Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 126
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season is here to bring you know this is a compilation episode.
Every episode of the week that just happened
is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package
for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gonna be nothing new here for you,
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here,
the show about how a small group of people
are trying to keep making bad things happen.
We're going to tell you what they are.
I'm Garrison Davis and joined with me is Dr. James Stout.
Hello, doctor.
Hi, Garrison. Thank you for having me. Put some respect on my name. Appreciate it.
So today we're going to be talking about something called Agenda 47.
And actually, we're going to be talking about this this whole week.
We've gotten a lot of requests to talk about the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which
is a kind of a roadmap for how a Republican president could change the country if they
get elected next year. And although this proposal is scary and quite big, it's a massive, massive
book. Yeah. Trump certainly listens to these types of guys,
but he doesn't always like really like them. He does what the fuck he wants. And again,
no one controlling Trump. He kind of does whatever he wants. Right. And I mean, there certainly are
other people like in Congress, including the speaker who are definitely pushing this project
2025. And I think we'll probably talk about this on the show at some other point.
But Trump actually has his own plans for if he's going to be elected president again.
And we're going to be talking about that.
And that is called Agenda 47, which I believe is a subtle reference
to the 47th president, which will be the him if he gets elected.
Yeah. Also, the 45th president.
Yeah.
So sell more merch that way.
So the next few episodes we're going to be diving into Trump's plans for if he becomes
the 47th president of the United States called Agenda 47.
He has all of these listed on his website.
And one of my favorite parts is that.
To accompany each one of these policy proposals,
he has a video of him like reading out something on a teleprompter,
and he very often will go off script just completely and just start talking,
which which they include the entire transcript for underneath each video, which is just fascinating to read, totally divorced of like how he talks. It's just amazing. Also, all of the videos are embedded on his website
via rumble, which is just amazing, amazing stuff happening. It's perfect. So that's that's
that's kind of the the overview of what we're gonna be doing this next week and why. And
the reason why I have James here, James, you work in education, right?
I do.
I do some educating.
Yeah.
So you have opinions on education, I would assume.
Yeah.
Strong ones.
As a doctor.
Yeah.
A doctor of modern European history, just to be clear before anyone says pictures of
their illnesses.
Please don't.
So I'm going to be talking about Trump's plan for education. And by the end, we can see
if it gets the James Stout approval as someone who works in education.
Yeah, yeah. I'm, you know, I'm open minded. Let's see what he's got.
So Trump now, the problem with us doing these episodes is that all of these are like videos,
right, for his policy proposals. And I don't want to subject you, the listener, to just
videos of Trump talking. I don't, you don't need to hear that. But there's a part of me
just deep down, a shameful part of me, that when I'm reading these quotes, I really want
to like slip in to like a, to like a bad transgender Trump impression, which I've tried to suppress.
I've tried to suppress this urge, but every once in a while it just, it just sneaks out.
So as I'm going through these quotes, I cannot promise that certain things might start happening.
And it's just, it's just a part of the deal.
You've been possessed by the spirit of Donald Trump.
Oh God. So on this note, Trump opens his education proposal with this line, quote,
our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs, which really sets
the tone for the rest of what we're going to be talking about today.
I do want to highlight that I've been trying for more than a decade, but obviously some
other people have been more successful than me in that regard.
So over these next like 25 minutes, I'm going to try to explain what he calls his quote plan to save American education and give power back to American parents.
And the American parents land is going to be a reoccurring trend here.
to be a reoccurring trend here. So in kind of a broad overview, Trump believes that regular public schools as well as colleges and universities are just so far gone to not only require like
massive massive regressive changes, but also frankly, whole new alternatives are needed,
which leads us to our first policy proposal.
So Trump says that Americans are horrified that, quote, once respected universities express support for the savages and jihadists
who attacked Israel, unquote.
So that's obviously not great.
There it is.
Savage is very, very quick. Just immediate immediately getting
this sort of stuff.
Despite spending more money on higher
education than any other country,
schools are, quote, turning our
students into communists and
terrorists and sympathizers
of many, many different dimensions.
Unquote.
What does that even mean?
What does it?
They're sympathizing with the alternate
dimensions, you know, the...
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
The near-universe version.
They're needing too much sympathy.
Yeah.
As well as turning into communists and terrorists.
To be fair, he is right that, like, one of the areas where you will find, like, the few
whole...
No, actually, Twitter is the other area.
Unreconstructed Marxist-Leninists is in the academy.
It's there and on X.com, formerly known as Twitter.
So to combat this communist and savage and jihadist incursion into universities, Trump
is proposing something quote unquote dramatically different.
His plan is to seize quote, billions and billions unquote of dollars through taxes, fines and
lawsuits against quote, excessively large private university endowments unquote, and
use that money to quote, endow a new institution called the American Academy unquote.
That's already a thing.
The American Academy is already, but is he spelling it with an E or it's Y like?
No, it's with a Y.
Okay, so it's a place, not like the institution.
So, the American Academy will seek to, quote,
make a truly world-class education available to every American,
free of charge, without adding a single dime to the federal debt.
And then to do this, quote,
the institution will gather an entire universe of the highest
quality educational content, unquote.
And I love the phrase educational content.
Yeah, yeah, this is the, this sounds a lot like the, the short PragerU videos.
Yeah, wait, what are you, like, you're starting to, you're starting to suspect certain things,
right?
Like, what do you think the American Academy is going to be here based on the limited
information you have?
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a credible university, does it?
It seems a lot like if if you're a world class education, maybe it's what
Barry Weiss is doing in Texas.
You know, maybe she's going to be helming the American Academy.
It sounds like Jordan Peterson's Griffift university is what it sounds like.
It's a world-class education after you gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content.
So this content, Trump claims, will, quote,
cover the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills
and make that material available to every American citizen online for free."
Unquote.
That's a library.
What he's describing is a library.
We already have those.
Not quite.
The content pod.
Not quite.
It's not just a library because, quote, the Academy will utilize the latest breakthrough
in computing, unquote. computing," as well as study groups, mentors, and industry partners to provide a truly quote
top-tier education option for the people.
For this next part, I have to do it in the Trump voice because otherwise the grammar
won't make any sense.
Whether you want lectures or an ancient history or an introduction to financial accounting or a trade to get a skilled trade.
The goal need to deliver it and get it done properly.
I love the phrase whether you want lectures or an ancient history.
Yeah, yeah, like you could give yourself a history.
You could go back to Sumeria and insert yourself.
Whether you want lectures or an ancient history or an introduction to financial
accounting or training in a skilled trade.
So you will be able to learn all of this online for free, getting a truly top
tier education, which sounds like, oh, OK.
But Trump specified that your American Academy education will be, quote unquote,
strictly non-political
unquote. I'm really excited to learn an ancient history from a strictly
non-political standpoint. That's great. We can't discuss the formation of
the state because there will be a political stance. Furthermore, Donald Trump promised
that at American Academy quote there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed.
None of that's going to be allowed.
How will I teach without jihadism?
My personal jihad is to educate the youth of America, but now I can't partake in it.
Sorry, not allowed. Not allowed, according to Trump.
Very sad.
Very sad.
So this plan also seeks to help the 40 million Americans
who have some college education, but no complete degree
by granting credit for past coursework
at quote unquote legacy institutions
and giving Americans quote,
the chance to complete your education
at the American Academy for free
and much more quickly than is now possible or available." Unquote. So now if there weren't
red flags going off already there certainly should be now with that last
line, more quickly than is now possible or available, which is a classic
tell of an online university scam. Now the exact details of how the American
Academy is supposed to work are kind of unclear,
probably because it hasn't been figured out yet.
Holy shit, Garrison!
And quite possibly never will get figured out.
Yeah, many such cases in Agenda 47 as it turns out.
But Trump University founder Donald Trump did say that his American Academy proposal
does plan to, quote, compete directly with existing and very costly four year university systems
by granting students degree credentials
that the US government and all federal contractors will henceforth recognize.
Yeah, they'll recognize them as fucking useless.
Not degrees, degree credentials. Degree credentials.
Gotta put my degree credential up on my wall. This is just another Trump University, an
uncredited scam that Trump is hoping to prop up with the federal government this time instead
of his business empire. It's not- That's his entire thing, isn't it? Like, that is the whole thing with Donald Trump.
It's not real. It's not real.
He's he's framing this plan as a quote unquote revolution in higher education
that will provide a life changing opportunities by awarding American citizens
with, quote, the full and complete equivalent of a bachelor's degree.
I love it when he just fucking sends it on. There's gonna be one in my episode which will be here later this week when he just cannot
say the word film.
And I love that he doesn't fucking try.
He just owns it.
The full and complete equivalent.
That's neither full nor complete if it's an equivalent.
Anyway, Trump ends this video with an eloquent, quote, enjoy it, learn from it, and thank
you.
Which is just...
I'm going to finish all my lectures that way.
And then I'll do like a smoke puff and just disappear.
So yeah, this is the first plan to save American education.
That sounds great.
I cannot wait to get a full and complete equivalent of a bachelor's degree credential.
Very, very cool.
Yeah, wonderful stuff.
But do you know what isn't a scam, James?
Can we say that?
Like we might be able to hot water for sure.
I trust my life on every single product and or service that follows this musical sting. We are back. Do not, I repeat, do not send me any of the advertisers that just aired.
I don't care what they are. My life is indebted. I don't care. I don't care.
You can send them to you can send them to Sophie. Her Twitter is at I write. OK, I write.
OK, send it to Sophie. All right.
So while this Trump University too will remain uncredited,
Donald Trump, creator of the Donald Trump board game that did not sell very well in 1980.
What?
Yeah, didn't you? Yeah, creator of the Donald Trump board game.
No, no.
Wow. OK.
Is it like Monopoly, but you just like lie and generate?
I didn't I didn't look too far into it for the bit. I'm gonna be honest here.
This is disappointing. I was ready to go in deep dive.
But Donald Trump also plans to attack the current accreditation system
for being run by a communist scourge, which leads us to our second
Agenda 47 topic titled, quote, protecting students from the radical left and Marxist maniacs infecting educational institutions.
I believe he's talking about you, James.
Yeah, which is ironic, because I'm an anarchist and I'm not a Marxist.
You're not a Marxist maniac.
No, no, sadly not many such cases, but I do make them read the the Communist Manifesto in in my one on one class.
It's OK. It's OK.
You got to read it.
You got to. It's something you should emerge for history education having read.
So Trump starts for talking about how, quote unquote, academics are, quote,
obsessed with indoctrinating America's youth at colleges and universities
while charging a ballooning tuition fee.
Trump claims to have a quote unquote secret weapon that he will use to quote, reclaim
our once great educational institutions from the radical left, the college accreditation
system.
It's called accreditation for a reason.
It's called accreditation for a reason. He never extrapolates on that sentence.
No, yeah, I genuinely don't. I can't fathom what I think he means. It could go in so many directions.
There's no way to know. There's no way to know.
Just leaves her hanging.
So Trump explains that, quote,
accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers,
but they have failed totally, unquote, which is not really what college accreditors do.
Both government run and private accreditation organizations exist to develop criteria and
conduct evaluations to ensure educational quality and authorize if a school qualifies
for student aid programs from the Department of Education. That's generally what accreditation
institutions do. They don't they don't look out for if students are being ripped off. Like that's not really their role,
but whatever. So upon returning to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.,
Donald Trump promised that he will quote, fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed
our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.
He believes that there's like communists that are running the accreditation system and that's
what's currently ruining colleges.
That is his belief.
They come in, they sit at the back, they're writing a little book, it happens to be read,
and then we have a criticism circle afterwards where they check how many Marx references
you've made in your lecture.
So after sending all these communists to the gulag, Trump will then begin to quote, accept
applications for new accreditors. Now, it's unclear if he's talking about just like the
public or private sector here, but these new accreditors will quote, impose real standards
and colleges once again and once and for all.
Now, what such standards, you ask? Thank you, James.
Well, Trump gave us a handy little list, which includes like
some of the more average conservative to libertarian positions, like protecting free speech,
eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs,
offering options for accelerated and low cost degrees, providing meaningful job placement and career services,
and implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually
learning or getting their money's worth. Right? Which all that sounds like kind of standard
politician talk, right? It's like, okay, sure. But Trump did mention a few other standards
that will be imposed once again, by this new generation of accreditors which will also include quote defending the American tradition
and Western civilization and removing all Marxist diversity equity and
inclusion bureaucrats unquote so DEI DEI the rights new favorite boogie man
that's responsible from everything from rising university costs to botched
surgeries aviation incidents and boats malfunctioning and cladding with
bridges. It is the villain of the conservative right at the moment. And so because this has
been a trending topic among conservatives, Trump's trying to jump on this DEI train,
which sounds incredibly dangerous from their perspective.
Because this term, he probably never even heard of before like a year ago.
Like come on.
No, I don't think he I don't think he implemented DEI in his business institutions.
I think this is yeah, it's a word they say when they can't say slurs.
I think they found a funny workaround to saying slurs.
I mean, that's this thing was like every every time someone says, like, like
critical race theory, woke or D.I., they're really just trying to say a slur.
And if and if you replace cowards, if you replace those three terms with just a slur,
their sentences make a lot more sense, because the way they use the word woke
does not mean anything in a lot of cases.
But if you just replace it for a racial slur, you're like, oh, now I can understand what they're saying. It's a handy trick that really is not fun to think about.
Or subtle.
As a part of this DEI frenzy, Trump has promised to, quote, direct the Department of Education to
pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage
in racial discrimination, unquote, which also kind of calls upon like older like affirmative
action complaints that conservatives have been talking about for years now.
That's what I wondered if he was going after.
Yeah, it kind of it ties into that as well.
And Trump added that this race based discrimination, quote, includes discrimination against Asian
Americans unquote, which is definitely invoking that style of affirmative action, conservative
rhetoric from like 10, five years ago.
Yeah. Even more recent. When was that Supreme Court case?
Oh, yeah, that was that was that was just like last year.
Becky with the bad grades.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So beyond just threatening to sick the DOJ on woke schools, Trump also made the more specific promise that if schools, quote, persist in explicit and lawful discrimination under the guise of equity, unquote, he will not only make sure that their endowments be taxed, but also, quote, through budget reconciliation, I will advance to measure to have them find up to the entire amount of their endowment unquote
Does he realize that not all schools have endowments like I teach at the community college. We ain't got an endowment
No, he's he's I'm sure that he's gonna go after like the Harvard endowment. Yeah, that's gonna track
Yeah, have fun finding 50 billion dollars from Harvard. That's totally gonna happen
Yeah, have fun finding $50 billion from Harvard. That's totally going to happen.
But his plan after he seizes these endowments, quote,
A portion of the seized funds will then be used as restitution for victims of these illegal and
unjust policies, policies that hurt our country so badly.
Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers,
and now we're going to get this anti-American insanity out of our
institutions once and for all so that's cool like okay sure you're gonna use
this to pay back white people who've been declared we've been denied college
admission okay cool that sounds like a winning electoral strategy.
Yeah, finally the reparations people have been demanding for decades.
Exactly. You know who's had it too hard for too long, James?
Yeah, it's white people who didn't make it through college, Garris.
It's because they didn't go to Yale, now they have to go to Princeton. Embarrassing.
Yeah, yeah, terrible. Why would you even bother?
Embarrassing. Yeah, terrible. Right. Why would you even bother? So, it's, but it's not just colleges. Trump also threatened to quote, cut federal funding
for any school or program publishing critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate
racial, sexual or political content onto our children. We're not going to allow it to happen,
folks. Very cool. Great.
Yeah.
I used to teach a gender sociology course, so I look forward to it.
Oh, defund.
Defund.
Yeah, yeah, no.
We're going down fighting.
We're going to **** that shit.
They will have to fight their way in.
James, don't say that on air.
You can't say that.
You're going to turn your community college into a ****.
You can't say that.
So yeah, he's going to go after regular schools, both colleges, universities, regular schools,
if there's doing any CRT, gender ideology.
You can tell that some of this was written like a year and a half ago, because no one's
talking about critical race theory anymore.
But yeah, yeah, he missed it.
But like, can you imagine teaching a sociology course and just being like, yeah, we're going
to skip past race and gender?
Oh, politics?
We're going to skip past race and gender. Oh, politics? We're going to skip past politics.
Yeah, yeah.
This is a man who himself went to like, did he go to Harvard or Yale?
No, he did not go to either.
He was sent to a military school by his father when he was 13 for being annoying.
Then he think he went to a school in Pennsylvania.
Respect.
And then what other school did he go to?
Critical respect to his dad.
He went to the New York Military Academy that he went to Fordham
University, and then the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School.
Oh, yeah, Wharton Business School. Yeah. Not a real graduate
degree.
So the reason why this is all so evil is because Trump thinks that a lot of this stuff
is basically forming a new religion.
All this woke stuff.
Quote, the Marxism being preached in our schools is totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings
and in many ways it resembles establishing a new religion.
Can't let that happen.
Can't let that happen.
One thing we take a big swing at is Judeo-Christian institutions.
To combat this growing threat of religious Marxism, his administration...
I'm sorry, I can't.
I cannot look.
His administration will, quote, aggressively pursue potential violations of the Establishment
Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution,
that's very simple.
I agree.
There's something you can't quite understand.
The full remit of that, that.
Luckily we do Russian Orthodox Marxism at my university, so we should be safe.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Well.
A lot of beards.
So, and then, in kind of like a laundry list of policies and talking points, Trump pledged
to quote, veto the sinister effort to weaponize civics education.
Oh, what?
We will keep men out of women's sports and will create a new
credentialing body that will be the gold standard anywhere in the
world to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values,
support a way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate
children, but very simply to educate them.
No one's ever done, no one has ever created a credentialing body for patriotic teachers
who embrace quote our way of life before.
It's never been done.
Not in the 1930s.
You know the sinister effort to weaponize civics.
Just imagine him looking for the civics bill.
Yeah, very funny.
You could probably distract him for a while, stop him doing some actual terrible shit.
A little bit with that last part was like indoctrinating children.
And and this next little bit will kind of demonstrate how stuff like QAnon
didn't simply go away like some have postulated.
Instead, it's just been absorbed into the fabric of American politics.
No longer does the boogeyman have to be a DNC pedophilic elite.
Now it's been de-territorialized and destroyed,
mutated into just being any school teacher
or like every trans person, right?
Or God forbid, a transgender school teacher.
That's what I was gonna say.
Right, which is like the prime evil
of the current conservative society.
And Trump promises on day one of his new presidency, he will quote, begin to find and remove the
radicals, zealots, and Marxists who've infiltrated the Department of Education.
And that also includes others.
And you know who you are, because we are not going to allow anyone to hurt our children.
Do you know who you are?
You know who you are. You know who you are. So this is the weaponization
of nearly eight years of QAnon rhetoric, right? That is that has grown past the need to actually
invoke QAnon. Plus the two years of the Republican Party, the Daily Wire and Libs of TikTok,
working to shift QAnon's kind of disgraced and unfocused momentum towards a manufactured
continuation in the form of this transgender
groomer craze that's taking over American schools.
Quote, Joe Biden has given these lunatics unchecked power.
I will have them fired and escorted from the building and I will tell Congress that any
appropriations bill I sign must reaffirm the president's ability to remove defiant employees
from the job.
It's all about our children." Just imagining an executive order to remove someone from the lecture hall.
I am going to be signing an executive order on this podcast to go to another ad break. We are back and thank you James for reaffirming my ability to remove defiant ads.
Yeah, well while you were all away, several federal agents came in and inserted an ad
break.
In this last section here, we're going to return to Trump's conception that entire alternatives
are needed to America's broken woke school system, now focusing on the grade school side
rather than just the post-secondary.
So in this vein, Trump is courting the growing number of homeschooling families.
So according to a Washington Post poll from last year, Republican homeschoolers outnumber
Democrat ones two to one.
So he kind of he kind of already has the majority of that vote.
But still, it's something he is going after.
According to Trump, ever since, quote, the China virus,
America has seen an estimated 30 percent increase in homeschool enrollment, unquote.
Just a funny term is homeschool enrollment.
Yeah, just going to the homeschool to enroll.
I'm going to be enrolling in home school.
Very funny.
And if elected president for a second time, he will do everything to support, quote, parents
who make the courageous choice of home school, unquote.
Again, the way he uses the word home school is unlike anyone else I've ever heard talk.
It is a very odd use of the English language.
Yeah, he doesn't seem to understand parts of speech. That's what he wants.
No. And Trump said he'll work to ensure that homeschoolers will be entitled to all the
benefits available to non-homeschool students, like being able to participate in athletic
programs, clubs, afterschool activities, educational trips, and more. He pledged that in his next
term he will allow 529 education savings accounts to be used for quote,
costs associated with homeschool education.
Current 529 savings accounts allow families to withdraw up to $10,000 a year to spend tax free on tuition for private schools,
which Trump called a quote, tremendous win for school choice, very important school choice.
Remember that term unquote
That term never comes up again in this video
So Trump is planning to to to expand this tuition savings program to include homeschooling families as well
with a very unknown system of checks and balances to determine what exactly qualifies as
costs related to homeschooling.
And often homeschooling is used by abusive parents to just have kids do free labor around
the house and they try to make it count as like education. And like, if you're now allowing
parents to put money into a savings account to remove 10,000 a year tax free to spend on education,
like what does what does that mean? Does that mean just curriculum? Does that mean like household supplies? Because that's being put towards their
home school because they're schooling at home. Like very, very unclear. And it's kind of refers
back to some of the general problems, homeschooling, especially in like conservative homeschooling,
where it just is a large way to abuse children. Not like the groomer way that right wing people talk about.
It's like, no, you're just literally like
limiting your kids access to the outside world because you think if they go
outside, they're going to turn gay.
So but even if oh, sorry, there's there's one one final quote
from this homeschooling video, which are just fucking phenomenal.
To every homeschool family, I will be your champion. Do not vote Democrat. They're
looking to destroy you. If you don't mind me saying that Joe Biden can't put two sentences
together and yet he's looking to destroy you. Do not vote Democrat. Do not vote for Crooked Joe.
Vote for Honest Donald. Thank you very much.
For honest Donald. Honest Donald!
Honest Donald!
It's funny because in the video when he says vote for honest Donald, he also starts to
crack up because he knows how ridiculous this is.
Good God.
It sounds like a cartoon character.
Do not vote for Crooked Joe.
Vote for honest Donald.
Thank you very much.
Very, very cool. They're looking to destroy you,
if you don't mind me saying. Yeah, if you don't mind me saying, a man who rarely asks permission
to say the most insane shit. So even if parents are not choosing to homeschool, Trump wants to
let voters know that he will fight for parents' rights. Which isn't quite a dog whistle, but it
does refer to a very specific style of
patriarchal rhetoric popularized by hyper religious conservative think tanks that propose
a extremely narrow version of how the American family should operate within society. More
on this later. But so what can Trump do to let right wing religious parents know that
he will be their champion even in like blue states or big cities? As much as Trump might
want to be a dictator, he doesn't have unlimited power
to impose his war on wokeness in liberal cities.
But Donald Trump, who was impeached
for trying to blackmail the president of Ukraine
in summer of 2019, does have a plan.
He wants to quote,
implement massive funding preferences
and favorable treatments, unquote,
for states and school districts that make four specific,
quote, historic reforms in education
that Trump has decreed.
These four specific reforms include
abolishing tenure for K through 12 teachers
so that we can, quote, remove bad teachers
and adopt merit pay to reward good teachers. The second is to
quote drastically cut the bloated number of school administrators including the
costly and divisive and unnecessary DEI bureaucracy. Third, to adopt a parental
bill of rights that includes complete curriculum transparency in your form of
universal school choice. And lastly, quote, implement the direct election of
school principles by the parents. Trump calls this last bit to the the ultimate form of local
control, something our country has never had, or at least has not had for the last 50 years.
So those are his four reform plans, which is like, yeah, you know, who's had it too
easy for too long? Teachers, Let's abolish tenure. Adopt
a merit pay, a disaster of a system, cut administrative roles, put more work on teachers, have parents
be able to fire fire principals by voting and a vote to elect their own principal. And
universal school choice is actually more of a dog whistle that it just refers to a series
of like, very racist, like urban planning policies to direct rich white people's funding into
a very few selected number of sensitive where they actually like live and instead
of the actual district they live in. So there's all of that. And like what Trump
keeps coming back to among all these quote unquote reforms, it all kind of
relates to complete parental dominance. And part of this was the parental Bill
of Rights, which you've
probably seen some conservatives talking about more these past few years. And this is another
quote from Trump here. It's all about the parents for their children more than anyone else. Parents
know what their children need. And if you haven't heard of a parental bill of rights directly,
you most certainly have heard of one by another name, the Don't Say Gay bill.
That was a parental rights bill, a sensibly targeting education.
But these bills often end up giving parents just complete control over every aspect of
the child's life.
They dictate how children are allowed to express themselves and allow parents to impose nearly
any discipline or punishment they desire.
Total control over what the child eats, what they wear, what they read, what they watch,
what they see online, and what they're allowed to learn in school, who they're allowed
to socialize with.
Some of these bills that I read through for this also bar mandatory masking policies in
schools back when that was a thing, and then are often full of anti-vax talking points
and attempts to ban sex ed and quote unquote gender politics.
As a part of these bills, teachers and school administration are legally
required to act as parental surveillance tools to report how a child behaves,
how they socialize, how they dress, how they like to be referred to
and who they are friends with.
This includes outing children as gay or trans to parents.
If anyone in the school suspects that the student has a non heterosexual
sexual orientation or is acting in any way inconsistent with their assigned
gender at birth. These types of bills often have other consequences as well. In states where some
of these bills have passed, like North Carolina, due to legal risks, some elementary schools have
been unable to talk about or give out educational materials on consent or how to identify when
child sexual abuse is taking place as a part of the Safe Touch programs. These programs are basically unable to happen because teachers will now be held
personally legally liable if any parent objects to this material. So parental
rights bills have been signed into law in six states over the past two
legislative years, famously Florida, as well as Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Iowa,
and North Carolina. Since then, similar bills have been introduced in more than 25 states, many of which have passed through at least one chamber. Some of
them are still in the process of either passing through a second chamber or being signed by the
governor. I'm going to end with two quotes here from from Trump that kind of reiterate this this
parental dominance thing that he's really pushing for. And also people like Ron DeSantis have been pushing for,
Ted Cruz, a lot of right-wing politicians.
Quote, as the saying goes, personnel is policy,
and at the end of the day,
if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids,
we have a major problem.
When I'm president, we will put parents back in charge
and give them the final say.
We will get back to teaching reading writing and math
called arithmetic and we will
The high quality pro-american education they deserve
They're gonna teach a math called a
Magnificent amazing
We may spend the most but we're going to be tops in education no matter, no matter where you go anywhere in the world.
We're going to be tops in education.
There will be no bottoms in the American education system going forward.
So this is, this is Donald Trump, the second host of the TV show The Apprentice, who's
run for public office.
This is his plan for education.
Dr. James Stout, how do you feel about about these education reform proposals?
Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't seem like a great idea.
If I'm being honest, having having listened to it, I think perhaps he hasn't got the the
sharpest grasp on what's going on in the education system.
The reason we have education is because your parents don't necessarily know what's best
for you, right?
Your parents can't be an expert in everything.
Yes!
So some of us go and get PhDs so we can, and then we teach your people the important things
about that.
By definition, your parents cannot fulfill
all the roles that an education system fulfills and like unlike pink haired communists who have
complete who have complete total control over every aspect of what a child should learn
it's one of the things when you enter the university you know like they do a tuberculosis
test and then they pass you a pink hair dye. And you get a nose piercing as well.
A lot of this is very much reminiscent of like the the fears of like
communist education that you see in like the 1930s, how there's a lot of
political, a lot of political tension trying to be raised over the fear that
there's communists teaching you in universities and schools.
Yeah, it's interesting because at the same time, like...
Frankfurt school style stuff.
Yeah, yeah, I've written a lot about like, anarchist ideals, educational ideals, right?
So at the same time, there were anarchists in Spain being like, you know, we should do
all our classes in the forest.
Let's just go out into the forest.
Absolutely.
There was a school by the sea where they talk kids like they were just having
this incredible utopian education dream, which in many ways, we still haven't adapted to
some of the things that that really could offer. And instead, yeah, we're having this
McCarthyism part two.
Well that is that is Trump's plan for education in case in case you didn't know.
So watch out for this pink haired communists.
Keep an eye out for any parental Bill of Rights being proposed in your state.
And it is probably has little little to do with actually protecting children and more
to do with making parents just complete dominating force and controlling every aspect of their child's life.
And I mean, the other sinister thing about this is like it removes access to for kids to talk about things that that they may be upset about.
And access to mandated reporters like I'm a mandated reporter.
Like this seems to get away from that.
Exactly. And I mean, the idea that that that schools are going to be legally
required to out a child if he's if they're acting like perceived to be deviant in some like gender
sexual way, like all of these things are just ways to enable parental abuse in a variety of
like ways that are explicit and non explicit.plicit. And it's quite upsetting.
And that's the thing that conservatives
are currently trying to push for.
This is a big topic.
This stuff was talked about in the Republican primaries
that were completely useless.
Constantly, stuff like this is referred to
while invoking this fear of this pink-haired,
transgender communist teacher,
which is currently the biggest threat to America,
according to most conservatives.
Yeah, they can take us down from the inside.
That and jihadism, which are probably linked somehow.
Yeah, yeah, I think, well, the pink-haired jihadist, the famous.
Well, that is it for us today.
What are we going to be learning about next for Agenda 47, James?
Well, we're going gonna be learning next about immigration
Don't don't Trump's border policies. Many of you will be shocked to hear that they're not very good
And well, we're gonna I have two classes this summer
If you're if you're in San Diego and you want to get in before they take the Marxism out of the education system
You can
but strike now I
Do love how I do love how much of this is like, do you know who's had it easy for too long?
Transgender teachers.
They, they, they don't have any point.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The people who are so fucking broke, they have to have like GoFundMe's up for their
gender reassignment surgery.
Like great stuff.
Wonderful stuff.
Oh, yeah.
All right. We will be back tomorrow to talk about Trump's border policies.
Things that will probably be totally normal, totally chill. Yeah, it is very be back tomorrow to talk about Trump's border policies, things that'll probably be
totally normal, totally chill.
Yeah.
It's very, very similar to both.
Fucking flatly they are similar to Biden's, but that's a whole other dystopia.
That's a whole other discussion.
All right.
See you on the other side.
Bye. Thank you for taking the light and you're gonna shine it all over the world
and it makes me really happy.
I never imagined that I would get the chance
to carry this honor and help be a part of this legacy.
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Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where my friend Garrison Davison
and I incur countless amounts of trauma by watching videos of Donald Trump talking about
things he doesn't understand.
How are you doing today, Garrison?
Oh, I'm doing fine and peachy
on this wonderful spring afternoon.
Yeah, we'll sort that out for you.
We'll bring you back down.
Because what we gathered here today to discuss, Garrison,
is that we talked about Agenda 47 yesterday,
so hopefully people have listened.
If you haven't, you can go back
and understand what Agenda 47 is.
This short version is that it's Donald Trump's policy platform for his proposed second term,
right? If he gets elected in 2024. And there is a lot of Agenda 47.
There is a lot of Agenda 47.
Yeah, yeah.
Arguably too much Agenda 47.
Yes, yeah, yeah. One could argue that, I think quite compellingly.
What we're talking about today is his border immigration policy.
And I don't think it'll shock anyone to hear that these are major pillars of Agenda 47, right?
He kind of launched his political career with an incredibly bigoted speech about migrants.
And it's been the real through line.
Like the only thing, one of the few things where he actually was able to be efficient
enough to do a large amount of harm was at the border and with immigration.
And it certainly seems like he has plans to do a lot more in 2024, post 2024, I guess.
Biden's tried to counter this by lurching to the right, but he's harmed a lot of people
in the process, but it hasn't stopped Trump without taking a breath outflanking him far to the right on immigration policy.
So that's what we're going to talk about today.
So Agenda 47's website, it's structured with a series of these scripted rumble videos, which are embedded,
and then a spectacular own goal, also transcripted, which just like like Garry said
yesterday, it is a joy to read Donald Trump speaking without hearing Donald Trump speaking.
It is you never know what's coming next. Like it consistently blindsides you. No one can
the best to ever do it. No one no one can replicate Donald Trump.
So a lot of the pages detail his proposed actions on his first day in office, right?
What he's going to do with his executive power.
Sure.
Which, as we'll go into, he seems to be, this is not a man who attended civic class and
paid attention.
Well, because, because civics are being weaponized.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He peace loving American didn't go.
Okay, the other things address like largely right wing talking points, which in many cases
kind of either fictional or over exaggerated or not really related to what's going on with
the border and migration.
And he sort of proposes quote unquote solutions often it's not exactly clear how or if these
things are legal.
But I think as we'll get into that doesn't really
matter. His big theme going through all of his immigration content is to end
what he calls automatic citizenship for children. I'm not gonna do the voice I
can't do the voice. You know because you're cursed with your Britishness. Blessed, yes. Yeah, sure.
God's chosen people.
Okay.
Average Christian identity opinion-haver.
Yeah, yeah, big Christian identity opinion-haver.
Okay, so Donald Trump, his big thing is taking a swing at the 14th Amendment, right?
Birthright citizenship.
It's very funny that, well, it's not funny,
actually it's quite fucked, but if you're not familiar,
the 14th Amendment, right, was passed after the Civil War.
And in the first part of the 14th Amendment,
there's a sentence that reads,
all persons born or naturalized in the United States
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof
are citizens of the United States.
Cool. That sounds very simple.
Yeah, it does, doesn't it? It does. What you're not considering, Garrison,
is like some fringes on the flag tier legal bullshit, which Donald Trump and his camp,
unsurprisingly, are pursuing. We're going to get to a little bit about this later.
They're not the first group of people to make ending birthright citizenship,
that whole thing, right?
It's been sort of a bugbear on the right for a while.
So, as I said, the 14th Amendment was
strongly opposed by Confederate states after the Civil War, right?
But they were forced to ratify it in order to regain representation in Congress.
Yeah, I get fucked.
Yeah, yeah. So Donald Trump's now bringing, I guess coming back on behalf of the Confederacy
to challenge the 14th of May.
Many such cases.
Yeah, in this and many other ways. That's why they call him Stonewall Trump.
Do they?
Yeah.
Wait, really?
No, I don't think so.
Okay, okay. Do they? Yeah. Wait, really? No, I don't think so. Okay. I mean, I guarantee, I guarantee.
Let's just Google it real quick.
Let's see what comes up.
Stonewall Trump.
It's going to be one of two things.
Stonewall really splits.
Wow.
Okay.
No, there's some cursed stuff there.
Google that.
Your own risk.
Okay.
So the 14th Amendment has been really pivotal in American history.
It's one of the most litigated amendments to the Constitution. It gave us the Roe decision, which has now
been overturned. It gave us the Obergefell decision, which legalises same-sex marriage.
It gave us Brown v. Board of Education. More relevant here is that it superseded the Dredd
Scott case and enshrined in law the right of anyone born in the USA, regardless of race
or ethnicity, to be a citizen. It has a few exemptions, like I think the children of foreign diplomats and
visiting heads of state are not US citizens, so like King Charles couldn't come over here,
have another kid and then have that kid be a dual citizen.
Trump proposes that he's going to stop this immediately on entering office by executive order.
Can you remove an amendment of the Constitution by executive order, James?
I'm not a legal expert by any means.
No, no. I am a historian of anarchists in Spain.
This is not the center of my area of expertise, but I'm pretty confident,
like without going full Seth Abramson here, that no, you can't.
You can't just do that.
Because it definitely feels wrong.
Yeah.
It doesn't pass the smell test.
No, I think if American history would be very different if you could change the
constitution by executive order, but it's, it's going to stop Donald Trump crying.
The specific case he has a beef with is US versus Wong Kim Ark, it's called.
It's a couple of people who were Chinese nationals who had a kid in the United States and the
Supreme Court found that their kid was citizen, right? We don't need to go into the case.
But Republicans have been on this for a long time. I think they really began to get concerted
momentum behind it during the Obama administration. Obviously, before Obama was elected, Donald Trump sort of really entered politics with his birth
allies, right? And this idea that Obama was not a US citizen, therefore was not eligible for the presidency.
And that sort of that tendency continued in Republican politics.
Lindsey Graham, a man who looks like a melting sloth,
attempted to introduce a constitutional amendment during the Obama administration and failed
to do so. I don't think he actually ever introduced it. I think he just could have
shopped it around, see if he could get support and then failed. This has been a continuing theme
since actually Matt Gaetz, along with Gosar, Santos and some other representatives tried to institute a house resolution last year ending birthright citizenship. Trump has also been cooking up some rather unique
legal theories about this for a while. In 2018, he claimed that you don't need a constitutional
amendment to change the 14th amendment. He also repeatedly claimed that birthright citizenship is
something that's either rare
or in some cases he claimed it's unique to the United States.
Which is not true.
There are about 30 countries that offer birthright citizenship.
The legal justification that he offers most often comes from someone called John Eastman.
Do you know who John Eastman is, Garrison?
I do not.
John Eastman was one of the legal architects of Trump's plan to overturn the 2020 election.
He has also been indicted in the Georgia case against Trump and his co-conspirators.
John Eastman also tried to do birth of shit about Kamala Harris.
Many of you will be able to draw the line between Kamala Harris, Barack Obama and perhaps
the underlying motivation for their birth and stuff.
But Eastman is contending, I guess, that the quote, subject to the jurisdiction thereof
element of the 14th Amendment means that somehow people who live in the United States, work
in the United States, and pay tax in the United States are not subject to its jurisdiction if they're
not citizens themselves.
Which, look, it doesn't matter how, like, I think the big thing I want you guys to
take away from this is that everything he wants to do is probably illegal and none
of that really matters, right?
Because we have a court, like he's, he's got a Supreme Court, which has, but it's
packed with Republicans, right?
And has constantly affirmed his ability to do crimes and get off with basically no punishments.
Yes, yeah, like this is a man who tried to do a coup and is standing for election again.
The court system is not going to save us. If he has enough time and enough political will,
he will try and do this. And I think it's not unreasonable to expect that
he will attempt to buy executive order on the first day of his presidency to take birthright
citizenship away from the children of undocumented migrants.
Garrison, do you know what won't take rights away from your children?
I forget what food service box we have and therefore cannot make jokes about on air.
But it's one of them. One of
them can, one of them can't. And you have to know which one, what everyone advertises
is the good one.
Yeah, always. It'll be when they speak really fast at the end, just slow that down. You'll
hear them talking about your children. We're back. We hope you enjoyed those outfits.
The second thing Donald Trump is big mad about is something called birth tourism.
He calls birth tourism, right?
Okay.
I think I see where this is going.
Yeah.
It's when you take a holiday to the womb.
You go in like a pod and it's very...
I thought it's where you take a holiday somewhere to pop out a kid
and then they get automatic citizenship.
That's what it actually is, yeah.
Which is a great plan.
Yeah, yeah. You go on holiday to like an all-inclusive resort
and then you don't have to pay for your birth expenses
because they're included when you go to the all-inclusive resort.
It's a great deal for everyone.
Oh, I didn't think of that. Yeah, many few people have,
but now the word's out and it might close that loophole. What I think is interesting about his
quote-unquote birth tourism claims is not like, obviously this again has been a right-wing talking
point for a long time, right? It's that in this particular section of the Agenda 47 website, he includes
links to provide evidence for some of his claims, which is a bold move for Donald Trump,
a man who eschews evidence. But what he links to is the Center for Immigration Studies,
right? The CIS. The CIS is an extremely right-wing think tank, founded by
someone called John Tanton, and is listed by the SPLC as a hate group. The reason it's listed by
the SPLC as a hate group is because it pretty consistently publishes the work of Jason Richwine,
who is an unreconstructed race science guy, a? Like a modern day phrenologist, if you will.
This is a man who is so racist that he was forced to resign from the Heritage Foundation.
Oh, oh wow.
Yeah, yeah, which I didn't know was possible actually.
It was quite...
I didn't know they had like a bar for that, huh?
No, true racist for the Heritage Foundation is quite racist, as it turns out.
But that'll be gravestone.
Yeah, they probably will.
After...
CIS, when there's a bit of a blow up about this during the first Trump presidency,
and CIS claimed it wouldn't be unusual to occasionally include a racist or an anti-Semite
given the volume of content they put out.
So this led to the Southern Poverty Law Center conducting an analysis of their weekly newsletter.
I'm going to read you a summary of that analysis now. The Southern Poverty Law Centre and the Centre for New Community examined
approximately 450 of CIS's weekly emails dating back almost 10 years and found that CIS circulated
over 1,700 articles from vdare.com. Garrison's face is just...
Looks like they've stepped in something horrible.
Yeah, I have.
This podcast recording?
Yep.
That's right.
An average of three V-Dare articles every week.
Huh.
Yeah.
So that's where Donald Trump is getting the bulk of his statistics and
information, or at least, look, Donald Trump isn't writing this stuff, right?
I don't think he has the attention span.
But whoever is writing his immigration policy is sourcing from Vida.
Do we want to explain what?
Yeah, go off Garrison.
Let us know.
So Vida is like this white nationalist, like anti immigration, not like a lobbying
group, but like a kind of they produce a whole bunch of rhetoric and talking points about
all of the big risks of immigration. It gets sent stuff to like Fox News. Trump's used
this stuff before. It's it's not it's not great. They receive like dark money from
conservative funding groups, like donors trust. It's finding a whole bunch of silly ways to
try to justify their types of racism. And they are still a problem. They were founded
nearly 25 years ago, still they're still going.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, they they've compared the anti white rhetoric to the Rwandan genocide
before and just some they what I think is important to hear about Vida is that they
exist to take straight up hate rhetoric and insert it into mainstream politics.
And yes, they take stuff from like actual like, like very like recognized like white nationalist
groups and and turn it into rhetoric that is acceptable on Fox News.
That is that is their entire goal.
Yeah.
And CIS one might argue exists to take that VDAS stuff and dress it up as research articles,
statistics, information that might inform policy. There's a bunch
of stuff in his sort of abolished birthright citizenship that I don't think we need to
get into. He talks a lot about birth hotels. He links to a national affairs op-ed from
Peter Shuck and Rogers Smith. These are the people who have really been like the originators
of the abolished birthright citizenship movement,
they wrote a book about it I think in 1985. It's also worth noting just so like Trump
repeatedly claims in his little videos that children can then make their parents citizens
as soon as they become citizens. Like so if someone was undocumented right and their child
became a citizen, their child,
five-year-old child can sponsor them for citizenship and away they are now, the whole family is
American citizens. And then the logic of this website goes that Biden imports these people,
they all become citizens, they all vote for the Democrats. And this is sort of the great
replacement theory with a couple more
steps. It's worth noting that children have to be 21 to sponsor a parent. And if that parent has
entered the country in an undocumented way, then the parent has to leave for a decade and then come
back to apply. It's not possible to simply citizenize your parents as soon as you become
a citizen by birthright citizenship. It would be an extremely long game to try and have a kid in order to gain
your own citizenship. I've met thousands of migrants who have entered between ports of
entry, right? I've never met anyone who have articulated this sort of goal, this route
to citizenship. He then goes on to...
He has this like, literally a bullet pointed list of border policies, right?
These include quote unquote extreme vetting at a quote national vetting center.
That's a little worrying.
The national vetting center is...
Who's going to be doing this vetting?
What are they vetting for?
Who are they vetting?
Yeah, well, the migrants. Who's going to be doing this vetting? What are they vetting for? Who are they vetting? Yeah, well, the migrants. Who's going to be doing the vetting? Probably the people who
forced women to have abortions in their custody and lost thousands of children and have been
able to relocate their families. So that'll be great. It's not also clear what they're
vetting for. He doesn't say that specifically. He does say that he wants to quote unleash interior immigration enforcement, which anyone who's lived in the United States in
the last decade may have noticed that we in fact have interior immigration. Yeah, I think that has
been unleashed, but yeah, it's kind of me as whole Twitter thing. But yeah, I think I guess this is
part of his massive deportation thing, right? His goal to deport undocumented people.
He does not at any point differentiate between undocumented people and asylum seekers.
He seems to see them as one of the same thing.
Yeah, yeah.
They're all dangerous illegals or whatever.
Yes, yeah.
And anyone crossing the border for any reason other than with a visa in hand
to him falls into this, like, should be deported.
If you're a certain skin tone.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Visa plus skin tone is what makes it A-OK.
Yes, yeah, yeah, I think that's probably fair.
What else has he got on his laundry list here?
Let's see, there's ending federal grants to sanctuary cities.
I'm not quite sure how he thinks that would work or what exactly he means by federal grants.
Like, are we just going to stop having highways in California?
That would be interesting.
One can dream.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let's return.
I'm ready.
I'll be riding my bike everywhere like a king.
He also talks about ending quote, catch and release at the border. It's not
clear what he means by this.
I've certainly heard this term a lot the past year, catch and release.
Yeah, and it's like, catch and release was used to refer sometimes to Title 42, a policy
that Trump put in place whereby migrants would be caught and immediately turned back into Mexico and released there and they would generally try and cross again and we've covered this in an entire series I made on Title 42, right?
Another of his weird little bugbears is ending the visa lottery. Are you familiar with the visa lottery, Garrison?
Roughly, but not super.
Okay, so the visa lottery is more properly called something called the Diversity Visa
Program. It allows for up to 55,000 immigrant visas a year for individuals from countries
that are underrepresented in the US immigration system. So it's literally there to increase
diversity, right? I guess it's DEI, it's DEI.
He must have recorded this before DEI was a big deal
because he doesn't say that.
Shame.
And much how much equity there is going to be
in the lottery program.
Yeah, well, you're about to find out, Garrison.
Trump has repeatedly suggested that he believes
that this diversity visa program consists
of non-US countries raffling off green cards.
Like, you pay and then they draw your number. That's not how it works. It's the United States who decides who gets them.
It's a computer program that selects about 50,000 applicants from about 15 million.
I have met probably hundreds of people who have applied for diversity visas. I meet them all the time. Every time I'm traveling for work, Myanmar, Thailand, Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, you'll meet
people from all these places who have tried to apply for the system. Most of them end
up not getting it because the odds are very slim.
When they do get it, they then have to go through a series of vetting processes and then they have
to make an appointment at a consulate, one of the last parts of the process, making an appointment
at a consulate to get an interview. What the Trump administration did last time was stop people from
getting appointments at consulates citing COVID. They couldn't, With the COVID restrictions, get an appointment. That meant
that de facto, because you only have seven months once you get awarded the visa to fulfill the
process and get the paper visa and begin your travel, those people weren't able to get it.
And so they had to go back to the start, which is crushing. I know how much of their money and hope people allocate to these programs.
And to be told, yeah, you got it, it's incredibly rare. And then to be like, oh, actually, you
can't make the appointment, screw you. It's crushing. Now, the Biden administration, in
all fairness, has restored their right to book an interview, but it's moved to the bottom
of the priority list. So in practice, it's still happening that people can be, they can
quote unquote, win the green card lottery and still not get a green card
it's a complete mess and
Trump's proposal is to entirely do away with it. This would require legislation. That doesn't matter
He also has a little that's like a one sentence where he claims that Biden's border policies are killing migrants
And weirdly he links to an NPR article about it.
He's not wrong.
Like he's absolutely not wrong.
Like, but, but, but, but, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The but is that Donald Trump would kill a lot more.
Great. I mean, yeah, I mean, is it also are those like referring
specifically to Biden stuff or like the stuff that like,
like that, like Governor Abbott's doing? Like what?
It's the increase in border crossings and border deaths from 2020 to present.
Much of that is due to Trump's Title 42 policy that Biden wholeheartedly supported,
defended in court, right? Because when people were caught and then released back across the border,
they often they were offered unlimited crossings by the people who were like
helping them cross or they de facto had unlimited chances to cross because they're
just being dropped back in Mexico, right?
Yeah.
They often they're dropped without any resources in places where they have no
communities.
So they try and cross again and they end up going to more and more remote places
because they don't want to get caught. Right?
So they end up crossing in the places where there are gaps in the wall.
Those tend to be very remote and those tend to be the places where people die.
So you can map the deaths and you can see this in real time.
And Trump's pretending to find this to be a problem.
Yes.
Yeah.
Trump is very sad about this. He's big sad.
So he's going to make a kinder, gentler immigration system.
Carson, do you know what else is kinder and gentler
than the immigration system?
Well, I guess ads.
I mean, I don't know if ads might kill less people,
but it's really hard to say.
Yeah, I think they probably would. I think we can confidently say.
Now that cigarette ads are banned.
What if it's a banana advert? Because then you could get into the whole sort of...
Alright, well here, let's play these ads. We're back. Enjoy your fruit.
I love ethical fruit.
Yeah, nothing. Grow your own fruit. That's the message of this podcast. And then if we
didn't have, if we did grow our own fruit, we wouldn't have destabilized many of the
countries that these migrants are coming from.
Beautiful Georgia peaches.
Yeah, yeah, if we destabilized Georgia.
Boy can dream.
So there's a couple of other bug bears, little sort of things that Trump has.
One of them is benefits for migrants.
Now this is something that's been hopping around the right wing for a while.
It's really been more sort of one of their talking points in the last few months I think,
like since right wing streamers certainly started coming to places where I volunteered on the
border I've heard them talking about it and I try not to hear them talking so they might have been
talking about it for and I was just not paying attention. Just to be super clear, undocumented people are not eligible for most benefits.
Even people with legal status have a range of hurdles, including...
Even if you have a green card, there's a lot of stuff you can't have.
Yes, yeah. And there are also public charge rules, which in some cases,
some forms of assistance might be a hurdle if you were looking to change your immigration status.
So even if you had accepted them, that might stop you moving along the immigration pathway.
That's only for things like SSI and TANF, but I don't think we need to go into the nitty gritty of it.
He claims that people are coming here to live off benefits.
He calls, quote, welfare and a gigantic magnet drawing people from all over the world.
They want to come to the United States.
They want to feast off the sweat and savings of the American taxpayer.
And feasting off sweat is not, not a beautiful image.
Well, the defense.
He continues to claim that these migrants also take American jobs, right?
So they're at once claiming unemployment benefits and taking American jobs.
And again, like I don't think Donald Trump stuff has to line up for it to be dangerous.
Just to like inject a moment of like factual analysis again, you have to wait at least
five months after applying for a work permit when you
arrive here as a refugee to get a work permit.
You may not apply straight away.
Many people wait for a year or more without the right to work.
Undocumented workers working under the table are hugely underpaid, very frequently abused.
And the reason again, why your fruit is cheap.
He says in his day one plan that he's going to stop migrant workers taking
American jobs by having like American hiring provisions for all federal agencies.
Federal agencies are not hiring undocumented people.
Yeah, that's simply not happening.
That's just, that is like, believe me, I am a person who has been a migrant to
this country, the amount of bullshit you have to go to, to even do a government job like teaching
is a large amount of bullshit and they absolutely are not hiring undocumented people.
That brings us, Garrison, to the final pillar of the Trump immigration policy.
And for this one, Garrison, I want you to take a moment to listen to this clip of
Donald Trump explaining the well-researched information that he uses to develop his immigration policy.
I was thrilled to host a screening at Bedminster of the important new film, Sound of Freedom,
about the power of faith in overcoming evil, and in particular the evil of child trafficking.
Big problem.
We had it down to the lowest number in many years,
just four years ago, and now it's gone through the roof.
Even though the fake news media has tried to ignore it,
Sound to Freedom has been a national sensation
and a colossal success at the box office.
Really big numbers.
Everyone should see it.
This is a very important film and very important movie and it's a very important documentary all wrapped up in one.
Oh wow. That's crazy.
Film.
Film.
Film.
It's like you're sliding another I there in between L and M.
I've heard English spoken around the world and I've never heard that pronounced that way.
What a curious choice.
Yeah, just a fascinating man.
I mean, yeah, besides the point like most of those had a freedom tickets were bought
by right-wing billionaires and were completely empty seats.
Sure.
He goes on to detail the exact number of dollars it took in the opening week to talk about
how it's such a success.
Fill it in.
Yes, a decent amount of his entire child trafficking policy is him describing the film.
The freedom. It's incredible. Like that was, that was a gift
that I did not, this is, if you read the transcript, you miss out on some of these
absolute Easter eggs that Donald Trump leaves for us. I think I, I think I saw a clip of him
at a rally recently where he was talking about Sound of Freedom and he also said it like that.
No, it was, I know what it was. It was him talking about David Lynch when there was that misquote about, about
Lynch saying, um, like, like Trump seems like, like, like an energetic guy or
something and he's like, film director David Lynch endorsed me for president.
He was like, okay, that's not whatever.
Yeah.
That is, uh, so he's, he's been saying this way for like almost 10 years at least because that's insane actually.
Yeah, like because because that yeah, because that clip was from like the 2015 campaign
rallies.
Wow.
It's so it's not.
Yeah.
Wow.
The power of senility, an incredible thing.
If anyone else, anyone we could do like the NPR thing.
If you're if they say it, film where you come from.
I don't think anyone else says film.
I really don't think so.
Yeah, no, no, there's not a...
Yeah, he just comes up with his stuff from a blank slate.
Well, that's cool.
Yeah, you know what else is cool?
It's...
I love that this video goes like,
Trump calls for a death penalty.
Yeah, well, yep!
And we're laughing about it.
Pronunciation. Yeah.
Well, unfortunately, Garrison, it's time to stop laughing
because, yes, Donald Trump, I'm going to outline a death penalty thing.
Quote, I will urge Congress to ensure that anyone caught
trafficking children across our border receives the death penalty immediately.
And that includes also for women, because women, as you know, are
number one in trafficking.
Children are actually number two.
But that's a sentence which you could pick apart for a long time.
What does he mean by trafficking?
That is extremely unclear.
He seems to mean the arrival of people in the United States.
Right?
Like that's kind of what it sounds like.
Yeah.
Like he-
It sounds like it just means crossing the border.
Yes.
Yeah.
He, well, because he, and he also says, quote, I will use title 42 to end the child
trafficking crisis by returning all trafficked children to their families in
their home countries and without delay.
I made an entire fucking series on Title 42.
I recorded it in a week and then I wrote it in a week and then we edited it and it has
destroyed me and I have never recovered.
Title 42 does absolutely nothing about child trafficking.
Title 42 returns all migrants, anyone crossing the border between ports of entry to Mexico,
which suggests that he sees all these people as trafficked, right?
Yeah.
It also absolutely does not reunite children with their families. This is the administration
that separated families at the border and has in some cases been unable to find the parents of
the children it separated. Friends of mine have worked for a very long time, very hard, and absolutely not for the Trump administration trying to find those people's families.
But it's really interesting that he is talking about Title 42 again.
Title 42, if you're not familiar, is a public health law, right?
It's to stop the introduction of infectious disease into the United States.
It's a very old law that was initially designed around tuberculosis.
And we know that the Trump administration planned to use Title 42 before coronavirus
was a thing.
Or, coronavirus is already a thing, before COVID-19 was a thing, right?
So he's just being completely open about his idea to manipulate public health law in a
way that allows him to do things that immigration law
would not allow him to do.
He also finishes up, I guess, by making his claim.
Once again, he goes back to the well that is the fucking border wall.
I'm just going to quote here.
We created the most secure border in US history, dealing a major blow to the cartels and traffickers.
We built hundreds of miles of wall.
We renovated hundreds of miles of wall. We built hundreds of miles of wall.
We never had anything like it. And then I got Mexico free of charge to give us 28,000
soldiers to protect us from people coming into our country illegally.
It's not going to surprise anyone that this is bullshit, right? Trump first made this hundreds of miles of wall claim in a debate with Biden.
I filed a FOIA for a new wall building that night.
The best estimate I can come up with based on the documents I got from FOIA and from
other people's FOIAs is that they built about 85 miles of new wall.
They did replace several hundred miles of wall and in some cases that went from a pretty insignificant barrier to a pretty large one.
The 28,000 soldiers thing, this will shock you, was also not true.
There was an agreement in 2019 with Mexico that didn't list a specific number of troops,
but it did say that most of them will be in the southern half of the country and Mexico's
border with Guatemala.
He then goes on just a complete tangent where he says, I will rage war on the cartels just as I destroyed the ISIS caliphate.
100% gone, 100% destroyed.
Uh huh. Yeah, that's why that attack in Russia was...
Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, it's so good.
Yeah. ISIS car bombed the street that I stayed on a couple of weeks after I left in October.
Like, uh...
This is why the ISIS press people are like begging people to like, to believe that
ISIS is like still a thing.
They're like, no, please, we're, we're still real.
We're still around, please.
I'm a real boy.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
The Pinocchio ISIS.
That'll be a highly entertaining film.
Look, I want to finish up by saying here that like, as we saw in Donald Trump's
first term, his malice is really only matched by his incompetence and his
incompetence at the border is much less important, I guess, but he's been able
to be more competent at the border than he has been anywhere else in enacting
his policies.
He managed to do plenty of things in his first term that were unconstitutional, because the system only really works when the people
playing the game agree that the rules of the game are more important than the outcome.
And that's not the case with Donald Trump, right? We know that. The fact that he dedicated so much
of his agenda 47 pages to migration tells us that peddling great replacement theories is going to
be a major part of his campaign and a major part of his second term if he gets one. The sources that he links to here
tell us that he's as addicted to right-wing rage bait as he ever was, and that he's still
surrounded by cranks and crackpots with fringe-on-the-flag-level conspiracy theories.
None of my suggestions that what he's saying is false or illegal or impossible under the constitution mean that it's not dangerous. I would have told you in 2016 that it was
illegal to bounce people back to Mexico without hearing their asylum claims because it is.
But we had it under a democratic president for three years. We had it under Trump for
a year. It still happened. He succeeded in moving the border and migration debate massively to the right.
And we have Biden advocating for things that would not have flown, like
a good, that Clinton would have been aghast at, right?
And just by Trump making this an issue, even if he doesn't get elected in
November, Biden's going to try and fight him on this by claiming that he too is tough on the border, that he too is tough on these fictional things like the
taking of American jobs or migrants claiming public benefits or birthrights to citizenship.
Biden has completely failed to plow his own path on this and he said he's entirely reactive
to Trump.
So I think, I guess the big take home here is that
whatever happens in November,
things at the border are gonna be terrible,
just like they're terrible now.
And look-
And you can't just rely on politicians
to do things at the border.
Like there's actually, like, you can't just like
push away, be like, oh, now that so-and-so's in charge,
now I don't have to think about it.
Be like-
But that's the whole fucking problem, right?
The reason that we are so broke,
the reason that I personally am so broken and my truck is falling apart, is
that that is what people are doing. At least with Trump we got money. In 2018
when he held the Mike Caravan at the border in Tijuana, my friends and I were
there doing mutual aid and we did just what we're doing now in a kumba, right? We
fed people, we bought them blankets, we took care of them and we stole them from dying.
But at least Libs sent us money.
Like we had tons of money.
I remember spending a thousand dollars on soft toys in Costco in Tijuana.
That doesn't happen anymore because people think that they voted for the kind, gentle, nice guy.
And I guess, like, I want people to look at this with the understanding that whatever happens
at the ballot box, like, you need to help at the border because neither of these politicians
are going to.
That's my speech.
Thank you for listening to our podcast.
Anything else, Garrison?
No, no, but we will be back tomorrow with more exciting, exciting news about...
Yeah, what are we learning about tomorrow?
47 Agenda.
Either... Actually, I don't know because we have not planned it out that far ahead.
Throughout the rest of the week, we'll be talking about Trump's plans
for handling the gender question.
Trump declaring war on cartels and his his his plans to to fix the pharmaceutical industry.
So. All good stuff.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where the future president wants us to die and the current
president doesn't give a shit.
I'm your host, Mia Wong, with me is Garrison.
Hi.
Okay.
So, we're covering another aspect of Trump's Agenda 47.
Alright, we're looking at President Trump's Plan to Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender
Insanity. President Trump's plan to protect children from left-wing gender insanity Now despite that title, this is the least Trumpy of all of these
He is just phoning this one the fuck in it's the most him reading off a teleprompter
I have ever seen in any speech he's ever given because historically he's never cared about this kind of stuff
He's just having to do it now to appease the people he needs to get votes from.
But like if you look at Trump's stances on transgender people historically,
however, not good.
They're not like a genocidal.
And you could really tell his heart is in it.
It is. Yeah, he I mean, legitimately, he sounds like someone doing an ad
read for a Raid Shadow Legends sponsorship.
He's so bored.
It's funny, because you can tell, there's something that started happening in the middle of the administration, was you could tell when his speech writers were just writing in a Trump
word for him to say so it would look less like he was, and they're doing it in this one.
There's only like one genuinely Trumpy thing in this.
Unfortunately, it all fucking sucks ass.
It's quite bleak.
So let's let's get into what exactly is in this.
I would love to hear Trump's plan for the transgenders.
Yeah. So first, he wants to end Biden's executive order on gender affirming care.
Now, you might be asking, wait, Mia, what the fuck?
What executive order?
I had to look this up, too, because I was like, wait, what is he talking about?
So apparently back in 2022, Biden issued a series of executive orders
that were supposed to protect the rights of trans kids to get gender affirming care.
So that didn't happen.
No, no, no, these were yeah, these were mostly stunningly ineffective.
Well, let's I'm going to quote from, I finally found the actual executive order,
which is disturbingly hard to find the actual text of because everyone just wanted you to read
the press release. Because what's actually in it is, okay.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall, as appropriate and consistent with
applicable law, use the Department of Health and Human Services authority to project LGBTQI-plus individuals' access to medically necessary
care from harmful state and local laws and practices, and shall promote the adoption
of promising policies and practices to support health equity, including in the area of mental
health for LGBTQI youth and adults.
Within 200 days of this order, the Secretary of HHS sought to develop and release sample
policies for states to safeguard and expand access to healthcare for LGBTQI individuals
and their families, including mental health care services.
Now, let's pull out for one second to try to figure out what does it actually do.
So what is being done there?
The thing that is being commanded is that the Department of Health
and Human Services makes sample guidelines
for states.
And then there's another part where they're talking about
how they were going to form a committee to study trans mental health care.
So none of this did shit, right?
But this is the first thing that trumps like we're going to overturn this.
I guess the actual substantive shift here is and we'll get to this in a bit.
This didn't do anything.
This was just a PR op.
He does.
And this is funny because he does a series of these things
every single trans day of visibility and then nothing ever happens because.
Yeah.
Joke. We've had like.
So many states since 2022 completely restrict
health care for trans people under the age of 18.
And I've not I've not heard of a single instance
where the federal government has intervened to to help
to help a kid get puberty blockers in the in a state like
where they pass these sorts of bills.
I will say this.
The Justice Department has done lawsuits.
Sure, sure.
And I think they won like one of them.
So that's not literally nothing.
It's just mostly nothing like and then this is the thing.
It's coming through the judiciary, not through the federal bureaucracy.
And that's a point of contrast that I want to get to, because Trump,
you know, and this is something that's that's always been true about sort of
the use of executive power by Democratic versus Republican presidents. Right.
Sure. You know, there are like the Democrats sometimes do use
like massive executive power overreach things like, for example,
Obama's claim to have the legal authority to kill any man,
woman, or child the moment they step off the US door regardless of citizenship status,
a thing that he used to kill a 16-year-old American citizen in Yemen.
So he does that sometimes, but they don't do anything useful with it.
And now let's get to what Trump is going to do with this.
Quote, sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs
that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age. Ask Congress to permanently stop
federal taxpayer dollars from being used to promote or pay for these procedures.
Okay, so that's bad. What exactly this does is kind of murky. We're going to talk about
Planned Parenthood in a second because there's another one of these proposals that's a lot worse for Planned
Parenthood.
And I guess that'd be going after some level of like
government insurance if you're trying to get
medical care paid for, if you have government insurance,
I guess that'd be what that's trying to target.
Yeah, I think there's like two things one.
And I think this is the main target is well, I don't know.
It's sort of unclear. But the two main targets, I think, are any kind of federal education program that talks about queer people.
Sure. And then the second one, yeah, is like, like if you're in the military, you won't be able to transition anymore because it worth.
And this is actually a pretty big deal because there are a lot of federal employees. The federal employees health insurance would no longer cover
any gender for Medicare.
And this is for everyone.
Right. Because it's not fortunately.
Yes. A lot of transgender employees at the D.O.T.
Yep.
So that's very bad.
Why those drones?
Now, God.
Oh, you meant, oh, you had D.O.D.
Yes, the department. But no, you said D.O.D. Yes, the department.
But I know you said D.O.T.
Department of Transportation.
I was like, well, yeah, that to this much.
Well, yes.
Also, because you were in the trades.
Yes. No, but I meant I I meant the D.O.D.
Yeah.
No. Trains and drones.
You know, it's bad.
There's an open question here about how exactly this works.
So one question that I I'm genuinely not sure about.
There's a possibility this works like abortion funding or federal money
can't go to promoting abortions.
I think there's some very weird stuff with USAID money overseas.
So sometimes happens, but I don't know.
Someone I'm not I'm not a USAID expert,
but, you know, so, for example, you so if you are a clinic
that does abortions, right, you can take federal money.
You just can't use the federal money for the abortions.
So it's possible that, you know, for example, so one of the one of the
the informed consent clinics in Chicago takes federal money for HIV treatment under this wording.
It seems like they could still get federal funding for that, but they couldn't take any
money for gender affirming care.
But also Congress could just pass a bill that stops.
I'm pretty sure could pass a bill that stops all funding for anyone who does this.
So you know, this is something that's kind of interesting about these is that this stuff
is all very, very bad.
It's also not quite the maximalist genocidal policy yet.
I think in large part because they haven't taken power
and because the the the groups who are like pushing this stuff,
this is actually kind of an older
this is this is from February twenty twenty three.
So, OK, OK.
It's it's actually a lot older than a lot of the other stuff here.
And even even back like in twenty twenty three,
the beginning of the year, stuff was less radical than it is now.
Yeah, that was before the big we must eliminate transgenderism.
Yeah. Thing that started with the daily wire.
Then Trump mirrored some of that rhetoric in his like a CPAC talk from that spring.
Yeah, it was kind of a ramp up,
like on some of like the quote unquote transgender ism rhetoric
really was getting more popular around that time.
The the kind of groomer rhetoric from the year previous
twenty twenty two was starting to kind of fade away
and they were finding a new thing to replace it.
Yeah. So so there's a there's a good, just a decent chance that this stuff is all actually
much worse when it gets implemented. That that's the way it's written right now, as best as I can
tell. So the third one, and this one is a fiasco, any hospital or health care provider who either
gives up puberty blockers or does gender affirming surgery for minors or gives hormones to minors can't accept
Medicare or Medicaid they get knocked off of the approved list. Okay. So that is a huge deal because that immediately knocks out
Planned Parenthood who you plan period gets this like Sophie's Choice thing of either you don't provide
puberty blockers like you don't you don't provide gender affirming care of
either like either sort of hormones or puberty blockers, like you don't provide gender affirming care of either hormones or
puberty blockers to kids. Or you lose every single person who uses Medicare or Medicaid.
And that's a lot of people. That's like, I've seen numbers that suggest it's like 40% of
people who use Planned Parenthood use particularly Medicare.
And this is a complete fiasco.
I also wonder how this would impact like
cis children who need to be put on puberty blockers
because people forget that like puberty blockers have been a thing
for like decades and decades and are like well proven to be safe
and effective for delaying puberty.
It does noting puberty.
It does not stop puberty from happening altogether.
It does not castrate you permanently or any of these kind of wild claims.
Yeah.
Well, and the stuff that's weird here too is like it's the language they're using is
really inflammatory shit.
So it's actually deeply unclear what the fuck they're talking about.
So I mean, I've read a lot of these sorts of bills,
even like the Arkansas bill targeting IVF.
When these politicians are questioned about some of the language
that would ultimately, if written and acted upon as written,
would like block a whole bunch of regular medical procedures from happening.
They're often confused about why they're being asked about this,
because they're like, no, obviously, things will continue on as normal.
And if we have to amend the bill to like change this, this
one little thing, then we'll do that. They don't actually think about all the little
tiny ways that this also just like interferes with like regular medical science. Yeah. And
they just they don't care because they know it's because they're never going to prosecute
for stuff like that. It just isn't it. They're genuinely not thinking about those other use cases at all.
Yeah, and like I'm going to read the first sentence
or the first one of these, like the text of it.
Revoke Joe Biden's cruel policies on so-called gender affirming care
in quotes, a process that includes giving kids puberty blockers
and mutating their physical appearance and ultimately performing surgery
on minor children. So that's like. Not real.
That's not what gender affirming care is now.
So, but the thing is, right, it's fucking impossible to tell whether this would result in them
actually banning all gender affirming care whatsoever, which includes other stuff as well.
Or if it's just a more limited ban, like who the fuck knows?
Because they're not being specific at all.
So this can mutate into a whole bunch of stuff.
One of the other immediate sort of impacts of banning, particularly
of banning Medicaid is that like there's a lot of trans people on it
because trans people are significantly poorer than cis people.
So, I mean, just, just to take like a random statistic.
So the unemployment rate right now in the US is 3.8%.
The unemployment rate for trans people is 18%,
which is 1935 Great Depression levels of unemployment.
So, you know, if you're a trans person out there
and you're listening to people tell you how great the economy is
and you're like, what the fuck is going on?
The answer is that you literally do not live in the same world as people
who are telling you this.
You live in the 1930s, in 1935, Great Depression.
So yeah, and but the and, you know, so
so cutting off one of the ways that people can access medical care,
if they, you know, can't afford it is a fucking disaster.
This is going to.
I like presumably if this goes through with the only way that you're going to be able
to get like gender affirming care if you're a kid is by having rich parents and going
to like some kind of clinic that doesn't take Medicaid.
Their Medicare Medicaid.
Yeah.
So you know what else doesn't take Medicare Medicaid actually?
Who knows?
I don't know.
Look, it's a bad time to be doing ad pivots.
Okay so we're back.
So okay now having gone into all of that detail, number four
is just, quote, pass a law prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states. So this
is see, this is this is a great example of the thing I was just talking about how like,
theoretically, if one was a smartass, you'd be like, Oh, so you're banning circumcision.
You're like, No, of course not. Because they, because they're not thinking about this sort of thing.
This is this is like, yeah, no, it's just it's just yeah, trans kids can't get which also like almost never happens.
There may be like one or two very bizarre like outliers where someone has gone through extensive therapy from a very young age that might result in them receiving such surgery at like 16 or 17.
But that is such a minuscule amount that that simply just does not happen.
Yeah. In any real statistical notion.
You know, but I mean, but this is one of these things.
It's hard because it's like, OK, it's like, what are they actually?
What are they talking about?
And the answer is who the fuck knows this?
They think this is happening.
Well, no, but but also like because like, you know,
because one of the things that they do here, right, is they'll talk about
feedback, like they'll talk about like general mediation, like whatever.
But they'll also include in that like puberty blockers.
Yeah, of course, because because to them,
puberty blockers are like a chemical castration device.
Yeah. And it's all, you know, this is one of these things.
But you know, but the thing I should mention about this one that is, I don't know.
It's something I was sort of hesitant to talk about because I don't know.
Like, I don't like I'm torn between wanting to spread panic and wanting to be like, well, this is probably what's going to happen.
But there's a non zero chance that with how far this stuff has gone, that if
Republicans take the House and the Senate, that this bill turns into just a full band,
because that's what's being pushed for now by the sort of constituencies that this stuff
is for. It's just like a full ban on all care. It's way less popular than even the anti-trans
kids stuff, which is not very popular. But on the other hand, like this is I mean, this entire thing is
just Trump sort of like being like, yeah, sure, whatever to these, like these weird anti trans
dipshits. Yeah, there certainly are a percentage of Republican politicians and like right wing
influencers who who do want some of these bills to expand up to just including everyone or everyone under the age of 25.
As as we've mentioned before,
that I still don't think there's it's it's it's too far off to to say
whether or not this is like
something to actually like worry about in any in any real sense. It's it's.
It's too murky.
Yeah, but on the other hand, he is, he is very explicit on just banning all banning
care for minors. Like that's the thing that he's very like, that's just in the text,
right? The next one is one of the, this is like one of the sort of almost every bill
that gets passed by estate legislature now has this provision that creates like quote
the private right of action for victims to sue doctors for anyone who got any kind of
gender affirming care as a minor. This is we've talked about this on the show before.
This is this is you know, this is a thing that lets D trans grifters who think that
God talks to them like try to go and destroy like doctors and clinics. Yeah, it's one of the tactics that they use to try to like run
people who they can't otherwise go after legally out of existence.
So, you know, that that that's like a
that's just a sort of normal classic anti-trans thing that
they want to bring to it.
Well, I guess the other important part of it is it is having this on a national
level lets them target clinics in like blue states that they otherwise
normally wouldn't be able to.
Yeah, I mean, that's the big goal of a lot of this federal stuff.
Yeah, it's being able to actually have it affect like New York, California,
the other half of the country, whereas because right wing
governors are doing all this sort of stuff in a lot of the red states.
But that is not satisfying to a lot of these people.
They the reason why this is being pushed on a federal level is to try to put as much pressure on blue states as they can just out of the desire for sheer human misery.
Yep. Now, speaking of the desire for human visory, so there is just a, there is one very
Trump one that I've actually haven't seen before. Quote, direct the Department of Justice
to investigate big pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they deliberately
covered up horrific long-term side effects of quote sex transitions to get rich at the
expense of vulnerable patients or illegally marketed hormones
and puberty blockers which are in no way licensed or approved for this use.
That's that's deeply funny because it's just like nothing he's saying is real.
No like all that's fake. The long-term side effects of sex transition is being extremely
based and cool. But no like there's also this there's just nothing to support any of that
notion so even if the DOJ does investigate this, they're not going to find anything because no one's trying to market testosterone or estrogen to make money off of it.
I know this is one thing that certain freaks at the Daily Wire try to talk about, be like, oh, the shady pharmaceutical companies are making all this money off of estrogen.
It just isn't true because not yet.
Most people aren't paying for estrogen anyway.
They're getting it through like health insurance.
The the most I have to pay for is the fucking needles.
Well, and also and also think about estrogen is like
the majority of the people who get estrogen are cis women.
Yes, yes. Like so.
You know, the majority of people who get testosterone are male bodybuilders.
Yeah, it's like, have you ever fucking tried to like, get a like, get like
like even something like facial feminization surgery, which is like,
technically speaking, is like a fairly highly paid from when you use plastic surgeon.
Do you know how long the waiting lists are for that?
You can't even pay them to do this to you.
You have to pay them and then wait for fucking years because no one does it.
It's like it's something that I think coming off of, like the opioid epidemic.
We have certain influencers online who are trying to like
find different ways to tie in big pharma to whatever thing they're currently talking about.
And they're trying to do that with trans health care.
And it just it is honestly it doesn't. The reason trans health care. And it just honestly, it doesn't.
The reason why you hardly just talked about because because it doesn't lead anywhere.
It'll get a passing mention in the What is a woman documentary.
It'll get this passing mention by Trump.
But like, you don't actually see anything on a legislative level
actually targeting this because it's just there's just nothing to do.
There's nothing to investigate.
Also, all of these drugs are approved and tested for all of these things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And have been for decades.
So like it's it's it's simply not real.
Yeah, I mean, this is the thing where I think the actual effect of this
with DOJ would just be Trump doing like random witch hunts
and like going through and like raiding patients files for shit,
which like I could have a hip, you're not allowed, not allowed.
I don't think the Trump Justice Department is going to give us.
Well, here's the thing.
Is the Supreme Court going to stop them?
No, of course, this record is not going to stop like such a non problem
because there's just nothing to do here.
Yeah, but it's like, I don't know, like, I think the prospect of Trump
realizing he could actually just do unlimited judicial tyranny and do whatever the fuck he wants in the Supreme Court, like
sure, seven to two will be like, yeah, cops have the right to like
execute trans prisoners or some shit.
Yeah, but that's not what's currently being talked about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but I mean, I do.
I do think there'll be sort of like fake scaremongering investigations.
I don't. Sure.
I don't think it'll lead on this list at all. I don't think it'll be sort of like fake scaremongering investigations? I don't. Sure. I don't think I need any of this list at all.
I just don't think it'll lead anywhere.
I think it's mostly just like a wild goose chase to satisfy
whatever fucking person who watches too many right wing podcasts on YouTube.
So that like it's it's it's I don't see this as anything like super pressing.
The next one, I think, actually could be real, depending on how motivated
they are to do it. So the next one. so this is a ban on teachers and anyone who works. So this is this is this is supposed to be a directive sent down from the Department of Education. And it says no one who works for a school so no teachers or any school administration can tell a kid that they might be trans. And that the consequences for this are civil like civil rights like investigations into them and
Also the elimination of federal funding for any school district where this happens
Okay, and that's this is effect
What what this effectively is is a threat to cut off federal funding from states if they don't implement what is effectively?
I don't say trans bill. That one, I think that one's going to be pretty real.
It kind of depends on the extent to which the Department of Education is
willing to spend a bunch of time going through individual cases. But you know,
like given that it's possible that Department of Education just gets filled
with a bunch of like deranged Trump weirdos.
I think there's a real chance that this one actually goes through and does stuff.
Yeah. And the other thing with that one is because that's
that's a directive through federal agencies.
It doesn't it's not to go through Congress, which is sort of alarming. It's I don't know.
It's one of these things where it's a question of how powerful
is the federal bureaucracy going to be?
And I tend to lean towards the side is the federal bureaucracy going to be?
And I tend to lean towards the side of the federal bureaucracy has an immense capacity
to cause harm.
The last part is he wants to get a bill in Congress that ends all recognition of there
being non-binary people and saying that the only genders are men and women.
So this would do things immediately like getting rid of like the X gender marker on passports and only recognizing people's assigned gender at birth, which means the government is now
saying that only two like only two renders exist and also that the federal bureaucracy gets to
assign you a gender, which is, you know, normally the exact kind of federal tyranny the Republican
Party decries., but you know,
they hate us.
Do they ever do they ever actually to cry that sort of tyranny?
Federal why federal tyranny they're supposed to.
Also, I think it's supposed to be their thing.
But it's also less like the federal government declaring your gender.
It's like whatever random doctor fills out the paperwork.
Sure, but the the the the government now is forcing you to in their eyes be whatever gender
that they decide that you are.
Yes.
And we've had some stuff like this try to get passed through in Europe and certain US
states for like their own state IDs.
Yes.
So that's part of why, I don't know why this bill is these three things lumped together,
but it's the bill.
This specific bill is this one using Title nine to stop trans women from playing
in women's sports in college or in schools.
Sure. And then protecting the right of the parent to keep their kid from transitioning,
which is fucking absolutely fascinating because protecting the right of the parent
to make you have your kid not transition. that that's a really interesting wording there.
Yeah.
Well, let me read the exact exact wording is protects the rights of parents from being
forced to allow their child to assume a new gender identity without the parents consent.
Yes.
So they're referring to the types of parental Bill of Rights laws that Yeah. That have passed in like six Republican states.
Yeah. Yeah.
So the last one I think is really interesting,
and it kind of gives the game away as to what this is all like,
what the actual point of this is for someone like Trump,
who's not that interested, doesn't like transient, but isn't that interested.
And this one, I'm going to read it first as part of our new credentialing system,
credentialing body for teachers, we will promote positive education
about the nuclear family, the role of mothers and fathers
and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women
different and unique.
Sure. So this is this is literally this is this is legislating
institutional like sexism education.
Yes. And, you know, we've talked about the credentialing stuff.
It's unclear to me how this would work, because it's not it's not quite
the same credentialing thing that you were talking about.
But basically, this is a federal mandate that says that you can't be a teacher
without teaching sexism, which is I'm sure. I'm sure the teachers unions will love to take that one on.
Yeah. Well, you know, I this is one of the things that I.
I don't know.
I mean, you have to like go into like walking with a stick and beat them on it.
But I am so excited for the Trump administration
has to deal with an actual national teacher strike.
Like, have fun with that one, you dipshits.
This is why these types of conservatives really, really hate teachers unions.
Yeah, yeah.
They frame teachers unions as being like one of like the most evil lobbying forces in America
because they really don't like that they don't have complete total control over teaching kids,
whatever kind of fucked up
nuclear family, patriarchal bullshit that they want to like a mandate by law.
Yeah, and so they're going to attempt to do
they're going to attempt to have they're going to they're going to make everyone
watch a shitty Matt Walsh documentary or some shit.
And if you complain about it they
prosecute you under the Civil Rights Act for being discrimination or something.
So that's Trump's plan to protect children from left-wing gender insanity.
It's really quite bad, as funny as some of it is. I mean, it's a bunch of
gender affirming care bands sort of stitched together with stuff trying to knock hospitals
out from doing it, stitched to the sexism law.
Very cool.
Yeah, it's quite bad. Come back tomorrow for probably even worse shit.
I don't remember which one is tomorrow, but you'll find out when we do.
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Hello, welcome, this is It Could Happen Here and I am Shireen. Today we are continuing
to talk about Agenda 47 and this episode is about quote unquote Big Pharma. Trump often
goes after Big Pharma in his campaign rhetoric and there is a lot of content within Agenda
47 that addresses what he views as the problems with the pharmaceutical industry.
In his first campaign for president, Donald Trump tapped into bipartisan anger over high drug prices to bash pharmaceutical companies.
In his latest run for president, he is echoing more extreme elements of his party to suggest that the industry's products may be hurting Americans, particularly children.
Using children in this way is usually a tried and true tactic to make people get up in arms about something,
and it works especially on those who may be less informed.
And there are a plethora of reasons as to why our healthcare system is absolute shit and completely sucks,
and it's more often a hindrance to the average
American. But when Trump continues to spout unfounded and dangerous claims about the pharmaceutical
industry, all this does is further undermine public health and any remaining faith that
America's have in it. It reflects how deeply the mistrust of health institutions and anti-science
rhetoric have become embedded, especially within a sizable
faction of the Republican Party following the pandemic. Trump's comments about drug makers,
posted in policy proposals and videos on his campaign website, have largely flown under the
radar as his campaign speeches have doubled down on extreme rhetoric, like his use of anti-immigration language and praise of foreign
authoritarians.
One of the Agenda 47 proposals on Trump's campaign website is called, Addressing the
Rise of Chronic Childhood Illnesses, and it cites a quote, unexplained and alarming growth
in the prevalence of chronic illnesses and health problems, especially in children, end
quote. and health problems, especially in children." In a June 2023 video that was posted to Truth Social, Trump questions whether the food we
eat, environmental toxins, or the quote overprescription of certain medications is contributing to this
increase of chronic health problems and illnesses in children.
In the video, Trump says,
Too often, our public health establishment is too close to Big Pharma. They make a lot of money, Big Pharma. In the video, Trump says,
Trump goes on to call for a quote, special presidential commission of independent minds who are not bought and paid for by Big Pharma
to investigate the rise of chronic illness.
Interestingly enough, Trump's language around childhood illness
is reminiscent of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s views, who has been a prominent
vaccine skeptic running for president as an independent, and he has been praised by Trump as a, quote, common
sense guy.
In a video on his campaign website, Kennedy promises to, quote, end the chronic disease
epidemic in this country.
Kennedy has promoted the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism, and though he
doesn't directly make this claim in the video,
he previously tied the quote, children's health crisis to quote, environmental toxins and vaccines
in an ebook published by the Children's Health Defense, which he also founded. Kennedy's campaign
spokesperson Stephanie Speier said that Kennedy is pleased that Trump is highlighting the rise
in childhood disease. Trump's attention to the issue testifies to the success of the Children's Health Defense,
she said, and many other activist organizations in putting the chronic disease epidemic on
the political radar.
And while it is true that the rate of conditions, including disabilities, mental health diagnoses,
ADHD diagnoses, and obesity.
They have gone up among children in recent years, and this is according to the American Academy of
Pediatrics. There are numerous and complex social, health, and environmental factors that underlie
these numbers. Increased awareness and better ability to diagnose some conditions are believed
to be contributing factors. Vaccine scientist and pediatrician Peter Hotez said,
Trump's conspiratorial language is unhelpful, as the anti-vaccine movement in recent years
has sought to tie vaccines to a range of chronic diseases.
Quote, now that the far right has adopted the anti-vaccine movement, it's very conspiracy
laden.
The anti-vaccine movement's rhetoric on chronic illnesses, now being voiced by Trump, is so
vain and badly crafted he says, how do you even address it?
Hotez went on to say that it gives them a license to bring up any condition they want,
whether it's asthma, or whether it's a peanut allergy, or whether it's lupus.
They just use it as a catch-all for whatever they feel like alleging at the time. A spokesperson for Pharma, aka the main
drug maker lobby, did not address Trump's proposals directly when they were asked about them.
Alex Shriver, Pharma's senior vice president of public affairs, told Axios in an emailed statement,
political rhetoric surrounding health care will only continue to rise as we enter an election year.
Candidates should focus on voters' top priorities,
lowering out-of-pocket costs and holding insurers
and their pharmacy benefit managers accountable.
Long story short,
the trust in public health institutions plummeted
among Republicans during the pandemic,
with prominent
members of the party questioning the safety of COVID vaccines and the actions of vaccine makers
as well as government agencies. And despite Trump's own history of vaccine skeptical comments,
his administration's Operation Warp Speed produced safe and affected COVID vaccines
at an unprecedented pace, an achievement that his base
doesn't really give him much credit for. Vaccine skepticism has grown among GOP voters in recent
years. In recent KAF, aka the Kaiser Family Foundation, polling, it found that Republicans
are significantly more likely than Democrats to believe that misinformation about COVID-19
in vaccines are true, although independents
are not very far behind them, or in some cases, they are more likely to believe misinformation.
For example, 29% of Republicans said that it's probably or definitely true that the
combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine has been proven to cause autism in children,
compared with 14% of Democrats and
34% of independents.
It's very important to emphasize that scientific research has repeatedly found no association
whatsoever between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Trump's calls for investigations into big pharma, it also taps into GOP voters' anxieties over education,
gender-affirming care for adolescents, and the youth mental health crisis.
A schools-related proposal on Trump's campaign website calls for the Food and Drug Administration
to convene a quote, outside panel to investigate whether transgender hormone treatments and
ideology increase the risk of extreme depression, aggression, and violence.
Last spring, Trump made a similar pledge during a speech given at the National Rifle Association's
annual meeting.
The campaign says that the Trump administration will explore whether, quote, common psychiatric
drugs, as well as genetically engineered cannabis and other narcotics, are causing psychotic
breaks.
It also calls for a Department of Justice investigation into whether
quote, Big Pharma and the big hospital networks have covered up the horrific
long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to
get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.
And another proposal to quote, dismantle the deep state,
it specifically calls out Big Pharma as part of the plan to quote, dismantle the deep state, it specifically calls out big pharma as part of the plan
to quote, ban federal bureaucrats from taking jobs
at the companies they deal with and regulate.
In an ideal world, which we are clearly very, very far from,
the idea that you can trust the prescription drugs
that a health provider offers you,
it should be a basic societal norm.
While mainstream politicians across the political spectrum on both the right and the left for years
have criticized the pharmaceutical industry over pricing, there has been a common understanding
that, for the most part, the U.S. system can be trusted to place safe and effective drugs on the
market and to remove them if new evidence showing otherwise
arises. But Trump is suggesting negligence or cover-ups of safety issues. Vaccine scientist
and pediatrician Peter Hotez again, he said, elements of the GOP, especially the far right,
has been targeting science and scientists as enemies of the state. I was hoping Trump would not go there.
Let's take our first break, and we will be right back.
Another part of Trump's Agenda 47 plan to take on Big Pharma is to end the global freeloading
on American consumers.
It's honestly a little difficult for me to just not read aloud the transcripts that are
on Trump's website that describe his agenda for Agenda 47 because they're just pure comedy
and they're all just provided on his website for our entertainment.
So I won't read all the transcripts, but I will read the highlights.
Here goes.
Crooked Joe Biden likes to pretend that he stands up to Big Pharma, but in fact, I was
the only president in modern times who ever took on Big Pharma, and I took it head on.
Biden canceled my tough-on Pharma policies the moment he had a chance.
As president, I signed a historic executive order declaring that the United States government would
pay the same price for pharmaceuticals as other foreign countries, and no more. We don't want to
pay anymore. Can you imagine that? How simple would that be? This would have saved American
patients billions and billions of dollars.
But shortly after taking office, Joe Biden rescinded my executive order, stabbing patients
and US citizens and especially our seniors right in the back.
For many years, Americans have been paying among the highest prices in the world for
our prescription drugs, while other countries negotiate sweetheart deals off the backs of
America.
On day one of my new term, I will sign an executive order to end this global freeloading
on American consumers for once and for all.
The United States is tired of getting ripped off.
We've been ripped off by everybody for so many decades.
We are tired of it.
Not going to happen.
They should have never rescinded
my original executive order. It just shows you the power of Big Pharma. Thank you very
much." This was a very easy one, and this was an honor to tell you because this is something
that should never have happened. It should never, ever have rescinded my executive order.
I just, I had to read that whole thing because it's incredible
that these transcripts are up here because they are so ridiculous sometimes. I love that
they also included like the ending after he already said thank you, how he was like, this
was a very easy one. But anyway, I just thought that transcript was worth a little read. Those
are his words, what he wants to do and how he thinks.
There's more transcripts later that I find funny, but for now, let's go into what he's saying.
Trump also has a plan to quote, end Joe Biden's pharmaceutical shortages and return the manufacture
of life-saving drugs to the United States. This is not just a public health crisis,
it's a national security crisis, he says. As part of my plan to obtain total independence from China, we will phase in tariffs and import
restrictions to bring back production of all essential medicines to the United States of
America where they belong.
I signed an executive order to begin this process in 2020, but Biden has shamefully
failed to follow through.
Part of this plan for Agenda 47 will be to restore
this executive order he keeps talking about,
Executive Order 13944, which was dated August 6th, 2020.
The executive order required federal agencies to
quote buy American by facilitating the domestic
production of medicines and medical devices that the
FDA determined essential to public health.
It did so by requiring federal agencies to buy medicines and medical devices that are
entirely produced in the United States.
Trump says that restoring this executive order will kickstart the domestic production of
life-saving drugs.
His website says,
American doctors should never have to give a patient a drug from an unapproved facility
in China or India. We can and must produce these essential medicines at home, rather than allowing
federal agencies to buy essential medicines from quote unsafe foreign countries. Another angle of
his Agenda 47 plan describes how Joe Biden's drug shortage constitutes an urgent public health crisis.
It says that Joe Biden's drug shortage is fueled by over-reliance on foreign-made medicines
and in some cases potentially unsafe manufacturers.
Here's some of that fun transcript.
Under crooked Joe Biden there has been a catastrophic increase in shortages of essential medicines.
It's a mess.
There's currently a shortage of at least 14 critical cancer
drugs in the United States.
They just can't get it.
And every month of delay, cancer treatment
increases the risk of death by at least 10%.
It's unthinkable that this could be happening in the United
States of America in 2023.
It is truly unbelievable.
We are becoming a third world country very rapidly between our open borders and our bad
elections.
We are third world.
He goes on to say that even more dangerously, the top producer of critical medicines that
we rely on in the United States is a place called China.
China produces 95% of all ibuprofen, 91% of hydrocortisone, 70% of all Tylenol, and nearly
half of all penicillin.
Can you imagine that?
This is not just a public health crisis.
This is a national security crisis.
As part of my plan to obtain total independence from China, we will phase in tariffs and import
restrictions to bring back production of all essential
medicines to the United States of America where they belong.
I signed an executive order to begin this process in 2020, but Biden has shamefully
failed to follow through.
He wants it ended.
He wants to take care of China.
This is a matter of tremendous urgency.
American lives are on the line, and it will be one of my top priorities as
president. It will also create countless new American jobs. Thank you." In another Agenda 47
video, Trump announced his plan to eradicate the drug addiction crisis in America.
We will not rest until we have ended the drug addiction crisis," he says. "'For three decades before my election, drug overdose deaths increased every single
year.
Under my leadership, we took the drug and fentanyl crisis head on, and we achieved the
first reduction in overdose deaths in more than 30 years.'"
On his website, in all caps, it says, Saving American Lives.
It says that Trump has pledged that he will not rest until we end this crisis, and that
he will, impose a full naval embargo on the drug cartels and deploy military assets to
inflict maximum damage on cartel operations.
Ask Congress to ensure that drug dealers and human traffickers receive the death penalty.
Direct US federal law enforcement to take down the gangs and organize street crime that
distribute these deadly narcotics on a local level.
Permanently designate fentanyl as a federally controlled substance.
Tell China that if they do not clamp down on the export of fentanyl's chemical precursors,
they will pay a steep price.
He wants to strengthen the pillars of work, faith, and family, which give life meaning
and hope for those struggling with addiction, and he wants to expand federal support for
faith-based counseling, treatment, and recovery programs.
It's faith-based for me.
Even if in theory some of this kind of sounds like a good idea, both subtly and not so subtly,
you see the bigotry seep through.
It's actually not about saving lives or taking care of addicts.
It's about implementing and cementing this country as a quote, faith-based country.
And having faith, which obviously only means Christianity when it's used in this context,
it's going to be America's savior.
And Trump over here is literally being a Bible salesman.
It's so nauseatingly obvious and slimy, it drives me crazy, and this shit actually works
on many, many people.
The last thing I'll touch on is a section of Agenda 47 that is titled, quote, ending the nightmare of the homeless, drug
addicts, and the dangerously deranged. It describes his plan to, quote, rescue
American cities from the scourge of homelessness, the drug addicted, and the
dangerously deranged. Trump wants to ban urban camping, offering violators the option to
either receive treatment and rehabilitation or face arrest. In this transcript, he says,
Our once great cities have become unlivable, unsanitary nightmares,
surrendered to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged.
We are making many suffer for the whims of a deeply unwell
few. And they are unwell indeed. The homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk
into a place for them to squat and do drugs. Americans should not have to step over piles
of needles and waste as they walk down the street in a beautiful city, or at least once beautiful
city because they've changed so much over the last ten years.
Our first consideration should be the rights and safety of the hard-working, law-abiding
citizens who make our society function. When I am back in the White House, we will use
every tool, lever, and authority to get the homeless off our streets.
We want to take care of them, but they have to be off our streets.
There is nothing compassionate about letting these individuals live in filth and squalor
rather than getting them the help that they need. We need professionals to help them.
For a small fraction of what we spend on Ukraine, we can take care of every homeless veteran
in America. Our veterans are treated horribly. Likewise, with all the money we will save
by ending mass unskilled migration, we will have a huge dividend to address this crisis
in our own country. Under my strategy, we will ban urban camping wherever possible.
Violators of these bans will be arrested, but they will be given the option to accept treatment
and services if they are willing to be rehabilitated. Many of them don't want that, but we will give them
the option. Okay, it's me again. Basically, Trump's plan to end homelessness is to criminalize it.
He wants to make homelessness illegal.
Alan Mills, executive director of the Uptown People's Law Center, told Newsweek that Trump's
plan is unconstitutional and will dissuade people from seeking assistance when they truly
need it.
Mills said Trump's remarks left him feeling appalled,
but unsurprised by the former president's antics
based on Trump's long history of anti-homeless agendas.
He says, it is blatant in the constitution
that you can't arrest people
just because they don't have a home.
But more importantly, it doesn't work.
People are not homeless
because they're afraid of punishments.
People are homeless because they don't of punishments. People are homeless because
they don't have a home. Trump's plan isn't over yet though. He continues by saying that,
we will then open up large parcels of inexpensive land, bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social
workers, and drug rehab specialists, and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated
and their problems identified.
We will open up our cities again,
make them livable and make them beautiful.
For those who are just temporarily down on their luck,
we will work to help them quickly reintegrate
into a normal life.
For those who have addictions, substance abuse,
and common mental health problems,
we will get them into treatment.
And for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will get them into treatment. And for those who are severely mentally ill and
deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions where they belong, with the
goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage. It's a tough task.
A very tough task was taking place on the streets, what's taking place when they're taking so much
drugs, but the fact is, we're
going to try.
This strategy will be far better and also far less expensive than spending vast sums
of taxpayer money to house the homeless and luxury hotels without addressing their underlying
issues, and they have so many of these underlying issues and needs.
This is how I will end the scourge of homelessness and make our cities clean
and safe and beautiful once again. We will do it. We will bring back America."
Ann Olivia, the chief executive officer for the NAEH, the National Alliance to End Homelessness,
also condemned Trump's plan, calling it alarming and dangerous in numerous ways. She said, "'The way to end homelessness is not to arrest people
and move them out of sight into internment camps.
Jail isn't housing.
Prison isn't housing.
Tent cities aren't housing.
Housing, with services tailored to people's specific needs,
must be at the center of any plan to end homelessness.
Prioritizing any immediate strategy other than housing is a red
herring, a political ploy to divert attention from the real resources communities need while
othering people in the most vulnerable situations imaginable. And then there was Vote Vets. Vote
Vets is a veterans advocacy group. They said on Twitter that rather than continue the progress
of helping homeless veterans, Trump wants to find them and toss them into what can be
best described as internment camps.
Whew. All in all, Agenda 47 is a big fucking yikes and it should concern you. I'm going
to leave you all with an uplifting quote from February 24th when Trump spoke
at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
He said, November 5th will be our new liberation day.
It will be their judgment day.
Wow.
Can't wait.
Until then, see ya.
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Oh, hi, I'm Rachel Zoe, and I'm back for another season of my podcast Climbing in Heels.
You might know me from the Rachel Zoe Project or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist.
And guess what?
I'm still just as fully obsessed with all things fashion, beauty, and business.
My podcast Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women,
and this season, we're taking things up a notch.
I'll be talking to some incredible women
across so many industries,
from models and beauty industry stars,
to doctors, entrepreneurs, and TV personalities.
Climbing in Heels is here to bring you a weekly dose
of glamour, inspiration, and fun.
Every week, listeners will be able to ask me any questions. I'm
answering it all. My life is absolutely crazy with so much going on and I'm so
beyond excited to bring you along for the ride. Whether we're talking red
carpet looks, current trends or products I'm obsessed with, I'm here to be your
fashion fairy godmother. Listen to Climbing in Heels every Friday on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart.
And this week, a podcast about Agenda 47, Donald Trump's plan for, you know, what to
do if he winds up winning reelection and being back in all of our lives in the sense of having political power as
Opposed to just back in all of our lives because he never shuts the hell up and neither do any of the journalists who report on him
So we're talking about that all week. You've been listening to the episodes put together where my colleagues today
I'm going to be talking about Trump's border policy, particularly his promise to
declare war on the cartels and use the United States military to attack them.
Before we get into it, I do want to note, if you notice this sounds a little bit different,
I am in Texas currently.
My father has leukemia.
He's being treated for it.
He's on chemo in the
hospital. Just finished chemo actually. But anyway, I had to fly down to Texas last minute
and I'm not recording this in my normal space. We should be back to normal very soon here.
But I just wanted to explain if you think it sounds different, it's not me fucking something
up. I just had to fly across the country. So let's talk about Agenda 47 and the cartels.
Back in 2008, when I was still a baby, and in fact in Dallas, Texas as I am right now,
I worked as the secretary for a financial planner named Al Jones.
I was bad at this job and I didn't really know much about financial planning then,
but I have since come to suspect
that Al was not great at his job either.
The first sign of this might've been the fact
that when I took the job,
Al got excited because I mentioned
during our little interview
that I wanted to be a writer someday.
And he was like, I'm a novelist.
And I was like, I thought you were a financial planner
And then he hands me a copy of his self-published novel
operation night watch
Now the plot to this motherfucker was
Barkingly mad spurred on by an epidemic of inner-city violence the government sent in a team of special forces guys to take on
The criminals I think it's the government who sends them
They may just be a bunch like Green Ber Berets and Navy Seals who decide to
fight crime on their own. It's been a while since I read the thing. I'm trying to have
a hardcover delivered to me, but there's not a lot of them left. So you may get to hear
more from this book. But anyway, the idea of this is that like, yeah, there's all of
these very much racially coded criminals in the streets making life too dangerous for
regular people, these evil drug dealers and robbers, and we just need our special forces
guys to murder them, right?
There was a lot of uncomfortable fetishization of brutal violence from this very mild-mannered
seeming dude who mostly held meetings at Texas roadhouses with old people to try to get them
to invest in
annuities or whatever a split annuity is. I've since forgotten. So again, obviously even at that
point in time, mostly having lived either in the country or the suburbs, I had spent enough time
in Dallas to know that his description of inner city life was not precisely accurate. But what
I remember most about the book is that it wasn't even really a story. It was, and talking to Al made this clear, a literal description of
the policy he wanted to see. The thin characters that he included in the story were basically
just there to help dress up what was again a policy proposal. And that policy was we
should use the US military to kill quote unquote
drug dealers.
Right?
Now, over the last 15 years or so, mainstream Republican policy has actually caught up to
my old boss.
And now President Trump has included in agenda 47, a promise to invade Mexico with US special
forces.
That's not the extent of the promise.
We will be talking about that all through this fun episode. On December 22nd, 2023, the Trump campaign uploaded a
page titled, President Donald J. Trump declares war on cartels to his campaign website. And
I don't know about you guys, I'm pretty sick in the motherfuckers voice, so I'm just going
to read how this opens. But if you go to the website, you can listen to him say this, if that makes you happier.
The drug cartels are waging war on America and it's now time for America to wage war
on the cartels. In this war, Joe Biden has sided against the United States and with the
cartels. They're making more money than they've ever made before. Times 10. There's never
been anything like it. They're major, major companies. They're bigger than even some
of our biggest companies. Biden's open border policies are a deadly betrayal of our nation.
He's definitely got a unique diction. You know Trump came up with that one more or less
on his own. Didn't need to be scripted. Now, Trump goes on to state after this that when he is president again, the United States
government will treat cartels the same way they treated ISIS, which you might recall
still exists and recently carried out an attack in Russia.
Republicans might note that this attack was by ISIS-K or ISIS-Khorasan, which is true,
and boy howdy, does Afghanistan come back into the story in a little bit.
So just, just, just keep that in mind.
But first let's continue with Trump.
He claims that under his presidency, we had a quote, very, very strong border.
And in fact, the strongest border in the history of the country and quote,
drugs were at a low for 45 years.
Now it's important to fact check things
both Joe Biden and Donald Trump say.
The use, the diction he uses here
does make fact checking slightly difficult.
The strongest border, kind of a meaningless term, right?
But the claim about drugs being at a low for 45 years
can be fact checked to some degree.
Although again, his approach to grammar
makes it hard to tell what he's claiming here.
Is drugs at a low for 45 years mean like drug use is at a low?
Drug smuggling is at a low?
I don't know.
He has made variations of this claim often though, including a note on his campaign website
in January 2023 that under his presidency, quote, drug overdose deaths declined nationwide
for the first time in nearly 30 years.
So let's assume that that's kind of what he meant to claim that drug overdose deaths were
the lowest they've been for 45 for 45 years, right?
Which is again, I mean, it's just wrong in its face because earlier he said for 30 years.
So like, which is it Donald, but whatever, let's, let's just wrong on its face because earlier he said for 30 years, so like, which is it Donald?
But whatever, let's say that what he meant to claim
is that under his presidency, drug overdose deaths
were at the lowest point in a long time, right?
If we're being fair, that's the fairest I could be to him.
And it is true that the overdose death rate
dropped during Trump's presidency for one year in 2018.
That's the only year that it dropped.
During each of the other three years he was in office, the overdose rate rose.
And in fact, it rose by record numbers in 2020.
PolitiFact also notes, quote, looking at overdose deaths from synthetic opioids, the closely
watched category that accounts for the largest share of all opioid overdose deaths, the rate
rose every year of Trump's presidency. This is worth noting because all of the things he wants
to do at the border to the cartels, all of his justifications for really needing to crack down
on human trafficking, for wanting to use the Navy SEALs or whatever to kill cartel guys to basically
invade Mexico, it's to stop fentanyl, which he describes as an
existential threat to the country and makes the claim that basically when I was president,
all that stuff was, we were taking care of it.
It was all declining.
And then when Biden took over, it got a lot worse.
No, the rate of fentanyl use and fentanyl related deaths in particular rose every single
year of Trump's presidency every single year.
Anyway, Trump promises no mercy to the cartels and that he will designate the major ones
foreign terrorist organizations with the goal of cutting off their access to global financial
systems.
Incidentally, this would provide a pretext to basically charging every drug user, whether
or not their drugs had anything to do with the cartel with material support of a terrorist organization and thus allow nightmarish penalties for people
caught dealing weed or LSD or whatever on the justification that they're aiding the cartels
with whom we are at war. Trump also states that he will ask Congress to pass legislation to allow
the death penalty for quote drug smugglers and human traffickers.
Now, he's made similar statements
around drug dealers in the past.
Here's how this particular rant
on the Agenda 47 website ends.
The drug cartels and their allies
in the Biden administration
have the blood of countless millions on their hands.
Millions and millions of families
and people are being destroyed.
When I am back in the White House,
the drug kingpins and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again. We did it once and we did it better than
anyone else. There's never been a better border than we had just two years ago. It was strong,
it was powerful, and it was respected all over the world. And now we're laughed at all over the world
and we're not going to let that happen much longer. We have to take over. We have to be tough and we
have to be smart. We have to be fair. But if we don't do something immediately, our country is gone.
Now that's all ridiculous, but it behooves us to look into the origins of this particular
violent fantasy. When President Trump was still in office, he repeatedly floated variations of a
single idea, using US missiles to destroy so-called drug factories, specifically those producing either fentanyl
or methamphetamine.
Obviously, cartels do operate sizable facilities where they prepare drugs for smuggling and
sale.
They have places where they cut fentanyl, which generally comes from elsewhere, into
other drugs or make it into pills, etc. and they've got places where meth is cooked, obviously.
So as best as the New York Times has been able to trace, his obsession with military
action against Mexico seems to have started in late 2019.
So while the coronavirus is spreading, our president, rather than focusing on a response,
is kind of obsessed with the fentanyl crisis, which is serious, but his way of dealing with
it was to hold these constant large Oval Office meetings that people absolutely
had to attend.
Quote, and this is from the New York Times, some participants felt the meetings were of
little use because officials tended to perform for Mr. Trump and he would perform for them.
And that does put the fun idea in my head of Donald Trump and a bunch of friends all
dancing about like, I don't know, whatever kind of animal
you would train to dance.
I'm spacing on that right now.
So why don't we just roll the ads for a second?
While I think of animals.
["The New York Times"]
We're back.
So I'm gonna continue that quote from the New York Times.
When the idea of military intervention was brought up at one such meeting, Mr. Trump
turned to Brett Giroir, who was there in his role as the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health.
Mr. Giroir was also a four-star admiral in the commissioned corps of the U.S. Public
Health Service, and he was wearing his dress uniform.
His main point was that the United States was unable to combat the crisis with treatment
alone according to a person briefed on his comments.
It was clear from the way Mr. Trump singled out Mr. Giroir that he had mistakenly thought
he was in the military because of his dress uniform according to two participants in the
meeting.
Mr. Giroir and his response suggested putting lead to target, the two participants recalled.
That seems likely Giroir denies this, right?
He claims, well, the president knows me really well.
We met all the time.
He would never mistake me for a soldier.
And like, sure, buddy, for one thing, I totally believe he could meet
with Trump regularly and Trump not remember him.
But also it kind of sounds, I mean, again, and these are all
maybe not the best sources, but assuming the people who are like, he said we should put lead to target are telling the truth.
That sounds to me like this guy wearing his uniform because he knows it'll impress Trump was also trying to use military metaphors because he, I think maybe was just trying to have this impact on Trump, right?
Make Trump think of him as like a military official giving advice.
There's some, some claims that, uh, people in the administration were so concerned about
this and were so terrified that like Trump might actually attack Mexico that they asked
Jaror to stop wearing his uniform to meetings. Basically being like, he's hypnotized by this
shit man. Like if you dress like a soldier, he'll take you seriously when you say this
crazy bullshit
Anyway at the same time this is all going on
Attorney General William Barr had also started floating the idea to the president that maybe the United States should consider
Carrying out some attacks in Mexico to kill cartel guys to stop the fentanyl, right?
His argument though was not so much that we should do it But that if threaten Mexico with military action, that will force the Mexican government to be more aggressive against
the cartels.
Now, William Barr is not a guy I consider very smart, and this is in fact a dumb idea.
Because like, Mexico's government has tried a bunch of different ways to fight the cartels,
they haven't destroyed them, right?
The current president of Mexico is more on the left and he has a policy described as
hugs not bullets, right?
Which is not using the stick to fight the drug cartels.
But that doesn't mean that hasn't been tried.
The Mexican government and the Mexican military have carried out a number of very high intensity
operations against cartels over the years.
It's just like, it's hard. The cartel problem is a massive, massive complicated thing. And the idea that like, if we threaten
Mexico, they'll finally do it, kind of understates the degree to which Mexico is capable of ending
this epidemic or ending this problem, right? Of somehow taking back this territory and
rendering the cartels unable to function. I don't actually know that they are. I don't know that I certainly wouldn't say that the
current president's plan is working, but no one else has stopped them either. So I don't know.
I think Barr is rather silly when he thinks that it's just a matter of threatening Mexico
with an invasion and that'll force him to take care of this shit. I don't really know that they have the ability to do that either way.
So for his part, Barr does not seem to have actually wanted military action in Mexico.
Again, he's thinking that the threat will do the trick.
And in fact, when Trump pushed back that like, well, maybe we could just shoot some missiles
into Mexico, Barr pushed back on this and was like, well, if we fired missiles, we might hit the
wrong target, right?
Basically civilian casualties could happen, so we should avoid that.
And that really kind of showcases how fucking dangerous someone like Barr is because his
plan is he's thinking he's playing 40 chess or whatever.
It's like, yes, the Mexican government will get scared and they'll take care of these
cartels for us.
But when you start floating that idea to a guy named Trump, he's going to be like, well,
yeah, let's just shoot him with missiles.
And you may push back against that initially, but when your stupid plan to bully Mexico
into destroying the cartels doesn't work because they can't or because they don't want to be
bullied, then where are you?
You can't step down at that point.
You can't back off once you've threatened to bomb them.
Because if you threaten to attack and they don't do shit, and then you just kind of back
off, you're going to look weak.
And that's the worst thing in the world to these people.
Trump's certainly not going to accept something like that.
It's part of why, like, what Barr was doing here is just incredibly irresponsible, just
with a guy like Trump. you can't pull that shit.
So this means again, that at some point, if this kind of process goes on, if Trump wins
office if he's to carry out something like what Barr was suggesting or something like
what Gerard was suggesting at some point, Trump's going to need to use military assets
to strike Mexico, if only to save face.
And again, the safest thing for him to use would be missiles to basically fire missiles,
guided missiles at factories or whatever, making drugs.
This avoids risking US servicemen.
It certainly avoids the risk of them getting captured.
Anyway, I'm going to quit from the New York Times again here.
At least twice during 2020, Mr. Trump privately asked his
defense secretary, Mr. Esper, about the possibility of sending Patriot missiles into Mexico to destroy
the drug labs and whether they could blame another country for it. Patriot missiles are not the kind
that would be used. They are surface to air weapons, but Mr. Trump had a habit of calling all missiles
Patriot missiles, according to two former senior administration officials. I just find that funny. Like, man, you are the, you're the commander in chief and you
don't know. Like you don't even know that like it's, I don't expect the president to
say like, I want you to fire this exact version of missile, you know, that may be a little
more granular than is necessary for him to know. But like, you should know that Patriot
missiles don't get fired at ground targets. That's not what they do. They're kind of a major part of like our military
or anti-missile defense. It's just, it's just very silly of him.
All this nonsense came to a head for the first time in 2020 when during one of these interminable
fentanyl meetings, Trump looked over to Defense Secretary Mark Esper and asked, can we blow up these drug labs with a missile and make it look like another country did
it?
Now, that's, you know, bad, right?
Like it brings up a lot of questions, namely like what other country is in a position to
fire missiles into Mexico, right?
Like if you're saying, oh, it wasn't us, are you saying it's Canada?
Cause they'd have to kind of cross a lot of space to do that.
Are you saying Guatemala's firing missiles into Mexico?
Because it doesn't really seem like a Guatemala move.
Who are you going to blame?
Thankfully, Esper was one of those rare Trump appointees who possessed a basic minimal capacity
for rational thought.
And we never, thankfully, got the answer to the question, what would have happened if
he'd fired a missile into Mexico.
Esper argued against the idea and then he wrote about it in his memoir, which I have
an issue with.
He's one of these guys who, yeah, maybe we should have known about that when it happened
rather than waiting for your fucking book, but people got to get paid, I guess.
Reactions from Mexico to these revelations about Trump considering missling them and now the fact that he's got on his website, like our plan is to
use military assets to attack the cartels.
Reactions from Mexico have been pretty universally negative.
For reasons I probably don't need to elaborate on, President Lopez Obrador
told reporters in March, quote, this initiative of the Republicans, besides
being irresponsible is an offense to the people of Mexico a lack of respect to our
Independence to our sovereignty if they do not change their attitude and think they are going to use Mexico for their propaganda
Their electoral and political purposes we are going to call for not voting for this party because it is
Interventionalist and human hypocritical and corrupt
He's wrong there. I don't know how much ability the
president of Mexico has to shift votes in the United States, but you know, it is interesting.
You don't often hear a world leader, particularly not of the US's largest trading partners, say that
they're going to take sides in an election. Not that openly at least, but you know who never takes
sides except for your side, because
they're always on your side.
The products and services that support this podcast and or program.
We're back.
So the opposition candidate next year's Mexican presidential elections also made a
statement that was a little bit more moderated than Obrador's, but it belittled Trump's
comments about using military force on Mexico and stated, rather than threats, we should
work in a smart way.
So nobody's really happy with this down in Mexico.
Not surprising to see why.
Meanwhile in US politics, conservatives are now falling over themselves to justify military intervention in Mexico.
As soon as Trump adopts this, it now becomes basically the standard Republican line that like we need to be sending our special
forces guys in to fight the fucking cartels.
I'm not gonna go over a laundry list of all the dumb fucks
who have embraced this crap idea,
but I do wanna read one quote from an ABC News article.
Quote, House Oversight Committee Chairman,
James Comer, Republican, Kentucky, on Tuesdays
said that it was a mistake that then-president
Donald Trump did not bomb meth labs in Mexico
after he had reportedly asked his defense secretary
about the possibility in 2020. One of the things we learned post-Trump presidency is that he had ordered a bombing of a couple
fentanyl labs, crystal meth labs in Mexico, just across the border, and for whatever reason
the military didn't do it, Comer said on Fox and Friends, I think that was a mistake.
Now I want to discuss for a second how impossible it is for this plan to work. As I noted earlier, there are drug labs in Mexico,
quite a few of them making a variety
and not just making, but in many cases,
taking drugs that come from elsewhere
and basically packaging them in a way
that they can be sold or smuggled.
That is, those facilities certainly exist,
but they are not like the large centralized factories
that I don't know, like a military rival
would use to produce tanks, right? Most of of this work even if it is currently being done
in a sizable facility can be done in smaller facilities and can be moved
pretty readily and again it's just not very intelligent to think that you can
cripple this the same way you can cripple an enemy's ability to produce
missiles or tanks and and even then, that's not easy.
We're actually really bad at it.
We've repeatedly during wars bombed countries to attempt to destroy their
ability to produce munitions and failed to really do that to a substantial extent.
And so something like the narcotics industry, which is even more underground,
even more hard to identify by nature of what it is.
It's just, it's a big ask on the surface, right?
It's also worth laying out why it's dumb as hell to conflate drug cartels with ISIS, because
a big part of why Trump, how Trump thinks things are going to go is like, well, ISIS
took over Raqqa, took over Mosul, and then we beat them up.
We kicked the crap out of them. We
destroyed ISIS. That's what he, I think that's literally what he thinks happens. And it's
certainly what he wants his voters to think happened, but that's not really what happened.
When the physical caliphate was liberated, ISIS went underground and they are still there
and still have the potential to take and hold territory again. ISIS attacks in both Iraq
and Syria have been raising steadily for years.
There's a lot of reasons for this.
Big part of why things have gotten worse in Syria is that the Biden administration has
done fuck all to stop the Turkish government from attacking the autonomous region Rojava,
who are the folks who defeated ISIS in Syria, and that has degraded their capacity to keep
a fucking lid on things.
So number one, this victory he claims wasn't a total victory.
And number two, the reason that why ISIS was knocked out of Mosul and knocked out of most
of their territorial claims in a fairly short period of time was because of a couple of
things.
Number one, the US was providing support,
but we were not carrying out either operation on our own.
In both Iraq and Syria,
we were supporting other extant militant groups
that had a long history
and a decent amount of support in the region, right?
And number two, and maybe you can make the claim
that that's the case with the Mexican army,
but the other aspect is that ISIS
were not guys who had been in charge for forever in that
region and had deep bases. Most of them were foreigners and they were foreigners who had
very quickly taken urban areas and then started running them like dog shit. Cartels have existed
for a lot longer. They have effectively and do effectively rule large chunks of Mexico and have
done so for longer than ISIS has existed. They have deep networks of local ties and in many areas a reputation for providing services
better than the Mexican government has done.
I don't say this to whitewash how horrible these organizations are, but they are not
ISIS, which just came up seemingly out of nowhere, took over a bunch of cities and then
got fucking kicked out and never had a huge base of support among the populace, particularly
in Iraq because, again, there were just some assholes who showed up one day as opposed
to the cartels, which especially once the US starts bombing Mexico and killing Mexican
civilians, which will happen any time we're bombing them, just the amount of support it
could potentially build for the fucking cartels is substantial.
But even beyond that, the idea that you could knock these people out easily, they're not
again, they have a deep base of support, a deep history in these areas.
They have functioned for a long time, not just running things, but also constantly fighting against a military and the government
that has a degree of capacity and technology at its back. So the idea that you're just going to
be able to kick these guys out of whatever, Sonora, the way that ISIS was, quote unquote,
kicked out of Mosul, it's fanciful, right? It's a's a farce now speaking of farces, I want to talk about kind of the
The thing that we should all see is the model for what might actually how it would actually work if Trump tried
To go into Mexico to take out the cartels and this brings me back to Afghanistan, right?
During Trump's administration the Department of Defense was empowered by the president to use vastly more force in their attempts to destroy Taliban drug labs.
Obviously Taliban funded a lot of their war effort with the sale of opium, you know, heroin
or whatever.
And it was believed that if we can cut, if we can destroy their ability to grow and process
this stuff, we can cut the legs out from underneath the Taliban.
Trump really bought into this and allowed the DOD to accelerate their efforts to do this.
Our forces started carrying out a mix of airstrikes and special operations attacks
on Taliban drug labs in 2017. It is the same plan that they executed that Trump is pushing
for the United States to use in
Mexico.
And in Afghanistan, this plan was such an abysmal failure that not only did it not stop
drug production, it actually accelerated the production of opiates in fucking Afghanistan
at the highest level in recorded history.
This program failed so badly that the Pentagon ended their strikes on drug labs in 2019.
They gave up in two years because they couldn't do it.
They were bad at it.
Now, the fact that this kind of plan that Trump has pushed would undeniably fail to
actually destroy the cartels, to stop drugs and human trafficking across the border, this
does not mean that it would actually be a failure for the reasons that Trump and many
other Republicans want it to fail, which is that declaring war on cartels allows them
to justify a major power grab and destroy or in the lives of US citizens they already
see as enemies.
And I don't mean to say that this is more serious than the lives that will be lost in
Mexico.
It's certainly not, but this is very serious as well.
Last October, a think tank, the Center for Renewing America, published a policy paper
with the fun title, It's Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels.
The paper makes it clear that illegal immigration is just as much a priority as fentanyl in
carrying out these actions.
And in fact, it lists the goals of this planned military policy in Mexico this way.
Number one, ending the illegal flow of people, trafficking victims, and drugs across the
southern border.
Now, the paper suggests creating a new classification that is similar but different to foreign terrorist
organization for the cartels.
It lists a series of escalatory stages that Trump's administration should take, starting
with putting pressure on the Mexican government to take care of things themselves.
And since the Mexican government is not really capable at present of ending either migration
or drug cartels, escalation is inevitable.
So after this phase fails,
phase two is to have the president start deploying military units initially to
interdict the coast but also to coordinate with the DEA to target and
kill cartel figures and destroy their assets. US ports will be closed whenever
the number of illegal immigrant apprehensions at the border increases
past a certain level, right? So they're also saying, and again, you get the feeling from this paper,
while Trump always harps on the drugs and the horrors of fentanyl, it's very
clear from this paper there is concerned, and if not more concerned, about the fact
that non-white people are entering the country. Quote, while costly to the
economy, this, closing ports, would incentivize the Mexican
government to crack down on human smugglers, migrant caravans, and cartel trafficking networks.
Now into the fourth and final phase of this plan, the US government would basically carry
out a full-scale invasion of parts of Mexico in order to defeat cartels and secure the
border.
At no point are there any suggestions made as to how this might be done or why it would be more successful than the attempts that failed in
Afghanistan. Instead they just move right on to the last phase, the victory phase,
which includes these suggestions. Congress should enact legislation that
creates enhanced penalties for US citizens found guilty of collaborating
with the cartels. Punishment should include mandatory minimum federal sentencing of 15 years in prison for
working with cartels labeled as transnational criminal organizations, and mandatory minimum
sentencing of 25 years in prison for working with cartels labeled under the new cartel
statutory guidelines.
Congress should enact legislation that defines material and financial supports for the cartels
designated under the new statutory framework as tantamount to engaging in terrorism against the United States.
This basically means, depending on how this is written, it could mean that doing drugs,
possessing drugs, having friends who sell or use drugs, could mean that you're committing
terrorism by supporting the cartels.
It is not impossible that that is how these laws, should they be actually put on the books
ever, should this program be enacted, it's not impossible that that's how it would be
interpreted and why wouldn't they want to?
This would allow them to lock up a shitload of people that they see as being on the left.
If you think back to Richard Nixon, a big reason why, and this is a stated reason why
the war on marijuana was escalated, is that it let you arrest the fucking hippies and
anti-war protesters and put them in prison.
That is a big part of what a lot of people in Trump's orbit want to do with this.
I say that because the guy who wrote this fucking thing is a dude named Ken Cuccinelli.
Ken is a major anti-left culture war fucker.
One of his jobs under Trump was he worked under Chad Wolf, who was the, illegally, the
director of the DHS, during the 2020 uprising.
In September of 2020, he ordered the intelligence branch of the Department of Homeland Security
to downplay threats by white supremacists
and instead focus on the danger of Antifa.
Under his watch, DHS also compiled intel reports on journalists in Portland, Oregon, and defended
the abduction by federal agents of civilians in unmarked vehicles.
When people were being abducted off the streets of Portland, he was a big fan of that.
Ken Guccinelli really likes that idea.
He is also essentially a white nationalist himself.
In August of 2019, he announced a revised regulation to go into effect
October 15th, 2019 that expanded the public charge requirements for legal
immigration, made it harder to get green cards and visas if you were poor.
Basically he stopped, he made it basically if get green cards and visas if you were poor. Basically, he
stopped. He made it basically if you, if you might need something like food stamps, it's
harder to get, you know, to immigrate legally to the United States. He was asked, doesn't
this kind of contradict, you know, that poem on the Statue of Liberty about welcoming,
you know, poor and persecuted people. Cuccinelli suggested a revision to the poem on the Statue of Liberty.
Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become
a public charge. So that's, that's cool. He also made a point that the poem referred to
European immigrants. So, you know, fuck those non-white people, right? You know, like the
poem was never meant for them.
He's a fucking Nazi, right?
He's a white nationalist at the very least.
Like Ken Cuccinelli is the kind of person
that a decent society would,
Google what the Romans did with the Tarpeian rocks
when they had someone who was a traitor to their system.
And that's what should happen to Ken Cuccinelli.
But instead, he's trying to get the US military
to invade Mexico.
So that's good.
Anyway, that's a Trump's agenda 47 policy on the cartels.
I hope you all had a lot of fun.
Anyway.
Bye.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until
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