It Could Happen Here Weekly 156
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong. It's the start of a new week, so let's start preparing for what these next few months are going to look like in the wake of Trump's election victory last week.

So one thing I was thinking about after the results kind of rolled in and seeing everyone's reactions online, you have a mix of people going full Doomer, some people trying to get hopped up on Hopium, some people on Copium, right? Just trying to find any psychological way to survive.

And for me, kind of the way I like to survive is just through information. So this episode, we're going to get into how we see life for trans people under a second Trump term, based on both what he's done in the past, what he's promised to do in the future. And I know in like the days after the election,

like LGBTQ crisis hotlines all saw a massive spike in people calling in to the point where some people were even unable to reach someone. And I understand this is a very scary moment in time. And as much as it might not be fun to hear about how things are all going to get worse, there's also some misconceptions. And I think there's also a degree of power in actually being able to

reasonably ascertain what things could look like instead of just kind of feeling it out and just going purely on vibes. So to kind of start, I guess I'll mention some things that Trump did in his first term that then got undone by Biden, which will probably just end up being reinstated. We don't know these for sure, but that's like a decent guess.

So one of the first things Trump did when he got into office is he rolled back an Obama era memo directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination. Yeah, and that, by the way, discrimination protection is a constant theme in this episode. It's going to get a lot worse. Trump later went on to ban trans people from serving in the military. He also went after trans prisoners, making it so that trans people usually would need to be housed in prisons.

prisons and jails according to their assigned sex at birth, which is, of course, a very dangerous situation for people incarcerated, specifically trans women. Yeah, and I think there is good reason to expect that treatment there is going to get worse.

There's been, you know, we'll get into this more later in the episode, but there's been a real focus on incarcerated trans people getting health care. Yeah. And this is one of the things that's kind of ambiguous as to how Trump could go about trying to stop these people from getting health care.

So the thing about providing health care to trans people who have been incarcerated is that they have to do it. It is something that is required by the Constitution of the United States. The Eighth Amendment holds that there is a ban on cruel and unusual punishment. And withholding medical care is so obviously a form of cruel and unusual punishment that even staggeringly right-wing Supreme Courts have been like, no, you actually have to

give people medical care in prison. So this is one that's going to be a little bit difficult for him to do. I don't know. He might find some way to do it. This is one of the ones where there's a real potential for it to get worse. And we simply do not know enough about what legal strategy is going to be here to say for sure. But it's also worth mentioning, like people have had to fight for access to health care in prison. Like it's not something that comes easily.

easily. People have had to sue to make sure that they get the health care that they are legally required to receive. And we can just assume that that process will probably be slightly more difficult under a second Trump term like it was under a first Trump term than it may kind of currently be now. So that's kind of one shift in how things might be slightly more challenging.

Yeah. And I want to also mention, so that analysis and a lot of the analysis, the policy analysis that I'm going to be doing going forward is heavily indebted to trans policy expert Corinne Green, who we've had on the show a couple of times before.

She was one of the people who ended up working on compliance for that lawsuit where Kamala Harris tried to keep trans prisoners from getting healthcare. And she came in and had to ensure that the state of California was doing it, and they weren't. So that's something that has been fought for. And that's something I mean...

The trans community is small enough that that is the thing that has specifically been fought for by people who I consulted to make this episode. So, yeah, these rights have been dearly won and it's going to be very hard to protect them. If I'm doing something where there's something about policy implementation, assume that I talked to Corinne about this and that's why it's accurate.

And while I'm doing this, I want to bug a couple of the projects that she works on. But there's there's something you can do very immediately right now before we get into all of the terrible stuff that's going to happen, which is you can donate to the Trans Income Project, which is a project that supports trans people and trans sex workers in particular, which is a lot of trans people.

and supports them by just giving them direct cash transfers. They do some other work too. But yeah, direct cash transfers are one of the most effective ways that you can help trans people. And if you give money to this organization, there'll be links in the chat. You can help do this. So let's get into how things are going to get worse. Unfortunately, Trump administration, Congress, and state legislatures have an enormous amount of power to make everything worse. We're mostly going to be focusing on what Trump and Congress can do

Well, we'll get into the legislators a bit at the end. So there are a lot of levers of state power and sort of policy techniques that Trump can pull here to make things worse. We're going to go roughly from easiest to hardest to pull off.

So the first lever is federal funding. Probably the easiest place that this lever can get pulled is in the education system. Trump can unfortunately fairly easily implement what amounts to a don't say trans ban on a federal level by threatening to withhold federal funding for any school that doesn't mandate things like misgendering and dead naming students and banned. And this is something he's explicitly talked about is like banning anyone in classes, any teachers from talking about transitioning at all. He's also, you know,

you know, threatened to have teachers who talk to students about being trans, like investigated by the department of justice. We'll get more into department of justice investigations in a bit.

He's also used explicit threat, the same threat of cutting state funding to stop schools from letting kids use the right bathroom in the locker room. It's also possible he will do that through Title IX, but there's a lot of ways that he can do this very easily that are probably not going to be able to be stopped. And this is going to get extremely bad very quickly.

Another sort of avenue that he has is, I guess, what do you call like the Hyde Amendment for trans people? So for people who don't know what the Hyde Amendment is, the Hyde Amendment is a writer that bans federal spending on abortion. It's been like modified. It's not like the 100% ban that it used to be because now there's like exceptions for rape and incest and stuff. Life of the parents, too. But it is a very, very effective Republican tool, especially also politically.

Joe Biden helped implement that. That's been used to limit access to abortion. And we already have seen the start of these kind of things. Even under Biden, there was a version of this of a kind of Hyde Amendment for trans health care that was an attempt to get the DOD to not be able to spend money on trans health care.

That's already a provision that's been tacked on to one of the most recent spending bills that went through because Joe Manchin defected and joined the Republicans to get it on to one of the spending omnibuses.

And that was, again, just for the Department of Defense. We are very likely to see versions of these attached to every single spending bill that explicitly say that government funding cannot be used for trans healthcare. It will definitely be used to say you can't use it for trans healthcare for minors. It is possible this will be expanded to adults. We don't know. It depends how far their sort of anti-trans derangement goes. But that is a real danger.

And this can also be expanded to refusing to allow Medicare and Medicaid to pay for anything at a clinic that does trans healthcare, even if the money isn't funding the healthcare. That's also possible. That would be absolutely catastrophic for the medical system.

Even just a government ban that prevents things like Medicare and Medicaid and government health care from covering transition in the first place is a disaster. But if they go further and prevent clinics who provide trans health care from

taking Medicare and Medicaid. That's bad enough that I think that is, in terms of what is the thing we most need to be worried about right now, I think that's the worst possible thing that can happen very quickly. Because it could basically pressure medical clinics into refusing to offer any kind of gender-affirming care because it would threaten their just base ability to operate as a medical clinic, taking Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Yeah, this is something I talked about a bit in our Agenda 47 episode on this, but this effectively creates Sophie's choice for these

These clinics, because it's either you treat trans people who have private insurance, right? Or you can treat like people who have poor or Medicare and Medicaid. So it's like, okay, either you let trans people get fucked or you let like every poor person or old person in the U.S.,

eat shit. So there aren't good options here for that. How do we think something like this would be implemented? Is this an executive order or does this have to go through Congress? So that's the other part about this that's very bad. The way this is being done is

These things are attached as what are called writers to spending bills. So any spending bill the Republicans put in front of the House, they will have this like provision in it, right? And the really big problem for us is that spending bills usually get passed now out of this thing called Senate reconciliation. And the thing about Senate reconciliation is that you can't filibuster them. So these can just get rammed through really, really quickly. And there's not going to be enough opposition in the House to stop it either.

So, I mean, some of this stuff probably could be done with executive orders, but it's quite possible you won't even need that because it can just be rammed through in spending bills. Which is a little bit harder to undo from my understanding.

Yeah, yeah. Executive orders can be overturned by the next guy, whereas getting these provisions out is going to take a long time. Yeah. You know, this is another issue that we have. The map for the Democrats retaking the Senate is terrible in 2026, and it's bad in 2028, too. So I still don't think... This is being recorded Friday. I don't think we still actually know what their majority in the Senate is going to be, but it's a lot. And also, we know that Joe Manchin is willing to vote for stuff like this because he's done it already. So...

This is probably coming quickly. It basically depends on how good their policy people are, which who knows. But yeah, this is not going to be difficult for them to implement and it's going to be extremely damaging. Well, that was a lot. Let's take a little bit of a break. And when we come back, take another look into what life could be like under a second Trump term.

We are back. So the threat to trans people does not only come from Congress and the president. One of the things that's almost certainly going to happen very soon is there is currently a case about a trans health care ban for minors in Tennessee in front of the Supreme Court. It's called Scrametti versus U.S. We are back.

almost certainly going to lose this. Not losing this requires a bunch of extremely unlikely things happening. And this is very, very bad. What Scrimmety versus U.S. is probably going to cost us is trans people as a group being protected by the 14th Amendment.

So the 14th Amendment is supposed to provide everyone equal protection under the law. The way this has been interpreted is that if you're passing a law that directly targets a group, there are certain levels of scrutiny that have to be applied to it to see whether or not it's discriminatory and can be allowed to proceed. What's probably going to happen here is that trans people aren't going to be held as protected at all, which means that the 14th Amendment will not protect us from things that are unlawful.

unbelievably obviously discriminatory like trans healthcare bans for youth which is again literally the same procedures that are happening for trans children are done to cis children all the time and it's fine yeah so this is very obviously discrimination we're probably going to lose it because the supreme court is full of a bunch of the worst people in the entire world it is technically possible that gorsuch defects and drags someone else over and we get a thing that says the

we have intermediate scrutiny. That would be the best win we could possibly get on this. It's extremely, it's unlikely. We're probably going to lose it. And this is also going to overturn the landmark case, Bostock versus Clayton County, which is the one that rules that you can't discriminate against trans people based on gender identity. Specifically for like employers as well. Yeah, for employers, specifically for employers. So what

what we could very well be about to lose, and again, this is another thing that's very high likelihood because this case is already in front of the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court hates us. We could be about to lose employment discrimination protections. Now, to be fair, and I think most trans people who are listening to this show know this, I don't know how many cis people understand this, but

The level of trans employment discrimination in the workplace is unbelievable. Yeah, this isn't really enforced at all. It's pretty bad. It is something that right now is technically possible to do, and you're not allowed to just straight up say it. But, you know, like there is a reason that the unemployment rate for trans people is like three times as high. No, I think it's about three times as high as the rate for cis people, right?

We don't have great data. There's some data from the Transluxury Survey from 2022, but the full report isn't out yet. But what I will say is that the trans level of unemployment right now in the U.S. is very low. The level of unemployment for trans people is 1936 Great Depression levels. And this is before we lose these protections. It is also worth noting this will not overturn state level protections. So if you're in a state that has specifically banned it, you will have some more recourse.

But we're losing 14th Amendment protections. On a federal level, it would basically allow explicit employment discrimination if someone's trans. It's possible that case goes marginally better for us, and that doesn't happen, but it's hard to see how that would happen. The lawyers I talk to will say this is not a legal opinion, but they seem to think that this is how this would go, and the policy people seem to think it'd be going the same way. There's some other things that can happen

Trump has been promising we're going to get federal investigations into clinics that provide gender-affirming care, also into hospitals. There's going to be...

enormous legal harassment. This has already been happening on a sort of lower level, but from sort of individual lawsuits and state attorney generals. Yeah. But this is going to be happening with the full backing of the Department of Justice. You can look at like what Texas has been doing the past four years. Yeah. With them investigating not just clinics, but also like parents of trans kids. Yeah. Parents, like individual health care providers. He was also pledging to investigate like the companies that make hormones. So that's

That's bad. There's also the Department of Justice has been making some incredibly half-assed attempts to try to go after some of the health care bans. That's all going to stop. They're just going to give all that up. There's also a bunch of bills that could be passed depending on the Democrats' willingness to filibuster them.

So Trump has called for a ban of trans people like playing sports that correspond with their gender. And that may well pass because the Democrats are cowards and the Republicans are going to have a large majority in the Senate. Yep. Trump has also pushed for a ban on gender affirming care for minors, including HRT's homo replacement therapy, which is.

like one of the main ways you transition and puberty blockers, that one is less likely to make it through the Senate. But it also, again, depends on how cowardly the Democrats are and how much they decide to cave. And this is the moment that there is another thing that you can do. And you should start doing this right now, which is this is the moment right now to start pressuring your congressperson about this. Like start calling them, start pressuring them and start making sure that they don't

fully sort of turn on trans rights. This is something that you can concretely do right now because these people need to understand that there are consequences for turning on trans people because if there aren't consequences, they're going to do it.

Now, Trump has also called for a ban on recognizing trans people at the federal level on like all identification documents, things like that. Also would outlaw non-binary markings on passports and stuff. That would also be really bad. That's also something that probably requires a law. And that's again and everything. Call your Congress people, pressure them now. Start doing it now. Do not wait until he's actually in office.

All of these issues are things that public opinion has been shifting on greatly the past two years. These things used to be much more seen as like, yeah, this makes sense. This is a humane and reasonable effort to include a group of discriminated people. And now we see in a growing number, a majority of people polled on this issue do not support these measures. They don't support

having the ability to have your gender marker match your gender identity. They don't support your ability to participate in public life. And that is the result of an intentional misinformation campaign and essentially like a hate crime campaign and a hate speech campaign that has been going on for the past four years because Republicans knew that they already lost the battle on regular gay people, so they moved on to the next subjugated class. And that's something we've talked about for a while. And

this is something that is shifting. So you have to actually verbally express to your representatives that this is something that you actually do care about. Otherwise, they will look at these general polls and be like, oh, I guess this isn't popular anymore, and shift and cave on it. They need to know that their constituents actually do care about these things if we want these things to not get passed through Congress. And it's also worth mentioning that a lot of this, people just don't know anything about trans people because we're like 1% of the population right now.

Part of the reason the Republican campaign is working is that people are susceptible to being told things about trans people and believing them. But that also works for us, right? It goes both ways. Part of what's been going on is that we haven't had the kind of giant advocacy push outside of some trans people, but we have no money, we have no resources, and we need there to actually be large, widespread, and vocal public support because otherwise all of the stuff that's happening here is going to get even worse.

And, you know, the word and we could get very well the worst case scenario things, which are full bans for adults. That's the thing that they could pass through Congress. But.

Right now, they don't have the support for it. However, comma, as Kirsten is going to get to, there are signs that the Democratic Party is deciding to throw us under the bus. Yeah. Not as steadfast on this issue than what we would probably prefer. Yeah. And on the state level, I guess the important thing for the state level is that once we lose 14th Amendment protections, it's going to be so much harder for there to be legal challenges to any of this. And this is going to be a big issue.

This means we're going to see a proliferation of these state level bans on health care, even sort of marching ahead of where the federal government is. Let's have our last break. And when we come back, we will close the episode by discussing Trump's focus on trans issues during his campaign, as well as things that you can start doing like right now to get ready and prepare for these next four years. All right, we are back.

During the last few months of Trump's campaign, his team shifted away from the key issues of the economy and immigration in their national election ad efforts and specifically honed in on trans issues as a wedge against Kamala Harris and the Democrats in general.

The infamous Kamala is for they them ad being the prime example of this. According to a PBS report, from October 7th to October 20th, Trump's campaign and pro-Trump groups spent an estimated $39 million on anti-trans ads. And Trump ended up spending more money on these ads than on housing, immigration, and the economy combined. This was his main focus in his final ad push, specifically after the September debate.

A new report from journalist Casey Parks using data from Ad Impact shows that Republicans spent nearly $215 million on anti-trans ads this election cycle. And this figure does not include cable or streaming ads. This is just network TV.

And these anti-trans ads weren't just focused on the presidential election. Other Republicans in various Senate races picked up on the success of these anti-trans ads and used them in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Now, initially, some thought that maybe this would be a repeat of 2022. Maybe this extra focus on this small group of the population wouldn't lead to kind of electoral successes, pointing to how a similar strategy failed during the 2022 midterms.

But then election day came and we saw that there was a degree of success, or at least these did not hurt them in any substantial way. And Republicans won many of the Senate races on anti-trans campaign messages. I'm going to quote from an article in the New York Times called Trump and the Republicans bet big on anti-trans ads across the country. Quote, the Kamala is for they them ad was rated as one of his campaigns more effective in September in some Democratic testing, according to results reviewed by the Times.

Republican strategists said the focus on transgender women and girls in sports had been particularly effective with a key group of voters the party had hemorrhaged support from in recent years, college-educated women.

One of the things you see in the focus groups is that the moms get really visibly angry on this issue, said Jim McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who works for Mr. Trump and other Republican campaigns. Quote, it's a fairness issue. They don't want their daughters to lose a scholarship and they don't want them to get hurt, unquote. The enthusiasm for this issue kind of lines up with what me, Sophie and Robert saw at the RNC, where anti-trans statements consistently got the loudest applause.

Though some state-level Democrats, like Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Tom Sulzy of New York, as well as some other DNC advisors, have jumped onto the blame game, citing trans issues as, if not the reason, then a reason Democrats just completely fumbled this election, claiming that the Democratic Party is far to the left on trans issues than the average American,

But largely, the Dems were not out campaigning for trans people, like loud and proud, this election cycle. Trans issues were intentionally pushed offstage at the DNC, and the Harris campaign tried their hardest to sidestep this issue, giving vague non-answers on whether trans people should be able to receive healthcare by just stating that her administration would quote-unquote follow the law and invoking states' rights type framing.

And I see this as just a massive failure to confront an issue that Republicans have like slingshotted into the spotlight. And it shows a failure to do things because it's like the right thing to do, not just necessarily for some like electoral gain. Well, even even on a strategic level.

Right. We saw this with border policy, too. Right. Exactly. Democrats adopted the Republicans border policy and then they lost. Exactly. And it's like, yeah, if you just agree or refuse to contest them on their core issues, then that's what people are going to believe, because people have a tendency to believe what their elites are telling them. You can't defeat these people's ideology by just agreeing with it or stepping out of the way of it. That just lets it spread.

I think this is going to be proven to be like the biggest mistake Democrats made this election cycle. Like you can't just cede territory to the right based on a massive disinformation campaign, which is exactly what the Democrats did on immigration and crime. And they showed a willingness to do that on trans rights.

Now, even if some of these people, Democrats included, claim to not hate trans people individually, they have allowed questions around access to bathrooms, sports, and government-funded healthcare to be used as a wedge against trans rights as a whole, and the ability for trans people to be able to exist in public life.

To close, I think we should have just a brief discussion on what people can do, specifically during these next 75 days, and even in the months after, like what people can do to prepare for some of the worst aspects of this, specifically on the healthcare front. Now, we did a series of episodes a few years ago on DIY HRT. There

There are both pharmaceutical and home-brewed options for hormones that can be ordered online. Now, since that episode, home-brewed distribution networks have spread throughout the United States. There's probably one already in whatever city is closest to you. Now, access to those networks does require a degree of like

in-person community. And I know that can be challenging. You can certainly do organizing online on Discord. You can certainly find trans people on Discord that can help you learn where pharmaceutical-grade estrogen can be ordered online. But that type of online organizing will only get more dangerous under a Trump term, especially if the legal status of these hormones change.

So I will always emphasize the importance of in-person community. And it might just take learning if there's a trans band in the city you're in, going to some shows, learning where trans people go, where trans people gather. Is there community picnics? Is there book fairs? Is there zine fairs? Is there even gaming conventions, right? Just places that there might be a number of trans people gathered. And...

Talk to them about being trans. Talk to them about the issues that you're facing. It might take a few months to like gain trust and become friends, but that's just how friendships work anyway. And that can be challenging. And there may not be something like this in a city super close to you, which is why online connections are useful. And sometimes it might require a little bit of travel.

Now, what we can do, at least right now, is stockpile things in case things get harder to maintain or produce. There's multiple forms of these hormones that can be stored. And I do believe that there will be some form of home-brewed option that will most likely continue to exist even if prescribed hormones get restricted. And a part of why I emphasize kind of doing this in person as well, especially if you're a minor, that will just get more dangerous to do under a second Trump term.

I will point people to the website DIYHRT.wiki. It's currently the best information source on dosing, testing, how to find supplies, and options for ordering hormones. Now, because changing legal paperwork on the federal or state level often takes a while, if that's something that you want to do, now is the time to start. There's still 70 days until Trump takes office, and some of these changes could start being put into effect.

you should absolutely apply for a passport. Now, depending on many variables, it may be advantageous to have your legal name and gender marker match whatever you more easily pass as, rather than your gender identity. Now, I understand why this is less than ideal, and if you think that this might just inhibit your transition progress and push you further back into the closet,

especially if the option of changing your gender marker on federal documents just goes away during the next four years, then people should just go ahead and get that stuff changed ASAP. But it's something to reflect on and consider. Lastly, I want to mention something about personal safety.

Over the course of the past week, I've heard from friends around the country experiencing a spike in anti-queer and misogynistic violence. Chuds, frat boys, and just asshole men have been way more willing to just openly harass queer people out in public. Some of this, I think, is just Trump supporters quote-unquote celebrating the election results.

But once Trump takes office, I expect this type of harassment to start slowly increasing as Truds feel like they can get away with more just open misogyny, homophobia, racism, etc. I know a lot of people have been talking about or posting about buying firearms, and I'm

Firearms is one of the last things you should buy in a panic. This is a very careful and calculated choice you need to make about your own personal safety, your own mental health, your own willingness to carry and train with a gun. This is its own topic. But I do recommend buying and carrying pepper gel for basically all queer people and women. It's a great self-defense tool. It spreads less than pepper spray, so you're going to be less likely to just spray yourself.

Sabre is a good brand. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for your friends. Mia, do you have anything else you want to add? Yeah, yeah. Two things. One, people have been asking for book recommendations, so we're giving them to you. We're only giving them to you at the end of the episode, so you've got to stay around. And I think something that's good to read in this moment on trans issues is Julia Serrano's book, Whipping Girl. I've had Julia Serrano on the show before. She is one of the most important people

I mean, honestly, like feminist theorists of the last, like of this century. And there's a new edition of whipping girl that's come out recently.

And it is one of the fundamental sort of texts to understand the experience of trans femme people in this country and why things have gotten the way that they've gotten. So, yeah, go read Whipping Girl. It's spectacular. And then I want to plug one more thing that you can give money to. So, I mean, again, another very effective way for cis people to support trans people is give them money because all of us are unbelievably broke all of the time.

Another place you can give money to is the Trans Justice Funding Project. We'll have that in this too. And they give out grants to other just like trans groups who are doing organizing or doing other kinds of support work, mutual aid, etc., etc. So that's money that goes directly to trans people. Yeah. And then obviously, as we've said, this is the forces people part of the episode after our four trans people part.

Go call your congresspeople, go pressure them, go show up to their offices and make it extremely clear that it is unacceptable to write off trans people and that they need to be willing to successfully stop these writers and successfully do whatever they can to channel the works to make sure that the Republicans cannot pass bills that will harm us even more than the things that they're already going to do.

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Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Black boxing stars and black music royalty together in the heart of Zaire, Africa.

Three days of music and then the boxing event. What was going on in the world at the time made this fight as important that anything else is going on on the planet. My grandfather laid on the ropes and let George Foreman basically just punch himself out. Welcome to Rumble, the story of a world in transformation. The 60s and prior to that, you couldn't call a person black. And how we arrived at this peak moment. Hi!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans, and...

You know, along with all of our other correspondents, I'm looking forward to what we can expect from the Trump administration, which is a broad and far-reaching question given the ambitions that Trump and the others who I think will be involved have.

in this new administration have already expressed. And the elevator pitch theme of today's episode is what's going to happen in Gaza once Trump is president again? Will things get better or worse? Obviously, the expectation is worse. I think that's where certainly the safe money goes if you're putting money on this. But the short answer to that question is no one fully knows.

Now, the first thing that I did when trying to prepare for this episode was track down as many articles as I could that included interviews with Gazans about their expectations. And those expectations were largely negative, but a little more mixed than you might expect.

A Reuters reporter interviewed Abu Osama, living in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. He called Trump's election a, quote, new catastrophe in the history of the Palestinian people, adding, despite the destruction, death, and displacement that we have witnessed, what is coming will be more difficult. It will be politically devastating.

This essentially agrees with what a Palestinian from Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Ahmed Jarad, told Al Jazeera, quote, "'Trump and Netanyahu are an evil alliance against the Palestinians, and our fate will be very difficult, not only in the fateful issues, but also in our daily concerns.'"

This is a sad day for Palestinians. Trump will endorse Netanyahu's free hand regarding the possibility of the return of settlements to the Gaza Strip and even the displacement of large numbers of Palestinians outside it. We hope to return to the north, and now all of our hopes have been shattered.

And unfortunately, Jarad's fears here have been immediately proven well-founded. On November 6th, as the rest of the world reeled from Trump's victory, IDF Brigadier General Itzik Cohen told Israeli reporters, there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes. Humanitarian aid would only be allowed to enter through the south. His justification was that there are no more civilians in the north.

Reporting from The Guardian interviewed several international humanitarian law experts, and the members of that likely dying field described Israeli actions here as war crimes. The forcible transfer of civilian populations and the use of food as a weapon are supposed to be banned. Despite this, we can safely assume that there will be no serious consequences as a result of any of this.

Now, the timing of this announcement was predominant, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that Israel might not have been as bold as they're currently being if Harris had won. Another Gazan, 70-year-old Dr. Zakia Hilal, told Al Jazeera, it is true that American administrations do not differ in supporting Israel, but some are more severe and more intense than others, like Trump.

You can find numerous Gazans expressing feelings along these lines if you read long enough, but you will also find a number who feel like what's coming won't be worse, or at least won't be very different from what they've already endured. Jihad Malaka, a researcher at the Palestinian Planning Center, told Al Jazeera he does not expect Trump's administration to be wildly different from Biden's in this regard.

Trump uses rough tools, and Biden and the Democrats resort to soft tools, but the politics are the same. Biden did not make any decision in favor of the Palestinians and was unable to achieve a ceasefire. He did not change the reality of the decisions of his predecessor Trump at all. The positions of the two administrations regarding Israel are the same and identical, and they put its interests above all other considerations.

You can also find some Gazans who see a sliver of hope in Trump's new administration. Reuters spoke with the owner of a grocery store in Gaza, Khaled D'Souza, who told their reporter, I think Donald Trump, if he wins, he promised the Muslim people in America to stop the war in Gaza. We hope that happens.

And it's not necessarily absurd to hope that there may be some positive effects here. Trump has said many horrible things about Palestinians, obviously, several weeks before the election. He had a phone call with Netanyahu that may have been a violation of the Logan Act, although laws don't really matter anymore. Here's how Slate.com summarized what happened in that call.

According to Trump, the Israeli leader said he disregarded President Joe Biden's warning to keep troops out of Rafah in southern Gaza, a decision that resulted in the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Senwar in a shootout in the area. Trump also said Netanyahu asked him for advice on how to respond to Iran's missile attack on Israel, to which Trump said he responded, do whatever you have to do.

Now, that's a dire sign, and it is impossible to imagine that a new Trump regime won't restart the sale and shipment of specific munitions that Biden banned for export to Israel. This July, Biden halted the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to the IDF because, quote, "...they cannot be used in Gaza or any populated area without causing great human tragedy and damage."

Now, the fact that munitions like this will very likely be used is hideous, and I think it's extremely unlikely that we do not see an immediate rise in the death toll. But at the same time, Israel's extant acts have caused great human tragedy and damage. The munitions they have have already been responsible for calamitous death and destruction on a fairly wide scale. So where's the cause for any optimism on this at all?

It comes from Trump's own self-interest. As Khalid D'Souza noted, Trump ran promising to end wars. This means he does have some vested interest, even if only in his own ego, in forcing Netanyahu to draw things to a close in short order. And there is indeed reporting that Trump has told Netanyahu to wrap things up by January so that he can take office with an end to the conflict

and ideally use that as a way to kind of bolster his early popularity and gain some political capital for the other sweeping changes he wants to make. Now, the fact that Trump is pushing Netanyahu on ending things in January doesn't mean a sudden peaceful ceasefire. For one thing, nothing is going to happen in the months between then and now to reduce the level of bloodshed.

And almost every likely theoretical ends with Israel massively escalating violence and using new, more destructive weapons before bringing an end to their campaign. But it does mean that Trump might be able to pressure Bibi to bring things to an end.

There's a good article on this in the BBC. No guarantees Trump will give Netanyahu all he wants. Now, in that piece, Mideast correspondent Lucy Williamson writes, Donald Trump's first term in office was exemplary as far as Israel is concerned, said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. The hope is that he'll revisit that, but we have to be very clear-sighted about who Donald Trump is and what he stands for.

Firstly, he said, the former president doesn't like wars, seeing them as expensive. Trump has urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly. He's also not a big fan of Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank, said Ambassador Oren, and has opposed the wishes of some Israeli leaders to annex parts of it. Both of these policies could put him in conflict with far-right parties in Netanyahu's current governing coalition, who have threatened to bring down the government if the prime minister pursues policies they reject.

Michael Oren believes Netanyahu will need to take a different approach with the incoming president. If Donald Trump comes to office in January and says, okay, you have a week to finish the war, Netanyahu is going to have to respect that. And we'll continue talking about what this means, but first, here's some ants. So,

It is possible that we will see a quick end to the violence in January and perhaps a quicker one than we would have seen under Harris. That's the best case scenario and not necessarily the likeliest one. And I should reemphasize here that best case scenario still means that we will probably see a massive escalation in violence.

as the IDF seeks to force more people out of northern Gaza and end the conflict with a large slice of Gaza permanently wrenched from Palestinian control and handed over to Israeli settlers. There is no version of what comes next that is not a calamity to the Palestinian people.

Now, the signs from within the Israeli government on what a new Trump administration means for them are certainly bullish, you could say. And reading these tea leaves provides very little fuel for optimism. Itmar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, posted yes with several S's and an emoji of a flexed bicep in a post on social media when the first good returns started coming in for Trump.

On the day of the election itself, and a sign of confidence in the coming results, Bibi Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yov Galant, who had been his primary point of contact with the Biden administration. And it's harder to imagine a much more direct sign of what he wants to do than that.

Now, I've struggled to present the sweep of possible results of this, and it bears reiterating that the bulk of predictions from Gazans who are plugged in to the politics of the region are incredibly negative.

Ahmed Fayyad, an independent researcher in Israeli affairs who currently resides in central Gaza, told Al Jazeera that he felt Trump's influence would be entirely negative, adding that Trump was a, quote, more dominating figure than Biden, and his influence would allow Netanyahu to, quote, conquer Gaza. Quote, amidst the weakened Palestinian front and absence of any Arab unity and solidarity, the whole Palestinian cause faces its worst threat yet.

Now, what does bear watching is the degree to which Bibi might face threats from his own right flank. Netanyahu himself is almost certainly on the side of doing what will please his patron Trump all the more, and that would be forcing a quick, violent end to the fighting and taking northern Gaza as the spoils of war. But this might bring him into conflict with radicals on his own side, who can't be placated by anything but what they would see as total victory.

In the event Netanyahu feels pushed, it is not impossible that he will wind up in conflict with Trump. This has happened before, as Beebe's sense of self-preservation led him to take actions that enraged Trump.

The best example of this took place in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, if you want to think back to those happier days. Beebe was again the first world leader to call and offer Biden congratulations on his victory as he was with Trump. This is a habit for the man who, among other things, is an expert at toadying for favor with U.S. leaders.

Trump was livid, and he spoke out about this, telling Israeli journalist Barak Ravid that he believed that he had saved Israel from destruction, and in response, Netanyahu had stabbed him in the back. I'm going to quote now from an article in the BBC. Mr. Trump accused Mr. Netanyahu of congratulating too quickly Mr. Trump's successor, Joe Biden, on winning the 2020 U.S. election. Mr. Trump disputed the election result, though his claims were never upheld.

The first person who congratulated Joe Biden was Bibi, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with. Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake. He was very early, Mr. Trump said, like earlier than most. I haven't spoken to him since. Fuck him. I actually don't know that he said fuck. The actual text of the article says expletive him. But I'm assuming he said fuck him. I think that's probably a fair assumption for me to make.

Now, some evidence does suggest that Trump and Bibi don't personally get along, as that quote I just read implies. Certainly not to the degree that Netanyahu and Biden once did. Once, I should say. This may hinge partly on the fact that Trump really only believes in himself and his own benefit, whereas Joe Biden was a strong and committed believer in Israel and was willing to take actions against his own political self-interest in furtherance of that belief. And we've all seen where those actions got him.

Just last December, Trump attacked Netanyahu at an early campaign rally in New York, saying Bibi had, quote, led us down by pulling Israeli support for the operation that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani at the last minute. He also criticized the Israeli leader for not being prepared for Hamas's October 7th attack.

Now, I want to be clear here that these divisions between both men are blisteringly unlikely to mean anything that approaches relief for the Palestinian people, at least in the near term. The immediate and probably long-term future of Gaza is much bleaker today than it was a few weeks ago.

The Guardian recently published an article interviewing former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta. He predicted Trump would give Bibi a blank check for aggression, which might invite the possibility of open war with Iran. Now, that's the kind of thing that can lead one to panic, especially when you assume a guy like Panetta is privy to a lot of inside information. We may not be, but I'm actually not really sure that he is.

I don't see any evidence from this article that Panetta is speaking from direct personal knowledge about extant plans to carry out an attack. Instead, he quoted Trump's description of the call that Trump had had with Bibi before the election, telling Netanyahu, do whatever you have to do.

So, Leon may just be working from the same information the rest of us have and coming to a somewhat different conclusion. I'm not as sure as he is about an imminent attack on Iran because Trump campaigned heavily on ending wars. And while I don't credit Trump as a particularly honest man, I do think he sees his personal benefit right now.

in being able to portray himself as a peacemaker, in part because he has so much domestically he wants to do and so much else internationally he wants to do, right? Expending a bunch of political capital, dealing with the kinds of protests and unrest and even anger from his base that a war with Iran would mean, especially once it gets bogged down in the kind of violence that would come with that. He may not and likely doesn't see that as being of benefit to him.

Now, that doesn't mean it will never happen. It doesn't mean his calculus won't change. I do foresee some situations in which Trump might decide that his personal benefit is in there being a wider ground conflict with Iran that U.S. forces get drawn into. You know, we'll talk a little bit about some of the possibilities around this. And we're getting outside of the realm of kind of established fact at this point. But I do think it's worth considering some of this. But first,

Consider these ads. So when we talk about the possibility of a ground conflict with Iran, starting between Israel and Iran, but almost inevitably drawing in more U.S. forces, the known unknowns and unknown knowns in this situation are pretty staggering. If I let myself analyze every possibility, my mind can go to some dark places. Trump sees war with Iran as a negative now, I'm quite sure. But how would he feel about it in the wake of, say, a Musk-centered plan to end the

and tank the dollar in the wake of the changes that all of his immigration policies would make on the price of food, the Depression-era levels of inflation and unemployment returning to the United States, and the attendant social unrest that that would cause. If Americans find themselves on the verge of food rights, perhaps Trump would gamble on war being the best distraction he could manage. It's certainly not impossible.

Now, I don't know how useful it is to bury myself in theoreticals and probabilities. The known threats are dire enough and they demand full-time awareness in order to attempt to counter and endure. So instead of spiraling, I'm going to leave you today with the words of another Gazan, Mohamed R. Mauch. He's a journalist who wrote an article for MSNBC right after the election titled, My family and I survived the war in Gaza. We know Trump's America won't save us.

And here's Muhammad.

For us, the election of Donald Trump isn't just a blip on the political radar or a shift in foreign policy. It's a challenge to sustain existence while the world seems intent on erasing us. It's about surviving 77 years under occupation and over a year of ongoing genocide. The very genocide I barely survived last December when my family and I, including my elderly parents and three-year-old son, were buried under the rubble of what was once our home after it was struck by an Israeli-fired U.S. missile.

The date, December 7th, 2023. Our bones were crushed between layers of concrete and twisted metal as we spent hours in the dark, buried together and praying to be pulled out in one piece. The trauma of that night, in both its physical and emotional toll of my son's small, fragile hand clinging to mine, comes back to me now as Trump prepares to take power once more.

I've seen how American political leaders toy with the idea of change, how they dress up their campaigns with grand ideas about peace and justice.

Yet each president brushes off our reality. Barack Obama promised hope and change we could believe in, yet we got more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging unyielding support for Israel, leaving us to live through even more horror. Vice President Kamala Harris's niceties included no concrete promises to protect Palestinians, but she did pledge to continue financial support for Israel.

And Trump's bluntness, as he promises to come back swinging, reminds us not to hold out hope for change. So, you know, not much optimism here, but I do really recommend reading that article that MSNBC published. You know, it's bleak but important, especially given the fact that

We may be soon entering a world where it would be harder for people like Muhammad to express their feelings and their truth to an audience. I don't think it's unlikely that a clampdown is coming on some of these things. It's hard to say how extensive it will be.

But there's a threat that, you know, Israel and their backers see in the way that public sympathy has built so quickly for Gaza in a way that wasn't present with a lot of previous stages of violence between Israel and Gaza, right? Now, this is the result of a lot of videos spreading on social media. It's the result of voices from Gaza getting out and getting to people in a way they really hadn't before, right?

And so one thing that does worry me greatly when I think about what's going to happen in Gaza under President Trump is not just what's going to happen to the people living there right now, but what's going to happen to their ability to tell their story, to get information out to the rest of us. That is very much an open question at this moment, but it's certainly one that should be on your lips. And it's one that we will be investigating here at Cool Zone as long as we're able to continue doing that.

Until next time, I'm Robert Evans. We'll be back tomorrow and every other day reporting on, you know, the world.

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Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I shook up the world. James Brown said, say it loud. And the kid said, I'm black and I'm proud. Black boxing stars and black music royalty together in the heart of Zaire, Africa.

Three days of music and then the boxing event. What was going on in the world at the time made this fight as important that anything else is going on on the planet. My grandfather laid on the ropes and let George Foreman basically just punch himself out. Welcome to Rumble, the story of a world in transformation. The 60s and prior to that, you couldn't call a person black. And how we arrived at this peak moment. Ah!

I don't have to be what you want me to be. We all came from the continent of Africa. Listen to Rumble, Ali, Foreman, and the Soul of 74 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that's about trade policy now. I'm your host, Mia Wong. This is amazingly going to be the fun one of all of these episodes. It's about tariffs, so it's going to be a long week. Yeah. Yeah, that was the voice of the singular Garrison Davis, the one, the only. Yes. Hello. I'm excited to hear about tariffs. It's tariff talk here on It Could Happen Here, one of my favorite topics.

Favorite topics I guess now. All right, guys. We're putting you on the spot. What is a tariff? It's basically Google No A tariff is when Trump says China's bad so he makes China pay extra money to sell their goods to Americans and luckily China pays for all of it and the American consumer gets off with a Boosting economy. That's at least what I've heard. I

Yeah. So unfortunately for everyone, I don't know. I mean, I guess I guess there's some accelerationists who are probably really excited about this. Most certainly the way the way this actually works is OK. So the government sets up a tariff. That means if anyone is bringing a good into the US, they have to pay the tariff on it and that money goes to the government.

So, okay, there's been a long history of tariffs in the U.S. This was a huge domestic policy thing, particularly in the 1800s. That's really fucking boring. The incredibly short version of it is that the thing about tariffs is that especially like tariffs on a specific sector is that they're good for you manufacturing that thing kind of mostly and they're bad for anyone trying to buy that good because it's now more expensive.

So Trump's plan, and we're going to get into a bit more detail about this because there's parts of Trump's tariff plan that everyone seems to have forgotten about for some reason that I don't know why they've forgotten about.

But the basic plan is to impose something like a 10 to 20 percent tariff on all goods that enter the U.S. from anywhere. There's specifically one from Mexico, but the numbers on what the Mexico tariff is changes every time he opens his mouth. Sometimes it's like 25 percent. There's one where it's like 250 percent.

Of course, two interchangeable percentages. Yeah. And then for China, it's supposed to be a tariff of somewhere between 60. 60% is the most commonly cited number, but he's also said 100% tariff. Once again, basically the same thing. Yeah. And so, you know, part of what we, unfortunately, the rest of us who live in the normal world have to do is figure out what is actually going to happen if we get, for example, 20% tariffs on all goods entering the U.S. and a 60% tariff on...

Goods from China. So the first thing you need to understand, I think most people kind of get this now. But the thing about a tariff is that you pay for it. So the way that it works in general is that this is just an additional cost for the company that's doing that. That's doing that, like moving the good around. Right.

And so they are almost always going to just pass that cost directly on to you. Obviously, sometimes we've talked about pricing the way the pricing works a lot on this show. Companies tend not to want to raise prices largely because of their effects on consumer happiness and brand loyalty and stuff like that. So sometimes people will just eat shit on it. But if you're talking about a 60% tariff, like you, the 60% tariff is going to be paid for by you.

So that means that any time we buy something that's either from Mexico or China or any of the other countries that this will be applied to, the easiest way for these companies to get around the tariff is just to pass off the cost to the consumer. Yeah, and it's actually worse than that because, and this is something I don't think people really understand, when you think about global trade, right, people tend to think about trade as something that happens between countries.

And this is something that was an old dream, like the anti-globalization movement. People sort of understood this and kind of don't now. Trade doesn't actually really happen between countries. Most trade is one company, an international company, moving a resource from one country to another. Right. So like trade is fucking Amazon moving something from a warehouse in one country to a warehouse in a second country. Right.

Now, I've seen a lot of people, and this ranges from very, very serious news sources and economists trying to just directly model what the price increases are going to be. I've seen people be like, oh, your shirts are going to cost 60% more, or physical video games will stop existing because they're too expensive. And

Who gives a shit? Why are we even trying to do sectoral modeling of the impacts of this? If you try to impose a 60 to 100% tariff on goods from China and a 20% tariff on all goes into the country, the economy will collapse. I don't know why everyone is pretending that this won't fucking happen. We're going to get into it in a second. I guess the reason why people are pretending this is happening because the way they're doing the modeling kind of assumes that it won't, which is baffling, incomprehensible nonsense.

Well, and that's especially amusing because the seemingly biggest issue this year around politics has been inflation, which has impacted every country around the globe. The U.S. has actually weathered it decently well, although there's been a

catastrophic failure in communicating that and listening to the actual complaints from people on how they're still struggling with rising inflation. But still, a big reason why Trump was elected is because he simply is not Joe Biden, and he's not from the Biden-Harris administration, and there's this perception that he will be able to fix the economy. He will be able to get around inflation, lower prices, when seemingly his main economic proposal will lead to

what's probably going to be an economic collapse if it happens in the totality of which he proposes. Yeah, and there's another element of this, right? When I say that the likely result of Trump actually trying to implement his tariff policy is a global economic collapse, there's another part of this that everyone seems to have forgotten.

And I don't know why they've forgotten this. I guess it's because nobody actually reads any of the things that Trump puts out on his website. Which is true. No one actually reads that stuff. It's nuts. Especially his own supporters. Yeah. A majority of his own supporters do not pay attention to like daily news. Yes. And now I remember this because I did an episode about these tariffs like six months ago. And one of the things about this, he has a thing called Agenda 47, right? Which was his agenda for what he's going to do when he takes power.

Which no one has cared about, and now everyone is going through and posting policy proposals from like fucking two years ago with the headline, Breaking News! Trump Announces New Plan. And we're like, no he hasn't. Yeah, these are old plans. This stuff is like two years old. He's been openly talking about all this. Yeah, for ages. And one of the important parts of this, I'm just going to read this quote because it is a part of this that has been ignored by every single fucking analysis I've seen from like fucking the Center for American Progress, who obviously were going to screw this up, to like

Stanford's labs, like everyone who's been writing about this has just ignored this part, which is quote, as one of his top economic priorities, president Trump will stop the flow of American jobs overseas by passing the Trump reciprocal trade act.

Under the landmark legislation, if any foreign country imposes a tariff on American-made goods that is higher than the tariff imposed by the U.S., President Trump will have the authority to impose a reciprocal tariff on that country's goods. Okay, so what this would do, again, is that any country that has a tariff already or imposes a tariff, and this is important if we get into a trade war where countries start imposing tariffs on each other in retaliation for their other tariffs, which is what happened when he did this trade war with China in 2018-2019,

That means that we're also going to impose a tariff, which means that the tariff rates don't stay at 10 to 20 percent. They cyclically spiral upwards. That's just like an escalating series of tariffs. Yeah. And the thing is, right, the policy proposals that they have on his page are like, well, OK, we're going to do this through like a presidential act. Right. But the thing is, the president actually has really, really under under a number of different acts, has extremely wide discretionary authority to set tariffs as long as he can basically sort of like impose.

cobble together some kind of bullshit excuse for it and at that point you're relying on the supreme court to stop literally anything that trump does like they don't give a shit well i mean i don't know maybe maybe someone will like go up to like in clarence thomas and go like hey if we do this like importing new like windshield wipers for your rv is going to cost 10 million dollars more or whatever but like there's there's no shot of this stuff getting stopped and the thing is right

The reciprocal tariff stuff? He could just do this through his existing tariff authority. He doesn't actually even need to pass something through Congress, which would actually be, I think, tricky for him, but he doesn't need to. Do you know what we need to do right now, though, Mia? Just badly, badly. Cut to a bunch of companies that are going to be absolutely fucking eviscerated if this goes through. That's right. Donald Trump stands for anti-capitalist action. He's going to destroy free trade. So enjoy these ads when you still can.

Okay, we are back. Mia, let's hear how Trump is going to perfect the capitalist economic system by a series of escalating tariffs that will destroy the economy, and in doing so, providing the opportunity for Marxists to seize power and change the world economic system. Yeah, so I'm going to read another quote from that same Agenda 47 thing. Quote,

For example, food items like cereals or other preparatory goods are tariffed at 32.9% by India, 19.5% by China, and only 3.1% by the U.S. India applies a tariff of 25.3% on transportation equipment, while the U.S. only tariffs those goods at 2.9%. Now, those exact numbers are debatable, but it doesn't matter because these are going to be vibes-based. One's based on how pissed off Trump is at a country.

Yeah, Trump is usually a vibes-based guy, especially when it comes to the economy, especially when it comes to these numbers he's pulling out, like between 60% to 100%. He doesn't know what any of those numbers mean. He's just thinking of a number and saying it out loud. And the thing about all of these things, right, even just the base 20%, or let's go to the lowest numbers he's talked about, which is a 10% tariff on all goods and a 60% tariff on Chinese goods, right?

That in and of itself blows a smoking crater in the world economy. And none of the assessments that you will read are talking about this. One of the things that they will mention that is true, but they're not getting to the importance of is that this affects stuff that's made in the U.S.,

Because the thing about things that are made in the U.S. is that they're made from components that are from elsewhere because that's how international supply chains work? Oh, wait. Even though we have, through tariffs, moved all manufacturing of Toyota into the United States, you're saying that still some of the materials are not all solely...

made and produced within the country and it actually requires on foreign trade. Yeah. And part of the problem, I think, of like, okay, so if you logically think out the conclusions of what that means, right? Okay, first mistake, Amiya, that you're trying to solve this problem through logic. You won't, but here's the thing, right? I'll

Obviously, Trump is not going to think through this. Right. But I kind of expect people who are like writing about this for a living to do mildly better than this. And possibly some of the people that he like hires onto his cabinet and team, maybe. But we'll see. I'm talking about like his critics. Oh, sure. Sure. One of the numbers you'll see all the time, the Center for American Progress has this line about how the terrorists will function as attacks that cost the American consumer like seventeen hundred dollars a year.

Right. Which was the line that Kamala used pretty often. Yeah. Framing his tariffs as like a sales tax.

This is fucking horseshit. The only way you can think that the net effect of this would just be a $1,700 tax is if you don't understand how the economy works at all, right? So I went through and read this, and the way that they model it is just by, like, they find the, like, net dollar value of imported goods and then apply a tax to it and then try to figure out, like, how much of those goods that the average person would buy in a year and then increase the price. But

And this is something that's very important. At the end of the analysis, right at the very end, there's a little section where they say that they assume this would have no other effects on the economy. This is unbelievably fucking stupid. I cannot emphasize enough. Can you explain why that doesn't make any sense? Okay, so here's the thing, right? Prices go up. Now people can buy less things. What does that do to the economy? Well, it slows its growth rate, right? Companies start to go out of business. And we're going to get into more of the ways that this plays out in a second, right?

But a bunch of a bunch of people in a bunch of places fucking lose their jobs because suddenly the reduction in consumer demand means that there's a there's a fucking reduction in necessary production. And this has cyclical effects throughout the entire economy as more and more people fucking lose their jobs. And also, you know, the thing the thing about those people who lose their jobs is that that also fucking reduces demand because those people are now even like less able to afford the stuff that's been increased by inflation prices. And this this spirals through the entire world economy.

In order to understand what exactly this is going to do, I think we need to understand why, you know, because like if Kamala Harris, I don't know if it makes any difference in the election, but Kamala Harris walks on the stage and says this is going to cost you $1,700. She does not walk on the stage and say this is going to cause an economic collapse. Right. And I think I think the reason that happened is because we've gotten into this place where nobody fucking understands how the economy works at all in a way that's even worse than it was even in like the 2010s.

In the 2010s, I think people sort of had a vague understanding that the thing that was happening to the economy was uberization, whatever you call it, was the expansion of gig work, right? There was sort of an understanding and a focus on the very sort of low-level parts of the economy. Like, what are you, a poor person, doing for your job, right? How does your income work? And not purely on these sort of, like, high finance or in the case of what's been happening here, everyone has been unbelievably completely focused on, like,

the CHIPS Act and like state-led industrialization and all that stuff is fucking bullshit. It basically hasn't done anything yet. It's not going to do anything for like a decade and it's not mostly what's going on in the economy.

I've been holding my tongue on this for years, but the people who have been writing about the economy don't understand how the fuck it works because they've been completely myopically obsessed with the idea that we're in this new era of state capitalism. And no, like the actual thing that's been happening in the economy. And I think if you are like a person who buys stuff, you probably understand this. But for some reason, this has never made it to like economists or like people who fucking write about the economy for a living.

is consumer to manufacturer sales. So this is stuff like Temu. This is stuff like Shien, who, and Shien, I mean, invented, it's a strong word, but they're one of the first people who sort of popularized this model, right? And this is a thing where you have a platform that lets people like nominally buy directly from the factories or from, you know, the people who are producing fruit, right?

And these factories aren't producing goods until basically either people order the goods or like analytics tells them to order it. So they don't have a lot of the problems that other kind of like distribution bottles have. You have a bunch of goods sitting in a warehouse. You just don't have that because you don't start production until your sort of orders come in, your analytics come in. And the theory here is you can reduce costs by eliminating the middleman. But of course, a new kind of middleman emerged, and that is the drop shipper.

Oh, God. So the drop shipper is just someone using the consumer to manufacturer pipeline, right? The platforms that are supposed to let you, the consumer, sort of just like buy directly from the thing and cut out middlemen. It's just someone doing that, but then turning around and selling you the result. And this has become just utterly fucking ubiquitous in the American economy. It's sort of like an integral part of the American scam economy now, too.

As the American economy has been increasingly sort of riddled and consumed by scams and riddled and consumed by sort of like people trying to capitalize on like some fucking meme or some political thing. You know, you have all these people doing like drop ship T-shirts, right? But they can immediately come in and sell all of this stuff. These like short lived like trend meme based either like fashion or even like goods. You know, we can talk about like.

the amount of like content creator merch that is all funneled through these like drop shipping companies yeah and it's also what's been it's it's the thing that's enabled like fast fashion to function in the way that it is right now right absolutely and this this has become what consumption is in large swaths of the world is is from this sort of like direct-to-consumer drop shipping shit right yeah now the thing about about these drop shipping things is that their profit margins are really really low they don't make that

that much money and in fact a lot of these things like hemorrhage money until they've basically you know they do the thing that amazon did right where like you lose money for a million years but then eventually you have enough market share that you start making money again yeah because you make it so all your competitors basically can't function because you have prices that are so low and then when you're the only one in the game with a sizable power influence you can raise prices and then you make tons of money also the uber model although uber still isn't profitable

Yeah. Well, so, yeah, Uber will never make any money. Right. But the other thing here that's important is that, you know, so the margins of a company like Temu, right, which is probably the biggest of these sort of companies now are low. But Temu technically has tech money like they have money to back them up. Right. You know who doesn't have an unbelievable amount of just like capital sitting around? They could just instantly pull from if suddenly there is, I don't know, a 60 percent fucking price shock.

Oh, wait, it's all of the fucking manufacturing, you know, tiny manufacturing firms that these dropshipping things use to produce all their stuff. Right.

Right. That infrastructure is very fragile. Its margins are very bad. And, oh, guess what happens to that shit if you impose 60 percent tariffs on it? Right. It just shuts down because that's the easiest option. Right. Yeah. And, you know, and presumably I think one of the other parts of this would be part of part of the reason this has been happening is that all of this stuff isn't being imported like under tariff loopholes. But like that loophole is not hard to close. Right. What tariff loopholes are you referring to?

Oh, yeah. So I talked about this the Temu episode. There's loopholes on American tariffs where like if you're if you're bringing stuff into the country, it's below a certain value.

It has to be above $600 or something to trigger a threshold to activate the tariff supply into it so people just ship a bunch of 1 billion boxes individually that are like $599 to go under the thing. So you're saying I can still maybe buy my new Sonic the Hedgehog PS5 game though. That should be fine. I'll be totally good. Oh god. Okay, so the other part of this that's important, right? So this is the kind of

I don't know if new is the right word, but this is the kind of recent part of the economy that's incredibly dependent on Chinese supply chains, right? That gets just liquefied if these tariffs go through. These are enormous companies that, you know, are going to just eat shit. And those companies eating shit have these sort of effects we talked about earlier, right? Which is it causes people to get fired. It causes growth collapses. It causes cyclical decreases in people's ability to buy things. And then also like demand decreases because people can't buy things.

But this is like the new school supply chain stuff, right? Temu is a product of really the last six or seven years, and it really only functions the way it does now and lasts about four. But the previous two eras of supply chain logistics, right, which is sort of Walmart and Amazon, are both also almost completely dependent on Chinese supply chains, right? Yeah. There's a good JD Super article, which is they're like a business intelligence company.

website right you know it talks about how walmart imports 70 of all of its goods from china yeah that tracks 70 70 right and and the reason that it works like this is because walmart's entire business model all of their supply chains all of their logistics everything that they do right was was designed basically hand in hand to be integrated into chinese economic production

And you can't just move that shit instantly, right? And this is also true of something like Amazon, right? Where Amazon, like 63% of independent sellers on Amazon, this is from the same source, are Chinese, right? So what you're dealing with is vast parts of the American economy, right? The parts of the American economy that you interface to buy things are based on goods that are suddenly going to have like 60 to 100% tariffs stapled onto them.

Now, the thing that people have been talking about as the like, oh, well, here's the thing that will happen instead, instead of like instead of the thing that's pretty obviously going to happen if this happens, which is just the decal bubble we're in pops and everything starts to go to shit. People have been like, oh, well, this will just accelerate the shift of production of goods out from China and like.

I've been talking about this for like a fucking decade, right? Like the journal Chuang, which is something that I talk about a lot that I recommend people read, has been talking about this for literally ages and ages and ages. So people have been trying to move production out of China for ages. I

I mean, like one of the first big attempts to do this was in 2011 when there is there's a series of riots in China and people tried to move production of goods out of China and they couldn't do it. And the reason that they couldn't do it was because you have to find a country that has both the relatively skilled and educated labor force and also has the infrastructure to be able to like match Chinese production. And so we're talking about things like they have to have like a functioning electrical grid.

that is stable enough for production to function. And this rules out an enormous number of countries. And it's just really, really hard. And yeah, like capital has, Chinese capital has been moving away from its sort of old centers in the program of Delta to China.

places like Vietnam, right? But, and this is the fucking big one, right? A lot of what's been happening for, people have been talking about this thing called quote-unquote decoupling, which is the separation of the US and Chinese economy so that they're not intertwined with each other. People think this is good for ideological reasons or they think it's just something that's happening and it's not, it's not happening.

You know what else isn't happening? It's us not plugging these products and services. I think we do legally have to plug them. So here they are. Here's the plugs for the products and services. All right. Now that you've decoupled yourself from your money to buy these products and services, let's talk a bit more about why decoupling is fucking bullshit. One, and this is something I've been saying on the show for years,

Like people have this sort of fantasy that what's happening is that, okay, instead of making your thing in China, you make your thing somewhere else. And this means that American companies no longer have the supply chains running through China.

That's not what's happening at all. On the financial front, what you have is actually increasing integration as China attempts to sort of like, you know, has been lifting restrictions on the ownership of different types of corporations to make it easier for foreign owners to actually come in and invest and put capital in China. Right. The second thing that's happening is a lot of these supposedly like we're cutting China out of the supply chain. Things have been a bunch of Chinese companies start starting to set up production in Mexico. Right.

Now, the thing about that, right, if Mexico was supposed to be the fucking panacea for getting us out of these tariffs, remember that Trump was talking about 200% tariffs on Mexico. And that's the country that's supposed to, like, fucking get us out of this mess by like, oh, it'll be fine because like.

production will just shift away from China to like to where like a lot of the assumptions I was reading was like people were talking about oh the production will like 25% of production will shift to Canada it's like no it won't Canada doesn't have the fucking production facilities to do this like what are you talking about like Canada doesn't have the population to do that no it doesn't and this is the sort of problem right

You know, on the one hand, you know, China has been deindustrializing for like a decade and a half now. Right. And kind of slowly. But the percentage of the population that's working in manufacturing has been steadily decreasing for years and years and years and years.

But the problem is that when you move production out of a place, you actually have to have a second place to produce it. And there just haven't been right. Like you, it's pretty easy to move low end manufacturing. This is what's been happening, right? Like really cheap garment stuff, for example, has been, has been moving to places like Bangladesh and Vietnam for a while. But once you start getting into the stuff that China produces, like the most of, right, which is things like fucking cell phones, sort of mid tier commodity production, that gets way, way, way, way, way harder. No,

No, but the Chips Act will save us, Mia. I heard it from everyone on the television. I just, God. This is the sort of thing about this, right? If you read the analyses that people are doing of this, they just sort of assume that you can just like

Oh, well, like naturally a bunch of the consumption that Americans are doing will stay the same because they'll go buy goods that aren't produced in China. It's like, okay, like where are you finding these goods from? Like what production facilities are you just like suddenly that have just been like sitting there fallow or just suddenly going to like appear out of nowhere? And the answer is like that's not going to happen. And it's not going to happen partially because they don't exist and partially because they

Again, the immediate consequence of this is a massive economic collapse. China's economy has already been slowing for the like basically I mean, it's been slowing since like 2008. Really? Well, I see as an 11 kind of, but it's especially been slowing in the past two or three years because of sort of COVID restrictions stuff.

And also just a kind of lackluster rate of returns on their own. Like they had their own version of the 2008 housing bubble. And that's annihilated an unbelievable amount of money because it turns out investing in real estate doesn't work as is basis for economy. But like, that's the thing, right? If the Chinese economy fucking goes down, right? That's like, that's 17% of the world's GDP. 17. Yeah. Of the total GDP. Right. And it's like the economy isn't stable.

national in a way where you can have an economic collapse in another country and just a country that's that large and ignore it. And the thing I want to close on, and the reason we know that this is true, is that it is actually possible, kind of, to restart American domestic manufacturing, right? Reagan was able to do it in the 80s, and Reagan did it through this thing called the Plaza Accords, where he basically, he didn't literally put the prime ministers of Japan and West Germany at gunpoint, but he basically put them at gunpoint

and force them to increase the value of their currencies so that the U.S. currency would devalue, which makes it like a more competitive export economy. And this actually brought back American manufacturing for a while until it had to all be reversed under the Clinton administration in the reverse Plaza Accords because the problem was when you sort of nuked the zero-sum manufacturing of a country like Japan, their fucking economy didn't work anymore.

And in order to sort of bail out the Japanese economy and stop just a sort of world-running economic collapse that would have just, like, tore the absolute shit out of the economy, the U.S. had to fucking re-increase the value of its currency and lose its whole domestic production base, right? You can't actually increase a production base in the world right now without decreasing it somewhere else. And that has sort of staggering ripple economic effects for the entire global economy...

Which is why, even if Trump's plan worked somehow and didn't immediately cause an economic collapse by the direct effect on American consumers, it would cause another economic collapse by the effect on fucking people in China. So... Well, Mia, I think you might be overreacting here a little bit because...

At least food will be available. Obviously, I learned this on X, my main source for news, is that agriculture is almost all done in the States. So we should be fine. Like, we'll still be able to eat food, right? I say, staring into the void. No, you can't. Because unfortunately, the thing about American agriculture is it's all fucking mechanized agriculture. The thing about mechanized agriculture is that you need the mechanized part, and that's all fucking produced mechanized.

either in other countries or the John Deere fucking like tractor factories in the US are all unbelievably reliant on a bunch of parts that are made overseas. So also we do import a great deal of food. Oh, we do. Yeah. Even just talking about the food that we produce here. Right. Like that's also going to be fun. I wonder, I wonder where your strawberries in November are coming from. Oh,

I think the other thing to keep in mind here is that this is only one aspect of how Trump will impact the economy. Obviously, his immigration policies could serve a similarly large financial problem if a whole bunch of agricultural jobs suddenly kind of vanish.

and farms and other processing plants just go out of business due to a lack in workers. And even some people on Trump's team have started to acknowledge this, mostly Elon Musk, who has openly said that Trump's term will involve some, quote, temporary hardship.

So between tariffs and mass deportations, like even people on his team know that this is going to damage the economy, especially in the short term, if not the like forever term. Yeah. And yet he was still elected as the economically viable candidate. Yeah. And I think the last part we should say in this is it's not that you can't.

like fucking obliterate a giant portion of the american economy and still come out extremely popular because you've crushed the american working class like that that's what reagan did right like reagan and the volker shocks did this enormous i mean just put a crater in the american economy in the in reagan's first term like they're skyrocketing unemployment just like real real sort of economic devastation but the thing about the volker shock is

was that the way he blew up the economy was really, really good for people who like fucking owned assets, like people who like owned bonds, like people who held other people's debt. It was great for those people. And like the burgeoning investment economy, which now kind of dominates our entire economic system. Yeah, and it was incredible for those people. And so it was fine. But the thing about this economic collapse is that this is also going to just absolutely fuck up the days of a bunch of extremely wealthy,

wealthy and influential capitalists. So including, by the way, Elon Musk, whose Teslas are produced in China, like he has a gigafactory is a gigafactory in Xinjiang. So we'll see if Trump actually is able to implement this stuff. I think he's able to on a policy level. It's just politically. Can he actually do these tariffs?

Yeah, it's unclear. It's also unclear what exact numbers he's going to run with. A 10% tariff will still be bad, but it's nothing compared to 100% tariff. I think Trump, by and large, just says whatever comes into his head without thinking through the actual logistical ends of what he's saying. And I think most Trump supporters do not take him literally as a person. At least they don't take what he says necessarily literally all the time. They take him seriously, but perhaps not literally as a person.

Yeah, so we'll have to see how this actually plays out. If it does play out in the ways that Trump has said that it's going to play out, it is going to just unbelievably tank the economy in ways that absolutely suck. So...

Yeah, that's happening here in the future, maybe. That's the name of the podcast, right? So stock up on your PS5s now before they get harder to buy, and it'll be fine. Yeah, there'll be nothing else bad that happens to the economy, as long as you have your PS5s. Yeah, people always want fucking books at the end of episodes, so I'm just putting books at the end of episodes. This is my plugging Chuang, C-H-U-A-N-G. We'll put it in the description. It's a bunch of stuff about Chinese economics.

mostly it's a sort of economic history of originally the socialist period and then this transition to capitalism but it also has a bunch of very very good stuff on trying to understand the chinese economy and so if you want to be about 10 years ahead of like guys who write for the economists if you read chuang you will end up being like 10 years ahead of those guys so yeah great stuff

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, and what it is today is me, James, and Mia Wong. Hi, Mia. Hello. Hi. What we are here to talk to you about today is something else, which despite my positive tone of voice, is sad and depressing. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a lot of that, and we don't want you to be too sad. It doesn't bear moping around. We've got time to get organized, and that's what we should be doing, and also like

just get out and go outside and see your friends and do things that bring you joy. Like we'll work out how to get through it somehow. You know, like I think it's really easy and I found myself doing this stay at home and be sad, but don't like, I went out with some friends for a hike on Friday. I feel so much better. So I would advise you to do that. Maybe you're listening on your hike. That would be fun. Actually, I think if I was hiking, I would, I would skip this one and listen to the birds and, uh, you know, enjoy the outdoors. Well, I mean, you know, it,

If you want the ideological framing of it, the ideological framing of it is that morale is a terrain of struggle. Yes. And it is very easy to lose if your morale is absolutely terrible. Yeah, we've got four years. We can't be moping around. We will get through it. We will find ways to make it better. And part of the way we do that, yeah, is keeping our morale up and doing things that bring us joy. The thing that brings me joy is talking about Rojava.

The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. And we're going to talk about that today because we're talking about Donald Trump's foreign policy in his second term. So his previous foreign policy was a pretty mixed bag. And he bombed the shit out of the Islamic State, right? Cool. Based. He also bombed the shit out of thousands of Syrian and Iraqi civilians.

Not so cool. Also, we should note, not so different from every other president this century. Bombing civilians has been pretty much the through line of American foreign policy in that part of the world for a very long time. In particular, in the Trump administration, I want to talk about there was a single U.S. strike cell called Talon Anvil. I think they were mainly like CAG guys from what I read. So Delta Force guys, Army Special Forces guys who...

were making these decisions. They hired an office building in Syria and these guys were constantly looking at drone feeds and various other information and then calling in strikes on various targets, right? I'm not sure if they had the CAG guys watching computers. I'm not entirely sure why they didn't have someone else. Who knows? But,

This strike cell dropped more than 120,000 bombs. Jesus Christ. Yeah. The amount of ordnance we dropped on Syria is insane. It's circumvented procedures are in place to prevent civilian deaths in order to do so. They had embedded lawyers who were supposed to approve the strikes, but these lawyers tried to raise the alarm that some of these strikes were reckless. They weren't hitting things that were actual targets. And

They sort of ran into an organizational brick wall. At some point, pilots even refused to engage targets because they didn't think it was... Jesus. Yeah, which is not usual. Yeah, like, that's pretty fucked for a fighter pilot to be like, no? I don't think I've ever heard of that before. No. So I found this out in, I think it was the New York Times. New York Times did a pretty good investigation, which we linked in our sources, about...

And yeah, it's like a throwaway line, but I would love to hear more about that. It could have been a drone pilot too, which is a slightly different gig, I guess. You know, if you're sitting north of Las Vegas, they're flying a drone, kind of a different scene. So in the battle to defeat the Islamic State, thousands of innocent people lost their lives. As we reach the end of that battle, Donald Trump, who was president at the time, personally called Erdogan, who's the president of Turkey at the time, right, in late 2018,

Trump asked Erdogan, if we withdraw our soldiers, can you clean up ISIS? That's a quote. According to an unnamed Turkish official interviewed by Reuters, Erdogan replied that Turkish forces were capable of a mission. Quote, then you do it, Trump told him.

and asked his national security advisor, John Bolton, who was also on the call to, quote, start work for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. What this resulted in was U.S. troops pulling out from some locations in Syria, right? Local people threw tomatoes at them.

Even worse than the tomatoes was the fact that it gave NATO's second largest army, which is Turkey, of course, free reign to attack the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, which it did in 2018 and it did again in 2019. Those two operations that claimed considerable ground in Syria cost countless civilian lives, continued to perpetrate human rights abuses, to rehabilitate people from ISIS and other jihadi groups as Turkish Free Syrian Army and

they killed some people who were people I care about. And I continue to care about the cause of Rojava or Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria very deeply. And it really fucking sucks to think about the potential of the US abandoning those people again, not that Biden has done very much. Now, I think this anecdote, right, of what Trump does with Erdogan tells us a lot about his approach to foreign policy, which is he really sees it as

It's very transactional, which isn't that different from everything else he does, I guess. He's a very transactional person. And he seems really only to be concerned about what he can get out of it. So in this case, I guess he wants to say he brought US troops home from Syria. He's anti-war. This is one of his things he says now, right? But he's prepared to also...

In the case of the bombing, right, he's not so concerned with civilian casualties as long as he can claim that he was the one who defeated ISIS, right? Obama couldn't do it. He did it. He did it on a pile of civilian remains and also using chiefly the Syrian Democratic Forces, right, not U.S. forces. Yeah. There were U.S. forces on the ground. They were engaged in combat, but in minuscule numbers compared to SDF, who lost 15,000 of their children in a battle against ISIS.

And I think Trump would be very willing to admit that he's transactional, right? That's kind of his brand. It's like America first and then fuck everyone else. So I think he'll probably be similar in this term, right? He will act unilaterally. He'll pivot whenever the fuck he feels like it. He will continue with his affection for strongmen and dictators all around the world. But a

A lot of stuff has changed since Trump's first term. I think it's illustrative for us to think about how he will engage with things that have changed. So

What has changed? There's a much larger conflict between Russia and Ukraine now. And that conflict has been seen massive and overt support, both from the USA and from the rest of NATO. There's been a revolution in Myanmar. I suppose he doesn't know that. Yeah, I really doubt. Well, maybe some of the like weird pro-coup memeing from the right got to him. Yeah, perhaps. Or like, I mean, the parallels between the coup in Myanmar and January 6th are...

are pretty obvious. Like if January 6th took the landing, it looked a lot like that, except that it was a military party, not just a political party. The Islamic State doesn't exist as a territorial entity, but it very much does exist as a terrorist group which continues to and has actually increased its activity this month with sleeper cells, continued suicide bombings, continued attacks, and the SDF continue with their anti-ISIS operations. Without US support, those would be harder to

And so we have to ask, I guess, on what Trump's going to do with these things. And I want to look at a few different issues and pick apart what Trump said on his campaign website, pick apart what he said on the campaign trail, and then look at who he's appointed so far. We're recording this on Tuesday the 12th. So if someone gets appointed before you hear this, that's why we've missed them out.

So I guess to start with Trump's foreign policy, we should talk about his number one peer competitor, which is China in his eyes, right? Not a big China appreciator. So I looked at his campaign website for this, which really has some

Just incredible use of capital letters. He just fucking does what he wants. It's wild to see. So, chiefly, one of the things that he's been on about for a while now is tariffs on Chinese-made goods, right? It's his means of foreign policy. Yeah, we just, we talked about this last episode. Yeah. You will have heard about tariffs at this point. So...

As we previously mentioned, right? He's talked about these tariffs. These tariffs would cost a lot of money and they would increase the cost of you going shopping. Yeah. And they would probably destroy vast swaths of the global economy. Yes. Both the Chinese and the American economy. Yes. Just sort of implode.

And then all these countries in Africa and Myanmar, for instance, exports a lot of these rare earth metals to China. And a lot of countries in Africa do too. Aside from the economic sort of aggression, his stance on Taiwan is weird, which is normally where we would expect to see the most physical friction between US and China. Mike Pompeo has pressed for the USA to formally recognize Taiwan before.

which would be a step. You know, there'd be a pretty big swing. Trump, on the other hand, seems to want Taiwan to pay the United States for being its ally right now. Yeah, this is like one of his big sort of foreign policy principles is like try to get people to pay him for stuff because that's sort of the only way his brain works. But I remember he did this with NATO a lot where he's hit this whole line on NATO that like NATO should be like paying us because...

people like you're not spending enough on defense so we're like paying all their defense budgets this is like one of his kind of yeah it's been his like hobby horse yeah like floats around in his brain sort of colliding with its walls yeah an empty space yeah yeah like a ping pong ball ironically like

In the time that Trump's been out of office, Russian aggression has led NATO members to spend more on defense. Yeah. Rather than Donald Trump lambasting them. So one of his big things is that Taiwan should pay the United States. But it would seem very unlikely that he's not going to abandon Taiwan, I think, because it gives him a place to grandstand on China. Yeah. And also, like, you know, I mean, one of the things about Trump is that one of the best ways to sort of influence him is just...

get a world leader in a room with him alone. Yes. But unfortunately, well, fortunately for us, Trump does not speak Chinese and Xi Jinping doesn't seem to like him very much. So yeah, yes, we won't be joining the PRC anytime soon. China, along with Russia, right, the two countries we've spoken about most so far, both make big plays in Africa. Russia has rebranded what was Wagner as the Afrika Korps.

And they're sort of providing support to regimes that lack enough legitimacy to exist otherwise. Yeah. They are like sort of classic mercenary shit. Like, is your state illegitimate? And does it lack the capacity to do the violence it needs to maintain itself? Don't worry. Here are some psychopaths from Russia. Yeah. And there's a lot of people, I think, because like a lot of these sort of governments will kind of like...

do their, like, put a red beret on and start doing their anti-imperialist cosplay, and then you, like, read the, like, the fine print of the contracts they've signed with, like, Africa Corps, a thing that, like, you expect to be spelled, like, Africa and Corps with a K, like, K-O-R-P-S, like...

And it's like, oh, OK, so like they've signed away a bunch of the country's mineral rights and like they've signed away a bunch of these specific mines to these mercenary groups. It's like, oh, OK, so this is like also this is also just imperialism. It's just new management. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's just different imperialism. And then China has big plays in Africa, too. Like I've personally seen a lot of Chinese owned mines in Africa, Chinese roads in Africa. Yeah.

China does also like offer infrastructure. China does a kind of quid pro quo. It doesn't come in like with the violence like Russia does. It comes in with the we'll build you a hospital if we can have all your natural resources. U.S. policy in Africa is pretty much to stop those two countries getting too much influence. The Biden administration is, as many liberals are, there's actually not that much difference between what Biden and Trump will do in Africa. The difference is that Biden is smart enough not to say it.

Trump's ability to do anything useful in Africa is going to be masked by his massive racism. When he says things like shithole countries, it becomes a lot harder for the US to do anything in Africa that isn't tinged by that. It doesn't make that sort of imperialist ambition more obvious. US politicians rarely talk about Africa. They rarely campaign on what they were going to do in Africa and

And so pretty much the only things we're going to hear from Donald Trump about Africa, I would imagine are going to be when he lets his racism out. Yeah. That will have results for like U S credibility. Also, my guess is we see intensifications of sort of U S drone strikes, particularly in the horn. And we see like, like all of the stuff that Biden is doing, but worse and killing even more people somehow. Yeah. I would imagine that we will see these more aggressive drone strikes, especially against like Islamist groups in Africa and,

The US has special forces deployments in a few places in Africa, which it will probably maintain, I would imagine. I don't think those are things that Trump would... He wouldn't see any benefit from stopping them, I guess. And it may not even know about them. So yeah, I think...

We will see little change in Africa, would be my guess. Yeah, mildly worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talking of mildly worse, Mia, the thing that makes these podcasts mildly worse is our obligation to pivot to advertisements, which we must do now. That was a great one. We've been holding out on you for three years to get you the good ad pivots. Yeah. Well, there it is. That's what we've got for you. All right, we're back. So I want to talk about Europe.

As you've heard in the tariffs episode, right, he wants to put tariffs on European goods. The European Union is going to slap tariffs right back on American goods. That doesn't really help anyone. It will make exporting from the USA very, very hard. One thing that the USA might stop exporting is weapons to Ukraine. It's a little unclear. Trump, he called Zelensky the greatest salesman on earth, but has also claimed that he can personally end the war in 24 hours.

I don't think that means he will be deploying himself to the Donbass like a like a like a Gundam. But he claims he can do this with his negotiating skills. This seems unlikely, to put it mildly. I don't think that it would be possible to end this war in 24 hours if both sides declared peace.

Right now, getting communications to their frontline troops would be a challenge in 24 hours in some places. So the way I interpret this, and I may be wrong here, is that he is likely to leverage the support that the United States gives to Ukraine in order to force Zelensky into an unfavorable settlement.

which would achieve his goal of, A, being able to say he stopped giving American money to Ukraine, which has been a big talking point for the... Like every time you start with the Western North Carolina right after the hurricane, all these Republican sort of talking points were like, oh, well, all the money's in Ukraine, so we can't have...

fucking MREs for people in Western North Carolina. Like FEMA has no money because we sent Ukraine some M4s. This is very silly, right? This is not a zero-sum game. It's not really a reasonable critique, but it's one that Trump has kind of managed to stick in the culture wars. His base seems to see the money going to Ukraine as directly coming from things that would otherwise be going to them, which he would benefit from if he could bring this war to a close, right?

JD Vance has mentioned a demilitarized zone in between Russia and Ukraine, which, yeah, who's going to minister to the DMZ? Like, yeah. Do we really want this? Are we going to have troops there like we do in South Korea for, you know,

When was the Korean War? The 1950s, 70 years. I don't think that's really what they want. The thing about DMZs is no one actually likes them. No, they suck. It sucks. Yeah, they're awful. It's just a bit of land that you can yeet weapons over each other. Especially in modern warfare, they're not that effective at stopping two people fighting. But very funny that North Korea will be two for two on DMZs in wars it has been involved with. Yeah.

huge dub for them he essentially seems to be advocating for exactly the peace settlement that putin has proposed and that has been rejected multiple times several sources i've seen suggest that trump has spoken to putin quite a few times since leaving office this his plan for ukraine certainly seems closer to the russian one than the ukrainian one the ukrainian one being

stop invading us and go home. And the Russian one being, well, we'll just keep all the stuff we've taken so far and then add a buffer zone in between. And Ukraine can keep whatever's left of its country, right? What's interesting to me is what other NATO members will do in the event of the US reducing its aid. I would suspect that they will try and step up and meet that gap.

It might also result in... The US puts certain restrictions on its aid, right? How it can be used, where it can be used, crucially, right? They don't like Ukraine using things to attack in Russia proper. They don't mind them using them to attack Russian forces, but not within Russia. I did see a picture yesterday of a...

I think it was three guys from Rogue, I think it's called, which is a unit within the International Legion who had been killed within Russia. And they had a lot of AT4s and things like that, right? Like US anti-tank weapons. But the United States doesn't want Ukraine using the long range artillery and stuff. It's given it to yeet projectiles at Moscow.

I can see a situation where if the US draws down some of its aid, European allies of Ukraine might not place some of those restrictions on their aid. And that could lead to some interesting complications for Russia, right? If Ukraine is more affected, like if they get more aid from Europe and Europe doesn't place restrictions on their aid, they could potentially strike Russia within Russia, which is not going to be good for Putin. It's probably not going to be good for like bringing, I mean, unless they can deal some really crippling blows. It,

might not be good for bringing the war to an end, but maybe it will. Maybe they've done some pretty effective things with not a huge amount so far. I don't know. Maybe they'll get lucky on a strike on the Kremlin or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just the one, like, I mean, yeah, I'm sure that would be their strategy if they didn't have restrictions, would be to just keep pounding places they think Putin might be.

This is the history of Russian warfare. Dumber things than that have happened and have lost Russia wars. Yeah, yeah. A lot dumber than that. So, yeah, I don't think that Ukraine will be screwed if the U.S. pulls out. I do think it will be a lot harder for them. Yeah. And, you know, if that's something... There are a lot of U.S. citizens still fighting in Ukraine. It would be pretty devastating to abandon Ukraine. And I think also just from the sort of stopping Russian aggression aspect,

It's much better to stop it here than somewhere else. But yeah, we will see, I guess. European countries are already ramping up their defense, but right now...

the US is like the heart of the military-industrial complex and Europe really can't keep up with the US production. Of course, the US being the heart of the military-industrial complex does mean that a lot of Trump donors will probably be able to leverage some of their donations to his campaign. And so we might not see as much of a drawdown of aid to Ukraine as we're worrying about here. Mia, talking of launching things from a long distance at a very small target, I would like to launch these advertisements from...

iHeart Media's advertising department directly to your ears. Here you go.

It's all so bad. As we were recording this, it's come out that the new Secretary of Defense is going to be Pete Hegseth, who's like a Fox News guy who doesn't believe germs are real. Yeah, this is a guy who has not washed his hands in 10 years. Great. I mean, at least he might die of COVID. Yeah, I was going to say, he made it. Wow. Sorry, that hair is really something. Oh, that's not good at all. Yeah.

Wait, what? On June 14th, 2015, Hank Seth accidentally hit a West Point driver with an axe while filming a live TV segment in honor of Flag Day. Oh, the Wikipedia is incredible. Let's get that link pulled up. All right, this video is unavailable. All right, no, we're finding this video. Nothing disappears from the internet. All right, here we go.

No! I missed a fucking target attack! My God! This is just clown shit. I need to write, listen, if you were hit in the dick and balls by an axe thrown by future Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, please contact CoolZoneMedia at iHeartMedia.com. Shut up!

I hope the VA is paying for this man's benefits. This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen someone do, like, in the course of reporting for this show. Yeah, it's amazing. Like, very funny. Again, please contact us. I hope you're okay. Service-related injury.

Yeah, so that's Pete Hegseth, right? Future SecDef. Also, former reservist who deployed to Guantanamo, was an infantry platoon leader at Guantanamo. I think he also deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, and previously he'd also deployed to Iraq. He did two voluntary deployments, or he's in two locations in Iraq, at least, so...

He's hit the greatest hits of U.S. foreign policy in the last 20 years, I guess. He's made his career as a Fox News pundit. Yeah, he's just like a right-wing ghoul. Yeah, I mean, in the last Trump administration, when he was punditing, he advised... Trump had been considering pardoning several war criminals and did pardon several war criminals, right? And Hegseth was one of the people who, A, he talked about on Fox News while he was advising Trump to do it, and B, he was advising Trump to do it. Jesus.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. You can read up about the Trump pardons for war criminals. It's bad enough that a guy was getting turned in by his own special forces unit. Like, do you know how bad, how, like, fucking hideous the shit you have to do is for, like, your own guys in a special forces unit to be like, holy shit, we have to stop this guy. Like, it's awful.

Yeah. I mean, you should look up Clint Laurence's stuff as well. Like, L-O-I-N-C-E, if you're interested in this stuff. He was convicted, I think, of two murder counts for ordering his soldiers to fire on unarmed people. And then, yeah, the other one was a Green Beret named Matt Galtian, who was also charged with the murder of someone in Afghanistan. Someone who had been making IEDs. So, like...

I think we can see where this guy is going. We've just found this out as we're recording for context. That's quite troubling. His other two foreign policy appointments that I've seen so far have been less so. Look, I'd say less so. Marco Rubio is a turd, right? I think we all know that I share very little with Marco Rubio. On Turkey and Rojava, he is good. He is not a fan of Erdogan. He's in contact with Gulenists everywhere.

He kind of puts turkey in the bricks box. He's a ghoul.

Yeah, which leads us to the very funny idea of Marco Rubio ordering a drone strike on Eric Adams. I mean, well, here's the thing, though. Gulen's dead now. So there's like a secession crisis of who's going to head up Gulen's network. I'm proposing it's Marco Rubio. The Gulenist anti-pope, Marco Rubio. That could be very good for Rojava at least, right? The big concern among...

those of us who care very deeply about java has been that trump will abandon them as he did in the past right and so i guess we're looking for glimmers of hope and i think rubio

kind of oddly, weirdly was one compared to, I was expecting more of the heck this like Fox news commentator type people in foreign policy positions because Trump fundamentally doesn't care about foreign policy. And like, it's an area where he can kind of give something to those kinds of like insane far right. Yeah. Commentator types. He also did a point, Mark Waltz, I think could be walls. Uh, he's, he's one of the first special for army special forces guys serving Congress, maybe the first, uh,

as a national security advisor, was as a member of the Kurdish caucus in Congress. So again, positive for Rojava. Talking of army special forces, there's one more insane Trump foreign policy proposal that I want to discuss. And that is his desire to use

The United States Army in Mexico. I'm just going to read from his campaign website here. President Trump will take down the drug cartels just as he took down ISIS. He will impose a total naval embargo on cartels, order the Department of Defense to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership and operations, and designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and choke off their access to the global financial system.

President Trump will get the full cooperation of neighboring governments to dismantle the cartels or else expose every bribe and kickback that allows these criminal networks to preserve their brutal reign. He will ask Congress to ensure that drug smugglers and traffickers can receive the death penalty.

There's a lot there. The way that Donald Trump helped defeat ISIS was exclusively by bombing things and with some small contributions from U.S. ground troops. But we don't really have a partner force in Mexico like that. And I think, especially with the new administration in Mexico, and especially with Trump proposing 100% tariffs on Mexican goods, we're unlikely to find one, which leaves the very strange kind of prospect of...

US troops carrying out like unapproved, undeconflicted hits on Mexican nationals in Mexico, which like is an act of war. Yeah. You are invading Mexico is what you're doing. I should point out that Bortak under Biden did shoot one Mexican national this year who was...

He was holding up migrants with a gun. He was rubbing them with a gun. It wasn't... It's a place where I've been dozens of times where they shot him. And there didn't seem to be much fuffle about that. But that is not invading Mexico. Yeah. Like, if they're invading Mexico, like, you know, as close as American-Mexican sort of security cooperation has been and as many people as that's killed from the Mexican side, like, that's... Oh, boy. Yeah. Like, it remains to be seen how much of this actually happens, right? Yeah.

Mexico has a new president. The United States has a new president. They're not exactly politically fellow travelers, I'll say that.

But yeah, I mean, I will say like AMLO and Trump got along like decently well, largely off of AMLO's like anti-immigrant policies. But I don't know if that's going to work with Scheinbaum. And like in the final year of AMLO, like they definitely did a lot to help Biden with effectively enforcing U.S. border policy by deporting people south. People I spoke to in the Darien series have been sent south again this week.

But Biden's had actually some pretty high-profile cartel arrests within Sinaloa cartel. He's destabilized that cartel, but those happen within the U.S. They didn't send teams into Mexico. And the way that the U.S. has traditionally...

hold of cartel leaders before he was sent to be arrested in Mexico in cooperation with Mexican government forces, be they police or military, and then extradited them to the U.S. for trial. That doesn't seem to be what Trump is proposing. But again, like the bombastic rhetoric and the reality are sometimes very different. Yeah, I have some vague memory that he like last time he wanted to like send

send special forces guys to do this and his advisors were like what the fuck are you talking about we can't send people into Mexico yeah look just to be real those organizations have reach inside the United States and that would be an extremely messy situation and like the way this would have to be done right I don't think you can do this with drone strikes you have to do this with boots on the ground and that's going to be contrary to what he's promised to do which is not risk more US soldiers lives

who knows what this will actually look like. Yeah, my guess is he will find a way to get the maximum number of civilians killed. Yes, yeah, yeah. That's probably what would be the result of this. Yeah, exactly. And I think, as you sort of weigh this down, civilian deaths are probably going to increase, right? He's never shown himself to be unduly concerned about those things. He doesn't see that as a problem. The second thing the US will lose is what Joseph Nye called soft power, right? Which

which is like the power to influence people without projecting force, cultural power, cultural capitals, Boudia might've called it, really getting heavy on the university shit at the back half of this episode. The US lost a lot of that in the first Trump term, right? And it will lose more of it in the second Trump term. Some of that,

is you know the u.s maybe shouldn't be influencing and the u.s has had some pretty malign influence around the world yeah you can listen to a song called washington bullets to learn more about it but it will mean that like there will be a space for other bad actors right russia china you know russia has not shown itself to be uh any more concerned with human rights and probably less so than than the united states went in in its uh time in syria

It's been an unmitigated disaster for the Syrian people, the Russian cooperation with the Assad regime. We do not need more of that around the world. The Wagner/Africa Corps deployments in Africa have been horrific in terms of human rights, and this will open more spaces for that. So yeah, I mean, it doesn't look great, this Secretary of Appointment. Maybe we'll learn more about that in the coming days, but that doesn't look great.

There are some bright spots for Ushava, I guess, or some glimmers of hope there, which is a nice thing. Trump's policy on Gaza fits with this general model of like, he wants to end conflicts. And the way he sees of doing that is doing away with any restraint in terms of civilian casualties. And so the way that he went after ISIS was to just say, bomb them all. I can see him doing the same thing in Gaza, right? Just saying like,

He wants to claim that he brought an end to the war and he doesn't care how many bodies he's standing on when he says that. Yeah. Same thing in Lebanon, obviously. So yeah, these are not great things. These are things that we will have to deal with for decades to come, whatever happens. And I guess the way that you can do something here, like my little glimmer of hope, it's like you can reach out to people all around the world and let them know that like, even if America's foreign policy is shit, you're not. I have seen,

sat in Rojava and I have seen them taking the children to the hospitals and I've watched the US soldiers sit in their bases and do nothing. And like, it didn't help really. I wasn't able to do very much, couldn't even give blood, but I was able to be there with them and maybe that meant something. And like, you can do little things to show your solidarity around the world because there won't be much of it coming from the government.

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Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

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Black boxing stars and black music royalty together in the heart of Zaire, Africa.

Three days of music and then the boxing event. What was going on in the world at the time made this fight as important that anything else is going on on the planet. My grandfather laid on the ropes and let George Foreman basically just punch himself out. Welcome to Rumble, the story of a world in transformation. The 60s and prior to that, you couldn't call a person black. And how we arrived at this peak moment. Ah!

I don't have to be what you want me to be. We all came from the continent of Africa. Listen to Rumble, Ali, Foreman, and the Soul of 74 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all? Welcome to It Already Happened Here. Because this was the goal of this show, was to tell you that things was probably going to happen here, and then it did.

I am not one of the normal hosts, as you can tell. I am your friendly cousin that shows up every once in a while during the holidays. If your cousins are anything like my cousins, which means we're immediately going to get in trouble because parents are going to blame you since I'm the cousin because it's not my fault because I'm the guest. Anyway, we want to talk about some stuff that, like, in some senses is a bit absurd to talk about because, like,

The American understanding of pan-ethnic terms and demographics are just absurd. It just don't make sense. Nobody in the group identifies as what the group is called, but that's still the group, right? I recommend a book called Why Fish Don't Exist. It's a great book. I am here with the brilliant, brilliant...

Mia Wong, what's up Mia? It's all happening, it's all happening here and it sucks, but at least I'm getting great intros, this is the best one I've ever gotten. Best intro, that's what I come for, you know what I'm saying, I come for us to be able to have pancakes for breakfast, you know, because your cousin's here, you know what I'm saying, so you get to have pancakes for breakfast and stay in your pajamas longer, it's great when your cousins are here.

Yeah. Anyway, so let's do this. We want to talk about. Well, the thing is, like, I don't know if y'all have admitted. I admitted this on our show that like we kind of had to have all hands on deck discussion here as to like, OK, let's get organized. Like, let's figure out what we're going to say as a network. And.

kind of brainstorm things to talk about because I'm pretty sure like a lot of us are still like wait what the fuck I'm sorry what like you know yeah and us holding down the DEI section

Of Koolzo. We are the diversity, equity and inclusion over here. Figured, you know, there were some things that were super shocking around some of the data that was that was coming back from the exit polls as we thought about like, OK, so who actually is.

voted for who and how much. And so we kind of wanted to talk about the Asian vote, right? Yep. Which is again, from the intro, it's an absurd category to say that. We're going to get into that because, oh boy. Yeah, totally.

Yeah, the Latino vote, which is also equally as absurd as a category. And yeah, just where some of the sort of marginalized groups, like some of the numbers that were in some ways shocking. I will say, as far as holding down the black man section, I am very proud of us for

eventually coming back home, right? And voting in the upper 80% for the black woman, you know, which was encouraging. Now, granted our number of how many of us voted shrank, but,

immensely, you know, but either way, we just wanted to talk about those things. And I think one caveat for me, I would say, and then I'll turn it over. I think Mia, like, you know, you can take it on from there is I am in fact a black man. So I think I can speak from a certain level of experience, obviously not the experience of every human, right. But I can speak from a certain level of experience. Now, as we talk about the Latino vote,

I am in fact newsflash not Latino. You know what I'm saying? My wife is from East LA, but obviously proximity is not the same as being a member of. So keep that in mind as we discuss these things. So let me turn it over to Mia. Yeah, and you know, this is one of these, you're talking a bit about the sort of category and coherence here, right? And like one of the things about

The way this is aggregated is that so Asian Americans as a whole went about 5% to the right in this election, but that doesn't capture what was going on because every part of the demographics were just sort of flying in every direction. Yeah. And unfortunately, most of the actual right wing poll was very specifically from my people, which is to say Chinese Americans who went right in staggering numbers, uh,

I don't know. I'm not really surprised by it because this has just been the way that sort of specifically Chinese American communities have been shifting for the past, I mean, really like eight, ten years, but particularly intensifying since 2020. And so if you look at sort of where these things happened, the biggest ones were New York and L.A. and places like Seattle had some.

But I think New York in particular, New York and L.A. in particular are important for this because a huge part of the reason that this happened was the sort of crime panic stuff. Yeah. And the crime panic didn't 100 percent start with Chinese Americans, but it's one of the earliest sort of incubators of this entire thing. So the sort of trajectory of this is that in 2020, you have.

this sort of like whole stop Asian hate campaign, right? And, you know, you have all this race, like sort of like racist, like incitement of violence. Yeah. And you get sort of two responses to it, right? There's the kind of like liberal ish response, which is stop Asian hate, but it's kind of vacuous. It doesn't,

Doesn't really have any political content at all. It's kind of vaguely anti-Trump, but there's not much there. And then there's the right-wing response, and the right-wing response is just, okay, we're just going to blame black people for this. Yeah. And that's fucking horseshit. It's like, no, it was almost everyone which is getting killed by white people because that's... Almost all of them, yeah. The way racial violence works in this country, right? Yeah. But unfortunately...

This was an area where the left kind of just did nothing. And if you look at the left response, there's some people who did stuff, right? There is some sex worker orgs like Red Canary Song did some great work. But most of the rest of the American left saw this and was like, okay, the thing that matters here and the actual problem with anti-Asian violence is that people are criticizing the Chinese government too much.

And that's what's causing this. And so we need to defend the CCP. And this is just politically, this is fucking radioactive to like 80, 90% of like fucking Asian Americans. Because like, there's a sort of combinations of factors, right? You have on the one hand, you have sort of immigrant communities where most of this shit doesn't work because you're dealing with people who were like, I don't know, we're fucking sterilized by the government because the CCP decided to like,

do Malthusian fucking population control. Have no love for the CCP. None whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah, right. And this is too reductive even with Cubans, but it's like, this isn't something where you can just sort of brush this away with like, oh, all of these people were like reactionaries from Taiwan or something like that. It's like, no, like a lot of these people came here very recently and...

And there are, you know, there are sort of Tibetan communities. There's people from Xinjiang here. Yeah. And all of those people, like all of the sort of pro CCP shit is radioactive. And that's what was coming out of the American left. The same thing with like sort of with the Hong Kong movement, right? Where there was like, you know, there was this really broad consensus among sort of Americanists.

American social democracy, you know, you're sort of like people who were like marginally left of Bernie, right? That that stuff was all CIA stuff and it was bad and that you should support the CCP. You know, I mean, there are some tenant organizers who do good work. We've had on the show, right? Like there are people trying to organize communities, but like the mainstream left was just like, fuck it. We don't care. We don't give a shit about you. Like the important thing about you being killed is that we can defend this fucking state that we like. Yeah.

And so what happened to the stop Asian hate thing is that it got folded into the crime panic because the product of this was both the sort of right wing. We're going to give you anti-black racism as you're like, this is this is going to be your solution, quote unquote, to this. Yeah. And the sort of stop Asian hate, like mainstream sort of liberal thing, both just fed directly into carceralism. Yeah. And, you know, so you started like it turned into this rallying cry for like hate crime bills and then like increasing police presences.

And, you know, like the fucking cops were like all over the place where this shit was happening and, you know, didn't do anything because they're cops. Right. Like facts. All of this fed into it went sort of seamlessly into the crime panic where you could just feed all of these people the sort of the sort of memory of the fear or the anger over like Asian people getting killed. And you could just lump that in with crime. And then these communities also. And when I say these communities, it's kind of important.

here to do like class breakdowns here too because a big part of what's happening here is an alignment that I think like if the Republicans could be like 15% less racist or figure out how to channel the racism against one target at a time a lot of these people would have fucking fled right in the first place because yes that's what I was going to say yeah it's like rich people professionals and like small business owners it's like well yeah of course those people are like unbelievably sort of turntables

turbo hardline reactionaries. It's like, yeah, those are the guys who are, like, shooting at people from the rooftops in fucking LA in 92. Like, these same people in China, like, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, like, these are people that if you were on the left, you would just be fighting every day. But, you know, they kind of have been lumped into the Democratic Party because of the just unbelievable racism from the Republicans. And now...

the sort of crime panic stuff has finally given them this thing where the Republican deal is basically like, okay, if you're okay with sort of being anti-black with us, if you're okay with massive expansions of police presence, you're okay with us running on that, right? And also on anti-homeless politics, that's been a huge, extremely effective thing, particularly among business owners. I remember, God, I think I've told this story on air, but back

Back when I was in Chicago, there was this library in Chinatown that I used to like. It was next to a bunch of shops, so you could get bakery food and you could go sit at these benches. And I came back to them in 2020, and the benches literally had a thing drilled into the table threatening to arrest you if you sat at them for too long. Oh, gosh. Right? And this was like 2020, 2021. Yeah. So, you know, the sort of anti-homelessness stuff had...

started really, really early there and it's just hideous. And, you know, these places have swung to the right, they're electing Republicans and they're doing it because this kind of like Asian American petite bourgeois, like small business class and some of the sort of richer tech people, et cetera, et cetera, are swinging really, really hard to the right. Yeah, man, that actually connected so many dots for me. Like, first of all, like even to like the anti-homeless thing, like, you know, you start seeing that weird,

middle of the bench arm rail. Yep, yep, yep. You know, like, well, it's like, that's so you won't lay on it. You know, that's why you did this. But like, I hope what I'm about to say is not a trope. You know what I'm saying? It's just, it's because of like the proximity that I've had with the Asian community in the sense that my stepmom's Filipino, you know, all the DJs I've all worked with, all these just hip hop at some point in the 90s.

the Filipinos took over. You know what I'm saying? So like, that's been a lot of ways our community, but I found that, you know, the like proper Asian in the jungle Asian thing where it's like,

depending on your relationship with the United States is almost even if you identify as Asian, because you sit down 10 Filipinos, like half of them going to say they Pacific Islander, you know, the other half going to say to Asian, the other half going to say they Asian Pacific Islander. And then, and then my Lord Cambodia right next to them who are all in long beach and their crips, you know what I'm saying? So like that sort of world, like they were with us, you know, as far as like, they were just a part of our community. Whereas the,

the sort of Northern kind of proper Asian world, like it's cities is like Alhambra, Monterey park. This is very California stuff, but they stuck to themselves, you know? And they, they saw a lot of the American thing is like, this is pragmatic. Like we're here to win. Like, you know, like, so when you started having the Asian hate thing, like it, it's almost like

Now that you say it, it's like we just tied that community up into a bow and then handed them to the right. Yeah. Because this all happened at the same time as like the the anti affirmative action. Yep. You know, I do. I do want to say in the anti affirmative action stuff, because I think people mischaracterize what's going on with that. Asian-Americans as a whole and as subgroups support affirmative action. Yes. Very consistently. Every time they're polls, there's like 60 percent support for it. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

But there's like 40% of these fucking dipshits who are like, I don't know. My sort of like classic Asian response to this is like, I fucking did it. I was a terrible student. I got into the University of Chicago. Like you dipshits need to fucking study harder. Like you're not, the reason you're not getting into these universities isn't because like black people are being allowed in. It's because you suck. Like fucking skill issue. What the fuck?

is wrong with you people. But like, there was this like class, you know, this sort of class. That's what I was going to get to is this class distinction in the sense that from a black perspective, it was like, yo, we rallied for y'all.

Over the like stop Asian hate thing. You know what I mean? And then to come back around and see this again from a class perspective, because kind of the same thing happened in a lot of ways in the black community, because the reasoning, as you say that, that's what I think it all makes sense. The reasoning is the same. Like,

The system is not for me. So I'm just going to get mine. Damn the community. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm just going to go get mine, you know? And so in the, again, in the black community, for those that swung, right. It was just like, like in some senses, they're like, well,

Well, I know y'all are fucking racist. Like, you know what I'm saying? So I'd like, as far as like the rights, like, I know you are with the left. It was more like, you're just gaslighting me. Yeah. So, well, if you're just going to gaslight me and I already know that you hate me, well, fuck it. I'm just going to get mine, you know? And that becomes the thing. But as a community, like you said,

you know, in the same way as far as like the beef between like the, you know, the historical LA riots, like Chinese and Korean communities, while their parents were on this, on the roofs of their, of their shop shooting at us, they kids was breaking into the city. They was with us, like breaking into the same store.

We'll break it into, you know, so that that class distinction was something that made us kind of be like, bro, like, don't you understand? You'll never be one of them. They'll never really love you, you know? And I feel like even that sort of like appeal would lurch this group even further.

To be like, don't tell me who you are. Don't tell me what they're, they're giving me what I need. You know? So yeah, like I never thought about tying all that together and being that it being like a specific, a Chinese lurching. Wow. I never thought of that. Yeah. And okay. You know, you know what else sells products that are from China? It's these products and services. It's worth the podcast. We sell products from China. And we're back.

So I think that there's one more thing I want to make sure I get to about the Chinese American stuff before we move on. And that's one of the things you kind of brought up earlier was the insularity. Because part of what's going on here, too, is that there's a lot of Chinese immigrants and people who, you know, you get communities that are speaking like they're used to being like Cantonese or Mandarin. And in a lot of cases, it's like you get these very, very small, tight knit communities with people who are speaking like Mandarin.

provincial dialect that's like yeah semi incomprehensible to other people right because it's like it's like effectively its own language and one of the problems here and this is one of the places with the left shit the bed like wasn't doing a good organizing right and the consequence of this is that in these a lot of the things that we're getting put out in these spaces the media is all unbelievably right wing yeah right there's miles who whenever god like who

12 years from now when I finish the lab leak episode, which is going to be, he's going to be a big part of this, was he was this Chinese billionaire who defected to the US and came here and ran 1 trillion scams and is currently going to prison for like, I'm pretty sure he was the guy whose boat Steve Bannon was on when Steve Bannon got arrested by the post office cops. Let's go. So like,

So just varsity level bad guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was issuing passports from like a fake government in exile that he set up. He's running every scam in the entire world. But he's also, you know, he's also one of the people who started the whole lab leak thing. And he was flooding the like all sort of Chinese language media with information.

this hardline right-wing sort of pro-Republican hardline anti-China stuff. And then you have a very similar thing coming from the Falun Gong who are everywhere in any, every Chinatown. There's Falun Gong guys everywhere. They're posters. They, the people, so they're a cult. They run Shen Yu. They run a newspaper called the Epoch times, which is just a pure fascist propaganda outlet.

And those things kind of just like devoured the entire Chinese language media ecosystem. And it wasn't good before because like there were also a bunch of other weird right-wing groups. Like part of the problem here too is it

It's possible for in sort of Asian American community for you to have two people who in a by American standards have identical politics, right? They're, they're identically right wing on things like racial politics on their like anti-crime stuff, you know, who are incredibly sexist and like homophobic, but they absolutely fucking hate each other because one of them is a pro CCP Chinese nationalist and one of them is an anti CCP Chinese nationalist. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But this, this kind of like,

you know, what, what's been able to kind of weld that shit together is, is this sort of like Republican anti-black Puff on crime campaign combined with all of this sort of media sphere stuff. Wow. Yeah. You know, it's Shays rebellion all over again. Like just the, at least you're not them, you know? And, and yeah, like the simplicity of that right wing message of just like,

Here's all your problems. All your problems are those fools. And I'll just get rid of them. Yeah. And we can solve this with more cops and Donald Trump. We just solve it with more. Yeah. Yeah, man. So for my end, I looked at,

the black and Latino vote. I can run through the black one pretty quick because it wasn't as interesting of a story. And also because, you know, we did an episode with Garrison Hayes from Mother Jones on like black conservatives and Trump voters. And I think ultimately it comes down to the fact of like the,

the Franz Ferdinand thought of like, okay, what is, what is liberation? Like what is freedom? And is it, you know, my ability to flourish without any hindrances or is it a collective ending of suffering? You know what I'm saying? So like, in other words, it's like this, this plantation would be better if I ran the big house rather than being like burners.

burn the fucking big house down because there shouldn't be slavery. You know what I'm saying? So like that sort of approach to, again, the reality of,

Why know the system's not for me? In a lot of ways, that's what's interesting about the understanding of it. So when you would look at somebody like a black person, like, why would you vote for this racist man? And it's like, well, the same reason I would vote for every other racist man. You know what I'm saying? Like, which find me one that ain't, you know, so like that attitude is already there. So, you know, obviously all of us would push back and say that, like, well, you choosing yourself.

is also a vote against yourself and is destroying your community. Clearly it's never worked at some point, you know, which I'm sure y'all, y'all can relate to. It's like, I feel two ways when I see like black people, specifically black men sit at this table, because I'm like, I can imagine the, the first joke that you kind of let slide. That was like, I was kind of weird, but I don't know. It's not, it's no big deal. I'll get over it. Maybe, maybe they didn't mean it. You,

You know, and then that joke gets more and more intense. And then all of a sudden you sitting in a room and they cracking jokes about Haitians eating pets. Yeah. And that Puerto Rico's a trap. You know what I'm saying? It's like it didn't start there. It started with you accepting and just being like all lighten up. And at some point somebody said something to you and you made a face and they went, oh,

dude, just, it's a joke, man. It's a joke. Come on, bro. You know me, you know me, right? You've had that, you know what I'm saying? And I know that happened a year ago and now look at you, you know? So like eventually the point I'm making is like, at some point you are going to have to lay down all of your identifying factors to be able to stand at, stay at this table. And, and I hope that, I hope that 30 year fixed mortgage was worth it. You know? So the black story is that, is like,

What is going to get us the financial or get me specifically minds, the financial freedom that, that the Democrats kept promising, but never gave to us. But that's, like I said, that's a much less interesting story in my, in my opinion, then, then the Latino vote, which we could talk about after this break. All right. So we're back now, 64%, right. Of, of,

Air quotes, Latinos voted right wing this year. Now, I feel like this. Well, I don't feel like I know this needs a lot of unpacking because, first of all, what the hell is a Latino? Yeah. Right. Is the first question that you have to ask. And essentially, I think I think I've come to the fact that what America means by that is you were colonized by Spain.

So in some way you kind of speak somewhat Spanish, unless it's Brazil. Yeah. In which case you were colonized by the Portuguese. Right. So it's like, you don't even know what you mean. Like y'all don't even know what you mean. It's sort of, it's staggering that like one of our primary demographic categories was invented by a coalition of like,

Maoists and like Vietnamese Marxist-Leninist that fell apart immediately with the moment that China invaded Vietnam and that's only our second most incoherent democratic Category, like it's completely incoherent, right? So you have exactly you have my wife my life partner who is born in LA and

But she is a first gen. She grew up in southern Mexico. She is first gen Mexican. But she's like, I identify as indigenous. And it's and it's true. She is like, even when we did the DNA test, if you believe in that stuff, she's like, but you can just look at her. And I'm like, you're Incan. Like, you know, just I just you're looking at her and she's like, yeah, you're right. Like we are.

overwhelmingly vast majority of her DNA is indigenous. So for her, if you check a demographic box, it's like, are you, are you Hispanic? She's like, why would I identify with the colonizer? So no, I'm not Hispanic. Like they're the colonizer. Yeah. Right. Whereas you ask a Puerto Rican or a Cuban or Dominican, they say Hispanic, but they just mean it differently. One, because

The island was called Hispaniola. You know what I'm saying? So like, they just mean something totally different. And Dominicans is black as hell. You know what I'm saying? And then what about a Cuban? The way that they relate to America is also incredibly different, especially because of like, you know, I'm pretty sure y'all room knows is if you could touch dry ground. Right. Yeah. And that really just had to do with the fact that we just ain't fuck with Castro. So,

the way that they relate to even immigration is completely different because if you could make it to the soy, if you could make it to Florida, you a citizen. So they just didn't go through the same things that people from Central and South America went through to be able to become a citizen. And on top of all that, California, Arizona, and Texas is Mexico. So like, so some of them ain't immigrants. They was here. Like the border move. We didn't cross the border. The border crossed us. So,

You put all that together, mixed with a group of people who might be ninth generation Mexican, that people that don't speak Spanish, the no sabos, as you call it, like won't even speak Spanish. You know what I'm saying? That like, you love all these people who speak so many different languages and have so many different understandings of who they are, and you just call them Latino, and then you get this number. But if you're willing to accept the absurdity of it,

then we could talk about the actual, like what actually happened here. And what you find are two things that are, seem so reductive. But as you look at the exit polls and even like interviews that I personally conducted, if you set aside the person that has been just cooked by just the right wing information, like set that person aside, that is just, your brain's been cooked. Like you set that aside,

And you look at this, there are two very reductive things that just continue to just be true. One is Latin America is very religious. It's still Catholic. And machismo is a big part of their culture. And it just, it seems so reductive, but it's what happened. You know, this is still a very patriarchal culture.

And, you know, as anecdotal and as running joke as it is that like if you have a Latina daughter and she's bringing because, again, they're very traditional. That's why I'm saying I'm using cisgender things. It's like you bring a boy over.

Your grandma, all your tias are watching you make him a plate. You have to go over there and make him a plate and sit it in front of him or you going to be judged. This is just the culture, you know. So it's no surprise that that is not going to play into how you vote. Right. And then secondly, the religious thing in the sense that like this actually like really blew my mind.

And a couple interviews I had, I wanted to talk to specifically Latina women because I was like, it just seemed as though there was just a triple layer of of shit you'd have to swallow to be able to go this route. Right. And my main question was like, what was the non-negotiable? And was there a line that Trump and by extension Trump?

the republican party could cross like where's the where's the line what is the too far line right and they landed on a few things it was it was crazy like after talking to three different women they all kind of landed on the same things it was abortion yeah right they were like at the end of the day this is untenable and to which i pushed back where i was like well trump's not anti-abortion

And what they all said was like, we could deal with the 16 week. Like I could deal with the 16 week thing, obviously, because again, they are women and they're not completely peeled. They're like, we understand that there are situations that happen, right. That just are untenable. And then the next thing that they said was like, which was the part that like really just kept putting my brain in a pretzel was

We are really big on anti-sex trafficking. And...

The the idea for us on this, knowing that like, OK, so the right wing stole that like they don't believe it. They stole that concept and they wrapped everything around it. Right. But one of them mentioned how she couldn't vote for Hillary because she heard rumors about child stuff. And she's I mean, she's referring to Pizzagate, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Just huge shit of which I was able to push back to be like, well, that was, you know, is debunked like.

And she was like, I just don't want to, I just don't like, I just don't like how they move. I don't trust Bill and how he behaved in the Oval Office. And it's like, you're looking around like, are you, wait, what? I thought Epstein's played. Like, what? I'm like, she even said, she was like, but the Epstein thing. And I'm like, well, they're all, I don't, I don't understand. Wait.

I don't understand how you don't see this connection. Right. And to which they both said, oh, no, we see it. You're again. Find me someone that's not nasty is their answer. Find me someone that's not corrupt. Find me someone that's not nasty. At least he's going to save the babies was the thing. And then the next question I had about them was the anti-immigration thing, the borders. Right. And we're talking to people who are.

one and two, some of them three generations removed. And one of them gave me an example of a family member's in-law who got deported, 50 years old, got deported from something they did when they were 19. He's like, it's tough. Like this was a hardworking man who's done his best, who has done everything they could. And it's got to, so I asked her like, yo, do you think that, so do you think that that's unfair?

She said, no. She was like, our family waited in line. Our family did everything they needed to do. We fought. We came to this. I can't same thing. We came to this country because we believed in the dream and we fought for it, you know, and we and we did it right. You know, obviously, like with the Mexican, like sort of like work ethic of like,

no excuses, just work. We don't, we can't stand for no cheaters. We don't believe in stuff like that. You have to work for yours. Right. And we come here, there's no cuts in front of the lines. There's no shortcuts. You do the work. Right. And if you cheat, you go to the back of the line. That's just what it is. So she's like, he's talking about criminals. I'm not a criminal. He's talking about criminals. Yeah. You know, that's not me. I'm,

I'm a hardworking citizen, you know? So that sort of mindset. And then she said, at the end of the day, we came for the dream. I'm here to work, you know? And if I put in the work, if my family puts in the work, we succeed. That's what this country's for. You're fucking it up for all of us. You cheating the system is fucking it up for all of us. And so that sort of like, I can swallow everything

The racist shit because I don't give a fuck about you anyway because I already know you don't give a fuck about me. I'm just here to get mine. So for them, at least according to the way they're explaining it is like the prejudice line is not a line they worried about. That's something I've already accepted.

But what is a line is, oddly enough, treatment of women and the treatment of children and the ability to flourish. And then lastly, for the men, it's what we know. The manosphere has cooked our kids. It just cooked them. And it dovetailed so well into the Latino machismo. And even on the black shit, I knew we were in trouble when...

the hood niggas was talking was running around here saying they was going to vote for trump because it's because they understand it it's like you either get on or get out like i'm here i'm gonna get with my you either for me or against me we this is what we doing you know i'm saying right i'm gonna let you be you know as as derogatory as this is like i'm gonna let you be a man you go fight what you're gonna fight and the democrats are gonna turn your sons into daughters

I don't, like, that's the thought. You know what I'm saying? It's like, okay, well, fuck it. Let's just get ours. You know what I'm saying? That simplicity of a message, it just resonated. While you have

which didn't bother me, but you have somebody like Obama coming in there like somebody's uncle, basically like you young niggas need to turn, pull up your pants, stop acting like thugs and get in line. You know what I'm saying? It's like, all right, okay. You know, to me, I don't bother me because I'm like, well, yeah, you're somebody's uncle. Like you are that. Oh, of course, that's how you talk, you know, but the street dudes is like, look, man, I don't need this. Like, I don't need this Harvard grad, like pretty ass, like rich nigga to tell me what it's like. You was never out. You weren't out here. You wasn't in the trenches.

You know what I'm saying? Like you're a millionaire. I don't like you. You barely want to. Oh, because you can hoop. Oh, so you like basketball. You one of us. You know what I'm saying? So I just think that that like you've already got yours. So let me get mine.

is like at the end of the day was so appealing to this particular demographic and it just made sense. So that's why they voted that way. Yeah, and I think there's just sort of like angles of this too that connect with what was going on with Asian Americans. So partially also the religion angle is a thing that isn't talked about enough and also isn't talked about enough with Asian Americans, like particularly Chinese Americans. There's a whole bunch of... How do I explain this in a way that...

You know, the sort of like zeal of a convert shit where like the first generation converts are the most nuts. Yeah. Yeah. So that's like a huge portion of like Chinese Christians are these like first generation evangelical converts. And so you get these just like really terrifying, like ferociously right wing. Yeah. Stuff that there's just kind of like.

just kind of eats everything around it and i think the second part is i think there's an interesting distinction here too because i think there's like a kind of differing parts of the story ness of the kind of like we came here to work thing because that was the asian american thing from maybe 20 years ago and the last 10 years and especially post 2020 has been people realizing that

it's not real. Yeah. And that, you know, you work, you work, you work, you work. And this is actually also funny enough, exact same thing happening in China with sort of different political results because it's less, it's, you know, we're not dealing with like the same kind of sort of immigrant culture stuff. But the Chinese American version of this was like, okay, we need to figure out

Yeah. Yeah.

And that was a really sort of appealing message to people. And it's the same kind of thing with the people who went for the affirmative action stuff, where it was like the people who, you know, are like in all seriousness, like we're running into kind of like, oh no, there actually is a sort of wall that you hit where it doesn't matter how hard you work. Like there's only so many spots at university. There's only so many, you know, there's only so much, so far you can go. And hitting that wall drove a bunch of people right.

You make a good point, you know, and and I imagine the same sort of reaction to that within the Chinese community is going to be the same with ours, where it's like, OK, you go learn that you are not welcome to that table.

You know, they will always choose themselves. And, you know, you could dress yourself up, you know, and just to the degree for which you can alter all identifying factors for us. It's like to the degree for which you can remove your blackness is to the degree for which you're welcomed in this table. But at some point you can't take it off. Yeah, it all rub off.

You know, dress your kids up. You know, that was like for us with respectability politics, like teach your kids to speak proper English and dress them up and don't let them wear hoodies. OK, good luck. You know, like Jay-Z's seminal work. Look, O.J. said, I'm not black. I'm O.J. OK.

Like, you know, it's just, they will never accept you. The world you're trying to get into will never accept you. And this step towards trying to be accepted by this world is working against you and everyone else behind you, you know? But this is America. You can vote however you want to vote. Well, and I think 2020, like for us, was that moment, right? Where like, you know, everyone kind of got knocked out of the...

you know, whichever way you sort of fragmented politically, it's like, that's when you got knocked out of the sort of Obama multiracial dream. Yeah. Was when you realized that like all of this fucking progress you've made isn't going to stop people from killing you in the street. Yes. And the reaction to that was like, and I saw this on the left where like a bunch of people basically splintered off and became like hardline Chinese nationalists because they were afraid and they were like, okay, well,

you know, here's this thing that we have this like strong state that will protect us. And we just have to fight for it here. It's like, well, that didn't work. Right. You know, and then you have a lot of other people who started to recognize that this wasn't going to happen. Right. Like the, the thing that they had bought into was a lie, but the part of it that they believed was,

They were just like, well, okay, if we can just like fucking get the black people out of here and like we can get the cops in, you know, we can go back to living in our fucking fantasy world. Yeah. And that's been just the sort of dominant response to it. And I don't know, it's bleak, but it's not something that can't be overcome, but it's going to require like it's going to require organizing and it's going to require the left to not be about.

Fucking making white people feel more anti-imperialist, which has been what fucking politics for Asian Americans has been. And until that shit gets jettisoned, like you're going to keep seeing this shit.

accelerate yeah man has there been any um i don't know if the right term is like vision casting among this community because like i say that to say albeit a very small very small fraction of voices but among some of the black thinkers is like a serious consideration of pursuing like creating a third party of just like like but let's like take it serious this time like for real for real

Yeah. You know, like there's you know, it's like I said, it's very small and like obviously like my grandchildren will probably be the ones to see any sort of beginnings of that actually taking root. But it's still like, you know, if you were to this, some of the things that are being talked about right now, like we should like really, like really consider it.

Is there anything like that going on? No. And this is also part of the problem is that the Asian American intellectual class is one of the most bankrupt classes in the entire country. There's nothing. It's a wasteland out there. It's... Oh my God. It's so bad. It's like all of the art and the media, the culture, and the sort of analysis is all...

I've talked about on this show a decent amount, but it's all wrapped up in this sort of like, oh, you two can like integrate and become a small business owner. And those people, you know, the people who believe that and people who did that don't actually have any interesting ideas. They have, they have the incredibly narrow ideas of their class and the incredible narrow idea, incredibly narrow ideas of their class are completely useless to,

for the sort of task we have ahead of us. And it's kind of working for them. Yeah, I mean, it's working for them. It's just, it isn't working for anyone else. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and like, I'm a god, like, I don't know, like the people who are supposed to be, like Wesley Yang, who was supposed to be like the great sort of like new Asian intellectual is now this just completely cooked right winger. Like, some of the people have been like turntables

turning on like some of the big podcasters have been like turning on trans people and I'm just like well fuck all you guys like eat shit basically yeah so yeah it's it's a the situation's bad it's also the fragmentation mm-hmm

is so powerful because you're dealing with so many kinds of like linguistic lions and lions, which in people who've been here for 10 generations and people who just like walk off the boat yesterday, there's a, you know, and so the fragmentation I think helps prevent a more coherent sphere, but like it's, it's bleak out there. Yeah. Yeah. You know, obviously like the black queer community is obviously incredibly vibrant and, and,

strong and organized and

you know, at least from the part of the intersection that I'm a part of, you know, the voice coming out of that, that space of like a lot of times of like very much prophetic and like, you know, very much like truth telling that you hear from again, like, you know, black queer community is like, from our perspective, they continue to be like five steps ahead of us, you know, of like where we need to go as, as a, as a people. Yeah. This was like the sex worker orgs for us, but then because, um,

This is another thing with left just kind of shit the bed, right? Like this is a thing with Bernie where Bernie voted for Sesta Fosta, right? And there's never been a reckoning about that at all. Yeah. And so, you know, like the stuff that could have come out of that just kind of never did. And we never got the kind of integration, the kind of politics that we could have had if people had been like...

5%. Well, not 5%. It would require them to move their positions a bit. But if people had actually cared about sex workers, we wouldn't be here right now. Totally different story. Yeah. Well, that was informative. This has been...

I don't know. How do we describe what this has been, Mia? You know, I think I close with this, right? This situation isn't hopeless. Yeah. Right? There's been a lot of good tenant organizing going on. There's a lot of kinds of stuff that can and do work. It's nose to the grindstone time, right? It's time to lock in. It's time to organize. And these communities can be organized. Yeah. We just haven't yet. And...

Yeah, to your point, for me, all information is helpful. If somebody's lying to you, it's good information to know that this person thinks that that's something worth lying about. You just told me something about yourself, the fact that you think that that's worth lying about. So I say all that to say...

This understanding, a better understanding of like, it's hard to reason with somebody when they hungry, you know, so just a better understanding of what are these communities actually prioritize? What do they actually value? And.

like, you know, the Dems and unfortunately even the left was just like, just swinging a miss guys. Like this type of thing, like you said, it's not hopeless. It's like now there's an understanding of like, okay, so you

You value the hustle. All right. Well, let me tell you in the ways for which the choice you just made is working against your hustle, you know, like, or now, now here, here are ways for which you can, like you said, nose to the grind and accomplish these goals in a way that's not so detrimental to the people around you. Yeah. You know, I'm with it. Like I'm not hopeless either. I think that we just need to think about the word, our word choice and what hills we willing to die on and be like, this is what we meant when we said this. Yeah. Yeah.

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