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Journalist Nathan Stone and Producer Josh Carmody invite you to sit down for deep dives on the rapid changes happening in Trump’s new America.
00:02
The death toll is mounting as US strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling boats continue apace. The Trump administration has justified the attacks by saying that the country is in an armed conflict with drug cartels. The claim is legally dubious, but Trump is hardly the first president to rely on extrajudicial killings as part of his foreign policy. Welcome to the Politics of New America. On the show today,
00:28
America's love affair and long history of extrajudicial killings. And the Pentagon loses its press corps. I'm your host Nathan Stone and with me tonight is producer Josh Carmody. When I heard about this, the Venezuelan, like, boats being blown up and obviously I don't want to make light of it. But part of what I do here is kind of just bring up movies that it reminds me of.
00:54
This is quite literally the plot of Clear and Present Danger. Like, Trump admitted that the CIA did stuff in Venezuela. That's the whole crux of Clear and Present Danger is the president not admitting that. It's... I don't know. That's crazy. I mean, truth is stranger than fiction and boy, yeah, I do wonder how the CIA uh
01:23
felt about that. wonder if someone might have reminded the president that they are a secret organization that does things clandestinely as opposed to Trump who does everything on camera. Yeah. But do you remember uh after Hurricane Katrina they were doing like a uh
01:42
like raising money, like kind of telethon thing. Oh, absolutely. Kanye West and Mike Myers were on screen and Mike Myers was just like, and we need to give all this money. And then Kanye West immediately just said, George Bush doesn't care about black people. And Mike Myers like had that like look over at a look back and kept reading from the teleprompter. Yeah. Kanye West is Trump. Mike Myers is the CIA. Oh, yeah. This the Venezuela situation.
02:12
I think if these were more normal times, if we even remember what normal times are anymore, this would dominate the headlines day in, day out. is upsetting. It is upsetting. have zero idea who these people were. mean, at least as far as I have been reading, I haven't seen anything where they've had presented any evidence or gone and gone through.
02:37
wreckage. don't know, maybe you're gonna tell me about this. like it's based on your reaction seems like we will. uh But that seems like that would be very important. And I think, you know, people when he initially declared this kind of war on or he said the cartels are terrorist organizations. And I think that allows sort of these extra rules, quote unquote, that they can do. um It's unacceptable. It's unacceptable.
03:07
It really is. these rules that you mentioned, yeah, that's kind of the crux of what I wanted to talk about today because ever since 9-11, there has been this kind of, and this goes beyond Republican and Democrat. is every United States administration has used the rules put in place uh that were meant to go after Al-Qaeda, meant to go after, you know,
03:36
They're specifically uh the perpetrators of 9-11.
03:45
Those rules have been expanded and...
03:54
used by every single administration for these extrajudicial killings. And it's one of those things where Trump really isn't even the worst offender, quite frankly. But what Trump does is amplifies everything that he does. And the people that he chooses to go after with these are not typical. uh We'll talk a little bit about Obama was an absolutely just blood soaked.
04:23
President when it comes when it came to these but his his and they were always drone strikes with Obama. He was he was the drone president. But this was in uh Pakistan. This was in, you know, kind of the the greater Middle East and You would hear about them on the news, but it was so far removed from everything else that was going on that Western media really didn't.
04:50
pay it a lot of attention, right? Every now and then you'd hear about it. But he was kind of pretty continuously using these drone strikes as part of America's foreign policy. And that was continued uh into the Biden administration as well. So Democrats are just as guilty of this as Republicans. And it has such a long kind of bloody legacy ever since 9-11 and the victims of these extrajudicial killings.
05:19
You know, this is in the thousands at this point, and there's really no recourse if this happens to you. If the United States military makes a mistake and bombs your family instead of, you know, a terrorist den. That's basically in a lot of these places, akin to an act of God. There is no recourse, right? There is no justice that's going to be done here. And
05:47
So much of this in the past has been papered over by American soft power, right? So they would, especially in countries, um you know, where Obama was active, it was always, oh, hey, we're partnering with these countries, right, to root out terrorists. know, America's providing arms, they're providing funding uh through USAID and all of the organizations that they ran, right?
06:16
So there was always kind of this quid pro quo. It was, hey, we're going to put a bunch of predator drones in your sky, and every now and then you're going to hear an explosion, and don't think too hard about it. But in return, we're going to help you with your security issues. We're going to provide this form of aid, whether economic or social or military. But Trump is such a different breed, right? He's such a mask-off bully.
06:44
That he's not really doing anything that the United States hasn't been doing for the last close to 30 years now. But the way he does it and the targets that he chooses are so. Wildly different than what we've seen in the past, that it feels like a new era almost. He's got the energy of the younger brother.
07:09
who wants to do all the stuff the older brother got to do and maybe the parent realized they shouldn't. because recently he said he was like, oh, well, you know, look, 50 % of the past presidents decided to use that if they thought about using the insurrection act and that and he's upgraded that to 50 % of the presidents did use the insurrection act. it's like he just yeah, he tries to justify his actions by
07:39
pointing to the people that came before. But that is the actions of a petulant child and not of uh a Starfleet commander that I would like to follow. Yeah. And his claims are so wildly outlandish, especially when it comes to that, that if you know even a little bit of American history, you just say, no, that's not.
08:08
at all, even close to the truth. The Insurrection Act has been invoked mercifully few times because it's really not been something that America has had a big problem with. I it was about 17 or something. I did recently read about that. I won't say that is for sure, but it's certainly less than half. Oh, God. Yes. Yeah. this is the yeah, his his style of just
08:38
claiming things is always going to be a bit of an issue when you're trying to establish a reality to work from. But, yeah, let's let's kind of dive in a little bit about what's been happening in the Caribbean and clear and present danger as far as Trump is concerned. the United States is is has about 10,000 personnel now deployed.
09:07
the Caribbean, uh this is Army, Navy, Air Force, and they're spending what must be absolutely ludicrous amounts of money carrying out these attacks. And let's call it what it is. This is basically bullying a smaller nation, right? This is a fight that Venezuela didn't pick. It came to them. Now, we've seen about six attacks.
09:34
It's six strikes on Venezuelan ships and strike is kind of a almost a nice term to put on it. If you've seen any of the videos, these boats just simply cease to exist. didn't know there was videos. yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I didn't know that there's yeah, you can see them all the Pentagon's published them. uh Yeah, they it's it's kind of simply one minute. There's a boat and then the next second it's just all fire.
10:02
And there's nothing left of it. These aren't precision strikes. These are very much just guided missiles. And what's absolutely insane about this, you think about it, is firstly, these are unarmed ships. They're not warships. They're not built for combat in any way. These are, in a lot of ways, repurposed fishing boats. And that is if you take the administration at its word that what
10:32
we're seeing these strikes on are boats laden with drugs destined for American cities.
10:40
There's been no evidence and the administration actually hasn't released even one piece of evidence for any of these strikes that that these were narco boats were kind of left at. Do we take their word for it? Now, there's been some joking from the from various administration officials that, you know, it's a bad time to be going, you know, being a fisherman in Venezuela.
11:10
And that just kind of makes you think that, okay, yeah, maybe they're not being too careful about this, but older administrations back in saner times would have had more of a benefit of the doubt. Now, I don't think any administration prior to this one would have done this, but again, that erosion of American soft power is now why we're seeing more pushback, especially from other uh Caribbean nations. So we've seen the president of
11:40
Columbia come out and uh at the UN, his uh scathing speech about Trump, Trinidad and Tobago is like, hey, think you, you know, kind of lodging complaints where they're fearing that uh two of their citizens might have been killed in one of these strikes. And I think the worst part about all of this is that the United States Coast Guard,
12:10
has a very strong presence in the Caribbean doing drug interdiction and has for years. And I have a bit of a connection to this. in my day job, I write about the Canadian Navy and every year the Canadian Navy sends usually one, sometimes it'll sometimes two uh ships down to the Caribbean. They call it Operation Caribbean.
12:41
and they help the American Coast Guard run drug interdiction. And every time they come back, they caught a boat with so many hundreds of kilograms of cocaine or whatever.
12:56
There are systems in place for this. And drug interdiction is the civilized way to do this. Because again, these aren't warships. If one of these little boats comes across a destroyer or even a Coast Guard boat, it can't fight them. It can't fight off a warship. So what they'll do is they'll board those ships, they'll make arrests, and they'll...
13:23
proudly display on big old tables or on the flight deck of these warships, know, all of this cocaine that they've found. And they've been doing this for years and years. This is not something that's new. It's not something that they tried and then failed. This is a continuous operation that has had an extraordinary amount of success. Yeah, I met a guy who did that. I was at like a friend's party and it was like a kind of a high school friend of his. m
13:50
who was in the Navy and he talked about doing that like kind of like boarding a boat and doing this kind of thing. No one got killed. No, he certainly didn't have a he wasn't like, oh, I'm now I have PTSD because it was a terrible experience. And oh, it was it was literally just like, oh, well, we found it. And that's the end of it. Yeah, some arrests, I guess, you know, but it wasn't like it wasn't a seagull movie. Yeah. And so
14:20
This is what we're seeing now is just these indiscriminate killings, these strikes. I hate to call it political theater where people are losing their lives, but that's kind of what it seems to be is political theater for a domestic audience, for specifically Trump's base that feel like not enough has been done, right? That the drug war needs to be reignited and
14:49
you know, there needs to be a new sheriff in town, one that's going to shoot first and ask questions later. Because that's really the only justification other than trying to start an armed conflict with Venezuela, which maybe is possible, but I find it hard to believe even for this administration that they would be looking to start a full-blown war. ah
15:21
So if it's the case that this is for domestic consumption, then none of these strikes actually matter. They won't really move the needle, especially because what you're seeing coming from Venezuela and Colombia traditionally is cocaine. Cocaine only accounts for about a quarter
15:49
of American uh drug related deaths. The big one, of course, is fentanyl. Fentanyl is king of the castle. And we're not seeing them go after fentanyl in the same way that they're going after these Venezuelan cartels. Unless you're Canada. Unless you're Canada. In which case, you know, that one dude with the backpack with fentanyl and it was...
16:15
was enough for us to get sanctioned, And appointed a fentanyl czar. Oh, yes. Oh, man, that would be a great job if you could get it. What do you even do? You sit in an office like, hey, tell me if you see any fentanyl. mean, the last time we talked about the fentanyl czar was a thousand episodes ago, as far as I'm concerned when it comes to this show. But we did at that time talk about how they really need to have a funny hat.
16:42
Oh, Something like really like, you know, Flintstones water buffalo style like or what the the the royal guard like it's got to have that's got to have a Kutraman's, you know. I'm also thinking of some kind of uniform with just way too many medals. the insane amount of medals like really like you if the fentanyl is coming down the hallway, they better be jingling jangling my spurs. They jingle jangle jingle jingle jangle.
17:13
Oh, yeah. I, man, better times, better times. So.
17:22
That kind of sets our scene here. And there's a couple of, I think, geopolitical things that we could mention about Venezuela. I don't. Sorry to cut you off. I don't actually understand where the position of the Venezuelan government is at. Are they kind of considered a left wing or right wing government? I don't really know. So the Maduro government is kind of your classic authoritarian left.
17:49
wing government. it came from, if you remember Hugo Chavez. the name, but I don't know. yeah. It's long time ago now. But basically Maduro is basically his successor. uh technically, yeah, what you're looking at is a government that claims to be socialist, but is in a lot of ways kind of more authoritarian than anything else. Maduro's had
18:20
Again, uh there are elections. Venezuela claims to be a democracy. That being said, a lot of international observers, including the Americans, but also probably more believable sources at this point, are saying that the last elections probably were not free and fair, probably rigged in some way to ensure his victory.
18:49
What's interesting about the Venezuelan regime was for a while, especially under uh Chavez back in kind of the 2010s, uh there was a real spike in oil production and prices. So Venezuela was actually doing very, very well. And through the socialist government, the government took in the lion's share of the profits from that and were able to reinvest that into communities.
19:17
And so for a while, while Chavez's government was very authoritarian, could, they enjoyed a lot of support because of all of the things that they were doing with that oil money and the social policies and programs. Now, oil being uh not the most stable commodity, there was a huge, huge crash. And I think that was kind of in the mid teens. And that
19:47
plummeted the country into into kind of this this impoverished chaos where crime skyrocketed, you know, the the shelves were empty, basically just a total economic collapse that that you always get with kind of petro states that don't have anything to fall back on. so Venezuela has kind of been caught in this. Cycle ever since, where you have a socialist government that really can't
20:16
afford a lot that it's really quite broke, that's very authoritarian, but still enjoys a lot of support amongst its own base. So it's a very complex country with a very deeply complicated history. But there are a lot of Venezuelan expatriates that
20:44
immigrated to the United States over the years, especially once kind of everything fell out of the economy. And it's amongst that Venezuelan population where you do get a lot of hardliners that are uh pro-Trump and kind of pro-military intervention in Venezuela. So there's kind of a lot of variables when you look at it.
21:13
But Venezuela recently has been leaning very heavily on China. China has become its biggest customer as far as oil goes. going back to the old bipolar world of the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States was always very protective of the Americas. And I don't mean protective in a nice fatherly way. mean protective as in, like, this is our stuff. Don't you dare touch it.
21:44
So part of what Trump might be doing here in putting pressure and trying to destabilize already not a very stable country is that a collapse, the collapse of the Maduro regime in Venezuela would economically hurt China, who is buying a lot of their gas.
22:12
But also Venezuela is buying a lot of Chinese goods, a lot of Chinese military equipment, that kind of thing. there's a good relationship there between those two countries that the United States could kind of get in the way of. The other thing to realize, too, is that Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil in the world. So even larger than something like a state like Saudi Arabia. And we know Trump loves oil. The Republican Party loves oil.
22:42
So some of the thought there is.
22:47
are we looking at a regime change situation? And especially if the CIA are active in Venezuela, because the CIA in South America, oh boy, uh we've seen this movie a few times and we kind of know how this ends. Harrison Ford's getting his plane ready to extract the CIA agents. Calista, don't worry. Don't worry, Calista. I just got to take one more plane out, one more flight.
23:15
Yeah, there's numerous reasons why Trump could be going after Venezuela and might see it uh as a good thing. There's also the fact that this really plays into the administration's
23:32
strategy of flooding the zone. The Epstein thing still hasn't gone away. ah But hey, some some South American military action. Oh, that could distract people. So, yeah, there's so much here. ah And. I think we should we should get to the part because I could talk about this all day, but. uh How in the world is any of this legal? It's a really good question.
24:03
It comes down to a couple things. Firstly, that the United States has designated
24:11
the Tren de Aragua cartel, which is active in Venezuela, which is kind of the main cartel that they are saying is are operating these these vessels as a designated foreign terrorist organization. So that is again, kind of not how the term was originally intended to be applied. uh Generally terrorist
24:40
what they considered to be terrorist organizations were more ideologically and politically motivated organizations that were violent, that were conducting terrorist attacks, which I think is pretty fair if you're going to call an organization terrorist organization. You should probably check to see that they have committed some form of terrorism. The administration, of course, argues that their form of terrorism is by selling drugs to Americans.
25:10
And those Americans then die of overdoses. uh But yeah, it's a very legally kind of dubious thing. Now, the problem with that, though, is that just because they claim that these people are narco terrorists doesn't automatically make them lawful military targets because the United States has to be engaged in an armed conflict.
25:40
with for targets to be lawful military targets. And can you be engaged in armed conflict with drug runners? Right? Is that a group that qualifies for this? And here is the issue is that the administration claims they are in a non-international armed conflict with drug cartels.
26:12
Which is not really a term that we're familiar with where armed conflict comes into it, right? Non-international armed conflict sounds like maybe a civil issue, but of course you're killing people in international waters, so you don't really have that backing you up.
26:35
What they're doing is basically trying to sidestep international law around, you know, how you can engage militarily. And it's not really working. The UN has come out and kind of condemned these attacks and just called them what they are, which is extrajudicial killing. constitutionally even.
27:04
we come to the same issues that we've seen so many times in this show, uh Article 2 of the Constitution lays out that the president is commander in chief of the army.
27:19
And because everything around that is so beautifully vague, you have constitutional experts on one side that say, this does grant the president power to authorize strikes against military targets. And you have others that say, well, no, no, no, the president doesn't declare wars. So he can only act as the commander in chief in the military.
27:47
with the powers given to him by Congress, and Congress would need to declare war against uh whatever organization, whatever nation that the president feels like bombing today.
28:00
And because this is so unclear, it would come down to Congress to stop the president's actions in this case, right? Because Congress kind of holds the ultimate power. I know it doesn't look like it, it doesn't seem like it, and we've not seen them use it in quite some time, but Congress can actually veto most of the things that the president does. They won't, but they could.
28:31
So all of this is bolstered by something that I mentioned earlier in the episode. After 9-11, there was the 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force Act, or the AUMF. And we have mentioned this on the show previously a million episodes ago. But what this did was it gave the president extended powers to work outside of congressional authority.
29:01
while going after the terrorists responsible for 9-11. However, that suite of powers has been extended and expanded by every administration so that now, through the authorization of use of military force,
29:28
The United States is blowing up Venezuelans in boats and hoping that they're terrorists, right? This is how far we have strayed. But each administration has pushed that envelope further, right? II was the one that got the ball rolling here and of course had his own wars. But Obama killed over 3,000 people and over 300 of those confirmed civilians with his drone attacks. uh
29:57
in 2001.
30:01
uh There was, uh so this would have been during the Biden administration, drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan that killed, and this ended up being quite famous because they tried to cover this up, the United States government, but a man named Zamari Ahmadi, who was an Afghan aid worker and nine members of his family, which included seven children.
30:31
and he was employed by the Nutrition and Education International, which was a US-based humanitarian organization, I think under the USAID umbrella.
30:43
So after that strike, the Pentagon initially claimed that the strike was successful and righteous because it had killed someone it characterized as a suspected terrorist. And the more that came out about this attack, the more and more it got worse and worse for the Pentagon, because not only did they not kill anyone related to terrorism, ah they killed someone who was working for a US organization.
31:12
and just a bunch of the kids in his family. And this is the kind of thing that
31:21
US soft power used to gloss over, they used to smooth out those wrinkles, right? When you're fighting this war on terror, it used to be the type of thing where they could say, oh, but look at all the good we're doing and look at, we've hounded these terrorist groups.
31:44
but it's always been there in the background, right? Trump is doing nothing, nothing that previous presidents didn't do when it came to extrajudicial killings. In fact, he's got some ground to make up on some of the more recent presidents. And all of this is kind of come from this monster that grew out of the authorization of use of military force.
32:11
It's all from that 2001 thing. there's like Bush made the Infinity Gauntlet and he's kept passing it on to the next president and they keep adding Infinity Stones to it and making it more and more powerful. And they just keep getting with. And now we have Trump with the full blown Infinity Gauntlet. But it's like now everything's out in the open. He had he has the full power. That's it. Everyone can point the finger. So while he maybe hasn't exercised that quite as much in this
32:42
brief period of time that he has been president for his second term. uh The stuff he's doing, uh he's very proud about. Yes. Which is upsetting. The other US presidents would have at least put on the veneer of civility and, you know, the. And we're not condoning that, by the way. We're just I think we're trying to paint a picture of like why this is.
33:09
upsetting why we should probably focus on it. Yeah. But also it was never good. No. But the its escalation is a serious, serious problem in this administration. And it will not get better. That's it. Yeah. The broadening of scope of how this this suite of powers is being used is honestly the most worrying thing about this, because
33:37
Terrorism is such an absolutely abstract concept, right? We pretend and did for many years that this was something that we could nail down what terrorism was, what a terrorist was, what kind of people were terrorists, what did they look like? It was even less of a dirty word prior to 2001. Absolutely. I I'm a big Star Trek fan. Any other Star Trek fans who are listening have watched Deep Space Nine.
34:02
One of the main characters in the show lived through an occupation that is in the kind of the beginning of it overthrown and things are changing. She regularly refers to herself openly that, no, what I did was terrorism. I had to do this to survive. It wasn't quite the word that it was prior to 9-11. So and now we live in this post 9-11 world, which I hate to say it. Anytime I used to hear that, I'd be like,
34:32
But it's true. No, it was a huge fundamental shift in society for the entire planet. Absolutely. And what you had was something that fundamentally changed the nature of the world's remaining superpower. Right. This was this was an act that, yeah.
35:02
You know, the death toll when you compare the death toll of 9-11 to things that we've seen recently, recent atrocities, it really does pale in comparison. But the damage it did to America's psyche, I think, is probably the lasting legacy because we don't have Afghanistan. We probably, well, we may or may not have had the Iraq War without it, but there's so much that has snowballed since then. And when you think of everything that
35:31
happened afterwards. So much of it is in policy. The Patriot Act that that kind of destroyed, you know, a generation's worth of privacy in the United States. If there's any young people listening, going back and watching Fair Night 9-11, kind of it's a good, know, people it's a documentary, but it's better to kind of look at it as like an essay. Yeah, I would say it's a video essay is that is great, which hey, young people love.
35:59
Uh, so I would say look at it more like that, but it is a good way to kind of get an idea of where people were at and the Patriot act kind of coming out, but also just, yeah, we're talking about like rhetoric and things, uh, changing. There was a uh phrase, I don't know whoever said it, uh, but it was, you know, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And I think that since nine 11, it's been very easy to classify any, uh, pushback.
36:29
against authority as terrorism. Yes, it's all bad. There's there's they've they've tried to homogenize it down to be able to like, no, you can't question anything. There's no gray area anymore. It's black or white. It's terrorism or it's, you know, we're serving up some democracy. And I think so much of that has has bled into the public consciousness, because when you look at
36:57
things like mass rallies today. we just recently, as of this recording, had the latest No Kings March in the United States. by all measures and all metrics, uh absolutely massive, absolutely massive. And...
37:16
When I looked at the coverage and I was reading about it and the inescapable part to me that I just I couldn't quite grasp was I kept thinking to what end is this right? I get you want to mobilize people awesome. I get you you want to march you're angry you're marching in the streets fantastic showing your disapproval uh of this power grab that's been happening.
37:47
fantastic. But you did it in a way that it inconveniences no one in power. Right. It's a weekend. I get it. Yeah. Weekend more people turn up. But here's the thing on the weekend. You know, no one has to go into the office, the streets you're blocking off. No one's you know, you're not causing trouble. You have to cause at least good trouble. Right. And there is a difference between
38:17
I think.
38:20
good trouble and bad trouble in terms of organizing resistance. you've got this on a weekend. You've got people coming out. Everyone's super peaceful. No one's trashing anything. And yeah, that makes for immaculate lawns and it makes for, I guess, good PR for your movement. But didn't you just spend a day?
38:49
in the street for no tangible benefit, right? I read responses from some folks in the administration, some social media ones, just simply saying, who cares? And that is kind of what I was left with was this is an administration that doesn't care. And I know that this administration is going, the minute that,
39:20
someone steps out of line in one of these protests, the minute something, you know, turns violent, some rocks start getting thrown at police. I know that they want that to justify more weaponize it. Yeah, they want to weaponize it. Here's the thing, though. You either accept that it's going to be weaponized against you and fight anyway. Or you spend all of your energy on these.
39:48
protest movements that while yes big huge great good vibes absolutely
39:55
What pressure are you putting on the administration? Yeah, it's it's you have to. They're going to do what they want to do. They have they have shown you the blueprint. We have all of the notes. This generation of Republicans loves to tell you what they're going to do. Listen to them and then figure out ways to stop them effectively. And don't be afraid. You know, people are going to get arrested. Look at the
40:26
battles that the left has won in American history. The New Deal, the civil rights movement, two biggest transformational changes in the United States in the 20th century. Neither of them were peaceful. Yeah, I was going to say they weren't unbloody. Yeah. And all of them stood up to authoritarian violence from the government. And I'm sorry because it sucks.
40:55
It's awful. Like the people who suffered in those movements and they did truly suffer. A lot of people died for those movements. The hour is getting pretty goddamn late. Right. This is not. You know, if you're really if you really think that that the republic is going to disappear. You know, it has to be more than this. And I'm sorry, that's a bit of a digression.
41:23
I it's fine. I wanted to talk about it, too. And mean, yeah, I was going to say the no kings protests remind me of the uh the the SpongeBob Patrick meme where he's like, we did it. We saved the city and the city's burning behind them because it does it. It's a little bit too patting yourself on the back, as you said, like, you know, I'm not going to sit here on my podcast, not protesting in the United States and tell people, well, you got to start throwing some bricks like.
41:52
I can't do that. But I do need people to, I want them to take an objective look at what they're doing and what it actually is changing. What measurable, effective change have you seen from one of the biggest protests in American history? How can you measure that for me? And what has it changed? And I think if we ask people to reflect on that,
42:22
That is powerful. And I think that that's really what we want is that I think if you are reflecting on it and you're seeing nothing, then maybe your tactics are going to change again. I'm not suggesting that you buy soup, which isn't technically a brick and throw it at the police. But and don't also say don't do don't do this because it's very don't say that it's soup for your family uh and not something that you brought to a protest to throw. Don't do that. But
42:51
I want you to really objectively look at what you're doing and tell me what was useful from what you did. What was accomplished? I think that that guy in the frog suit at the ICE detention center having like tear gas sprayed into his like little like air hole is far more effective at affecting change than the no kings protest has been. So maybe compare yourself to that. And I think
43:22
Even even with all of the criticism that I've leveled towards this, if people were there and they were organizing, they were making contacts, they were networking. Right. Perfect. Then do it. Then that that alone could justify what what you went out there and did. Right. It's it's making sure that your actions have tangible consequences, like you said. Yeah. And follow up. Follow through.
43:49
Like, yeah, just make sure like there's got to be something next. There's got to be something more. And right now we're in a very weird place because a lot of what Trump is doing is unconstitutional. It just simply is. And Congress has has abdicated being that check on presidential power. So.
44:17
What we're left with is a scenario where the Constitution matters until it doesn't. So if you are someone who is, you know, is looking to keep the Constitutional Republic going, if you're a group that wants to do this, you have to know you have to educate yourself on the Constitution, on the laws of the land.
44:43
Because the people who are trying to fundamentally change what America is, right, the Heritage Foundation, the new Republican Party, you know, the MAGA, right, these are revolutionary forces. It's a revolution, a revolution like none we've ever seen, but it is a revolutionary force. They are looking to fundamentally change the government of the United States into something different.
45:12
Yeah, whether you like it or not, it is a revolution. Yeah. So if you are a counter revolutionary in this sense, what you need to be doing is making sure you know how the systems that are in place right now work. Because those guys, the Heritage Foundation, the Republican Party, they have very smart people who have been thinking about this for a very, very long time. They are well funded. And they are very well funded. So
45:39
If you have to get in and gum up the works, you need to know how the works operate, right? You need to know what you can do at a community level, at a state level, and at a federal level to make things as difficult as possible for them. Because any kind of resistance that you can offer that slows down this
46:09
What has been almost a warp speed uh disintegration of American institutions. really hate that you had to use a Star Trek reference. Really bastardizing my love. Yeah, I get it. I get it. Let's go. uh You know, anything that you can do like that is is going to make more of a tangible difference than peaceful protest. uh Unfortunately, right. There's a reason why.
46:38
peaceful protest is such a lauded uh right throughout liberal democracies. It's because peaceful protest really doesn't affect business or government. And because of that, they're happy for you to do it all you want because you're going to spend your energy and you're going to feel like you've accomplished something.
47:08
Have you? Anyway, yeah. I didn't. I really don't mean to. This isn't an attack on anyone who went to a no king's rally. No, you should have went. Should it be good for you? just I hope you. But what is next? Yeah, I hope you made friends. I hope you made plans. All right, Josh, before we end on the extrajudicial killings here.
47:35
I do want to talk about efforts to repeal the uh AUMF because as long as this has been around and ever since kind of the the hangover of 9-11 passed and the US kind of found itself embroiled in a couple of different wars and you know spending trillions and trillions of dollars. A lot of people have kind of questioned whether the president should have this power and maybe it was a step.
48:05
too far.
48:11
It's come under criticism from both sides of the aisle, generally when their guy is out of power, I should note. But one I thought you might enjoy was. Oh boy. So in 2023, so this would have been during the Biden years, some Republican senators, and you may recognize some of the names here, Rand Paul.
48:41
Mike Lee, Mike Braun, some dude JD Vance introduced the End Endless Wars Act bill in June 2023 seeking to repeal the 2001 AUMF. And
49:01
Yeah, their argument was that the AUMF has been used to justify a worldwide war all the time, everywhere, forever.
49:11
And now JD's off in California. Getting peppered uh with shrapnel. just at the old olive garden. The old olive garden just cracking it down on They're like, say when? And he's just dead pan staring at them. I think my favorite part of this is that were, Newsom was like, don't do this, it's a bad idea. And they were like,
49:40
Fuck you, pussy. And he was like, well, I'm closing the highway. And they were like, whatever. We're going to drive on it anyway. And they got peppered with shrapnel. Yes. Yeah.
49:54
So yeah, it also just I do want to say the end endless wars thing does remind me of Zoolander and the Institute for Children's Can't Read Good. oh
50:07
Man, I wish it was an AUMF for ants. That would be lovely. yeah, so JD, uh it was, I guess, a 155 millimeter shell that was fired during this event. And for anyone who's missed this, as we're recording this, it kind of just happened today, I believe. But this was an event celebrating the 250th birthday of the United States Marines.
50:32
which I think is next month, technically. Probably is, you know, sometimes you these things when can. thought that was kind of some part of what they said. I mean, I can always cut this out, but I was pretty sure they said that it's technically would be next month. They did it now as part of their flood the zone thing. And ultimately it backfired or sprayed all over their face. Yeah. So this this shell that that
51:02
Yeah, prematurely detonated, uh sprayed shrapnel over what seems like quite a wide area because it hit police cars, hit Vance's motorcade, and it kind of came as you mentioned, uh state officials in California and the White House fought over uh Newsom's decision to close part of Interstate 5. And yeah, the governor
51:31
was quoted as saying, you know, firing live rounds over a busy highways and just wrong. It's dangerous. I feel like that should need to be said, but I'm glad he said it for for posterity now that we can go back and say, yeah, well, you were right, Gavin. And uh yeah, Vance's uh pre shrapnel reply uh was also pretty good. If Gavin Newsom wants to oppose the training exercises that ensure our armed forces are the
52:01
deadliest and most least most lethal fighting force in the world, then he can go right ahead. So, you know, well, clearly it's not working because they weren't able to kill the president. Yeah. And now, again, though, I think he may have misunderstood what they were doing here because it's not a training exercise. This was a demonstration. This was this was a gun party. Basically, this was a look how cool our stuff is. Yeah. Yeah.
52:30
Let's fire some live rounds over the highway. I mean like not over a highway, but like I I get it It's cool to fire up live rounds like I'm I'm not against guns. Yeah, I'm just against using them stupid. Yeah Just just don't do what you did yeah, so this this was worth mentioning because this is Honestly pretty funny, but yeah
52:58
All of the 250th celebrations that the White House has really kind of put its stock into seem to have been falling flat for them because the military parade was really quite sad. you know, if if the vice president can't even attend this thing without getting peppered and shrapnel, I just feel like maybe maybe just call it here. Do something for the 300th. It's fine.
53:25
Yeah, November 10th technically would have been. Oh, OK. I did look it up just so we're clear. So good. We keep get to keep all those jokes. I so last thing I kind of wanted to talk about, unless you've got more on on the shrapnel thing. But just I mean, in terms of how funny I think it is, I mean, it's just such a. If you wrote it into a movie.
53:51
and that movie aged about 20 years or 30 years, people will be like, this is absurd. You know, like if that happened in a movie from 1991, people five years ago would have been like, that's the craziest shit that would never happen. Yeah, I think that's really where we're at. It's the absurdity of it, like the the posturing, the the the misplaced confidence, like all of it is so funny. I'm glad no one
54:20
died or really genuinely got hurt. Like I wouldn't want that because there's a lot of people like when you think of like people are like, oh, well, JD Vance's motorcade got hit. Yeah, that's a bunch of people working like there's secret service agents, there's police, there's there's people who don't necessarily deserve to be peppered with shrapnel there. So I don't want anyone to die. But I think that it is a really funny thing to happen to them that they all had to
54:48
ducking cover like they're in an old instructional video from the Cold War. Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, the way you just described this is is the way that this administration has been going. It is it is over the top. It is something where if you described it to anyone beforehand, they'd be like, no, no, this is ridiculous. the Apple dumpling gang. They're from the hip. Yeah, they're they're not in the movie Tombstone.
55:15
They're in the movie The Apple Dumpling Gang and the bullets going to bounce off of like a church bell and then also hit a sign that's going to swing down and hit them in the back of the head. Yeah, it it really is the most absurdist government I think I've seen in in my lifetime. Certainly, I can't think of one that has. More completely altered the way that people think about.
55:45
United States, but also just the world in general, right? The things that we thought about in kind of this, the post World War Two order, how quickly that is disintegrating before our eyes. You know, there was a level of stability, even through Trump won, right? Kind of the background stability of what America was.
56:14
And all of a sudden it is vanished and what we're left with is just the theater of the absurd that we talk about every week on this show. Yeah. So just quickly before we wrap up, I did want to mention this because uh this is really important and it's the kind of thing that we're going to feel going forward. And that's uh new rules from the Pentagon.
56:43
ah that they have released around what the press can and can't cover and how uh the kind of Pentagon, the press covering the Pentagon at the Pentagon and the covering the military, the standards that they're going to be held to and the oversight that they're going to have going forward. So.
57:11
This.
57:15
Basically journalists who cover the Defense Department at the Pentagon can no longer report information or gather information, even unclassified information, unless it has been authorized for release by the government. reporters who refuse to sign a statement agreeing with these new rules uh are having their press credentials revoked. So...
57:42
Almost every news media that has reporters at the Pentagon immediately came out saying that this is a terrible idea condemning it because it fundamentally changes journalists ability to cover the Pentagon and the US military in totality and basically saying that it kills transparency. So.
58:06
what it basically does. it kind of sounds like, OK, like they got to they got to clear this with people,
58:16
It's really stifles independent journalism and it stifles it at. Honestly, what is already one of the most unaccountable. Institutions in the United States, the US military is just by its sheer size and its kind of place in America's culture. Not above criticism and certainly that's.
58:45
you know, something that it is kind of under severe criticism from American journalists from time to time. But it is it is such a uh kind of closed world that that an independent press being able to have their own sources, gather their own information is so important to keeping the Pentagon accountable to the American people. It's a fundamental.
59:12
part of journalism. it's part there. There used to be an oath that you were supposed to uphold as a journalist. You know, like there was a sense of curiosity that was meant to keep the public at large safe and informed. And it's eroded to an unimaginable degree. Yeah. So what this would do to the journalists
59:42
that stay would be basically turning them into part of the Pentagon's press wing. Because if you can't report on any of the information you get unless you basically show it to a uh minder, a Pentagon who's... And again, I work quite closely. I'm a civilian who works quite closely with the Canadian military.
01:00:10
I know how this operates, right? It's basically the public affairs department who would handle this for both for the Canadian military and the American military. And I will tell you this and hopefully I don't this doesn't come back to bite me in the ass. uh Public affairs. Is my sworn enemy. Because everything that I find out that's interesting. They don't want released. That's just the way it is right. The stuff that would be of.
01:00:40
interest to Canadians, the stuff that would make people go, huh, well, that's interesting, is absolutely the things that they do not want you to release. Yeah, you'd be pulling the earbud out going, wait, my tax arrows doing what? Yeah. Yeah. And so a lot of and I'm going to be quite honest here. The. A lot of the stuff that I write gets censored because the organization that I write for
01:01:10
uh has military oversight not full military oversight but enough military oversight that if I write something that they don't like it will not go to print so there are stories that I know that I have that will never be written because I have a family to feed and I'd rather not lose that job and so again this is this isn't stuff that you you you know, this is an unimportant stuff that you just
01:01:39
You know, I'll run it by someone before you release it. This is going to fundamentally. Stop reporters from reporting accurately and honestly. On the Pentagon. uh So, of course, they can't they can't get to reporters who aren't covering the Pentagon at the Pentagon, right? You can still write about the US military, but it's going to be so much harder.
01:02:09
to get your information, right? And it's already very tough. uh Just again, as someone who speaks to military people all the time, the junior ranks are great to talk to you because they haven't had media training, but they're scared to talk to you. The senior ranks have had media training and they won't say anything interesting. So you're always kind of at odds when trying to cover the military. And
01:02:38
This is the type of thing that you cannot have a free society if you aren't allowing journalists to ask those questions, right? To get those stories and to form their own sources, right? I know you want a leak free Pentagon. I don't think you're going to get one, but. Especially not with Hanks out there. Got all those chats like coming out.
01:03:07
That's true. mean, they'll still have him. Thank God. You know, in there. Yeah. Maybe he just wants to funnel it all through that. It just all goes through his signal. Just going to start doing everything through emojis. Oh, I love it. That string of emojis that was in some of those league chats that he was dropping. was like, yeah, that's that's fire. Yeah. Yeah. American flag fist bump. Oh, yeah. Hell, The yeah.
01:03:35
set him up on a chat with some of those young Republicans that made the news this week and get some good stuff. Yeah, something we also didn't get to. But hey, at least there's repercussions for them, right? Yeah. All of those children, those 25 to 36 year old children, you know, seeing their comeuppance in their young, youthful age. ah So this is my my decision to not let my daughter have
01:04:04
A cell phone until she's 40. Looking good. Looking good right now. I'm going to point to this every time. I'm like, look, I can't I can't have you falling in with the wrong crowd and oh, man, your daughter is going to be swinging the Canadian flag on top of a mountain of skulls fighting the army of robots sometime in the future. she is. All right. Yeah. So that's kind of what I wanted to say about that is this is a really important thing. I know
01:04:33
The news organizations have come out very strongly against this because it does really hamper their ability to accurately report on what's going on in the Department of Defense or sorry, the Department of War. And yeah, I know. And the others is Nobel Peace Prize. Where is it? Where is it? The other thing I want to say is keep an eye on this, because if this effectively muzzles the press.
01:05:03
where the Department of Defense is concerned, keep an eye out for this policy leaking into other federal departments. Because this is an administration that is very hostile to news organizations that are not in their pocket. uh Now, many of those organizations that used to be independent are very quickly uh either being bought by billionaires or starting to toe the line.
01:05:32
They may not have to worry about that a whole lot longer, but just keep an eye on this one. It's democracy whippers in the closet. Yeah. Yeah. All right, folks, on that cheery note, we're going to end off this one. Thanks so much for listening. I know this one was a little bit all over the place, but we were in a uh good energy fired up fired up tonight. Yeah. So as always, thanks so, much for joining us. Bye bye.
01:06:03
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