Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:01]
Amazon Music Advertiser
Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed during that perfect meditation flow. On Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad free podcast episodes. So you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts. Ad free included with Prime.
- [00:34]
Aura Advertiser
Did you know data brokers are making billions selling your personal information, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. With one app you get a vpn, antivirus, password manager, spam, call protection, dark web monitoring, and up to $5 million in identity theft insurance. All backed by 24, 7 US based support. Other companies might just sell credit monitoring or just a vpn. Aura gives you all of it at the same price. Competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today@aura.com hidden protect yourself now@aura.com hidden.
- [01:56]
Matthew Schmitz
Welcome to the compact podcast. Today we'll discuss the extraction of the Venezuelan leader, former Nicolas Maduro. We'll discuss Tim Walls, the governor of Minnesota stepping out of the ring and our own Jeff Schoellenberger's run in with the authorities in El Salvador. I'm joined by by Jeff Schulenberger and by Ashley Frawley. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So we've seen the memes. Nicolas Maduro is out of Venezuela. Trump ran against forever wars. He's saying that we may need to be in Venezuela for some time. We're also told this isn't a war because really it was just the removal of a single man. And Trump interestingly does seem ready to work with Maduro's own lieutenant. So the regime, I don't know, is the regime changing? They've removed the leader. But is this regime change, Jeff?
- [03:14]
Jeff Schulenberger
I would say no, it's not regime change. And this is in a way what I would praise about this operation. So I'll say two positive things about it in order to then set up, you know what I see as maybe the problems going forward more than two negative things. Well, I think the negative things I'll point out will be in a way the flip side of the positive things. So obviously this operation was highly successful in a limited sense. You've seen a lot of euphoria about that, a lot of people just kind of celebrating it. And clearly as a, as an operation, it was highly successful. There have been some speculations that the success may be owed in part to defector or not defector, but let's say elements of the regime that were disloyal to Maduro and wanted to sort of sacrifice him in order to set the, set the ground for a reset with, with the U.S. so that's, that's one possibility. It's being debated whether this is true. But, you know, there's some, I mean, I've seen some Venezuela, some Venezuela experts on the left, including Eva Gollinger, the lawyer who was very close to the Chavez regime way back when and is. Is quite knowledgeable, although obviously also kind of tendentious and is not, even though she was sympathetic to the Chavez regime, is not an apologist for the current Venezuelan government. But she has argued that there's good evidence that Del. C. Rodriguez, the vice president who's now been elevated to the presidency, and her brother, who are important figures in the regime, again, essentially sacrificed Maduro in order to advance their own interests and also, again, you know, possibly reset relations with the US on, on different terms. So in any case, you know, the first positive thing I'll say is that operationally it was obviously a success. It's funny, I've just been reading this book, the Fort Bragg Cartel, which is all about the Delta Force and other kind of special operations units and how basically how screwed up they are and how corrupt and caught up in, in the drug trade and various other things they have become during the period of the war on terror. But obviously, you know, despite, and there are many stories that could be told about ways that they've kind of broken bad and gone awry in recent years, but nonetheless, you know, clearly can be an incredibly capable force, as we also saw with the apprehension of bin Laden, although. Or the killing of bin Laden, although obviously in that case too, there was speculation that essentially it was something of a, a setup in the sense that the, the Pakistani intelligence, you know, gave the location and, and essentially collaborated with the capture. So it's, it's a. I think that's probably something. It can be compared to the, the killing of bin Laden in terms of just sheer operational cleanness and success. And I think it should be contrasted to the completely disastrous operation against Gaddafi which led to this, you know, horrible, just kind of mob, brutal mob murder of Gaddafi and you know, subsequently led to essentially a failed state and sort of regime collapse situation. Which brings me to my second positive point, which is that it does seem that even though I think there are many lessons of history that this administration and its supporters are showing may have not learned, it does seem that they learned the negative lessons of several recent regime change operations, including that in Libya which I mentioned, and obviously Iraq, where there was this process of de baathification which essentially laid the groundwork for the anti occupation insurgency and various developments, including the rise of ISIS in subsequent years. And so they seem to have realized that there's a real danger in just kind of destroying a governing, a military and governing apparatus at one fell swoop and just kind of casting it out into the wilderness. Because that is going to be the basis of when you have organized and knowledgeable people who you just kind of cast out into the wilderness. They're very likely to spearhead insurgencies, make things very difficult. So it does seem that there's an attempt to develop a modus vivendi with what remains of the regime, which is pretty much the whole thing other than the President himself. So at this point it's too soon to tell. I think there's a lot of contradictory messaging coming out. But this would sort of lead me to, you know, I, I, I said two things. One, operational success, two, regime permanence or regime continuity, that these are both, you know, I think things to be, to be positively impressed by about this, this operation. But they leave a huge number of questions open. You know, the first one being there's obviously always the question of what's, what's the day after scenario, what's going to happen next. And I think, you know, plenty of people are sort of saying, aha, see you could have just done this and in Iraq, why do we have to do this whole waste, this whole kind of wasteful occupation process? Well, I mean that's not even, that's not even really remotely meaningful analysis because the whole reason that they did that is because the whole reason that they occupied Iraq, set up the provisional authority and so on, is because they actually had a plan as to what things were going to look like the next day. And it seems to me pretty clear that for the moment the administration just kind of wants to bask in the aura of the success of this operation, but doesn't really have a very clear plan of what things are going to look like going forward. And you know, I think that there's obviously plenty to criticize about how it turned out in, in Iraq. But I think you can argue that this is really another sign of weakness and sort of fecklessness from this administration, that they, they don't really have a very clear plan. I, I would guess that, you know, what's going on now is some kind of compromise between different factions. On one hand, you have the people who have long wanted to simply depose the Venezuelan regime and put in power somebody like the, you know, Nobel Prize winner Maria Corina Machado and, you know, sort of restore democracy to Venezuela. And then on the, you know, which is essentially the kind of neocon vision which would have been closer to the Iraq project. And then on the other hand, you have people like Richard Grinnell, who was the special envoy there, who seemed to take a much more brutally pragmatic approach, which does seem to be the one that's most consistent with Trump's own instincts, that he doesn't mind working with, you know, sort of thuggish regimes that are happy to cut deals with him. And so I suppose the question now is whether this regime is willing and also, frankly, able to, to cut a deal with this, with the administration that, that it's, that it's happy with. And so, you know, I think, again, the two positives, operational success and regime permanence, also raised just a lot of questions because we don't really know what any of this is going to look like going forward. And as far as this whole idea of just taking the oil, which is, you know, Trump's consistent critique of, of the Iraq invasion, I think there's a sense in which that's just as much a fantasy as the fantasies of bringing peace and democracy to Iraq were, because you have to actually achieve that. And the only way you're going to achieve that is through a very large and effective military occupation. And that brings with it costs that. And so I think the idea that Trump's sort of crude and transactional approach is in contrast with that of the Bush administration is something of a fallacy, because the fact is, the Bush administration understood that you had to have a long term effective military occupation in order to achieve strategic goals, then they attempted to accord legitimacy to that operation by, you know, using this whole sort of ideology of democracy. But, you know, if you just try to do the whole long term military occupation without any ideological legitimation whatsoever and just say, yes, we're here to plunder your resources and take them for ourselves, to enrich ourselves. I just, I think that, again, I said there are many lessons of history that we could learn here. But it's just clear that that is not a reasonable long term plan. And again, is just as much a fantasy as, you know, the glorious, the rise of a glorious, you know, prosperous democracy in Iraq was, I mean, in some ways a more pernicious fantasy, I would say, because it's at least the, the, the neocon fantasy understood, you know, and this I, I've been thinking about Francis Fukuyama, who I mentioned as my, my top read of 2025, but understood that there was a need to secure and to make people feel that they are being accorded some sort of recognition as, as democratic subjects. So the idea that you can just kind of go in and bully people around and nakedly plunder them forever, you know, and if you look at the sort of dissident right posters on X who are sort of the, the seething ID of the, the Trump regime, you know, in terms of like, who are the people who, who they follow and kind of get their propaganda cues from, you know, just completely delusional nonsense. I mean, this guy Matt Forney basically said something along the lines of the world is going to be our slaves. I mean, this is, this is far more delusional than anything the neocons said. It's, it's just completely fantastical and nonsensical.
- [14:43]
Matthew Schmitz
So, you know, a kind of hilarious vindication of St. Augustine's writing on empire, which he presents as this kind of moral temptation which obviously the powerful dominates the strong, but also the powerful is dominated by his own baseness. He is himself enslaved to his libido, his desire to dominate. So, yeah, it's pretty wild. Ashley, what do people outside the glorious shores of Columbia, our home, America, this blessed land, make of this?
- [15:31]
Ashley Frawley
Actually, just from a normie perspective, someone sent me a meme which I'm sure you probably saw was ice accidentally deports Maduro, which is kind of funny anyway. Well, you know, you were talking about how there's like, sort of like naked plunder, whatever, but is there not a thin veneer of an attempt at legitimacy in terms of classifying this as law enforcement as opposed to invasion? So once you kind of frame a state as criminal, a government as criminal, not a government, then, you know, you don't really have to respect sovereignty. The leaders are extraditable, and it's framed really in an odd way as technical rather than a sort of geopolitical thing. Right. So there is at least that kind of like attempt to put this sort of thin veneer of legitimacy over it. But I think another wave, another thing that I'VE been seeing people put forward as an understanding, which is interesting in that it's not as much a powerful frame as one would expect, perhaps because I am on Twitter and those forces may have been liquidated from Twitter. But this idea of like, Venezuela being punished for resisting capitalism, that. So this, this frame of like, oh, actually this is, you know, capitalism versus socialism. And I think. I mean, I haven't seen that frame accepted by the right or the left as much as one would think. But of course, this would. This is. Would simply confuse people. Venezuela obviously isn't being attacked because it's socialist. It's attacked because the form through which it's being. It has been, or there has been an attempt to integrate it into social, into capitalism hasn't been working. Um, and so when that happens, you have a. An assertion of discipline on the, on the global front. Um, so capitalism can tolerate a certain amount of inefficiency. But if you're not. If you're sitting on all these resources and you're not using them to accumulate, to contribute to global capital accumulation, there will be an assertion of force and discipline. And this reclassifying the government as a criminal entity allows for that assertion of discipline. And that's a very old thing. That's not something that's unique to the Trump administration by any means. But what I think is really interesting is, and I think you mentioned that. I think, Jeff, you mentioned this as well, is this idea of not having any kind of plan for afterward. And I think this actually fits into this, the way that Venezuela has functioned or failed to function in terms of contributing to global capitalism. So rather than trying to integrate it into capitalism, you have this kind of disengagement with it as a state, this abandonment with it as a state in the sense that there's no commitment to rebuilding society. And so, you know, there's no plan for reconstruction, there's no promise of integration, no promise of development or political normalization or anything like that. It's this. It's because Venezuela is. This is being perceived or portrayed as a kind of failed interface. There's no society there to be rebuilt. And we see this not just. You know, I wrote about this in my piece, A World Without People in a kind of roundabout way, in the sense that capitalism is losing that rebuilding kind of force that you. Populations are now seen as surplus. Politics are seen as disposable. Whole countries can be disposable. You don't even have to promise that capitalism will create a world market that, you know, that raises all boats you know, this rising tide that eventually raises all boats. Like, yes, okay, we have global inequality, but look, we've raised people out of poverty and so on. We don't have to promise that anymore. You can just go in and like take out a leader and extract its resources, treat that population as surplus and move on. And so this is, you know, we have capitalism without incorporation. And that is a bit different than the promise of past imperialism, which promise kind of administration and order and productive populations and stability of long term governance. But the US doesn't want to do that. It wants oil flows, it wants control over assets, maybe some risk management, but there isn't a kind of commitment to social reproduction and not even a lie about it. And I think that's really interesting. I think it's speaks to a kind of trying to say this in a very simple way because I've been wanting to. This is one of these sort of projects that I've been working on for some time that is so complicated that I'm finding it difficult to see it through to fruition. But this kind of negative abolition of capitalism, where capitalism starts to abolish itself, but without any kind of serious push against it, any kind of powerful opposing force that is future oriented, you wind up producing all sorts of of destruction without creation, without the other side of creation. And so you just have naked use of law and so on and naked extraction of resources without anything, without anything that is produced in return or promised or anything like that. And I think this is partially because of this kind of desperation of capitalism and the need to extract as much as possible and the failure of social reproduction within that there's just no point. Why bother with these people, these states and so on, that all that matters is global flows, if that makes sense. That's kind of my take on it.
- [21:32]
Jeff Schulenberger
Yeah, I mean, one interesting point here is that Venezuela's oil infrastructure is highly degraded. And so its oil output is very, is very reduced from where it was and much lower than it could be. And that relates to all kinds of things, right? It relates to all kinds of things, including the policies of the government, but also the sanctions. And I suppose the interesting thing here is that there's been some debate about, I mean, you have sort of people in the administration all the way up to Trump sort of saying, yes, we've talked about this before, this sort of ethos of, yes, blood for oil or whatever. But I mean, the interesting thing is that this, the call for this does not seem to be coming at all from the oil companies, which in Some ways would have been happier to have the sanction. I mean, it. I've read some things to the effect that most of them were actually lobbying to have the sanctions removed. Now, there are sort of conflicting interests within the oil industry, some of which are actually happy with the sanctions because reductions of supply from some areas will benefit some actors. But the point is, the industry was not at all kind of aligned behind this operation. In some ways, the problem is going to be to get the industry to make the capital investments necessary to revitalize Venezuelan oil output, which currently is dwindling. But it doesn't seem that the big oil companies are desperate to undertake this. So I guess the interesting thing is that it's not even clear to me that you have, on the part of direct capitalist interests, you necessarily have the incentive to do the things that these political actors, you know, Trump and so on, want them to do. And, you know, it's. It. It. It's. It's very interesting, like the. The history of nationalization of oil in Venezuela, you know, it goes back a very long way, is almost 100 years, and the various kinds of. The various phases of nationalization. But the point is, you know, there was kind of a long political process involved in this, and at different points, the oil companies kind of had to find ways to coexist with different sets of political arrangements. And at the moment, it seems as if partly because the politics became so disastrous, much of the oil industry just kind of didn't think it was worth its efforts or expenditures to even be involved. So, I mean, an interesting, interesting problem is, like, can you have that extraction without social reproduction? I mean, I think, you know, you can sort of set up these. I suppose the model here would be some sort of, you know, special economic zone dedicated to oil, where you just have mercenary forces guarding installations, and it's completely separate from society, and you just have the oil flows secured by processes that kind of circumvent politics altogether. So that's probably something like the model. You know, you sort of have black. You basically just have these. These oil installations that are guarded by Blackwater. And, you know, you can just kind of circumvent politics that way. But whether that actually works or is just another kind of fantasy is maybe less clear to me.
- [25:34]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah, I was gonna say it seems more like a Blackwater kind of thing as opposed to sort of individual. Individual capitalists. I mean, individual capitalists don't want things like this because you wind up with all sorts of risk and instability, reputational issues. They don't want to deal with any of that stuff. And also they're not like particularly interest. You know, they want money. At the end of the day, they don't necessarily care that much about actually producing a product. So if they're able to extract enough, then they're, they're fine. But in the terms of like a, a global, from the perspective like global capital accumulation, you need, you can't have a country that's sitting on resources like that and not effectively integrating them into the global system. So you need, you know, firms themselves will pull back and then this, you know, state level, large scale, more sort of larger scale forces will step in to resolve these kinds of issues, to integrate, to extract more quickly, more effectively, to accumulate.
- [26:38]
Matthew Schmitz
It seems that the geostrategic frame is more helpful in explaining this action than the economic framework. In terms of this logic of capitalism, it seems more like the logic of great power politics simply to secure Venezuela and its vast energy resources within the American orbit rather than the Chinese orbit. I think that's a more helpful frame. But where I myself am, I guess a bit perplexed is that it's not entirely clear to me what exactly the Trump administration's stance toward China is. So certainly if one were preparing for a confrontation with China, a move like this would make a great deal of sense. But the second Trump administration has been notably more dovish on China in the economic sphere than either the first Trump administration or especially than the, the Biden administration, which actually kind of intensified the China hawkishness that Trump won introduced. So those are questions that we'll be exploring more in the pages of Compact. Is there some kind of underlying logic to this seeming geopolitical gamesmanship along with a kind of economic thawing? Or is it simply a matter of the contradictions of the Trump coalition working themselves out?
- [28:18]
Ashley Frawley
That's actually a really important point towards what I was saying is that like Trump is stepping in where capital won't, you know that. And they're saying, they even say it explicitly, like, what's the point of having this great power if we don't use it? Let's go back to the time of great powers of states asserting their power on the global stage. Yeah, because capitalists won't do that. They don't want to do that, they're risk averse, they don't care. And Trump is the one who's stepping in to do that. So I do think that that power actually has a really important role in that of sort of overcoming this sluggishness of capital.
- [29:00]
Matthew Schmitz
Regime change in Minnesota The Land of a Thousand Lakes. Not. Well, not exactly. But Tim Wallace, the governor announced that he won't be running for reelection. He cited in his announcement the controversy over child care centers in Minnesota that according to various sources have been defrauding Minnesota taxpayers by claiming to serve more children than they actually do. Many of these child care centers that have been discussed in the controversy are run by members of the Somali immigrant community in Minnesota, which is closely tied to Walls's Democratic party. And Walls is stepping aside. I guess he's taking one for the team. It's a pretty stunning fall though. I mean this man was close to being a heartbeat away from the presidency and now he's not even seen as having enough juice to win re election in a state where Democrats have won every state wide office since 2006. It's a very Democratic state and evidently his party doesn't think he'll necessarily be able to win, so he had to step aside. Jeff, can you give us an elegy for our fallen king, Tim Walls?
- [30:33]
Jeff Schulenberger
Yeah, so his, one of the boys
- [30:38]
Matthew Schmitz
with his camo remarkable rise. Ih Scout.
- [30:40]
Jeff Schulenberger
Exactly. His remarkable rise last year I suppose was you know, obviously an attempt to find an acceptable representative of the, the white rural constituencies that, that you know, were, had, had fallen away from the Democratic Party. And you know, it did represent this kind of aesthetic attempt to emulate a kind of MAGA. Look, including these Camo Harris walls camo hats that I, I still maybe occasionally have seen. I mean maybe not in the colder weather, but I think, you know, well, after the election I, I, I still was seeing them around. But yeah, I think he, well, I suppose it's ironic that this representative of, of rural America, you know, was kind of felled by this classic sort of urban graft scandal. This sort of, you know, it feels almost like something you would have heard about in the old days of machine politics. Just these, these kind of ethnic enclaves figuring out and you know, this stuff never went away. It's, it's always been around in different forms. But these ethnic enclaves figuring out ways to kind of juice the system to you know, extract some flows of, of state money towards and, and sort of direct them towards their communities and the, and then rewarding the political party that facilitated this, you know, it's, it's very old kind of urban machine style politics it seems to me. I don't know Minnesota politics. Well, I believe we're going to have Daryl Paul writing on this who is a Minnesotan, so he will inform me better my understanding of Perhaps why this was so fatal is that part of the selling point of Minnesota politics was it was, you know, the closest thing to kind of Scandinavian progressive sort of good governance in, in North America because of the, of course, you know, Scandinavian heritage of many people in the state. It's other, you know, beyond the Somali community and a few other enclaves. It's a, a, it's a relatively white state, especially for, for a Democratic dominated one. But, and, and so it has a little bit of that kind of Nordic socialist flavor. But you know, this, this, the image of this, this sort of rank corruption obviously kind of clashes with that. And so you, you can sort of see why it doesn't, why it's, it's not an easy scandal to, to overcome, I think, you know, and we published Herman Diaz del Castillo today on a kind of Mexican parallel, a story involving the former left wing president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who, you know, basically as part of what he calls Republican austerity, chose to shut down a state run or a state funded child care program. And I think what's, what's specifically interesting about that is that former President Amlo, you know, basically chose to cut out the middleman and instead direct payments for childcare directly to families. So part of why this, this seems significant is that a great deal, you know, this kind of corruption, but just a great deal of corruption that exists, I'd say particularly in, in blue states. And I've had a few sort of encounters with this kind of thing myself really has to do with this intermediation public services where you have these vast kind of blobs of, of NGOs and other sorts of, you know, sort of subtly public services. And this seems to be, I mean, just to give you one example, I had a friend who was a while ago doing social work, you know, go do an MSW master's in social work and was placed in a Brooklyn public school as sort of a, you know, in the school counseling office. And this was, you know, it's one of these things where, you know, that actually the school counselors are not employed directly by the state or by the school. They're some separate subcontracted service that you know, then provides, you know, these counseling services. And you know, he essentially had to become a whistleblower because the corruption that he witness in that context was spectacular. I mean, basically the other counselor sort of long term, he was just an intern essentially doing a kind of on the job training as part of his degree. But the other counselors who were ostensibly long term there Basically just didn't show up to work and were collecting salaries for literally doing nothing. And so this is just the kind of thing that is rampant in a lot of, in a lot of blue states and cities, in part because you have this intermediation of services. Another context where I've encountered it is dealing with the Medicaid bureaucracy on behalf of a relative that there, there are huge, you know, and this is something Republicans were saying about Medicaid. But, you know, there are huge amounts of corruption, but that really have to do with this model of outsourcing and subcontracting everything to these intermediary organizations. So to me, that's, I mean, beyond the kind of interesting aspect of like old, again, old school machine politics corruption that, you know, I think does put a dent in the sort of good governance image of Minnesota Democrats, you know, quite a serious dent, I would say. The bigger story here, and, you know, I think obviously the Republicans have made it about immigration. To me, the bigger story really has to do with this reliance on intermediaries and the kinds of corruption that that engenders. And I do think our piece about the Mexican, again, left wing government that essentially cut out the middlemen and created a new system in which childcare funding went directly to families to do what they chose to, you know, is, is a good illustration of how you can, you know, pursue similar sort of progressive goals while at the same time cutting out these corrupting intermediary organizations.
- [37:34]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah, you took the words right out of my mouth. I mean, that's, and it's ironic too, because a lot of the, the rhetoric coming from the Trump administration and you know, things like Doge were the long term policy outlooks that created this situation. That is you hollow out the state, the state no longer does anything. Increasingly, the state isn't, doesn't do what you want a state to do, becomes an administrative state, becomes a state that simply oversees and creates checklists and so on. And so you give the money to these NGOs who have this veneer of charity and closeness to the people on the ground. And the state simply provides these checklists that the NGOs fill out and say, yes, I've done a wonderful job, thank you for the money. And so the state winds up holding all the risk, actually. And it, you know, part of the reason why they, they hollow this out is to, they sort of offload some of the risk onto these NGOs. But in terms of like, whether or not children actually get fed or there's childcare or there's like Outcomes like women going into work. The state is holding all that risk because they have that expectation on them, but they're giving money to these NGOs to actually carry that out. And this is the failure of the regulatory state, the failure of the administrative state, which we've seen in so many different occasions, particularly during COVID is that you had all these. The state increasingly just creates all these plans. And then the NGOs and the civil society organizations are supposed to execute the plans, but they're constantly rolling over and churning and doing all sorts of different things. They're very difficult to track and they're off. And they're often responsible simply for filling out checklists and they then often do what they want. And it is a, it is rampant. It's not just in the us it is all over the place. I just did a whole bunch of research for MCC Brussels on this where I, I chased down all this money, tons and tons of money going into these LGBTIQ groups and so on. And I looked at their educational materials. I signed up for the courses and played the games, the gamification platforms. And the thing that struck me most, how much money was going into it, how crappy it was. This, the really poor quality of a lot of this stuff. People were just, and they were taking millions, you know, in their organizations and giving people jobs and promotions. And I, for what? I, I don't know, sitting there creating, oh, a super fun platform game to teach young LGBTQ IQ youth self respect. And it's like the game was like a wall of text and then answering multiple choice questions like, really, I'm not even joking. Like someone literally just copied and pasted their propaganda into this game site. And this is, you know, they're getting millions for this, this junk. And, and the, the, the trouble is too, and I think that the tide is turning now, obviously, but a lot of this went on and is going on and has been going on for so long because of a shield of good intentions, you know. Well, you know, we saw this with Black Lives Matter, right? Like you give a ton of money to these organizations because they are going to right a social wrong. And if you question that, you looked horrible, you know, and if you question what a lot of these NGOs were doing, if you question NGO complex generally, you looked like a horrible person. And so it just went on with this kind of rampant wastage and essentially corruption because of this, this shield of good intentions. And the other thing too is that NGOs are being used to this day to evade subsidiarity so, you know, I'm sure you're all familiar with the principle of subsidiarity. So you want to have decisions made by the lowest kind of person, the person closest to the phenomenon. When it comes to the eu, that means that member states need to be able to make decisions on things that the ngo, that the EU doesn't have control over, things like education, that there are certain things that are, you know, within member state priorities or competence. And in the US there's similar kind of principles at play. But there are larger agendas, particularly around values that, you know, changing people's values, educating populations toward becoming citizens with who are more amenable to governance and so on that require evasion of subsidiarity. And NGOs are often very well placed to do this. So in education, for example, they will fund NGOs to create BS educational materials that are then laundered as good practice and sent all over the country. And now you have essentially a national education program for, you know, some objective that the state wants and creates. All of these PAYS NGOs to create these educational materials that then pop up all over the country. You can see this with all sorts of faddish crap like self esteem and whatever it might be. You get the. All of a sudden all the kids in every school are learning about self esteem or how to manage their mental health or whatever it might be. So yeah, so Walls has taken the fall on this. But it is not an isolated problem that can be reduced to a single man. It is a massive problem that the Trump administration itself is feeding by hollowing out the state and turning it into, and by continuing the long term hollowing out of the state and its transformation into an administrative organ that simply administrates all these NGOs administers. I should say
- [43:01]
Matthew Schmitz
it's a huge issue. I mentioned earlier, Mamdani, who's so celebrated, I mentioned on an earlier podcast, Mamdani, who's celebrated or declared decried as this kind of big government socialist and probably the signature element of this in terms of his campaign proposals is his idea to have city owned grocery store as well. Where these ideas have been implemented or proposed by other progressive urban governments, they've generally been administered by third parties. And so this is kind of the pattern of the progressive machine today. And as you say, Ashley, there's a kind of dynamic where the right slashes governments and then the left, rather than sort of expanding government itself, kind of expands kind of handouts to NGOs which end up performing these governmental functions. But Less accountably and often less efficiently in terms of walls as political obituary which has still to be written. Pay attention to compact. We'll have more on him soon. I think this kind of shows the folly of viewing him as a potential reincarnation of a kind of Midwest progressivism that was expressed in different ways and kind of prairie populism. You know, you had things, you know, the earlier in the 20th century where, you know, North Dakota was. Had a state owned coal mine. North Dakota and South Dakota had state owned, you know, grain elevators. Right. My home state of Nebraska to this day has all public power. The only state in the union to have it with not a single private kilowatt hour sold in the state since the 1940s. And then along with that kind of prairie populism, you have the sewer socialism of the upper Midwest associated with areas with heavy German especially, and also Scandinavian immigration. So when Wallace emerged on the national scene, I think some people looked to him and thought he can maybe revive this tradition, because that's one of the most functional examples we have of kind of workable progressive economic vision within America. Well, something very different has been going on in Minnesota. It's not state owned and operated provision of public goods, obviously. Instead you have this kind of weird NGO system interacting in seemingly perverse ways with issues of immigration and diversity, which of course we've long dealt with in America. So I think that's kind of the deeper disappointment of Tim Walls. And that was kind of the highbrow version of what some people hoped Tim Walls could deliver to the Democratic Coalition at the level of pure vibes. It was sort of the camo hat, the IH Scout, you know, the Remington Wingmaster shotgun or whatever he had. He probably had a. Probably had an Italian gun, something nicer. But yeah, in the highbrow sense, he was supposed to kind of bring a little prairie populism sewer socialism into the coalition. That never happened. Now we need to turn to the most important headline of all. Jeff, I understand that you have had a run in with the authorities in El Salvador. You may be at risk of being sent to see COTS because of your disrespectful takes on El Salvador's criminal justice revolution. Can you explain your crimes?
- [47:10]
Jeff Schulenberger
Yeah, I mean, I've wanted to go back there, but now I'm not sure if it's a wise idea. My crime was tweeting, actually back in October, just a chart that showed that a considerable amount of the reduction of crime in El Salvador actually occurred before Nayib Bukele was president. And the reason I pointed this out is just to say that I think there are a lot of people, I mean, I was not even so much critiquing the, the government of El Salvador as critiquing the sort of one weird trick interpretation of what's happened there. That's very popular on the American right, because it's actually been a much longer and more complicated process, the reduction of crime there that proceeded in various stages and involved various different approaches and strategies. So anyway, I mean, I thought it was a pretty mild sort of attempt to nuance the story of what's happened there and go beyond the sort of Bukele superhero image that you often get, where he just kind of comes in, he's the new sheriff in town, locks up all the bad guys, and everything's great. So anyway, the only reason this is significant, it wasn't even a particularly viral or notable tweet, but President Bukele himself retweeted it and sort of attempted to refute what I said. I, I don't personally think what he said is necessarily at odds with, with what I said, but, you know, he called me an armchair pundit, which, I mean, I did, I did, actually.
- [48:50]
Matthew Schmitz
Is that a misdemeanor or a felony in Bukele's?
- [48:54]
Jeff Schulenberger
I mean, I think it's, it's a state of exceptions, so anything goes, whatever he decides. But yeah, I mean, it was an interesting reminder of, I suppose it brought me back to, you know, when people were first using Twitter back in, I mean, I didn't join it until like 2013, 2014, but I remember people talking about, oh, you can, like, tweet at some, you know, celebrity or politician, and they'll actually reply to you. And obviously this, this has sort of been, you know, a continued theme in some ways, but it, it reminded me I can actually get the attention of a, of a, of a leader of a sovereign nation. And then, you know, so I, I chose to reply by sending him the article I had written based on the, the reporting I did there back in 2024. And who knows whether he, he read it. I did request an interview with him at the time, and I assume he was too busy barnstorming, but, you know, it would be interesting. I, I, I think he's, you know, one thing I do say in that article is that whatever else you may say about him, he's a very skilled PR man, which was his profession before going into politics. And, you know, I, I don't think I, I can see why my version of the story which is sort of, you know, nuanced and, you know, complicated and multifaceted, isn't, you know, it's not the version of the story he wants to tell. But it was interesting to see him reply to it because it was not by any means the most vociferous criticism of him or his government that you'll find. So in any case, it was an interesting experience to have that picked up that way.
- [50:40]
Matthew Schmitz
It's a great article, Jeff.
- [50:42]
Jeff Schulenberger
The title is Bukele's Kingdom of dreams.
- [50:46]
Matthew Schmitz
And as you say, it's great because it complicates the narrative that you've heard from, you know, the kind of online right about Bukele. But it is, it's not some kind of denunciation of him. And it's a piece of journalism I'm very proud of as the editor of Compaq because I think it expresses what we seek to deliver to our readers, which is something they really don't get elsewhere in terms of looking at these big stories and complex issues in a way that's, you know, subtle, sophisticated, but willing to draw surprising conclusions. So that's my pitch for subscribing to compaq@compactmag.com Subscribe. A lot of people are joining. Subscriptions are way up. So go with the crowd. Do it. And with that, thank you, Ashley. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks to our producer, Steven Ada Bato. And thank you, listeners.
- [52:14]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Well, the holidays have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life again gift. Well, Mint mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year.
- [52:29]
Matthew Schmitz
What do you have to lose?
- [52:31]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time
- [52:35]
Amazon Music Advertiser
50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 month or 180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy.
- [52:43]
Matthew Schmitz
See terms.
- [52:45]
Kalshi Advertiser
The world is always changing. Now you can track what's likely to happen and trade on the outcome with Kalshi from politics and economic breaking financial news. Kalshi markets show real time probabilities of what will unfold and you can make money on what you think will happen. The state of the union is Tuesday. Will new policies be announced? What will Trump say? Who shows up? Trade outcomes live on Kalshi available in all 50 states for a limited time, download the Kalshi app and use code iheart to get $10 when you trade $10k a l s h I Kalshi trade on anything.