Executive Disorder: Alberta Separatism, Ukraine's Starlink Predicament, Global Protests Continue

0:01 Call zone media.

0:07 This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. This episode we are covering the week of October 14th to October 21st. Diva down! I am sad to report the new White House press secretary, Katie Zachariah, was fired after just five days on the job.

0:37 R.I.P. You guys can't see it, but I'm pouring a 40 out for her right now. It is all over my floor. This is going to cause damage to the wood.

0:45 This is half a Scaramucci.

0:47 Is it half? I thought it was 70% of a Scaramucci.

0:50 Half a Scaramucci. Scaramucci was 10 days.

0:53 She was five days. She was only for five. I thought seven for some reason. Good to know.

0:58 Maybe it's that Scaramucci did more press conferences because she only did one press conference. That's all it took.

1:04 Before being fired.

1:06 That's all it took.

1:08 To give a sense, I was camping without signal for the entire duration of her career and didn't know who she was.

1:15 You missed an entire press secretary?

1:17 Yes.

1:17 I am a journalist who covers this shit and I completely missed her.

1:22 Her firing came after poor reception to her first performance. and reporting scrutinizing her claims about being a lawyer, despite not passing the bar exam. Trump told her, quote, Honestly, if I were you, I'd reconsider. Is this for you, Katie? Because honestly, you don't need this, unquote.

1:45 She sure doesn't.

1:47 One of the funniest Trump exchanges I've ever read.

1:51 Yeah, wow, really coming in with empathy.

1:53 Is this for you, Katie? You don't need this.

1:57 Trump channeling HR manager.

1:59 It's incredible. Yeah, no, he's handling this very delicately by most accounts. Politico reported that Trump told the White House officials Katie had, quote, no talent and shouldn't be on TV. But the White House disputes this. And the White House says that she is, quote, transitioning to a new role, though Katie said on Twitter it was, quote, an honor to work for Trump in the past tense. So who knows what she's gonna be up to in the future sure incredible but yeah no we have lost out on a lot of potential content in the future so pour one out for all the all the podcasters out there who is relying on years of press conferences to mine content.

2:40 Yeah Saturday Night Live gotta be really fucking scrambling after.

2:43 That oh my god yeah damn yeah I mean you know sometimes a beautiful thing comes into your life and it's just there for a little while and all we can do is enjoy the time we had together with what's her name Yeah, what's her name?

2:56 I know her name, man.

2:57 Like I said, I was camping the whole time.

3:00 Luckily for us, we have so many things to cover, so we'll be fine.

3:04 Everyone else, in danger. Us, deluged. Speaking of other things to cover, threatening letters containing a mysterious white powder have been sent to the offices of over three dozen congressional representatives and election offices across at least 32 states. At least one of these letters, sent to Democratic Congresswoman Hillary Scholten of Michigan, made a quote, And interestingly, according to Scholten, the letter claimed to be from the Democratic Socialists of America. Yeah.

3:46 So I guess they're kind of moving beyond labor organizing and electoral reform towards much more interesting tactics. This, of course, is not true. The DSA did not send letters containing mysterious white powder, the implication being it could be anthrax. It has not been found to be anthrax or dangerous.

4:08 Usually when letters are received containing white powder, that is the sort of implicit threat.

4:13 Nice.

4:13 Nice. Nice. Nice.

4:36 The DSA has allowed extremists in its movement, which not only allow, but justify violence as a viable means to achieve political ends.

4:46 Unquote.

4:47 Man, this sort of kicked out all my friends who were doing, who were being street medics. Like, come on. They don't got the juice for it. I mean, it's not even the juice. Like, no one in the DSA is doing anthrax letters.

4:58 Come on. Yeah. Yeah. DSA told CBS, quote, Needless to say, we are not involved with these letters and we are glad to learn no one was harmed, unquote. What are we doing here? Yeah.

5:12 If a bunch of amateurs with no like chemical and biological weapons experience were attempting to distribute anthrax around the country, you would hear about it first when they infected themselves with anthrax. Yeah. That would be the story.

5:26 Yeah.

5:27 You know, like it's worth mentioning, like, yeah, like this is a fairly common right wing tactic. This is not a thing where even you're sort of like, I don't know, you're like 1970s, like Red Brigades guys who are like kidnapping people off the streets. Like they didn't do this.

5:41 No, because it's really hard and dangerous. It's really hard and dangerous.

5:46 It's very much giving, like, learned about terrorism in the 1990s, hasn't paid much attention since, and decided to do a hoax.

5:54 Early 2000s, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sure, early 2000s.

5:56 Come on!

5:56 Yeah.

5:58 I don't know, it's such a weird option to go with anthrax. I guess there are other white powders, so it's kind of an easy one to go with.

6:06 I mean, yeah, they're just mailing a white powder.

6:09 They're not mailing anthrax, right?

6:10 It's just flour or something.

6:12 It's a low-effort hoax, sure, yeah.

6:15 There's all sorts of white powders out there. There sure are.

6:19 Powder trigger.

6:20 The Germans have this fake cocaine that's not intoxicating that comes in this little glass thing if you just want to snort something. It's cute. Oh, wow.

6:29 Snuff.

6:29 No, it's not snuff. There's no drug in it at all. It's just basically like mint. Just like talcum powder. It's just like something you can snort if you really need to snort.

6:38 If your nose needs that stimulation. Germany is quite the place. Thank you, Germans. So I heard from someone in Northern California this week, and it's a pretty credible source, that ICE agents have been seen outside the Sutter County Veterans Hall in Yuba City, which is a polling place. I didn't see any evidence that they were making detentions there or of people there, or whether they were just using that as a staging area, I don't know. But this is something I'm really hyper-focused on in the weeks coming up to this midterm election. Secondly, DHS is leaving TPS recipients from Ukraine and Sudan in limbo. It's not renewing their TPS, but it's not cancelling it either. so a tps generally is already a status which has to be

7:23 renewed on a very fixed short timeline right so it doesn't give people much permanence to begin with but at this point they have even less permanence right it makes it very hard for them to to know what to do next like we saw what happened to haitian communities after the removal of that tps right yeah part of me wonders is if this is just like a um like a rate limiting thing for DHS, like they're still going hard on the TPSs they've already canceled and like maybe they want to sort of divide and conquer with their surges in different communities or if it's a pre-midterm thing because it is still somewhat unpopular to go after Ukraine. Next, I have CNN reporting that the Department of Defense is

8:07 loaning an active denial system to CBP. This thing is often called a heat ray. The idea, of course, is that CBP might use it at the border for areas of high migrant traffic. They have experimented with this before. And what's interesting is that the Pentagon seem to have refused to have their people run the system or develop training tactics and procedures to use with the system. This is in line with how the Pentagon has previously approached this.

8:32 They had these for like almost two decades and they took them to Afghanistan, but they never used them. And I'm guessing they never used them because some jag somewhere was like, yeah, that's looking, that's giving war crimes. It's not a new technology, right? It's they've never really been able to find a place where they felt. And, uh, for, for younger folks, they did some shit during the war on terror, which is generally considered to be a flagrant violation of international law, but they didn't do this. CBP has evaluated it before, too, in the El Centro sector, when Rodney Scott, who's now CBP commissioner, was there. El Centro sector, of course, is ground zero for this shit, right?

9:13 Greg Bovino, OSG patrol agent there. Obviously, this comes with massive human rights concerns, as well as international law concerns, if you're using some kind of heat ray to attack people who are not in the United States. The obvious other issue here is that we have fires all the fucking time at the border, and turning on a heat ray is probably a great way to have more of them.

9:32 I guess, an interesting development. And this is right before we recorded. Hegseth, one of his deputy chiefs of staff, Patrick Weaver, used to be an advisor to Hegseth. He's bumped around a bunch of executive branch appointments. He posted, quote, the border is now a military installation and a battle lab for testing new systems to include directed energy weapons.

9:51 The border is locked down. And then he posted a picture of the story. I just want to point out that, again, it's not Department of Defense staff using this. It would be CBP, and CBP would have to develop a whole set of training tactics and procedures to do it before they used it. Last time they did it, they decided basically the juice wasn't worth the squeeze, right? And especially in the El Centro sector at that time, people were coming through a lot of irrigation canals, and the chances of somebody drowning large number of people drowning because you use this on them in a place where they're already in danger obviously they decided not to use it so we'll keep an eye on that i.

10:26 Guess this has also a very interesting like imperial boomerang yes effect of military technology then being used to the border and then as we've seen across the country that also increases the possibility of border patrol using this technology against american citizens yeah doing like crowd control like in portland in 2020 where they used a very specific lrad that induced you know piercing headaches the idea of this technology getting you know closer and closer to being used within our national borders i mean as bad as bad as it is that it exists as bad as it is that cbp could use at the border itself which is this whole issue yeah this also kind of shows the the tendency of this sort of development to get

11:09 closer and closer to the imperial core.

11:10 To the metropole, yeah. And I think that that's towards the end of the earth, right? Like Miller's book, Empire Borders, I don't know when that came out, but he talks about the US-Palestine border, the direct pathway, testing systems on Palestinian people to selling them to border patrol. And then as you say, to them finding their way into the metropole, right?

11:28 Like the whole country is experiencing now what we have experienced at the border, which is the state is either hostile or completely absent. And talking of that, in Pensacola, where people are working to repair from storm damage, I saw that ICE had come to arrest two roofers who were working to repair that storm damage. What you expect from the federal government is FEMA. FEMA is pretty much on its knees right now. But ICE has swallowed up all that funding, gobbled it up, and it's there. I think it resulted in we're not coming down from the roof and eventually ICE leaving, which has happened in several cases, specifically with roofers.

12:04 Good for them. Glad they didn't get caught.

12:07 Yeah, talking of weird DHS shit, the United States Coast Guard has released a bizarre promo video detailing their work in San Diego, which features, I think I would describe it as an emo cover of Pink Pony Club by Chapel Roan.

12:19 What?

12:20 It's real weird. Yeah, we can listen to it, but we don't have to.

12:24 No, I'm good.

12:27 Continuing in their trend of trolling intellectual property, right? Finally, the Junto Miema is continuing to flounder in its assault on Rakhine or Araka state. It's sort of continuing with its major tactical philosophy, which seems to be doing World War II shit in 2026. This time they've gone with an imposed amphibious assault. They're trying to stop the Araka army's offensive on Sitwe, and the way they've done that is like big landing crafts full of conscripts, which has resulted in massive casualties, right? There's been a bunch of reporting over the last few months on how these big hunter offensive work. And it seems to be like straight up human wave attacks at which the officers, at least

13:14 the higher ranking officers, the officers who would plan such an operation are not present. And then any of the NCOs or officers who are present, like their role is not to think tactically and adapt. It's to enforce discipline and continue enforcing the plan, even as everybody's dying.

13:30 Exactly.

13:31 So yeah, it's a pretty brutal scene for conscripts in Myanmar right now.

13:36 Early voting has begun in Texas, and this past week in the lead up to the election, pamphlets have been mailed to households across Texas from a group identified as the quote, Texas Transgender Student Union. These pamphlets were addressed to students in the household and contained resources for LGBTQ youth, and a guide on how trans teens can emancipate themselves.

14:03 These mailers have sparked outrage among conservatives, and that appears to have been the point. This, quote, Texas Transgender Student Union doesn't actually exist, or at least didn't exist until last month, when a group by that name registered as an LLC in Wyoming, according to Business Records.

14:26 What?

14:27 I said LLC in Wyoming.

14:29 Okay.

14:29 Hell yeah.

14:29 Great stuff happening here.

14:30 This is not a real student advocacy group in Texas. This is an op. This pamphlet does include some resources from TENT. That's Transgender Education Network of Texas, which is a real advocacy group. But they were not involved in the making of this mailer, nor do they have emancipation resources. TENT has since faced a huge wave of harassment and threats.

14:55 following the mailing out of this pamphlet. The Texas Tribune traced the mailer ID of two pamphlets to a mail tracking company called Snailworks, who the National Republican Congressional Committee has paid almost $ 60, 000 over the past two years for mailing services, according to a federal election commission search of campaign finance records. Steven Manicelli is currently kind of running this lead down and trying to figure out exactly where this mailer is has like come from. He's been like live tweeting his investigation. We don't know tons yet, but if you want an update on it, check out our correspondent, Steven Monticelli on social media. He'll probably have some more info about where exactly this letter came from and who

15:39 might be behind it. Texas Smith County Republican precinct chair, Sarah Fields posted a picture of one of these mailers that she received and wrote, people are getting pissed. Let this be a reminder to take your anger to the voting booth. though a later follow-up post noted the suspicious origin of these pamphlets. Quote, I just checked my messages.

16:01 No less than 100 parents had messaged me. Enraged over the mailers. Is this an op? If it is, it's not okay. It even gives tips on how to get emancipated.

16:12 Unquote.

16:13 So it appears that this mailer was sent out specifically just to make people mad. Some Texans upset enough to go to the polls. trying to mobilize anti-trans sentiment to get them to vote for the Republicans.

16:27 Yeah, it's an extension of a theme, I guess.

16:31 In some other, I guess, transgender-related news, earlier this month, the New York City Health Department announced a plan to spend $ 9 million to provide gender-affirming care to minors after two hospitals in the city, NYU Langone and Mount Sinai, caved to pressure from the Trump administration and cut services to trans youth. This funding is set to go into effect early next year, likely partnering with Callen-Lorde, which is a local LGBTQ hospital system in the city. And as of the day of recording this, Wednesday, October 21st, the Supreme Court, at least temporarily, blocked the Trump administration from denying gender-affirming care to trans prisoners. This was just a two-sentence unsigned order, which leaves in place a previous court

17:16 order from a U.S. district judge in D.C., which originally blocked the Bureau of Prisons' new policy going into effect, which would have taken away trans prisoners' gender-affirming care, including their health care. The second sentence of this two-sentence order from the Supreme Court reads, Justice Thomas and Justice Alito would grant the application for stay, meaning that these two justices would have let the new anti-trans policy from the Bureau of Prisons go into effect. So the fact that those two are singled out is interesting. You could interpret this possibly as like a 7-2 ruling, but there's really no legal justification given. It's just two sentences. It's the shortest shadow docket ruling I've seen. We'll see what happens

18:03 going forward.

18:04 Yeah, glad we got a good one.

18:06 Yeah, we got another small thing that literally broke while we were doing this.

18:11 Great.

18:12 San Diego City Council Committee voted on Wednesday to rescind the ALPR use policy. That doesn't take ALPRs completely out in San Diego. It means that any future contract would have to go through the whole process again, including the privacy review board.

18:30 That is automated license plate readers?

18:32 Readers, yeah, flock cameras in the colloquial, but in this case and other analogs, right? A lot of places said, oh yeah, we're counseling flock and then gone to Axon or another provider.

18:40 Switch to Axon.

18:41 Yeah, that's the move. Yeah.

18:43 Bravely.

18:44 Mayor Todd Gloria has immediately stepped in to put himself between the flock cameras and the people of San Diego. Like the hero he is.

18:54 Todd Gloria has cloned himself and is personally standing in front of every license plate reader.

19:00 Most useful thing he's ever done.

19:03 Todd Gloria is watching.

19:05 Would that work? Are clones people? Could we just do that with the flock cameras? They're just twins. Somebody get to work on that.

19:11 A flock of Todds. Instead of a.

19:13 Digital twin, everybody just has a clone twin that stands in front of the flock cameras.

19:19 Just constantly flipping them off. Yeah, Todd said automated license plate readers are helping San Diego police solve serious crimes, cover stolen vehicles and property and locate missing people. Taking this proven tool away from our officers will be a serious mistake and a step backwards for public safety. Shut the fuck up, told Gloria. A number of people in San Diego have been wrongly arrested and detained because of flock cameras. People will remember that San Diego police had the vehicle description and number plate for the people who shot up the Islamic State. of San Diego, the mosque, for hours. And they did fuck all. Not one of the cops engaged those people. The only person who stepped up,

20:00 who kept that community safe, were people who were already at that mosque, two of whom died in the act of stopping the shooter, killing more people. Surveillance is not safety. That is not the same thing. And it is particularly pathetic for our mayor, right, who was shouted down at a press conference that night at the ICSD to attempt to lie about this when he has failed our city so badly. Fuck this guy. There is very little nice I have to say about Todd Clorea. Let's move on, I guess, to other contract shit. ICE has issued a no-bid extension to the contract that I'm pretty sure it's Aumentum Services has to keep running East Montana. I know what the company is called. I'm guessing that's how they

20:41 pronounce it. It could be Aumentum, but I don't really care. In the justification, they say, quote, Aumentum owns and controls key facility infrastructure and operational assets at Camp East Montana. These assets include temporary housing units, security systems, generators, food service equipment, and other infrastructure necessary to operate this facility.

20:59 Because of this ownership and operational control, Amentum uniquely possesses the ability to continue services without a break in performance. No other vendor can assume responsibility for the facility and provide the required services without substantial transition time, duplicity cost, operational disruption, and unacceptable risk to detainee welfare and mission continuity.

21:20 They then go on to mention the Office of the Inspector General report on the horrific conditions there, including three deaths and the destruction of evidence in one of those cases. They say, quote, recent oversight by the ICE Office of Detention Oversight yielded a preliminary report identifying more findings, the circumstances created and contributed to a need for immediate contractual action to protect any detainees and staff and ensure performance under ICE standards. So they are renewing and extending this contract, right, for this agency, which is remarkably bad among ICE contractors, among immigration detention, right? This contract is vast. It has a base period of seven months, followed by a 12-month option,

22:02 and then two six-month options. The payout for these, and then there's quite a lot of redactions in this. A redacted item on the budget, combined with all these extensions, would together be $ 2. 8 billion.

22:14 Jesus.

22:15 Yeah, this is for a tent camp, right, on a military base. So, like, these people are not having to build buildings, nor... They have to maintain their tank camp, right? But they also don't own the land. Like they're doing this as a contractor on a military base.

22:32 That's crazy.

22:32 I mean, you're left to wonder how much of this whole thing is like state subsidies for like allies for the republican party or like it's it's just it seems.

22:42 Right that's a lot of stuff.

22:44 Yeah beyond the morality of like what's going on it seems like a wildly inefficient use of funds yeah well what's.

22:50 Particularly remarkable i don't think amentum had ever we've reported on this before but i'm pretty sure at the time we reported that they they this isn't what they do or they hadn't done this before this is going to be the biggest contract by orders of magnitude they've ever had also the monthly rate escalates from 68 million a month to 97 million a month.

23:08 Whoa.

23:09 I mean, maybe Trump's just going to go after it a bit more with inflation. Maybe he's going to invade some more places and make oil and everything's going to get more expensive. Maybe that's what they're predicting. But it could also be that they plan to scale up this facility, right?

23:23 Yeah. Yeah. It is remarkable.

23:28 This one hasn't had as much reporting, I don't think, as some of the geo group and core civic facilities because it's harder to, right? Because it's harder for people to protest outside. Often we find out about things by either migrants shouting them out over the walls or writing notes and tossing them out. So we haven't heard much about this, but the conditions we have heard in that report were horrific. And nonetheless, these guys are about to net a massive bounty. Talking of bounties, is it time for us to make some money with an advertising break?

24:01 I'm afraid of this.

24:02 Yes.

24:03 Nice. And we're back. So first, kind of a quick story. This is actually a huge story. It might wind up being one of the biggest ones we've covered in the last few months. But at the moment, there's just not a ton out in terms of like knowing what the consequences are going to be. But there was a massive vulnerability revealed in PHP this week. PHP, which stands for personal homepage, is a scripting language used to develop websites, like most of the websites in one way or another.

24:43 I think like 70% of the internet these days relies on PHP in some way, you know, aspects of the website or whatever, like I still use it. WordPress uses it heavily. So do platforms like Drupal and Magneto. It wouldn't be too far off to view PHP as a foundation level of the modern internet. Late Tuesday, a massive vulnerability was discovered in PHP by AI Systems. Two vulnerabilities actually were found, and without getting technical, these could provide bad actors with a way to run whatever code they want on an affected server without even logging in. One thing a bad actor could do with this is create a backdoor or edit the content of a website to embed malicious code. This is a tremendously, like, broad-reaching and

25:21 severe vulnerability. Now, when stuff like this gets found, the ideal thing to do is to inform, you know, the people who maintain... Yeah, PHP or whatever, or whatever thing a vulnerability has been found in so they can patch it. before it becomes known to everybody that there's this massive vulnerability.

25:37 But that's not what happened. The vulnerability was leaked hours before the patch came out. The patch was set for Wednesday. And on Tuesday, like late afternoon, early evening, everyone knew that there was a vulnerability. And so every major website on the planet scrambled taking themselves down or disabling PHP-related parts of the website and applying emergency fixes. Like the Netherlands, like a bunch of government websites went down. 4chan was down.

25:58 A bunch of like very– large and influential websites were down, including a lot of government sites. You've probably noticed this to some extent. I want to quote now from an article by Malwarebyte Labs. The longer term concern is forgotten infrastructure, abandoned websites, unsupported applications, and connected devices with PHP-based management interfaces.

26:17 Vulnerable installations may remain exposed if nobody maintains them or a vendor no longer supplies updates. So it's way too early to know what the long-term impacts of all these vulnerabilities and of the hacks that are going to be carried out as a result of these vulnerabilities will be. But this is a big story. You should expect to hear a lot more in the near future. This is an example of how one of the things these AI tools have done is that hacking has always involved a lot of automated stuff, like running scripts and whatnot to search for vulnerabilities. And AI has allowed us to supercharge the speed at which vulnerabilities are found and and exploited and so shit like this is going to become much

26:55 more common this is all part of like the decreasing reliability with which we'll all be able to access and utilize the internet safely and yeah uh it's just kind of worth keeping an eye on this even though it's not clear what the fallout entirely is going to be at this point scary but everybody you know in digital security says this is a very big deal so yeah it's real bad heads on a swivel family So, moving outside of the internet and over to a place that has no internet, let's talk about Canada. Garrison, is that accurate?

27:25 Does Canada not have the internet?

27:26 I don't know, man.

27:28 You don't know? Okay, that's good. Good to know. That's our Canadian correspondent, Garrison Davis.

27:31 Thanks.

27:32 Yeah. Sorry. I'll be up there to report in person in a few months, so.

27:36 Yeah, yeah. If you can text me, we'll know there's internet. Well, actually, that's not the internet. That's good. That's a good point. Those of you who pay attention to the most important goings-on of our neighbors to the Know that the province of Alberta just held a referendum on whether or not to hold a binding referendum on separating from Canada. And the separatists failed, just like in Star Wars. Also like in Star Wars, the roots of the Alberta secession movement have a lot to do with complex issues of trade, particularly the oil and gas trade. In 1969, only about 5% of Albertans expressed interest in discussing separation from Canada during a provincial poll. But then came the 1970s and the

28:15 1973 oil crisis, which was sparked by the Yom Kippur War and then OPEC getting big mad. OPEC got really mad a couple of times in the 70s. And there are a bunch of fuel shocks. If you grew up in like the time most of the people in this podcast did and you went to like an elementary or a middle school or any kind of public school that had no windows, that's because it was probably built around this period. And they were like desperate to find ways to reduce heating and cooling costs.

28:37 Yeah. Amazing.

28:39 And another impact that those fuel shocks had was that it caused a lot of North America to go like, well, I guess we have to exploit our own oil reserves much more because we cannot rely on the stuff we had been relying on. This helps spur massive and rapid growth in the North American oil sector, obviously across the United States, but in Canada as well. This was a big deal in Canada because Alberta happens to be one of the most oil-rich places on planet Earth. The province alone has the fourth highest proven reserves of oil on planet Earth, according to a 2025 report by a consulting firm, McDaniel & Associates. And we actually didn't, like, this is actually a change in terms of what we knew about

29:16 Alberta's oil reserves. They keep going up as we, like, figure out how to get better at, you know, It's a mix of hydraulic fracking and, like, better science and whatnot, but they're getting better at finding out and exploiting, like, how much oil there is in Alberta. About 2 million more barrels of oil were recently discovered in Alberta thanks to a mix of hydraulic fracturing and new technology for drilling wells. For a write-up by the Bow Report, oil sands production has grown substantially in the past decade, up 70% from 2 million to 3.4 million barrels per day. The growth of several projects has increased confidence in the commercial viability of developing additional lands. Now, this is significant for

29:52 a couple of reasons, but one thing that has grown over the past few decades alongside Alberta's proven oil reserves is is secessionist or separatist sentiment. There are different opinions among those people about what should be done when and if Alberta separates, but a decent chunk of them do support joining the United States. And I don't think it takes a lot of imagining to wonder why some people in the charge of the United States government right now might support that. To continue with that Beau Report analysis.

30:19 Since the shale revolution in 2008, there's been a massive growth from North America, and the rest of the world hasn't grown oil production. we're now seeing that the tight plays in the U.S. aren't infinite and are showing signs of plateauing. Specifically, when we look at the United States' largest oil play, the Permian, it has essentially been flat at 5.5 million barrels per day since December of 2023.

30:39 Flat production from the Permian is contrary to the previous decade, where we saw tight oil production grow by half a million barrels per day per year. Oil demand has gone up by about a million barrels a day per year for the last several decades, and at this point we do expect that to continue, at least in the very near term. Given the growing demand for oil and stagnation in supply growth since the shale revolution, it's expected that Alberta's oil sands reserves will become increasingly critical. As global oil demand continues to rise and with limited growth and production from other sources, oil sands reserves will be relied upon more heavily. So Alberta is one of the places in North America that we keep finding more oil. And

31:15 as we start to plateau in the United States, People in the U.S. government, particularly the Trump administration, are looking at Alberta as a potential crucial resource for the future. So while there's a lot of wackiness around the Alberta secession movement, as there is with any secession movement in the U.S. or in Canada, there's also major geopolitical implications behind the mere discussion of Albertan independence. And the prize of Albertan oil was considered well worth some scheming by people in the Trump administration. The movement had gotten supercharged first during a conflict in the early 1980s between then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the Albertan Premier Peter Lougheed, who disagreed about how fair Canada's revenue-sharing energy policy was.

31:55 Trudeau argued that the federal government needed to control Canada's natural resources and sought to impose further taxes on oil and gas revenues. Lougheed threatened to cut production in response to new taxes. 49% of respondents in a 1981 poll by the Canada West Foundation agreed that Western Canadians benefited so little from membership in the Canadian state that independence made sense. And in the decades since, the issue has remained bubbling in the background, like crude. It was ignited in the modern era in 2015, when Pierre Trudeau's son Justin became the Prime Minister. And to make a long story short, over the last several years, things have really come to a head. separatist parties who had attracted like

32:32 one or 2% of the vote previously were supercharged by COVID-19 restrictions. And then the fact that Trump's been launching a trade war and talking about making Canada the 51st state, that's also helped kind of clamp down on some of the separatist sentiment. It's a big part of what Prime Minister Carney has used to sort of like argue that Canadians need to stand together in this time. And he's right that the separatist movement is being like deliberately pushed by a whole bunch of people in the United States. Now, obviously, the most direct reason why this referendum came about is because in May, Albertan Premier Danielle Smith announced that the independence question would come to a vote. She supported a

33:08 unified Canada, but was willing to have a referendum vote because over 300,000 Albertans had signed a petition asking for a referendum. The petition's signatures had been gathered after a mass town hall campaign by pro-separation citizens. It was blocked by a court for reasons to do with indigenous rights initially, but was allowed to go through. Voters in this referendum had a number of choices to make, not just as to whether or not to do a binding referendum, although first they did have to choose, do we remain with Canada or do we start the process of holding a binding separation referendum? But, per the BBC, quote, there are nine other questions that have been put to voters, though they have been overshadowed by the one on independence. They

33:43 deal with two main topics, immigration and constitutional matters. For the most part, all of them seek to ask Albertans about options to gain autonomy from Ottawa. Voters were also asked, for example, if they wanted more control on immigration and whether people should have to provide proof of citizenship to vote.

33:58 U.S.

33:58 Interests repeatedly attempted to influence the election in a number of ways. A write-up in Maclean's documents how U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant held an interview with Jack Posobiec where he said, I think we should let them come down into the U.S. Alberta is a natural partner for the U.S. Rumor that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in the U.S. or not. This was taken very seriously by Canadians as a statement of U.S.

34:19 support for intervention in Canadian politics. Consistent with the 2025 national security strategy our regime released, which revealed what's known as the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

34:29 The Donro Doctrine?

34:30 Yeah.

34:31 This, per the White House, put Canada in the U.S. sphere of influence. As McLean's wrote, quote, The document was read with dread in Ottawa. The strategy has, of course, played out in rhetoric and policy. The administration wants a say on Canada's trade agreements. It wants specialized access to resources, and it has zero regard for notions of sovereignty, except, it seems, when it comes to Alberta. Now, the most direct U.S. influence in this whole process so far has been online. Tons of MAGA-affiliated accounts pushed Albertan secession. Benny Johnson suggested taking Alberta militarily. Stephen Crowder supported Albertan statehood.

35:04 All sorts of stupid shit. A McGill study found pro-independence accounts on social media outperformed anti-independence accounts by an eight to one ratio, which is pretty clear evidence of interference by social media companies, I would say. Right before the referendum, public interest Alberta called for an inquiry into foreign interference in Alberta's secession referendum after it was found that Albertan separatist leaders held a meeting with U.S. Republican political strategists in the province about how to push the referendum. This is all very fucked up and Canadians should be pissed at us. The good news is that for now, things did not go MAGA's way, did not go the Trump administration's way. Albertans voted overwhelmingly to stay part of Canada.

35:47 Nearly 2 million people cast their ballots and so far about 75% of them look to have supported remaining Canadian. I think we'll be continuing to cover aspects of this in the future, but that's what you need to know right now.

35:58 Nice.

35:59 Anything to add, Gare?

36:01 Yeah, I'm glad that Alberta voted to not have a vote on whether to leave Canada.

36:05 Yeah.

36:06 Unfortunately, though, some of the more confusingly worded referendum questions on stuff like immigration were not as unanimous. The early count on a bunch of those immigration questions leans, yes, in favor of pursuing more restrictions. But the margins on those are pretty small. And votes from cities like Edmonton and Calgary are still coming in. and could theoretically switch those over, but they'd have to go up a couple percent.

36:38 Some of the other questions on changes to the Constitution have already flipped from yes to no, as we've been getting in more results from the cities. But these other questions are pretty close. We don't have full results quite yet. So although U.S. interference did not produce the result on separation that MAGA may have wanted... the type of immigration rhetoric that spreads on social media is not, you know, unique to the United States or really any kind of quote unquote Western country right now. There's pretty ugly stuff everywhere.

37:14 But yeah, in terms of the separation referendum, that all lines up with what I've been reading in the old CBC and what I've been talking with my family about. Because, yeah, they've been voting.

37:27 They're voting. I don't know, Canada, I'm going to give you the same advice I give every country these days. Invest in long-range missile defenses.

37:35 Well, I don't know if that's the best use of Canadian state money.

37:41 It might be. There are some countries that really do like this.

37:48 But no, Alberta really is the heart of the conservative movement in Canada right now. This is where the trucker convoy was. Was organized, all of those. All those many years ago.

38:02 It is one of three provinces I've heard described as Canada's Texas.

38:07 That's the only one that's accurate. People could say maybe Manitoba or Saskatchewan. They're lying. Those are obviously Midwest states. Nova Scotia's got a little bit of Texas.

38:17 In it, but only a little.

38:18 It's definitely Alberta. My family lives surrounded by oil derricks. It's quite incredible. Should we stick to... non-U.S. countries and pivot to Mia Wong.

38:33 So speaking of places where people are pissed off at the Trump administration, we are moving to our dispatches from a world in revolt and we're moving first to Albania, which has seen staggeringly large protests over the last roughly a week or It's very difficult to get good numbers on how big the Albanian protests are. I will say just off the top as a indication of how successful they've been, they lit the Supreme Court on fire. They lit part of the Albanian Central Bank on fire.

39:08 So.

39:09 The protests that have rocked Albania over the last week are a massive escalation of ongoing protests over a basically city-sized seaside real estate development tied to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, whose firm Affinity Partners. Okay, so this is where it gets murky because they've been granted special investment status by the government. They also talked about this development project.

39:36 There's a video, I think, on Instagram of them talking about it and how they discovered this place when they went on vacation. It's kind of unclear exactly the extent to which they were involved in it, I don't know. No one seems to exactly know how closely tied they're in. I've seen some reports, like the rumor is that they're just straight up selling it to Kushner's firm, right? This development is going to be built on a wildlife reserve that is home to a whole bunch of animals like sea turtles and importantly, a bunch of flamingos, which has led to these protests, the original version of these protests being dubbed the Flamingo Revolution.

40:10 Nice.

40:11 But the protest kicked into a higher gear in the last week. As I mentioned before, the protesters have been extremely successful in combating security forces. Again, they lit the Supreme Court on fire. They have spread rapidly across the country. Albania's nominally socialist party president has blamed conservatives and also Iran for fomenting the protests. But this rings somewhat hollow, given that a very prominent young member of his own party, who he had handpicked to run at like age 25, also joined the protest during the original phase of it.

40:46 And the intensification of these protests and their expansion from being sort of solely about this real estate development to being about the things that all the rest of the uprisings are about, which is to say unemployment, terrible education, bad economic prospects, are very directly linked to the other uprisings in France, Spain, India, and other places. People are directly inspired when you read interviews of them in the streets.

41:14 They're directly inspired by what I don't know if I like the name, the Gen Z revolt, but that's kind of what it's being called.

41:21 Yeah.

41:21 And there is this massive like generational conflict element of these protests.

41:27 Yeah.

41:27 Although, again, like it's worth noting that like a lot of the people involved in this are a lot older than that. Like I think I think part of what's happening is like it's like the students were the first people to take the street and then everyone else goes with them.

41:41 And that tends to be the case, like generally, right? Like it's generally young people who are just a bit less risk averse and who tend to do those things.

41:51 They have less stake in the, in ways continuing exactly how they are. Yeah.

41:55 And more to gain, right? Like they have the rest of their lives to deal with this shit.

41:58 Yeah.

41:59 Yep.

42:00 And, you know, I think this is actually very encouraging that you're seeing very, very deliberate sort of tying of these protests to the protests going on in other countries. in a way that wasn't really true of the 2018, 2019, 2020 wave of protests. And it harkens back to the sort of internationalism of 2011, where you would have things like protesters who were occupying Tucker Square would be ordering pizzas for striking teachers in Wisconsin. This is closer, not fully there, but closer to that kind of era of solidarity between these movements. And a lot of that is because the people taking the streets are seeing the same economic conditions everywhere and are seeing people like go fight to break. And that helps to break the passivity of,

42:46 you know, the passivity of the hour and get people into the streets. Speaking of getting people into the streets, we're going to turn from Albania to France where the question in France for the last few weeks had been fairly simple. The question was, will the rest of French society join the French students in the streets or would they let the student movement be crushed alone? And this weekend, to its credit, French society issued a fairly resounding answer. Yes, we are going to go into the streets. And the result of that was over the weekend, France saw the largest protest the country has seen since at minimum the peak of the Gilets Jaunes yellow vest uprising, possibly larger.

43:27 And it's been defined by a level of militancy that even in a nation defined by the riots, is almost more characteristic of a small revolution than a large protest.

43:39 The Gilets Jaunes, they've set up a whole website to convene people to protest and they have another one coming up on the 24th.

43:47 Yeah, yeah.

43:47 And that's part of what's been happening here is that, you know, the student protests survived long enough for the dates that the LFS had set up. And what this has caused is a huge swath of both the French left and the French working class out there. You're seeing everyone from like proles in like, you know, French territories and reunion in Guadalupe, where like in Guadalupe, people seem to be like shooting at police stations and stuff to, you know, you have the remains of the yellow vests.

44:15 And in something that is genuinely sort of remarkable for French society, you're seeing both the white and non-white French working classes go out at the same time, which is something that very, very rarely happens. Usually when one segment goes out, the other one doesn't. So if you look at the riots in 2023 against police killings, were probably the most militant street movement you've seen in France in ages.

44:39 But it was just the non-white workers going out. And this time it's been both, partially because the student movement was born in a bunch of working class suburbs of Paris, but then spread to the rest of Paris and the rest of the country. You've been seeing a sort of alliance here in a way that you haven't. in a long time. And the consequence of this is that when enough of the French working class goes out together, you know, you can start doing the thing that they're doing right now, which is burning down city halls. And, you know, you can see this when you read accounts from people on the ground, it doesn't read like an account of, you know, even a pretty militant French protest. Like it reads like

45:17 something out of like 1848. You're reading things like, quote, thousands of people are in the Elise district setting up barricades and These are the largest mobilizations we've seen this decade. It's hard to get good numbers of the peak of the gilets jaunes. The government is estimating 500,000. The unions estimate 800,000, which I think is much closer. I've seen estimates up into the millions. This was also a massive shock to the government. The government had been projecting that about 100,000 people would come out. They were projecting the movement was about to die. And then suddenly, eight to 10 times as many people as the government thought was going to be out came out. And this is also surprising to some extent in that this uprising differs a

46:00 lot from the last half decade of anti-austerity protests and general strikes, right? There have been a lot of general strikes in the last half a decade, but the call for this didn't come out from the unions. It came out from a whole bunch of decentralized networks, including the sort of yellow vest things, including the student movement networks.

46:18 And because of that, it was able to put into the streets almost an order of magnitude more people than anyone else has been able to call out. And it puts the French state in a somewhat difficult position because there isn't really a force that can just rein the protests in, in a way that you had with the French general, with the general strikes, where you can negotiate with the unions. There's just an unbelievable number of extremely angry people in the streets. And we're going to see how the protest continues to escalate this weekend. I'm going to move to a couple of kind of small ones.

46:49 So in Tunisia, we had Tunisia's largest union calling a pretty large anti-government protest which is pretty notable because so tunisia has been under the rule of like effectively a dictator who came in promising to sort of like end the rampant corruption and unemployment of the sort of post-revolutionary Indonesia.

47:11 That hasn't happened. But Said has been, like, incredibly effective at repressing protests and repressing opposition. And this is the largest group, like, group of people anyone's been able to put in the streets in, basically, since he came to power. So we're going to be monitoring what's happening there. It's also worth mentioning what's going on in Italy, where there have been some small protests in the north.

47:32 I say small.

47:34 Very effective, but small protests in the north that, like, managed to sack a whole bunch of Milan's shopping district, which pissed off the government enormously. So there's a troop deployment going on in Milan. But I think more interestingly are the protests happening in the South at the same time, where there's a set of roadblocks that are being maintained as part of a trucker's protest over sort of rising diesel.

47:55 Diesel prices are skyrocketing. There just isn't diesel to buy as well, which means that a bunch of the trucking sector that fuels the sort of export economy of the agricultural parts of Southern Italy are collapsing because the truckers who are independent contractors can't afford diesel. And that's been crushing their industry. And so we're starting to see blockades of the roads leading up to ports. And that's something that I think can escalate because there just has not really been a government solution to these problems. Finally, I want to talk about Indonesia, where on Tuesday the 19th, or yesterday as we were recording this, protests sort of begun in earnest. against the country's increasingly embattled right-wing president,

48:39 Prabowo Subiento, who is a former general and a former minister of defense and who came in on a very sort of like right-wing military fascist platform. Subiento has come under fire, and I use that term quite literally here, for his failure to even vaguely contain a massive series of wildfires in Sumatra and Borneo that have been going on since July. So this is not a situation where people are mad at the government for not being able to control the weather. These fires have been going on for four months, and they have covered not just Indonesia, but a broad swath of the entire region in these clouds of toxic smoke. And I mean, these clouds of toxic smoke are reaching Vietnam, right? And this has been

49:22 going on for four months now, and the government has not been able to put them out. People are extremely pissed. I'm going to quote here from Arab News, quote, the Ministry of Health, this is just in Indonesia, the Ministry of Health has recorded at least 277,000 cases of acute respiratory infection related to the fires so far. of which 60,000 are children under five. So this has pushed people into the streets in the last couple of days. Again, this is a set of protests that begun with students like hearkening to the student protests across the world. The government has said it will deploy 9,000 police officers to crush the protests. It's unclear exactly how this is going to go because we're in effectively day two of them

50:04 as we're recording. Yeah, and we will keep you informed as that situation unfolds.

50:09 Let's go on one more ad break and then return for two more important stories.

50:24 So talking of like a world on fire.

50:28 Yeah.

50:28 Let's talk about Iran and Ukraine, right? So the UK MTO's report, Maritime Trade Office, I believe, indicated that the Maritime Reporting Agency has struggled to accurately report true numbers of attacks, with the majority of vessels refusing to report to UKMTO. UKMTO is aware, via other sources, of incidents but constrained on reporting through lack of verification. Despite this, they recorded more than a dozen attacks last week. They recorded that transit to the strait was 70% lower, straight from Hormuz, obviously, than pre-conflict levels. While a lot of oil is moving through that east-west Saudi pipeline that bypasses straight from Hormuz, it seems the move in Hormuz right now is to use smaller craft to offload to larger vessels. This,

51:18 of course, is all happening at the same time that Ukraine has continued to use long-range drone attacks to batter Russian fuel infrastructure. launched a bunch of larger scale operations over the weekend. And it appears that the world's most divorced man is not happy about this. That's Elon Musk, if you're not familiar. Elon Musk has been gating the speed at which Ukraine can remain connected to the internet through his Starshield system. He started doing this about the 14th of October, which was last Wednesday for you listening on Friday. This has... Serious impacts for Ukrainian drone offensives.

51:57 According to posts by Ukrainian officials on Telegram, they weren't warned about this. They already can't use the Starshield itself in Russian territory. But for other operations, it seems that they've been limited to connecting at speeds below 100 miles an hour, 160 kph. This 100 mile an hour limit seems to be something that they've now arrived at. But when this was first happening, people were experiencing connectivity issues even slower than that. So it's not uncommon for drones to be equipped with a terminal, right? Like a Star Shield or Starlink terminal to either function as a relay or in some cases, like the actual drone that engages the Russians will have a terminal on it. They also use them on interceptor drones. I'm not entirely clear how,

52:43 like I can guess, but I'm not going to guess in public. Someone knows, I'd love to hear coolzone tips at proton.me. If you're not familiar with StarShield, StarShield is a gov slash military version of Starlink. Sometimes it has access to faster speeds, certain specific satellites. They're not entirely interchangeable, but StarShield can use that Starlink network kind of plus, I guess. Ukraine has a couple of things. It has StarShield, and then it has a registry of Ukraine Ministry of Defense Starlink terminals, which seems to be a separate thing, right?

53:19 But like when It took a long time, but eventually Starlink turned off support for the Starlink terminals the Russians were using. And it seems that they have this registry, which is oftentimes units in Ukraine will either fundraise to purchase or have donated to them a Starlink terminal. And then they can go to the Ministry of Defense and be like, hey, can you add this to your list?

53:39 And then it's treated differently by Ukraine. the company as, as opposed to like, and I guess the deal there is to avoid Russians buying it. And they don't want to be supportive of Russia invading Ukraine, at least in that way. On X.com, the everything website, Elon Musk claimed that quote, star shield systems are owned and controlled by the U S government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the U S military and ultimately POTUS.

54:03 Starlink of course is a commercial service owned by space X. And this is, I'm continuing quote from Musk here. Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defense activities cannot be used for offensive military action as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company. On the 17th of October, Marco Rubio then went on to claim that Ukraine does not have Starshield.

54:25 On Starshield, what's going on?

54:27 Because Elon Musk said it's.

54:28 Up to the president. Well, Starshield or Starlink? Well, yeah, I know.

54:33 It's confusing.

54:34 So Starlink is a commercial product, okay? And so it's regulated and handled as a commercial product. StarShield is a defense product, a military product. And as I said, I mean, that is something that we have a military, United States military uses. It's not at this moment available to Ukraine, and that's under conversation. It's under discussion right now about how they would want to use it.

54:58 No, but did the U.S.

54:59 Have anything to do with it not working in Ukraine at the moment? Zelensky said it was deliberate.

55:02 Well, I don't know what Zelensky said. I'm not sure Zelensky knows what he's talking about, but it wasn't deliberate. We had nothing to do with that. The United States, nobody ordered that Starlink speed to be slowed down.

55:13 So, subsequently, the Wall Street Journal reported that, quote, a person familiar with the situation said Musk talked to multiple senior administration officials, including with Trump, before imposing the new speed cap. which Ukrainian officials said had allowed Russian missiles to evade their defensive. Tensions between the United States and Ukraine are really growing right now. Zelensky has claimed that Trump administration has cut intelligence support, which has resulted in failing to track missile strikes into Ukraine. Trump has claimed the US still shares intelligence, but he went on to say...

55:44 We've given a lot to Ukraine.

55:46 You know what? We've given a lot to Ukraine. They've given nothing to us. Remember that. We've given hundreds of billions of dollars. I gave the javelins to Ukraine.

55:57 When he knocked out.

55:58 That was me. Obama gave him pillows. You know the expression? Obama gave him sheets and pillows. Trump gave him the javelins. So don't tell me about Ukraine. We've given a lot to Ukraine. They've given us nothing.

56:12 So Trump being pretty combative there, this seems to obviously be ignoring the minerals deal. People will remember the very infamous Trump-Vance Zelensky meeting at the White House, which resulted in this minerals deal. Trump has also repeatedly tried to blame Zelensky for diesel prices.

56:31 I want Zelensky to stop and I want Putin. Now, if you tell me that Zelensky... is again shooting at refineries, all he's doing is making the world oil price higher.

56:41 And he is doing that.

56:42 Well, I think that's a disgrace. There's plenty of other targets. They don't have to hit. There are a lot of targets that you can hit. But when you shoot at diesel refineries where you make diesel oil, and we need that, and the world needs that, then he's not doing a good service for the world.

56:59 Failure of the convention in the English language to use one's voice going up to indicate a question. Which is great. Of course, the far bigger issue is that Trump has started a war with Iran, right? Which is the major issue.

57:13 Yes.

57:13 The actual reason is diesel shortage.

57:16 I want to play this clip, though, because he really went in on Zelensky on Monday.

57:20 I think it's time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine.

57:24 Because what's happened?

57:26 Very little land has moved, but a million people, a tremendous number of people are dead. They're losing their male population. Ukraine could have had this thing settled a long time ago. If he would have listened to me, and you remember the Oval Office, he would have had this settled a long time ago. Maybe it's time for Zelensky to get somebody else to negotiate.

57:50 It seems that this is Trump's move going into the midterm, right? It's that among other things that he's tried to do to draw attention from what's happening to fuel prices because of his war in Iran, he's now trying to blame Zelensky. Just to wrap up on Starlink, Starlink is a reality of war everywhere today. It's used in Myanmar and in Ukraine and all over the world. And this has the really unfortunate effect of... making so many people directly reliant on Elon Musk specifically. It's a massive structural problem in conflict everywhere today. Elon Musk, especially in cases where there's not Star Shield, where it's just Starlink, the commercial product, Elon Musk has the ability to turn off the connection

58:37 to the outside world of so many places and movements. I'd be naive if I said I expected this to be the last time we saw that. Yep, that's what I got on conflict today.

58:49 For our last story, let's return to this show's namesake and discuss a new executive order. On Monday, First Lady Melania Trump made a rare public appearance with her husband to announce the creation of a new women's health division within the NIH, the National Institutes of Health. According to Huffington and Human Services, quote, the division will advance research into conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women, strengthen accountability in federally funded research, and accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries into prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and clinical care. Trump created this new division via executive order, And this order also established a, quote, White House Women's Health Task Force, which,

59:37 according to Trump, will, quote, mobilize the entire federal government to coordinate action focused on improving women's health. Here is the president announcing who will run the Women's Health Task Force.

59:50 And this task force will be led by Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F.

59:56 Kennedy.

59:56 That's a big one.

59:58 And he's been fantastic, I have to tell you. He's a little different. We understand that, don't we? Cheryl, do we understand? He is a little different. But that's what makes him good, I think. I'll let you know about it. That's what makes him good.

1:00:16 I think. I'll let you know about it. Very reassuring. Very reassuring stuff.

1:00:21 Ringing endorsement for the dude in charge of the women's health program.

1:00:26 Now, this task force will also be co-chaired by Chief of Staff Susie Willis, and the task force will also include Pete Hegseth, among other cabinet members, though Hegseth is the first one mentioned in the order. So, real star-studded cast there in charge of women's health.

1:00:44 Jesus.

1:00:46 Great stuff.

1:00:47 I'll read from the executive order, quote, My administration is committed to ensuring that American women are receiving the best scientifically supported medical advice in the world, unquote. Now, the NIH already has an Office of Research on Women's Health and has since the 90s, so it's unclear how the work of this division will differ from the office. To quote the New York Times, quote, Alina Salganikov, the co-chairwoman of the committee that produced the 2024 National Academy of Medicine report on ending unequal treatment, questioned how the new division would set research priorities and wondered whether it would end up focusing on the interests of the Make America Healthy Again movement, like non-hormonal approaches to contraception and fertility awareness,

1:01:37 for example. If you have a fixed amount of money and you're going to invest in new research, What are the trade-offs? What are you not funding in order to fund these new studies? said Ms. Selganikoff, who now directs the Women's Health Policy Program at the non-profit health research organization KFF. The questionable priorities of this division is not the only issue. Trump's new order does not secure or promise any research funding. Just last month, Trump cut $ 810 million from HHS, This was funding that was already pre-approved by Congress. During the wave of doge cuts last year, HHS slashed funding for the Women's Health Initiative, a decades-long ongoing study focused on women's health, aging, menopause, and the

1:02:28 effects of hormone therapy. After public pushback, funds for the initiative were reinstated, but the massive cuts to the NIH still have negatively impacted research into women's health. Trump has cut or froze over $ 3 billion in previously approved research grants, $ 2. 3 billion of which from the NIH, and Trump's 2026 budget proposal sought to slash the NIH budget by 41%, a cut of almost $ 20 billion. Since Trump took office, NIH has been rewarding grants much, much more slowly. with HHS, the Office of Management and Budget, or the White House flagging certain awards as quote, not acceptable, according to former NIH director Jennifer Toyer in an interview with NPR. Toyer explained how this interference from the White House has continued

1:03:26 even after Doge quote, went away, but the other systems had been put in place to do the same.

1:03:33 Function, unquote.

1:03:34 I think this is something that doesn't get reported on enough, even though Doge doesn't exist in name the same way it did in the early months of the Trump administration. A lot of those same sorts of policies are being done by other institutions, other departments, other agencies, especially the Office of Management and Budget.

1:03:54 They've learned this, right? It's the same with, we don't have Greg Bovino anymore, but we still have massive ICE detentions. They've learned you can't do it quite as loud and proud.

1:04:04 Yeah, they can shut down the most sort of obviously obstructive and disagreeable parts while still doing the same stuff, just quieter.

1:04:13 Yeah.

1:04:14 According to the Washington Post, in fiscal year 2025, there was a 31% drop in the number of NIH-funded projects that included the word woman.

1:04:23 Oof.

1:04:25 An analysis by NPR found that between fiscal year 2024 and 2025, Research areas that lost NIH funding included women's health, which was down almost $ 300 million.

1:04:36 Jesus.

1:04:38 Cervical cancer vaccine research, down $ 6 million. Stem cell research on umbilical cord, blood, and the placenta, down $ 6 million. And quote, violence against women research, which was down $ 2 million. Not to mention the other sort of health disparity cuts in regards to minority populations. Last July, HHS imposed new conditions on Title X funding to align the program with conservative values. Title X is the only federal grant program dedicated specifically to family planning, providing birth control, STI testing, and related preventative health services. According to New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led a coalition of 22 other states in suing to block the changes, to qualify for

1:05:26 Title X funding under Trump, applicants would be required to align their programs, quote, with a sweeping set of political priorities as a condition of receiving or keeping federal funds. The priorities include eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, excluding and stigmatizing transgender people, discouraging the use of contraception in favor of natural family planning, and requiring clinics to counsel all patients toward marriage and parenthood, unquote.

1:05:56 Jesus Christ.

1:05:58 Insane stuff yeah.

1:06:00 Yeah this is like uh we've spoken on this show before about romania you know and their natalist policies like uh i don't know that shit scares me a lot.

1:06:09 Yeah so the idea of hhs robert f kennedy jr and friends being put in charge of a new women's health initiative and task force not very reassuring to say the least no Trump's executive order also revokes a Biden memorandum and an executive order from 2024 to quote, advance women's health research and innovation. The memo established the first ever White House initiative on women's health research. And following Biden's executive order, the NIH dedicated $ 200 million to close the women's research gap. Biden then requested $ 12 billion from Congress, and ultimately the administration invested about $ 1 billion into women's health research in just 10 months. So, the sort of novel aspects of this announcement from Trump is just cribbing

1:06:57 something Biden already tried to do and actually provided funding for, while Trump's version has no funding, is in the wake of hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to funding for women's research, and is in control of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So, not great, to say the least.

1:07:15 Yeah, really, really bad.

1:07:18 It's... Yeah.

1:07:21 Other reporting from the Times has noted how this announcement is just weeks away from the midterms and Trump is polling at like 30% among women. And this could be some sort of ploy to get some more support for the administration going into the midterms. I don't know if that's part of the intent, but the timing has been highlighted.

1:07:42 Great stuff. It seems such a weird one to go for before the midterms because you're giving a massive middle finger to half the population. Slightly more than half. But who am I? Previously, this has been a successful tactic for them. Yeah.

1:07:59 Well, that does it for us, I believe. Here at It Could Happen Here.

1:08:03 Sweet.

1:08:05 Would you like to email us? You can do so. It's coolzontips at proton.me. Still, occasionally a marketing company email will sneak through and earn a ban for its entire domain name.

1:08:17 Oh, I did. I did actually specifically request marketing companies to send emails to that address last week when you were out, James.

1:08:23 Fantastic.

1:08:24 So that might be my bad. I tried to stop them.

1:08:29 Yeah, thank you. I look forward to hearing more about how your fucking book about investing is going to make you a great fucking guest on our podcast and that you haven't sent this to everyone else who has a podcast.

1:08:40 Great. Let's just clip out James saying I look forward to hearing more and then throw that in every future episode along with a link to the email.

1:08:51 Put a trans girl on your couch. We reported the news. We reported the news.

1:09:07 It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

1:09:24 Thanks for listening.