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- [00:01]
Young Pueblo
Love at first swipe? I highly doubt it. Reality TV and social media have love all wrong. So what really makes relationships last? On this episode of Dope Labs, poet and relationship expert Young Pueblo breaks down the psychology of love and provides eye opening insights and advice we all need.
- [00:21]
Robert Evans
It's a big realization moment that you should not be postponing your happiness. Like your greatest happiness is is not necessarily going to like come from a relationship your partner they should add to your happiness but your happiness is really coming from within you.
- [00:37]
Young Pueblo
Listen to Dope labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:46]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Do you remember what you said the.
- [00:47]
Garrison Davis
First night I came over here?
- [00:49]
Young Pueblo
Ow.
- [00:50]
Garrison Davis
Go slower. From Blumhouse TV, iHeart podcasts and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series.
- [00:56]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he.
- [00:58]
Garrison Davis
Unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfri.
- [01:00]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
I've been spending all my time looking.
- [01:02]
Garrison Davis
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.
- [01:13]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
To your favorite shows. My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild haired priests.
- [01:25]
Robert Evans
Trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in.
- [01:27]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
A hell bent effort to sabotage a war.
- [01:30]
Young Pueblo
J. Edgar Hoover was furious.
- [01:33]
Garrison Davis
He was out of his mind and.
- [01:34]
Young Pueblo
He wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees.
- [01:40]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Listen to Divine intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mark Seal.
- [01:47]
Mia Wong
And I'm Nathan King.
- [01:49]
Young Pueblo
This is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.
- [01:51]
Robert Evans
The five Families did not want us to shoot that picture. This podcast is based on my co.
- [01:55]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Host Mark Seals best selling book of the same title.
- [01:58]
Robert Evans
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. 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.
- [02:44]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Welcome Dick at App Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I. I am your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout.
- [02:51]
Mia Wong
Hi, Mir. Happy to be here again?
- [02:54]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah, I am. I don't know. I have mixed emotions about this one. So today we are talking about how the American state, particularly the sort of neoliberal American state of the last about 50 years, created Elon Musk and how it is destroying itself. And we'll start with the fun part of this, which is that Tesla Stock is down 25% in the last month.
- [03:16]
Garrison Davis
Yay.
- [03:17]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
It's extremely funny. The protests are working. People are, like, lighting them on, cars on fire, literally all over the world. Was just a big rash in France the day we're recording this. The pressure is working. He's having a bad time. 25% is just the start. We can get the other 75%.
- [03:35]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And, like, for people who, like, I guess, don't know, the value of Tesla stock is directly tied to Elon Musk's net worth. Like, obviously, he's diversified. He doesn't have all of his wealth in net stocks. But, like, when Tesla stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer.
- [03:50]
Garrison Davis
Yep.
- [03:50]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
It's great. It's great. We love making Elon Musk poorer.
- [03:53]
Mia Wong
Yeah. It's the one line we like to see, however, comma.
- [03:56]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
So we've talked a lot on this show about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the American state and about all of the people who he is harming and the lives he's destroying and the people who are dead because of his actions. And I think it's worth actually getting into how he was produced and how it came to be that at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously wrote that the bourgeoisie produced their own gravediggers. And, you know, his promised, like, inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus far failed to materialize. But neoliberalism and, like, this specific state seems to have produced their own grave diggers, partially in the form of Trump, but partially in the form of Elon Musk. And. And it's worth actually going into the story of. Of how specifically this happens. And also I think what neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of. I. I think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines of the story, of the extent to which, you know, Tesla and SpaceX were built by American subsidies. But it's worth going into some of the. Some of the more structural elements of how this happened and why. So one of the problems that we have here, and I say we have here, because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates.
- [05:14]
Mia Wong
Yeah, he says a lot of things he doesn't understand.
- [05:17]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah. And unfortunately, he has inherited like, the greatest of all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism, whatever you call his sort of ideology, you know, is supposed to be. And you know, I get like, he is just sort of a fascist. But on the other hand, he's a product of this wing of that movement that was created out of. Out of the Neil Earbull thing about like, ah, you must like, decrease the size of the state. You gotta, you gotta eliminate all regulations. You have to, you know, keep, keep decreasing the size of the state, keep fire, like, you know, fire all government employees, et cetera, et cetera.
- [05:52]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [05:52]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And again, this is, I think, largely what a lot of people think neoliberalism is, Right. They think it's like, okay, neoliberalism is where the state gets smaller. And this has always been a fucking joke. Like, through this entire neoliberal period, the size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing. And this has always allowed a kind of like controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to, you know, when 2008 happened. Right.
- [06:12]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [06:12]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
The economy, entire economy collapses. And then out of the woodwork come all of these like, Rand Paul sort of like quote unquote, libertarians who have a lot of sudden interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups. And like, all of these, all these sort of fascist paramilitaries. But, you know, they can come out of the woodwork and say, oh, the reason that the 2008 collapse happened was because there was too much government regulation. And this is like sort of what Bitcoin is, right. It's like, ah, the evils of capitalism are happening because, like, not enough capitalism. Yeah, well, it's because, like, but like, specifically, like the evil entrenched interests have taken over the state and you don't have the power to access the things that they do, which is obviously, you know, like, it is obviously true that these people have control of the state and you don't. But this sort of controlled opposition of, if you put us in power, we'll eliminate parts of the state, we'll get rid of all this regulation, and you can suddenly be in power this has always been a controlled opposition thing, you know, and this is. Disappears in the form of sort of libertarianism or like, on the most extreme engine, archaeo capitalism.
- [07:04]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [07:04]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And this is something that the Montpelier Society, which is like the. The people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all, like, their academics come from, they still have conferences. They've always had a problem with this. Where there's always been a branch of anarcho capitalists there who think the only thing that the state should do is enforce contracts or just that it shouldn't exist and everything should just.
- [07:24]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [07:25]
Young Pueblo
And.
- [07:26]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And the neoliberals are like, okay, you guys are fucking ridiculous. And the reason they think this is that the actual thing that these people believe and this is. This is something that, if you read more Hayek than just like serfdom, right? That's like the stuff for public consumption. If you read the stuff that you write for public consumption. If you read sort of like Rope Key and you read all of the. All of the sort of theorists who develop what becomes the imf and you know, you go through all the different schools, what they actually believe contra. The things that they say were like, oh, markets naturally emerge and the state just like, exists to control them. What they believe is that you have to use the state specifically to create markets, and you have to use the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until they become sort of like good neoliberal market subjects who go to work, go home, buy things, and do nothing else. And the product of this is the 1980s. Right. It's the replacement of the welfare state, you know, which is the sort of carrots of this system with just the pure stake of the police baton and the prison system.
- [08:23]
Mia Wong
Yeah. It's the end of, like the post second World War welfare state order. Right. That we saw certainly in. In the US but mostly in Europe. Right?
- [08:33]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah, yeah. But this, and this is very important. This never actually decreased the size of the state, because what the state, you know, what it was was a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from, like, the state giving you things towards the state, you know, like beating you over the head with a hammer. And also, insofar as it gives you things, making you go through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort of, like, scant welfare policies still exist.
- [09:00]
Mia Wong
Yeah. The state's surveilling you both for violence reasons and for withdrawing your benefits reasons.
- [09:07]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah. And this, and this is always something that all of these people have supported. Right. Now, the other Important part for our purposes is the thing I said earlier about the state creating markets. And that's kind of like an abstract thing. Right. There are sort of historical examples you can go through to look at what this looks like in a place where there aren't markets. But this is something that's very important because a huge amount of what Tesla is, is a direct result of, you know, pure neoliberalism in action, which is the state stepping in to create a market as its way of doing regulation and the way it interacts with the world.
- [09:40]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [09:40]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now, selling, selling off carbon credits. They're also called regulatory credits. In 2024, the selling of carbon credits was 43% of Tesla's net income. 43%.
- [09:57]
Mia Wong
Yeah. So we should explain what a carbon credit is if people aren't familiar.
- [10:01]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah. Axios has numbers on this. Their numbers are that since 2014, 34% of the total profits of Tesla are from selling these carbon credits. So the way the system works is that the EPA sets standards for how much. This is like, you know, you can read the Axios thing too, but, like, the EPA set standards for how much, like CO2 per mile, all of the cars and trucks combined that a car company makes can emit. And, you know, instead of doing the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just going to be like a firm cap on these emissions. They're like, no, no, no, you know, this is what I say when I say they create a market. So if, what happens if you go over the cap, isn't that like, you know, like, people get hauled off the jail or whatever, what happens is that you have to buy someone else's carbon credits. And if you're below the cap, it gives you credits you can sell to other companies. So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric car cars, Right. Their cars produce like zero, basically.
- [10:58]
Mia Wong
Like they don't have any fossil fuel use at all within their line.
- [11:02]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah, yeah. Now, obviously, like, whereas, you know, you can ask the question, where is that electricity coming from? But, you know, like, but that's. That stuff doesn't get factored into it, which is part of the sort of problem with trying to use the state like this to solve.
- [11:13]
Garrison Davis
Right.
- [11:13]
Mia Wong
It doesn't look at life cycle emissions, it just looks at driving the car emissions.
- [11:18]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
You know, this is the problem. We're trying to use a regulatory state like this to solve the problem of climate change by creating a market. And so Tesla makes. And again, this was this last year this was 43% of its net income came not from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits. So what they're doing is making it so that other companies can produce more cars that are less fuel efficient, can produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids.
- [11:43]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [11:43]
Mia Wong
It's why you couldn't get a plug in hybrid EV pickup truck. Like I think they may be plug in hybrid mavericks now, but like the reason that no U.S. manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck like the F150 Lightning that they have now is because they could just trade with companies like Tesla instead.
- [12:05]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [12:05]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And this is a fucking disaster for climate policy because instead of having all of the car companies just like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one car company that makes electric cars and then all the rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like CO2 per like miles, et cetera, et cetera.
- [12:20]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [12:20]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And the secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now, is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort of, in a lot of ways like romantic notion of what a market is.
- [12:31]
Young Pueblo
Right.
- [12:31]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
When they explain it. So it's like, ah, it's all this, there's going to be all this like competition in the market. The competition is going to create the best product. And what actually happens, and the neoliberals in their private doctrine understand this, is that when the state creates a market like this, what it's doing is handing like a person, like a single individual, a giant monopoly.
- [12:47]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [12:48]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And that's what happens. And that monopoly is one Elon Musk, who has now been handed the title of the richest man in human history by the state's regulatory apparatus because they've.
- [13:00]
Mia Wong
Given him basically complete control over. I mean there are other EV only companies, but they're minute. Right. Rivian or something like that. And he's got this scarce resource that the entire automotive industry now needs.
- [13:12]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [13:12]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And again, this is, you know, going back to the market creation part of this. None of this shit existed, Right. Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever produce by itself or whatever. Like this is a direct neoliberal intervention into the market, which is what neoliberalism is. Right. It's the neoliberal state coming in to create markets and the product of it is Elon Musk.
- [13:34]
Mia Wong
Yeah, it's a monopoly.
- [13:35]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah. And when we come back from ads, we'll go into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon Musk and not all of these other companies that became the sort of single guy and how, and how else he's benefited from the state. We are back. So the other aspect, you know, so we've gone into how Tesla is built on this carbon credit trading. The other aspect of it is that Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts. The Washington Post, in probably the last like expose they're ever going to do like this now that Bezos has been like, we are free market capitalists.
- [14:26]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [14:26]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Like tried to go through and find all of the money in government contracts that they've gotten. They totaled it. Well, I think, I think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that, but they totaled it at $38 billion. And that's just the ones that are unclassified, which is very important because a bunch of what SpaceX does. SpaceX is, you know, most other company is a bunch of, a bunch of contracts for classified like deployment of spy satellites. So it's definitely way more than that, right?
- [14:52]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [14:52]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
But this comes to the other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies like in general do not make money.
- [15:01]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [15:01]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
They hemorrhage money for basically their entire existence until they can find a bunch of government contracts that can make them money. And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating shit after 2008. And you know, WaPo talks about this. They got a $465 million low interest loan from the Department of Energy in 2010 that basically saved the company from the brink of collapse.
- [15:23]
Mia Wong
Good thing there was nothing else to spend the Money on in 2010. No one else needed low interest loans or anything. It was fine.
- [15:29]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
No, no. There was no attempt to build like a giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed.
- [15:34]
Mia Wong
Yep.
- [15:35]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
You know, nothing else was happening.
- [15:36]
Mia Wong
I wasn't living in my car at that time. It was fine.
- [15:39]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah.
- [15:40]
Mia Wong
Thank you, Obama.
- [15:41]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And so, and so as this goes on, right, the goal of you as a tech company, there's two things you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire on your pile of money. Or if you're a larger tech company, you are trying to amass enough U.S. contracts, like U.S. government contracts to like get you to sort of stability.
- [16:00]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [16:00]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And this is what happens with SpaceX. SpaceX now has gotten $18 billion of contracts with NAS. And this is sort of a part of like, I mean NASA's always used government contractors, but like, this is different. Like this is just Straight up, they are using Tesla's rockets to do things. And this is also part of why, like, Tesla and Boeing fucking this up is part of why a bunch of astronauts are fucking stranded on the space station right now, because these things do not work. But there's been an enormous amount of money here. And the other thing, you know, this is one of the other sort of like, great neoliberal things, is that a lot of the. A lot of the factories that Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones that are in the US Are there because they get unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from. From. From local states themselves. All of this brings us to, you know, one of. One of the other really core aspects of sort of the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling. In terms of selling cars. But we should also mention this thing, Axios talks about that, like, if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, this company would literally never make money.
- [17:04]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This has been the case. I wrote about this, like, I think two years ago. Yeah, I remember writing about this before Elon Musk had gone full fucking evil villain, I guess. But that's what they are. They're a carbon credit company that makes cars.
- [17:18]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah. But even their car sales are enormously bolstered by a $7,500 tax credit for electric cars.
- [17:26]
Mia Wong
Oh, yeah, I got some tax credit information on electric cars. It's now the time.
- [17:31]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah, yeah. Do you want to talk about the other one that's driving these unhinged sales?
- [17:35]
Mia Wong
Yes, I do, because I have been driving around San Diego and I have seen an obscene number of cybertrucks wrapped in people's business livery. And it occurs to me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck, nor do people who need a pickup truck for work by cybertrucks, because they suck at being trucks. And so I did some digging, and I discovered that the IRS has a special tax deduction for vehicles which are rated over 6,000 pounds gross vehicle weight. The gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not like, the mass of the vehicle, if you drove it, like, off the dealer lot onto a scale, that's the maximum operating weight of the vehicle as specified by the manufacturer. So, like, it's your Tesla with. I mean, there are very funny videos of guys, like, loading one bag of compost into the back of a Tesla and being it's a great truck for truck stuff.
- [18:26]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
The other really funny one is when they try to attach, like, a winch to it and Try to use it to pull, to pull heavy things. The back of the truck comes off because it's just like made of like, it's like secured by like glue.
- [18:37]
Mia Wong
Like a unibody.
- [18:39]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [18:39]
Mia Wong
It might not be a body on frame like a, it might not be a proper truck. I actually don't know. I will look into that afterwards. I bet it's. I bet most of the electric or like high mileage pickup trucks are not. So yeah, not a good truck actually. Under, it's called Section 179. Under Section 179, a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating over 6,000 pounds, you can deduct up to 31,000 in the first year rather than deducting the depreciation of the capital good over time. Right. So instead of deducting the depreciation of your vehicle that you purchased your business over time and not paying tax on that amount, you cannot pay tax on 31,000 in the first year of your vehicle if it's over £6,000. Right. There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles like if you've got a Maybach or something really fucking heavy. So that would even cover the Model X, right? A Tesla Model X have the GVWR above that with a truck there are exemptions for work vehicles and they have to have a separate cargo compartment that is not the driver's compartment that is 6ft or more in length. So the cybertruck just happens to have a six foot bed.
- [19:47]
Garrison Davis
Woo.
- [19:48]
Mia Wong
Yeah. So you can deduct 100% of the value in the first year from what I understand, for these vehicles which have a six foot bed, at least this was the case when I was looking. I became aware of the exact nature of this when I went on the Cybertruck Owners Club forum and looked what tax deductant peoples were doing. Right. And then I, then I worked back from there and it does seem that people are doing this. I think it might be changing. So you can only deduct a certain percentage soon. It will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you tax advice nor am I qualified to do so. I'm not an accountant. This is not accounting advice. On top of that, Mia mentioned the irs Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit. Right. That's a credit, not a deduction. So the deduction would discount the amount of your income that you pay tax on versus the credit, which is just rate credit. So potentially the person could deduct the cost of the cybertruck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking cybertruck break to Prove it's a business vehicle and then if you're wrapping it, from what I understand, like these deductions somewhat depend on the percentage of the vehicles used at his business. I guess this could be like the equivalent of a fringes on the flag tax theory. People claiming that when they're driving their cybertruck to go to Whole Foods, but it's wrapped, they're advertising a business, so it's a business use. I don't understand how viable that is the claim, but.
- [21:09]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Well, you know, but like part of this is like it's very easy, like especially right now when the IRS is being gutted, like it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit.
- [21:19]
Mia Wong
People are not getting aud.
- [21:20]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:22]
Mia Wong
So they can take a 7500 commercial vehicle clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much. And like you would struggle to persuade me that that is not why a lot of people are buying cybertrucks. Right? Like it's got the weight rating, it's got the bed size. Like it's a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily, like, not all trucks have six foot beds. Now I will never buy a new truck because I can't find a truck that has like a decent seating arrangement and larger than 6 foot bed and 4x4 and doesn't cost more than I earn in a year. But it's quite a niche overlap of trucks that apply. And for a truck with a six foot bed and a 6,000 pound gross vehicle weight rating, the cybertruck's pretty small and it fits kind of with people who don't actually need a work truck but can nonetheless take advantage of the work truck tax deduction. So once again, thank you government for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the road today.
- [22:18]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah, and it's worth noting, so like, like Tesla, you know, you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is like one of the like best selling car manufacturers.
- [22:26]
Robert Evans
Right?
- [22:27]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And part of it is from this, but also, you know, and this is, this is the other aspect of this. It's worth noting. There's a very good Bloomberg article out today by Amanda Mole that talks about how 50% of all American consumer spending is now by people in the top 10% of the income bracket. So people make $250,000 a year or more. And that means increasingly that everything in the United States reflects the, you know, the sort of like cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes who all also want to buy this for their sort of like, like Cultural grudges and, you know, to like, to own the libs and like, show how, like, much of a fucking man they are.
- [23:07]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [23:07]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
You know, and so you already, you have that initial incentive and then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that, like, definitely. This is like, designed with a shit in mind.
- [23:17]
Mia Wong
Yeah, without a doubt. And it becomes like you say, it becomes like a status good, and it becomes like a culture war signifier. In addition to all those things, I guess people also, like. I've noticed that there's been a lot of backlash against people who own Teslas. If you go on the front the day we're recording the top article on the front page of Reddit, on the third article, Reddit, the top post, is someone who's been putting pictures that say, sell your car. And it's got a picture of Musk Zeke heiling on people's Teslas in Boston.
- [23:46]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yep, yep, yep.
- [23:47]
Mia Wong
Shout out to that person.
- [23:48]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah. Okay, so we're going to take a break and when we come back, we're going to sort of finish this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going. We are back now. I think this. This all. I think if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard of most of this. I actually. Okay, you've heard of most of what I've said to some extent. I don't think you've heard what James has said before because I've seen very little coverage of this. But. But there's also something deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here is that Elon Musk on a fundamental level is also a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all been living in for. For decades now. It's a product of an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Keynesianism. So regular Keynesianism, right, is about, you know, having the government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation. Also, you know, also like the military too.
- [24:49]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [24:49]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Like, let's not sort of like sugarcoat it, but it's about using a bunch of state money to like, make there be jobs and using this to sort of. I don't know, the way they call it is like countercyclical spending. But it's like they want to use the state to spend money to make there be jobs and to put money into the economy and to put goods into the economy to counteract economic downturns. Asset Keynesianism is still the state spending a bunch of resources. Right. But it's the state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms of incentives and in terms of sort of tax structures and specifically also very much in terms of the Federal Reserve's interest rates specifically to increase the price of stocks. And also, you know, and you know, the reason he calls it assets. Right. Because it's not just stocks. Right. It's also things like real estate. It's to increase the value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you think is going to be worth more later. I have talked about this a lot on this show. This has been the fundamental global economic strategy of most of the world's economies ever since sort of Japan kind of pioneered it in the 80s after the US sort of like kneecapped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy to the Plaza Accords. And by the end of this fucking administration, everyone who listens to the show will be able to explain what the Plaza Accords and the reverse Plaza Accords are.
- [26:02]
Mia Wong
That's when we stop. It won't happen here after that because you'll all understand and you'll stop it. Yeah, it can no longer happen.
- [26:09]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
You'll know. You'll know. You'll know the origin of the economy. Yes. So again, the Plaza Accords, the US Forces all of these countries to increase the value of their currencies relative to the dollar. This makes American manufacturing more competitive. It nukes all of their manufacturing. These countries need to find another place to, you know, develop their economy. Right. And the thing that the solution Japan comes to is real estate speculation. This blows up. This blows up in the 90s. This is, this is a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse stuff is from this. And then the US is forced to do the reverse Plaza cords in the 90s. This is Bill Clinton and you know, sort of annihilate American manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the rest, like prop. Japanese manufacturing to keep their economy from completely imploding. Japan was the number two economy in the world at that point.
- [26:51]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [26:52]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
But again this, this means that the US has now been doing this. There's the famous things called the Greenspan puts where like to try to stop a market collapse that was obviously coming when the tech bubble blew up. Greenspan kept cutting the interest over and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing and just making it bigger. And then eventually it blew up. This is what 2008 is, was. You know, we did a whole bubble. I mean there's, there's there's another bubble and collapse in between there. But like, you know, and this is what we've been doing for the last two decades, like since, since 2008. We've been creating this giant tech bubble and this tech bubble shit and this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part of the value of Tesla stock is just, you know, people who've been given a whole bunch of access to cheap credit. And by, and by people, I mean like, not really you and me, like a bunch of unbelievably rich people have access to like incredibly cheap loans and they use that money to buy Tesla stock. This is a sort of cyclical thing that just continuously increases the value of the company. And it's not just sort of like banks and investors. A lot of money that goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension funds. Yep, from a whole bunch of different countries and also like a huge number of American states, like your teachers pensions are all tied up in this because pension reform, the way that we sort of like lost the pension as a normal thing was that it was, you know, it was converted to 401ks. And the people who still have like regular state pensions, all of that money is now sort of invested in the stock market and it puts billions of dollars into Tesla every year.
- [28:14]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [28:14]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And so this is also another aspect. This is the broader structural level on which US macroeconomic policy was designed to create a bunch of companies like Tesla and then US sort of like micro policy, the micro creation of markets through tax credits and you know, all of these government contract that they've been given to do like everything from like fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit. Right. And like the US is like contracting out Starlink now. I mean like all of this stuff, right, is, is literally how Elon Musk was created.
- [28:45]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [28:46]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
But there is a third, even deeper level in which, you know, we can look at, at how, how these cars are actually produced and how these rockets are actually produced. And they're produced by just incredible, the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers. And I think people tend to think about, you know, Tesla workers in the U.S. but there's Tesla workers all over the world. There's a huge gigafactory in Xinjiang. You know, there's factories all over China. And yeah, you know, these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit. They work in unbelievably dangerous conditions and at the end of the day they get a very small amount of money so that the richest man in the world can get fucking richer. Every day.
- [29:26]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And that's before we consider like ingredient parts to Teslas, right? Like the lithium that we just addressed, for instance, in our episode on Congo. There are parts for your test, your Tesla, that come out of this country where there has been a war for as long as most of us has been alive, really very little effort has gone into improving conditions for people there, certainly for workers there doing jobs that are essential to our economy. And to like Mia and my 401k line going up comes from exploiting workers in Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world.
- [30:05]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah. And you know, this is something our standard of living is based off of. But at the end of the day, right, Elon Musk's. All of Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the state's monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these people from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in order to stop these people from taking back the fucking value that they create. Now, unfortunately, all of this sort of neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last 50 years, right, this attempt to sort of like depoliticize everything and have everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this sort of like non politics where you're voting for two parties that are like literally even more the same than they are now. This attempt to do things like solve climate change through these promotion of carbon markets and create this sort of stable capitalist hegemony forever has ultimately been self defeating. It's why all attempts to regulate capital inevitably fail. Because the functioning of the capitalist system, and particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism has worked, has concentrated the most wealth ever held by a single human being into the hands of one guy who was a Nazi. And then these people use their wealth to accumulate political power and seize control of the state, dismantling the systems that were meant to regulate them. And you can't solve this problem with regulation because again, eventually they will simply accumulate enough power, retake power and eliminate the regulations. You can't even solve this problem just by killing them. I see people talk about like the killing of billionaires in China as like an example of this. And like A, that's all political, factual infighting stuff, and B, they'll execute people specifically to sort of appease, like the Chinese workers so that they never have to fucking watch the PLA get run out of Shanghai again. Yeah, but the thing is, even if somehow you use the state to just kill them, right, it doesn't work. Because capitalism will just produce more of these people. If you actually want to stop this, if you want to stop this, Elon Musk, from destroying the entire country and quite possibly ending all life on earth by fucking with America's nuclear weapons until there's some. Until there's simply not enough safety mechanisms to stop someone from accidentally sending one off, you are going to have to destroy them completely. The permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch, the power of the billionaire, the power of the dictator must be broken. This tiny group of men cannot, as a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals, supply chains to produce everything we need to survive, it must belong to us. We create their wealth. The only way to save this world is to take it back. If we want to save democracy, the only way to do it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon Musk rules. As a tyrant, democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast at its lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too. They must cease to rule. They must cease to exist, not as individuals, but as a class. And the only way to do that is by giving control of their power and their property and their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of it in the first place. That is the tax that we have in France of us. The challenge that we face is that we face effectively the entire might of the American state, which is the most. Like one of the most powerful apparatuses of repression that has ever been built. Our advantage is that that apparatus of repression is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are, and I cannot emphasize this enough, maybe the two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan, after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the Revolutions podcast, concluded to be the great idiots of history who by their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision at every single moment, are what makes revolutions possible. And if these people are not the great idiots of history that allow us to bring them down and stop them from destroying everything that has ever been in this world that is good, then nothing else is.
- [34:04]
Mia Wong
Yeah, we have. The one great stroke of good fortune we have. Right, Is that all power has been concentrated in the hands of complete idiots who are addicted to Diet Coke and being mad at their children.
- [34:18]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yep. And they, you know, we have already seen. They don't understand how this apparatus works. Right. They fired the nuke police by accident.
- [34:25]
Mia Wong
Yeah. So it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of the means of coercive violence.
- [34:31]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah.
- [34:32]
Mia Wong
When we started, mate, you spoke about controlled opposition.
- [34:35]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [34:35]
Mia Wong
And the idea that, like, the great debate of our time is how much state regulation we should have and how much unfettered anarcho capitalism we should have. They are drinking the Kool Aid that got them in power. That is the one thing going in our favor right now, that they are dismantling the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe the myth that if the state didn't exist, they could be even more wealthy and even more tyrannical.
- [35:01]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah. And. Well. And the second advantage that we have is that they have been. They have set about systematically alienating every single group of people who they would need as their political base. They are pissing off the military. They are pissing off the intelligence services. They are going through and they are, like, systematically pissing off the farm states. And, you know, like, the farmers obviously do not have that. Like, don't fucking matter, but they're picking. They're pissing off the agro businesses. They are individually going through and pissing off a whole bunch of the country's scientific resources. They're going. Going through. They're like, fucking with the Social Security Administration. They are individually going through and pissing off every single group of people on earth who matter. And people who, like us, under this system aren't supposed to matter until we fucking do something about it. And, you know, the other big thing that we have right now is that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do, and by pulling apart his base of support and by putting together coalitions of some of these people and not all of them. Some of them. Some of them, you just need to divide and conquer by getting them out from backing him. Right. Like, the whole thing with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was that people just mostly stayed home and that was how they won. That is largely what we need. We need these people to stay home. But these people can and will, if we have anything to say about it, be fucking driven home. And hopefully we can bury both the gravediggers and the people whose graves they were digging in the same spots in the dustbin of history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again.
- [36:44]
Robert Evans
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- [37:15]
Young Pueblo
Love at first swipe? I highly doubt it. What's your biggest red flag? No, no, no. What's your ul green flag? These days, reality TV and social media have us thinking love is instant. We're marrying strangers at first sight. We're finding love through walls, or we're even judging people by balloon pops. But what really makes a relationship last? On this episode of Dope Labs, poet, author and relationship expert Young Pueblo breaks down the psychology and biology of loving better. And he provides eye opening insights and advice that we all need.
- [37:50]
Robert Evans
It's a big realization moment that you should not be postponing your happiness. Like your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to like come from a relationship. Your partner, they should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you.
- [38:07]
Young Pueblo
Listen to Dope labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [38:18]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Why would you do that to me.
- [38:20]
Mia Wong
When I thought we were friends?
- [38:21]
Young Pueblo
We are friends.
- [38:23]
Robert Evans
Los Angeles, 2021.
- [38:25]
Garrison Davis
A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true.
- [38:30]
Robert Evans
Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist.
- [38:34]
Young Pueblo
So you didn't stand a chance.
- [38:36]
Garrison Davis
But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare.
- [38:40]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Bloom generally targeted people with money, and.
- [38:43]
Garrison Davis
I was not alone.
- [38:45]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
He took over 100 people for over $15 million.
- [38:48]
Robert Evans
One of the victims was his own grandmother.
- [38:51]
Garrison Davis
I was married to David for almost 10 years.
- [38:53]
Young Pueblo
It was insane.
- [38:54]
Garrison Davis
I was barely functioning and I just had this realization that he will not.
- [39:00]
Mia Wong
Stop until he kills me.
- [39:02]
Garrison Davis
Getting a con artist to pay for their cross crimes isn't easy.
- [39:06]
Robert Evans
Charge David Blue. I'm Caroline de Moray.
- [39:09]
Garrison Davis
Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [39:17]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Our iHeartRadio Music Awards are coming back.
- [39:20]
Robert Evans
Monday, March 17th on Fox. Starring Bad Bunny Glorilla, Kenny Chesney, Money Long Nelly, your host, iHeartRadio LLC, Cool J. Are you guys ready to have some fun tonight?
- [39:32]
Young Pueblo
Plus, iHeart Innovator Award recipient Lady Gaga.
- [39:35]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Iheart Icon Award recipient Mariah Carey, and iHeart Breakthrough Award recipient Gracie Abrams. Watch live on Fox Monday, March 17th.
- [39:45]
Garrison Davis
At 8, 7 Central. Welcome to it Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis and I'm joined today by a special guest host, Bridget Todd. Welcome back to the show.
- [40:02]
Young Pueblo
Thank you so much for having me. I am completely excited to be here. I am a listener of the show, so it feels like getting to be on a show that I actually freak out too often.
- [40:11]
Garrison Davis
And I'm very excited for you to be here because you have a special report on one of the people who I've been cyber stalking for years.
- [40:23]
Young Pueblo
And.
- [40:23]
Garrison Davis
I'm very excited to hear the details of what she's been up to these past few weeks. I, I kind of know the, the rough overview because again, kind, because of my cyber stalking, but I've not, I've not done a deep dive the way you have. So I'm very excited to hear an update on this, on this character.
- [40:39]
Young Pueblo
So it sounds like we are in a similar place when it comes to this person and this person is none other than Candace Owens. First of all, what are your thoughts on her? Because I am low key fascinated with her. I follow her on social media, I watch her videos. Like, I am like weirdly captivated by her.
- [40:56]
Garrison Davis
I mean, I've, I've covered her mostly through her involvement with Daily Wire. I've talked a little bit about kind of how that all fell apart, you know, like a year and a half ago or so. I've talked a little bit about her involvement in Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk. And she's just kind of been one of like these like random, you know, like, like orbiters of like the online, like right wing content sphere for like, I don't know, the past six years at least. And I typically focus more on like the, you know, like the Ben Shapiro's, the Matt Walsh's, you know, back in the day, the Steven Crowders and stuff. But Candace was always just like around and like she definitely like went after a different demographic than what like my usual focus is, right? Like I'm, I'm focused on like what's going on with straight white men, like why, why are they like this and who, who is targeting them and you know, and that's, you know, that's like the Matt Walsh, like Steven Crowder kind of angle. But like Candace Owens has like a kind of a broader net that she targets with her content. So like, she's always kind of come up as like a side character. I don't think I've ever done like a distinct focus on her before besides just, you know, whatever Kind of crazy post or like, you know, anti trans or like very like weird like racist rant that she goes on like every once in a while.
- [42:08]
Young Pueblo
Yes. So there is so much to talk about when it comes to Candace Owens. I'm sort of like, you, like, I sort of saw her as a side character, but only recently have I realized, like, oh, people in my life are listening to Candace Owens and citing Candace Owens and they have no idea any about her, anything about her backstory. Yeah, all the stuff that you, that you were just talking about, she's like.
- [42:30]
Garrison Davis
Reinvented herself like multiple times. And you know, some people who mainly come at this from like the anti fascist research perspective might not be aware of her like latest rebrand, which is what I'm excited to hear about today.
- [42:41]
Young Pueblo
Yes.
- [42:42]
Garrison Davis
I just remembered how she had that whole event with Kanye when she did her like BLM documentary. That was a whole other Candace era. Yeah, so much.
- [42:51]
Young Pueblo
Oh my God. I have to say I was like, low key embarrassed for her because, like, during her Kanye west era, she was like, kanye west designed the couture outfits for my blexit movement. And Kanye west was like, no, I fucking didn't. And like, I was like, ooh, that's so embarrassing that you like, that you like publicly aligned yourself with Kanye west only for him to basically like diss you publicly right after. Yeah.
- [43:18]
Garrison Davis
And then come out as like an explicit neo Nazi like two weeks later.
- [43:22]
Young Pueblo
Yes. Yes. Ugh. Candace girl. So I want to talk about her. Like, I don't want to spend too much time on her background, but there are some pieces that I think like, are good for understanding kind of who she is, this chameleon figure that she's been totally. If there is not like a behind the bastards on her, do you know if there is? There should be. If there's not, not yet.
- [43:41]
Garrison Davis
Like, similarly on Basterds, she's been one of these, like recurring characters.
- [43:44]
Young Pueblo
Oh my God.
- [43:45]
Garrison Davis
But she has not had a distinct focus.
- [43:47]
Young Pueblo
Robert Evans, get on it. Because we need the Candace Owens behind the bastard. So Candace grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. While she was a student there, she went through this horrible sounding racial harassment. A classmate left her like this racist death threat on her voicemail that turned into like a pretty serious local scandal because it turned out the student who made that threat via voicemail did so in a car with a group of students that included the son of the then mayor and then future Democratic governor of Connecticut, Daniel Malloy. So she got tons of support from the local chapter of the NAACP and Her family ended up suing the Stamford Board of Education and federal court for failing to protect her rights, resulting in a $37,500 settlement. She went on to study journalism at University of Rhode island before dropping out.
- [44:37]
Garrison Davis
And this is like the early 2000s.
- [44:39]
Young Pueblo
Yes. This was like young, like baby Candace, high school Candace before she was the Candace Owen that we know today.
- [44:47]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [44:48]
Young Pueblo
So I sort of like almost see a little bit of myself and where she got her start. Like me. She was an early adopter of using the Internet to talk about things like race and politics, like me. That also seemed to sort of manifest in a lot of like low hanging fruit shit posts on the early days of blogging. Like in 2015 she was writing blogs making fun of Trump penis size.
- [45:11]
Garrison Davis
Sure, many such cases.
- [45:13]
Young Pueblo
Yes, many such cases. So in 2015, Owens is running a blog called Degree180 where she wrote pieces criticizing conservative Republicans writing about the, quote, batshit crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party. The good news is they will eventually die off peacefully and in their sleep, we hope. And then we can get right on with the obvious social change that needs to happen immediately, she wrote on her blog. So back then she was really someone who had like a progressive point of view and was doing a lot of public writing about what she was seeing and experiencing in politics at the time.
- [45:49]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, no, this is something that I guess some people might not know if they've only like become aware of her through daily wires. Yeah. Like in the pre2016 like buzzfeed Internet kind of sphere. She was just, she was just like one of like these people who would, yeah. Have like, like, you know, progressive, like ish, take likes, criticize, embarrassing like politicians and like overtly racist stuff happening. And then the degree to which this, this like heel turn happens is like one of the most stark examples I've seen in like a. I don't know, I. I'm trying to think of if there's like any like exact parallel. I don't like there's like certainly some like detransition like grifters. There used to be like ex gay influencers or you know, this is like like proto influencers kind of before influencers were a thing like ex gay speakers. But yeah, the switch around. On. On Candace from these blog posts is so concentrated.
- [46:43]
Young Pueblo
So in her own words she describes it as happening overnight.
- [46:46]
Garrison Davis
There you go.
- [46:47]
Young Pueblo
Yeah. How it happened is like fascinating to me. So in 2016, when Gamergate was in full swing, Owens launched a Kickstarter for a project called Social Autopsy, which she Described as a way to catalog the abuses of trolls and cyberbullying. Fun fact that Kickstarter is still up today. It is such a weird time capsule of a different time. There's like a video of her speaking earnestly about the need to like have the Internet be a like safer, more equitable landscape. It is nuts. Like people should go listen to her speaking about this project. So the plan for this project was essentially that, that she would create a way to de anonymize online commentators and then connect them with like their real names and their real life employers. And what's so funny is that like that is the very same argument that a lot of people use. People who like want to restrict the open Internet still use today. That like problems on the Internet, online harassment and abuse would all be improved if only everybody had to use their government ID and government names to access the Internet. And so like it's very funny that that idea, it was bad then and it didn't really die, it was just recycled into today.
- [47:58]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, I mean like there's a version of this that happens, or at least it kind of used to happen more in regards to like anti fascist research really. Like you're like, you know, identify specific like extremely racist accounts or like explicit neo Nazis and contact their employer in an attempt to get to get them fired so they can focus on getting a new job and supporting themselves rather than doing racism online and in person. Especially if he's like, you know, a member of like, like a group, whether that be, you know, the proud boys back in the day or many, many other groups. Patriot Prayer now, Patriot Front, that sort of thing. It's funny how hated this tactic is soon to be by people like Candace and the Daily Wire people, but here she's advocating it herself.
- [48:40]
Young Pueblo
Exactly.
- [48:41]
Garrison Davis
In like this like post Anita Sarkeesian kind of content, like world.
- [48:45]
Young Pueblo
Yeah. So pretty much everybody thought this was a bad idea, including video game developer Zoe Quinn, who folks might remember was kind of at the center of Gamergate and was like viciously attacked. Owens was subsequently harassed and doxxed and she blamed Zo, Quinn and other feminists for this and said so publicly. As you can probably guess, like people like Milo Yiannopoulos loved this. People who were promoters of Gamergate really hyped up. Owens claims that like yes, feminists were actually the ones doing all the online harassing.
- [49:18]
Garrison Davis
Okay, I can see where this is going.
- [49:21]
Young Pueblo
So this event is what Owens credits with her turn from progressive to quote, becoming a red pilled radical. She says, I became a conservative Overnight, I realized that liberals were actually the racists, liberals were actually the trolls. She starts promoting right wing viewpoints on her YouTube channel, calling herself, quote, red pill black, which I gotta say, is like, pretty good branding. Like, I'm not mad at the branding there. I was like, okay, black woman talking about, like, right wing stuff. Red pill black. I get it, I get it.
- [49:52]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. I'm interested to see how much. How much the checkbook was a consideration here.
- [49:56]
Young Pueblo
Oh, yes.
- [49:58]
Garrison Davis
How much her Kickstarter got versus how much she realized she could get if she jumped on the other side of the content turn.
- [50:05]
Young Pueblo
Well, she almost instantly gets noticed by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Points usa. Right. And he hires her. Almost immediately, she starts cranking out these videos that really perform quite well. Like, her videos really go viral. Videos where she's doing things like dismissing the 2017 white supremacist unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Alex Jones gets her to co host some of his Infowars shows. She's doing stints on Fox News as a paid commentator. Like, business is booming for Candace Owens from this turn.
- [50:36]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. This is around when I became aware of her.
- [50:39]
Young Pueblo
Yes. In 2021, she joins up with the Daily Wire. There was so much fanfare around them hir Candace. Like, it was a big deal. She moved to Nashville.
- [50:49]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [50:49]
Young Pueblo
Fun fact. There was even a house joint resolution. House Joint Resolution 350, a resolution in the Tennessee government to congratulate Candace Owens on relocating to Tennessee and for her work at Daily Wired. That reads, whereas Ms. Owens has earned the admiration and respect of millions of Americans through her activism in support of President Trump as a black woman and her perceptive criticism of creeping socialism and leftist political tyranny.
- [51:16]
Garrison Davis
Very cool stuff.
- [51:17]
Young Pueblo
Yeah. Imagine it being like a joint resolution in your local government when you move someplace.
- [51:24]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. The governor of Tennessee was, like, super excited when the Daily Wire relocated their headquarters to Tennessee and brought in all these people. Like, there was, like, so many, like, private dinners, meetings. There was, like, a number of resolutions welcoming the Daily Wire to Tennessee in this, like, 2021 period, as they were just starting to, like, launch their own, like, streaming service website. Which is why they recruited Candace, is because they were. They were looking for content creators to fill out their slate.
- [51:53]
Young Pueblo
So you would think that this should be like, a match made in heaven. Right. Smooth sailing. They need incendiary content creators. She's an incendiary content creator. Should be a match made in heaven.
- [52:03]
Garrison Davis
Perfect.
- [52:04]
Young Pueblo
Not quite. Because things end in, like, this really messy public fallout just a few years later. So I know that you've done episodes on this from my perspective, and I would love to know what you think. It's not 100% clear what went down, but the public friction between Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, one of the founders of Daily Wire, it seemed to be, like, related to reactions around the situation in Gaza.
- [52:31]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, totally.
- [52:32]
Young Pueblo
So. So Ben Shapiro is Jewish. And Owens, as we said, has said and done, like, a lot of anti Semitic stuff. Like, a lot.
- [52:40]
Garrison Davis
And, like, actual anti Semitic stuff like that. People use that as a way to, like, shut down. Like, very, very admirable. Like, like, like pro Palestinian, like, activism. No, like, Candace Owens just is anti Semitic. And this. It's like, same thing with, like, Jackson Hinkle. And she made it, like an escalating series of anti Semitic claims after October 7, which. Which slowly kind of, like, broke with the company and Ben, like, more and more and more of it over series of a few months.
- [53:11]
Young Pueblo
Yes.
- [53:11]
Garrison Davis
And it's. It's funny because, like, it also kind of mirrors this, like, online fight she had with Steven Crowder, like, a year or so prior when Daily Wire was trying to recruit him. And then she got informed about, like, how, like, abusive he was to his wife. And then she went on, like, a media blitz, like, against him as, like, as he was in negotiations, like, with the Daily Wire. Her, she's, like, very willing to, like, stir shit up. Like, even if it, like, goes against her own interests or the interests of, like, whatever company she works for. Like, she is. She is absolutely willing to, like, make like, some kind of, like, chaotic spectacle, regardless of her own, like, you know, financial security, I guess.
- [53:48]
Young Pueblo
Yes. Like, she. I'm so glad that you mentioned that she is not afraid to get down and dirty in public. And I do think, like, you know, as a black woman who works with a lot of white men, I would imagine that she's probably thinking, like, I have to have some kind of decorum. I don't want anyone to say that I'm being a crazy black woman or whatever. She. It seems like she has no such qualms. Like, she is like, I will make this a public, messy fight, and I am not afraid to make a genuine spectacle of myself.
- [54:18]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [54:18]
Young Pueblo
And so it is really important to note that, like, as you said, she wasn't just, like, criticizing the Israeli state. She was, like, getting into, like, blood libel and, like, deep conspiracy theories.
- [54:30]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, no, it was. There was some really nasty posts.
- [54:34]
Young Pueblo
Yeah. Like, one of the things that she said, she's claimed that Judaism was, quote, a pedophile centric religion that believes in demons and child sacrifice and that she was waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power. Like, stuff like that.
- [54:46]
Garrison Davis
Not great. Not good.
- [54:48]
Young Pueblo
Not good. So as you said, like, this starts to become like a public feud toward her employer. She wrote on Twitter, no one can serve two masters. And ended her post writing, you cannot serve both God and money. To which Ben Shapiro, her boss, tweets, like, quote, tweeted, oh my God. Like, candace, if you feel that taking money from the Daily Wire somehow becomes between you and God, by all means, quit. Like, messy as hell.
- [55:13]
Garrison Davis
It's crazy that instead of having like a company meeting, they were just doing this on twitter.com oh my God.
- [55:21]
Young Pueblo
And my messy ass was eating it up. I was like, like, keep fighting, let em fight.
- [55:25]
Garrison Davis
Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. I'm totally willing to, like, watch this, watch this go down. I do not wanna get involved.
- [55:31]
Young Pueblo
Right, right, right. Owens, like, went on Tucker Carlson's show and said that Ben Shapiro was, quote, acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged for weeks now. She said that Shapiro, quote, crossed a certain line. When you come for scripture and read yourself into it, I will not tolerate it.
- [55:47]
Garrison Davis
Very cool.
- [55:48]
Young Pueblo
Yeah. So at one point, despite Owens tweets that she wants Ben Shapiro to have a public, like, debate with her, moderated by podcaster Patrick Bette David. Ben Shapiro was having none of this. He tweets, candace, I can see why you'd want to hide behind a moderator, particularly one who said we should rename our company, quote, Daily Jewish Wire just yesterday. No, Jesus. One on one Monday at five, we can sit down and have a healthy debate like adults and we'll livestream it on X and YouTube. Take it or leave it. As to the true reason why you didn't respond to my offer to sit down with you and discuss these issues publicly or privately back in February, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Like, this is lawyer, employee going at it on Twitter.
- [56:29]
Garrison Davis
I can't believe I'm taking Ben Shapiro's side here. Not just because he's Ben Shapiro, but also because he's an employer. But it's a really, it's a really tough situation here.
- [56:38]
Young Pueblo
Yeah, I, I feel the same way because, like, it's just not a great look to have somebody that you just hired to all this fanfare coming at you like this on Twitter. Like, and I think, I mean, this is just my opinion. So, like, take that for what it's worth. Just as somebody who has worked in media and been around the block. The reason why I'm not comfortable saying like their feud was entirely based on Owens anti Semitic comments and behavior is that she just went so hard and so public. That something to me, I almost wonder if there was like a contract dispute here.
- [57:09]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Sure.
- [57:09]
Young Pueblo
That like she was like, oh, I can make more money on my own, gotta get out of this contract or something. Cause like, like it just doesn't smell right.
- [57:16]
Garrison Davis
I mean, yeah, if she had like an inclination that she could afford to lose this job because she might make more money on her own, then yeah, absolutely. That, that would, that would allow her to push this further than what she might otherwise might like. There's been a lot of, a lot of discussion in the right wing content sphere about like the Daily Wire's very fairly restrictive contracts. Despite still getting paid like tens of millions of dollars, there is like restrictions on like what happens when you lose monetization because the Daily Wire is like a company trying to make a profit. So totally. I think there could absolutely be other financial stuff going on here. I think it's more like an interlocking series of issues rather than just one thing or another.
- [57:52]
Young Pueblo
Yes. So after Rabbi Shmuli Boteach criticized Owens for her defenses of Kanye West, Owens liked a tweet asking Boteach if he was, quote, drunk on Christian blood again.
- [58:04]
Garrison Davis
Jesus.
- [58:04]
Young Pueblo
And I guess that was the final straw. A few days later, Daily Wire and Candace Owens ended their relationship with Owens tweeting, the rumors are true. I am finally free. Okay, so that's what happened with her and Daily Wire. So where is she now? Well, this is where the story gets interesting because I had not heard from Candace Owens in a minute and my reintroduction to her happened recently when I was trying to make sense of the dispute between two Hollywood A listers, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. So the issue between Blake and Justin, it's a little bit complicated and ongoing, but it's actually a pretty interesting story that includes a lot of things that I enjoy, like how celebrities use media and how social media platforms can be weaponized for or against specific people. Email correspondence where people make themselves look terrible in writing because they do not expect those emails to be in a deposition later. Like, that is my favorite thing in the world. Please continue to put your wrongdoing in writing so that my nosy ass can read it later and be like, ooh, messy. So I do encourage folks to read up on it because it does go beyond just like two celebrities having a feud. But you don't really need to know the Specifics for our purposes, the quick and dirty version is that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were in a movie adaptation of the very popular novel by Colleen Hoover called It Starts With Us. In December, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and starting a smear campaign against her. Baldoni strongly denies that and has sued her. In response, both camps have released information like emails, text messages, and video attempting to make the other look bad. So it has kind of turned into one of those inkblot tests that changes depending on whose version you buy. Version one is that Blake Lively was being sexually harassed on set by a fake feminist ally who is actually an abusive man. Or version two, that Blake Lively is an egomaniac who was using her star power and a list celebrity network like her husband, Ryan Reynolds from Deadpool, to control the narrative around her being a nightmare on set and steamrolling everybody on this project.
- [60:23]
Garrison Davis
Cool.
- [60:24]
Young Pueblo
Yes. And so what's interesting about this to me is that it's one of those stories where algorithmically, it depends on what silo or what pocket of the Internet you're at to determine, like, what version of this story you're getting. Like, much like Johnny Depp's defamation lawsuit.
- [60:40]
Garrison Davis
It sounds too much like the Johnny Depp thing.
- [60:42]
Young Pueblo
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, like, for whatever reason, TikTok thinks I hate Blake Lively and want to pour over every nuance of how she is a fraud. Right. Like, but someone else's TikTok might be like, no, Blake Lively. We should be supporting her. Like, it's one of those situations where just depending on where you are on the Internet, you might get a very different impression of the public sentiment leaning one way or another.
- [61:06]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, yeah. This is all the types of things I try to avoid learning about at almost all costs. So thanks.
- [61:13]
Young Pueblo
Yes, I do. I do not believe that she let me know. So I was trying to get to the bottom of it because I kept hearing about it, like, everyone was talking about it. So I'm talking to my cousins, who I was. Would lovingly describe as normies, and that they are not super online. It's like, they're not like you and me. They're not like, deep into the depths of extremism or anything like that.
- [61:32]
Garrison Davis
No, they're. They're not watching, like, the Daily Wire for fun slash for work.
- [61:36]
Young Pueblo
Yes.
- [61:37]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [61:38]
Young Pueblo
And my cousins are like, oh, my God. There is this black girl journalist who has been following everything and breaking it down. She has all the tea. We'll tag you. That journalist was Candace Owens.
- [61:49]
Garrison Davis
Okay, so all right.
- [61:51]
Young Pueblo
You know, Candace has been making so many videos off of this and like, her coverage, if you coverage in quotes has really taken off online. As the cut put it in a piece called Candace Owens has Gone Mainstream. They write the right wing commentators. Coverage of the Blake Lively Justin Boldani case has reached millions of viewers. Owens podcast was hours and hours of analysis of the case, Deep dives into court filings, tabloid news stories, even ryan Reynolds recent SNL 50th anniversary special appearance. One listener said she's really been able to go in and pinpoint discrepancies in some of the things Blake Lively has said, rather than us having to go through it on our own.
- [62:28]
Garrison Davis
Ah, of course it's the woman who's lying about being sexually harassed. Of course.
- [62:34]
Young Pueblo
One listener of her podcast says she recognizes that Owen seems to have a pro Boldani bias, but she doesn't care because, quote, she's urging us to look past the fact this is not a feminist issue at all, that it's about getting justice for whoever is being wronged here. She's uniting the left and the right. The right wing women's magazine also published a headline about this saying how Candace Owens is uniting conservatives and liberal with her. It ends with US coverage. So her coverage of this dispute has really allowed her to attract a lot more viewers beyond her like normal right wing extremist base, which has generally been like a lot of white men, like that too, was really listening to her content before when she was with Daily Wire. Now she has really branched out. So like normies like my cousins who have no idea who Owens is, have no idea her background, her past, the work that she has done, and just think like, oh, she's a normal entertainment journalist, like digging and getting the dirt.
- [63:30]
Garrison Davis
I know she's doing this like on her podcast, I assume YouTube as well. She also just like, like trying to like flood. Tick tock. Trying to flood like Instagram reels. Like, is this, is this kind of part of how she's trying to like expand her reach?
- [63:42]
Young Pueblo
It is like she's everywhere. And then she has her longer form podcast than YouTube, but then clips of her like, you know, breaking down the top lies or top inaccuracies and things that Blake Lively has said, those go super viral on social media. The short clips.
- [63:58]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, okay.
- [63:59]
Young Pueblo
And all of this has been just gangbusters for her growth and engagement. Here's how the cut put it. Since Owens started covering the Lively Boldani case, her YouTube channel has exploded in popularity, allowing her to attract a much larger fan base. Than the audience of hardcore conservatives she has amassed over the years. Each episode about Lively racks up at least 1.5 million views. In the past month alone, Owens has amassed more than 450,000 new subscribers on YouTube. And her total video views have quadrupled since this time last year. This is according to data from the platform Social Blade.
- [64:34]
Garrison Davis
Oh, no.
- [64:35]
Young Pueblo
Over the past three months, her audience on YouTube has almost started skewing 65% female, according to data provided by a spokesperson. A marked shift from her past fan base. So, yeah, she's exploding in popularity. She's everywhere. And now she's attracting, like, normie women who are just coming in for this celebrity dispute.
- [64:53]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, that's probably not gonna end well, huh?
- [64:57]
Young Pueblo
Well, I don't think it will end well. You know, I was like, racking my brain trying to figure out, like, why has this story taken off so much for Owens? And there are a couple of reasons. I think this is, like, working for her. One, I hate to say it, but she is actually genuinely interesting to listen to. You know, when she was a progressive voice online, she definitely was somebody who had a point of view and a clear voice and a perspective. And that real. That really comes through when she's breaking down Blake Lively in these videos. She has a way of speaking that really makes you pay attention and signals to the listener like, this person is really breaking it down. It's the same reason why on TikTok or social media, when someone is like, story time or like, I'm about to tell you all the details of something, those videos always perform very well on social media. And I think that Owens is. Is just very good at knowing how to hold somebody's attention online. Like, I have to say it.
- [65:51]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Sure.
- [65:51]
Garrison Davis
I mean, she's been doing the content churn for almost a decade now. Like, yeah, you, you do get good at it on, like, a technical proficiency level.
- [66:01]
Young Pueblo
Yes. Also, you know, we just love good old fashioned misogyny. And if that misogyny can be laced with, like a conspiracy theory, oh, yeah, I think that's. It's even better. So, like, I think that part of this is just like, like, social media platforms are always going to amplify misogyny. I would argue that things like misogyny, transphobia, misogynoir, racism, all of that is like baked into the experience of showing up online as a feature, not a bug. And I think that Owens takes it even further because she is breaking it down like she's uncovering some conspiracy. Like, it's not just, let's talk About. About Blake Lively.
- [66:40]
Garrison Davis
It's.
- [66:40]
Young Pueblo
I'm uncovering the web of lies, and I'm gonna. I'm gonna expose Blake Lively Dark truth, right? And so, like, of course that's gonna take off.
- [66:49]
Garrison Davis
And she does gain this element of authority because she's a woman talking about this. It makes men feel better about being misogynistic because a woman's telling them it's okay to. I mean, this is. This is the same thing that she was able to weaponize for all of her, like. Like, you know, anti Black Lives Matter stuff. For all of her, like. Like, racism isn't real things. She tries to, like, use that to her advantage, mostly to make, like, white members of her audience, like, feel good about their own racism because a black woman told them it's actually okay. And, like, that. That's been, like, a big part of her career the past few years.
- [67:23]
Young Pueblo
Exactly that. And I think, like, she really understands the inviting power of taking what you might think of as, like, a contrarian stance on something like.
- [67:32]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, totally.
- [67:33]
Young Pueblo
Like, after the MeToo movement, how many women got engagement by taking a contrarian stance? Right. Like, I think going against the conventional attitude that says, like, oh, we have to automatically support the woman in this. In this dispute, probably makes people tuning into Owens's breakdowns feel like they're, like, free thinkers who are going against the grain, you know, by taking an unpopular opinion. Which I do think connects to her more odious stances on things like trans people and women and Jewish people.
- [68:00]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, no, I mean, like, you see the same thing with, like, you know, like, the gays against groomers thing. Right wing trans influencers. D. Trans influencers. It's the same, like, gambit. And certainly, I think, like, yeah, like, your identification of her as, like. Like, a professional contrarian is, like, very, very key to her success.
- [68:17]
Young Pueblo
Exactly. I also think, like, part of the reason why people are attracted to conspiracy theories is that it allows for, like, fantasy world building. And I think that I really see the ways that she injects that into her coverage. Even the word coverage. I put that in quotes because, like, she is, like, a wild person. So her coverage is, like, also wild. She does not adhere to, as she puts it, quote, quote, a traditional style of reporting.
- [68:42]
Garrison Davis
You know, I'll take her word for that one. You know what?
- [68:44]
Young Pueblo
I'll.
- [68:45]
Garrison Davis
I'll believe her on that. That single point.
- [68:48]
Young Pueblo
Yeah, I believe her. I believe that, you know, she amplifies rumors, and even once she read a letter that she said that she got from Blake Lively's husband Ryan Reynolds, his acting coach when he was 12 and according to Candace Owens, his acting coach said that Ryan Reynolds was an obnoxious kid.
- [69:06]
Garrison Davis
You know what? I also believe it. I. Yeah.
- [69:09]
Young Pueblo
Oh, I have no trouble believing that. But like her coverage, it includes like side characters.
- [69:15]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. Things that have no bearing on this whatsoever. I mean like this, this focus on like this like conspiratorial Ben is like the same. It. She's using the same tactics she did for her Black Lives Matter documentary for like most of her political work. Like, it, it's. She's using the same tactics over and over again. And eventually she like reaches has this like stress point or this like threshold where she cannot see a path forward or she can't see a way to surpass it. And then she does a pivot. This happened with her progressive blog. This happened even at the Daily Wire. She does not, she, she doesn't work with Turning Point USA anymore. And like this, this new pivot is learning. Hey, it's super lucrative to be like a tabloid entertainment quote unquote journalist. Very easy. Super lucrative. And all of the tactics you learned on the right wing media sphere work great here. Like all of this like conspiratorial thinking, really a disregard for like, like facts and evidence works perfect for this sort of like rumor based reporting. And it spreads like crazy. And yeah, it spreads across political lines. You don't, you aren't just targeting the mega people or like the far right. This, this can be so much more broad to like the giant audience of like, you know, quote unquote, like apolitical people go to these platforms for a form of like, of like escapism and entertainment rather than you just hearing about politics yet again. Because that's, you know, very, very tiring.
- [70:35]
Young Pueblo
Yeah. And I think in my mind all of it is sort of, sort of connected. Like Ben Shapiro. Nobody cared more about celebrities or talked more about celebrities than Ben Shapiro. He would love to be like, I don't care what Hollywood is doing. But he was obsessed with like Beyonce and Meg thee Stallion. Like it was just like a negative obsession. Like, yeah, you know, anti fandom is still fandom. When you make video after video about how much you don't like Meg thee Stallion in a kind of way, you are a fan just in the opposite direction. And so I think that Candace Owens really took that and learned how to perfect it because she is much, I think that she is much better at this than Ben Shapiro is. Like the evidence being that like her YouTube channel is exploding with people who probably would never watch any of Ben Shapiro's content.
- [71:21]
Garrison Davis
The big bummer for me is that the Daily Wire's first film, Lady Ballers, left us on a cliffhanger with, with Candace Owens and Matt Walsh sitting in a car talking about how Matt Walsh planned this entire like, plot of, of the film as like, as like some kind of scheme or like social experiment. And you know, it was implied there would be more, you know, it was like a, you know, like Avengers Nick Fury type post credit scene. And, and now we're never gonna learn what Candace Owens and Matt Walsh get up to now because she's left the company. She's now doing her own thing. So now we just have this dangling plot thread that's just gonna bug me forever. Like, what does the Candace Owens character at the end of Lady Ballers do next? I'm gonna be thinking about this for like years.
- [72:04]
Young Pueblo
America deserves closure. We deserve to know just putting that out there.
- [72:09]
Garrison Davis
I think we do deserve closure. I just think my closure is gonna be a little bit different. I am, I'm very fine having all of these plot threads wrapped up quite quickly, but I do not see that in the cards immediately.
- [72:32]
Young Pueblo
So in terms of where she's at now, like, you know, my question is like, has Owens has this kind of like mainstream audience that she's been able to amass? Has she changed her views? Is she, she trying to do a rebrand or a pivot? In an interview she said, in terms of my perspective, I haven't changed anything. I've been anti MeToo since long before it was cool.
- [72:54]
Garrison Davis
Sure, I mean, that can be true. It's also true that she is getting better at propaganda and widening her footprint, which. Yeah. Then once her audience gets bigger, she might be able to slip in more things that I would find unsavory to a larger audience over time. But she also might be content to keep growing that and be slightly less off putting in the meantime. But no, I mean, like, there's also just a huge audience for like the anti woke backlash, anti me too stuff right now. Like that's kind of, that's kind of like the new mainstream, frankly. So I am certain that she's going to try to continue to like flex that and grow that in the, in the next few like months, years.
- [73:32]
Young Pueblo
Yeah, so I agree with you. I believe Owens when she says that like her stance is, have not changed much. It's easy to be like, oh, well, she's pivoting to go mainstream now that she has these like, women in her audience who are interested in celebrity. And you can honestly, you can sort of see some of this in changes to her physical appearance. Like, she was sort of known for having very severe hair. The joke being that she had alienated herself so much from her fellow black people that, like, no black person was gonna do her hair. And that's why it looks that way. But lately you've really seen this, like, softening. She's kind of going for, like, a softer public look. She is pivoting to different kinds of programming. She's branched out into doing a book club for paying subscribers and some kind of a fitness program.
- [74:16]
Garrison Davis
That makes sense. Yeah, totally. Like the health guru fitness entertainment bubble. Yeah, that's huge.
- [74:22]
Young Pueblo
That's such a good grift. She's gonna make so much money.
- [74:24]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, yeah, she is.
- [74:27]
Young Pueblo
But I really agree with you, Gar, that like, like, I think that these new followers are certainly going to be walked down a pipeline that includes her extremist attitude just using celebrity scandal as a hook. Because, like, as you said, celebrity scandals and celebrity stories are just considered fluff for a lot of people. So, like, people who care about extremist content and ideology are maybe not seeing that as a space that they need to pay too close of attention to about these stories that you might see on the COVID of an Us Weekly. But these stories actually can be used to tap into extremist ideologies and unleash them on a whole new audience. And like, like you were saying, if you are just like, watching a podcast because you want to be entertained about a story about two celebrities, you might not have your, like, bullshit detector up to be like, wait, is this extremist content? Because it's. It's seen and treated as a less charged space. And so, you know, that line of thinking that says that, you know, this is just fluff. It doesn't really matter what happens in celebrity news. It's not incorrect. It is dangerous because it lends itself to people being more susceptible to it when extremist content is slipped in without even really realizing it.
- [75:35]
Garrison Davis
I mean, and like, that relates even to, like, the originator of this Gamergate stuff and the whole, like, anti woke, like, media fandom content sphere, right? Where so much of, like, the anti woke backlash has been built on people complaining that Star wars is too woke now. There's too many women in. In movies, there's too many black people in commercials. Where do all the white people go? There's too many gay people in tv, there's too many trans people in tv. And like, that is his is Definitely focused on by the rest of the Daily Wire goons. And you can very easily pivot back to that sort of cultural commentary after you're done talking about Blake Lively. Like, this is, this is, is a very small jump where you're still talking about the entertainment industry, but with this like anti woke framing of like, you know, why is all these minorities here, why are they pushing transgenderism on, on kids? You know, whether that be talking about, you know, trans actors in the business, whether, whether you be talking about, you know, like female led or like diversity casting, like all, all that kind of stuff that especially Candace can use her like, contrarian position to speak on authority about, talking about, why are you recasting these legacy characters to be people of color? Or why is a woman the lead of this thing when it should be actually a man? You know, just like very, very basic stuff that's been a part of like the YouTube slop for a decade now. But it's still like, still takes in a lot of, a lot of clicks. And it is, it is a lot of like the Daily Wire and like right wing content still, still does. It's all this like weird, like culture war stuff. Stuff. It's very, very tight in with Hollywood. Like you were saying about how like Ben Shapiro claims to, you know, like, hate Hollywood. He's trying to build his own alternative to it, but he can't stop talking about it. Like, he can't stop complaining about Disney's Snow White. And I can see Candace doing like the exact same thing, but now with like an honestly, like a bigger, A bigger, more like apolitical audience that's much more malleable and can be shaped around these like, larger cultural trends. When you think about this like, perception of this backlash against wokeness, I absolutely.
- [77:38]
Young Pueblo
Think that's what we're gonna see. And I can tell you, we can finish by. I can tell you about her next big pet issue, which is going to be, oh yes, championing Harvey Weinstein, who she is.
- [77:50]
Garrison Davis
Oh, no, no, no.
- [77:52]
Young Pueblo
She's been interviewing him since 2022. According to the Hollywood Reporter. She explains, while he is, quote, an immoral man, he is also a victim of the justice system.
- [78:02]
Garrison Davis
A victim, Sure, A victim.
- [78:04]
Young Pueblo
And she says, I've always had faith in our court system and now it's beginning to change. Now I'm beginning to wonder if our courtrooms have been politicized. And the thing that's made her think this is Harvey Weinstein.
- [78:15]
Garrison Davis
It's wild. I mean, like, Ben Shapiro is starting his own campaign to free Derek Chauvin. I think there's gonna be a lot of pressure on the courts right now. I mean, you're seeing that from like, Elon and Trump as well, I think. Undermining the authority of the court, I think is actually kind of part of this larger concerted issue amongst the entirety of the right right now, because this is like their biggest remaining roadblock to achieving their right wing utopia is the court system. And I, I, you know, this may not be intentional on every person's part. Like, Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens aren't, aren't like intentionally collaborating on this, but they may be copying each other's trends. And if they're seeing this, this wider push across a large amount of like the right wing content people to put pressure on various aspects of the courts, including by using like, high profile cases like Harvey Weinstein or Derek Chauvin, that's not a great sign. And I can definitely see them trying to, trying to do that in conjunction, I guess.
- [79:11]
Young Pueblo
Yeah, I think we're gonna see a lot more of it. Candace has a series coming out called Harvey Speaks that apparently tells his side of the story. So look out for that. And I think that's the thing, like, I think with her content, like, when asked, asked why it was she thought that her Blake Lively stuff was really taking off, she says that she believes her new fans on the left, quote, have just kind of gotten wise to the fact that maybe women lie just like men. And so I just implore folks that, like, even if you think that you're just like retaking in this content because you're following fluffy celebrity news or whatever, it is so easy to go from maybe women lie to maybe women can't be trusted or maybe women shouldn't work and have jobs. A stance that Candace herself is actually advocating despite very obviously being a working woman. And so I don't think we should trust Candace Owens even if she does this rebrand. Like, no, don't let her rebrand herself as like, just a celebrity investigative journalist. Like, she put all of these odious views out into the world, and I don't want her to be able to like, soften it or, you know, soften what it is that she advocates for and what it is that she believes in, if that is truly what she's trying to do, to just sort of like, amass a more mainstream audience. So don't fall for it if you're, if you're getting tagged in Candace Owens videos, just know what she actually is about.
- [80:30]
Garrison Davis
I mean, yeah, I, I think I Think for our audience, it's. It's more likely that you'll have, like, family members who are going to be finding this stuff. And you should find a list of sources, maybe this. This episode included. But probably, you know, you can find some articles as well that think of some background on Candace's history and. And previous beliefs. Can pick and choose some of her most like outrageous claims. So when your aunt sends you a video about how Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are kidnapping children or something, you can, you can maybe inform Aunt Judy that maybe you shouldn't listen to everything this Candace Owens character is saying.
- [81:08]
Young Pueblo
Yeah, this Candace Owens might not be on the money. Might not be on the level.
- [81:13]
Garrison Davis
No.
- [81:14]
Young Pueblo
Yeah. Inform an auntie today.
- [81:16]
Garrison Davis
Yes, that's right. Right.
- [81:17]
Young Pueblo
And that's all I got. That's it. I don't know how you usually end.
- [81:21]
Garrison Davis
These episodes, usually by getting sad, but I don't know. This has been an interesting dive into the life of a woman with. With many, many careers.
- [81:33]
Young Pueblo
Many a chameleon.
- [81:35]
Garrison Davis
Many personalities. A chameleon. A chameleon of contrarianism.
- [81:40]
Young Pueblo
Oh, I like that. If I ever write a book about her, that'll be the title.
- [81:44]
Garrison Davis
Jesus Christ. Oh, what a nightmare that would be, man. Scary Bridget. Where can people find you online?
- [81:52]
Young Pueblo
You can find me on my podcast. There are no girls on the Internet on this network. Iheartradio. I mean, you can find me on Instagram @bridgetmarieandc or on bluesky@bridgett. Todd.
- [82:01]
Garrison Davis
Well, thank you so much. Good luck in dc. Thanks for holding, holding the line out there as, as Elon puts a killdozer through your entire city.
- [82:11]
Young Pueblo
We're doing our best.
- [82:12]
Garrison Davis
I would love to talk again about a DC update. Maybe. Maybe next time you come on the show.
- [82:18]
Young Pueblo
Oh, my God. Yes, please.
- [82:19]
Garrison Davis
There we go. Well, we will. We will talk then. Goodbye, everybody.
- [82:41]
Robert Evans
Some people won't give you the real talk on drugs, but it's time we know the facts. Fentanyl is often laced into illicit drugs and used to make fake versions of prescription pills. You can't see it, taste it, or smell it. Suppliers mix fentanyl into their products because it's potent and cheap and the dealer might not even know. Keep yourself and others safe by knowing the real deal on fentanyl. Get the facts. Go to realdealonfentanyl.com this message is brought to you by the Ad Council.
- [83:12]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Why would you do that to me.
- [83:14]
Mia Wong
When I thought we were friends?
- [83:15]
Young Pueblo
We are friends.
- [83:17]
Robert Evans
Los Angeles, 2021.
- [83:19]
Garrison Davis
A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true.
- [83:24]
Robert Evans
Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist.
- [83:28]
Young Pueblo
So you didn't stand a chance.
- [83:30]
Garrison Davis
But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare.
- [83:34]
Robert Evans
Blum generally targeted people with money.
- [83:37]
Garrison Davis
And I was not alone.
- [83:39]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
He took over 100 people for over $15 million.
- [83:43]
Robert Evans
One of the victims was his own grandmother.
- [83:45]
Garrison Davis
I was married to David for almost 10 years.
- [83:47]
Young Pueblo
It was insane.
- [83:48]
Garrison Davis
I was barely functioning. And I just had this realization that.
- [83:53]
Young Pueblo
He will not stop until he kills me.
- [83:56]
Garrison Davis
Getting a con artist to pay for their crimes isn't easy.
- [84:00]
Robert Evans
Charge David blum. I'm Caroline D'Amore.
- [84:03]
Garrison Davis
Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [84:12]
Young Pueblo
Love at first swipe? I highly doubt it. What's your biggest red flag? No, no, no. What's your ultimate green flag? These days, reality TV and social media have us thinking love is instant. We're marrying strangers at first sight. We're finding love through walls, or we're even judging people by balloon pops. But what really makes a relationship last? On this episode of Dope Labs, poet, author and relationship expert Young Pueblo breaks down the psychology and biology of loving better. And he provides provides eye opening insights and advice that we all need.
- [84:47]
Robert Evans
It's a big realization moment that you should not be postponing your happiness. Like your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to like come from a relationship. Your partner, they should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you.
- [85:03]
Young Pueblo
Listen to Dope labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.
- [85:13]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Our iHeartRadio Music Awards are coming back.
- [85:17]
Robert Evans
Monday, March 17th on Fox. Starring Bad Bunny Glorilla, Kenny Chesney, Money.
- [85:23]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Long Nelly, your host, iheartradio.
- [85:26]
Mia Wong
LL Cool J.
- [85:27]
Robert Evans
Are you guys ready to have some fun tonight?
- [85:29]
Young Pueblo
Plus iHeart Innovator Award recipient Lady Gaga.
- [85:32]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
I heart icon award recipient Mariah Carey and iHeart Breakthrough Award recipient Gracie Abrams.
- [85:38]
Robert Evans
Watch live on Fox Monday, March 17th at 87 Central.
- [85:47]
Garrison Davis
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, still banned from one of the top 15 highest endowment universities in the country. But I am not banned from this podcast. Today I'm joined by Robert Evans and James Stout to discuss the very troubling news of students having their visas and or green cards revoked by U.S. customs in relation to anti genocide protests. James, this is something that you've been putting together a piece on for a while.
- [86:22]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [86:22]
Robert Evans
Repeatedly trying to warn people of Cassandra like to no Avail?
- [86:27]
Mia Wong
Yes, Yes. I do feel like we kind of saw this one on coming a little bit, but that doesn't mean it's not bad. And specifically, the case we're talking about today, I think is particularly egregious because it doesn't actually involve someone's student visa. Right. So I've been working for a while on people who actually, under the Biden administration, were potentially facing deportation.
- [86:52]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [86:53]
Mia Wong
But the material difference between that and now is that those people were facing deportation because the university removed their visas or the university removed them from the university, and therefore their visa was no longer valid. In this case, it seems that the order came directly from the State Department to deport a guy whose name is Mahmoud Khalil. So Khalil was a prominent activist in the encampment at Colombia. Right. But what's notable is that and the events here, as best we can tell, went down like this. I'm referencing an AP article here that we'll link in the show notes. ICE agents came to his front door, which is on university property, and told him that they were revoking his student visa and therefore he was being deported. He then informed them that he didn't have a student visa, that he was a legal permanent resident. Right. Colloquially referred to as a green card holder. They then told him or his lawyer, at some point, he got his lawyer on the phone and was communicating with them through his lawyer. They then told the lawyer that they were revoking the green card. And at some point, it's reported that they attempted to detain his wife, who is a US citizen, which, of course, is not a thing that ICE can do. So the difference between a legal permanent resident and a student visa is like, the place I want to start this, because they are materially very different. Right. Student visas are pretty fragile. People lose their student visas for lots of things all the time. A green card is a much higher barrier. And the revocation of his green card. We spoke a lot before this episode about exactly kind of where this comes from in Trump's mishmash of executive orders and speeches. Right. Because after he was detained, we saw Trump truthing about specifically using the word green card. We also saw Marco Rubio tweeting about. About removing green cards. Right. Rubio being the Secretary of State. Normally the green card wouldn't be a State Department thing.
- [89:00]
Robert Evans
No.
- [89:01]
Mia Wong
It seems the most likely course of events, as far as we can tell from what we know right now and today is the 10th of March, is that Ice came thinking he had a student visa. It's not particularly uncommon for ICE raids to not have all the information on someone, from what I understand.
- [89:17]
Robert Evans
I mean, this is just a police thing.
- [89:19]
Mia Wong
Yes.
- [89:20]
Robert Evans
It's not just cops who are doing raids very often don't have. Have all or accurate information.
- [89:26]
Mia Wong
Yeah. ICE in particular, very often don't have a judicial warrant. They have a warrant that they made they'll sign themselves, which is a different thing. They're supposed to require a warrant to get onto Columbia University campus. But as of now, I don't believe Columbia have clarified that they did have. And I think the apology also allows for them to allow ICE onto campus in, like, exigent circumstances. So we'll have to see what exactly that warrant was for, why exactly Columbia allowed them onto campus. So it seems like they came attempting to revoke this guy's student visa, realized he didn't have a student visa, detained him anyway, and then kind of expose facto these tweets and statements came out. But, Garrison, you found some stuff in. I mean, Trump has made previous statements that are kind of unclear. Right. He uses the word aliens a lot.
- [90:12]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. So we've been trying to kind of figure out the exact details of, like, what is going on, what justification they have for doing this, and how we can, like, extrapolate this out to larger trends. Because deporting, like, legal residents for college protests is pretty insane. And also the rhetoric coming out of the White House and, like, the White House, like, social media accounts around this incident is, like, extremely worrying.
- [90:37]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [90:37]
Garrison Davis
Like, the way they're basically putting up, like, wanted posters for protesters and. And in general, the way that the White House account has been doing this, like, own the libs, like memetic nationalism. The past few weeks has been really upsetting, and this has continued around this issue. And I think it is worth focusing on this as, like, a specific escalation because you had people like Mamadou Tal, who, I think Cornell tried to revoke their student visa, and then he in some way negotiated back into that to stay on. The interim provost, John Siciliano eventually ruled in Tal's favor, so he did not end up getting deported last year. And now this new development in relation to the Columbia protests is a significant escalation.
- [91:26]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [91:27]
Garrison Davis
Because not only is this not just like the university revoking in F1, which they do have the, you know, authority to, this is like coming directly from the Trump administration where they are. They are going after specific students without the involvement of the university and students who may be legal permanent residents.
- [91:44]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Garrison found a fact sheet on WhiteHouse.gov, where Trump is quoted as saying, quote, to all resident aliens who joined in the pro jihadist protests, we put you on notice. Come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you.
- [91:57]
Robert Evans
And that would seem to include the legal permanent resident.
- [92:00]
Mia Wong
Yes, right. Like, resident alien is attack status. But again, like, like, I think it's quite possible that the, the vagueness in the language is deliberate, not necessarily from Trump, but there are other people within the Trump cabinet who, who might seek to. To use that vagueness for things like this. Right? Like, who might see that as a benefit.
- [92:20]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, well, and you see that with other things, like with, like with Rubio's State. State Department directives on trans people right now, where they keep the language intentionally vague. They. They leave the enforcement up to, like, individual actors and then they can eventually, like, figure out the logistics, like in court, once people be like, oh, no, this is illegal.
- [92:38]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [92:39]
Garrison Davis
So, like, yeah, it is vague because they want to test the actual, like, full authority of their power. But I, I think the specific, like, fact sheet, which is like a sister article towards this executive order, says like James was saying to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro jihadist protests, we put you on note us, come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses which have been infested with radicalism like, never before, unquote. So, so there you have him saying both resident aliens, which we can infer probably refers to green card holders as well as student visas. Like, these are. These are two separate things that he has specifically named as going after.
- [93:24]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [93:25]
Garrison Davis
And now you see more direction from Rubio after this arrest that happened Monday. You see more direction from Rubio and the State Department in like, specifically naming legal permanent residents as targets for removal and targets for ICE actions, which is, you know, not something that is extremely common.
- [93:42]
Mia Wong
Yeah, like where I've seen it before is like, in. In cases of. Of material support for terrorism, which. But that has quite a high bar of proof, right? That that's like a listed organization approving a material, I. E. Financial or physical support, like in kind donations. Like, I've written about a guy who was providing material aid to the Islamic State called Sikhi Ramis Hodzik, sending stuff from Bass Pro, actually, like thermal scopes and hunting scopes and things like that. But that has a much higher bar than this, which we will see because we have a legal permanent resident here and they're seeking to revoke that I imagine we will see a court case and we will see exactly the justification for revoking his green card in that court case. That will be sometime in the future.
- [94:27]
Garrison Davis
Let's go on a quick break and we will come back to discuss some more of the details on what Marco Rubio is actually saying and where this could all end up. Okay, we are back. I, I would like to talk about specifically some of the rhetoric that Rubio has been using since this arrest and a little bit of what he was saying before, like we were saying before the break, some of this kind of vague language can kind of be used to their advantage. And this is certainly like riffing off of very vague language that Trump would use on the campaign trail, right. Where he would talk about wanting to jail or deport protesters, like, in general, regardless if they're student visa holders, green card holders, or just U.S. citizens. Right. Like, Trump has made statements about wanting to do all of that and campaign, like off the cuff statements and actual, like, government policy are two different things. And right now, like, they're trying to figure out where the line between that is, like, how much of this rhetoric can be turned into government policy. And we mentioned, like, the fact sheet from the executive order that I believe was signed in January, which is, you know, to quote, unquote, combat anti Semitism. And then like last week, so before this arrest happened, we had a post from the secretary Mark Rubio Twitter account, official quote, those who support designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, threaten our national security. The United States has zero tolerance for foreign visitors who support terrorists. Violators of US Law, including international students, face visa denial or revocation and deportation, unquote. So that one specifically focuses I, I would say pretty, pretty firmly on people who have student visas. Right. He names like visitors.
- [96:16]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [96:16]
Garrison Davis
And then after the arrest happened, he posted a different statement on his own personal account, quote, we will be revoking the visas and or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so that they can be deported, unquote. Sharing an AP article. And then the Homeland Security DHS gov account posted on March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti Semitism. And in coordination with the Department of State, U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump's executive orders and protecting US national security, unquote. And there has now been a flurry of posts from both the White House account And DHS accounts basically posting like a picture of this person saying that he's aligned with Hamas in celebration, almost like styled after a wanted poster, but instead it just reads like arrested. And that is like the, that's the rhetoric that like, they're using right now on their official accounts. Something that, like, James, I think noted, it's, it's important to like, like think about if ICE was just freestyling this action or if there was a directive beforehand to go after green cards specifically. Right. And it seems like at least for the people, like, doing the raid, they did not care. Nor, nor did they like. No, they weren't like informed. They just were told to go after this person.
- [97:49]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [97:49]
Garrison Davis
From someone higher up. Right. And, and that, that very well could be Rubio. I mean, a lot of DHS is being ran by Stephen Miller right now. A lot of this feels very Miller esque.
- [98:00]
Mia Wong
Yeah, we got an update. As of the time of recording it, I've just discovered that Mahmoud Khalil's lawyers filed a lawsuit challenging his detention. And a judge in New York City, a federal judge, obviously ordered that Khalil shouldn't be deported while that court then considered his case.
- [98:17]
Robert Evans
Yes, I was gonna bring that up.
- [98:19]
Mia Wong
So that also, like, his case will be considered in New York City, which is probably good for him as opposed to a more conservative jurisdiction elsewhere.
- [98:26]
Garrison Davis
Right, totally. Like, like this happening in Texas, like in all of those districts where Elon Musk is trying to set up his corporations because there's friendly judges. This would be handled quite differently. Right.
- [98:36]
Mia Wong
Yeah. This is something migrants I speak to are at least aware of sometimes that they don't want to enter into Texas because the fifth Circuit is seen as less favorable to them than say, the ninth Circuit, where they would be if they entered in California. I'm sort of surprised if it is a Miller joint that it isn't someone at like UT Austin in or somewhere like that.
- [98:54]
Robert Evans
No, they're going directly after this individual in part because he's somebody that a lot of folks who might otherwise be like, up in arms about a move like this would say because of some of his connections and some of the things he said in the past. Well, he's, you know, supported groups that are really bad. Like, I think they're really trying to find the first case is they want someone that they can cab a lot of like, liberals off from being too scared to support because he said some things that like, they don't want to have attached to them. Like that's, that's how they're and they're going to keep pushing that further and further each time you find some folks who you can scare off a lot of maybe what you might call like their otherwise natural support base because you can point out this thing or that thing they did that was, that was not great.
- [99:39]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [99:39]
Mia Wong
HTLU types like, when I'm not, I'm.
- [99:41]
Robert Evans
Not insulting or trying to say bad things about this guy. I'm just saying, like, that's the tactic here. Right. Is to try to paint this guy as like, well, this guy did this. Do you really want to support that? Which is why you have to take an incredibly firm stance that, no, the government doesn't get to do this, the State Department doesn't get to do this.
- [99:56]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. Regardless of any things that this person.
- [99:59]
Mia Wong
May have said, that First Amendment is for everyone.
- [100:01]
Robert Evans
I don't care what he said, you know.
- [100:04]
Mia Wong
So, like, it's also worth noting that Colombia, specifically, the Intercept, has reported on this that There is a WhatsApp group called Columbia Alumni for Israel. And they have been explicitly trying to identify these students and to call for like prosecution and I guess, persecution of these students. So, like, and I think the Columbia encampment was particularly objectionable to a lot of people. That was kind of the one that got a lot of the national focus in the reporting. Right. So it's understandable that that's where they went for this.
- [100:36]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. It's high visibility. And I think it's also very likely that they are just looking to have a test case for this to see if they can create legal precedent for removing people's green cards for, you know, anti genocide protests. Right. And the specific details of that will become more and more or less important based on like the results of the case. Yeah. As long as they can create that precedent. Right. And specifically like the precedent for revoking a green card, something that's pretty substantial.
- [101:05]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [101:06]
Garrison Davis
They want something that's like, you know, in their mind, like the most favorable towards their outcome. Outcome. So I mean, that's part of what they're trying to do with this specific case. And it is very much in line with Trump's campaign rhetoric and versions of what Trump has said before. And now you're seeing someone like Rubio, someone who's a little bit more policy minded, taking steps towards this outcome.
- [101:28]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Which I think is the other thing they didn't get to do, I guess, is that they weren't able to deport the guy at Hyperspeed, which they have been doing with some people. He was detained in New York and then moved to Louisiana. Very upset about this, rightly, because it's removing him from easy access to his lawyer and to his family and to his eight month pregnant wife. Right. That's all things that shouldn't be done. It's also something that the Biden administration did routinely. We have other episodes on this, actually, especially in San Diego, where we have some funding that allows people who are detained access to legal assistance. It has been very common for those migrants to be then moved to Texas. I've seen it with migrants I've met at the border and I've looked for them in the ICE immigrant detention Locator, and they've been moved to Texas. It's not uncommon at all. So it's bad that it happened. It was bad that it happened under Biden. It's still bad that it's happening now. We shouldn't have let it happen then. We shouldn't support it when it happens now.
- [102:24]
Garrison Davis
And I think before we go and break again, I do want to kind of close this section by talking about how they don't necessarily need an executive order specifically allowing Trump to do this or Trump doesn't need to make an executive order explicitly for this based on like immigration deportation law. Like, there will be an argument made in like in court that, that they, they have justification for this action already. This is something that like, I've already been through when I immigrated to the country and like, did like my citizenship interview. Right. Like if you, if you have discussed in the past, you know, something that can be construed as support for a terrorist organization that does disqualify you from U.S. citizenship. Right. So there's going to be a lot of argument, arguments around specifically these terrorism statutes that will make someone like this a subject for removal.
- [103:14]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [103:15]
Garrison Davis
And that's going to be the angle in which they go about this. And I think that's worth keeping in mind.
- [103:21]
Robert Evans
I also think it's worth because, and I don't want to make this because a lot of people online have, this shouldn't be our immediate primary concern. Our immediately primary concern should be Mahmoud and the other people like him who are in situations like him who are going to be targeted. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that, like, if they get away with this, at some point they will start saying, like, look at the support for Palestine the government describes like, or any support for any group that the government considers a terrorist. It doesn't matter if you were born here as a citizen. You know, we can start like that is a potential end state of this, which is again, should not be on your front burner. It should be the people being targeted right now. But also an awareness of like, this is part of why you have to draw such a hard line. Like if, if the situation was reversed and this were a democratic administration coming after an anti vaccine student activist who is a permanent legal resident, it would be wrong for them to disappear them. Right. Like, that has to be like where the line is drawn.
- [104:15]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, yeah. The state should not have this like, ability. Like we should not let them get away with this and we should put as much support and legal support into preventing this from happening. I really can't say which way this will go. Like, immigration law is one of the most headache inducing things I've ever had to go through in my entire life.
- [104:36]
Mia Wong
He will be spending a lot of money on immigration lawyers now.
- [104:39]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Also be really clear, I'm not equating support for Palestine to being anti vax. I'm just saying, like, if this was like a shitty guy. Right.
- [104:46]
Garrison Davis
It would still be wrong. If it's something that we like to laugh at for getting measles in Texas, disappearing people.
- [104:54]
Robert Evans
Bad.
- [104:54]
Young Pueblo
Yeah.
- [104:54]
Mia Wong
If he thought Russia was doing anti fascism in Ukraine, it would still be important to do this. Should we take a break and come back and discuss some more?
- [105:05]
Garrison Davis
Yes, yes.
- [105:17]
Mia Wong
I wanted to give a little bit of background here, some other stuff that I've been looking into. So on the 5th of February, if Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a series of memos. One of these was establishing a quote, October 7th task force. I'm going to quote from it here to prioritize seeking justice for victims of October 7, 2023 terrorist attack in Israel, addressing the ongoing threat posed by Hamas and its affiliates and combating anti Semitic acts of terrorism and civil rights violations in the homeland. It then lifts several action items for the FBI. Right. Among them is investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, anti Semitic civil rights violations and other federal crimes committed by Hamas supporters in the United States, including on college campuses. The final point is, quote, supporting efforts by the Israeli government, Department of Defense and Department of treasury to pursue non criminal responses to the October 7th attack and other terrorist activities by Hamas. There's a couple of things that are considered. Obviously non criminal responses could include deportation. Right. Like if the person is not being accused of a crime, but nonetheless having their visa revoked. Also the idea of cooperating with a foreign government, a government which is currently committing a genocide potentially against US citizens or US residents. It's quite concerning. It's especially concerning when we talk about that Trump executive order that we've already discussed. Right. One of the parts of that Trump executive order that I noticed that I haven't seen any reporting on was the, quote, inventory and analysis of all the Title 6 complaints and administrative actions, including in K12 education, related to antisemitism, pending or resolved after October 7, 2023.
- [107:01]
Garrison Davis
Can you explain what Title 6 is?
- [107:03]
Mia Wong
Yeah, I can, Garrison and I would love to. So Title 6 is part of the Civil Rights act of 1964. Right. It prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national or origin dei. Yes. It applies to federally funded programs, activities or institutions which receive federal funding.
- [107:22]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [107:22]
Mia Wong
Which will cover almost every institution of education in this country, apart from some, like religious private schools. I guess maybe they still get some federal funding. There have been a number of Title 6 cases filed for anti Semitic discrimination and anti Palestinian or anti Arab or Islamophobic discrimination since October 7, 2020. The ones filed for Islamophobic discrimination don't seem to be covered by this, but the other ones do. The Biden administration kind of rushed to finish up and resolve some of these in the last few weeks of his tenure, and normally the results were pretty ineffectual. It was like some more trainings, a review of policies. Anyone who's been an educator at one of these institutions will have already been very familiar with the sort of anti discrimination training video that you have to watch. And they were suggesting that you watch more of those videos. I'm not really convinced that that is the way we deal with hatred, but that's what they recommended. The Emory one I thought was interesting because they told Emory that it had to commit to a, quote, equitable handling of protest after its campus police were so violent towards anti genocide protesters. A lot of the other cases are still pending, but it seems like the Trump administration is going to go back and review all of them anyway. It does seem like. Like whether it spread organically or whether it was some kind of campaign to file Title 6 complaints. A lot of Title 6 complaints were filed after October 7th. And during this time when we saw campus protests and we saw support by some faculty for those campus protests. Right. And we saw some faculty who may or may not have supported the protest, but felt very strongly about the right of students to have freedom of speech on campus. And I'm sure they would have been kind of wrapped up in this big Dragnet tour that this potentially raises the specter of at least career threatening. And again, lots of faculty are not US Citizens.
- [109:11]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Right.
- [109:12]
Mia Wong
They might be permanent residents, they might be married to citizens, they might be here on a visa. There are a number of different immigration statuses that they could have that are not US Citizen, that they could potentially lose.
- [109:24]
Garrison Davis
So what is Trump trying to do about these cases which could be pending or have already been resolved?
- [109:30]
Mia Wong
Yeah, well, what they said is they want to familiarize institutions with the grounds for inadmissibility so that that's not allowing someone to enter the United States. Right. Under and read out the section of the United States Code, but a section of the United States Code so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds, and for ensuring that such reports about aliens leak as appropriate and consistent with applicable law to investigations and if warranted, actions to remove such aliens. So it's in there, right? Like this is in Trump's late January executive order. This is the legal argument that they're making there, and they're asking universities to do some of that legwork for them. It seems, I imagine, that this is the same section of the United States Code that we'll see used with reference to Khalil, but it refers to excludable or inadmissible aliens, which is people coming into the country. But I guess they could make an argument that he disguised his inadmissible status or became inadmissible.
- [110:35]
Garrison Davis
Sure. I mean, there's these two sections, Right. There's this one that revolves around who can be admitted, who can be accepted. And there's that one section which is, I believe, section 1227, subsection A4A C, which is the section specifically on deportation as relating to supporting, quote, unquote, terrorist activities. So I think they will try to use these both in conjunction. And I think it's also important to note out here the use of the word aliens, as opposed to the word that Rubio was using previously, which is visitors. Right. Visitors, I would say, probably applies more to student visa holders.
- [111:13]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Non residents versus aliens.
- [111:16]
Garrison Davis
Aliens. Aliens can be anyone. Right. Like, aliens can be visa holders, can be green card holders. Right. And so, at least in, like, the official wording here, they use the word. I think aliens is important as opposed to, like, Rubio's, like, you know, posts on x dot com.
- [111:32]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [111:33]
Garrison Davis
Which now become official policy because we're in the hell world.
- [111:36]
Robert Evans
Yep.
- [111:38]
Garrison Davis
That refers to, like, just, like, you know, visitors to this country.
- [111:41]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [111:41]
Robert Evans
The Right.
- [111:42]
Mia Wong
Has used aliens for a long time. Right. Because it differentiates them from people.
- [111:45]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. It's like, it's very basic. Basic dehumanization language. Right.
- [111:48]
Mia Wong
In this case, I think it's important. It's pivotal so we have a sense of what will happen there. Maybe I could just finish up by saying, if you are faculty or a student, if you are encountering this, you can reach out to us using our encrypted email. So if you'd like to reach out to us, it is. Coolzonetipsoftn Me. It's only encrypted if it's encrypted from the sender as well as a recipient. So that would mean using a proton or other encrypted email. Email to reach out rather than using an unencrypted email. If you'd like to reach out again. CoolZoneTipsOn me. Obviously, this is something we're gonna continue taking an interest in. And obviously it's something that we can't report the entirety of now because we're still waiting on the court case. But we are very interested in learning more about it. So please feel free to reach out.
- [112:35]
Robert Evans
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
- [112:37]
Garrison Davis
Well. And it's something that Trump is also saying they will be taking a continued interest in. He is promising that this is the first arrest of quote, unquote, many to come. So as they continue to focus on this, we will as well. James, did you have anything else you wanted to say, like re lawyers?
- [112:57]
Mia Wong
Yes. So, as I mentioned before. Right. People. People under the Biden administration have been moved away from their lawyers. This was very common. It seems that now people are being moved away from their lawyers and having teleconference requests denied, I. E. Let's say, Garrison, you're a lawyer and you have a client detained to San Diego. They moved to Texas and now you can't teleconference in for a 10 minute hearing. So you would have to fly. Right. For that 10 minute hearing. Yeah. Which is going to make it impossible both in time terms and financial terms. What I'm understanding. I'm still digging into this a little bit more, but that's what I'm hearing. So this is going to be an ongoing thing. I guess if you're an immigration lawyer in one of the places people are being sent to, like Texas, you can help. But you probably already know that and you're probably already doing that and you're probably already very, very overworked if you work asylum cases. So, yeah, I think now is the time for groups like the ACLU to step up or shut up and we'll see.
- [113:50]
Robert Evans
Well, the ACLU has come out against Mahmud's arrest.
- [113:53]
Mia Wong
Okay, good.
- [113:54]
Robert Evans
The ADL Obviously, totally for it shocked the adl, an organization formed to help avoid another holocaust, does not see any potential danger in a state redefining citizenship in order to disappear its political enemies. So we love the ADL here, folks, but the ACLU did. I mean, we'll see if they do anything, but they did, like, make a statement. Yeah.
- [114:15]
Mia Wong
And they've been very good, I should say. The ACLU has been pursuing a lot of litigation against Trump administration.
- [114:20]
Robert Evans
This is the sort of thing they're pretty consistently anti. Yes.
- [114:23]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Especially at a national level. They've been very good at this. And so. Yeah, you know, shout out to them, I guess.
- [114:30]
Robert Evans
I don't know. We don't need to shout it out. It's their job.
- [114:32]
Mia Wong
Yeah. They get millions of dollars to do this.
- [114:34]
Robert Evans
Yes. Like, this is literally why you're there.
- [114:36]
Garrison Davis
Do a good job, job or else.
- [114:37]
Robert Evans
I guess you'd better do something else too.
- [114:40]
Garrison Davis
Like.
- [114:41]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah, you better show up. Yeah, I know. Don't donate to the adl. I guess if you were thinking of doing that after listening to this podcast.
- [115:07]
Robert Evans
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- [115:38]
Young Pueblo
Love at first swipe. I highly doubt it. What's your biggest red flag? No, no, no. What's your ultimate green flag? These days, reality TV and social media have us thinking love is instant. We're marrying strangers at first sight. We're finding love through walls or we're even judging people buy balloon pops. But what really makes a relationship last? On this episode of Dope Labs, poet, author and relationship expert Young Pueblo breaks down the psychology and biology of loving better and he provides eye opening insights and advice that we all need.
- [116:14]
Robert Evans
It's a big realization moment that you should not be postponing your happiness. Like your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to, to like come from a relationship, your partner, they should add to your happiness. But your happiness is really coming from within.
- [116:29]
Young Pueblo
You listen to Dope labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [116:41]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Why would you do that to me.
- [116:43]
Mia Wong
When I Thought we were friends.
- [116:44]
Young Pueblo
We are friends.
- [116:45]
Garrison Davis
Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true.
- [116:53]
Robert Evans
Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist.
- [116:57]
Young Pueblo
So you didn't stand a chance.
- [116:59]
Garrison Davis
But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare.
- [117:03]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Bloom generally targeted people with money, and.
- [117:07]
Garrison Davis
I was not alone.
- [117:08]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
He took over 100 people for over $15 million.
- [117:11]
Robert Evans
One of the victims was his own grandmother.
- [117:14]
Garrison Davis
I was married to David for almost 10 years.
- [117:16]
Mia Wong
It was insane.
- [117:17]
Garrison Davis
I was barely functioning. And I just had this realization that.
- [117:22]
Young Pueblo
He will not stop until he kills me.
- [117:25]
Garrison Davis
Getting a con artist to pay for their crimes isn't easy.
- [117:29]
Robert Evans
Charge, shave and blow. I'm Caroline D'Amore.
- [117:32]
Garrison Davis
Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.
- [117:38]
Robert Evans
Get your podcast podcasts.
- [117:40]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Our iHeartRadio Music Awards are coming back.
- [117:43]
Robert Evans
Monday, March 17th on Fox. Starring Bad Bunny Glorilla, Kenny Chesney, Money.
- [117:49]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Long Nelly, your host, iheartradio.
- [117:52]
Mia Wong
LL Cool J.
- [117:53]
Robert Evans
Are you guys ready to have some fun tonight?
- [117:55]
Young Pueblo
Plus, I heart innovator award recipient Lady.
- [117:58]
Robert Evans
Gaga, I heart icon award recipient Mariah.
- [118:01]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Carey, and I heart breakthrough award recipient Gracie Abraham. Watch live on Fox, Monday, March 17th.
- [118:08]
Young Pueblo
At 8, 7 Central.
- [118:13]
Robert Evans
Oh, my God, you guys. It could happen here. Meaning our podcast. It could. It is. It's happened.
- [118:22]
Garrison Davis
Erm, Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast it is happening Here?
- [118:26]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Huh. That's. That's a fun joke that I only hear 47 times a day. And the whole point of the podcast was. Well, initially I was a crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen, and now it's a bunch of that stuff happened and even more of it looks very likely. And so now I just feel bad all the time.
- [118:49]
Mia Wong
It's going to be called. I fucking called it. I fucking told you, bro. I said this was going to happen.
- [118:54]
Garrison Davis
Why don't you rename the podcast? I just feel bad all the time.
- [118:58]
Robert Evans
Yeah, why don't you rename the podcast? Robert should have bought more stock and ammunition companies companies than he did. And dgi. Jesus. Should I have bought stock at dji?
- [119:09]
Mia Wong
Yeah, I'm gonna buy a little DJI drone here soon.
- [119:14]
Robert Evans
Yeah, there we go. A lot of people are gonna be buying little DJI drones here very soon, James.
- [119:19]
Mia Wong
Yeah, I should point out that I'm buying one that's not capable of carrying a payload.
- [119:24]
Garrison Davis
It's definitely a safer investment to pull out your 401k now when the market's crashing. Use that money. Buy drones. Those drones will be worth a lot more in five years.
- [119:35]
Mia Wong
Or. What is that? That is. That is the sound of a sound investment. A box of bullets.
- [119:42]
Garrison Davis
It's like how boomers used to, like, invest in, like, silver or gold as, like a stable currency. No, we're investing in dji, like physical dji. Drones.
- [119:53]
Robert Evans
We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder.
- [119:56]
Mia Wong
Yep. You gotta get it in a bottle, rub it in a box. It can get light struck or get moist. You wanna get it in a special black, black bottle.
- [120:04]
Robert Evans
James, I keep all of my gunpowder in. You know how, like, people used to take cocaine by wrapping it in toilet paper and swallowing it?
- [120:11]
Garrison Davis
No.
- [120:12]
Mia Wong
Sure. Okay, well, if you say so, buddy.
- [120:17]
Robert Evans
Speaking of toilet paper, Nate Silver has a newsletter and it would be useful as toilet paper. More so than it is as a newsletter.
- [120:26]
Garrison Davis
Sorry, I just got like PTSD flashbacks from toilet paper 2024 when you said that it's okay.
- [120:31]
Robert Evans
Normally my, my rule of thumb is every election, usually starting in like December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or four times in a bucket, and then head over to Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls. And I do this. I hate that I keep having. I have regularly on election the years, people were like, but he was always wrong. He's like, no, he's reasonably good on polls. Usually if you read what he's saying about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close to that. So I read him during elections and I hate it because he's never been right about anything else. But he's a gambler. He's a degenerate, filthy gambler. And so when we're talking about degenerate filthy gambler stuff, and by God, election polls are the most degenerate type of gambling that exists. Exist. He's worth reading. And then after the election, no matter how well or badly it goes, I ignore him again for four years. And I didn't get to do that this year because on February 25, 2025, Nate wrote a column called Elon Musk and Spiky Intelligence.
- [121:42]
Garrison Davis
Spiky Intelligence. Am I hearing that right?
- [121:45]
Robert Evans
Spiky intelligence. Yes. And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm sure he used some AI. He must have used some AI, like video software to do that just shows you a kind of spiky star looking thing and then like a blob with rounded edges. I can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver Thought that, like, we needed this illustrated.
- [122:08]
Garrison Davis
I have to see this.
- [122:09]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [122:09]
Mia Wong
Yeah. I would like it to be shed.
- [122:11]
Robert Evans
Look at this. Why did you like the promise of AI? We couldn't have envisioned a spiky thing. Yes.
- [122:17]
Mia Wong
Wow.
- [122:18]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [122:18]
Mia Wong
It looks like maybe an amoeba, if you were.
- [122:21]
Robert Evans
It looks like an amoeba and then, like, a poorly drawn star. Isn't it Boba and Kiki.
- [122:25]
Garrison Davis
This is. This is an actual thing.
- [122:27]
Mia Wong
Biffs, you. Wait. This is a thing?
- [122:30]
Garrison Davis
This is Boba and Kiki with a weird, like, digital fuzz over it.
- [122:34]
Robert Evans
Who the fuck are Boba and Kiki?
- [122:36]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Okay, Garrison.
- [122:37]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, it's like a social experiment to, like, ask people what, like, the emotional correspondence of each of these shapes are. Like, which.
- [122:45]
Mia Wong
It's a Rorschach test.
- [122:46]
Robert Evans
Oh, it's like a Rorschach thing.
- [122:48]
Garrison Davis
Sure.
- [122:48]
Young Pueblo
Or like.
- [122:49]
Garrison Davis
Like, which one looks. Which one looks nicer, which one looks meaner. You know, that sort of thing. I'm a Kiki type. Like, Like, I. I am a Kiki. In terms. In terms of my behavior, I am Garrison.
- [123:00]
Robert Evans
Now that you bring up Rorschach, all I can think of is how cool it would be if Rorschach from the Watchmen showed up in Nate Silver's house and did his thing.
- [123:09]
Garrison Davis
Unfortunately, I think Rorschach and Night Silver might actually get along.
- [123:13]
Robert Evans
Friends.
- [123:14]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Yeah.
- [123:15]
Garrison Davis
Actually, yeah.
- [123:16]
Robert Evans
No, no. Nate would. But after them getting along for, like, 45 minutes, Nate would take him to an illegal card game and Rorschach would murder everybody in the room because they were gambling without a license.
- [123:30]
Garrison Davis
So I. I'm assuming Nate's going to try to argue that. That Musk's intelligence is akin to the Kiki drawing here as opposed to, like, the empathetic Boba right now.
- [123:41]
Robert Evans
There. Actually, yes, there is a little bit of that in there. He does not mention this and Boba thing. I don't know if that's because I'm supposed to just infer it from the image or if he's. Okay, we'll get your opinion on it. Is he ripping these people off? Because this doesn't count as enough for him to be crediting them. If this is the underpinning of his stupid idea, which he credits to his stupid book that he came up with later. But I'm just gonna start reading the stupid column.
- [124:04]
Mia Wong
Well, hit us with the second paragraph, because that fucking.
- [124:06]
Robert Evans
We haven't gotten paragraph one, James. Okay.
- [124:08]
Mia Wong
That radicalized me immediately.
- [124:10]
Robert Evans
There's been a debate raging on Twitter. Noah Smith can run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the platform's own owner, Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest. And then there's a little I in parentheses because we need that. Elon is obviously pretty bright. And then there's two eyes in parentheses. This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment. Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things.
- [124:32]
Garrison Davis
Okay.
- [124:33]
Robert Evans
You'd think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves Elon and intelligence, well, it was. Elon has run, founded or co founded Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, XAI, PayPal and more recently Twitter. He's also managed to steer himself into a position where he's now the de facto chief of staff to the President of the United States. I do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects. Some of these were long shot bets. And Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk documents he thought he'd be ruined if there'd been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success of some of these enterprises might also be debated. Yes, Twitter was a canny play for cultural and political influence, but it probably. And he doesn't bring up in this whole thing where he's talking about like all his successful companies. Not a word about the boring company, not a word about hyperloop. Right.
- [125:18]
Mia Wong
Well, yeah, any of the failed ones.
- [125:20]
Robert Evans
His record does seem better if you ignore the two massively publicized and invested absolute failures.
- [125:27]
Garrison Davis
Yes, well, and last week I know there was a SpaceX launch. I'm sure it went well. I'm sure it didn't fling debris all over lower.
- [125:35]
Robert Evans
I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial Eric also crediting it like yeah, I guess technically co founded OpenAI, but not in a way that mattered. He just shotgun money in there and then kind of edged out.
- [125:47]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, sure.
- [125:48]
Robert Evans
Yes. And is actively in a conflict with everybody who did make OpenAI as prominent as it is. Again, Nate has to leave a lot out in order to start making this case but.
- [126:00]
Garrison Davis
So he's going to argue that, you know, we're going to see how, how well this co presidency goes, but he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all of this stuff done, right?
- [126:08]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And he's also saying, well like maybe Twitter won't profitable, but we'll see how. You know, he could probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff. Not a word from Nate about like, yeah, but he's just like that, just breaking the law. So why are. Why are we, why aren't we including in our canny businessmen guys that get rich Selling, like, shitloads of heroin for the cartels. Because, yes, if you are breaking the law, sometimes that goes well for you financially.
- [126:32]
Garrison Davis
Walter White may have done some bad things, but.
- [126:35]
Robert Evans
But you can't deny he was a brilliant method. But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is. 1400. According to Isaacson. He's clearly some sort of outlier in many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably even a genius. And yet, when my. And first off, it becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider a 1400 to be an impressive SAT score and would normally be judgmental of someone who had an SAT score of 1400 if it weren't for all of Elon's other genius accomplices. And yet, when my partner and I were heading to dinner the other day and we saw some tweet that Elon sent, I forget which one, because he tweets so much, we were both like, man, he's such a dumbass. Yes, someone can be both a genius and a dumbass. Welcome to what I call spiky intelligence.
- [127:23]
Garrison Davis
Here we go.
- [127:24]
Robert Evans
This gets to, like, the core of what's annoying about Nate is his need to. He's one of these guys, you know? You know what it is? He's an intellectual enclosureist. Right. Where he's not confident to be like. Everyone is very aware of the fact that no one is good at everything and that people have holes in their competence and that there are, like, brilliant surgeons who are bad fathers or whatever, because there are different kinds of intelligence. This is, like, a broadly common understanding.
- [127:51]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [127:52]
Robert Evans
Nate has to give it a name so that he can sell his book. So he gives it the names. It's like an intellectual. No, it's my idea. I'm the one who came up with the concept that smart people can be dumbasses. Stop it, mate. It's annoying.
- [128:04]
Mia Wong
Capital S, capital I register trademark. Spiky intelligence.
- [128:07]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah. Now, he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original and then links to somebody without really, like, crediting them. Interestingly, many of the instances online refer to people on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he has Asperger's syndrome, but the concept is simple. While intelligence is a multidimensional phenomenon on the scientific consensus is that there's also something known as a G factor, sometimes also called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and verbal skills in the GRE are correlated. The correlations are loose enough that you'll wind up with all Sorts of different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's just going into like, he talks about like the absent minded professor. Like it's all just these very common ideas that like, yeah, people are usually bad at more things than they're good at. Right. Like, it's. Yeah, there's, there's no need to, to explain like the, the how Elon Musk has been successful at certain things. But, but Nate does and he has to keep going back to like, he makes a comment later in here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that like, well, if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves, which ignores the fact that like, he's not making any of these decisions. Like, he bought a company that already had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket engineers to design rockets. Elon is arguably good at hiring in certain circumstances. And he is inarguably a great hype man. Right. Like, that's the actual brilliance that Elon has is he was very, very good at hyping people up and getting people to believe in him until he was too big to fail. Like, that's the one thing he actually did. But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of, among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is, who is a guy who was really good at one narrow thing and now has a career writing about everything and he can't. That's like a dangerous thing for Nate to think too hard about.
- [130:12]
Garrison Davis
Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after the these very soft and soothing ads.
- [130:19]
Robert Evans
Yeah, we're back. I want to talk a little bit about the danger of being a guy who gets famous for being really good at one thing and then gets a job talking about everything. Because I've had a version of that experience. And let me tell you, you're not ever going to be competent to discuss all of the things that you can make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No one ever has been, no one ever will be. Which is why what you ought to do is the thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on a bunch of people to like, run a website with you, right, where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately, it turns out 538 was a bad business venture. It got massively overvalued. A company spent a shitload more money on it than it was capable, capable of making. And now everyone's gotten laid off and Nate left years ago to do his. His sub stack. You know, it's a tragic case in the problem of, like, hubris and the fact that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't run an entire media enterprise. But Nate doesn't like thinking about that. It isn't like thinking about the fact that maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at was being the guy from the Music Man. Because I think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period of time.
- [131:44]
Garrison Davis
A lot of people did.
- [131:45]
Robert Evans
Clearly does. Yes. Yeah, there's been this thing lately where a lot of folks on the left have been like that. Oh, you couldn't always tell that he was a con man. You couldn't always tell that he was this bad. Like, he was always the worst. I was like, no, like, back in 2014 15, when I was writing about the billionaires and rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie Dimon because he had helped create the 2008 financial collapse. And he seemed. He just seemed obviously much worse than this guy who up to that point was pretty much just making cars and rockets. You know, he had two companies doing that. Musk was not top of most people's radars for very good reason. Which gets to like, there's this thing that's been created because of some of, like the sinister beliefs that his grandfather had and his like, family background, which has a lot of white supremacy in it, to that.
- [132:34]
Mia Wong
That.
- [132:35]
Robert Evans
That this has been Elon's sort of like, grand plan from the beginning and that it's all come together for him. Him, like, as if he's. He's, you know, a marvel or a James Bond villain who's been executing this like, 30 year plan to get where he is.
- [132:48]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, yeah.
- [132:49]
Robert Evans
I think when you look at his cognition, like, he's not the same man he was 10 years ago. He's not the same guy he was when he started dating Grimes. And I'm saying he was a good man before then. I don't think he particularly ever was. But he's clearly his brain has degraded in part due to contact through Twitter. Twitter.
- [133:08]
Garrison Davis
Well, yeah. And you can like, measure this through his posting as well. Like, yeah, the types of posts he would make in 2017 are like, completely opposite to the way that he would talk about certain social issues now. Oh, yeah, he's not like memeing about, like, anarcho syndicalism.
- [133:24]
Robert Evans
Yeah, we get to a few of those things. But I want to read another quote From Nate's article because he's going to talk about his book on the Edge, which quote describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call call the river. These people who occupy a range of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital are bright, but in spiky ways. In Baron Cohen's dichotomy, they lean heavily towards the systematic side of the equation. They're good at abstract analytic reasoning. But they may lack other forms of intelligence like empathy, judgment and self awareness. They also have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence. For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrarian. And again, what. You are talking about all of these people. Number one, when he says AI research, he's not talking about people who are doing like the gut level coding. He's talking about Sam Altman, right? Poker, venture capital. This is all gambling. You're all talking about gamblers. The river is just gamblers, Nate. It's people like you who put money on gamblers bets. And they are contrarian and competitive because that's how gamblers are.
- [134:32]
Garrison Davis
That's.
- [134:33]
Robert Evans
That's the intelligent. That's the river. Like he, he's thinking about it as like this specific chunk of intellectuals who have, you know, there's some dangers, but they have great potential to make the world brilliant. Like. No, no, no, no. These are just people who like wind up shooting themselves outside of a sports betting facility. Like that's the river, Nate.
- [134:53]
Garrison Davis
I have been turning into a monster during our friend poker nights recently. It's. It's tough.
- [134:59]
Robert Evans
Garrison, by the way, I've been meaning to talk to you about wearing the full data makeup because you know your skin can't breathe if you coat your whole body. You're only supposed to put that on your face.
- [135:07]
Garrison Davis
I don't do that every time I play.
- [135:10]
Robert Evans
You're gonna goldfinger yourself, Garrison.
- [135:12]
Garrison Davis
I don't put on the data makeup every time I play poker. Just that one time. Actually, no, I've done that twice now. Nevermind. I have done that two times.
- [135:22]
Mia Wong
Okay, it's becoming a habit.
- [135:24]
Garrison Davis
I also have the little hats. I ordered a TW12 pack of the little poker visors to complete the outfit.
- [135:30]
Robert Evans
Of course you did.
- [135:30]
Mia Wong
Wonderful.
- [135:31]
Robert Evans
Of course you did.
- [135:31]
Mia Wong
Yeah, it would be rude not to.
- [135:34]
Robert Evans
For better or worse, this typology. The river is associated with high achievement in certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is also associated with high variance. Sam Bankman Fried built FTX into a company that investors valued at 32 billion before the house of cards collapsed Again.
- [135:51]
Young Pueblo
Because He was a gambler. Yeah.
- [135:53]
Garrison Davis
Because he was a con man. Yeah.
- [135:54]
Robert Evans
And again, Nate can't just accept, oh, he was never actually very smart. He just got really lucky for a while and then gave it up and then gambled it all away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought. Nate Sundays, I interviewed SBF several times for the book, and I can tell you that he very much falls into the genius but dumbass category. How about just dumbass, lucky dumbass.
- [136:16]
Mia Wong
It's not hard.
- [136:17]
Robert Evans
What's the genius?
- [136:19]
Young Pueblo
Where did he prove that?
- [136:21]
Garrison Davis
I mean, he proved that by fooling Nate Silver, a man who probably values his own intelligence, like, a great deal.
- [136:27]
Robert Evans
I mean, that's the whole thing.
- [136:28]
Mia Wong
Right. Nate Silver can't. Like, it would be ego death to admit that there are just some lucky dumb white dudes.
- [136:34]
Robert Evans
Yeah. If a guy had won, like, one of the lotteries where it was like, a billion and a half dollars. Right. Got crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks because he just kept putting half a million dollars at a time on 21 black at a roulette table in Vegas. And I would be like, well, obviously he's a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How else could he have made the money in the first place? No. He's like, no, he got lucky, and then he gambled it all away because he doesn't have good judgment. Yeah. So it's important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence. Namely, neither their worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story. And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless statement because that's true of every human being ever born.
- [137:18]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [137:18]
Robert Evans
But clearly Nate doesn't feel. Feel that way because only. I think the undercurrent here is that only people like this, in Nate's mind, are worth talking about, because only gamblers bring the world forward. Right.
- [137:30]
Mia Wong
Yeah. No one else deserves empathy.
- [137:32]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Yes. Like, you're just addicted to putting money on sports, games and elections. Nate Silver. Anyway, so here's the two things he wants to warn us of or wants people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent in several ways, but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just because he isn't in others. And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does it's not high school. Nobody cares about his SAT skills.
- [138:07]
Garrison Davis
Elon's what, like 50? Like 55 or something? Like, what are we doing?
- [138:11]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you are. You are a middle aged man. I don't even know what my SAT score was. Was.
- [138:17]
Mia Wong
I was gonna say, like, look, I never took an sat, but I spent more than a decade in full time education and anyone who ever told me their SAT scores, I immediately hated and never took them seriously.
- [138:27]
Robert Evans
I've spent almost 20 years asking people questions for a living and I've never asked anyone there. Sorry, Garrison.
- [138:33]
Garrison Davis
Although SAT might not be like a stable metric for evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method.
- [138:40]
Robert Evans
Absolutely not, Garrison. Just how much? Well, he does.
- [138:44]
Garrison Davis
Well, he does have an alternative method.
- [138:45]
Mia Wong
Seeing what you might call an infographic.
- [138:48]
Robert Evans
Because the next section of the article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence. So first he admits he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to talk to him. Because Elon, even I have to say, Elon, does have better shit to do than talk to Nate Silver. Because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree. And that is a better use of his time than talking to Nate Silver. So since he can't actually talk to, to Musk, he's going to model and extrapolate from, quote, many other Silicon Valley bigwigs I have met.
- [139:24]
Garrison Davis
Okay?
- [139:24]
Robert Evans
Helping him in this is the fact that, quote, Musk maintains an extremely public profile. He's turned X into a running diary of his innermost thoughts, and in addition to that, the biographies of the guy. One more caveat. Here I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory of Elon's career, not just his recent ambulance antics. So we go down here, and the next segment is dimensions where Musk has exceptionally high or genius level intelligence. So finally, Nate's going to prove it, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you guys how he, how he, how he chooses to do that, what the evidence he gives us here is.
- [139:57]
Garrison Davis
And I think this is something that we should reveal to the audience after these ads.
- [140:02]
Robert Evans
Good point, G. All right, we're back. So let's look at what Nate shows as the chief dimension where Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence.
- [140:21]
Mia Wong
I'm just reading that first line, man.
- [140:24]
Robert Evans
So the first words under this are cognitive load capacity and overall horsepower slash ram. He's always on. I mean, literally, look at how often he's tweeting. And then a huge grand graph that shows the density of tweets posted and when, which has been used by other people to prove that since Sometime in late 2022, he's almost never gone more than about three hours without posting a tweet. Like, it's just a solid red after he buys the site. This, like, graph of, like, when he makes his posts, he's never offline. Now he's not sleeping.
- [140:57]
Garrison Davis
So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from 2014 to 2024, showing the time of day and when a post is posted, represented by small red dots. And yes, at around 2022, the thickness of the red increases dramatically.
- [141:14]
Robert Evans
It's almost just a straight red line.
- [141:15]
Garrison Davis
Like the period of where he must be sleeping in. This is very concerning.
- [141:21]
Robert Evans
No, he sometimes sleeps from about 6 to 9am as far as we can tell, but not regularly or often.
- [141:29]
Mia Wong
That's like a streak of 2023 where he just isn't sleeping.
- [141:32]
Robert Evans
He's not sleep. And again, he's on drugs. People, I think they're probably prescript. I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed. When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you want to do recreationally prescribed. Right. But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that to judge drug users. I say that as someone who had a drug problem. Like, this is drug user behavior.
- [141:59]
Garrison Davis
And specifically Silver is using this.
- [142:01]
Robert Evans
Sobriety is possible. Sorry.
- [142:03]
Garrison Davis
And specifically Silver is using this as evidence of Musk's intelligence.
- [142:07]
Robert Evans
Yeah, it's not.
- [142:08]
Garrison Davis
He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he must be like a special type of person.
- [142:14]
Robert Evans
Yeah, he's railing Adderall and eating Ketamine lozenges all day, every day. That's what this is a sign of. And no one is allowed to take his phone away. Anyway, here's how Nate explains why this is smart. In NBA terms, we'd say this is a player with an exceptionally high motor. And this is undoubtedly a valuable trade as the world becomes more complex. Last fall, I was simultaneously doing an extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to build up Silver Bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work. Even if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would only have been sustainable for a short break burst. But Elon is taking on, I don't know, approximately a thousand times more stress than that and has done so for years. No, he's not. That's. He just tweets. He has. He has a massive number one, all of the businesses are being run by people who are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to sit in meetings and say yes or no to stuff, and occasionally tells him to do something crazy that causes issues. Right, and they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now than it gained after the election. And SpaceX just had a giant rocket explode again. The boring company has not done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas. And the hyperloop is nothing. Right. Like this. This. This is just full of shit, Nate. Like what you have just described. Running an election model that's functional, Going on a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing.
- [143:50]
Garrison Davis
Oh, yeah. More actual effort is mostly like sitting in an occasional meeting, doing drugs and injecting random women with his sperm.
- [143:58]
Robert Evans
Yes.
- [143:58]
Garrison Davis
And sending tweets.
- [143:59]
Mia Wong
He doesn't do the injecting, I think.
- [144:01]
Robert Evans
Oh, God, Garrison. That comes up too.
- [144:04]
Mia Wong
No.
- [144:05]
Robert Evans
Oh, and it's crazy how it does. Right before he posts the graph of how much Elon tweets.
- [144:12]
Mia Wong
Okay.
- [144:12]
Robert Evans
God, there it is. Okay, okay. Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains. Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating. Especially. Especially if Musk ostracizes people who might keep him grounded more sympathetically. He's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities, doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which would be stressful on their own, while still managing to father 13 children and tweeting hundreds of times per week. Again, equivalent efforts. Tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering 13 children. He's not a father to them.
- [144:44]
Garrison Davis
No, he just.
- [144:46]
Robert Evans
He contributed by. He didn't even have sex. Yeah.
- [144:49]
Mia Wong
It is literally the lowest possible effort way to have a child.
- [144:54]
Robert Evans
Like, I'm gonna guess most of the people with penises listening to this come. Like, that's not a big effort. You wouldn't include that as, like, what did I get done this week? Well, in addition to working 40 hours, I jacked off.
- [145:07]
Garrison Davis
That's a little transphobic. This is an HRT joke. Anyway, continue.
- [145:13]
Robert Evans
It said. I'm just saying it's. It doesn't count as work.
- [145:18]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, certainly not from us.
- [145:20]
Robert Evans
Unless you're a sex worker. Then it does. Okay. Like, especially. I know a lot of male porn stars. That's. That is a difficult part of the job. That's why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that kill their hearts.
- [145:32]
Garrison Davis
I would like to get into more of Silver's, like, justification for. For why. Why he associates this, this high tweet load with like, intelligence.
- [145:43]
Robert Evans
Well, because it shows rapid cognition and thin slicing ability.
- [145:47]
Garrison Davis
Okay.
- [145:48]
Robert Evans
Mm.
- [145:49]
Garrison Davis
Right?
- [145:50]
Robert Evans
Yeah, sure, sure, man. Indeed. In a capitalist system with a significant premium on being first to market, making decent judgments fast is often more important than making better judgments slowly. Canonically, VCs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders as though on Shark Tank, relying on well owned gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble, as it has for Elon. What is Shark Tank bank success rate? Yeah, I bet there's a quick answer to that.
- [146:18]
Mia Wong
And considering that it has built in free television advertising for any product, less.
- [146:24]
Robert Evans
Than 50% of deals are successfully closed.
- [146:27]
Mia Wong
My God.
- [146:29]
Robert Evans
Yeah, so I don't know. All this tweeting also shows abstract problem solving capability. This is related to the idea of creativity, though in Musk's case, it seemingly doesn't manifest itself in artistic prowess.
- [146:43]
Garrison Davis
Seemingly. Seemingly. You know what, I'll give it to Nate there. I'll give it to Nate.
- [146:48]
Robert Evans
I don't disagree with you there. And then, of course, instrumental rationality. Philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types of rationality. Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ends, basically figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want. For this category, I think you have to point towards the scorecard board. Musk has some unparalleled accomplishments and isn't about to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an not one for nice guys now and again, if Musk's actual goal is a stated goal, getting to Mars, then backing the political party that is actively doing as much damage to the biosphere as possible, ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind of off world civilization likely, I would argue is a stupid decision. But he doesn't actually want us to get to Mars. Right? He just wants to be in charge of everything.
- [147:40]
Garrison Davis
No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference. That's. That's really all it is.
- [147:45]
Robert Evans
Yes.
- [147:45]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [147:46]
Robert Evans
Yes. And he is. He has been very successful at that. But again, it's the success of brute force. It's the same way as like, if you hire a thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps of a guy who annoys you, like, you could say, like, I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who annoy me, but really you just have a lot of dudes who can beat people up for you. Like, is that intelligence? Or did you just have enough money to hire thugs or Are you just.
- [148:10]
Garrison Davis
A mob boss, right?
- [148:11]
Robert Evans
Are you just a mob boss and a mob boss? No one is allowed to attack because it's going to be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon, you know. Anyway, we need Ghost Dog.
- [148:23]
Garrison Davis
It's pretty, it's pretty upsetting because, you know, a few weeks ago I was having a little bit of a Resist live moment and I actually ashed my clove cigarette on a parked Tesla. Felt pretty cool about it, but now I guess I can't even do that. It's too, too dangerous.
- [148:37]
Robert Evans
No, you can't.
- [148:38]
Garrison Davis
I could face substantial charges.
- [148:40]
Mia Wong
You might want to text resist to a certain five digit number or something. That's probably the best way to solve this. Garrison.
- [148:46]
Robert Evans
I just text resist to every single person my phone book every day. It takes about seven hours. I have fallen behind on work, you know, but it's the only thing we.
- [148:57]
Mia Wong
Can do to fight fascism.
- [148:58]
Garrison Davis
The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep deprivation and drug problem, apparently. Or at least that is how you show for it. It's funny because I saw Brian Johnson, the billionaire who's eating his son's blood or now plasma. Oh yeah, the dead guy posted his own like self study on like the damaging effects of sleep deprivation. And I'm pretty sure Musk like retweeted it with like an emoji or something. I'm like, dude, dude, your brain is completely soothed.
- [149:27]
Robert Evans
No, you are fried. You are the most cooked a man has ever been.
- [149:32]
Mia Wong
It's an interesting study. There is legitimately interesting things to look at in Elon Musk's brain.
- [149:37]
Robert Evans
Well, yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data put together like exhaustively by researchers studying how not just sleep deprivation, but like wealth and power impact the brain. And like all of it. Makes a strong case that Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to his brain than like a career. One of those career WWE wrestlers who like kills their whole family and then shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their brain later.
- [150:04]
Mia Wong
Yeah, I mean.
- [150:07]
Garrison Davis
Well, before, before we close, I do want to say before any psychologists or sociologists or like linguists get mad at me. Yes, I know Boba and Keith. Geeky. Is, is a, is a, is a shape language like correlation test. I myself as well as Nate here have kind of expanded its, its usage to like projecting even more like human or like, like emotional qualities onto these shapes or onto these specific words. So please, sociologists, leave me alone. Do not, do not, do not message me about Boba and Keith, please send.
- [150:41]
Mia Wong
Garrison your favorite French sociology. Buy direct message on x.com.
- [150:48]
Garrison Davis
I'M afraid it's already too late. I think I already hear, like, 12 different Redditors typing. But, yes, I think Nate's just using that image there as, like, a metaphor to, like, show how, you know, aggressive or manipulative. Musk's own intelligence is as symbolized by a Kiki, as opposed to, you know, maybe like a Bill Gates, which might be more of, like, a Boba intelligence type.
- [151:12]
Mia Wong
Okay.
- [151:13]
Garrison Davis
A little softer, a little bit more philanthropy.
- [151:16]
Robert Evans
You know, I just got finished reading nothing but Rationalist and Zizian literature for two straight weeks. About a quarter of a million words by my last count. Garrison, I don't have it in me to do this again. I'm going to get back to my Hitler books. You know, where things make sense, where the world is predicting. Safe.
- [151:37]
Mia Wong
Yeah, I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War, which is my comparison narrative. Happy place.
- [151:43]
Robert Evans
Ah, the Syrian Civil War.
- [151:47]
Mia Wong
Yeah, it's a really great world. I do wonder if he's trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing by using that little filter that he used over the Booba and King.
- [151:56]
Robert Evans
No, because it would be if. It's actually not fair use now, as opposed to if he just mentioned that thing as. He doesn't.
- [152:03]
Mia Wong
Yeah, because he doesn't talk about them.
- [152:04]
Robert Evans
Then it is fair use. Right. And he could use, like, a little clip of it as. And to illustrate the point.
- [152:09]
Mia Wong
Yeah, like I did with Manu Chow.
- [152:11]
Robert Evans
Anyway, this is all I want to say again about Nate Silver until 2028. And if you know what the upside if democracy really does die is we'll never have to talk about him again.
- [152:23]
Garrison Davis
If Trump and Musk really take over fully and do a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silver.
- [152:29]
Robert Evans
Nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin T shirt. No, man.
- [152:34]
Mia Wong
They'll be doing Assad numbers, and he will still be analyzing that data. Straight regime capture of Nate Silver.
- [152:42]
Robert Evans
Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten 104% of the vote.
- [152:45]
Mia Wong
But those are spiky percentages.
- [152:48]
Robert Evans
Those are spiky percentages.
- [152:50]
Garrison Davis
Why can't Nate Silver just, like, run, like, Trump's casino or something? Right? This is just, like. Just, like, put him away.
- [152:57]
Robert Evans
I understand. If Nate. Because Nate's rich, he doesn't need to do the other stuff. And if he was, like, just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, oh, yeah, that's what he loves. Right? If I Had Nate Silver money, I'd probably just write novels for the rest of my life because that's what I like to do. I don't understand why he keeps writing about politics. He's not good at it and he can't like it.
- [153:19]
Mia Wong
He needs to feel special. He wants to feel like a special boy who knows the answers that no one else does.
- [153:25]
Robert Evans
All right, well, anyway, this is us making fun of Nate Silver. So you don't. Well, you can still make fun of him, but you don't have to read him. We did that for you. Good night. Some people won't give you the real talk on drugs, but it's time we know the facts. Fentanyl is often laced into illicit drugs and used to make fake versions of prescription pills. You can't see it, taste it, or smell it. Suppliers mix fentanyl into their products because it's potent and cheap and the dealer might not even know. Keep yourself and others safe by knowing the real deal on fentanyl. Get the facts. Go to real deal on fentanyl.com. this message is brought to you by the Ad Council.
- [154:21]
Young Pueblo
Love at first swipe? I highly doubt it. What's your biggest red flag? No, no, no. What's your ultimate green flag? These days, reality TV and social media have us thinking love is instant. We're marrying strangers at first sight. We're finding love through walls, or we're even judging people by balloon pops. But what really makes a relationship last? On this episode of Dope Lessons Labs, poet, author and relationship expert Young Pueblo breaks down the psychology and biology of loving better. And he provides eye opening insights and advice that we all need.
- [154:56]
Robert Evans
It's a big realization moment that you should not be postponing your happiness. Like your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to like, come from a relationship. Your partner, they should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you.
- [155:12]
Young Pueblo
Listen to Dope labs on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [155:23]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Why would you do that to me.
- [155:25]
Mia Wong
When I thought we were friends?
- [155:27]
Young Pueblo
We are friends.
- [155:28]
Robert Evans
Los Angeles, 2021.
- [155:30]
Garrison Davis
A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true.
- [155:36]
Robert Evans
Let's not forget that day. David Bloom was a professional con artist.
- [155:40]
Young Pueblo
So you didn't stand a chance.
- [155:42]
Garrison Davis
But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare.
- [155:46]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Bloom generally targeted people with money, and.
- [155:49]
Garrison Davis
I was not alone.
- [155:50]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
He took over 100 people for over $15 million.
- [155:54]
Robert Evans
One of the victims was his own grandmother.
- [155:56]
Garrison Davis
I was married to David for almost 10 years.
- [155:59]
Mia Wong
It was insane.
- [156:00]
Garrison Davis
I was barely functioning. And I just had this realization that.
- [156:05]
Young Pueblo
He will not stop until he kills me.
- [156:08]
Garrison Davis
Getting a con artist to pay for their crimes isn't easy. Charge David blue, I'm Caroline D'Amore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [156:23]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Our iHeartRadio Music Awards are coming back.
- [156:26]
Robert Evans
Monday, March 17th on Fox starring Bad.
- [156:29]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Bunny Glorilla, Kenny Chesney, Money, Long Nelly.
- [156:33]
Young Pueblo
Your host, iHeartRadio, LL Cool J, are.
- [156:36]
Robert Evans
You guys ready to have some Fun tonight?
- [156:38]
Young Pueblo
Plus, iHeart Innovator Award recipient Lady Gaga.
- [156:41]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
I Heart Icon award recipient Mariah Carey, and iHeart Breakthrough Award recipient Gracie Abrams. Watch live On Fox, Monday, March 17th.
- [156:51]
Young Pueblo
At Foreign.
- [156:59]
Garrison Davis
This is it Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of the world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of March 5th to March 12th. Trump films a Tesla commercial. RFK Jr eats beef tallow French fries at Steak and Shake. And Sam Cedar commits a mass casualty event on YouTube. How's everyone doing today?
- [157:28]
Robert Evans
Very happy to join you for Ed this week. Huge fan of Ed. Just like, just big, big Ed guy. So, you know, psyched to be here.
- [157:36]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
I feel like we should mention up top, there's also a bunch of unhinged tariff news and the most like electing fucking Caligula's horse to the Senate thing I've seen in a long time. So stay tuned for that.
- [157:47]
Robert Evans
Lots of good, good stuff.
- [157:49]
Garrison Davis
Yes, we will get to it. First, I would like to give a little bit of an update on a story that we talked about a few days ago, the detention and the revocation of a green card for a Palestinian activist, Mahmoud Khalil. As of Wednesday, his lawyers have still been unable to even contact their client. There was a large rally outside the First Court conference in New York this Wednesday. So we talked about this a few days ago. For some background, an episode with James, Robert and myself. Robert, do you want to like, briefly summarize the situation and then I'll play a clip from one of his lawyers.
- [158:29]
Robert Evans
The situation is that this guy got taken into custody. My understanding is it was at an apartment that he lived in with his wife. He was a US Citizen. He became aware, it looks like at least about 24 hours before probably became aware that he was being, being. It's a little clear if he was Just, like, being surveilled or there was something else that tipped them off. But he contacted the school asking for help, convinced that ICE was coming for him about a day before they did when they entered the house. My understanding is, based on the claims being made by his wife, that they did not, like. They didn't, like, produce a warrant or anything.
- [159:05]
Garrison Davis
He's still not charged with any crime?
- [159:06]
Robert Evans
No, he's not been charged with any crime. They just took him and, like, turned off the phone when they were on the phone to their lawyers, if I'm remembering corporate correctly.
- [159:14]
Garrison Davis
Correct.
- [159:14]
Robert Evans
So it's like, none of this is the way this should have gone. Like, if this was an arrest.
- [159:19]
Garrison Davis
No, he was just, like, black bagged from campus.
- [159:22]
Robert Evans
Yeah, but it's not an arrest again, and they've been very clear about this that, like, they have specifically stated. We're not accusing him of, like, breaking the law. Right. Like, that's. That's not what's going on here.
- [159:33]
Garrison Davis
Correct. And we will get to some of that later. I'm gonna play a clip from a press conference outside court that happened on Wednesday day, March 12th. This is one of his lawyers.
- [159:43]
Robert Evans
Mr. Khalil's detention has nothing to do with security. It is only about repression. United States government has taken the position that it can arrest, detain, and seek to deport a lawful permanent resident exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism. In this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and an end to the genocide in Gaza. The government takes the position that because the Secretary of State finds his dissent unacceptable or contrary to US Foreign policy.
- [160:30]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
He can be deported.
- [160:32]
Robert Evans
As Ramsey suggested, it's largely unprecedented, save for ugly historical precedents, including the red scare and McCarthyism. That's what we're talking about. We're also talking about a period of repression that the center for Constitutional Rights knows well, following 9 11, when we were in the courts trying to get people out of secret detention. One thing that's different now is the legal infrastructure is so much stronger. And everyone out here on the streets knows that we cannot hide in the face of this amount of repression. We will be fighting in the courts and fighting in the streets to bring Mahmoud home and prevent this level of repression from spreading.
- [161:23]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
To many others, as.
- [161:24]
Robert Evans
The administration has threatened to do.
- [161:27]
Garrison Davis
So. That was on Wednesday. For now, Khalil will be remaining in ICE detention in Louisiana. And ICE Director Tom Homan said Wednesday that, quote, free speech has its limitations, unquote.
- [161:43]
Robert Evans
Yeah. I have found some stuff today of people on the right attacking the judge who Put out a, I guess called a stay on on this, in part because the judge is Jewish. So it's nice to see the anti Semitism being used in that way as well in this instance. Just fascinating. We're really breaking new ground in all of this.
- [162:06]
Garrison Davis
A White House official did tell friend of the pod, the Free Press, not necessarily our favorite publication, but they do have an exclusive quote here that the basis for targeting Khalil is being used as a blueprint for investigations against other students, saying Khalil is, quote, a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States, unquote, said the official, noting that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest, saying, quote, the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law. So we have this official, like, open, openly saying, like, he's not charged with a crime. We're just wanting to see if we can do this. Can we deport a legal permanent resident for saying something that we don't?
- [162:45]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [162:46]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And I think that there's been a lot of comparisons to this to direct McCarthyism. I think that's accurate to some extent. I think the most direct comparison to this is not McCarthyism, it's the Palmer Raids.
- [162:54]
Robert Evans
Yep.
- [162:55]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Which I think people tend to be way less familiar with. That was the first Red Scare, which was largely targeted at the Industrial workers of the World for their opposition to World War I. And they did basically the same shit. A lot of people would give anti war speeches, and then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort of, like, leftists would get fucking deported for it. So, yeah, that was a absolutely terrifying period of repression if the line is not drawn here, and it should have been drawn, like, 200 miles back from here, but if it isn't drawn here, this is going to continue. This is going to continue to get worse.
- [163:25]
Garrison Davis
And I mean, all this is. All of this is in relation to Trump's executive order, you know, about, quote, unquote, anti Semitism. Meanwhile, today in the Oval Office, he said something incredibly anti Semitic and also anti Arab, somehow in, like, in the same statement saying, quote, schumer is a Palestinian. As far as I'm concerned, he's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian, unquote, which is just an unbelievably anti Semitic and anti Arab statement all at once. Like removing someone's Jewishness because of how they act or things they've said or things they believe in.
- [164:04]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And it's one of those things, again, like, it's worth, like, covering this as it develops. There's not much to say other than, like, this is incredibly illegal and has to be opposed immediately and vigorously.
- [164:15]
Garrison Davis
Like, yeah, yeah, no, it's really bad. And of course you're not going to have the ADL coming out against Trump here.
- [164:21]
Robert Evans
The ACLU did, which I should note, because I heard some people saying they did not expect the ACLU to. They have. But, yeah, the ADL is fully in the camp of lock anyone up who's ever protested in Israel.
- [164:32]
Garrison Davis
And they're not going to call Trump anti Semitic for making a statement like this because their interests are fairly aligned at this point re what's happening in Gaza. So I think now we're going to play a special report from James, who can't be on the recording here today, but he does have a report on deportations in Panama. So, James, take it away.
- [164:54]
Mia Wong
So something that we've seen in the last week is that the people who the US Government has deported to Panama, who it can't deport to their home countries, have in some cases been released by the Panamanian government and given a 30 day visa or 30 days to essentially exit Panama. And they're not really being given any support. So they're in some cases, like just sleeping on the streets in Panama City. Right. Just wandering around, trying to work out how to get home and trying to work out, like, what they should do next. Obviously, these people who have fled places like Afghanistan, Iran, Right, Places where they can't go back to, they would face persecution just for the act of having tried to leave, even if they weren't already facing persecution before, which many of them were, that that's why they fled. So they've just kind of kicked it down the road a little bit and we'll see where this leads. But it's, it's another piece of evidence that this wasn't hugely well planned, that the Trump administration just wanted to get these deportation numbers up at almost any cost.
- [165:53]
Garrison Davis
All right, we're going to go on a break and come back to talk about the Department of Education and tariff talk with Mia Wallow.
- [166:11]
Robert Evans
Wow. Well, we are back and, you know, it's everyone's favorite time of the podcast talking about tariffs. And before we get to Mia, I want to bring on a musical guest to set this section of the program up.
- [166:33]
Mia Wong
Rocking Casbah Tyree don't like it.
- [166:38]
Robert Evans
Rocking Casbah. Rocky Caspar. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh, that was worth the rest of our year's budget. Now everyone will be getting paid for the rest of the year in Denny's coupons. That's all we have left after paying for this, but I think we can all agree worth it.
- [166:58]
Garrison Davis
Do you want to explain what that is? Because I still don't really have a clue what exactly that opening theme song is for tariff talk.
- [167:07]
Robert Evans
Well, there was a great band called the Clash once, and they wrote one song that wasn't very good. And in it somebody says something that didn't sound very much like the word tariff, but if you mispronounce the word tariff, it fit in. And that's where $42,000 of our operating budget this year went. Anyway. Mia, let's talk about tariffs.
- [167:26]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah.
- [167:27]
Mia Wong
Now.
- [167:27]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Now that I've. Now that I've gotten one of the two things I've ever wanted in life, play on music. So since last week, this has been an entire roller coaster because right after we finished recording in like the next two days, everyone went, oh, the tariffs aren't going to be that bad. Because a lot of the tariffs that were hit with Trump's sort of general 25% Canada Mexico tariff got waived after Trump agreed not to apply them to goods covered by the USMCA free trade agreements. But then everyone remembered that the 25% steel and aluminum tariff was still going into effect. And so that went into effect this week. Now, there was also a brief, incredible moment of panic where Trump was talking about doubling them to 50%. He backs off of this in exchange for Ontario's Doug Ford stopping a, like, 25% increase in electricity prices. However, comma, the trade war is 100% still on. Canada is doing a whole, like, sort of slate of reciprocal tariffs, specifically on steel and also tariffs and taxes on a whole suite of other US Goods. I'm just going to read this from the Associated Press because this is no longer. The trade war here is no longer limited to the U.S. canada, China, and to some extent, Mexico. So Mexico's really hasn't been responding in the same way as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs, or at least the sort of main focuses of these tariffs. But this week, the EU officially joined the phrase. So here's from the ap, quote, across the Atlantic, the European Union will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon and motorcycle. Michaels, bourbon again?
- [169:00]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, Bourbon twice. Yeah, it's twice as important as the other things.
- [169:05]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yes. Peanut butter and jeans. Actually, you say this. There was a whole, like, part of the, the whole speech that was not a joke.
- [169:11]
Robert Evans
Mia.
- [169:12]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
People for the EU would like this. This was, this was Part of the thing was. Yeah, like, we're hoping to restore the profitability of the American spirits markets when the US Backs down.
- [169:19]
Garrison Davis
It was also the only American product that Trudeau could name during his big speech.
- [169:23]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Very funny.
- [169:25]
Robert Evans
Let's be honest, outside of music, this nation has produced one thing of value to the world, and it's bourbon.
- [169:32]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Pretty reasonable. It's also very funny that it was like. Bourbon was like our. What attempt number was it at making whiskey before we finally got one that was, like, exportable? Terrible. I mean.
- [169:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah, it took. It took generations. Look, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day, and bourbon is the Rome of liquors produced in Kentucky.
- [169:52]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah, well, and speaking of it being produced in Kentucky, this is actually deliberately. Okay, well, all right, so the eu, in theory, the. The line that they're saying is that these. These are deliberately designed to, like, target things that are made in red states. They also did do soybean tariffs, too, though, which is, you know, like, you're dropping a nuke on Illinois here. Okay, so the. The EU has imposed reciprocal tariffs on $28 billion of US goods. Also on Tuesday, China's tariffs went into effect, which means the agricultural tariffs that we talked about last week, and notably, I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such a critical part of the system of American agriculture as the crop that you rotate out with corn to sort of, like, preserve soil integrity. The Chinese tariffs are now in effect. It's mostly on agricultural goods. Yeah. And this has, I think, in ways that are pretty predictable, at least to me. This has caused a lot. A lot of panic in the markets. There's been some sort of rallying as more information comes in, but there's stuff that I did not predict, which is. So, okay. Goldman Sachs has downgraded its projection for US GDP growth. Their chief economist is talking about how he thinks we're going to get stagflation again, which is sort of. While stagflation was the thing in the 70s, that was. You have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time. This is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state and allowed to write to take power in the first place.
- [171:16]
Garrison Davis
That's funny, because when I Google stagflation, I get very different results. That could just be my own.
- [171:22]
Robert Evans
No, that's. That's stagflation, Garrison. Two. Two very different things.
- [171:26]
Garrison Davis
Oh, sorry. Yeah, I think I. I think I mistake. Anyway, the things I have to deal.
- [171:33]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
With on this job, they never did warn me. Every single time. It's true. It's true, it's true. This is, this, this makes up for a lot.
- [171:41]
Robert Evans
If you ever get to fight the Undertaker, you have a song to go with one too.
- [171:44]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
It's true. So, okay, now sort of, sort of more surprisingly, and this is something I have literally never seen before with the US Both Citibank, while Citi, which is the over Citibank, like changed his name to Citi or something. But Citibank and ubs, the giant Swiss bank, downgraded the status of all US equities. I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. They are also boosting the status, status of Chinese and EU equity. So this is basically like, this doesn't have like a technical official effect, but this is like, this is basically their, their evaluation of what countries like stocks basically you should purchase. Right? And this is also sort of applies to bonds.
- [172:27]
Garrison Davis
So is that bad?
- [172:29]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
This is like I assumed that the US would get its actual credit rating devalued before this happens. I've never. This is, this is unreal real. Like the argument that they are making here is that it is because of the instability in the US like because, because of the tariffs and because of everything that's going on that like you should just fucking pull your money out of the, out of the US and American companies and put it somewhere else. And they're specifically boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities, which is astonishing because again, one of, one of the, one of the countries, again, who's, whose equity status that they are boosting is China. China's economy is a fucking disaster right now. They're dealing with like their housing bubble going under. They've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer based economy for years and years and years and years and it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough to actually like fuel an economy by consumer spending. Like they're, you know, they're about to take giant damage from the trade war. And also that like, you know, like it was only like three years ago. The CCP faced their first like nationwide mass protest like since Tiananmen, right? And these guys like, and again, these are, these, these are the financial analysts list of Citibank and UBS have looked at that and went, you are better off putting your money there than you are putting it in the U.S. i.
- [173:39]
Garrison Davis
Mean at this point I think Trump's tariffs have wiped out. I'm reading 4 trillion from the US stock market just in this past month.
- [173:46]
Robert Evans
Now, now, trillion, Is that okay? So for example, I have $32 right now in my pocket. Is it more than that?
- [173:56]
Garrison Davis
I think it's a little bit more.
- [173:57]
Robert Evans
Okay, okay, okay. So it, it is enough to buy two different servings of, of, of pizza. Okay. This is, I'm trying to put this into terms I can understand. Thank you.
- [174:07]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
It is. Imagine, imagine one burger, right?
- [174:10]
Robert Evans
And a burger in, in Portland does cost $32. So.
- [174:13]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yes, yes, now, now imagine, I thought.
- [174:16]
Garrison Davis
You were going to say burger in port, like, does cost $4 trillion.
- [174:20]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
I mean, probably tomorrow, right? Like, who knows? I don't know if like the fucking.
- [174:25]
Robert Evans
Plagues that we're doing, having adding levity. Because this is legitimately kind of frightening.
- [174:30]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
No, like, this is. I have never seen the financial press, like, yes. Like, the only times I've ever seen the financial press react to something like this is like they were kind of acting like this about the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn, like, taking power in the uk. Like, they are. Like, I watched a guy on cnbc, right? This is not like, like, this is, this is not msnbc. This is not even like cnn. This is CNBC literally go on air and call what Trump is doing, quote, insane and start talking about how. And this is something, and this is, I think what these people are worried about is they're, you know, the thing that they're seeing that's starting right now, and it's starting with these sort of, with these downgrades of US equities is capital flight, which is straight up a bunch like international capital taking their money from the US and fucking literally moving out of the country and moving it somewhere else because the US Is so unstable. This is, I don't know if anyone knows what mass capital flight from the US Would do because I've never seen anything like this. So part of what's going on, right, and part of the reason the markets have kind of recovered in the last few days after the tanking they did Monday, is that, like, the inflation data came out and it wasn't that bad. But the thing is, all of the inflation data we're getting right now and all of the economic indicators we're getting right now, it's going to take a little bit of time for the actual effects of these tariffs to set in, right? Like, these are, these are things that, like, you know, it's going to take, it's going to take like six months, maybe a year before we fully see the impacts of that. And, but, and when we do, it is going to fucking blow a smoking crater into the economy. And the worst part about this is this isn't even the most unhinged part of this. The most unhinged part of this is how the Republicans have been reacting to all of this in Congress. So one of the few things the Democrats have been trying to do, and I say one of the few, because, like, the response has been downright collaborationist, but they've been trying to force Republicans to take a vote on the tariffs because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular and they're particularly unbelievably unpopular among, like, the capital owning class who, you know, actually matter. So what they've been trying to do is that Trump did these tariffs by declaring a state of emergency and the Democrats wanted to use the National Emergencies act to force a vote on the tariffs. I'm just going to read this in the New York Times. Times. The National Emergency Law lays out a fast track process for Congress to consider a resolution ending a presidential emergency requiring committee consideration within 15 calendar days after one is introduced and a floor vote within three days after that. But the language the House Republicans inserted into their measure on Tuesday declare that, quote, each day for the remainder of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that Trump declared on February 1. So the point we are at right now is, is in order to preserve a bunch of tariffs which are effectively about to fucking obliterate the entire world economy, Congress has declared that days don't pass. This is fucking, this is completely unhinged. This is fucking like Caligula's horse in the Senate shit. Like, they, again, they are literally, they have literally decided, declared that calendar days passing are not actually calendar days so that Trump can just keep doing tariff shit and rule by fiat.
- [177:37]
Garrison Davis
Like the Israelites, they have stopped time in order to win the battle.
- [177:43]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
It's, it's genuinely astonishing. And the extent to which this has kind of just been swept under the rug. The Republicans have been, you know, doing this kind of quietly, right. And, and, and the fact that, like, the fact that the Democrats are not literally on TV every single second of every day going, the Republicans are voting to stop time so that Trump can destro economy is astonishing. It's this real, like, sort of admission by the Republican Congress that like, they're ceding authority over policy, like, to Trump completely, right. Like the government now is Trump ruling by sort of fiat and people attempting to sort of like run circles around him in courts, which is not, you know, working enormously well.
- [178:20]
Garrison Davis
Yeah, we'll see.
- [178:21]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
And, you know, and this, this is, this is starting to have effects on, like, investor confidence, like in the, in, like the US As a political entity and the US as an economic entity, which is unprecedented. The other thing I think it's worth noting is that these people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the people around them have been saying for a long time that the plan is to cause a recession. And then after the recession, things are going to get better. And the financial pressures hasn't believed them. And this right now is the period in which they're starting to realize that they were serious about this. And I don't know what the political ramifications of that are going to be because these are people who actually matter in the political, political system. And I think we'll see the ramifications of this play out in the sort of coming weeks and months. But this is a fucking cliff that we've hit. And we're now like Wile E. Coyote, like, running off the side and trying not to look down.
- [179:12]
Robert Evans
But on the upside, we have a great new song for everybody. So who's to say if any of this has been bad.
- [179:26]
Garrison Davis
Foreign we are back. Speaking of running circles around the courts, we do have a small update re USAID USIDE. Last week, in a 5 to 4 vote, the Supreme Court denied an appeal from the Trump administration in a case regarding Trump's attempted federal funds freeze and the shuttering of UN usaid. This was a case filed by the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council. The White House is now required to pay foreign aid contractors for work that has already been completed and further details will be worked out back in the district court. And it's still unclear, you know, if the Trump administration is going to abide by the court's ruling and resume all required payments. But this is the first move from the Supreme Court regarding, you know, Trump's actions the past few, few months. This has also not stopped Trump from trying to slowly close other entire government agencies. This very week, the Education Department laid off nearly half of its workforce, over 1,300 employees. Late Tuesday night, Education Secretary Linda McMahon went on to Fox News to say that this reduction force is only the first step towards abolishing the entire Education Department. Say, quote, this was the president's mandate. His directive to me clearly is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished. But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat, unquote.
- [181:04]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah. And I mean, like you know, we've talked about on this show for a long time how eliminating Department of Education and eventually destroying public education has been a long running goal.
- [181:12]
Robert Evans
Oh, yeah.
- [181:13]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Of the most absolutely unhinged of these people, who are the people now in charge? And. And yeah, they've decided to just like individually fuck every child in the U.S. it's incredible.
- [181:23]
Garrison Davis
Well, and so far, the way that they're trying to close up the Department of Education is kind of in a more selective manner because they're still keeping certain parts of the department active.
- [181:34]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah.
- [181:35]
Garrison Davis
On March 10th, the Education Department announced that they were launching investigations into 60 universities for, quote, Title 6 violations relating to anti Semitic harassment and discrimination, unquote. And this is in relation to anti genocide protests on campus. And this comes after Trump announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University. The Education Department is threatening that these other 59 universities may lose their funding if they do not, quote, enforce Title 6 of the Civil Rights act, which prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from description discriminating on the basis of race, color and national origin. National origin includes shared Jewish ancestry, unquote. I don't know what to say here.
- [182:21]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
You get to see all the threads of this admin coming together, Right, which is that, you know, these people are also attempting to effectively destroy, like, the secondary education system in this country too, for reasons that are sort of unclear to me. I don't know. But what we're seeing here, right, is the ways that the Democrats sort of like falling into lockstep with Republicans on backing the genocide in Israel has sort of led to this thing where the Republicans are using this to just straight up obliterate, like, all of the US's like, political, economic and social institutions.
- [182:54]
Garrison Davis
Well, and specifically with this, like, investigation, they are, they are trying to get all these universities to cooperate in efforts to selectively remove students who have protested against the Japanese genocide in Gaza. Right. This is, this is, you know, the same attack on free speech and free expression that they're doing against Khalil. Like, this is, this is the same exact purpose. And now they're trying to get more and more universities to be complicit in, like, the selective removal of, of people in this country who choose to express their First Amendment rights, regardless of whether they're a citizen, a green card holder, or on a student visa. So this is, this is, is all deeply, deeply worrying. Robert, you have a, you have a small segment you want to discuss before we start to close out.
- [183:38]
Robert Evans
Yeah, just a little bit at the end here. So in the subreddit for the 50501 protest campaign, which is an attempt to do protests in all 50 states simultaneously. Right. I think their next day of action is coming up in April. I'm not giving an opinion on the overall thing, but the. In the subreddit, somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard. So soldier giving kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would respond to orders to carry out violence against U.S. citizens. And I just wanted to chat about this book because it's. It's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly. My opinion is that one of the likely ways things come to a head probably as early as this summer, is that there is mass protests in D.C. and the insurrection act gets used and, you know, the Guard at least are brought in to attempt to crack down. I mean, obviously, Trump has done a version of this before, and Trump and his state attorney have both discussed using the Insurrection act to crack down on protests. I think they see D.C. as the place they want to do that. So it's interesting to me to see a post like this. This is not a thing where, like, I've been able to verify this guy yet. There's a couple of points that make me think this probably is a National Guardsman. For one thing, there's a lot of them, right? Like, this is not like a National Guardsman. Where'd you find one? There's a ton of fucking dudes in National Guard. For the other thing, everything he says is consistent with things that I have seen and talked to other people who are in and were in the Guard about. There's one little bit where he advises people on, like, stop the bleed gear. And he. He gives good advice. He says only by from nar North American Rescue. It's the same advice we would have given. He cites DoD Directive 1344 10, which is why he believes he's. He's well within his rights to make a post like this. And in essence, what he's saying. Saying is that it is his belief that most of the military chain of command, from NCOs up to officers, would not be down with following illegal orders to fire on U.S. citizens. But the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon, would get over whatever issues they have with that very quickly. Right? That's the gist of it, is that I think, you know, within sort of the officer class and the NCO class, there are a lot of resistance to the idea of the military being used for domestic policing. That is less clear with kind of the enlisted class, who are, you know, a significant chunk of them are very much down for Trump. But whatever sort of divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon. And I, I think this is probably like a, assuming this is accurate. And I, I don't really see a reason to doubt it. There's nothing he's saying here that's crazy. I think this is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind that, like, when you're looking at the military, it's not the police. Like, if I have to have agents, armed agents of the state, cracking down on a protest, I'm less worried about people being killed if it's the National Guard in general. But that situation can change very, very rapidly if, like, the situation becomes an active firefight. And, and I do think, like, that's a thing we have to consider right now is the possibility that we have U.S. soldiers, whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in shooting at American protesters. Like, that's, that's in the cards as early as this summer. And it's not a fun thing to think about. But I'm seeing more and more, not just posts like this, but I'm having more and more conversations with people who are in the military or who were in the, are in the National Guard about their concerns about what they might be called upon upon to do. Some of this has to do with the border, but, like, it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military to worry about how they are going to be used in the immediate future. We're not talking about years. We're talking about this summer. Right. Is when there's a very good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head. So these are things you should be thinking about. If you're listening and you are in the military, these are things that you should be thinking about because the people who are in charge of our government right now now have made a lot of statements about how they want to use the military to deal with protests. And the idea that that's going to happen very soon is not, not fringe or crazy.
- [187:58]
Garrison Davis
Well, and although these people might have, you know, slightly more discipline when it comes to actual firearms, there is also incidents like in 2020 where the Kentucky Army National Guard killed someone via the misuse of crowd control.
- [188:10]
Robert Evans
Absolutely.
- [188:11]
Garrison Davis
Munitions. I think that this is also worth stating. Even if, you know, like, a Kent State situation maybe is not as likely in, like, the modern day, there's certainly other, other ways to cause grievous harm.
- [188:24]
Robert Evans
Yes.
- [188:24]
Garrison Davis
In these sorts of, like, protest environments.
- [188:27]
Robert Evans
And when we've seen, I mean even in Portland, when we have seen, which you witnessed personally. Unfortunately, Garrison, the worst injuries to crowd control devices are usually people. In our case it was federal agents, but who are utilizing crowd control weapons and have not trained on them because they're not, there's certain ways you're supposed to and not supposed to use them. And these guys are just hang, you know how to use a gun, you must know how to use the rubber bullet thing, you know.
- [188:51]
Garrison Davis
No, if, if, if you use like less lethals the way you would use, you know, a regular firearm.
- [188:56]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [188:56]
Garrison Davis
That actually leads to like much more like possible lethal consequences or like life changing consequences.
- [189:02]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [189:02]
Garrison Davis
Which you know, police are more familiar with the regular use of crowd control munitions than necessarily, you know, like more technologies attack or like state National Guards. Something that's also, you know, worth keeping in mind. Let's close by my my least favorite segment, Stinky Musk, which I still has a really bad name. On Monday, a central judge ruled that Musk's DOGE should be subject to comply with FOIA requests and public disclosures of information required of government agencies, with the judge ordering the release of email correspondence between Musk's team and the Office of Management Budget and was ordered to, quote, begin producing documents on a rolling basis as soon as practicable, unquote. Now, despite Musk's claims of, quote, unquote, maximum transparency, last month the Trump administration tried to shield DOGE from public records requests by labeling the agency's documents as, quote, unquote, presidential records, which carries special protections. This specific case is super interesting. The judge, a federal judge by the name of Cooper, also critiqued the way that the Trump admin tried to litigate this case, quoting from Politico, quote, the lawyers offered virtually nothing in the way of evidence about Doge's operations or management. Indeed, the court wonders whether this decision was strategic, Cooper said, noting that the Trump administration lawyers had taken competing positions, including that DOGE qualifies as an agency under some sections of law, but not others when it suits it. Thus, DOGE becomes, becomes, on the defendant's view, a Goldilocks entity, Cooper wrote. Not an agency when it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient, unquote. And I do like Cooper's analysis here of how DOGE is very selectively an agency only when it causes, you know, benefit to Trump or Musk. And finally, we have one other Musk story to close out. This episode admits Tesla's plummeting stock price protests outside Tesla dealerships and reports of analysts realism of dealerships across the country. Trump has essentially started doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway. Upon climbing in a red car that he's not allowed to operate, Trump remarked, wow, everything is computer. So this was a very, a very odd and kind of embarrassing show of favoritism where Musk brought out like a number of different testing models and Trump got to quote unquote, you know, pick the one that he wanted to buy as he just like sat in on this like televised advertisement for Tesla as his, you know, company is, is, is losing a shocking amount of money in the, in the stock market.
- [191:42]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Yeah, and there's, I mean there's, there's literally, there's literally a picture of him with like the notes that he has this like in a, in like really.
- [191:48]
Garrison Davis
Really like a Tesla sales note. Like, like bullet point of like how much certain models are, what their different features are, which ones, ones have self driving features included, which ones you have to pay extra for. Yeah, no, he's, he's literally carrying like a Tesla sales pitch as he does this televised appearance boosting his new best friends and co president's company. Trump said on Truth Social. The radical left lunatics are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers and Elon's baby, in order to attack and do harm to Elon and ever everything he stands for, unquote. So now not only has Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, which, which is, you know, its own form of, of unhinged, but on Tuesday, Trump announced that vandalism of Tesla's will be labeled as domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will quote, unquote, go through hell. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote, ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Tesla's by radical leftist activists are nothing short of domestic terror, unquote.
- [193:00]
Robert Evans
So that'll be fun to see how that plays out.
- [193:03]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
I feel like we're, we genuinely are not that far off from just like Trump trying to hand down legal mandate saying you must buy a Tesla. Like this is, this is the, this is the kind of shit that we're in now.
- [193:15]
Garrison Davis
No, this is one of the most like bizarre things I've ever seen. If Biden or any Democratic president did anything civil similar to this, you would have like thralls of people screaming for his impeachment. Similar to like the Eric Adams thing. It's like one of the most blatant open displays of corruption I've ever seen where a president is using his office to boost like the personal financial interests of one of his top advisors who's also like running government agencies essentially and doing massive, massive cuts to prohibit their ability to like investigate his own businesses while also taking massive amounts of government government money to keep businesses like Tesla and SpaceX operable. So this has been a pretty silly thing to watch unfold the past few days. And now Tesla shares have risen 4% after Trump's support for Musk and Tesla.
- [194:04]
Robert Evans
Great. Well, I think that's going to do it here at US with the ED to play us out. We're going to refer back to our friend the Narcissist Cookbook, who put together our lovely new tariff theme song that you're going to hear every week until Tariffs Aren't a Thing anymore.
- [194:22]
Garrison Davis
We reported the news.
- [194:39]
Robert Evans
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
- [194:46]
Garrison Davis
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can now find sources for It Could.
- [195:01]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.
- [195:03]
Garrison Davis
Thanks for listening.
- [195:09]
Robert Evans
Honestly, Honestly, Honestly, no one wants to.
- [195:11]
Young Pueblo
Think about hiv, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like prep. PREP stands for Pre Exposure Prophylaxis and.
- [195:19]
Garrison Davis
It means routinely taking prescription medicine before.
- [195:21]
Young Pueblo
You'Re exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it. Prep can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices. Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention Options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead Reality TV and social media have love all wrong. So what really makes relationships? On this episode of Dope Labs, poet and relationship expert Young Pueblo breaks down the psychology of love and provides eye opening insights and advice we all need.
- [195:57]
Robert Evans
You should not be postponing your happiness. Your greatest happiness is not necessarily going to like come from a relationship. Your partner should add to your happiness, but your happiness is really coming from within you.
- [196:09]
Young Pueblo
Listen to Dope Labs on the I Heart Rate app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said the.
- [196:18]
Garrison Davis
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.
- [196:26]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he.
- [196:28]
Garrison Davis
Unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend.
- [196:31]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
I've been spending all my time looking.
- [196:32]
Garrison Davis
For answers about what happened to Santi and what's the way to find a missing person?
- [196:37]
Young Pueblo
Sleep with everyone?
- [196:37]
Garrison Davis
Everyone he knew, obviously.
- [196:39]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio.
- [196:41]
Garrison Davis
App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
- [196:46]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
My name is Brendan Patrick Hughes, host of Divine Intervention. This is a story about radical nuns in combat boots and wild haired priests trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover in a hell bent effort to sabotage a war.
- [197:00]
Young Pueblo
J. Edgar Hoover was furious. He was.
- [197:03]
Robert Evans
He was out of his mind and.
- [197:05]
Young Pueblo
He wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees.
- [197:10]
Brendan Patrick Hughes
Listen to Divine intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.