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Just Josh: America on the Brink · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  It's easy in isolation to notice the authoritarianism of the Trump administration and to think that the best way to fight it is to ensure that
• 0:10
  authoritarianism doesn't triumph in the United States.
• 0:13
  What if the gravest risk is not one party rule but a kind of Balkan style civil war where neighbor is against neighbor?
• 0:29
  Because the more open hostility there is on the streets of America, the likely era to stand into civil war.
• 0:37
  Well, well, well. It's interesting times.
• 0:41
  How are you feeling at the moment about American democracy?
• 0:47
  I always find that it reminds me of being when I was at high school in university and you had to do an essay and try to figure out what you thought about the essay question.
• 0:57
  I would always look across at fellow students who read the essay question and then immediately launched into writing.
• 1:04
  And I would think there's no way they're going to get a good mark because I haven't had time to digest.
• 1:11
  What the point of the question is to structure their argument and to reach a conclusion that makes sense in advance because they don't know where they're going with their argument yet.
• 1:21
  And I would always sit there after reading the essay question and spend the first precious five minutes of the essay writing time not writing but thinking and jotting notes and bullet points about how to tackle the issue.
• 1:35
  And I was thinking about that analogy the other day to the moment that we're living in where we're being thrown in enormous amount of information.
• 1:43
  And the news cycle seems completely overwhelming and daunting and our natural reaction is just to grab a pen and start scribbling mentally about what our emotional response is.
• 1:54
  And maybe it's a time to not do that because often our initial instincts and our knee jerk reactions are of the least constructive.
• 2:03
  But to pause and try to think not about the events but about how we should think about the events.
• 2:10
  To think about how we should think about the events and to talk about not the events but how we should talk about the events that is the point of this show after all.
• 2:20
  To talk about our conversations and how we have conversations with each other and to try to take a 30,000 foot view of things.
• 2:27
  So let's just try to maybe do that in some baby steps today but to lay the groundwork of what we're talking about.
• 2:34
  America currently has a government which began by sending the Arnie into cities that its president didn't particularly like and that it felt were obstreparous cities.
• 2:48
  They also had high crime rates but not the highest crime rates Washington DC is the obvious example.
• 2:55
  So the military and in you know remember that in democracies the military is supposed to be not used for domestic purposes.
• 3:05
  There is a firewall between law enforcement for the civilian population and military adventures for the country's defense.
• 3:14
  Except in extraordinary circumstances where the governor of a state requests the national guard to come in and assist with a natural disaster for example the cyclone and such.
• 3:25
  But here you have the government of the United States sending the military in against the will of the locals to supposedly enforce the law.
• 3:36
  Then you have the United States government sending customs and border and immigration and customs enforcement agents into cities that do not have the highest rates of illegal migrants.
• 3:53
  But cities again that have been bold in standing up to the administration's goals about hunting down illegal immigrants in Portland and most recently Minneapolis.
• 4:08
  Then you have an American government that has begun arresting journalists for a sensible crimes you know causing a disruption in a place of worst worship collaborating with people who are intending to disrupt the public piece through protests that impeded other people's expression of their religious faith in a place of worship.
• 4:30
  There's always something on the books that you can get someone for but we do not tend to charge journalists with J walking when they run across the road in order to talk to a source or to snap a picture of something that's going on.
• 4:46
  So the sense that there's a retroactive attempt to punish people for on on pretextual causes for the crime of being opposed to the government or opposed to the president.
• 5:01
  There's also this case that I have been repeatedly misremembering in recent podcasts and forgive me if I have been butchering it on the couple of occasions in which I tried to raise it with the mused guests who just sat there looking at me blankly like a cow looking at a train.
• 5:17
  But the case that I've now looked up is the case of in September the U.S. Justice Department Pam Bondy at Trump's behest when they were trying to attack the federal reserve because he didn't like the fact that interest rates were higher than he wants them to be.
• 5:32
  They launched a criminal mortgage fraud probe into the governor of the federal reserve Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas against her in Georgia and Michigan for supposedly defrauding.
• 5:48
  What it turned out to be was the accusation that she had said that her primary property was a property that wasn't her primary property and that actually it was a secondary property.
• 5:57
  But I mean, in complicated financial matters, the idea that someone like Donald Trump hasn't done things like that, a bazillionfold or that many, many of us including many members of Congress haven't been guilty of something if you poured over everything is bizarre.
• 6:11
  It was obvious that she was a target. She's a black woman and so, you know, all the more of a target on her back and they identified that they wanted to charge her with something and then they found something.
• 6:25
  Now we have an American government that is sending the director of the national security chief, Tulsi Gabbard, which is supposed to be, you know, an international spy chief into the domestic affairs of Georgia's election officials where she went down to Georgia, which has obsessed Donald Trump ever since 2020.
• 6:50
  He's been saying for years that he believes that the Georgia ballot was rigged. There's no evidence that it was. We have all heard the phone call of Donald Trump talking to the Secretary of State, Raffensberger, during the election counting process when Georgia had gone to Joe Biden in 2020, asking him to find 1100 votes.
• 7:13
  It's just not possible to have lost Georgia. It's not possible. When I heard it was close, I said, there's no way, but they dropped a lot of votes in their late at night. You know that, Brett, but regardless of those votes with all of it being said, we lost by 11, essentially 11,000 votes.
• 7:33
  And the people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you've recalculated.
• 7:43
  Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong.
• 7:48
  And recently at Davos in Switzerland, the economic forum Trump got up and said, you know, I won that he was talking to all the world leaders. I won in 2020. Everybody knows that and a lot of people are going to be punished for their attempt to steal that for their successful stealing of that election.
• 8:05
  He said, I might be breaking news here, but a lot of people are going to be punished.
• 8:08
  It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that they found out people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.
• 8:17
  It's probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election. Can't have rigged elections.
• 8:23
  And days later, the FBI went down to Georgia with the security with the National Security Director, Tosie Gavard.
• 8:32
  And she actually got Trump on the phone on speaker phone to give a pep talk to all the FBI agents who were pouring over basically seizing all of the ballots.
• 8:40
  They weren't able to get authority to seize the ballots from Georgia itself so they did a workaround talk about just picking what you what you want to achieve and then finding a way to do it, regardless of whether or not it makes any sense.
• 8:53
  They found a workaround by getting a court to approve it in another state that's unrelated to Georgia.
• 8:59
  And remember, in America, elections are run by the states. It's not like in most countries where the election is run by a federal election commission or a national election commission.
• 9:09
  This is a state issue. Nonetheless, they got the authority to seize all of those ballots and the voter rolls in order presumably to ferment and concoct criminal cases against the people who did the right thing by processing.
• 9:28
  We don't know what's going to happen to those ballots. We don't know what the integrity of those ballots henceforth they're in the possession of the FBI and under normal circumstances.
• 9:37
  You would expect that you could trust the FBI to go through evidence diligently when the FBI is run by Kashpatel who is a henchman for the president and is overseen by Tosie Gabbard who is another, I shouldn't say henchman, a lap dog say, yes, man.
• 9:53
  For the president, it's not inconceivable that there would be questions about the integrity of the FBI investigation when it is so clearly motivated by the personal animus of the head of state who has never believed that the Georgia election was clean, even though there's no evidence that it wasn't.
• 10:13
  And now we have the president saying that actually he was on Dan Bongino's podcast. This is the guy who was in charge of the ice raids in Minneapolis, but was recently demoted and went back to podcasting as we all do when when other gigs fall apart.
• 10:30
  And now Bongino was talking to Trump and Trump said, really, we should just have the Republican party controlling elections in at least about 15 states where it seems like there's just chicaneery going on.
• 10:41
  And the chicaneery that he's talking about is the fact that those states don't vote for him.
• 10:46
  So rather than swatting at each of these things like a cat with a laser pointer, let's try to look at them holistically and think about how we write the essay of how to respond to this moment.
• 11:01
  Marsha Gesson had a good piece. She's a Russian American dissident fierce critic of Putin and a scholar of authoritarianism, especially in Eastern Europe.
• 11:10
  She had an excellent piece in which she said what we're seeing in the ice strategy of sending in immigration and customs enforcement and border protection agents to cities that are the Trumps regards as inimical to him to create a sense of crisis.
• 11:29
  And indeed to end up unfortunately killing a couple of the protesters in the case of Minneapolis is not authoritarianism the way we traditionally think of it.
• 11:41
  What it is she argues is she should say they I think she's they now is state terror.
• 11:47
  State terror being different from authoritarianism in the sense that under authoritarian rule, you sort of know exactly what the rules of the gamer.
• 11:56
  You know that if you stay within certain parameters that you're you're going to be okay and you roughly know where the line to cross is.
• 12:03
  You know if you're living in let's say Eastern Europe under communism, you generally had a sense that you just have to say the right things about your field to you to the communist party.
• 12:12
  You have to not publish dissenting articles. You have to not try to stir up trouble against the government and then you'll be you'll be untouched.
• 12:21
  In this precarious state position that America is currently in marshes argument is it's more like the intentionally chaotic wielding a state power in order to induce terror and its citizens about the arbitrariness of that power that anyone could be hunted anyone could potentially be shot.
• 12:40
  You don't quite know where the lines are are you allowed to protest ice agents how much you allowed to protest them.
• 12:45
  You know guy gets shot Alex Peretti and immediately there's a claim this I mean the first woman who was client who was shot is good.
• 12:54
  The officials immediately said with no evidence that she was a terrorist immediately after the peretti shooting officials said that he intended to massacre law enforcement.
• 13:06
  I mean that's just not true Donald Trump told Fox News both of them were terrible he said both of them were terrible.
• 13:13
  This is before there's any investigation I mean in the past when there have been misdeeds or you know law enforcement overreach and people have been killed in the line of fire even if it was.
• 13:25
  Whether it was egregious on the part of the law enforcement or whether it was understandable and understandable mistake.
• 13:31
  Officials have usually taken a policy of well we don't talk about it until there's an investigation we try to figure out what actually happened because we don't want to get it wrong.
• 13:38
  In this case the instant happened she was a terrorist and he was intending to massacre law enforcement.
• 13:46
  The fact that he had a gun legally he was legally allowed to carry a gun he wasn't brandishing the gun he wasn't pointing the gun he had the gun in a holster and he was unarmed he had been removed from him by the agents at the time that he was shot ten times.
• 13:59
  In the back I believe initially by two agents the fact they had a gun was then used by believe it was the director of the FBI cash patrol to say listen if you can come into a scenario in which your protest are.
• 14:13
  Don't carry a gun and don't cause you know trouble well I am old enough to remember the tea party movement against Obama where there were a lot of conservative Republicans walking around with our 15 strap to their backs at protests and they weren't all super polite.
• 14:36
  So the idea that the having of a gun that a protest should be a reason why it would get shot and this is not to I'm not you don't I'm not fully drinking the left wing cool eight here I will have something to say about the nature of protests in a moment.
• 14:50
  But I'm just making the point that the rules are just shifting all the time that it's not like living in an authoritarian regime where you kind of know what you have to do in order to get along here it's not it's not clear we have to I thought it was okay to protest in America.
• 15:03
  And I thought that the right was okay with guns indeed as long as you're not using them I thought they believed in the second amendment in the right to bear arms and now all of a sudden that's being used by.
• 15:13
  Like the law enforcement as a way of telling me by people who would normally be on my side who would normally be pro gun as a way of saying telling me that that was the line that I crossed well since when was that rule made up.
• 15:23
  It almost feels a little bit like the experience of the left over the past decade where all of a sudden there would be a particular word that you weren't allowed to use or something or you know don't don't you realize that you know you're supposed to call illegal immigrants undocumented immigrants or that you know you can't even say this particular racial slur if you're talking about how bad it is in conversation or that even the argument that you should be able to say it in the case of Mike pesca who was fired from slate for not saying the N word but arguing that there is a
• 15:53
  place for white people to be able to discuss the usage or non usage of that word and saying it in the process although he didn't was enough to get fired and it was sort of headspinning right it was like hang on a second what how who wrote when when do wrote these rules what am I doing.
• 16:08
  And now we're seeing the same thing much more violently from an incumbent American government with authoritarian tendencies where all of a sudden it's like well yeah this is the new state the new way we do things now.
• 16:19
  We just retroactively charge journalists we hunt down for why federal reserve governors might have something bad in their past we make up a rule about how you should have been carrying a gun while you were protesting even if you weren't using it.
• 16:32
  So marches point is it's intended to ferment state terror even just the presence of army troops in a city like Washington DC just wandering around armed is a way of asserting state power.
• 16:47
  And keeping people on edge always making the city civilians on their back on their back foot not quite knowing where they stand in relation to the government.
• 16:56
  So I thought that was a useful way of contextualizing some of what's going on.
• 17:00
  I said I would mention my thoughts about the protests.
• 17:06
  It's obviously awful that these people were gunned down these two people is good and Mr. Peretti killed for just protesting.
• 17:19
  I would just say something about the nature of resistance here.
• 17:25
  Their method of protesting which is not to blame the victim here that they were innocent and they were murdered but their method of protesting is I don't think the way out of this morass.
• 17:39
  It's not the playbook of non violent resistance that was exemplified by Gandhi or Martin Luther King where these people who actually coordinated with law enforcement in order to enact large stay large scale staged demonstrations of civil disobedience in order to show up the corruption and the legitimacy of the system that they were objecting to.
• 18:02
  And this happens all the time by the way I mean when there's a big climate protest when there's a big Gaza protest.
• 18:08
  The ones that come off without a hitch without conflict that are successful in articulating their message.
• 18:15
  The ones where you do actually loop in the cops like you can tell them in advance where we're going to be doing this thing where exercising our rights to you know to assemble.
• 18:25
  You may even need a permit to do so and you get that and then you go and you show up and you express civil disobedience you might even not want to get the permit but you do it in a non violent manner.
• 18:36
  And you don't put yourself in situations that play into the playbook that validates the narrative that the right wingers or whatever system you're trying to object to are trying to propagate which is that you are an unruly lawless troublemaker.
• 18:53
  You try to make it clear that you are a principled moral objector rather than a nether well to use a nice term from the 1920s that we should use moral.
• 19:06
  So in that sense it's not to say that the shootings were justified they weren't but it is to say that I don't think that the strategy like put it this way.
• 19:17
  Every strong man and every fascistic regime in history has known exactly what to do with violent objectives.
• 19:27
  They know the playbook like it's quite they're quite happy engaging in warfare because that's the language that they speak there's us and there's them there's the you know there's the good guys and the bad guys if you come and you attack us we're going to come back at you a thousand fold that's the way that the logic of this kind of escalation works.
• 19:44
  So you go up and you spit in an ice agent's face as Paredi apparently did 11 days before he was he was shot though he'd had numerous altercations where he'd been in you know sort of wrestling matches and hostile matches with ice agent so a lot of good principle I guess I mean thought he was doing the right thing he's trying to stop.
• 20:02
  People he regards as being innocent although they did break immigration law but you know not all of them I must say he didn't but.
• 20:12
  People who he regards as being otherwise innocent of violent crimes from being rounded up by ice agents but the manner in which you do that is the question and what is likely to be most efficacious.
• 20:23
  If you spit in their face and try to wrestle them to the ground then not only are you putting yourself in danger you're actually behaving exactly the way they want you to behave and you're producing the images of unrest and violence and chaos that provide a pretext for a further doubling down of state power or even state terror.
• 20:45
  So there has to be a better way of approaching this right and non violent resistance strikes me in the in the realm of protest and we'll get to in a second to some other ways we might be able to push back against this but in the realm of physical protest and putting yourself on the street.
• 21:00
  Non violent protest to the greatest extent coordinated with authorities strikes me as the most prudent way and most effective way of doing a an end run around claims that the government might have that you're direct delusional and dangerous otherwise you're just creating the kinds of scenes they're going to play on Fox News and they're going to scare everybody and and enable further tolerance of government overreach.
• 21:28
  It's sort of the it's a bit like the difference between the model of gorilla resistance versus non violent resistance what we've been seeing it but from the left against ice on the streets of Minneapolis is a gorilla resistance is a form of gorilla resistance which authoritarians know how to deal with their much it's much tricky to deal with non violent resistance.
• 21:51
  I guess that's the point one little piece of evidence here, which I think I heard from Michael Schellenberger to give him credit was that there are signal chat groups among these resistance anti ice resistance protesters, you know signal of text messaging the private text messaging app and among the strategies is that anytime you see an immigration customs enforcement agent.
• 22:21
  Trying to take someone away because they're not legal citizen here illegally you should call 911 and report a kidnapping but not tell the dispatcher that it's an ice agent you should just say there are people being I'm witnessing a kidnapping right now.
• 22:42
  And so this was taking place now that is clearly a way of trying to create more violence it's trying to create chaos I mean there's something a bit Joker in the dark night about that because law enforcement agents are going to show up under the impression that there's a kidnapping going on they're not going to know what role the ice agents are playing or who the white ice agents are even there.
• 23:06
  They're not going to know whether to believe the person who is talking to that who is who the ice agents are trying to apprehend who is asking to be rescued or whether to believe that the ice agents are actually ice agents so you're just creating a hot environment in which there's an enormous capacity for misunderstanding or violence between government agencies state police on the one hand and federal immigration agents on the other.
• 23:33
  That is not a good faith tactic I don't think that's a wise that is definitely not non violent civil disobedience that is a very shrewd and Kenny playbook to create more chaos so you just have to step back and think who does more chaos benefit really like what's the end outcome of more chaos.
• 23:59
  Is it likely that more chaos and violence is going to lead to the administration stepping back maybe certainly the administration seems to have been somewhat chasing by the two deaths in Minneapolis.
• 24:18
  It that so the maybe there's a tiny short term win at the cost of a couple of lives.
• 24:24
  In the medium term it's likely that you're going to feed into a mood that gives the administration more license because they're going to have a pretext they're going to say we have to do these things because there's chaos all over the place.
• 24:39
  And in the longer term even more deeply.
• 24:42
  You're creating an environment in which it's harder and harder for both sides to get closer together.
• 24:47
  You know you're creating an environment in which it's harder for the people who could be one over from Maga and the people who could be one over from the center left to find common ground because the more open hostility there is on the streets of America.
• 25:02
  The likely are a dissent into civil war becomes so whilst I think the obviously the the ultimate people who are responsible for the tragedies in Minneapolis are the agents themselves and the people who sent them there.
• 25:20
  I would also say that some of the blame goes to the way that the protesters are thinking about protest and the sort of far left gorilla model that they're using instead of the Gandhiite model instead.
• 25:34
  Now it certainly doesn't help that immigration customs enforcement agents have been encouraged by at the highest echelons of the Trump administration to act with as much impunity as they want with a tacit guarantee that even if they were charged and found guilty even of murder.
• 25:54
  That would be pardoned as long as it happens before Trump leaves office or his successor if it's a Republican because Stephen Miller oh Stephen Miller how do we love don't we love a Stephen Miller I love me a Stephen Miller we're going to talk about Stephen Miller in a second.
• 26:12
  So he's Trump's top advisor you know we only a few people who who has lasted between Donald Trump's first term and the second term he's as recline calls him the prime minister of America to Trump's president he's basically one who runs everything well Trump does big picture stuff so Stephen Miller he literally told immigration and immigration and customs enforcement officers last month.
• 26:35
  Quote you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony.
• 26:47
  I mean could you be clearer than that in saying don't worry about the rules we've got your back regardless of what you do you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties not true constitutionally but the implication is that even if it was even if that was found to be not true in a court of law.
• 27:04
  They've always got the presidential veto to the presidential pardon rather to save them. So pivoting from Minneapolis and ice to the other thing that I think is deeply worrying at the moment is these targeted prosecutions of journalists and presumably soon election officials and previously federal reserve board governor.
• 27:33
  Where you're identifying a target and then retroactively finding a crime instead of the other way around you know law enforcement is supposed to be about here are the things that we want to stop we're too many car jackings stop car jacking so let's focus on car jackings and whoever is doing the car jackings is the one who we arrest.
• 27:52
  What authoritarian regimes do is instead of following the crime to lead them to the people they start with the enemies who they want to target and then they go fishing around in their history to try to find a crime to punish them with.
• 28:08
  And is there any doubt that this is what's happening here the former CNN journalist Donald Leman who's now an independent journalist used to be an NBC correspondent as well appeared frequently on the today show and on the NBC nightly news.
• 28:22
  Longstanding critic of Donald Trump feel us in his reporting now you know if the like him but he's a legitimate journalist and so he covers this protest in Minneapolis that happens to be take taking place in a church because the pastor is himself an ice agent I love this is I mean only in America right would you be a pastor a religious man of the cloth a pastor who moon lights as an immigration jack boot agent.
• 28:52
  Or perhaps he's an immigration agent who moon lights as a pastor I don't know or maybe it's a 50 50 split maybe he's maybe perfectly non binary he's a them in his in his professional affiliations between.
• 29:04
  The doing the spreading the word of the creator of the universe and Jesus's message of love and the mixture inherit the earth and on the other hand going around in upper people off the streets whilst wearing a mask and sending them to.
• 29:21
  Who knows where so anyway there's this past and so the processes have arranged to go into the church and they disrupt the church well.
• 29:29
  As you will know if you heard my episode about a week ago which was about specifically Donald Leman but just in case you didn't tell just to recap it there is a law in America called the face act F A S E F A C E rather.
• 29:44
  And it was brought in in order to criminalize people who were protesting at abortion clinics and preventing.
• 29:54
  You know women who were pregnant from going in and accessing reproductive health services and abortions from being spat on or blocked or whatever.
• 30:03
  So criminalized the act of impeding someone from accessing a fertility clinic abortion clinic.
• 30:10
  And in order to get the bill through they had to say they had to placate some of the religious members of congress by saying well okay I tell you what why don't we also make it apply to places of worship.
• 30:25
  You can't impede and obstruct someone's access to an abortion clinic and you also can't impede or obstruct someone's access to a place of worship okay fine great that's the compromise we're done that's the law.
• 30:38
  The law has only ever been used in the case of the abortion clinics it's never been used in the but in its second iteration as being about places of worship.
• 30:49
  This is the first time when these protesters along with Don Lemon.
• 30:55
  And to the church don Lemon was asking the past to some questions he flies back to Los Angeles to cover the Grammy Awards and he gets a knock on the door and it's under arrest.
• 31:07
  For going for apparently impeding people's ability to conduct a service in that church and a second charge which is being part of a conspiracy to do the same even though he wasn't the one I mean he wasn't part of the conspiracy he wasn't organizing it but he was there.
• 31:26
  This is again an obvious example of a person who Donald Trump has spoken about many times in the past as being a hack he's an enemy of the people he's part of the fake news he's peddling lies.
• 31:39
  Then he covers unfavorably a large national event which Trump wants to look good in the eyes of the public and all of a sudden there's some reason there's some legalistic reason why he should be arrested and charged even though America also ostensibly has freedom of the press enshrined in its constitution.
• 32:06
  Just stepping back a bit and going to that 30,000 foot sort of essay planning question rather than getting dug to distracted by the minutiae of the legalities of this or the constitution constitutionality of it.
• 32:51
  You know, it's really not easy to establish the delicate balance of what we would call Western civilization or what we would call liberal democracy.
• 33:01
  Once it's an ordinary thing for people in power to sure why not make their enemies lives a little bit harder by slapping a prosecution on them or accepting money favorably from companies or people who want to do it.
• 33:20
  You want to carry favor with you. It's extremely difficult to eradicate because every bone in our mammalian primate bodies wants to do those things. Of course we want to be retributive.
• 33:35
  Of course we want to greet our own palms who wouldn't. The only reason we don't is because we live in a society in which we've got this finally balanced kind of jenga puzzle.
• 33:47
  This sort of tower of babble where we're all holding together just just by the skin of our teeth.
• 33:55
  A set of norms of interlocking institutions that defend those norms that prevent that from happening.
• 34:01
  So I think squabbling over well, you know, he shouldn't have been in the church or maybe actually he was in breach of the face act or maybe there was something about the Georgia election and you know doesn't the FBI have a right after all to make sure the elections are clean and you know you take every case in isolation.
• 34:19
  You should already he shouldn't have been wearing wearing gun you know well don't be immigration you know surely illegal immigrants do have to be reported somehow and it's always going to be a little bit messy.
• 34:29
  It's very easy I think especially for my friends and colleagues on the right to compartmentalize each thing and to find rationales as to why there could be a pretext or a justification that makes some sense for them.
• 34:41
  But you can't lose the big picture which is that there is an outrageous and egregious overreach at the moment of the American administration in terms of its self dealings in terms of its vindictive prosecutions in terms of its authoritarian style sort of shock and or approach towards law enforcement especially when it comes to immigration.
• 35:08
  That and i'm not even talking at all in this episode by the way about foreign policy and I did an editorial a couple weeks ago about Venezuela and about I think was called.
• 35:18
  Josh's big dick little dick theory of American militarism so you can go back and listen to that if you want for the international side of things but just i'm just talking about the domestic rights of Americans and the capacity of American democracy to sustain itself and not descend into civil war or some such.
• 35:36
  There's speaking of ice you know and the kind of thinking about things in an overly minute perspective and a far too detailed perspective and sort of missing the forest for the trees.
• 35:48
  Matt Walsh is a right wing commentator in the states tweeted tweeted this as a parody he tweeted the ice situation is really complex my take is more nuanced i want our immigration laws to be enforced.
• 36:03
  But I just want them to do it without using any force and without anyone ever getting hurt and without anything sad or upsetting happening ever and if the people were trying to report don't want to be deported or if liberal activists don't want us to report them then obviously in that case we shouldn't do it but i'm totally conservative on the issue unless people get really mad at me then never mind please don't yell i'm sorry.
• 36:23
  Okay funny if you're completely unneuanced black and white fucked hard but a great retort to that was i think it was rostath that i've only got the quote here which i've stripped away during my readings i should really be better annotating things or maybe i need a little monkey on my side to drop down what i what i'm saving on my phone.
• 36:49
  And the response was.
• 36:52
  Essentially an attempt to defend the position that matwalsh is satirizing there matwalsh is implying that it's not possible to be serious about immigration enforcement if you're also to.
• 37:05
  Squimish about scenes of heartbreak there you know if you if you if you want illegal immigrants to leave the country and apply properly and come into the country legally and if those people have children then you're going to face a tough decision you're either going to have to separate the family or you have to deport a US citizen child.
• 37:30
  You know and to pretend that there are these trade-offs is a fatuous lie I suppose is Matt's point.
• 37:37
  But it must have been either as reclined or rostath at because I can tell that this is from the New York Times would have been one of them.
• 37:43
  Makes the makes the following point there are conflicts that can't be wished away such as the conflict I just articulated about deporting a child and there are a million other ones that you can think of in the space of law enforcement you know.
• 37:56
  You're going to you're going to be challenged to do things in a human way there are conflicts here that can't be wished away but the fact that some backlash and resistance are in
• 38:06
  escapeable doesn't mean that all enforcement strategies that generate backlash a sound or wise.
• 38:15
  That is a good logical point. That's great. Did you miss it? Were you driving were changing lanes were you doing the dishes did you just drop an egg that you're cleaning up in the kitchen.
• 38:28
  The fact that some backlash and resistance are in escapeable doesn't mean that all enforcement strategies that generate backlash a sound or wise.
• 38:39
  Right. There is a way of deporting illegal immigrants in the United States that does not involve an intentionally spectacular visual shock and awe show of masked agents roaming around.
• 38:56
  And hustling people into vans and whisking them away.
• 39:02
  You could certainly start with local jails and I think it's absolutely insane that there are some local municipalities and states that are not allowing ice agents to
• 39:16
  seize illegal immigrants who are in jail. I mean yeah come on if you want to if you want to prevent the craziness that we're seeing.
• 39:26
  If you want to prevent trumpism from getting even worse you have to be willing to meet them on their most reasonable demands so that their most reasonable voters have some chance of swinging over to your side otherwise you lost the game before it started.
• 39:40
  And it would strike me as completely reasonable that if you knowingly broke into the United States and stayed there without permission.
• 39:49
  Something that many other countries tolerate far less than America I mean in Australia you know.
• 39:56
  The reason we don't have one reason we don't have ice agents roaming around causing the mayhem that they are in the United States at the moment is because we haven't spent the past 20 or 30 years allowing uncontrolled illegal immigration we've had strict order policies very generous legal immigration one of the world's highest humanitarian resettlement rates of refugees.
• 40:19
  But if you overstay your visa in Australia and you're working here illegally you can be damn sure there's going to be a knock on your door by immigration agents you can be damn sure that you're going to get deported.
• 40:31
  There's no question about it. It is you know the level of illegal immigration in Australia is vanishingly low because it is properly enforced not with spectacular masked agents running down the street and wrestling people to the ground and throwing them into vans.
• 40:44
  But with targeted law enforcement the way that you know law enforcement is supposed to be when you watch LA law or I mean yes if you put the FBI if you put a proper FBI agency on how do you get rid of illegal immigrants in the country starting with the most violent.
• 41:04
  Then yes you would go to jails first and you say okay anyone who came in illegally and then committed a crime here you have absolutely not mean you had no right to be here to begin with because you didn't come in through proper channels.
• 41:15
  And now you certainly have no right to be here because you came in without the right to be here and then you hurt us and you broke out laws so get the fuck out that's totally legitimate and the fact that there are cities and states that are refusing to allow ice agents out of this grand principle of no human is illegal is crazy.
• 41:31
  What do you mean no human is illegal a human is illegal to the extent that they do illegal things I mean if I break the law then I'll be illegal in the context of having broken that law that this is silliness and it'll keep Democrats out of power in perpetuity if they continue banging on about it.
• 41:52
  So yes thinking about things from this 30,000 foot perspective understanding that there are going to be trade offs understanding that our goal should be to understand what the trend line of the administration is rather than squabbling over every specific detail or getting agitated about every latest thing that you see pop up on your Instagram feed that's not going to get us anywhere.
• 42:15
  And then being maximally generous I suppose to the most reasonable version of the argument that could win over people who are not the Stephen millers of the world or the Donald Trumps of the world but who just want an alternative to vote for.
• 42:29
  What makes this so hard of course is that we live in separate echo chambers of information at the moment I was listening to the slate political gab first which is a show that I highly recommend.
• 42:43
  And David Plott who's a friend of mine and someone I admire enormously was talking about you know he just thinks this is going to be disastrous for the Trump administration and for Trump's popularity because when you see all these awful images coming out of the child being taken away by ice agents in Minnesota and it's pretty being shot and good being shot and you know it's it's just going to be awful you see these specific images of these specific individuals and suddenly it lands for you in a way that.
• 43:13
  The radical idea doesn't land you know you see the crying eyes of the person you say and I was thinking to myself.
• 43:19
  What do you mean we I mean we we mean we see this we mean you you see this one season who is this universal cohesive group of people who are sitting down watching Walter Cronkite every evening and reading the New York Times in the morning and are living in a shared reality.
• 43:36
  You know what the last social media image that I had seen before plots said that his feed was full of teary eyed illegal immigrants being deported or you know protesters being shot.
• 43:48
  The last social media post I had seen.
• 43:50
  And it's funny because here's the thing about being a journalist because you research so much stuff the algorithms that track you and the cookies and all that they don't quite know what to serve you so Google and you like matter.
• 44:02
  I totally confused about what my politics are because one day I'll be just I'll be researching you know how to be a good neo Nazi and then the next I'll be like why why is Israel the greatest you know country in the world.
• 44:13
  So I so my Facebook feed is just when they have the suggestions from places that I don't follow but it's like you might like this it'll be like you might like this thing that you definitely will not like.
• 44:24
  But we don't know what to make of you so on this day it was an ad for ice ice the immigration customs enforcement not not meth it wasn't an ad for meth haven't gone that far down although that may be next depending on matters algorithms and not an ad for frozen water.
• 44:44
  But an ad for immigration customs enforcement and and it said it had a photo was a mug shot of a very nasty looking Latino young Latino guy and it had his name and what are those such and such and it was like convicted of three rapes you know a murder and kidnapping.
• 45:04
  And it said one more bad guy that ice has deported and it was like join ice or something like that down the bottom and if your media feed is images of criminals who had previously been allowed to stay in the country illegally who are now no longer roaming the streets.
• 45:30
  You potentially threatening to rape your daughter.
• 45:34
  You would have a very different idea about what motivates people to object to those kinds of law enforcement activities than Alex Peretti did.
• 45:44
  And until we can find a way to maximize the number of shared norms and shared experiences and minimize the number of ones that only we and our cohort are seeing I don't know how I don't know how we get around that problem.
• 46:04
  Speaking of ice training what do I have here I had an amazing statistic I'll here we go this is this is from the economist they had a piece about I about ice recruiting right and this is amazing so look I'll just read I'll just read it verbatim instead of skimming it mentally and then doing a hash job of trying to re articulate it from the economist.
• 46:29
  This is about how part of the problem is that Donald Trump is intentionally politicizing his sort of I don't want to call him armed agencies but essentially he he or Stephen Miller or both want agencies like ice which have weaponry to become more tools of their own policy goals than objective.
• 46:55
  They're trying to do that with the FBI as well quite shamelessly as in the case of the the seizure of electoral ballots in Georgia.
• 47:08
  And so they're targeting their massive recruiting also another thing that was amazing which John Dickerson pointed out who recently left face the nation at CBS terrific journalists.
• 47:19
  He pointed out that in the you know the Trump's big beautiful bill that big beautiful bill hidden in the big beautiful bill which nobody really remarked upon at the time or saw was a massive increase in funding for ice.
• 47:35
  And there was so much else that was wrong with that bill massive tax cuts and for the rich and so on that everybody focused on those things but only now are we seeing the the fruit of that particular strategy where I think there was a the in the increase in in in funding for ice detention facilities was quadrupled I think that was the stat quadrupled it's not like a 20% increase it's a 400% increase on ice detention.
• 48:04
  And the increase in money that they were giving to ice and there was another agency which escapes me but in a similar you know vain with a similar remit.
• 48:14
  Those increases were completely unconnected to any congressional congressional.
• 48:20
  What do you call it to command right so in other words the discretion was entirely at ice they were just giving them the money without saying this is money that you should use to do XYZ they're just here is a huge amount more money do with it what you will.
• 48:33
  So then you're trusting that the kinds of people who are running these agencies who are hand picked by Donald Trump are the sorts of people who are going to use that money in ways that will enhance the security of the American people not in ways that will achieve an agenda for Donald Trump and his political party.
• 48:51
  So the economist writes both ice and border patrol for instance weirdly there's separate agencies which I still don't quite understand but basically border patrol is actually the physical border and I see immigration customs enforcement when you get off a plane at L.A.X.
• 49:05
  from abroad or JFK the people who interview you at customs and look at your passport is ice because what is that border patrol and the ice is behind the scenes anyway don't know they functionally operate the same way.
• 49:20
  Ice and border patrol for instance were recruiting in December at America fest which is an a validly trumpy right when conference.
• 49:28
  Ice is recruit so just imagine that there's a political conference unashamedly and openly partisan and they send recruitment agents to that place in order to target people with that particular world view to come on board not people who are interested in law enforcement because they like forensics because they're nerds about a community safety.
• 49:49
  Because they have the interests of public service or public policy at heart but because they intentionally have a world view that is presumably likely to be consistent with Stephen Miller's and Donald Trump's which is that there are too many people from shithole countries coming into this country and we need to get get real and shut it down.
• 50:07
  So there's that second ice is recruiting portal so you go to the website.
• 50:13
  You officially if you officially want to apply for a job at ice this is what it says America has been invaded by criminals and predators we need you capitalized to get them out you do not need an undergraduate degree.
• 50:27
  America has been invaded by criminals and predators that's the way that the impartial enforcement agency simply following the rules is characterizing its mission.
• 50:38
  Several ice recruitment posts on social media rights the economist include dog whistles such as which way American man an illusion to a white supremacist book and destroy the flood a slogan from a video game about invasive parasitic aliens.
• 50:57
  New recruits are rushed through training in 42 days 42 days think about that 42 days a month and a bit.
• 51:08
  That's all the training you get before you're armed and trying to fend off protesters who are protecting people who they don't think should be deported or going to homes and trying to drag people who've been living in this country for perhaps 10 years.
• 51:23
  They are peacefully and drag them out and send them back to a place that they may not may no longer even know if they ever did depending on how young they are.
• 51:31
  Many recruits are rushed to training 42 days many of them are former cops and veterans but some will never have held a gun before says a former ice official.
• 51:38
  In contrast it can take up to a year for a local police officer to be deemed street ready so 42 days for an ice officer 365 days for a cop so I just thought that was that was interesting.
• 51:53
  Stephen Miller let's just talk a little bit about Stephen Miller that I have only halfway through a fabulous episode of one of my favorite podcasts which you have to listen to if you're in Australia and you ought to listen to if you're not it's called if you're listening to an ABC podcast by Matt Bevan who's been on this show and who's a friend of mine and he is one of the best in the business I think anywhere in the world at breaking down.
• 52:18
  Complicated ideas in a funny whimsical sort of tongue in cheek but really informative and just vastly nerdy and intricate and delightful way and the latest episode goes through and if you're listening as a reference to Donald Trump's speech during the debate with Hillary Clinton where he said Russia if you're listening you know you could leak some stuff on Hillary Clinton and shortly thereafter there was this dump of information about Hillary Clinton which reopened the FBI.
• 52:47
  For me case and many argue lost Hillary Clinton the election.
• 52:52
  Oh man what a different world it would be isn't it just crazy do you ever think about like the sort of butterfly effective you know how just random shit could have changed things like you know that 600 people in Florida in the year 2000 just get out of bed in the morning and just decide to vote for Al Gore instead of George W Bush and then is there no Iraq war maybe.
• 53:16
  Did we get a handle on climate change maybe.
• 53:21
  But then on the other hand we probably don't get Barack Obama right because if you didn't have the George W Bush administration and Dick Cheney and everyone getting so frustrated with that administration what was perceived as that administration is right wing over reach.
• 53:34
  You probably wouldn't have had the space for an Obama to come along so do we have to thank those voters in Florida in 2000 who did vote for George W Bush.
• 53:45
  For giving us Barack Obama subsequently but then you get Obama and without Obama you probably don't have Trump because the conservative base probably has more tolerance for traditional republicanism then they would have if they felt so outraged at this smug professorial black dude in the other office.
• 54:09
  So anyway I just always think about that stuff so yeah the things could certainly have gone differently and Stephen and so if you're listening is this you know great podcast started out being an investigation a deep dive into the Russia collusion hopes there's some people call it the Russia collusion theory.
• 54:28
  And he subsequently it was so good that everyone just wanted more events and there was a season about China now there's now it's basically just to show about any any sort of international foreign policy.
• 54:38
  Intrigue this interesting and the latest episode is about Stephen Miller and.
• 54:45
  He reveals Matt reveals like audio of Stephen Miller from when he was a teenager and when he was an aspiring student politician and so on and they would he was a real smarter like he was a funny clown and he would say incredibly outrageous things here you know there's audio him giving a speech.
• 55:02
  When he's running for I think student president and he's saying like is there anyone else sick and tired of being told to pick up their own trash when we have janitors who are paid $25 an hour working in this school who should be picking up the goddamn trash for us and the crowd goes for the kids go wild.
• 55:17
  So any you know the audio of him saying being asked about the Iraq war I guess he was in he you know is probably contemporaries because he's pretty young he he was I guess in college at the time of the Iraq war and he goes well what would I do with Saddam Hussein and the senior officials I wouldn't kill him because I'm a human person I would torture them and cut off their things because that is the human thing to do because torture is the human solution it's the solution that respects life.
• 55:48
  And Matt raises the point on the podcast is this is this just trolling and shit talking because certainly sounds like it when he's young.
• 55:56
  But now he is a person who is as I said earlier overtly instructing immigration officials that they have full federal immunity and the conduct of their duties and anybody who lays a hand on them is committing a felony.
• 56:09
  He's a person who is you know pushing who was one of the masterminds of the blowing up boats in the Caribbean with drones and going into Venezuela along with Marco Rubio.
• 56:24
  And is most known for his I wouldn't maybe white nationalism is too harsh white supremacy certainly too hard but I think white nationalism is probably or ethnic nationalism for America should we say the belief that there is just way too much immigration and that immigrants are a drain on the United States rather than something that is good.
• 56:45
  Someone who believes that the idea that diversity of strength is nonsense that unity of strength ethnic unity of strength and America should no longer be the shining light on the hill for immigrants but should be a place where basically white middle class people and certainly legal white middle class people although that even that is weird because like what do you have as much antipathy towards a Canadian or a Norwegian or an Australian overstaying.
• 57:15
  And they're visa in the United States it's hard to know I can't get inside but anyway this question of Stephen Miller people people around him people like him so there are I'm trying to differentiate between the true believers in the Trump administration and the people who are either just
• 57:33
  shit posting or their yes men their lap dogs and the question becomes this this people ask me quite a lot just Trump believe what he says to Stephen Miller believe what he says when Trump says that the 2020 election was stolen does he believe it.
• 57:54
  And I've come to believe that the question of belief is suspect in this case and the reason why this is important is because I think it will inform how we ought to interpret and stand up to this moment and hopefully create a better future that will reinforce American democracy rather than undermine it because.
• 58:21
  I think that Donald Trump is a transactional human being who believes in the things that it is necessary to believe in order to achieve the goals that he thinks are worth achieving by which I mean when he says that he won the 2020 election.
• 58:40
  Does he think it's true well I don't think that he is bothered about the question of whether or not the atoms in the universe when they assembled themselves into ballot papers and were counted were actually legitimately in his favor.
• 59:02
  I think what he away his brain seems to work and I'm just guessing here total speculation.
• 59:08
  But I've met some people like this the way his brain to it seems to work is that the world is a game of power.
• 59:15
  And you can shape reality into what you want reality to be and that there's something a little bit mediocre and low testosterone about just accepting the truth because it is it happens to be the fact about the way things are you create your own truth.
• 59:30
  So if believing that the 2020 election was stolen is a useful prerequisite to getting elected in 2024 then by definition it's true.
• 59:42
  It's true because it achieves the outcomes that you want to achieve.
• 59:45
  No one will ever know the actual truth of the atoms and who gives a shit about the atoms and the ballot papers and the numbers and the like facts on the ground facts are facts are created by powerful people.
• 59:57
  History is written by the victors and so I sort of think it's a moot question like to do they believe what they like they have goals they want to achieve they want to be powerful they have a vision of America that they want which is a much more mono ethnic ethnic country where it's very easy to get rich if you're a privileged white person.
• 1:00:21
  And whatever they need to.
• 1:00:24
  Claim that they believe or actually even believe in order to enact that will be judged by the utility of it you know I think it's sort of beside the question of saying do they believe it or not in some ways this is a bit of an aside but.
• 1:00:37
  I've been thinking about writing a column about this and so much reminds me of when you get into an argument with someone who is an AI skeptic and they say all the all the large language models are doing is they're just sophisticated auto completes they're just they're brainless things that are just spitting out the next thing the next not the next bunch of letters that they think they should spit out you just being hoodwinked into thinking that there's anything going on there.
• 1:01:03
  To which I kind of feel well they're doing things that are very strange and seem innovative and they're helping me to think about things and they're helping me to write things and they're helping me to.
• 1:01:19
  Plan things and they're enormously useful in ways that an auto complete isn't so if you want to call that and glorified auto complete be my guest it doesn't change the fact I mean I almost feel like you could have like a sentient large language AI overlord and you would still be able to accuse it as being a glorified auto complete I mean you could use me of being a glorified auto complete in the sense that.
• 1:01:47
  I've ingested all of the information that has ever occurred before me it has gone into my brain and my neurons are firing right now and they're they're spirting out words in a way that even I don't know what the next fourth word I'm going to say is I'm not in I'm not in charge I'm going to control of this model is not written I can't tell you what the next sentence I'm going to say is all of the information has gone into my brain and I'm just auto completing what I think is the most sensible thing to say next.
• 1:02:16
  That it strikes me as that kind of sort of sophistry that sort of like academic professorial nonsense and similarly I think we make the same mistake well do they just need Trump administration really you know think that's doing the right thing or just think that it's true that the you know that it's going to crack down legal immigration in the crack way is it I think it's true that the ballots needed to be seized in order to like I think they think that what is true is what it works.
• 1:02:43
  You know history is a story of people being able to create the realities that they want through the narratives that they construct so choose your narrative I think that's the way they think about this.
• 1:02:57
  But again that's only a suspicion I have no way of verifying that.
• 1:03:02
  So then you get to the weird part of this whole thing which is the people who there's no question that they don't believe in it but they go along with it anyway like the yes men.
• 1:03:15
  So I thought I would have thought the Tulsi Gabbard was one of these people the head of national security who went down to Georgia and called Trump in front of the FBI agents who has no role who only went because Donald Trump personally asked her to and.
• 1:03:28
  So she was a Democrat and she was a service woman she served in Iraq I think or Afghanistan and she became perhaps slightly deranged by covid and became quite conspiratorial she's on the sort of she was on this I guess the far left of the democratic party that can get so far left and so conspiratorial that actually becomes right wing like.
• 1:03:50
  Naomi wolf or I mean some people might say Glenn Greenwald people like that who you now the distance between them and Steve Bannon is like quite quite slim so the question of these people I can only assume that it's cowardice I can only assume that I mean I to be honest this is the this is actually a bit of the whole of everything is going on that I understand the least I sort of understand.
• 1:04:21
  I mean I don't understand because you would have to have so such time such a tiny tiny dick to be a congressman I was going to say I sort of understand like being in congress and not wanting to have Donald Trump tweet mean things about you and maybe not having to run not being able to run again or even potentially being threatened you know by crazies if you.
• 1:04:42
  cares about you that much but the idea that that would not be a price you would pay in order to object to a trend that is so obviously dangerous I mean even if you think there's some justification for it it obviously turns the dial up on the likelihood that American democracy does not succeed.
• 1:05:01
  is baffling to me but even more even if I could believe that because I could believe being a coward I can't understand the Tulsi Gabbards and the people in the administration who were not true believers but who came in you know Marco Rubio would be another person like this.
• 1:05:17
  who came in because it was a job and maybe they thought they could restrain Trump in some ways or help you know enact some of the things that they care deeply about.
• 1:05:26
  But there's only it's right there's only two ways that history will remember these people.
• 1:05:32
  either American democracy will restore itself and they will be remembered as participating in one of the darkest and most dangerous eras in American democracy.
• 1:05:46
  or their modus operandas will become the norm and America will enter a period of essentially alternating authoritarian regimes and some form of perhaps civil war low grade you know not civil war like the American civil war where there are trenches but civil war like the Balkan civil war.
• 1:06:10
  where there's
• 1:06:13
  I mean it's too horrible to think about but you know the enemy within is constantly the is who you're battling against.
• 1:06:20
  So in that second scenario where they so their their MO becomes the norm then they will be remembered as the first administration seriously executed an authoritarian paradigm which replaced the post world war two democratic peace in America.
• 1:06:35
  I don't think either of those options are good for them like if you lose and American democracy restores itself then you are a member of one of the darkest chapters if you win and the dark chapter continues then you are complicit in having brought it about.
• 1:06:56
  You know if you if they win then they usher in an era in which they will be remembered as an as awful instigators of a new way of doing things and if they lose then they'll be remembered as people who tried to derail the American experiment.
• 1:07:10
  So that those are the people who I really don't understand.
• 1:07:17
  I mentioned the low grade civil war.
• 1:07:20
  What's tricky about responding to this moment and here I reach the conclusion of my essay ladies and gentlemen.
• 1:07:27
  Is it's easy in isolation to notice the authoritarianism of the Trump administration and to think that the best way to fight it is to ensure that authoritarianism doesn't triumph in the United States.
• 1:07:45
  What if the greatest risk is not one party rule.
• 1:07:55
  Star one is in America or Nazism or a holocaust or something like that.
• 1:08:02
  But a kind of Balkan style civil war where neighbor is against neighbor and everyone is armed and there's bombings and shootings going on all over the place between extremists who live amongst us and they're trying to.
• 1:08:28
  I don't want to say exterminate but maybe expagate from the nation.
• 1:08:33
  The enemies of the state were on whichever side.
• 1:08:36
  So the right would believe that the country is trying to be taken over by neo Marxist left wing leftist fascists who are lawless and want to inundate the country where there's many illegal immigrants as possible in order to.
• 1:08:52
  Replace the native born population particularly the white population with hordes from the third world that will make America indistinguishable from Somalia.
• 1:09:02
  And the right wing people just feel they're not going to tolerate that and they're not going to tolerate the breakdown of the family and they're not going to tolerate their kids in public schools being.
• 1:09:11
  I told that it's okay to for boys to suck each other's cocks if they want to it's just okay for you know boys to turn into girls and for girls in change rooms to have other quite unquote girls with dicks walking in that it's just all way too far that's the vision of the.
• 1:09:26
  That's the vision that the right will have of the left and die to take matters of their own hands.
• 1:09:33
  At the same time people who are on the left will feel like there is an authoritarian Nazi takeover of the country and that fascists who are rearing their head in America again and labeling people as illegal and trying to shoot citizens in the street are fundamentally un-American and spit in the face of the American tradition of immigration and openness and they have to be defeated.
• 1:10:01
  You can easily see that coming about there are three actually four issues that are identified in another article in the economist which is about.
• 1:10:16
  The slide into authoritarianism and I think they're worth talking about this is from a they've interviewed experts about authoritarianism and to try to figure out the characteristics because I also think it's important for us to understand whether or not we're just being historical when we talk about fascism or I really don't think fascism is a good word.
• 1:10:38
  Or authoritarianism here so they have they identify four experts not the economist themselves but the experts in authoritarianism who look at the authoritarianism all over the world and the way that it unfolds have four characteristics first authoritarian's encouraged loyalty and
• 1:10:59
  to encourage loyalty people are usually well paid right so they this is about creating forces that are answerable only to the state is a little bit like what I was implying that the FBI and immigration customs enforcement are becoming under Donald Trump they're not objective arms of the state to which we all belong they are sort of personal.
• 1:11:19
  Well they are increasingly encouraged to be answerable to the regime that happens to be in power let's put it that way to be as careful as we can with our words and non hysterical.
• 1:11:31
  So to strengthen the would be ways that would be authoritarians try often try to strengthen the group on power by creating forces answerable only to themselves one to encourage loyalty they usually paid well.
• 1:11:43
  So the you know they pay so this huge funding for ice for example so you look at Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard core which is the the arm of state terror in Iran.
• 1:11:53
  Then they report directly to the supreme leader they're not law enforcement they have a much larger budget than the regular army and their offices are because the officers rather not the offices.
• 1:12:05
  The officers of the guard core are able to use that money to run lucrative businesses on the side often coercive ones they can run many mafia operations on the side and the government will turn a blind eye because they're members of the IRGC.
• 1:12:18
  So ice gets paid an enormous amount of money second whereas regular military forces are supposed to be politically neutral at least in democracies unorthodox ones may be fiercely partisan.
• 1:12:33
  India's Hindu nationalist paramilitary groups who tend to carry sticks rather than guns are open about their support for the ruling party.
• 1:12:42
  So that's another way that you try to get a strangle hold on power by creating forces that only answer to you.
• 1:12:50
  You have a partisan slant to it so there you have the recruiting stands at those partisan events in order to get ice agents to make sure that ice consists of people who believe in you and who are rallying for you as a partisan political figure not as ahead of state for everybody.
• 1:13:11
  Third a strong man's pet force is often allowed to break the law.
• 1:13:16
  Does that bring bells of Stephen Miller's line to ice you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.
• 1:13:24
  That's it he's saying you can break the law and you have immunity thanks to us.
• 1:13:31
  So you owe us your potentially your life.
• 1:13:35
  If you end up committing a murder for example and we pardon you.
• 1:13:41
  A strong man's pet force is often allowed to break the law. Thirdly in Venezuela as an example it's illegal to kidnap and torture dissidents or to stand outside polling stations shooting bullets into the air to intimidate voters.
• 1:13:52
  But motorbike gangs known as colic divos are sponsored by the regime and have done so without fear of arrest.
• 1:14:00
  So you outsource it.
• 1:14:04
  Allow them break the law and lastly fourthly leaders who sponsor the regular use of force nearly always claim it's to protect the public is the fourth characteristic.
• 1:14:13
  So the four characteristics of would be authoritarians who are trying to strengthen their group on power by developing forces that are only answerable to them or more answerable to them than you would want a force a state force to be which is supposed to be operating on behalf of everybody are pay them well.
• 1:14:32
  And just see the fourfold increase in budget for ice detention in Trump's big beautiful bill pay them well.
• 1:14:43
  Allow them to be trying to make them partisan rather than politically neutral there's a long standing tradition of political neutrality for the army and the police in all democracies.
• 1:14:53
  So now you have these agencies like ice being intentionally recruited in politically partisan arenas.
• 1:15:01
  Third allow them allow your pet strongmen to break the law seen Stephen Miller effectively prime minister of the United States openly say that any all ice agents are beyond the law.
• 1:15:13
  And fourth claim that it's to protect the public and the example on the fourth issue might be the Philippines where Duterte Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency by promising to quote forget the laws on human rights when fighting drug dealers he urged the police to quote fatten all the fish of mineral obey with the corpses of criminals to make the streets safe again.
• 1:15:36
  So again making the streets safe again as a pretext this is all familiar stuff.
• 1:15:41
  And it plays into the point that I was making earlier about my skepticism as to whether or not the best way to push back against such behavior is by fomenting violence against ice agents and in the streets.
• 1:15:55
  Because that plays perfectly into point four there into strategy for tactic for of the would be authoritarian who's trying to strengthen his grip on power by creating forces which are answerable only to him, which is to give him a reason a way to say that he's protecting the public.
• 1:16:11
  He's only protecting the public.
• 1:16:15
  So civil war versus authoritarianism and preventing civil war it's tricky because the things that you might want to do to prevent authoritarianism you might think could enhance the likelihood of a civil war.
• 1:16:34
  Like standing up more aggressively to Trump could increase partisanship and alienation and division and violence and conversely the things that you might think you want to do to avoid a civil war.
• 1:16:50
  Like trying to find a way for all Americans to get on the same page might impede your ability to stand up to Maga by making you more leery about trying to about being highly politically partisan at this moment and denouncing the Republican party.
• 1:17:09
  I think it's a false choice.
• 1:17:13
  I think if we're going to channel Gandhi and Martin Luther King when we're thinking about non-violent civil disobedience which I would strongly encourage and there may be some kind of economic sanction that could happen here.
• 1:17:24
  I know that Scott Galloway the business head of the business school at NYU has argued that Americans should just cancel AI subscriptions because AI is the only thing that is making the American economy grow at the moment and if every American or even 20% of Americans cancel their subscriptions to chat GPT and so on.
• 1:17:43
  The American economy would shrink it would go into recession and it would be I mean to me I just think that collective action like that is probably not going to happen is such a long shot that is not worth focusing on but I kind of like the idea.
• 1:17:56
  Civil disobedience rather than gorilla fermenting a violence as opposition to the jack booted thugs strikes me as very wise and if we're going to talk about MLK and Gandhi I think the the great person who we should look to in moments like this when we think about societies and countries that could have descended into civil war that got right to the brink and had every reason to in fact where one side was perfectly justified in.
• 1:18:26
  Trying to punish people who either wanted to or successfully did derail democracy but refused to do so and managed to sort of avoid that train wreck you would have to think of Nelson Mandela and South Africa.
• 1:18:48
  I mean after apartheid there was no reason and in fact the argument for continuing apartheid in the 70s and 80s was less that it was a great system really and more that.
• 1:19:01
  If we allow black the majority black people in South Africa to have a say they don't fucking slaughter us.
• 1:19:08
  I mean they're going to kill us this is the same argument by the way in America towards the end of slavery I mean part of the thinking was not just you know that it was the right thing to do to keep slaves it was like what do you expect us to do.
• 1:19:21
  If we liberate them they're going to what do you think they're just going to roll over and just be happy go away happily they're going to come in and they're going to cut it slash our throats.
• 1:19:31
  And the way that it didn't happen America's a different story because it actually had a civil war to decide that.
• 1:19:39
  But that was in some sense a voluntary civil war and in the sense that Lincoln could have just allowed the southern states to succeed if he wanted to.
• 1:19:47
  But in the South African case there was a conscious strategy on the part of Nelson Mandela when he got into power he could have hunted down all of the white supremacists who had punished him I mean who were running the country remember I mean you think Stephen Miller's a racist we had people.
• 1:20:06
  You know who had just been running the country three months ago in South Africa who who had been presiding over the most openly fascistic and and overtly racist regime in the world.
• 1:20:19
  And what did Nelson Mandela do did he prosecute them did he hound them did he find try to find trumped up charges to bring them down with and ruin their lives.
• 1:20:29
  Not only did he not do that not only did let them go free he insisted that they work in his administration that they work with him in his cabinet.
• 1:20:39
  Because he recognized the only way to move forward was to not be a coward right not say oh it was all right I'm not going to stand up for what I believe in to say these are my conditions when that is gone we're not going to believe in we're not going to do any of that anymore but we're also not going to re litigate the past.
• 1:21:03
  We're going to work together to figure out what a future looks like and there absolutely could have been a civil war post apartheid in South Africa many more reasons why they should have been there are for why they should be a civil war in America right now.
• 1:21:17
  And part of the mechanism in South Africa were truth and reconciliation commissions where they would actually have full investigations into what happened where people could speak about what had happened speak about their desires articulate how they were wronged and find some sort of reconciliation.
• 1:21:39
  This reminds me a little bit of the conversation that I had recently with Nicholas grew and I believe who's talking about citizens assemblies it's a great episode if you haven't listened to it you should.
• 1:21:51
  The idea that part of the democratic process that our our democracies have become so estranged from the views of the average citizen.
• 1:21:59
  That you know we're essentially ruled by a cabal of professional politicians who are dependent on enormous corporations to fund their campaigns and who are quite non responsive on a number of issues to voter will and they're also captive to the social media cycle to the just a relentless media cycle and they're so cautious about doing anything because they're always worried about the mob on social media.
• 1:22:24
  And that the voters too are caught in a cycle of an attention economy where we're deranged by algorithms and so one of the solutions that Nicholas grown advocates is something they did in Ireland for example before the gay marriage referendum there they had citizens assemblies where you were called up like you might be for jury duty and you are assembled in a demographically relevant consistent way so there were people from all kinds of communities.
• 1:22:51
  And you might have a very homophobic religious pastor with a very gay you know gay rights activist and they would sitting at the same table they would have tables of like a half dozen people in a hall they would hear speakers.
• 1:23:03
  They would people would come in and inform them about the what the law would be about you know how rights would be dealt with and so on and they would hash it out and they would talk about it.
• 1:23:12
  And so instead of getting your information from algorithms or from editorials in the news media you would get it from talking to other people and the idea of having a kind of a standing citizens body in a country in a democracy that can deliberate on the decisions that are before parliament.
• 1:23:28
  Just so that you could see I mean they may even be non binding initially but that you could just see whether or not regular people who are selected randomly by jury according to a process that is similar to a jury registration whether or not they would arrive at decisions that are consistent with or antithetical to what are elected representatives are coming to and if there was a consistent difference.
• 1:23:52
  You know if the people's assembly through a number of cycles of different citizens who'd been called up was consistently after thoughtful deliberation coming to different conclusions than parliament was then maybe well certainly it would embarrass politicians it would give the politicians who are who were only voting with their party grudgingly but actually agreed with the citizens reason to be able to justify their switching their vote or you can even have a photo.
• 1:24:22
  There's a formal trigger where if the citizens assembly votes I don't know three times in opposition to what parliament votes then parliament has to revose in a blind vote so that the parties have no power.
• 1:24:34
  So anyway there are all these ideas but these these kinds of ways of making it less about narrative and more about humans and more about reason more about conversation shall I say uncomfortable conversation.
• 1:24:49
  I respect the only way out of where America is yes we have to do our best to I mean if you're in politics obviously you have a different role because you need to be pushing back in a much more active way against every outrage but I would encourage you and us as a collective of reasonable people who enjoy thinking about conversations with a cool head and a warm heart instead of a hot head and a cold heart.
• 1:25:18
  I would encourage us to resist the temptation to freak out about every latest thing like we already know the trajectory it's it's sort of neither here nor there what Stephen Miller and Donald Trump do henceforth like we need to stand up against it.
• 1:25:36
  There should be absolutely be civil disobedience but go into it with a sense of righteousness and love for the American people and the American project and American democracy and for liberalism and for pluralism.
• 1:25:52
  And walk with it walk with your head held high and a sense of courage and purpose and faith in the capacity of American civil society to absorb this threat not because it's true but because you have to behave as if it is true if you have any chance of making it so.
• 1:26:15
  To hunker down into frightened fearful camps where your only response to an authoritarian overreach is to go into the streets and try to spit on immigration customs enforcement agents and wrestle them to the ground and risk getting shot.
• 1:26:31
  That is not a strategy for winning the big game of avoiding a civil war Americans are going to need to find it need to find a way of.
• 1:26:43
  Cleaving off the extremists so that the people who are genuine die hard on both sides if you if you believe that.
• 1:26:52
  At any cost all people who are undocumented in the United States should be removed from the country no matter how and no matter how many people have to die in the process.
• 1:27:03
  At one number how much it costs you can't be part of the conversation really you're not serious.
• 1:27:09
  Conversely if you believe that no human is illegal and therefore anyone should be able to come into the country and if they set foot in the country then they should be able to stay here indefinitely you shouldn't be part of the conversation because you're not serious.
• 1:27:22
  But these are vanishingly small fractions of the population one of them happens to be in power right now and it's scary to see that enacted.
• 1:27:31
  So we need to stop fucking around and trying new experiments with liberal democracy may will give this orange faced you know game show host try at the top job.
• 1:27:40
  These are sophisticated systems of liberal democracy that have established these norms against corruption and state power that are quite difficult to build if you doubt that just look at how many places in how many years have had.
• 1:27:54
  The societies as peaceful and law abiding and functional as ours you know if you start talking about how hard things are very difficult to buy a house you know things are really expensive if you see in the price of eggs.
• 1:28:08
  Part of me just wants to go shut the fuck up I mean go to any if I give you a dart board with all of the eras of human history going back I don't know a hundred thousand years do you want to go just 10 thousand years maybe we're going to go 2000 years.
• 1:28:22
  As long as human beings have been arranging themselves into societies and then I give you a doubt and then we also break it down into all of the countries in the world and I tell you you get to throw a dart board at that.
• 1:28:32
  What are the odds that you that your dart board hits rich western liberal democracy in the 21st century and if it hit that wouldn't you be pretty fucking stoked.
• 1:28:44
  I mean I would I would I wouldn't be throwing that dart if I would do anything to get out of that dart room I don't know which evil genius has come up with the idea of this scenario where he's going to teleport me into that particular time and place.
• 1:28:58
  But you would have won the fucking lottery to live in our societies so this idea of people are really hurting you know the elites just don't get it we got to we got to mix things up we got to try something really different maybe we'll try a bit of you know
• 1:29:15
  you know illiberalism for a change you know this initially began on the left in academia in the 1960s and Foucault and post structuralism and that then bled into social justice cancel culture and wokeism and now we're seeing the ferocious blowback from the right just calm down take a deep breath recognize that we have a lot to be grateful for.
• 1:29:44
  Try not to doom scroll a whole bunch recognize it the way out of this is most likely to isolate the extremes it's a little bit like a counter terrorism operation right where your job is to win over the hearts and minds of anyone who's winnable and to ice to cleave them off from the extremists.
• 1:30:05
  That is classic counter terrorism and that's essentially what America has to do right now isolate the actual extremists who are unwinnable that might be 20% of the population and the remaining 80% who will disagree in all kinds of ways about kinds of things but will not die on a hill for some ideological purity test.
• 1:30:28
  Those people have to find a way to escape the algorithm escape the natural sense of fury and partisanship that feeling like you're suffering any dignity when the other side wins can engender and talk about the America that they want.
• 1:30:48
  I don't know how to do that. I hope that this show contributes to it a little bit.
• 1:30:54
  I think that having uncomfortable conversations in a from a place of generosity and free from bullshit and trying to understand why people you know if you're on the left and you're absolutely outraged by what is happening in Minnesota I think the most useful thing you can do.
• 1:31:08
  Perhaps other than civil disobedience peaceful civil disobedience is to understand why people would vote for that and what the world view is of the person whose Facebook feed is totally inundated with images like the ad from ice that I saw about the rapist and murderer who'd been successfully deported by ice.
• 1:31:30
  It doesn't mean that you say off you're saying Nazis you know I will get my I will get my own saying odd so Josh thinks Nazis are okay Josh is saying we shouldn't stand up for fascism if it was the 1930s Josh would be like oh we just have to sit down and make friends with Hitler you know if only oh that's not the point some people are unwinnable and to them you have to stand up and fight.
• 1:31:53
  But if you treat everyone who voted for them and everyone who supports them and everyone who doesn't see the world the same way as you.
• 1:32:00
  As being in the same bucket as them there is no way to escape the inevitable ratcheting up hostilities into a war of attrition which will eventually become hot.
• 1:32:12
  So it just may be that the best thing to do right now is not necessarily a political act but an act of the heart and an act of self care.
• 1:32:24
  Where we understand each new blip in the new cycle as just a one jigsaw in a mosaic whose general picture we already know which is an administration which is now obviously actively trying to subvert American democracy subvert the norms of democratic civil life.
• 1:32:50
  It is one of the darkest attempted periods in American history certainly I would say since the Civil War and once you recognize that you don't need to keep being a cat with a laser pointer you can have some faith that maybe just maybe uncomfortable conversations will be what save us.
• 1:33:15
  I'll see you next time.