Latest / 5 minute updates on the latest Trump actions by Prof Christina Pagel / Trump's supervillain AI images, and the rest of a disturbing week

Transcript

Trump's supervillain AI images, and the rest of a disturbing week · 5 minute updates on the latest Trump actions by Prof Christina Pagel

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm back.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been logging the Trump administration's actions
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: for 18 months now, and so not much really surprises me anymore.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: But this week something genuinely did.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: So Trump has been posting more AI images of himself,
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: but instead of the usual kind of strongman stuff, so him
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: as a king, as a superhero or whatever, he's put himself on a black throne,
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: surrounded by huge black robots telling people to have nightmares,
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: under a caption promising he'll haunt their dreams forever.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he's just made himself look like a galactic super villain.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I'll come to that.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And just to say that in this video, I'm only covering the last week or so,
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: so not the whole summer.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: first, I'll start with the elections, because the midterms are now
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: less than two months away, then the leadership cult,
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: and then finally on the latest ways the state is going after
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: its perceived enemies and excuse the cat.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: So elections.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing is a hunt for non-existent fraud.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hundreds of agents at the Department of Homeland Security
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: have been pulled off their normal work, which includes investigating human
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: trafficking and terrorism, and put onto an effort that the government
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: is calling internally the Unlawful Voter Initiative.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea is for agents to comb through the voter rolls of all 50 states
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: looking for non-citizens who have registered or voted.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: The New York Times reported this
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: and saw the training documents and videos that the agents are being shown.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in America,
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: and there never has been.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: the Trump administration has been trying to find evidence for 18 months,
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: but without success.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: The next thing is potential voter intimidation at the polls.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: So at a press conference in New York, the Homeland Security secretary,
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Markwayne Mullin, was asked about ICE at polling places in the midterms.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, and I quote, “ICE isn't there to patrol
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: the polling places, we’re there to enforce specific threats.” So he said
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: agents could be at a polling place, but only if there was a threat to
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: the place or if they were serving a warrant
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: on someone they had been tracking.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: But federal law prohibits
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: armed agents from being at any place where an election is held.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And back in July, a dozen senators already warned Mullin
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: in writing that deploying ICE agents to voting sites would be illegal.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not like this is a new policy being announced.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: But it does matter,
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: because if ICE agents were at polling places, many citizens of color,
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: who historically might vote Democrat, might think twice about turning up.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Then there are the rules on who can vote and how.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, hours before North Carolina started posting mail-in ballots,
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: its Board of Elections changed the rules for how mail ballots get counted.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: So many more ballots are going to be marked as “spoiled” because of it.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then also fewer people are eligible to hand in someone else's ballot now.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that makes it harder for people who don't have,
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: say, close family living nearby but can't get to a polling station.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: To give an example,
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: a husband and wife who put both ballots in one envelope,
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: which used to be a fixable mistake, would now have both votes thrown out,
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: or someone who seals the outer envelope but forgets to seal
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: the inner one will also have their vote
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: considered spoiled, or not counted, whereas before they would have counted.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the administration's ongoing legal battle over
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: mail voting itself.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: So back in the spring, Trump signed an Executive Order
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: telling the US Postal Service to impose new requirements mail ballots.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so what he said was that the US Postal Service can only mail ballots
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: to people who had been checked on a new centralized citizen database.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, states and voting rights sued,
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: and a federal judge in Boston has blocked that rule twice, first
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: with a temporary order and then on the 4th of September,
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: with the preliminary injunction that blocks that order The judge wrote
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: that bringing this new rule in for the Postal Service less than 70 days before
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: an election, threatens to disenfranchize millions of people who vote by mail.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And in her words, the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: voting to support the rushed implementation of the rule.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: The administration has then gone to the Supreme Court twice in the last week
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: to try and lift the judge's blocks, so once against the temporary order
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: and once again against the injunction that replaced it.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And as I'm recording this video, the Supreme Court
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: has asked the challengers to file their arguments by this Wednesday.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: So kind of moving on to the the Trump leadership cult.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Most populous autocracies or states becoming autocracies,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: glorify their leader and produce huge amounts of propaganda to demonize enemies,
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: justify their policies, and present their leader as kind of beyond criticism.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's happening right now in the US, and it's getting ever more blatant.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: In early September, the White House put a set of arcade
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: games on its own official website at arcade.gov.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: There are five of them, and they're built to look like old games
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: like Snake and Tetris from the 1980s.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: In one game called Rio Run, you play the administration's border czar
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: chasing migrants drawn with different skin tones along the Rio Grande River.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: In another game called Build the Wall, you stack sections of the border wall
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: to and I'm quoting the game “protect the border from the coming horde”,
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: and another game has you fill your kid’s Trump savings account
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: by catching cash and gold.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: these are all on a government website paid for by tax payers.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: In late August, Trump posted
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: a chart on Truth Social ranking US presidents,
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: and he put himself alone in a category above everyone else called “The Greatest”.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln and Washington are one level below him as merely “Great”.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then over this last weekend, Trump went on a spree of posting
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: AI images of himself and some of them are hugely disturbing.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: In one, he's sitting on this huge black metal throne, surrounded by giant robots
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: in a kind of fiery industrial scene with the words “Give Them Nightmares”
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: along the bottom.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in another post, Trump stands among this kind of army of huge black
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: robots with glowing red eyes, and behind him is this kind of cracked
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: and broken moon or planet captioned “They will dream of us forever”.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't want to kind of over interpret these pictures, but
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: the president posting images of himself as an all powerful figure
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: behind images of cracked
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: or broken planet, telling his enemies to have nightmares.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, it's not nothing.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the DC building spree.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: So Trump is building a huge ballroom at the White House twice
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: the size of the main building, after tearing down the east wing to make room.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now a preservation group sued, saying
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: that Trump can't build the ballroom without congressional approval.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: The lower courts agreed and blocked the build,
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: but at the end of August, the Supreme Court
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: let construction carry on while the legal cases continue.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Supreme Court did not say that the ballroom is legal.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the Chief Justice dissented along with three liberal judges and wrote
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: that is likely not lawful.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the 5 to 4 Supreme Court order turned on a kind of technical legal point.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: but the point is,
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: is that the ballroom goes up, while the question
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: of whether it is even legal remains unanswered.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the same week, the Trump administration said it would break ground
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: on its 250ft triumphal arch near the Lincoln Memorial,
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: even though the planning body that has to approve
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: it has only given preliminary approval and can't give final approval until October.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: So again, opponents have gone to court asking for an emergency order
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: to stop the bill because once something's up, you can't kind of unbuild
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what's happening is that the Trump administration is just racing
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: to outpace the speed of the law by just building regardless.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, to kind of complement all the propaganda,
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: there's the erasing of the independent record.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: So on the 4th of September, the Interior Department
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: wrote to the Smithsonian Museums Board and said that federal agencies cannot in
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: good conscience keep supporting it under its current leadership
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: and threatened to stop lending Smithsonian artifacts,
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: helping with procurement or giving it grants.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the US administration is saying that the Smithsonian
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: is pushing a divisive ideological agenda and ideological activism.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we know that Trump has already complained
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: about the Smithsonian's “focus” on how bad slavery was.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: So what we've got is Trump building monuments and posting
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: kind of aggrandizing, dark AI slop, while at the same time
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: threatening to defund the institution whose job it is to keep an independent
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: record of the country's history.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, moving on to kind of how the state is weaponizing
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: against its enemies.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: So the House Education and Workforce Committee,
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: which is led by Republicans, has opened investigations into six
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: major unions, including the teachers, the auto workers and the steelworkers,
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: and demanded their financial records going back to 2023.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the trigger for this investigation was reports from two conservative groups
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: alleging that the union spent members dues on Democratic causes.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the unions say that they already filed detailed financial disclosures
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: with the Labor Department,
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: and this investigation is politically timed in the run up to the midterms.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so there is no there there.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Then Don Lemon, who is a former
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: CNN news anchor, was arrested and charged earlier
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: this year over his reporting on a protest at church in Minnesota.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And his lawyers have now said in a court filing that prosecutors will not say
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: whether they secretly obtained Lemon's phone records
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: using a type of warrant meant for customs issues, not journalism.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the government has already used that kind of customs warrant to pull
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: six months of another journalist’s phone records from from her phone carrier.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the government says that because Customs Enforcement
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: is part of Homeland Security, it can use those warrant types for anything.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: But experts say that this practice runs against the Fourth
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches,
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: and it is a direct threat to press freedom.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, attacks on universities continue,
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: but this time through the tax code.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So the Treasury and IRS which is the Internal Revenue Service
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: have proposed rule that would strip tax-exempt status from any school
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: or university that considers race in admissions, scholarships, athletics,
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: or in the wording of the rule “every other school administered program”.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it could affect as many as 18,000 institutions.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Treasury Secretary says
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: it's all about ensuring that “racial discrimination” has no place in education.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: But the main professor's union calls it “weaponizing
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: the IRS and blatant political coercion.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where we are
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: as we move into an autumn that I think will be dominated by the midterms.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: So see you in a week or two.