TRASHFUTURE - Dragnet feat. Josef Burton

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

Former US diplomat Josef Burton joins November and Riley to discuss the denunciations, deportations, and imprisonment of immigrants in the United States. Also, the degeneration of the state into personal enforcement fiefdoms, and the likely eventual Democratic leadership response (“we would do the black bagging much better”). Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *NATE ALERT* Lions Led By Donkeys is performing live in London on Friday, 11th April! Get tickets here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *TF LIVE ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Big Fat Festival hosted by Big Belly Comedy on Saturday, 21st June! You can get tickets for that here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello trash future listeners just a heads up There are a few live events coming up that we wanted to mention trash future will be performing at the big fat festival at big belly Comedy club in London on Saturday, June 21st. There's a link in the show notes Also as a side note lions led by donkeys will be performing at that same festival on Sunday, June 22nd Similarly if you would like to encounter Milo, you need to be in Australia for that. However, his Melbourne Comedy Festival show is ongoing and that is available at the link in the show notes as well. Look for the Milo alert. And if you simply want to see me, Lions Led by Donkeys has an upcoming show in London that's on April 11th, a Friday at

Rich Mix in Shoreditch. And there's a link to buy tickets in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for being a TF listener and please enjoy this episode. Hello everyone. Welcome to this, it's Monday, free episode of TF. It's a slightly short staffed one because we've been doing some political purges. So I hope you're gratified to know that me, November, and Riley have seized the podcasting microphones and all of our co-hosts are in undisclosed locations presently. Yeah, Milo is being held in Australia. By the DarkWoke movement for the crime of many accents.

Yeah, Milo has been detained by DarkWoke, Hussein is being allowed to live out his days in exile, and Nate, no, Nate is being allowed to live out his days in exile and Nate, no, Nate is being allowed to live out his days in exile and Hussein has gone to ground, although we are currently actively seeking him. Have you seen this, Matt? Yeah. Welcome to TF. It is Nova and Riley today and we are rejoined by Joseph Burton. Joseph, how's it going? Good. Thanks for inviting me on state TV to read this short statement to ensure you that civil servants and the people do stand behind the new regime. And I'm a real activist.

Yeah, look, I think if there's one thing that Joseph wants to tell you, it's that you should remain calm, stay in your homes, especially late at night. Patriots, however, very much in control. Yeah, very, very in control. We all agree with this. The people stand behind you. Anyone who doesn't, maybe not part of the people. Interesting. Curious. That's right. So as a podcast, if you see a Kesvanite activity, report it. If you see things like cereal as a soup, coffee as a soup, if you see kind of like activities such as secretly converting people to Islam or charging white people more

for things. Just be on the lookout, you know? Yeah, we're removing all Neon Genesis Evangelion media from every library. It is considered counter junta. I mean, to be clear, the reason why we're doing this, right, is because as you know, right, we follow the trade winds of where politics is going, and where politics is going right now is, it's purges. We're doing a lot of purges. And so I thought, you know, it would be good for us to get in on the ground floor of that

while it's popular, while it's fashionable. TZMNLMKL Look, Elon Musk was busy, so instead we hired the recently pardoned CEO of the electric truck company, Nicola, to come be our department of podcast efficiency or dope. You know what? We are a leaner and meaner machine. We are going to be replacing our microphones with little tin cans and strings so we can save even more money. Yeah. But I think losing three fifths of the hosts is just, you know, that's casting kind of like wasteful, you know, waste energy

from the podcast. Yeah, that's right. We've, we, and we brought in an outside contractor, but this thing I mentioned, by the way, the recently pardoned CEO of the firm Nicola, that old friend of the podcast, former guest, current efficiency consultant, Trevor Milton, we did several episodes about this a couple of years ago while the company was imploding. It was the... Was it was Nicola the one, was that the one with the truck, the electric truck that they

had to roll downhill to get it to move? Yeah, the fake truck, right? Yes, that's right. The fake truck. Was this also the fake truck that was going to like bring a dying Bruce Springsteen song, Town, back to life? Or is that another one of these fake trucks? No, that was a different fake electric vehicle company. I mean, if you look at the fake electric truck being rolled downhill, that's a very efficient use of resources.

It's way more efficient to just lie in situations like this. Yeah. So what happened is Trevor Milton, who, by the way, was the topic of a Hindenburg short report. So I am very excited for Sirhat Gumruku, the Turkish magician who was behind that, like flimflam cancer care company. I'm excited for him to be made like head of the CDC. I'm excited for Adam Newman to be put in charge of housing and urban development.

I think that's going to be great. So Trevor Milton, he released a statement through his company, Milton Media, a couple days ago, at time of recording recording saying, I have been unconditionally pardoned by, you know, God Emperor Trump. And he's like, it's no wonder why trust and confidence in the justice department has eroded to nothing. I wish judges would stop just believing whatever prosecutors say so Americans could trust the justice system again. Getting, getting very close to my, my joke about, oh my God, your honor, who fucking cares?

Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, it's Trevor, Trevor, like, look, Your Honor, who fucking cares? Yeah, yeah, it's just like, Trevor, Trevor was like, look, why are you listening to the prosecutor? He's like obsessed with me. He won't shut up about me. Like, we could just be friends, and like, we could ditch the L-O-S-E-R prosecutor over here. So he made this statement, it's basically like,

you need to stop listening to all prosecutors in financial fraud cases, and what we're seeing with the pattern of like Trump pardons and stuff is that's sort of the plan. Trey Lockerbie Well, they've had it too good for too long. Jason Krook Yeah. And the other thing though, is that there are two other things I think that really help Trevor Milton's case. And when I reviewed the facts, I want to retract our episodes talking about how Nikola was a company that seemed to exist for the purposes of parting investors with their money using shots of trucks rolling downhill via gravity,

is that there are two facts have emerged that I think are pertinent. So I want to apologize to Nikola and Trevor Milton. Number one, at the time, we did not know that his lawyer was the brother of the person who is now US Attorney General, Pam Bondi. So we didn't know that. Okay, sure. Yeah. Mayokalpa, we didn't know that would be happening. We also didn't know that his wife paid $1.8 million to one of the Trump's political action committees. So we didn't know that either. I think those two facts, if we'd know, we was, okay, well, clearly

this guy's innocent. Yeah, of course. Because what he did was he made his first ever political donation in life to Donald Trump, to the tune of like $10 million, which is, I think we've been analyzing this in the lab and we can say criminologically that is the act of an innocent man. It's a way you can kind of like, you know, pathologize this is innocent people tend to donate massive amounts to Donald Trump's campaign.

Yeah, 100%. You know, because it's like they like an innocent person wants a stronger state with better funded like politics, right? It's like a guilty person would be trying to take money away so that then they couldn't go after them. It just makes sense. So Trump for his part talking about this said, the pardon was highly recommended by many people, I don't know Milton, but they say the thing Milton did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. He's supposed to be... That's why he got arrested, apparently.

Your honor, my only crime. Between this and, like, the shaking down law firms, the naked corruption is more than I expected from Donald Trump, which is foolish of me. I thought there would be a fig leaf, and there isn't in fact a fig leaf, it's just a big marble penis, or small marble penis as the case may be, depending on the art style, just hanging out there. Yeah, they're just, they pop the penis right there, and you're there to look the penis of Grafft, and you're there to look the penis of of graft. They're looking at it. Yeah. He supported Trump. He liked

Trump. I didn't know him, but he liked Trump. I guess that's enough. I mean, look, this is going to be a bit of a theme this episode, especially as we get into sort of some of the what the U.S. is doing to its own higher education sector as more evidence for my U.S. is becoming the UK vile. Yeah. Just arresting a bunch of students and making us feel bad. A classic UK move. Even though the US is outpacing the UK and going in the same directions in some ways, but I would say the conflict between capital and different forms, different set license of capital playing out and them vying for control of the state and more nakedly reactionary provincial capital like extractive resource-based heavy industry type capital sort of winning.

That is happening in both places. The fuck business attitude is also one of frauds legal. She's just like, I'm now declaring the American economy to be more fraudulent, more nakedly fraudulent than it was. All of the things in 2008 that were used to cover up huge amounts of gambling and fraud in the financial sector, they're like, no, that's not personally profitable to us enough. We have to take off another layer of those ideological stories that we tell to make this a more palatable environment for business. It is the ultimate contradiction heightener. It's ultimately gentry-pilled because it's not even like a class-based seizure of power. It's like an individual seizure of power.

It's not an idea of like, how do we collectively as like car dealership owners benefit from this? It's like, where's my bag, right? This seems to be like with these pardons in exchange for like direct donations. It's like, where's my bag, right? This seems to be, like, with these pardons in exchange for direct donations, it's like, how do I personally cash out? Like, where's my dukedom in all of this? It's wild. Yeah.

It's really cool how Trump is doing the fall of the Soviet Union on the US in like, two months, and now everybody's like, okay, well we're gonna find out who the new oligarchs are gonna be and who the new kind of like, Pesci rulers are going to be. And people are just going to like seize towns off the back of their kind of car dealership. So yeah, great. And the, the, the Silla Vicks are having group chat drama. But I wanted to do a little bit of news before we get into talking about the immigration dragnets in the States.

Another item that's crossed my desk today, before we get into it is a new Labour Party plan to begin the fight back to no longer have the lowest approval rating in history for a government at this point in its life. Mm hmm. Keir Starmer is going to finally explore ways to become popular. He's been thinking about it really hard. And what's he come up with? Keir Starmer has come up with what if we had center left people on YouTube shows? Oh my god. Prime Minister Starmer, sir, I place myself at the disposal of this cultural revolution. I'm willing to become the centrist Joe Rogan. Again, this is like, once you start seeing the US and UK crumbling in parallel ways, you just can't stop seeing the similarities.

This is the same conversation that the Democrats were having in late November, which is, the problem is the podcasts, the problem is the YouTubes. We have to have our own podcasts and YouTube. ALICE Well, listen, we already kind of exiled and arrested a majority of our own podcast just now. I think we're ready to pivot centrist-wards. Yeah, this is now the best time ever to just, to walk up to the Labour Party and be like...

Give them a big wet kiss on the lips. Yeah, that's right. A big hug. So, this is the Labour growth group of 110 MPs. Yeah, the group of Labour backbenchers that's saying, Keir Starmer, why will you not go for growth? It's definitely not a benign growth, I'll tell you that. By doing abundance.

They say they're working with leading podcasters and popular figures to help labor backbenches become influencers in their own right amid concerns that toxic narratives about the party's agenda as politicians and policies are going unchallenged. Number one, those conspiracy theories or whatever. We talked about those when we spoke about the posting to minister pipeline last time we last episode, which is, yeah, that's just because like telegraph journalists or like

GB news people are all following esoteric fascists on Twitter. And so like, that's not new media, that's just old media. ALICE It's just really funny to be doing your, like, why we lost this election to reform briefing in advance while you're still in power. To do... it was the podcasts what lost it, right? Because this isn't campaigning, this isn't strategizing, this is excuse-making in advance. I think that's the only way to understand it. ZACH Yeah, 100%. ALICE And this is excuse making in advance. I think that's the only way to understand it. Yeah, 100%.

And this is the only thing that like, whether it's Democrats or the Labour Party, that they kind of really know what to do with power besides enrich themselves and, you know, immiserate a few other people incidentally, is to be like, well, actually I'm doing great, my opponent is hacking, and when I get kind of thrown out of power, it will be because you didn't like me enough. It is your fault for not wanting to hang out with me. Yeah. And the closest responsibility they will admit in that process is saying, look, maybe the

problem is that we aren't having Torsten Bell doing vigilante pedophile hunting videos. It's just like, a guy who has climbed into your house through the window in the middle of the night and has been in living in your, uh, in your kitchen for like two weeks being like, maybe the problem is, okay, I'm willing to meet you halfway on this. Maybe you're too stupid to know why you should like me. Yeah. Yeah. You're too, you're too brainwashed by your dumb, dumb entertainment.

You know what you're, you're watching too too much either Mr. Beast or Vitali the pedophile hunter. So we need to make a horrible crossover. Oh God. Mr. Beast blowing up a school bus full of pedophile. So I say those involved are working with a popular British YouTuber with more than a million followers who's already provided a trial media clinic. The MPs were told they could only challenge internet creators by neglecting the Whitehall obsession with traditional establishment media.

I really like the idea of a media clinic for the Labour policy because it really feels like it's not the setting in which you would typically get out a terminal diagnosis. Yeah. Assisted dying at the media clinic? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a Labour figure with knowledge of the plan said, quote, we've got to face up to the fact that today's media landscape is not the same as 1997's. And it's like, yeah, it didn't have to be if you'd passed press regulation in the late

2000s. ALICE Well, also, that was always a phantasm as well, because as much as cool Britannia might have been a thing, enthusiasm for Labouriasm for like, labor government and labor politicians, prissy short-lived to anyone with like, a memory of those times it was read and the thing about it. Like, people weren't that keen on Blair after like, you know, prissy quickly. They were keen on, I don't know, fucking like, MI5 funded Britpop and stuff, right? But because there's no kind of cultural thing to like, parasize off of, you know, not even, because even YouTubers were a bit too unsubstantial for that.

Starm was left with just like, well, they have to believe in us personally. It's not enough to just have general vibes, you know? And even the people who, of the labor ministers who poll well, these are not the pe- then again, I'm not saying these are particularly good or worthwhile people who have particularly good or worthwhile aims. There's just like, for example, Angela Rayner being associated with the Employment Rights Act even as she's watering it down. Yeah. And like, because Angela Rayner is authentically capable, authentically capable of getting

the press of like being a bit of a legend, legend. No one's... I get that. I get why people might feel a bit warmly towards her. Nobody is like, I will die in the West Streeting fedayeen. Yeah. There's no like, do you want to get West Streeting on diary of a CEO? Is that your plan? What I learned about forgiving myself by killing a bunch of trans kids. So this person goes on and says, low trust in politics, low turnout,

lack of a sense of delivery. Those aren't things we're going to change the times headline. We need to be in people's faces constantly on YouTube and TikTok. Is there anything worse you could imagine than just having... Liz Kendall mandatory TikTok dance. It's, it's. It's gratifying to know that they're suffering in government almost as much as I want them to. Just Starmer's press team rolling up to your ministry and being like, do the TikTok dance. Not like that! Not like that!

Do it better! ZACH Look, it's been five years. We have just taught Torsten Bell how to floss. It has taken so long. It's like there's been three to seven viral dance phenomena, but we finally nailed this one. It's a little late. Morgan McSweeney with two cigarettes on the go at the same time, massive bags under his eyes trying to explain to Rachel Reeves the concept of Fortnite.

Yeah. I mean, that's like ultimately, right? He says, you know, if we're going to leave a vacuum in these spaces, that's where we get toxic narratives emerging and going unchallenged where people's real concerns get jumped on and twisted. Before they go on to say, we acknowledge that the only Labour MP who's like an influencer in their own right is Zara Sultana. We acknowledge that, but she's not who we want. No, of course not. We want to do what she does, which is make TikTok videos and so on. But we want to be saying something else.

Or even Gary Stevenson has become pretty ubiquitous on social media, going on Question Time and so on. And they keep looking at, thinking, okay, well, people clearly like these people. Voters like these people. They're speaking to their real concerns. I assume because they like the TikToks. Yeah, it must be the style and not the substance, right? Like, people must enjoy... I don't know,

maybe if we all, like, you know, mimic the affects, then people will really get into it, and definitely not... People aren't, like, interested in them talking about stuff like inequality, right? They're interested in, like, the accent. Well, and that's where,, I already like am completely built on once you see the similarities, you can't unsee them. Cause what I'm thinking about is like Gavin Newsom being like, I have a podcast and Steve Bannon's on it, right? Because unless if they're just thinking about affect, right?

Of like, oh, they like the TikToks, they like the dances, like the Fortnite, like the podcasting. The next step in this kind of like bird brained analytical idea is like, maybe they just like far right content and hearing these guys. And then you have like, you know, the guy who was kind of lined up to be the centrist and being like, no, let's hear Steve out. Let's hear what he has to say.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'm so excited to see, you know, Starmer go on a podcast with Tommy Robinson from jail. Starmor having to arrest himself for for breaching a court order. It's like, what are the I think that when you see an obsessions with messaging like this are what happens when you are, I think, totally disconnected from power and have utterly removed any substance from your own relationship with power. And I think it's very amusing that both the Democrats who are probably about to be fucking declared a terrorist organization by the Trump administration and Labor Party who is,

how has one of the largest majorities in recent years are doing this in recent years, in decades, are doing the same kinds of thing where they are both so far from power, despite their opposite relationships to one another as to where they are in government. Right? They are so, so far from, I mean, if you want to know what a, what a powerless government in power looks like, again, not actually powerless. They could do things. They're just so constrained and so lobotomized that they, you know, they are avoiding doing them. And so they have made themselves powerless. They're doing all those tech talks. What are you talking about?

Yeah. Again, is Keir Starmer sounding not just like American Democrats, but also sounding increasingly like Rishi Sunak, talking about how, for example, small boat crossings make him personally angry at a summit against immigration crime recently. It's also really funny, like, we haven't really talked about foreign policy in a minute, and I think it's really funny how Stam is using that as a kind of, like, fire escape, to be like, well, all of this is terrible, and everyone hates me, but I do get to be a statesman, right, and I do get to try and, like, hammer together some kind of, like, best value NATO alternative. Which isn't to make

any judgement on that in itself, but just like, I can understand why you'd rather be looking at that side of your desk than the side of the desk that is like, we trying to teach Liz Kendall some fun dances. GARRETT We tried to have Liz Kendall do a Vogue-style hundred questions interview about which people she thinks should be killed through neglect. ALICE Yeah, we've got her on the tube, we've clipped a tiny microphone to her oyster card, and we're asking her a bunch of really banal questions. And we think that really that's

going to swing it in a few years' time at the next election. GARETH Yeah, so the ultimate failure of the centre-left is to get increasingly obsessed with just post better. Just post more and better. And I'm sure... And this is the thing, you have to build that cadre of posters and brain-rotted very online people authentically, right? That's something the left spent a long time doing, and the centre spent a lot of time

complaining about whether that's like, you know, fuck Bernie bros or whether that's momentum or whatever. But like these kind of like these, these bullying left wingers who know how to post it's like, no, no, no, only the left put in the hard yards of investing and making everyone go on the computer and drive themselves insane. We did that work. Well, and they had an opportunity to do that, right? In 2017, it was time for some game theory. Like, you had those centrist libs actually going insane on the TL all the time,

but, you know, they just let us live through their fingers. They had generational talent, and they didn't, you know, put it to work. It's brutal, it's brutal. And I mean, the thing is as well, is that the left is a... It was a potential resource. All you had to do was give us everything we wanted. And I mean, the thing is as well is that, you know, the left is a, it was a potential resource. All you had to do is give us everything we wanted. And I don't think that was too small an ask, given that it would have fixed everything. But I understand why they didn't. Yeah.

You know what? I wish the Labour Party best of luck trying to find the version of Gary Stevenson who tells you to personally work harder. Yeah. Best of luck learning to post. Oh, it'll be a long search for a city trader who's willing to tell people to work harder, I imagine. Yeah.

So, should take a while. I wanna transition into our main segment here. And I gotta start using a new word for segment changes. Yeah, you really do. The thing is I've just done neuro-linguistic programming on you. So now it's just in your head, the phrase transition. When I was resigning from the State Department, everyone kept telling me like, good luck with

your transition. Like, we're here. Like that's actually the term for resignation. Like, well, just next step for the next step in your transition. Like we're going to ship all your stuff. What's your home address? So I know that you're transitioning out. And I was just like, I was sitting there like, what?

Element of this process that I didn't know about. My favorite Trump tweet still is inexplicably transition to greatness with three exclamation marks. No other context. As part of our transition into the next segment here, I have a deed poll. As I want to switch to our main segment here, and I'm going to start it with yet another chapter in my, the US is becoming the UK, but at greater speed, which means they will at some point overtake us in being the UK. Oh God. The food's about to get a million times worse.

Yeah. What this is going to be all about is something that, Joseph, you and I have talked about a little bit and I think is worth getting into a little bit more is the ongoing immigration dragnets and ideological campaigns being waged by various parts of the US state. And what I've noticed is that before we get into what these campaigns are, what the immigration dragnets are and so on, is that they are doing to their higher education sector, what it has taken the UK years to do to its higher education sector.

And this is through a combination of not just spurious free speech claims, silencing more or less any... Not just silencing anti-imperialist protesting and stuff, but silencing even something that smacks of vague progressivism. Both countries have been outraged about vegan Mondays or whatever for a very long time. But the thing that I would say doomed the UK higher education sector is that when it was completely marketized, all of those funding gaps that emerged when state funding dried up or diminished considerably came from the UK's hardline approach to immigration deterring international students from coming to study.

And I'm not also going to pretend the US system of higher education was in a great way before. Most of these places are glorified asset management firms that happen to credential a few 21-year-olds outside of research. Research being a different thing entirely, of course, but its problems until now were please change course to avert doom loop rather than doom loop currently occurring. Enjoy your doom loop, right? This is just another, another point of convergence between these two states that are just going really well. So yeah, this is, this is one of the main dragnets that you've discussed Joseph, which is the, you call it the like Bataar, like denunciation drag net.

Yeah, so right now I think the important thing to like keep in mind, and it's just like, I wanna be like very clear-eyed about what's happening in the US, is like it's several overlapping things going on differently. And each one of those is like a touch point for another type of state decay, right? And the one that has come kind of first to higher ed and is, I think, really indicative of

like what's happened to the higher education system is the like, I think it's like 212A4, but it's basically the secretary of state Marco Rubio individually, like picking people by name and being like your green card or visas revoked were deporting you for your activities and campus Palestine protests. And the thing about those, they're very famous. I mean, Mahmoud Khalil is one of those people. There's also a professor at Yale, Hele Dutagi, who studies like third world this international law, who's also kind of in the same situation. Those people are all personally named by people close to the Trump administration, like politically, like I mean, Miriam Adelson specifically,

or Bataar or Canary Mission, but also people who are like, and it could be like individuals who are also like close to and rub shoulders with the institutions of higher education themselves, right? And this is a space where it's not so much like the government coming in and abducting students, so much as the government going in and abducting students with the acquiescence and kind of complicity of the higher educational institutions themselves for whom, you know, the students are kind of a secondary thing to like, how is the endowment doing? I saw Johns Hopkins, uh, sort of issuing guidance, uh, well, more like a warning really to their

staff not to, uh, like hide any of their coworkers or students from, uh, the feds should they come knocking, which it's the statement wasn't even, don't hide them. It was, if you know, don't warn them. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, there is a total like lack of an element of, of protection or care for the kind of educational community characteristics of these institutions. Cause they're, you know, they're all real estate hedge funds at this point.

Right. And if the actual purges are coming in on that higher level, then it's, I mean, that's kind of something the university has said it's okay with. Now, is that same attitude going to persevere if these drag nets become more indiscriminate? One of the other drag nets, that's kind of like the four and a half drag nets, I think that exist.

One of the other one is muzzle band 2.0, which is something that was supposed to go online on March 20th. And according to the executive order, and no one can figure out if it has or not. Right. And that would be a much broader kind of mass rejection of prospective students when they haven't even entered the United States yet. You're going in and you've got your acceptance letter and you're applying for a student visa and it says, no, you liked a free-Palestinian Instagram post. That is going to mess with the money to a degree because a lot of these

foreign students, like, you know, they all pay cash tuition and it keeps a lot of schools solvent. But I also don't know if anyone really cares so much of a couple of small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast go under because of this, you know? Yeah. I mean, the, I've quote from the sort of trade association for sort of the foreign students industry in the US in general, said that, universities must work to remind prospective students that detentions like these of a pro-Palestinian

activist at Columbia University, and more recently a scholar at Georgetown, are still not the norm. It's just like, don't worry, it's an exception. And is that exception codified into some kind of a state? Well, don't worry about it. Yeah, don't worry about that either. It'll probably be fine. Come study in the US.

A ringing endorsement. It's fine, come study in the US. The place that binds but does not protect. She goes on, she goes on. We have international students at lots of universities, said the spokeswoman, and news coverage has focused on consequences for international students at just a couple of colleges, so we have to put into perspective the fact that the vast majority of students are from universities where we're not hearing anything.

So this is the thing, if you're like, don't worry. Very, very few people get sort of like abducted off the street and held in communicado and then shipped to Louisiana. Having been told that the secretary of state is like personally trying to kick them out of the country and then it's going to be like a, you know, many lawsuits and then we'll see what happens. Okay, yeah, the extent might not be bad yet, but the consequence is, you know, like if you're doing sort of like mental calculus of should I study in the US, I think it's fair to conclude that like, okay, even if this almost certainly isn't going to happen

to me, it would be bad enough if it did that I don't want to do it. Yeah. It's like the logic of getting on a plane, right? If someone says this plane has a 99% chance of landing safely, you don't get on the plane. You don't do that. Nevertheless, I go on. There's two ways to look at it, right? If you wanted to look at it from the university perspective, which I don't really want to for more than a couple of minutes, is that there is this thing that the sector sort of depends on, does go away, there seems to be no plan to fill it, but most universities seem to have accepted that they are in crisis mode and they respond to crisis by betraying everybody in that particular community to try to appease the leadership.

Lyle- Listen, when somebody attacks you, you just roll over and show your belly and it's fine. Start betraying people voluntarily. They love that. Yeah, exactly. And there's this, as you say this, there's this student dragnet, but it's also not just people even who are liked a free Palestine Facebook post once. There is the story of Ali Reza Durodi, who was just never participated in a campus protest, just was Iranian and then got a charge for

reckless driving several years ago and is being targeted largely, it seems, on the basis of his nationality. Yeah. And that's where these things overlap. And I think it's important to kind of disaggregate what's going on between like, is my face on Canary mission? Like does Bataar post about me threateningly? Will Marco Rubio personally send agents to arrest me? And it is personal.

Like there are rumors and I gut check, no evidence, no public evidence on this, but just, just vibes. I believe they're credible rumors that actual State Department diplomatic security agents might have been involved in some of these things, which is Marco Rubio's personal little Praetorian Guard. It's becoming that, but it's really just a small law enforcement agency that protects embassies and guards VIPs. That's one level.

Then I'm pretty sure there's also an ICE social media center that's just randomly going through people's Facebooks and sending them emails saying your visa is revoked, you should need to get out of the country, which isn't really legally accurate. And there have been a couple hundred other people like... Marco Rubio was like, oh, we've revoked 300 visas, which is actually really not that many. There's a couple hundred more who are getting emails saying you don't have a visa anymore. And then there's, you know, the dragnet going on by Customs and Border Protection when you actually enter the United States, which is like going through your phone, by the way, not the rest of your social media, just what's on your phone and

denying you entry based on that, even if you have a visa. And then there's the like, does the Muslim ban exist yet? It's not quite sure level. All of these get read and parsed at the same thing, right? But every level is a different actor in the bureaucracy trying to stake out turf for themselves or trying to like being directed to extend whatever power is currently in their hands to fulfill this ideological objective, right?

And right now everyone else is just trying to get out of their way. So I'm glad you brought up Olly Rezo's case because it is, yeah, it's a minor traffic violation. It wouldn't be a deportable offense, but you see that in the computer and, you know, nationality says Iran. And if you're one of those, you know, low ranking ICE guys being reassigned to look at people's Facebook photos, you're like, jackpot, I look great if I can say I deported

an Iranian, right? And whether it's targeted malice or just opportunism, it's all overlapping, I think in a way that's freaking a lot of people out about like what's going on. And I do think it's prudent. Like my studies in the United States have a 2% chance of me being black bagged and sent to like a sweltering detention camp in Louisiana. That 2% would be too high for me, you know? Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. And I mean, I think one of the things I wanted to go into, I want to go into a couple of things off of this. One of them is why Louisiana, but we'll hold off on that for a second, which is that what you're describing or at least how you're

describing sounds like to me is a series of ideological entrepreneurs who have been placed across different agencies and are competing to exact as much exemplary cruelty as they can in such a way that will increase their profile. Yeah, pretty much. Increase their profile, but also in another context, save their assets, right? Like I don't imagine that diplomatic security is super eager to do this, right?

But if you're the director, or if you're part of another organization like the Bureau of Consular Affairs, and you know that the Doge cuts are coming, right? It's not even necessarily a sense that there's a like every head of every agency right now is a political appointee trying to make a Power grab. It's also like well if I don't play ball We could wind up like USAID where we're just locked out of our office one day, right? Yeah Yeah, well, how do you get the how do you get the heat off of you and onto someone else?

Yeah, it's hot potato for whoever Elon Musk or the president is mad at. Right? And like right now, it's a couple of hundred students who are having their lives like deeply dislocated. It could be a lot more and it could get worse than that, depending on the bargains that that gets struck. Right. But it's also pretty clear that there's not really institutional roadblocks to any of this. You know, Riley, like you mentioned

that the trend to Agua stuff, there was recently a Supreme Court case called Munoz versus United States that came down to a visa refusal based on gang tattoos, right? And the substance of the case was like, would you care to explain why you made that determination that these were gang tattoos? And the Supreme Court basically said, we don't have to tell you how we made that decision, right? So there's precedent for that. There's precedent for targeted deportations by the secretary of state. There's precedent kind of for everything that's happened up until now. So while it's tempting to say like, this is unprecedented, you know, and my whole thing that I'm constantly on about, this is all in a space of continuity with existing bureaucratic developments in the United States,

right? It's just this kind of theatrical cruelty starts happening when just a couple outside confluences of events push what already exists into spaces that look new, but have really just been kind of unexercised powers, right? And I feel like a lot of the discussions about the UK that, you know, I hear in Trash Future are really discussions about like momentum, right? Well, not, sorry, not the part of the labor party momentum, but like, but you know what I mean? Like, but like actual, like, oh shit, this thing has been slowly falling apart for a long time. And what do we do with it now? Or you also have institutions like The Met, which I know

has not covered itself in glory, who have just kind of stumbled into very broad and expansive authorities over the past couple of decades. And when that starts hitting this vortex, really gross things start to happen. If you want to talk about The Met, by the way, absolutely, you could say stumbling on the one hand or grabbing on the other. It's tough to say because they're such a strange organization. But they recently, 30 metropolitan

police officers stormed a Quaker meeting house to arrest six people who had not committed a crime, who were just accused of planning a Palestine solidarity protest in London. First time since the early days of non-conformism that the police have been kicking in doors of Quaker meeting houses. Yeah. It's, nobody's getting transported to Australia, I guess. Well, yet. Yeah. Well, yeah, indeed. When I was thinking about this, and I was thinking about the broad powers that the American enforcement arms

have reserved for themselves, you think about, okay, well, these are the powers that have already been reserved to British ones by a kind of momentum in that direction, by ideological demands that are repeated by everybody across the spectrum of people in politics who are listened to regularly. You must do something about the small boats. You must do something about the sort of blue-haired Hamas supporters or whatever. You must do something. Something must be done. You must do something about the sort of blue haired Hamas supporters or whatever. You must do something. Something must be done. We must reserve more powers to the police. We must be more... We have more crackdowns. We're going to plant fucking ninja swords

and zanbatos on them. Who cares? But I was just thinking like, yeah, that is the same pattern. And what if one of those people who was rounded up for, again, the crime of having planned to do something, not having committed any crimes, what if one of those kinds of public hysterias, they get married up with the anti-immigration bugbear in the same way that that is outdone in the United States? You can see the same kind of regime emerging here with the same kind of logic just with different institutions being carried via momentum towards those kinds of powers, in my view.

Yeah, absolutely. Because it is like this kind of crux of like basically inherited Cold War or War on Terror era powers running up against and I think austerity plays a pretty large part of this. I mean, that's looming over all of this in the United States and it's been a part of Britain in a much harsher way for a much longer time, right? But it's this interesting thing where, you know, there's a destruction or a hollowing out of the state and the canard is, oh, these people hate the administrative state. They want to take away state capacity. And the kind of defense is like, we need our state back, right?

We need to have these abilities and capacities again. And that's like, you see a lot of objections coalescing around that, at least in the circles I run in, in the U.S. about like, oh my God, what they did to USAID, what they did to the U.S. Institute of Peace. I can't believe it. Like, we need these things back. And that kind of belies the question of like, do they really hate the administrative state? Because one of the things about these multiple overlapping drag nets and also the the sudden completely unhinged shift on US documentation standards for trans people is like it's all quite bureaucratically elaborate right? Cables and things have been leaking a lot but one of the things I saw I think it might have been Ken Clippincine that shared it it was

definitely not something that I obtained by any other means I read it on a website get off my back. I think like all this stuff that like, you know, a big journalist have been linking is it was one of the things about like how we are going to monitor student activities for arrests during protests. And it specifically directed visa officers to look at this little box that like in the back of the 1994 beige computer program, which I remember it took me a year and a half of working in a visa section to figure out what that box did. Like there was literally a point where like the three of us were standing around being like, what the hell does this box do? And they're like, you guys need to check the box every single day to see if someone's been

arrested for Palestine protest, right? Or like the directive to like systematically misgender trans people on their passports and non-U.S. citizen trans people on their visas. Like you have to go back in and edit stuff, right? You have to go back in and look it up. And it's this weird thing where the momentum heads towards cruelty, but then the entropy gets accelerated because you have people who are about to have a lot less resources being asked to do like a lot more, you know, like I always sort of the whole small boats mania in the UK

is kind of interesting to me because that always goes hands in hand with like stories about how the Royal Navy, it basically like can't generate surface task forces anymore. Yeah. And when they're like, oh, well, we need to send out the gunboats to shoot them up and like dog what gunboats, right? Like it's a really interesting and I don't, I don't think it's a race to the bottom. I think there's going to be state capacity for cruelty, right? But I think what the state is and how it operates and these sort of idea of like, you know, a high 20th century administrative state or even a re-imagined smart 21st century, I don't know, cyber state with Tony Blair ID cards.

Like, I don't think either of those models are really adequate for what's coming and what we're kind of in the upper oddic stages of. Like there's going to be something new and shittier in every respect that's going to emerge out of this in the next couple of years. I mean, that strikes me as well because like there's a huge base of people who, what they want is whether this is in the UK or in the U S what they want is some kind of like revolutionary action. And for them, that was the point of electing Trump.

It will be the point of electing Farage of, they come on TV one day and say, everybody you don't like is gonna get arrested and sent to El Salvador or shot, right? And using these kind of very elaborate like bits of like state capacity is always gonna feel unsatisfying to those people. And yeah, I worry

about that being the thing that then generates the next thing, you know? Is that like, even Trump can't sort of like get rid of all these people like we want him to. TZM – Because I made a joke about, I want to put Stephen Miller one day in front of like a special tribunal or a revolutionary people's court, right? That's a common emotion on the right. But there's something about like, even if it is exceptional and terrifying, even if seeing, you know, Rumeisos to like black bagged on the street by plainclothes police, like wasn't generally horrifying, it's not satisfying to them that, haha, did you know that we've reassigned diplomatic security agents from

investigating passport fraud to abducting Muslims? ALICE It's interesting even if you look at the kind of responses to that, it's gleeful on the right, but it's still gleeful in the tone of like, oh wait until you see what happens when we really take the gloves off. GARETH Yeah, because it's not, it's ab- like, I mean, we all know what they feel about trans people, we all know what they feel about trans people. We all know what they feel about Muslims, right? We all know what they feel about the other. And this doesn't provide that right. Even Muslim banning people, even if Stephen

Miller gets his wish and he gets to designate people as terrorists and you go, Oh, you're a, you know, a three B designated terrorist. You'll never set foot in the United States, even if your child is a U S citizen. Like, let's be clear, when they say designated terrorist, they're seeing the FLIR drone kill camp. Right? There's not a satisfaction of bloodlust that can come out of these extant processes. And that's what really scares me. Yeah.

Cause the only thing that's gotten close, the only thing that's got these people most of the way there is the Secod stuff, is El Salvador, right? And the question then for them is how do we do more of that? Yeah. Yeah, this is the come as you are phase, right? Of all of this. And I think even in the UK, it's the come as you are phase. I mean, like, I'm stepping outside of my comfort zone here, but, you know, Brexit did seem

cathartic to some people, but none of the things that they wanted, I don't know, are your passports a different color now? They literally are, but that hasn't been enough, right? It's kind of the, it's unsatisfying fundamentally still, because true Brexit has not been achieved. True Brexit is when you never have to see a foreigner, ever. Just so you know, by the way, that's what reform is currently campaigning on. Yes, yeah. That's literally what they are currently campaigning on. Yeah. And it's something about this where it's like, you know, you're gonna have to

deal with the fact that there is a bottomless lust for death and violence on this because, you know, it's not lost on me that like, while these deportations for protesting Gaza are happening, like the bombing is restarting in Gaza and they've greenlit, you know, announced plans to ethnically cleanse everyone and kill everyone, right? And even that isn't the visceral feeling of satisfaction that these people want, right? Like, like you look at the organizations that have openly boasted about preparing the deportation lists and they're still kind of whiny and unhappy and unsatisfied about it. And that's not great. Right. So like, here's hoping that entropy can like the entropy of state

failure can just like outpace the capacity to do yet more violence. But I do think that there is, there's gotta be the satisfying answer, which I think for, for this kind of populous moment, whether that's, you know, reform in the UK or Trump a year from now in the U S like, I think what I, what I really think is it's gotta be something they come up with themselves, right? Because playing with someone else's toys doesn't feel nice. So you mean you mean to say that the reusing these powers and institutions that had been

created in previous administrations ultimately is still too limiting for them? It's still I think it is still too limiting, not because there's a lack of power. You don't need to change a word of everything. You have actually incredibly vast power and a lot of those powers haven't even been exercised yet. Like we're not even talking about new powers being used. Like the secretary of state, if they name an individual and say, deport them because I say so, like that's been on the books since like the fifties, right? And that's also, I mean, not, not to be a little like glasses, like, um, actually it's, it's a clip, a clip, it's a magazine, not a clip.

But like pretty much every sovereign state has something like that, right? Every sovereign nation state has the capacity to look at a certain individual and be like, get out of here. Well, famously, the UK did that with Shamima Begum some years ago, even stripping her of her British citizenship. So we don't just reserve the right to... This is why I say, right? These are countries that are much more similar, especially recently, that people are giving

them credit for. Our Home Secretary explicitly reserves the power to strip dual nationals of British citizenship if it is deemed necessary for national security, which also is why then I go back to this meeting at the Quaker Meeting House. If any of them were dual nationals, at what point do these constant demands that are not ever viscerally satisfied, as you say, Joseph, at what point does a probably labor frontbencher say, you know what, one of them is a dual citizen. We could send her, we could actually deport her or whatever. Yeah. And I think it is, it goes back to the episode

you had with Shocks where it's like, if we're moving into an idea of the state as a collection of fiefdoms driven by people who are trying to kind of cash out on their own terms for themselves, if we do have SulaViki in both Atlantic powers, it's unclear if they're actually going to be able to create something new for themselves. Right? And it's unclear, I'm in a space of tension of being very apprehensive of the future, but also not knowing if there's given the motives and the sort of like the kind of wheel of history behind this moment. I don't know if there's going to be the capacity to create new stuff. Right. There were a lot of things that the previous Trump administration didn't do because they just didn't realize they

like could do them. They've done all that stuff this time around, but it's unclear if they're going to be able to build things. And like one of the things that like, you know, my apprehension about like, is the Muslim ban in effect or not? One of the theories that I have about it is like, maybe they just couldn't get their shit together to agree on an SOP by now. Like it's entirely possible that they just like haven't been able to organize how the domestic review process is even going to work.

And I think the UK is clearly in that space for infrastructure. I think the US is heading into that space for air travel. But where's the tension between intention and capacity right now is completely lost to me. Trump came in and one of his big things was like, we're going to have mass deportations. We're going to mobilize the army. They sent the 82nd airborne down to the Mexican border to do kind of nothing. Right. And you can see a lot of those things being rolled back. Like they are not housing deportees at Gitmo anymore because it just didn't make sense.

They're not doing deportations with military planes anymore because those are way more expensive than the civilian ones. They were asking for volunteers from like USC is like the our equivalent of a you know The home office immigration people to like sign up as like auxiliaries for mass immigration raids that kind of haven't materialized Jesus yeah. Yeah, so like it's a level where they were basically like we're gonna do the bulk stern But for ice and we're gonna have do the bulk storm, but for ice, and we're going to have a bunch of people who are just like checking boxes on like H1B applications, like as door,

like the legal services are as part of like mass mobilization rates. And it looks like either no one volunteered or they just decided to furlough those people. Cause it was a bigger win for them to slow down the immigration process. So like incredible. We, we, we forced all of our folks to get fired. Yeah. Yeah. Basically it's like, it's showing, it's like one, one guy shows up and the book streams there and you're about to pass out the pants are passed 12 year olds and another guy shows up and it's actually, it's more based to fire all of you. Right.

And I don't want to sound like an optimist or like it'll all blow over or it'll all settle in the end. It's already not blown over for hundreds of people. Right. Like, and I don't want to be that American who like comes in to like trash talk to UK settle in the end, it's already not blown over for hundreds of people, right? And I don't want to be that American who comes in to trash talk the UK because it was there recently, it's great. But there is this idea, this kind of feeling of your episodes about the water or the school buildings falling down, and there's definitely similar things going on, I think, with deeper infrastructure in the United States, but all that stuff in the UK feels very close to the

surface. So I'm watching you guys. Let's see how this goes. It's a reversal of the usual thing, where the US is five years politically ahead of All that stuff in the UK feels very close to the surface. So like, I'm watching you guys. You know, let's see how this goes. It's a reversal of the usual thing when the US is like kind of five years politically ahead of the UK. We're kind of the preview, which is unnerving.

Yeah, we are the coming attractions. I mean, there are a couple more things I wanted to talk about though, right? Which is, you've raised this point of a gap between the state capacity to inflict cruelty, not because again the rules and powers aren't there, but because the actual organization frequently is not up to the task. What I think this gap gets filled is with increasing stakes raising mass hysterias that

are going to get more and worse and that are going to be... Again, you say like we asked like, well, what are the centrist parties going to do? Is they're going to again, keep trying to triangulate with mass hysteria, right? How many people all agreed with one another that one of the people targeted at Columbia University had like foreknowledge of October 7th, right? A lot of people just agreed, yeah, that seems fine. We're just going to assume that like, yeah, like there are people at like campus Palestine solidarity groups that had foreign knowledge of October 7th.

And we're just going to take that as a baseline and then react as though that's true. And I think the more there is a gap between the demands, the constant escalating demands that are made for performative cruelty to migrants, progressives, LGBT people, whoever, the more there's a gap between those demands and the state's ability to fulfill them, the reasons that we've talked about, the more mass hysteria and possibly even personal action are going to step in. You always remember the Gestapo, not a big organization, but there were a lot of people who liked to inform. And not just inform, act. The UK example, you talk? And not just inform, I mean, act. Like, you know, the UK example, you

talk about the volunteer border guards. Wasn't that actually floated in the UK for a while? I don't think they ended up doing it. But yeah, the volunteer border guards is another perfect example of not actually having the state that you want to meet out the cruelty that you desire. So like Marco Rubio announced that what

they were going to use to scan foreign nationals for Hamas links was AI, right? And my first thought was like, oh God. And my second thought was like, no way State Department IT is going to be able to integrate that into the computers, right? Like, like absolutely not. Like I was carrying around a Blackberry in 2017. Like that's not going to happen. But Hele Dutagi, who was fired from their position, I think they're attempting to deport her from Yale was denounced as a Hamas linked pro-terrorist anti-Semite scholar by an AI written

article on a Zionist website. So a private use. So like if you think about this as privatization, right? Like, you know, the Canary mission, Batar, whoever, whoever, they'll just set up, they'll be like, chat GPT, create me a list of the top 10 antisemites at Yale, at Columbia. And that algorithm, they basically wrote an article, they said it was hers. And on that basis, she's fighting not just for like her job, but her right to like live in the country that she lives in, right? And, you know, outsourcing, is there the capacity? The capacity might come from outside the state, right? I saw

Goody Proctor with Hamas, and I think you pulling up the prospect of mass hysteria is like, and even the first subject of the fake truck guy who got pardoned, who has a degree of personal access to the president because he gave him some money, right? And if this is pay to play, the thing that I'm most worried about, you know, now, whatever I'm, I'm hysteric about, you know, the fact that we, we think student for justice in Palestine at Columbia knew about October 7th when Hezbollah and Iran didn't, right? Listen, sometimes you can forget to add people to group chats.

It happens. And the reverse of the signal thing. You're in the paraglider, you've crossed over the wall and you're like, wait, oh, there's one, I got a text one guy, right? And that could be an end state, right? Is that basically whoever's got the buy-in access, and at this point, like we're talking about like Mary Maddelson personally, right? For example, in the United States definitely has had a hand in this or, you know, someone

who's given a couple million dollars to Trump and is a good guy can be like, I'm down for whatever the next, you know, mass hysteria, whatever the next panic is. You definitely see that with RFK, right? With RFK Jr. is like, dude, there could be some real grim stuff that happens there in terms of mass hysteria. I almost think of it in the same way as like, when we spoke with Julian Field a few weeks ago from QAA, the question was, if you think about the original QAnon conspiracy theory as the thing that emerged to fill in the gaps between the right wing revolutionary utopian demands that are being made of the Trump administration and the like its capacity

and in some cases will to deliver them, QAnon emerged to fill that gap. And I think that if you want to zoom in specifically, Trump 2025, the demands for exemplary cruelty, there is going to inevitably be that gap. And it is, as you say, it's not just going to be beliefs, mass hysterical beliefs that are going to move in to fill that gap. It's also going to be, as you say, just entrepreneurial and enterprising individuals essentially who are going to be like, Oh yeah, the state's not doing that. I can, I can do that. I can, I'll do it. And, and it's, that's always been, you know, vigilante anti-immigrant violence at, you know, in the U S and the UK,

both have long histories, right? I mean, if you saw the events, was it last summer in the UK, these like horrifying race riots that even race riots, even race riots doesn't even do it. Just they were just like one sided pogroms, right? You know, led by individuals. Like there hasn't been something like, I mean, like, you know, the U.S. We still do things a little differently. We drive on the other side of the road. We have mass shootings. You have, you know, a bunch of, you know, different cultural expressions, yeah, different cultural expressions of a similar sentiment. But like, I'm, I'm really worried that this could go to a really dark place of that same thing of like individuals taking action, but not just as like a racist,

lunatic, enacting individual violence of if you were to look at the person who, you know, maybe in the 2010s or 2020s would have wound up as a mass shooter. Is there a future where they have a channel to being like a kind of shabiha for ICE? And that's the channeling of mass reactionary energy through the state because the state can't do it anymore. It's just, Hey, another TF callback. It's like when the Byzantines are just hiring more and more mercenaries, you know, or like any Imperial decline, you call in auxiliaries, right.

Um, and there's been no motion towards that. And I almost don't want to like speak this into existence, uh, that, that, that, this could be a possibility, but you know, it's already happening just in a more genteel money elite level, right? Like, you know, it's, it's organizations that are out, even outside the mainstream. I think shy Davide fell out with the tar cause they were like two nuts. Um, but they've still clearly got lists and they're turning them over and people are listening to them, you know?

And I guess like you, you, you ask just like, um, what is the other other side sort of putatively? What are, what are they going to do with the people who are officially, um, you know, empowered as the opposition is very clearly is... I predict that they will come up with this thing we talked about just now of identifying the gap between the desire to perform cruelty and the lack of certain elements of state capacity to do it at the scale you want. I predict that the official democratic response is going to be to point at that lack of state capacity and say,

see, they can't even perform the cruelty. You should trust us to do it. 100%. 100%. Sir, sir, that mob should be made up of ICE agents. Right? They're not doing this black bagging by the book, you know? And the book has changed significantly since the Constitution. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you can already see that in the idea of changed significantly since the constitution. But yeah, yeah, exactly. And you can already see that in the idea of a defensive, our institutions, right? Like that idea or that notion or, or bring back the state or bring back, you know, whatever it's like under what terms and conditions, right?

And I think that there is going to be a, like be now's the time to be very, very discerning and very careful, not about just what is happening because it's the worst I've ever seen in my lifetime, but it's not apocalyptic. And it doesn't mean that we should freeze and freak out. We should ascertain exactly what's happening and understand the mechanisms by which this is this is happening. I think we've talked, you know, at length, but I'll say it explicitly, there's a lot of weakness in this structure right

now. Right. But we also need to be very aware of like, where's the gravity of pushing back against this, right? And there's an immediate, you know, like whether you're kicking down the door to the Quaker meeting house, I don't know how that plays over on your side of the pond. I don't know if we're all, if you're all going to be wearing frilly collars and there's going to be like, you know, I don't know where that's going over there, but you know, in the U S I think there are red lines crossed for a lot of people. There's an immediate reaction to that, which is the good, the right thing that we should be doing, which is like immediate popular pushback.

Like if you are a student at Johns Hopkins, like fuck the administration, warn people at the very least. Do more if you can, if you are a citizen. They're not denaturalizing people yet, right? But also to be very conscious of like where the opposition to this is coming about. Like, and I really noticed how, you know, Pete Buttigieg said a swear about, I can't believe they leaked that information in the group chat. And it's like, if the content of, I mean, you even cares about protocol, you could even say that that was a group chat about not doing war crimes. If we hypothetically just pretended that wasn't a group chat about blowing up on a part of

building of civilians to purportedly kill one guy. You could just focus on the fact that this is a crew of nakedly corrupt, stupid alcoholics, right? But they weren't even following that. They were like, I can't believe they discuss national security information in that signal group chat. And there seems to be actual political traction behind that. That's a worse sign than any developments. That's a worse sign to me than developments happening in immigration enforcement right now, if I'm going to be looking at the long

term. ALICE Just kind of liberals, liberals, they love to just concede the important bit and focus on process. So, great. Fantastic. I look forward to a very well-organized concentration camp. I feel bad, especially after the Shocks episode, that we're going out on a downer like this! Well, I mean, it's not our fault, it's the world. Look, we're playing the hand we're dealt, and unfortunately the hand we've been dealt

is aces and eights. So I don't know what to tell you. I don't play bilateral, I don't know any of that. Oh god. Wild Bill Hickok was just playing bilateral on his phone when he was killed. They killed him for it and they were right to do so. Not a lot of people know Wild Bill Hickok invented bilateral at the Deadwood mining camp in South Dakota. Yeah, the original names for the Jokers were all unprincipled. ZACH Yeah, it was Jack McCall resented that the Jokers were called McCalls. Anyway, look, you ask why we tend to go out on downers recently, as we said, that's the head we've been dealt. But Joseph is, again, one of these things where we have to almost walk this tightrope of,

well it is pleasant to talk to you, I do wish always it were under sort of polar opposite circumstances. Oh, yeah. Oh, you and me both. It's a lot of like, I hate going around saying, like when I'm going around saying called it, I called it a lot, but my voice just gets like smaller and more haunted every time. Yeah, that's right. So look, thank you very much for coming on the show. Joseph, thank you very much again for talking to us today. No plugs, which is, I like to have a no plugs episode occasionally.

Yeah, no plugs. Just learn your rights about de-arresting people. Yeah. And then we will see you on the bonus episode in a few days. I think we may be talking Tesla. We may be talking Meta. But we're going to be doing one of those two things in a couple short days.

So we will see you there. Bye, everybody. Bye. you