're the ones, and I completely support the use of telemedicine, but I also want to be careful about how to promote its thoughtful and safe use and wed that in the proposal and not just leave it for others to Figure out that. That I think would potentially change the conversation around. Well, you just want this and we're not going to give it to you. Like the standoff will, will subside when you try to work it, work a partnership out as opposed to a give it to me or else kind of scenario.

[Mark Seal]

I don't disagree with that. But I also think you're giving Doge more credit than I would, which is to say that they actually really. They really would focus or listen to. I think what they've just done is literally, you know, take a chainsaw and cut away at major federal funding and then kind of seeing what was really bad about that and what was it and being like, oh, okay, maybe we do need people in charge of nuclear security. Oh, maybe this is popular. We'll put it back. You know, I kind of, I kind of think that they're not taking as much attention or care. But I also do agree that the point is valid. I mean, sure, there's. Is there fraud in some telemedicine? Yeah, I'm sure. Probably small, very small percentage. But if we can specify use, if we can be better about that. I agree. I'm all for it.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. Especially right now. I was just thinking as you were talking about how important is people at accessing reproductive healthcare and being able to access reproductive healthcare wherever they are, and how much more difficult that would be if people didn't have telemedicine appointments, something we've spoken about before on the show. But yeah, I'm sure there are some small cases. I'm sure there are a bunch of CIS gender guys getting gender affirming hormonal care through telemedicine who probably could go without and be. Okay, guys, I'd like to wrap up there, but I want to give you a chance both to. You talked a lot about, like, science communication. So where can people find you online? Where can they see you communicating your medical knowledge?

[James Stout]

Okay, well, so I. Thanks, James. I have a substack. It's called Be a Health Architect. You can look me up at beahealtharchitect. And, you know, I have a conversation there around an issue that certainly affects me and those around me, which is physician burnout. But in the larger sphere of healthcare professionals, it really touches everybody in healthcare. So that's where I'm, I'm posting actively. I'm also sharing that, you know, through various other avenues, such as X and Blue sky and other places. So you can, you can find me there. Look forward to seeing you there.

[Mark Seal]

Yeah, I would also recommend Venkatesh's substack. If you're in the medical field in particular, I think you'll appreciate it. A focus on burnout is as important as it's ever been, if not much, much more. I mean, we were talking about burnout and moral injury in doctors before COVID and now a couple years down the road, it's only worse. So I think it's really important and I do recommend it. Or, you know, check out his latest article in the Los Angeles Times. As you mentioned before. As for me, find me on blueskyavemd. But more importantly, just listen to the podcast the House of Pod. If you are a fan of this show, I think you're gonna like the House of Pod. If you haven't already given it a try. It's a lot of the same people that you hear on this show on the House of Pod, James included, he's gonna be coming back to talk about the measles and with an author of a new book down there about, about the measles outbreak. And, you know, we take a look at grifters, medical grifters. We take a look at some people that would be considered medical contrarians. We take a look at some of the quackery in medicine as well. So I think you'll appreciate this show. If you like the whole behind the bastards verse, I think you'll, you'll get into the House of Pod too. So check us out wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, great.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Thank you so much for joining us, guys. Really appreciate it.

[Damien Hirst]

Thanks.

[James Stout]

Thank you.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Snakes. Zombies. Sharks. Heights.

[Damien Hirst]

Speaking in public, the list of fears is endless. But while you're clutching your blanket in the dark, wondering if that sound in.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

The hall was actually a footstep, the real danger is in your hand when you're behind the wheel.

[James Stout]

And while you might think a great.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

White shark is scary, what's really terrifying.

[Damien Hirst]

And even deadly is distracted driving.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Eyes forward.

[Damien Hirst]

Don't drive distracted.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council.

[Damien Hirst]

Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? Ow. Go slower. From Blumhouse TV, iHeart podcasts and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he.

[Robert Evans]

Unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend.

[Damien Hirst]

And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi and what's the way to find a missing person. Sleep with every everyone he knew, obviously. Pillow talk, the most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill conceived investigative hookups. Mama always used to say God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Now take a big whiff, my brother.

[Damien Hirst]

Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio.

[Robert Evans]

App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

[Damien Hirst]

To your favorite shows.

[Mark Seal]

I'm Mark Seal.

[Damien Hirst]

And I'm Nathan King.

[Mark Seal]

This is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.

[Damien Hirst]

The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is based on my co host Mark's best selling book of the same title. And on this show we call upon his years of research to help unpack the story behind the Godfather's birth. From start to finish, this is really.

[Mark Seal]

The first interview I've done in bed.

[Damien Hirst]

We sift through innumerable accounts. 35 pages isn't very much, many of them conflicting.

[Robert Evans]

That's nonsense.

[Damien Hirst]

There were 60 pages and try to get to the truth of what really happened.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

And they said we're finished.

[Robert Evans]

This is over.

[Mark Seal]

It only is not going to work.

[Robert Evans]

We gotta get rid of those guys. It's a disaster.

[Damien Hirst]

Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Caan, Talia Shire and many others. Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is John Cameron Mitchell and my new fiction podcast series. Cancellation island stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently cancelled. In the future we will all be cancelled for 15 minutes, but don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancellation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies like bad touch football, anti racism, spin class and mandatory ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the council to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing.

[Robert Evans]

Karen, where have you brought us?

[Damien Hirst]

Cancellation island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome to an It Could Happen Here Special Report. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by James Stout and Sophie Ray Lichterman.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

So excited.

[Robert Evans]

We are here to discuss Trump's first joint session speech of his second term. This is basically the equivalent of A State of the Union. Except it's too early to really give a good State of the Union. Even though this month has felt kind of like a year. So we are doing a special report here in addition to our regular Executive Disorder episode. Because there is just so much to talk about that we cannot fit it all in our regular Ed.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Just let it go.

[Robert Evans]

Pause. Pause for effect.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Okay, you can't get me.

[Robert Evans]

Gary, this was. Speaking of. This was the longest joint session speech in American history and man, it felt like it lasted forever. Yeah, I was gonna say. And boy howdy did it feel never ending. It went on so long.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Not a great feat of oratory really.

[Robert Evans]

I was supposed to watch some yaoi with a friend last night and they, they came over and I was like, haha. I gotcha. Actually, I have to watch this, this speech first. Don't worry. Usually it's only like an hour or so. 2. I did the exact same. Two hours later, I did the exact same scam to my friend Sarah. She was like, you know I seriously love you, right? Because this is horrible. Horrible. Two hours later, it finally ends and they're like, okay, we can finally watch yaoi, right? And like no, no, no. I have to watch the, the Democratic response speech. Don't worry, it should be shorter. And thankfully it was. Yeah. But yeah, let's. Let's just start by talking about like the beginning of this speech or rather what the general overview of this speech was. This was not a leaning across the aisles speech.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

This wasn't trying to unite the country. No, it was not. But you know, this catered to core like MAGA supporters and new issues at the center of the modern right wing media machine. The version of the speech I watched on on ABC frequently cut to Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro sitting together overlooking Congress as they were special guests of the President and the First Lady. Yes.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Magic.

[Robert Evans]

They did. They did this. They did the same on cnn. I switched back and forth between a couple channels. I noted this to our team. But when I first looked up like what time the speech was starting, I turned on my TV and went to CNN and I happened upon the them talking about if Dems should not applaud or if they should heckle. And some motherfucker I don't care about said that Dems should find places to applaud him to show unity. Cool. Sure.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, that's always worked well.

[Robert Evans]

Dems should find places to applaud him, to shame. Applaud the King. Applaud the King for ruining the government, for firing all the Workers, give him a clap, why don't you? Sorry, James. I realized that got a little insensitive.

[Damien Hirst]

Wow.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, Garrison, this is why we have to watch those videos where the bad actors talk about how they feel.

[Robert Evans]

Not anymore. Are you talking about our workplace harassment videos? DEI is over, James. No more of those videos. Here in the free state of Georgia, that's illegal.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Unfortunately, here in California, I have approximately 75 little, little red bells when I log into my workday.

[Robert Evans]

But like a single time. Early in the speech, Trump asked Democrats, why not join us in celebrating America after he complained, I could cure any disease. And these people sitting right here, the Democrats, they would not cheer. I could cure any disease and these people wouldn't cheer. No, no. That was weird. I mean, like, some Dems didn't even show up. They had this hub cave of wearing. Certain. They did the same. Yes. Performative. They always do. And they had what I can only describe as, like, church paddles. The status signs on it. They weren't. They weren't even like. I mean, like, come on, like a.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Ping pong paddle.

[Robert Evans]

Description. But no, some demonstration did not show up in protest. Others wore black. Kind of like in mourning. Yeah, who cares? Some of the women's caucus wore pink. Very cool, very feminist. And others wore the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Sure, that'll help.

[Robert Evans]

But, you know, Trump just pointed towards the Democrat side of the chamber throughout the night and just referred to them as the radical left lunatics. Like this. This was not a across the aisle speech. No, it wasn't. This was. This was, if anything, emphasizing the divisions within the country. One of the. One of the things that happened before the speech even started was like he drove in with Melania and Elon. First lady and first bitch boy.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, we're First Buddy Garrison. First Buddy is the official term.

[Robert Evans]

First Buddy. Yeah. I don't know, but, like, you know, Trump starts off the speech with America is back. And, like, how far back are we talking? Because you're not wrong.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, like 1864, I think, is the. Is the goal.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, this is the same phrase that. That Biden opened his first speech with as well. I think Biden was referring to, like, we are back to pre Trump America. And now Trump is using this phrase to refer to, like, this, like, mythical America, Right? Sure. But no, Trump took the stage to USA Chance throughout. Yeah, throughout the rotunda.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

That was. You know, I grew up watching the Houses of Parliament, so I'm used to, like, the boomers getting unruly, but this was something else.

[Robert Evans]

They're Just so feral. It's weird, so cheesy. The speech was outlining like a new golden age of America and the renewal of the American dream. Trump talked about how he has accomplished in, in 43 days more than most administrations do in four to eight years. And that we're just getting started.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Cool.

[Robert Evans]

He referred to this wide popular mandate, a quote, a mandate like this has not been seen in many decades, referring to like winning all swing states, winning the electoral college and the popular vote. And reference to this mandate kind of sparked the big boo. Big like disruption of the night. Specifically when he started saying we won the popular vote.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Which like is that heavily disputed? Like.

[Robert Evans]

No, I don't think that that's not specifically what Mr. Green was talking about. I'm not necessarily talking about when he specifically was sitting up. That's when the crowd had their biggest.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, they did, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Reaction of the night, which, like, weird in my opinion.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

It's great. It's the thing that Democrats are doing now which is trying to be like the Republicans but lib, like kind of.

[Robert Evans]

I suppose, but not really because they didn't follow fucking through without any like strength, like, without any actual like momentum.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Right. We saw the sort of blue and on attempts at election denial after the election and I don't think that's what they were doing here.

[Robert Evans]

Agreed.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

They gave off this like. Yeah, this very ineffectual kind of half arsed attempt at booing and then aside from Green, they all just sat down and waved their ping pong things.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So Representative Al Green from Texas. Old man with cane.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

It's a good cane. It's got a gold handle like I.

[Robert Evans]

Thought it was snazzy.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

I thought, I mean it's a sort of cane you normally see a sword coming out of, if I'm honest.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. That would have been cooler. That would have been cooler. But instead he just waves the cane around talking about how this mandate doesn't mean that there's a mandate to like, you know, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare. That was specifically what he was talking about.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Television mics did not really pick that up. No.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

And a lot of reporting didn't either, which was shitty. I thought like. Yeah, a lot of reporting just mentioned that he had shouted and not what he had shouted about, which I think is like, really when you like, you see what the media is doing is serving as like the propaganda arm of a certain class of people when they're more upset that he was shouting than that he was protesting the fact that people are going to lose their Health care and probably die because of it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And like, Trump started, like, yelling over these protests. There was like a brief maybe like, like, you know, minute or so, like, yelling match in the chamber. Mike Johnson was like, what do I do here? Eventually, you know, Mike Johnson threatens Mr. Green, gives a warning, and eventually directs the sergeant of arms to restore order and remove him from the chambers. Not a, not a regular scene in American politics, but a scene that you might be more familiar with in overseas politics and specifically in democracies that are in trouble. You'll have more and more scenes like this.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, we didn't get any smoke grenades like you see in Serbia.

[Robert Evans]

You know, it's still 20, 25, James. We still have three more. Three more years.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, three. Three more years for him to break out the ass off smoke grenades.

[Robert Evans]

Whether or not this is, like, you know, performative or cringe, it's like, it's something that demonstrates, hey, like, this, this actually isn't normal. More than holding up a cheesy sign next to Trump reading this is not normal, which is some. Others did in protest, this actually is treating it like a serious situation. And more Democrats should have done this. They should have staggered their protests throughout the entirety of the speech, continually disrupting it, making this speech basically unable to end. Pushing this past midnight, having an endless, like, procession of people having to be escorted out. You should force Congress to censure half of the sitting Congress people.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, if this really is, like, an actual existential threat to our democracy. If Trump represents right now a genuine constitutional crisis, which he does, he is ignoring the courts. The people in Congress should fucking act like it 100%. They should have gone literally single file, one by one, stagger it every, like, three minutes so that he just is unable to finish the speech. Yeah, like, have, have Mike Johnson do this every time. Because he was thrown. Yeah, he, he, he was thrown. And they should have continued to do this. The fact that no one else did is pretty disappointing.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

You could see Vance was very uncomfortable as well.

[Robert Evans]

Like, he did have that nervous smile.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

For most of where he normally does when he's confronted with a human being.

[Robert Evans]

But later on in the speech, after Trump talked about, you know, trans women in sports and the price of eggs, you had. You had a group of Democrats wearing resist T shirts walk out of the speech in protest. And, like, that's so much more pathetic than actually, like, standing up and talking about how this guy is ignoring the courts and is actually breaking the Constitution. Like, that's what they should have all been doing. Instead of wearing Resist Lib merch. Performatively.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. You could write an Onion article parodying this, but you actually couldn't because they would just do that next time. Like if they really think this is the last, the last joint session of Congress they're ever going to have, they sure didn't act like it or whatever.

[Robert Evans]

But this is going to be the first ad break in a series of two mid episode ad breaks that we are playing on this show. So here's the ads. All right, we are back. I hope you pick up your new ad break themed T shirts to walk around in protest of capitalism.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yep. Not made by unions.

[Robert Evans]

All right, let's, let's talk about transgenderism. One of the first topics Trump discussed at length was the anti trans culture war, declaring that the government will be woke no longer.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Oh God, that fully fucking sent me. I'd forgotten about that. It's just so asinine. Like drunk old man at pub.

[Robert Evans]

He bragged about, about signing an executive order establishing that there's only two genders as well as an order preventing quote unquote, men from playing in women's sports. He first pointed out to someone in the audience who was a former volleyball player who got hurt by a volleyball and then decided to quit the sport. And they now blame this on the fact that a trans woman was allegedly responsible for probably spiking the volleyball, which, yes, is painful. For playing sport the way that everyone else plays sport.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. For trying to win.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. In a team volleyball context. So. So yes, this was the first kind of of these political props that Trump brought along to kind of point out and demonstrate some of the things that he was talking about, frankly. It does. It just seems like this person was not a very good volleyball player. But the next example Trump pointed to. I think James can speak better on. But. But Trump said that essentially there was a quote, unquote man who beat a woman in a race by five hours to the shock of the audience.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. So look, it will shock listeners to hear that most of what he said is wrong. He directly referenced a friend of mine. He was referring to Austin Killips, who is a woman. She's a trans woman. She's a very good cyclist. The reason she was doing the race, which is the Arizona Trail race, it's an 800 mile ultra endurance race. Like I used to do these kind of things. The reason she was doing it is because of a UCI Union Siclis Internationale that governing bodies stopped trans women competing. Right. So she did these races which were not sanctioned by them. She did get the record. The previous holder of the record was a CIS man. The CIS man had previously beaten a CIS woman, Lael Wilcox. It's interesting that in this particular discipline actually like cis, women have been doing as well as, if not better than men. Like Lael Wilcox owns nearly all the long distance records in the United States. She's a phenomenal athlete. The idea that there's some inherent biological advantage is, it's particularly nonsense in this sphere of cycling. But the reason that she was five hours ahead is because this race is 800 miles long. Like those, those records are broken by that kind of period. Not all the time, but when you have athletes like Austin coming from the higher paying areas of the sport into this, which has been a much less well paid, a much smaller area of the sport, you're going to see these records getting broken. And again, she broke a record that was held by a CIS dude.

[Robert Evans]

Crazy.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, it's, it's ridiculous.

[Robert Evans]

I mean like the level of like propaganda and lie. I mean my, my mom watched the speech and she was like, that doesn't seem possible. And I was like. Because it's all.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. This is the second time he's picked on Austin and obviously it pisses me off. You can read her op ed in the Guardian where she wrote about this the last time he cited her in his executive order. And I would encourage you to.

[Robert Evans]

So after this initial dive into the trans topic, Trump followed up by talking about how egg prices are out of control. Take a shot. Which happened about 15 minutes into the speech. But near the end of the speech, Trump returned to the trans topic, pointing to the anti trans activist mom named January Littlejawd. No comment. Whose kid secretly used they them pronouns at school. With Trump discussing how wrong it is for schools to secretly transition students. And like this actually just isn't true. Surprise, surprise. The parents in this case knew that their kid wanted to use a different name and pronouns at school and actually were the ones to inform the school of this, according to school emails obtained by cnn. Not that this matters. And I will say during this clip when, when the camera cuts towards his mom, like all of, all of the people that were used as political props that were cut to, they all had the most bizarre look on their face, like completely blank, like soulless. Not even to get really excited. This, this woman who is, who is, you know, kind of one of also the faces of like Florida's don't say gay Bill. Just, yeah, completely like blank expression. Because this thing that the President's talking about is just A flat out lie. And like you know it. You lost a federal lawsuit over this lie. But here you are on national TV now, the prop of the president.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. On national tv in front of both houses of Congress attacking your own kid.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

For trying to be who they want to be. Subject on which you lost a lawsuit, like.

[Robert Evans]

And then Trump directly asked Congress to pass a bill banning trans health care for children, saying, wokeness is gone, our country will be woke no longer. Whatever. Such a loser. The next topic was Elon Musk's Doge. Trump essentially just read out a list that mischaracterized aid programs or scientific research grants, talking about how health and human services paid for housing for displaced immigrants in the United States, money for Middle East Sesame street for making mice transgender, and an LGBTQ education in Africa as well as DEI in Burma, which I will now pivot to. James, again, to fill in some context here.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. So I'm aware of this scholarship because I'm aware of the people within the civil disobedience movement who are talking to the State Department about it and they begged for it not to be a DEI thing because they could see this happening. Right. It's the Lincoln Scholarship program. I'll link to it in the show notes. But it exists to empower people in Burma. Right. With technical skills and to rise up young leaders in Burma. And it's not a DEI program, but for some reason it was categorized as such. Right. It talks about respecting diversity because as long term listeners will know, Myanmar is an extremely diverse country. Right. With more than 50 ethnic groups and hundreds of languages spoken. So, like, that's why it talks about respecting diversity. This is one of the few things the United States has done for the people of Myanmar after pumping up their economy, pumping up real estate, and then doing nothing when the military seized power there and started to brutally repress the people. And the US is also, I should add, at this point, holding a billion dollars of the Burmese people's money that it froze when the coup happened. And if it doesn't want to give them these scholarships, could give them back their money, but I'm sure it won't. I know this one pisses me off in particular because obviously I'm very invested in the cause of the people of Myanmar and they are my friends.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And this is very emblematic of the way Trump and Elon talk about a bunch of these aid programs, how, like, you know, HIV prevention programs will be lgbtq, USAID money. Right. Like they find a way to mischaracterize it in the most, like, culture war way.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. Talking about public health programs as circumcisions, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly right. They'll try to find every single, like, health or education program and turn it into some, like, LGBTQ or DEI culture war issue. Trump claimed on stage that they've found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud. Now, the Doge website previously listed $105 billion in, like, found savings, but this very week, the website scrubbed five of the highest dollar value receipts after journalists found massive errors in Elon's estimated count.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Shocking.

[Robert Evans]

And now its wall of receipts totals around 8 billion. Though that might also be an overestimate, according to some journalists.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Amazing.

[Robert Evans]

Trump also talked about alleged Social Security fraud, claiming that millions and millions of dead people are getting Social Security. Like, this just isn't true. The math is not mathing.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. This has been their thing for a while, right? Dead people are voting, dead people are getting Social Security.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Trump's own Social Security administrator has, like, said as much. The super old people in the database simply don't have death details logged, but they are not receiving payments. There is improper payments in the Social Security system, usually around 1%. Mostly that's overpayments or underpayments to people who are actually alive. And there is a system for resolving those already in place because Social Security is a pretty old system that we've had for quite a while. And, like, I don't know, like, Trump skirted by a lot of economy issues, and the way he did so was just by repeatedly claiming that Doge and, like, cutting this fraud will magically fix the economy. Right. Like, this is how he wants to frame this. Eggs are too much money, all of these things, and he has no actual solution to it. So instead, we're going to fix the economy through Doge, through finding all this fraud. Somehow we will locate this pot of gold hidden somewhere that will magically make our economy better. And this is his solution because he doesn't have any real solution.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, I should have pointed out that Lincoln Scholarships were, in fact, a Trump. They started in 2019, this round of them.

[Robert Evans]

So, like, good job cutting your own fraud, Donald.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Do you know what else started in the first Trump era?

[Robert Evans]

Garrison Advertising advertisements was, I believe, Trump's first executive order. He established the podcasting advertising industry, which, you know, supports us to this day.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Today is the backbone of the American economy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, that's actually, unfortunately more true than it should be.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

No. If anyone wants to buy any, what, colloidal silver?

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no. Okay. We are back on Top of trans issues. The other, I would say most cited element in this speech was the border. Trump referenced the Lake and Riley act, which requires DHS to detain illegal immigrants who've admitted to, were charged with or convicted of theft related crimes or any crime related to serious bodily injury.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

They're not necessarily illegal, they could just be undocumented people or they could be asylum seekers.

[Robert Evans]

Correct? Correct. Yes, that is a good point. I just want to note it was incredible the amount of sad looking children and or family members that he had as his propaganda prop people. He had a lot of props for this speech. A lot of props for his speech. I had a friend watch with me and she just kept going. How did he find like the. These people. These people have been figures of his campaign for years. Yeah, I explained that. I explained that. Yeah, he's brought these same individuals out as Garrett mentioned over and over and over again and used. Same thing with Fox News, same thing with One America News. Like their entire life revolves around being political props.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

It's an industry.

[Robert Evans]

Right. There was nothing new here. Trump signed an executive order on stage to rename a wildlife preserve. In this, like anti immigrant propaganda move, he called for mandatory death penalty for anyone who kills a police officer and asked Congress to sign that into law. Which is mostly like an anti immigrant dog whistle, essentially trying to find a way to kill immigrants who are like, charged with the death of a police officer.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, they proposed the same thing for people smuggling drugs into the United States, like effectively charging them as if they were going to give all the drugs to one person to murder them and therefore giving them the death penalty.

[Robert Evans]

Now that he wants to label all these people terrorists or has labelled these groups terrorists, it gives the government a lot more leeway to do stuff like that.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, I mean, proving membership of those groups would be a challenge.

[Robert Evans]

Sure. So is proving membership to antifa.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yes, exactly. We have seen how they're going to. Well, we've somewhat seen how they're going to try in the latter case, but not in the former. I guess we'll see, I'm sure at some point in the next year or two.

[Robert Evans]

But Trump said that like previously, America has quote, unquote, buckled under migrant occupation, but now we are achieving the great liberation of America. That's the sort of language he was using for this section and he said.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

How they rule from mental asylums and prisons.

[Robert Evans]

Very standard campaign rhetoric that he's used for years now.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

If you're new to this podcast, you can go back, you can search the word hukumba. Or border. And you can listen to interviews with probably hundreds of migrants. You can listen to my title 42 series, you can listen to my Darien series and you can judge for yourself if these people are criminal or bad or mentally unwell.

[Robert Evans]

The economy had a very minimal focus compared to border or trans issues. He really skirted over the tariffs thing as fast as possible. Briefly talked about the federal funding freeze, bragged about terminating the green new scam, something that has never existed. Talking about withdrawing from the Paris climate Accords again, as well as the corrupt World Health Organization and the. And the anti American UN War Crime Council. Very cool. Bragged about ending climate restrictions. You know, drill, baby, drill. Going after rare earth minerals. Talked about no tax on tips over time and benefits for seniors. And then briefly discussed that on April 2nd he will be enacting reciprocal tariffs just completely across the board for all nations. And he did warn farmers there is going to be an adjustment period. Quote, there will be a little disturbance, unquote.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Certainly when you adjust to not having a job that pays you any money.

[Robert Evans]

Anymore, crashing the economy will have a bit of an adjustment period. It will be a bit of a little disturbance. Yeah. I mean, just like he just kept going through these obvious ridiculous claims and making Trump side comment stupidity, like calling the Middle East a bad neighborhood and Sesame street joke. Yeah, it's just incredible. And James, our colleague Molly Conger had a good point.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

She did, yeah. Of her many good points, Trump said that people had never heard of Lesotho at the same time pronouncing it in a way that one would only know if one had heard it pronounced rather than seen it written on the page. Page. Very, very funny. South Own. He also said something about Liberia, like implying like, I would encourage people to understand the history of Liberia if they think the US doesn't owe Liberia a thing or two.

[Robert Evans]

One of the last focuses of the speech was national security, promising a golden dome missile defense system, which Trump has previously talked about at previous 2024 campaign events. Obsessed with gold, obsessed with gold.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Obsessed with dome.

[Robert Evans]

That is. Jesus Christ.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Garrison didn't even crack. For those listening, once again, his got him.

[Robert Evans]

Now once again, he announced that his administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Saying we have Mark Rubio in charge. Good luck, Marco. If something goes wrong, we know who to blame. Great. Cool.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, amazing.

[Robert Evans]

His. His comments on Greenland were specifically odd, saying Greenland, we strongly support your right to determine your own future and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America. But the full quote about Greenland was very odd. He said, quote, we need Greenland for national security and even international security. So weird. And we're working with everybody involved to try to get it, but we need it really for international, for world security. And I think we're gonna get it. One way or another, we're gonna get it. It's a very small population, but a very, very large piece of land and very, very important for military security. Unquote. Okay, yeah, very odd. Very odd comments.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Whole collection of English language words.

[Robert Evans]

He is, he is continuing to say that one way or another he will take Greenland. I think his focus on it for national security is particularly interesting. I think this has something to do with trying to make the US and Russia these like two massive world powers that both have like, you know, Arctic land at their disposal considering climate change or, you know, a variety of issues. But I think that this does move towards this like quasi, like duganism of like this like multipolar world that Putin certainly wants. And Trump is kind of signaling that, you know, through the influence of Bannon, he's also moving towards with like Putin and Trumpet, like, you know, the two people who control the world. Speaking of, Trump did talk about receiving a letter from President Zelensky asking to return to the negotiating table and bragged about freeing another weed smoking teacher in a Russian jail, returning him home to America. And oddly enough, Trump met with the mother of this teacher in Butler, Pennsylvania right before he got shot, which led him to, to point towards the comparator family again, pronouncing it in a completely new and different way. All of the members of the family seemed very, not thrilled to be there. Completely blank expressions. Quite, quite odd, extremely weird.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So this, this is where he ended the speech, was talking about, you know, getting shot and then kind of went on a very long 10 minute, almost chatgpt esque ramble about like America. I didn't take any notes on it because it just sounded like word salad. But there is a few other miscellaneous things from the speech I do want to mention before we close out. Trump bragged about stopping all government censorship and having brought back free speech to America, saying it's back, which is, you know, slightly humorous. Amidst reports of grants being pulled for using, quote, unquote, the bad words, wrong words, as well as a. A truth social post, a truth made earlier today, Wednesday, saying all federal funding will stop for any college, school or university that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or depending on the crime Arrested, no masks. So in one moment you can celebrate bringing back free speech and in the other you can call for deporting people who protest or imprisoning students for protesting on their own university campuses. Very, very typical Trump double speak type stuff. He talked about bringing the people back to the office. Like these are all like normal Trump. Yeah, well, yeah. And these are things that have happened already. Most of the half of this speech was celebrating things that he's already done. The other half was like asking Congress to help him do more things mixed in with these weird propaganda moves like making this 13 year old brain cancer survivor an honorary Secret Service agent and admitting this very square looking teenager into West Point, who by the way, this, this teenager has the most cop phenotype I've ever seen before. It's crazy. I was shocked. I'm like, whoa, they found him. The cop phenotype. There he is. Which was, which is two more of these weird props.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

It's like in the cave in Plato. Everything else is just a reflection of this cop kid. Every other cop.

[Robert Evans]

It's so odd because like Trump spent this speech talking about how, you know, like we're bringing back merit based hiring. We have quote ended the tyranny of DEI across government, private sector and military, as he then just did two DEI hires on stage. But you know, who am I, who am I to say? So that's kind of all I have to say on the Trump speech right now. I will briefly, very briefly talk about the Democratic response. The Democratic response was done by Senator Slotkin from Michigan, who opened by saying, America wants change, but there's a responsible way to make change and an irresponsible way. Trying to paint DOGE as like this very irresponsible and brash way to achieve efficiencies, something that we all obviously, you know, want the government to move more towards. She warned about how Trump's actions may result in a recession, warned about losing Social Security, Medicare and VA benefits. Quoted Musk, who recently called Social Security the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time and attacked Musk and the 20 year old Doge members for using their own servers to access your sensitive data. Slotkin spent a lot of the rebuttal praising Ronald Reagan. Odd for a Democrat, I would say. I don't know why, Strange. Don't know why you as the opposition party are continuing to base your politics on praising Bush and Reagan. Very cool opposition party bros. Very fun stuff. She also said, I've lived and worked in many countries. I've seen democracies flicker out I've seen what life is like when a government is rigged. Like. Yeah, I bet you have. Former CIA agent. She also mentioned doom scrolling. So that really shows how the Democrats have the finger on the pulse here when doom scrolling is mentioned as something not to do, saying instead, you should hold your elected officials, including me, accountable. Watch how they're voting, go to town halls, demand they take action and organize. Pick up one issue you're passionate about and engage. Doom scrolling doesn't count. Join a group that cares about your issue and act. If you can't find one, start one. And that was, that was the bulk of, of the 10 minute Democratic response. Oh boy, what a, what a, what a fun, what a fun day in American politics that was.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yep.

[Robert Evans]

Any final thoughts, James? Sophie, like this speech, this episode is running long. Yeah. So I really don't have any final thoughts other than bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. The Democrats are unwilling to do anything actually serious. Once again. The attempts at quote unquote fact checking this speech are also incredibly pathetic to look at.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Truly.

[Robert Evans]

There's this New York Times fact check which I will close on just because it made me and the rest of our group chat very upset, which outlined this long paragraph from Trump saying, over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States, many of whom were murderers, human traffickers, gang members and other criminals from the streets of dangerous cities and all throughout the world because of Joe Biden's insane and very dangerous open border policies. They are now strongly embedded in our country. But we are getting them out and getting them out fast. And the fact check for this very like false claim is quote, fast is a relative term. This statement is misleading.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

It's just.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, it only, it only focuses on the ending sentence saying that we're getting these immigrants out and we're getting them out fast. Ignores calling many of these 21 million people human traffickers, gang members and criminals, does not say that we never have had open border policy. Like it's crazy.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Even like the liberal fact checking is completely pathetic and toothless and like fact checking doesn't work. It's not useful anyway. That's why I'm not spending this whole episode fact checking Trump's claims. But the fact that you're going to parrot this insane anti immigrant rhetoric and only fact check Trump saying that we're going to get these immigrants out of our country fast, calling it a relative term. And this is the reason that, that the statement is misleading. This completely shows how Democrats like completely lost any momentum on the immigration topic. Same Thing with the trans topic. They're actually unwilling to push back on changing populist sentiment because they're automatically agreeing with the actual conceit.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Anyway, that got me upset and then I watched Yaoi and then went to bed. So there we go.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Glad you got your yaoi, Harrison.

[Robert Evans]

Anyways.

[Damien Hirst]

Snakes, zombies, Public speaking, the list.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Of fears is endless.

[Damien Hirst]

But the real danger is in your hand.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

When you're behind the wheel. Distracted driving is what's really scary and even deadly. Eyes forward, don't drive distracted.

[James Stout]

Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council.

[Damien Hirst]

Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here?

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Ow.

[Damien Hirst]

Go slower. From Blumhouse TV, iHeart podcasts and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he.

[Robert Evans]

Unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend.

[Damien Hirst]

And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person. Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Mmm.

[Damien Hirst]

Pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill conceived investigative hookups. Mama always used to say God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Now take a big whiff, my bruh.

[Damien Hirst]

Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio.

[Robert Evans]

App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

[Damien Hirst]

To your favorite shows.

[Mark Seal]

I'm Mark Seal.

[Damien Hirst]

And I'm Nathan King.

[Mark Seal]

This is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.

[Damien Hirst]

The five families did not want us.

[Robert Evans]

To shoot that picture.

[Damien Hirst]

Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is based on my co host Mark's best selling book of the same title. And on this show we call upon his years of research to help unpack the story behind the Godfather's birth. From start to finish, this is really.

[Mark Seal]

The first interview I've done in bed.

[Damien Hirst]

We sift through innumerable accounts. 35 pages isn't very much. Many of them conflicting.

[Robert Evans]

That's nonsense.

[Damien Hirst]

There were 60 pages. And try to get to the truth of what really happened.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

And they said we're finished.

[Robert Evans]

This is over.

[Mark Seal]

Not only is not going to work.

[Damien Hirst]

Get rid of those guys.

[Robert Evans]

It's disaster.

[Damien Hirst]

Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli Features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Caan, Talia Shire and many others. Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is John Cameron Mitchell and my new fiction podcast series, Cancellation island stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently cancelled. In the future we will all be canceled for 15 minutes, but don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancellation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies like bad touch football, anti racism spin class and mandatory ayahuasca ceremony are designed to force the council to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing.

[Robert Evans]

Karen, where have you brought us?

[Damien Hirst]

Cancellation island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Robert Evans]

This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Robert Evans.

[Nathan King]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Mia Wong, James Stout and Sophie Lichterman.

[Nathan King]

Tragically, we all have Ed. All right, I got it out of the way. We can continue the episode now.

[Robert Evans]

This episode we are covering the week of February 27to March 5th. Number go down. Public humiliation ritual of Vladimir Zelensky and the age of US global supremacy is over.

[Mia Wong]

Welcome to the end of the American empire. It sucks way more than I thought it would.

[Nathan King]

Yeah, uh huh. Well, I mean look, some of us have been saying this.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

First is tragedy, then it's fast, and then it's whatever the fuck is happening now.

[Nathan King]

Yeah. We have crossed the tragedy farce horizon. We're well beyond. We're well beyond anything Marx could have anticipated.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

We're going. We don't need farce.

[Robert Evans]

Like I am upset about how landy and everything is becoming. Like I feel like you have to be almost forced into being an accelerationist now because like there is no other way out.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Did you watch the Democrats last night, Garrison?

[Robert Evans]

It's like this non consensual accelerationism.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like people spent years trying to resist this accelerationist push that even now I'm seeing like analysts like embrace like I guess we have to be accelerationists now, which is very bizarre to see.

[Mark Seal]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

As I've been saying, there is no more ideology called accelerationism. There is just acceleration of what you do about it. So fun hole we've gotten ourselves into.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Speaking of, let's start with talking about Ukraine, a place which accelerated and that Oval Office meeting that happened last Friday. That was a little bit odd, wasn't it, folks? Garrison, say thank you. Thank you. Yes. I realize I've been under your employee for four years now. I've said thank you many times. Each of you thank me. No, I'm kidding. Jesus Christ.

[Nathan King]

Wow. Sophie. Sophie has gone mad with power.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

I'm gonna go court the EU because Sophie has asked me.

[Nathan King]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

So I don't know, I'm sure people saw like a 2 minute clip or something. I watched the full 10 minute section, which is much more crazy. Yeah. And like in Trump's push to get like this ceasefire deal, Zelensky's hesitation has been because Putin has broken multiple ceasefire deals, so how can we be sure that he will respect this one? And that's kind of what jumpstarts this extra combative exchange between Trump, Zelensky and eventually little boy jd. I don't know. Robert and James, you're war understanders.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, that's what it says on when I go into my HR page.

[Nathan King]

The. The increasing story of. And this affects Ukraine, but is not just limited to it. The story of the next several years is going to be the mass rearmament of Europe and almost certain nuclear proliferation. France, who has, I think 295 nuclear warheads and extremely advanced first strike capability, as well as a first strike doctrine is under Macron, has just made a statement that he's willing to have France be the nuclear shield for the rest of Europe. The UK also has enough nukes to kill way more people than actually live there. Unfortunately, their nuclear defense system and reaction system is very tied into the US one. I expect you will see them sever it from the United States. As the United States becomes more and more of a geopolitical adversary to England and to everywhere else in Europe, I think we're going to see more smaller states in Europe get the bomb. I think in general, I'm shocked if in four years there's not at least another four or five states that have gained access to the bomb.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Nathan King]

Because the overarching international lesson from Ukraine is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give up a nuke and get one at all costs.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. Famously, the European national anthem will now be. Because if it's not love, it's the bomb that will bring us together. Yep, Garrison, that one.

[Nathan King]

I don't like that. I'm not saying this because it's good, but it's also literally like, if I was in charge of European security, that's what you did. My priority would be, let's get as many fucking nukes out here as we can.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

I think we should say that this is how US Diplomacy happens. This sort of shouting out and humiliating non US Leaders is what the US Does. The difference here is that Trump did it in front of the entire White House press corps and TV cameras.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. In the Oval Office for everyone to see.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. And it doesn't give Zelensky a place to back down. Right. Like, he's a leader of a country that is at war. He needs to show strength. And, like, certainly sort of with the current understanding of leadership, he needs to show strength and to show strength. He doesn't have many places to go when he's been humiliated like that. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and like, you know, Trump was yelling about, you know, World War 3 and then and advanced Chinese.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

He's particularly incoherent with his.

[Robert Evans]

With his little, like, thank you speech. And I think, Robert, I think. I think you pointed out to me earlier, like, why Vance jumped in on this the way he did, in, like, a way to establish dominance when Vance and Trump have very little cards to play. Because this is a guy who has been, like, at war for years now, and, like, they need to feel superior to that. And that's why it's a public humiliation ritual. Because that's the only method they had right now.

[Nathan King]

No, because there's nothing really like they play act at masculinity. And their fan, especially Trump's base really, like, feeds into that. But they definitely also have that deep insecurity that because of aspects of our culture and media, I think most men who have never been to war have a little bit of that. I don't think it's a natural thing for men, but I think it's a natural thing in our society. I think it is extremely common, verging on universal. I went to war in part because of that derangement. And by the way, war doesn't do anything to make you better. But what it does do, what it has done for Zelensky and why he acted the way he is, is that, like, he's. He's literally been in the position of his entire family. And him having AK47 shoved into their hands because a Russian kill team was in the city gunning for him and his family as bombs fell all around, like, yeah, he's. He's just. He's. I think he just has too much pride. Sorry, pride's even the wrong thing. He's learned over the course of fighting this war. When you are up against a strong man, you can't Back down.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

You'll just keep getting pushed back further and further if you do that.

[Nathan King]

Cause he wouldn't have gotten anything if he had sat there and been nice and let them make fun of him. And the ending would be the same. They'd made up their minds prior to that meeting.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Right. And one of the things Zelenskyy has going for him, and there's a lot that he doesn't have going for him, he's not a coward. And, like, people have noticed that he's not a coward, and that has bought him some of the support, and it is allowed him to remain in that position of leadership, a relatively uncontested. Right. They haven't been able to have elections. This is something that the Ukrainian opposition have also kind of consented to. It's not like he's being a dictator here, as Trump has alleged, but, like, his, his personal bravery and willingness to confront these strong men is something that, like, people draw strength from in Ukraine, and he can't afford to let that go.

[Robert Evans]

He actually was fairly submissive in this exchange. He was letting Trump talk way over him. Zelensky did not raise his voice. I don't, frankly, I don't understand how people have even deluded themselves into thinking this makes Zelensky look bad or like he wasn't proper.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, he handled it like a grown up would handle it. Like, he tried to point out what you're saying is wrong.

[Robert Evans]

This was clearly like a coordinated trap from, like, the entire White House team. From, like, the press corps.

[Nathan King]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Like, talking about, like, why he doesn't wear a suit and like, someone like Rubio, a neocon that has more of this, like, geopolitics focus. Like, he was, like, literally, like, sinking into the couch as this was happening. Like, like Rubio was not thrilled at this.

[Nathan King]

Yeah, no, no, because Rubio, he has no personal pride or backbone. So he is willing to try and remake himself as a Trumper, but in his actual heart and soul, he's a Reagan Republican.

[Robert Evans]

Totally sure.

[Nathan King]

Or maybe at least a Bush Republican.

[Robert Evans]

Definitely Bush. And I know, like, Zelenskyy was literally kicked out of the White House on Friday. He's now trying to find a way back into the negotiating table. On Monday, the United States suspended all military aid to Ukraine after Trump has continued to inflate the numbers in regards to the amount of military aid we have sent to Ukraine, often by a magnitude of $200 billion. And I don't, like, this was one of the first things that me and Robert noticed at the rnc. Like, how much Ukraine was, like, a top issue for them. Like, people wouldn't shut up about Ukraine. And it took us a few days to, like, acclimate, be like, okay, like, why. Why are they talking about it in this way? Like, it was very odd. Robert did a deep dive on that last year with friend of the pod, Rudy Giuliani.

[Nathan King]

Garrison, I just wanted to update you. I've been talking with Rudy about the album that you and I wanted to drop with him, and he is on board. So we will be moving forward with that this spring.

[Robert Evans]

That's exciting. A little taste for all you listeners. This is very much a part, in my mind, a part of Bannon's push for this quasi duganism, this idea of a multiple polar world of Trump and Putin, with Putin expanding power into Europe while Trump tries to seize control over more parts of north and Central America. You know, taking the Panama Canal, eventually Canada and Greenland, you know, like, both people wanting, you know, more. More Arctic land that will be useful considering climate change. And Russia already has their fair share. So that's why, you know, Greenland is so essential for national security, like Trump talked about endlessly in his joint session speech, I guess. Mia, do you want to add something about this mineral thing before we go to break?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So I think one of the important things here is that this is the definitive break point. Like, this is the moment that people are going to point to when they look back on the moment the old American empire died. And that empire, the sort of post World War II international order thing. Right. The way the US maintained its geopolitical and economic power was by a network and system of alliances with a bunch of the, you know, with their allies in sort of in places like Japan, but also, you know, across Western Europe, they. They maintained a series of economic and political alliances that was able to win the Cold War, you know, make. Make the US like the world's lone superpower. But in order for it to function, the US has to, like, maintain the alliance system even as it's doing imperial power, protection, and use its allies.

[Nathan King]

Well. And like, the US's power primarily has always come from the fact that like, or at least in this last century has been from the fact that we're the center of the global economy. Yeah, right.

[Mia Wong]

And the second part of it has been. Has been its ability to wield power in international institutions. Right.

[Nathan King]

Yes.

[Mia Wong]

We know the US seizing control of the IMF and the World bank and, you know, using sort of trade, like trade doctrine to sort of empower itself. And this is all fucking gone. The US Is alienating, like everyone in the fucking globe basically, except for, except for Russia. And, you know, now we're entering this really kind of Argentina maybe. We'll see, we'll see how long that government holds.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Okay? Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But you know, like. And the thing that it's pivoting to now, right, is the stuff that used to be there'd be a sort of like coalition thing and American corporations would do this stuff behind the scenes is now just unbelievably explicit. The US is just straight up openly doing resource colonialism. Like they're straight up. They're demanding that Ukraine exchange its mineral resources for protection. Like it is straight up a protection racket.

[Nathan King]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

The proposed way that it works is that there's going to be like a, like a quote, unquote development fund controlled by the US and Ukraine, like jointly, but I mean, it's just gonna be controlled by the US I don't know why people are pretending that Ukraine is gonna like have a say in this. I'm gonna read from the proposed agreement. We don't know what the text of the final agreement is going to be. Zelensky has recently expressed that he's willing to sign it, but we don't know exactly what's going to look like. Here's the quote from the document that we had. The government of Ukraine will contribute to the fund 50% of all revenues earned from the future monetization of all relevant Ukrainian government owned natural resource assets, whether owned directly or indirectly by the Ukrainian government, defined as deposits of minerals, hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas and other extractable minerals and other infrastructure relevant to natural resource assets, such as liquefied natural gas, terminals and port infrastructure, as agreed by both participants, as may be further described in the fund agreement. Another quote. The fund's investment process will be designed so as to invest in projects in Ukraine and attract investments to increase the development, processing and monetization of all public and private Ukrainian assets, including, but not limited to deposits of minerals, hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas, et cetera, et cetera, ports and state owned enterprises, as may be further described in the fund agreement. So what they're talking about here is not just like seizing control of Ukrainian mineral resources. They are talking about, like privatizing the Ukrainian state and selling it off and taking the profits from that. They are talking about seizing ports, which I have, I have seen no media coverage of. I do not know why it is in the agreement. You can just read it there. I notably on the show am not like I am well known as not a China supporter, but I deeply remember for five years everyone losing their fucking minds about China doing this exact same fucking thing with, with port lease agreements. And the US is just doing it now. And this is, this is just what the new international order is going to be. It's the US just very, very openly instead of, instead of working through allies, instead of working through sort of like regime change operations. It's just the US Going to be going like, okay, like you are all going to die unless you give us all your money.

[Robert Evans]

Speaking of giving us all your money.

[James Stout]

Wow.

[Nathan King]

Hell yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Magnificent.

[Robert Evans]

That was art. Here's some ads. All right, we are back. Robert, you want to talk about Syria?

[Nathan King]

Yeah, Syria. I hardly know. Okay. Anyway, I was sent a document by my good friend Joey Ayoub from the Fire this Time podcast. Sorry, the Fire in these Times podcast. Joey's great. It's a document that the US is sending out to NGOs around the world. This one was sent to an NGO doing humanitarian work in Syria. And it's basically, you have to fill this out in order to have a chance of retaining the funding that has been paused right now. Right. So this is part of the USAID pause. If you want to get that money, you have to fill this out and basically prove that you are in line with the new executive orders and policies of the United States government. There's a bunch of questions on here that you have to answer. A lot of them are yes, no, and some, but many of them are just like normal shit. Right. Does your organization have a current risk management framework or policy? Yes.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

No.

[Nathan King]

If yes, please describe the framework or policy. Right. Not extreme or anything like that. You have to say that you're not working with cartels, narco human traffickers. But then you have to say you have not, quote, organized groups that promote mass migration in the last 10 years, which is interesting. And when you're dealing with like war torn areas that are helping like refugees escape, is clearly going to be damaging to a lot of NGOs that have done very good work to save people.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Nathan King]

Number five is, does your organization encourage free speech and encourage open debate and free sharing of information? Yes. No. And then right under that, does your organization have a clear policy of prohibiting any collaboration, funding or support for entities that advocate or implement policies contrary to US Government interests? So free speech, unless it's not stuff that we like. Right.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, that's kind of always been the.

[Nathan King]

Way to be fair now kind of the most. I mean, not kind of By a wide margin. The most fucked up thing about this is that it then goes down again right after the free speech thing. First off, I should note number 11, after the free speech question, can you confirm your organization does not work with entities that associated with communist, socialist or totalitarian party? And then below that is basically a question of, like, whether or not. And they frame it as, like, does this project take appropriate measures to protect women and to defend against gender ideology as defined in the below executive order? And then it links to the Defending women from Gender ideology extremism and Restoring Biological truth to the federal government executive order. And then it asks, does the project take appropriate measures to protect children? And links to the same executive order order. So it is basically saying your organization has to support effectively, like, transphobic policies in Syria in order to continue to get us money. Right. Like, and the fact that that is, number one, a requirement for aid organizations receiving aid worldwide now is deeply harmful. And it's also just like Syria was already transphobic. Like, the Syrian government is not really pro trans. But the fact that this is just.

[Robert Evans]

Being like, this is gonna be like, across the board.

[Mark Seal]

Yes.

[Nathan King]

Everywhere. This is going to be everywhere in the world.

[Damien Hirst]

Yeah.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

It'll be astounded in the future.

[Nathan King]

If you want to get US Funds to save human lives to stop the spread of diseases, you have to officially embrace transphobic policies. That's the stance of the United States government that. That matters more than stopping the spread of Ebola in the Congo.

[Robert Evans]

And this is particularly worrying for, you know, HIV preventative measures across the world as well. Most of the language that's used there has been heavily targeted. We are just going to get a whole bunch of people sick and die because of these actions.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, until it starts getting people sick and dead in this country. But we probably won't stop then.

[Robert Evans]

Probably not. James, I pivot to you on our semi regular border update.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, it's me, the border guy. I was down at the United States border this weekend. The one with Mexico, not the Canada one. And when I got back from the border, I saw an announcement from the Pentagon which announced the deployment of a Striker Brigade Combat Team and an aviation battalion. So what's a Striker Brigade Combat Team, you ask? Normally they're like 4,400 soldiers. In this case, they're sending 2,400 soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division based in Fort Carson in Colorado. Striker Brigade Combat Teams are based around strikers. What are strikers? They are armored fighting vehicles with eight wheels.

[Nathan King]

They're pretty cool. I've hung out in a couple A lot of them have fully automatic grenade launchers on the top. They have decent air conditioning.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Big vehicle outside, small vehicle inside. As with all military vehicles. Great when you're six foot three like me, but famously not really something you can use for policing the border.

[Nathan King]

No. Honestly, a lot of arguments as to whether or not they were good at their stated role in warfare.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Bradleys have been having a comeback in Ukraine. The strikers, not so much. What they are not good at is moving through incredibly rugged mountainous terrain like stuff where I was on Saturday.

[Nathan King]

This is something chuds don't understand because a popular thing among chuds is to take their Toyota tundras or their F150s or their jeep gladiators and send them down to this company in Florida. That adds an extra axle and two more wheel so that they have six wheels because they think it makes truck go better.

[Robert Evans]

Why does that just ruin.

[Nathan King]

It ruins everything. It's a horrible thing to do to a truck.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. No, the people at Jeep have actually been thinking about how to make Jeep better for quite a while.

[Robert Evans]

Actually.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Very amusingly, the place I was down at the border this weekend, there's a very rugged road that you drive down and then you get off and you hike. And I remember a few years ago a guy, fresh, minty fresh TRD tundra straight off the lot. And I've just negotiated this in a 1980s era Toyota pickup with my friend standing in the back to counterbalance and add weight as we go. I offered a spot for this guy, he says no, he doesn't need it because it's a TRD immediately destroys.

[Nathan King]

Absolutely. Oh, yeah, very funny. Beautiful.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Love to see it.

[Robert Evans]

These strikers are doing pretty good as well here.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah. So we're excited to see this Dragon.

[Nathan King]

Ball, perfect vehicle for the terrain.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

The other vehicles that we're going to see are U860, Black Hawks and Chinooks from the general support aviation battalion who are deploying alongside them. There are also about 1100 soldiers from sustainment units. Right. People who facilitate the, in this case, infantry and aviation deployment. There's some public affairs soldiers, there's people with logistics, people who are going to help, help make this deployment happen. Right. In a press release, northcom, that's the North American command of the United States Military, United States army, said tasks carried out by a second striker brigade combat team would include detection and monitoring, administrative support, transportation support, warehousing, logistics support, vehicle maintenance and engineering support. Personnel will not conduct or be involved in interdiction or deportation operations. So this is the. The posse Comitatus thing. Right. They're not directly going to be doing cop stuff, they're just going to be helping border patrol do cop stuff, supposedly. But this is still very different to the previous deployment we saw. The previous deployments were of engineers and military police. Right. So the engineers, the Marine Corps engineers, what they seem to do is get up every day and put razor wire on fence and then wait for someone to take photographs and put razor wire on fence again. Right.

[Nathan King]

And Marines love putting razor wire up. It's not the job that everyone hates the most.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah, everyone loves razor wire. Handling razor wire is famously fun.

[Nathan King]

Easy doesn't get you horribly cut the fuck up.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, it's just what you signed up to do, I think.

[Robert Evans]

What are the MPs doing that they.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Will be facilitating CBP operations, I'm guessing, like sigint, like helping with intelligence, that kind of stuff. Probably anti drone stuff. There's been a lot of talk about drones. I have not seen any small drones. Most of the areas where I go in the border are federal wilderness or state wilderness, so drones aren't allowed there anyway. But I've never seen one. What makes this different is that these are infantry soldiers. Right. Like this is a concentration of troops. Everyone in the military either kills people or helps people kill people. These are the killing people, guys and girls and. Well, no, there are no non binary secret lays secret they and the closeted they thems.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

If you're close to they them in the military, best of luck to you. That's what makes it different. Right. This is a significant concentration of troops on the border with one of our allies. This is coming as the United States has used drone overflights to pass information to Mexican authorities that resulted in the arrest of cartel personnel in Sinaloa. Right. So it is a significant change. And I. I imagine based on what I've heard from sources, that we will see more of this. Right. The US's deployable infantry troops will be coming to the border. It means that we might soon be seeing foot patrols.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Soldiers on foot walking through the mountains to the border. Because we ain't going to see striker mounted patrols out there. If they want to keep their strikers, they're adding more helicopter assets which can both move people to more remote areas and do more surveillance.

[Robert Evans]

Surveillance, I would assume.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like when a hiker was shot down at the border a few weeks ago and I was out there very quickly thereafter, and they used a, uh, 61st. Well, they actually didn't evacuate the person in the uh 60, they went in uh 60 evacuated them in a Eurocopter and then another military Blackhawk was kind of flying over after that. And I'm guessing that was just to kind of provide cover for the like the first responders. Right. Who were going there too. I think in that case they're investigating the scene. The person had been evacuated. But there are very remote areas of the border which probably are best accessed by helicopter and so that's what they will be doing. But this does represent a significant concentration of combat troops on the border with that ally, which is not a normal thing to do.

[Mia Wong]

And it's worth bearing in mind that as we're doing troop build ups on the Mexican border, there are a lot of people in the Trump administration who, I mean want to do just full on cross border U.S. military operations in Mexico. They want to do invasions, they want to do like what they think of as hell actions.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, there's a lot of support for drone strikes right now, which the terrorist designation does kind of pave a road to. But obviously it's worth noting for those not familiar that Mexico is a different country and you don't just get to drone strike other countries. That's an act of war.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and speaking of they thems in the military, I will do a quick follow up before we go on break. We mentioned last week about efforts from the navy to house trans naval members.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Sailors is his word.

[Robert Evans]

Sailors I guess according them, I guess they kind of are sailors aren't they? But basically house them with people matching their assigned gender at birth. Same thing with access to intimate spaces like bathrooms. This has escalated further to now a general quasi ban of trans people from the military altogether with a few implementation paths towards this a form of like don't ask, don't tell. We will report on this more in the future as a part of a larger piece on the lavender scare currently happening across the government. But that did happen. Literally like a few hours after we record it, we got word that they are seeking to just ban trans people from the military altogether. Anyway, we will go on break and return to talk Terrace.

[Nathan King]

We're back. Hey, I, I wanted to note something I was unaware of because is I have not changed my friend's name in my phone, but Joey now goes by Aliyah Ayub. I apologize for the error there but James corrected me so we're good.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Teamwork makes a dream work and never.

[Nathan King]

Changing people's names in my phone makes. Well actually I usually.

[Robert Evans]

I was gonna say I'm impressed you have A name saved in your phone.

[Nathan King]

Well, Aaliyah is a friend, so I actually have their name saved in my phone. 90% of the texts coming at me at any given time is just a series of unlabeled phone numbers, and it's chaos. I'm just guessing that people are. Who?

[Robert Evans]

Crazy.

[Nathan King]

Someone I be in contact with.

[Robert Evans]

That's absurd. Well, there's no tariffs or buts about it, but the economy is in a bad spot.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Boo.

[Mia Wong]

I was gonna do. I was gonna do. Speaking of absurd. But no, no, even worse.

[Robert Evans]

Even worse. Garrison.

[Nathan King]

You know what, Gare? I'm proud of you. That's almost as good as my Rock the Casbah joke. Joke.

[Robert Evans]

Mia, do. I don't want to do tariff talk.

[Mia Wong]

No, but we're doing it anyways. So after. After those horrors we got, we have other horrors. Question mark. So, on Tuesday, Trump's tariffs on Canada and Mexico and also an additional 10 tariff on China went into effect. So these are 25 across the board tariffs. There's some. I think they're only like 10% on Canadian oil.

[Robert Evans]

Canadian energy, yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Like energy stuff. Weirdly, that's not also applied to Mexico, even though we. There's a shit ton of oil. I don't know. And at sort of the last moment, there was a kind of. He got called by all three of the heads of the big three auto manufacturers who were like, if you don't exclude auto tariffs, we're all going to die. So he's. He's like, pushed tariffs out for one month. They're suspended on automotive imports. We still don't know what the fuck that actually means because it's unclear whether he just means, like, cars and trucks or what that also includes auto parts. Deeply unclear. There's also all tariff aluminum and steel imports. He announced a tariff on in the speech. The copper one. We knew about. I don't think we knew about the aluminum and steel imports, which are new, which are also going to be sort of catastrophic. I want to read this amazing quote from cnbc. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutenik said that Trump's tariff will cause, quote, higher prices, but he maintained that only some products would be affected and that price hikes would be temporary.

[Robert Evans]

Famously, price hikes are only temporary. Hold on, hold on.

[Mia Wong]

It gets better.

[Robert Evans]

We haven't even got to the good part yet.

[Mia Wong]

Lutenik insisted that those rising prices should not be considered inflation.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, cool.

[Mia Wong]

As the President said last night, there's going to be a short period where there will be some higher prices on certain products. The Cabinet secretary said on Fox News, it's not inflation. That's nonsense. Certain products for a short period of time. He said, now, now, the definition of inflation, and I cannot emphasize this enough, is prices going up. So great, great stuff here. There's also, you know, as this has been unfolding, there have been reciprocal tariffs from Canada. The first round of negotiations between Trump and Trudeau basically went nowhere. Canada's putting tariffs on. And this is true of both Canada and China, who have both done reciprocal tariffs. They've been more limited. They're only targeting sort of specific sectors. Well, the Chinese rates are lower. China's.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Rates are really 10 to 15%. The big one from China. And I'm very confused about this whole. The way everyone's talking about this, because everyone only seems to be talking about Canada and Mexico in these. Even though the tariff rate on China is now up to 20%.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, he did it over two steps. Right. Like, that's.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Slid under the radar.

[Mia Wong]

You know, obviously, like. Yeah. Okay. So, like, like the US And Mexico and the US And Canada have the two largest trading relationships on Earth. However, comma, the Chinese reciprocal tariffs are really going to hurt because one of the big things that they're targeting is US soybean exports. Now we do $12 billion of soybean exports per year. This matters enormously, though. It has an outsized impact, regardless of sort of the dollar amounts here. Because Midwest farming, huge parts of it is based on yearly rotations between soybeans and corn to maintain soil quality.

[Nathan King]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

Like the farm that I grew up near, like, this is what they did.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

This is a massive portion of Midwestern agriculture functions off of this.

[Nathan King]

Well, and it's just also just like soybeans and corn are, like, primarily what human beings grow each. And rice, like, those are really the big three.

[John Cameron Mitchell]

You can't.

[Mia Wong]

You can't eat that corn.

[Robert Evans]

But.

[Nathan King]

Yeah, well, you don't. But it's part of your food.

[Robert Evans]

Eventually it becomes definitely.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah, it's corn syrup and shit.

[Nathan King]

But, yeah, well, corn syrup and also it's, you know, what the animals eat.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Nathan King]

When they feed it to capital and chickens. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And so this is going to have a massive disruption on American agriculture. Trump has also been talking about imposing a tax on all American agricultural exports as some sort of weird, like, American autarky thing. So here's the thing. People are calling this a tariff. This is not a tariff. You don't impose tariffs on something that you are exporting. That's not how this works. You know, like you can go back to a basic, hey, division of powers. Congress has the power of taxation. Wait, how is he doing? Who knows? I don't know. We're so far beyond that. But like the thing that he's hinting at, at here, right, like if he really is trying to sort of like prevent all US agricultural exports, this is apocalyptic.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it's also worth noting this, something has also been lost in the news. But he's been talking about this. He's been talking about doing these tariffs to the EU. 25% across border tariffs to the EU. Now what I think is important. So the markets today on Wednesday have been going back up. They immediately tanked.

[Robert Evans]

Like Tuesday, this week was nasty. Like Monday, Tuesday was red.

[Mia Wong]

And what's happening here is that none of this shit, none of the analysts, none of the people getting paid like fucking $30 million, you do financial analyst, whatever the fuck. Like, none of these people, none of them thought this, these terrorists were actually going to happen. They all just assumed that they were. Oh, he's not actually going to do it. He's not actually going to do it. Let's just negotiate.

[Damien Hirst]

Tax.

[Mia Wong]

No, no, he was, he's doing it. He was going to do it. There probably will be like sector by sector negotiations to get temporary lifts on that, them. But none of this shit was priced in. None of the financial analysts, like, no one was doing business planning or whatever. Like none of this shit was supposed to be real, you know. And what's happening right now is sort of like they're, they're latching on to this thing with some of the auto tariffs being lifted for a month. Again, one month, not, not an actual lift, but one month they're latching onto this and they're going, okay, maybe we can sort of reverse this. But this is the first moment that the financial markets have actually had to grapple with the fact that Trump is going to do all of the shit that he says he's going to do. And like, like that afternoon Bloomberg had a guy on like calling Trump a dictator and saying he wasn't going to have elections. We are, we are beginning to see capital flight from the US where investors are, are openly talking about like pulling their fucking money out of this country and pulling it somewhere else because it's no longer stable. And this is something that, you know, I think the next dam will be when the US is like, credit rating gets downgraded, but we're starting to see the dam break on the financial class. And all of these analysts and like people on Wall street realizing that, no, he is going to continue to throw bombs at the entire world economy in order to sort of carry out his. Like, I want to be like the fucking big man empire guy.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, like, Trudeau, I had a call with Trump on Wednesday, basically going, hey, what's. What the fuck, man? I thought. I thought. I thought we had a deal. And Trump was like, well, I'm not seeing much progress on the whole fentanyl thing. And Trudeau's like, what the fuck are you talking about? And Trump then basically pointed towards him not being satisfied until there's a new Canadian government. Like, he's not going to want to lift these until Trudeau is out of office. And asked Trudeau when the next Canadian election is hinting towards the fact that he just is going to refuse to seriously negotiate with Trudeau and will wait until whoever the next guy is. Meanwhile, you have a post from the Chinese embassy in the US Saying if war is what the US Wants, wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we're ready to fight till the end.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I will say. I will say the. The guys they put on the embassy PR comms are dipshits. Like, those are not the guys running the Chinese government. Those are, like the clowns they put at these administrative posts to, like, scream about wolf warriors or whatever. The. The reporting I've seen from inside the Chinese government is that they also were like, what the fuck are you doing? And they're trying to figure out, like, okay, like, how do you negotiate with this guy? Yeah, like, yeah, they're having real issues because, like, for all of the shit the Chinese government does, like, this is a government of capitalists. They want to make money, and they're looking at a guy who is willing to just blow the entire thing up.

[Nathan King]

Here's my pitch for what we should do with China.

[Damien Hirst]

Right?

[Nathan King]

You know how China has this border conflict with India that could end the world, but usually just involves two groups of people with spears that were originally made in the 13th century having phalanx fights in the mountains?

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yep.

[Nathan King]

We should just send over a couple of thousand marines and do that with China. Get it all out of our systems. This whole. All this war talk, just have a couple thousand dudes have a big old spirit fight. We film the son of a bitch, we get some drones, we bring in. Maybe we bring in Tarantino. He'd be great to film the fucker. You know, we. We really just have a good time with it, and then we just go back to not, not doing stuff like this.

[Mia Wong]

Look, I think if we, if we get US and China to compete each other in the US against each other in the US Special Forces Games and we show this to Donald Trump and we have the Chinese government take like a staged loss or something, we could solve most of our problems.

[Nathan King]

You can just edit it to be whoever, like for both countries, right? You have an America version and a China version. We already do this.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So the last sort of serious thing that I want to talk about here is that this, especially the stuff that he's talking about with the eu, but also with sort of Canada, this has broken the sort of international coalition that all of these people have been setting up for a really long time, right? This whole sort of coalition of all the sort of world's right wing governments like coming together in this like national thing and like, they're really fucked now. Like the Canadian right was just like about to take power and they might not now. And even if they do take power, they're going to have to like deal with the fact that they've all been like fucking maniac Trump supporters this whole time and Trump has just been like fucking their entire country. And like these people are now talking about like again, like shutting off power to the US and this is happening all over the world with all of these fascist parties who've been ally with the US and are now having to grapple with the fact that the US is just going to, it's just going to fuck them. Weirdly, the thing it reminds me a lot is like the situation you got at the end of the seventies in East Asia with the communists, where it was like, okay, so we have three nominally communist governments on the border with each other, right? You have China, you have Cambodia and you have Vietnam and I guess you have Laos. And then those three governments, instead of like forming a united bloc, like all go to war with each other. And that's like sort of what we're seeing with the fascists right now is like, because Trump has decided to just be like, fuck it, like we're just going to do tariffs on everyone it has. It is really starting to tear his coalition apart. And hopefully this rolls back a bunch of their gains everywhere else in the world. And yeah, they see bleach it.

[Robert Evans]

And the things Trump is using for leverage here beyond even tariffs, like cutting out Canada from the Five Eyes Intelligence Group, halting intel sharing with Ukraine. Yeah, very, very like drastic steps in terms of like national security and intel sharing.

[Nathan King]

I mean it's, it's just deeply clear that that what's happening is we're ending every single thing the US Used to do that Trump does not see as a direct financial benefit.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah.

[Nathan King]

And largely aligning ourself with Russia against every state that does not have the physical power to stop us.

[Damien Hirst]

Yep.

[Robert Evans]

Well, that does it for us today. I know on Tuesday night, Trump did a speech to a joint session of Congress. We have a whole episode on that that released yesterday because there was just so much to talk about. So if you want to hear our thoughts on that, you can check out yesterday's episode on his congressional speech. Full of a lot of a summary. Yes. Because the speech was. Was very long. Focused a lot on trans people. Focused a lot on the border. Talked about national security. Really skipped over the economy because.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, no guys are great because.

[Robert Evans]

Because that's not really going too good.

[Mia Wong]

Keep shooting holes in it.

[Robert Evans]

It really, really skipped over that. Focused more on trans people as the single greatest threat facing this country. But yes, if you want to hear about that, check out yesterday's episode on the it could happen here. Feed the the shortest summary possible. Speech bad.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Speech bad. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Speech bad. The the era of woke is over would be the other summary I give.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Yeah, the era of woke is over where where you're employed. If the era of woke has ended your employment and you'd like to reach out to us us, you can using our Proton mail address. That doesn't mean that it's, it's not like if you're not using Proton, then it's not end to end. Encrypted. If you are, then it's encrypted. But it doesn't mean it's necessarily totally safe. So you need to do what you think is best. It is. CoolZoneTips Proton me. If you don't work for government, but you do work for Elon Musk in another capacity, it would also be very funny to hear from you about what that is like. So yeah, cool Zone tips.

[Robert Evans]

Proton me increasingly relevant considering that Social Security layoffs have started and they're now seeking to cut possibly upwards of 50% of the Social Security workforce. Yeah.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

And the IRS. So I'm sure that's going to work out great for government revenues.

[Robert Evans]

I'm sure everything will be fine and America will be back on top in no time.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

It is back. America is back. I learned that last time night.

[Robert Evans]

We. We. We reported the news. Yes, we certainly did.

[Damien Hirst]

We reported the news.

[Nathan King]

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe.

[Robert Evans]

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app 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.

[Damien Hirst]

Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How go slower from Blumhouse TV, iHeart podcasts and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hurst as he.

[Robert Evans]

Unravels the mystery of his vent Spanish boyfriend.

[Damien Hirst]

I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi and what's the way to find a.

[Robert Evans]

Missing person sleep with everyone he knew?

[Damien Hirst]

Obviously. Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, host of the podcast the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told. This season explores women from the 19th century to now.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Women who were murderers and scammers, but also women who were photojournalists, lawyers, writers and more.

[Damien Hirst]

This podcast tells more than just the brutal, gory details of horrific acts. I delve into the good, the bad.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

The difficult and all the nuance I can find because these are the stories.

[Damien Hirst]

That we need to know to understand.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

The intersection of society, justice and the fascinating workings of the human psyche.

[Damien Hirst]

Join me every week as I tell.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

Some of the most enthralling true crime stories about women who are not just victims but heroes or villains, or often somewhere in between. Listen to the greatest true crime stories ever told on the iHeartRadio app, Apple.

[Damien Hirst]

Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mark Seal]

I'm Mark Seal.

[Mary Kay McBrayer]

And I'm Nathan King.

[Mark Seal]

This is Leave the Gun, Take the Canola.

[Damien Hirst]

The five families did not want us to shoot that picture. This podcast is based on my co host Mark Seals best selling book of the same title. Leave the Take the Cannoli features new.

[James Stout]

And archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola.

[Damien Hirst]

Robert Evans, James Caan, Talia Shire and many others. Yes, that was a real horse's head. Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is John Cameron Mitchell and my new fiction podcast series Cancellation island stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently canceled in the future we will all be canceled for 15 minutes, but don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancel Desolation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies like bad touch football, anti racism spin class, and mandatory ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the council to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing.

[Robert Evans]

Karen, where have you brought us?

[Damien Hirst]

Cancellation island, where a second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.