How Does Anyone Not See the Fascism

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:03 Clip: So, just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan? I have concepts of a plan. That is a damning non -answer. I'm not trying to make it about myself, Your Honor. I'm just trying to show his bias toward the defendant. Just don't make it yourself.

0:00:33 Clip: Something simple as a crack pipe, a used crack pipe. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check.

0:00:45 Thomas: And welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1077. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. That over there is real-life attorney, Matt Cameron. How you doing, Matt?

0:00:54 Matt: Tag. Good I've been reading way too much once again about fascism, especially about Germany. So, well,

0:00:59 Thomas: Gonna blow up your spot. Before recording, Matt said this is the topic he, quote, feels most comfortable with. Not sure what you're not telling us, Matt, but I'm a little worried about that.

0:01:11 Matt: As it happens, I don't know if listeners remember this, but I actually do teach immigration policy at the graduate level. And what we're talking about today, yeah, I

0:01:17 Thomas: Okay. So he's just seen the fascism firsthand all the time. Gotcha. But

0:01:22 Matt: Have a particular perspective here as somebody who's been inside the deportation system for quite a while. But also, I've been having certain anxieties about things since June 2015, when Trump first came out within the first seconds of his campaign to talk about how they are rapists and murderers and drug dealers. And we're not going to go over that. We all remember that.

0:01:38 Thomas: He said some of them are probably good people, Matt. So I wish you would report accurately.

0:01:41 Matt: That's right. Some of them are good people. That is right. You got to hear both sides on that one. Uh you I told you last time I started reading obsessively about fascism at that point because I already know as a student of immigration history where this is going and we're going to talk about u.s. history already has a long history of immigration fascism from the beginning it's nothing new but this is supercharging it and this is taking somewhere else and This has some really unfortunate parallels to other fascist movements around the world, and I think we really have to talk about it. I really, at this point, especially in the last couple of weeks, and I want to try to connect some dots maybe that people haven't had time to put together. Maybe you haven't heard all of this, but it's getting worse, and I think you really can't be too alarmist about this, and I think now's the time, as much as we can, and maybe if you can share this episode with somebody who needs to understand these things a little better, I think everyone needs to be on board here to understand understand where we're at. We have to step back and actually hear what these people are saying, because it's so much worse than it was.

0:02:35 Thomas: You know, I had a thought while you're saying that, which is and this is what I want to really try to do with the show. But it's a difficult spot to hit because I feel like roughly speaking, there's going to be two categories of people. People, uh, one category that doesn't maybe know how fascist our immigration system and deportation system has been forever. And then another side who kind of does the like, oh yeah, it's maximum fascist. I don't know if you noticed that. I feel like there's a lot of like on the left. It's like, Oh yeah, no, it's already like, like the goal is to always one up with like how bad you think it already is to where it's like a maximum. And I I'm simplifying, but it's often zero or a hundred. And I think it's really important to note how, and I said this last time, how bad a yes it is, but also how much worse it could be. Cause that is like, it is actually important because if people think things are already as bad as they can be, I, that provides a disincentive to try to make things a little better, you know, like as well, it's already the worst it could possibly be.

0:03:33 Thomas: But as you could probably tell us more than most any people, Well, those little gradations of fascism actually, too, make a big difference in individual migrants lives or, you many people's lives.

0:03:44 Matt: They absolutely do. And there really has been a big difference in the last four years under Biden. There's still fundamentally real problems with the system, but it has been a lot quieter and easier to be with it. But I'm glad you brought that up, because one of the things I really want to talk about at the end here is what Trump is telling us he's actually going to do and why we have to take that seriously and what it actually means. People Because to really think about what it means when he promises these things, what that's going to look like in practice in our streets. So a lot to talk about today, but this is an important one.

0:04:12 Thomas: We're going to talk about all that scary stuff and probably more scary stuff that we don't even know about. Do we want to begin our dystopia? It's like the beginning menu of a video game we're making. Where would you like to begin? Customize your dystopian.

0:04:31 Matt: I am going to read you a little quote from a very famous biography. There is one state today in which, at least, weak beginnings towards a better conception of immigration are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States. Adolf Hitler, 1924. Yeah.

0:04:45 Thomas: Jesus.

0:04:46 Matt: So there's a wonderful book called Hitler's American Model, which I'm going to tell you straight up front, I'm gonna recommend to everybody, we will post it in the footnotes, of course. James Whitman makes a very compelling case because he's investigated the state of Nazi law. And the Nazis had a very sophisticated legal system. They had a lot of legal thinkers. Everything they did, of course, within the Third Reich was legal under their law, even by the end when they were using executive courts. Makes the point that we should be very uncomfortable with how much the Nazis drew not only from Jim Crow, not only from the law of the South, and they were actively debating whether the South was fascist enough. In some cases, they actually that thought Southern rules were too much, that maybe they wouldn't go over too well in Germany because they were too extreme. No, absolutely true. They thought the one -drop rule, they thought things like...

0:05:24 Thomas: Come on. Let's go with two drops at least. Let me just be reasonable.

0:05:32 Matt: They I mean, they thought it was commendable that Americans were treating things that way, but they thought it was a little much. We'll get back to Germany in a minute here, but let me just give you a quick rundown of how fundamentally racist, and I would argue fascist, our immigration system has always been, starting with the Naturalization Act of 1790. And I'm not sure how many people know this. Yeah, that was straight up right after the Constitution, one of the first things we passed. And the Naturalizing Act of 1690 specifically limited citizenship to free white persons of good character. It was just right there.

0:05:49 Thomas: Pretty pretty early. I was going to say white men at the time were like, ah, it's been so long and we haven't done fascism yet. Like, come on. It's been ages.

0:06:08 Matt: Just itchy fast trigger. Yep. Straight up. And know, and I think as we've talked about before, and I think as people generally know, the United States essentially had open borders until the early 20s. There wasn't wasn't much stopping people.

0:06:21 Thomas: I was gonna ask that because that confuses me. Because on one hand, this sounds fascist, as you say, but like, also, I know that that's been a talking point on the left for a while, which is like, hey, the way your, you did it or whatever, it was totally different. It was way easier. Easier gotcha

0:06:36 Matt: Yeah, it was. But in terms of citizenship, which is also an obsession of Hitler's, in terms who actually gets to vote and have the citizenship rights, that was limited to free white people for a very long time.

0:06:45 Thomas: So we'll let you be here as long as you do work for us and don't get any rights okay gotcha wow

0:06:51 Matt: Of workers, of course, we had the Chinese and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And actually, one of the things I found in the the book I was just telling you about was a German scholar saying that the US was doing a pretty good job of looking like it was at least a good place for refugees to go until about the 1880s. And that's pretty much when we were done with being good for refugees.

0:07:10 Matt: Yeah, I know. It's an amazing perspective. The Chinese were actually the only people who had to carry IDs. There were Chinese inspectors. The First Deportation Force was actually a Chinese inspection force in California that Because we were so strictly limiting Chinese immigration immigration to the point that the California equivalent of Ellis Island at Angel Island had about a 98% rejection rate, whereas Ellis Island had about 2% rejection rate, right? So it's pretty obvious given those streams where they're coming from. Moving on to the race science, and I guess I don't really want to call it science, but that's what they called it at the time, the eugenics, which were the underpinnings of the the early American visa system. And I don't mean just sort of conceptually. I mean, they had expert testimony from eugenicists, from people that believed in race science, to come in and explain about how we should organize the visa system based on eugenics, and that's what we did. Yep.

0:07:10 Thomas: Had a good run like they came and measured people's skulls and then we're like here's

0:08:01 Matt: Pretty much using all kinds of racial classifications that are very old -timey and you wouldn't even think about today. And the Immigration Act of 1924 instituted a visa quota system, which I want to talk about another time, that was based directly in race. And it was something else that Hitler admired. And there was at one point, the only two immigration systems in the world that were based on race were ours and the Third Reich's. To Sorry keep coming back to the Nazis, but yeah.

0:08:22 Thomas: So this is this episode is also known as a collection of far left memes that I'm like finding out which are true and which are or not because it's not 100% but But it's like it's also not anywhere close to 0%. It's like, oh, yeah, I've seen that meme before. Great. That the accurate one. Awesome.

0:08:39 Matt: Yeah. James Whitman is hardly a far, far leftist, and he's making the point throughout the book that we should be embarrassed and we should be very concerned about the fact that the Nazis drew so much from American law. Every major piece of immigration legislation in the 20th century and beyond has been in reaction to something, whether it's the Palmer raids reacting to anarchists and far leftists in the early 20th century, whether its all of the Cold War immigration measures and deportation measures that were instituted there, whether even the bill that Clinton signed off on in 1996, which fundamentally changed the immigration system to the point that people still don't really understand the fallout of it. And of course, after 9-11, the Patriot Act and Muslim registration, which we don't even even remember at this point, but Muslim young men had to register and report on

0:08:46 Thomas: 100%. Sorry, really?

0:09:19 Matt: A regular basis?

0:09:19 Thomas: I thought that was just like a proposed idea. That actually happened?

0:09:22 Matt: No, there was the NCERS program, which was finally defunded under Obama, but not actually end. Let me make sure. The National Security Entry -Exit Registration System, it was for non -citizens of certain ages from certain countries.

0:09:35 Thomas: Non -citizens, right. So if they're non -citizen, we can kind of do whatever because the Constitution doesn't exactly give the same protections.

0:09:43 Matt: That a big theme in American immigration law and American history. I'm going to get a little bit more into this when we talk about what Trump actually wants to do because a lot of it echoes the past, but I just wanted to kind of talk about some of that. Gave me all kinds of material just in the past week. And one you might've heard of, I sent you, let's start with that. Calling back to that early 20th century race science.

0:10:03 Clip: So far off. She has no clue. How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they're now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes, and we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.

0:10:22 Thomas: What wow oh

0:10:26 Matt: A lot of bad genes in our country right now, Thomas.

0:10:27 Thomas: It's a murderer it's in their genes how

0:10:31 Matt: Yeah, that's a straight up Nazi talk. There's no way around it. That is eugenicist talk. We haven't heard that kind of stuff.

0:10:34 Thomas: Would it be in their jeans you idiot so

0:10:37 Matt: We've not heard that in the United States from a major party candidate in a very, very long time.

0:10:41 Thomas: Wait if I can find let's do a um okay here's what we're gonna do we're going to coordinate Nate with 23andMe. We're going to find a murderer of every major genetic category that we can come up with. And then it turns out we're all just genetically murderers. Holy crap. All of us. Dang. Now we're on the same footing. I guess maybe we better... That cancels out. Maybe we'd better think of all of us the same then.

0:11:02 Matt: I'm a proud descendant of the Cameron Highlanders, and I can't believe there weren't a few murderers in the Highlands.

0:11:06 Thomas: Murders in your past.

0:11:09 Matt: So, just you think of as bad about the Third Reich.

0:11:14 Thomas: Yeah. Let me count the ways, man.

0:11:18 Matt: And there's quite You know, I think that we have a very simplified view of Nazi history that, you know, sort of Hitler sort of came to power somehow or another, and then there were some laws and he took over through executive orders, and there's some camps and then the Holocaust happened.

0:11:31 Thomas: And a bunch of people

0:11:32 Matt: And there's, yeah, right.

0:11:32 Thomas: Didn't know anything about it. They're just like, oh, shit.

0:11:36 Matt: Out of nowhere, just jackboots in the streets before you knew it. But no, they had a very long time to do this. The party platform in 1920 was mostly about immigration and very familiar to the Republican party platform today. Day. But immigration was really the underpinning of everything that would go on to become the very worst excesses of the Third Reich, the human rights violations, and still, what's hoped, the worst things that humanity's ever done to each other. And when I say that, I mean that the Nuremberg Laws themselves, of course, most famously, the second Nuremburg Law was the law of blood and regulated citizenship, and was obsessed with making sure that Jews could not be citizens. And that's a powerful thing with some resonance in things we'll talk about here. But that's just as a basic measure. You're talking about an immigration proposal, about who gets to be a citizen and who doesn't. And Hitler was also inspired by what we were doing with Puerto Ricans and Filipinos. And he really liked the idea of second -class citizens. That was something that specifically appealed to him and that he wanted Jews to be. And the Lebensraum, living space policy, which was how they justified expanding out of Germany into Poland and other places, was directly inspired by the American Manifest Destiny and the war on natives in the United States. Sorry, I keep coming back to this, but I've just read this book again, and it's really in my

0:12:47 Matt: Mind.

0:12:47 Thomas: But but like a real talk, they didn't give the British Empire any credit or anything, you know, like, come on.

0:12:51 Matt: Did. They did.

0:12:52 Thomas: Yeah, it can't be just us, especially if you're talking that long, like the Manifest Destiny stuff like that's you know. There's

0:12:52 Matt: It wasn't just us, but they certainly, yeah. They also admired the way that we use the legal system against the natives, which we did, just to point that out. But yes, no, certainly they were...

0:13:05 Thomas: Is not in defense of us. It's just an attack of other people, the British

0:13:07 Matt: Certainly. Certainly, we were not the only ones.

0:13:09 Thomas: Empire as well.

0:13:10 Matt: Also thought you'd appreciate when I was doing my research on this, that the New York Times really has not changed. 1935, In here's a headline about the Nuremberg Laws.

0:13:10 Thomas: Well yeah yeah okay okay

0:13:18 Matt: Germany adopts swastika as nation's official flag. Hitler's reply to quote -unquote insult. Anti -Jewish laws also passed.

0:13:22 Thomas: So first news is like the design news like the this is our new team logo yeah and then oh also some anti -jewish uh laws great awesome I

0:13:32 Matt: Check out this flag. Yeah. Things are going to fundamentally change Germany and lead to a horrible wave of antisemitism.

0:13:42 Thomas: Brought it I brought it up before but I hope I hope matt you've watched the uh the documentary america and the holocaust us because it's it's a lot of this exact stuff oh you you got to watch it if you hadn't haven't it's really interesting it's everyone should watch it it's just it's about like what america did and more importantly didn't do uh in this exact kind of time and it's and yeah the the nazi rallies that happened in in the u .s there's it man it is a it was very educational very interesting oh

0:13:53 Matt: I got to watch that. Sure. Sure? To be somewhat fair to the New York Times, when they're talking about the swastika, the reason that they actually adopted it in that moment was because a judge in New York City had taken a hard stand against the swasika because there'd been a bunch of protesters that boarded a German ocean liner to tear down the flags because obviously they saw where things were going in Germany. And this judge let them all off, dismissed the case, and wrote this screed about how terrible the Nazis were and how we can't have the swastikas. You call it a pirate flag.

0:14:40 Thomas: My god I and then if youtube existed there would be a bunch of steven pinkers going like look I don't agree with the nazis either but you can't vandalize property that's their you know like it's all there's that stuff is so not new it's it's barely joking like I guarantee you there were those arguments hey they have it's freedom you want to disagree with their ideas ideas put out better ideas than the nazis that's how you do it yep

0:15:06 Matt: But those poor flags though, leave the flags alone. Judge Brodsky, and this is another major theme in fascism I meant to mention a little bit more last time, is that you have to be a victim. You have to victimized by somebody or something. And Brodski was a low -level magistrate judge in New York City. He had no power at all. He just took it upon himself to write this very strong opinion. And the entire German government was like, we have to get back at this one Jewish judge in New York, right? So to stand up to him, the first Nuremberg law was actually the flag law to adopt the swastika as such an official flag. Then, of course, the law of the blood and the citizenship law. And protection of the Blood was actually a miscegenation law that was somewhat based on our own, not to get to that again, but they studied Southern miscegeneration law as well about race mixing and trying to prevent that. 1920 platform I was telling you about for the Nazis, I think it's important to remember that they were not talking about extermination of the Jews at this point. They were talking about removing the Jews from the country or forcing them to self -deport, in the words of Mitt Romney, basically making conditions is unlivable so that they would just leave Germany. That was the obsession at the time. And there was no open talk of extermination. This is 1920, this is well before the camps were even considered. And my point in a lot of what we're talking about here is not that we're heading toward a Nazi fascist state tomorrow, but this is how you get there, the

0:15:17 Thomas: Constantly yeah we're under attack yeah yeah that's important I not as though from 19 you know 30 onward there's a group of nazis led by hitler who said death to jews death to Jews debt like consistently this is what we're going to do here's our whole plan and then eventually it gained enough popularity to where it's like, yep, now we're doing that. It's like – no, it's a slow build. It is a way of – it's, like, with anything. I mean, it is like with conspiracy theories or even cults where you don't front load with all the crazy. You slowly build up to it.

0:16:54 Matt: Hydro-power level, as they say. I wanted to make is that along with the citizenship policy, treatment of the Jews was through deportation. And there's no other way to say it. That's what they called it. Deporting first to other parts of Germany into Prussia. And then once they occupied more of Europe, deporting Jews back into camps. And deportation policy was a very important part of the Third Reich. And that's mass deportation policy. And there's no other way to say it. Just think that that is worth saying out loud. That is, again, just one fascist state. It's the one that we're all the most familiar with. And I just thought it was worth going through a few of those things and emphasizing again that these policies were very much inspired by American law and policy and that they honored them in a very real way, and that they thought that we had the right ideas about these things. And as we talked about last time, definitely is Hitler -curious. There's no way around it. He's known to have kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bedside table. That was pretty much the only book he's known of. He's not the only one. He has a book called The Hitler He's Known to Have Actually Kept Around, which says something, I think, well

0:17:53 Thomas: Real?

0:17:53 Matt: Before. Yeah, that's real. That's multiple witnesses on that one.

0:17:55 Thomas: He doesn't read. I don't even – that's a – okay.

0:17:59 Matt: If you're going to read one book, I guess it's going to be Hitler speeches. I don't know.

0:18:04 Thomas: He's like, I don't need to read another book. I already read the best one.

0:18:08 Matt: And Kelly, former DHS and then also chief of staff, spent a lot of time with Trump. And he reported back recently that Trump said that Hitler did some good things. And Kelly responded, what? And he said, well, Hitler rebuilt the economy. Economy. And talked about how loyal his generals were to him and how great that was that he was able to keep control that way, even though some of his generals did try to assassinate him at some point. And Kelly tried to remind him that you just can't say anything good about Adolf Hitler. That's just not something you're allowed to do. He had to tell him that.

0:18:37 Thomas: Hey, see, PR. I'm an expert in this rule one.

0:18:41 Matt: Talk for a minute. Let's just a little sidebar here about Stephen Miller, because I think we all have, we all know who Stephen Miller is. I think we all have some idea.

0:18:46 Thomas: Hitler jr.

0:18:47 Matt: Yeah. Am convinced, and there's really no question at this point, that Stephen Miller is still directly advising the Trump campaign on immigration policy. And I've got a few things I can use to prove this. But let's just remember the way that Stephen Mueller talks. Maybe you haven't heard from him in a while, but he was Trump's immigration advisor. We have to, I'm sorry.

0:18:59 Thomas: Like do I have to? Okay. I'm going to get a barf bag. Such

0:19:02 Matt: That last clip that I sent you, if you haven't heard in a while, and if people haven't ever heard this, this is one of the most Batman villain things that's ever been said in public by a public official.

0:19:10 Thomas: A fucking dork doofus. I guess it's always those guys though.

0:19:15 Clip: All Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government. One unelected judge in Seattle cannot remake laws for the entire country. I mean, this is just crazy, John. The idea that you have a judge in Seattle say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States is beyond anything you've ever seen before. The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned. Are

0:20:01 Thomas: Will not be questioned what a dork god I

0:20:02 Matt: Yeah. I mean, that is, I remember where I was when I heard that. I was actually in Mexico on the beach, and I was just catching up on the news early in the Trump administration. And I listened to that clip several times over because I could not believe that he had actually said those things.

0:20:17 Thomas: Can't take him seriously and I and that's a big problem because like it is these people are impossible to take seriously and then they're as sort of to adopt what kamala said which I think is a really good line not serious people but serious consequences if we let them gain power

0:20:21 Matt: Know. Yes. Absolutely right. Right. And, you was a really stark reminder recently of how extreme Stephen Miller is. We're going to talk next about Trump's past and future immigration policies and how Miller fits into that. But Trump tweeted not that long ago, September 14th, something that really concerned those of us who follow immigration policy closely, because he used a word that he shouldn't have used, a wordthat very few people use, and it's a real dog whistle. I will read just the middle of this from his truth. Promising to do all these things to initiate mass deportation and stop all migrant flights, revoke deportation immunity, whatever that means.

0:21:06 Matt: But he says, and returned Kamala's illegal migrants to their home country, parentheses, also known as remigration.

0:21:06 Thomas: Deportation immunity say -migration.

0:21:15 Matt: Remigration. Remigration, and that, I will tell you where that comes from in a minute, but Stephen Miller quote tweeted that the same day, and in caps, he wrote, the Trump plan to end the invasion of small -town America, quote, remigration, exclamation point.

0:21:29 Matt: Yeah, and actually, that thing with, because obviously the biggest Nazi support came from the rural areas, and a theme that I want to explore a little bit more is the way that he turned the rural area against the cities and talked about the cities as a hotbed of degeneracy and liberalism. Familiar rhetoric. But the fact that Stephen Miller immediately retweeted this makes me think that this rhetoric came from him. And I'm sure it did. If not, there might be some other advisors we don't know about who are this far. But remigration is only used by hard right identitarians, like the most white supremacists, the most extreme kinds of people. That is not a word that has just been kicking around in regular immigration policy.

0:22:03 Thomas: And And that's not a natural word. That's not an accent. That you have to, I've never heard that. Like I've been doing this a long time and I don't think I would ever even think of that word. It's a weird, awkward word. There's no innocent mistake here.

0:22:15 Matt: It is. Yeah, no, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's translated from something else, because I believe it was come come up with by a French hard right fascist philosopher. So sounds like something that's been translated. Just wanted to mention that because, again, this is within the last month or so that we've got the president using hard right, identitarian, white supremacist language and his top immigration advisor endorsing this in a very direct way. And then just yesterday, again, the stuff has been coming so fast recently, Stephen Miller went to Aurora, Aurora, Colorado. And Aurora got in the news recently because there were a number of Venezuelan migrants there, and they were spreading misinformation. Trump and his people were spreading misinformation that a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, which is, I will say straight up, is a pretty terrifying organization.

0:22:56 Matt: I've now done some asylum claims from people fleeing this gang. And they were talking about it in the same terms that you hear people talking about how during the summer of George Floyd that we burned our cities down, As if somehow Boston and San Francisco were left in ruins. So they went to Aurora and they're stirring things up. And I gave you the video here, but the police chief of Aurora already came out and said, look, yeah, there were a couple of guys causing trouble, but we don't have a serious problem. They're not overrunning them. This is just regular crime. Yeah, who knew?

0:23:22 Thomas: Didn't all go to Aurora, Colorado and take over that city weird is

0:23:27 Matt: Listen to what Stephen Miller had to say in just yesterday. Check out what's behind him also.

0:23:32 Thomas: It four seasons total landscaping because if it's not then I don't care uh

0:23:35 Matt: Sorry.

0:23:37 Clip: These the kids you grew up with? Are these the neighbors you were raised with? Are these the neighbors that you want in your city? No. These are the criminal migrants that Kamala Harris brought into your community. And as swiftly as they came, Donald Trump will send them back.

0:23:42 Thomas: My god oh jesus

0:24:03 Matt: Yep. I wanted to be sure to play that one because that's just 24 hours ago. And you see what's behind him with these giant signs. Can you see in that clip, actually?

0:24:11 Thomas: I actually couldn't see it's too small yeah

0:24:13 Matt: There's giant signs that say, end migrant crime behind him and other things like that.

0:24:16 Thomas: Well that's that's like two dog whistles ago so that feels quaint oh in my room oh that's that's slightly better what is that coming out of his mouth wow

0:24:25 Matt: And that's just a straight -up fascist rally of, do you want these people in your community? I mean, there's no other way to say that. That's what is going on here. So, I want to put it in the context of the language that we've gotten more and more familiar with from Trump and his people that I think has just started to creep in. Thing that I've been watching closely is Trump's use of the phrase, illegal animals or animals to talk about people. What he's been doing is he's playing this game where he's saying, well, I'm just talking about gang members. But he's not just talking about gang member, he's let's listen to the first time that he used this, because there was some controversy around this at the time, six years ago.

0:24:58 Clip: Kinds of things that other law enforcement agencies can do. And it's really put us in a very bad position. It's a disgrace. And we're showing our land, and we're working hard, and I think it'll all come together. Because people want it to come together, it's so ridiculous. The concept that we've been talking about is so ridiculous, we'll take care of it, Marty. Thank you, we have MS -13 gang members, I know that. If they don't reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about them.

0:25:26 Clip: We have people coming into the country, trying to come, and we are stopping a lot of them. But we're taking people out of the country. You wouldn't believe how bad these people are. These aren't people. These are animals. And we're takin' them out of country at a level, at a rate that's never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast. We get them. We release them. We get em again. We bring em out. It's crazy. The

0:25:54 Matt: The time, I remember this pretty well, because I found it shocking. Again, just being familiar with the history of dehumanizing language with immigrants and where this goes. And there was an active conversation about, should we be calling people animals? And Trump has since completely normalized this, and he's been using this expression and making it worse and worse. And here's a recent speech that he gave. That, by the the way, it was a meeting of sheriffs, and there's a sheriff asking him to do more about helping ICE get people out their communities. I'm going to send you now another that's much more recent from a recent appearance in Grand Rapids with Border Patrol.

0:26:24 Thomas: Say, it always has to be perpetual victimhood. So the just hilarious thing is how he always has simultaneously be talking about this massive, impossible problem, but also he's solving it all the time. And he's kind of, it's really, it's Schrodinger's, you problem. There's always like, yeah, there's more now we're also getting rid of more than ever, but there's so, but they're also still coming in. So it's all always has to be this ever -present threat, this ever present self -victimization, but he's also a hero at the same time. And it's, it's with everything he says. It's really, I, fact that people can't see through it is just mind blowing to me. Like you can't See him saying, Oh yeah, the worst. So many people streaming into our country. I got them all out. And then what happened is they all got, they came because of it's like I don't think that's true man I don'T THINK THAT'S UH I DON'T THING THAT HAPPENED YEAH

0:27:20 Matt: Just words. My favorite Shredder's Emigrant is actually the, they're taking our jobs slash they're taking our benefits. You got to pick one, right? So here's the most recent use of animals that I could find where

0:27:28 Thomas: WHERE

0:27:32 Clip: 22 year old nursing student in georgia who was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal uh the democrats said please don't call them animals they're humans I said no they're not humans they're animals and nancy palese told me that she said please tell me this word animal soon you're talking about these people I said I'll use the word animal because that's what they are ours is only going in one direction and it's going to be very bad now because we have a A new form of crime is called migrant They're having fistfights with our police officers right in the middle of the streets. They're sending prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients, and terrorists to worse. They have in every country all over the world. This isn't just in South America. They're coming from the Congo.

0:28:02 Thomas: I REMEMBER THIS WEIRD ARE WE GONNA GET TO THE LATE GREAT HANNIBAL ACTOR I

0:28:20 Matt: So that's another one of his favorite things has been for some time that another way that we're being victimized is that countries are intentionally sending their worst, that they're emptying out their what he calls the insane asylums and their prisons. And of course that's just not happening anywhere. But that is just another very disturbing thing that's just gotten into the mainstream rhetoric now, that of people are who we're talking about. And in that particular clip there, he's got a sign that says, stop Biden's border bloodbath on the podium in front of him. And he's got some very uncomfortable looking CBP officers standing behind him and cops, because I don't think they like necessarily standing there while the president says anything.

0:28:51 Thomas: FEEL LIKE THEY'RE QUITE COMFORTABLE I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT YEAH

0:28:54 Matt: They're obviously supporters at the end of the day. Okay, you get the idea. I just want to make sure that we agreed on sort of the scope of the rhetoric right now, how bad it's getting. I want to talk about what Trump has actually done, what we know about what he's already done and what he is actually telling us he's going to do, just to put this on context. Because I lived through the four years of Trump as an immigration attorney, and there's a lot that people didn't necessarily know about that was beyond the headlines. But just to hit on some of the smaller things maybe that people Didn't really catch. That I like to talk about a lot that really made almost no news at all was they changed USCIS's mission statement almost immediately as soon as... They started talking about it almost immediately, as soon as he became president. And US Citizenship and Immigration Services is the neutral bureaucracy that administers immigration benefits. It figures out who's a resident, who gets work permits, approves visas. The original mission statement under Obama and well before that was that USCIS secures America's promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system. It's a pretty solid mission statement. Trump changed it to, U .S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation's lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values, which is just a really fascist way to say that we approve visas and review citizenship applications. And it's a small thing. I know it's small thing, but this kind of language, at the same time, they also started removing the courtesy language from their standard templates, things like, thank you for applying, or we regret to inform you. They just started removing that stuff as a matter

0:30:37 Matt: Of, like, they had, like meetings about this. And that stuff disturbs me because it's just those little changes, those little bureaucratic changes start to move the culture.

0:30:37 Thomas: INTERESTING YEAH YEAH IT'S LIKE IT'S A LOT anything in government like that like you say meetings it's a lot of effort to be like just a little bit shittier we just want to be a little bit more fash

0:30:49 Matt: There That's right. And that removing the courtesy language, especially, and Biden has restored a lot of that and changed the mission statement back. Back, but it says a lot about that when you're trying to take people like USCIS officers. They're not USCIS officials. They are not people that enforce immigration law. They aren't deporting people. They don't lock them up. I shouldn't say just. It's an important job, but they're reviewing and citizenship applications. So again, just a small thing, but I wanted to start with it because it might not have been something you'd heard about. Now, expedited removal is along the sort of theme that I'm most concerned about, which is that Trump is coming up with a number of different ways. When I say Trump, of course, I mean Stephen Miller and the other people behind him, to skip over immigration judges, to Skip over the limited forms of due process that we do actually have to prevent deportations. And expedited removal was actually something that I talked about a bit on my very first appearance on Opening Arguments back when we first met, when I came on to talk about CBP. And under 8 CFR 1225(b)(1), it has been under a regulation that there's different rules and different rights that kick in if someone has only been here for under two weeks and is within 100 miles of the border, that you don't have to go through deportation proceedings, that they can just send you back. Trump, from February 2017, the Trump administration was trying to change that to within two years of entry, if you couldn't prove

0:32:08 Matt: You'd been here four or two years, and anywhere in the country so that you could just skip removal proceedings. And they were pretty close to making that work. It was held up by the courts, but that's something they're definitely going to try again. And much more concerning. So that's just sort of one tool in the toolbox. But there's another tool that he is threatening to use. And Rolling Stone reported on this not too long ago about a memo that was circulating in the Trump campaign amongst their top people on how they could use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which is 50 U.S.C. 21. And this is something that Trump has been openly talking about. It's not some kind of secret, but this memo apparently fleshed out how they they could do it. Because legally, I would not think this would be something that would be possible. But let's just look at the text of the Alien Enemies Act real quick, because it is actually entirely possible, especially with the Fifth Circuit being the way that it is right now, because any of these cases are going to be brought in the Fifth circuit near the border. So the Alien Ememies Acts was one of the John Adams sort of fashy things that was passed early on. And it says that whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or, here's the important part, any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government. Now, that pretty strictly requires that there be a foreign nation or government behind that incursions. It's pretty obvious from the language. And for what it's worth, I actually went looking. If you guys would like to do this, is a great way to go do some originalist research. So I did a little bit of originalist research on the Alien Enemies Act. founders.archives.gov. You can look through all kinds of writings from the Founding Fathers. And I thought, predatory incursion seems like a pretty specific turn of phrase. And, I found 10 instances of that phrase being used in different writings, and they all relate to foreign governments, not to people just coming across the border, because they weren't thinking like that back

0:32:11 Thomas: That's right right yeah

0:33:51 Matt: Then. They were thinking about attempts attempts to, you skirmishes across the border. They're thinking about, you know, the British sending a force over from Canada or whatever. If you're going to do an originalist analysis, I don't think that this would necessarily survive if you are doing an honest original analysis. But of course, we all know that's not really a thing. So I'm sure that they can find, yep, no doubt they can do it the other way. Just as a starting point, not this some nutty outside theory that I'm coming up with. This is something that Trump has openly talked about, and it would be the underpinning of what he would do to skip removal proceedings, deportation proceedings, just round people up and start doing the kinds of mass deportations he's been promising. Now, the Alien Enemies Act has been used three times in US history, none of them particularly great. The War of 1812, when the British were invading, World War I, when we committed massive human rights violations, and really the beginning of some pretty serious fascism in the United States, and most famously, in the Second World War when we started detaining Japanese non-citizens. And

0:33:51 Thomas: Obviously doesn't exist yeah not often right yeah

0:34:49 Matt: FDR's order, Proclamation 2525, was based directly in the Alien Enemies Act. That was the legal basis for it. And he wrote, all alien enemies are enjoined to preserve the peace toward the United States and to refrain from crime against the public safety, et cetera, et cetera. All alien enemies shall be liable to restraint or removal and departure from the United States, and he was designating the Japanese that day as alien enemies. That's something that the United States did on December 7th, 1941. And it's been done before, and I think that there's no reason that Trump couldn't give it a try. Now, the Supreme Court in DICTA recently noted that that wasn't great, and that Korematsu, the case that upheld the Japanese internment, was almost certainly unconstitutional, but that wasn't an official finding. That was just sort of a DICTA thing. It was just in passing.

0:35:34 Thomas: Why not why not just be like hey let's overturn some of these old really racist things yeah

0:35:39 Matt: It would be great to do that officially, but it wasn't in front of them. So I it's never in front of them again, but we'll see. This is the one that I'm most concerned about of all of the Trump proposals, of all the things that foreseeably happen, because the promises that have been made in this direction, the things Trump is saying that he will do. Is where we get to the point where Trump is promising to call up the National Guard and to have them go into states that will not comply. If they're on the National Guard won't comply. Presumably, the Guard may come from New Hampshire to invade Massachusetts to start rounding people up, using the Alien Enemies Act to round them up without due process and without even going through the immigration courts. He was asked in an interview with Time he doesn't think that maybe that's an excessive use of the military against civilians in the US. Trump said, these aren't civilians. These are people that aren't legally in our our country. This is an invasion of our country, and you have to do what you have to do to stop crime and stop what's taking place at the border. He's also been repeating a lot the right -wing language about how there's a lot of military -age males. Have you heard this one, that

0:36:42 Matt: Expression? Yeah. Which, again, is a very strange kind of meaningless expression. I mean, technically, I think you and I are technically military -aged males.

0:36:42 Thomas: Yeah yeah weird it's it's It's a wide range. Yeah.

0:36:50 Matt: Yeah. This sort of the conspiracy theory that there aren't a lot women coming over, which I can tell was just not true based on my client base. But so

0:36:56 Thomas: Well, I mean, also historically, it's been like men would go to work to send money home. I mean that sometimes is true, but oh

0:37:02 Matt: Of course. Absolutely. Yeah. There's lots of reasons that men might be coming alone. This kind of rhetoric about using the military and Stephen Miller on the Charlie Kirk show last year kind of doubled down on that. And no doubt when you hear Stephen Miller talk about this, he's talking about things that Trump will try to do because he's going to be the guy doing it. Said, the Alabama National Guard is going to arrest illegal aliens in Alabama and the Virginia National Guard will do it in Virginia. And if you're going to go into an unfriendly state, think about that, an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland. Right. Very close. Very nearby. And that's terrifying to turning Americans against each other that way, to have the National Guard invading another place. The one easy fix that we can do here is repealing 50 U.S.C. 21.

0:37:47 Thomas: Seems like a good idea. What is it still? How's it helping still? Is there like a positives column?

0:37:53 Matt: There's no good use for it at this point. So Cory Booker, Ed Markey, and Bernie Sanders, along

0:37:57 Thomas: You what, why is that not one of the laws in old Gorsuch's book? You so many laws, Overruled, we are. Why isn't that one of them? Why isn't that one of those ones you pick? Like why? Get rid of some of those too, if

0:38:01 Matt: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would suggest that we pass the Neighbors Not Enemies Act, which is what Cory Booker, Ed Markey, and Bernie Sanders have introduced to repeal the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, because there's just no reason to have it on the books still. And that's one thing that we could do before a future Trump presidency if we got our act together, potentially. Essentially. We couldn't, but I'm just saying, yes. I'm just saying that, yes, that's

0:38:22 Thomas: No, we don't have the numbers. We couldn't. Yeah, I just want to make sure credit is where credit, like, we are on the side that doesn't have enough power to do these things, but is trying, which is important. And important because we need to give our side enough power, to do that, we need to not remove all enthusiasm for our side by, you representing uh currently happening well

0:38:43 Matt: That's right, absolutely. While we're taking a look at this theme, I'm going to send you one other quick clip that really terrified me from a recent rally. Is a woman... is before the speech in Colorado, and you see the end -migrant crime behind her. But this is the kind of language, when you're putting it in conjunction with calling up the National Guard from Virginia and sending them into Maryland, put it in the context of what she's saying here.

0:39:06 Clip: Dollars, the profits, these people into my city through Denver. Let me tell you something else. Had better start to keep to themselves.

0:39:12 Thomas: Jesus who

0:39:28 Matt: That's not something you hear.

0:39:30 Clip: The time of Denver controlling the entire state, these days are over.

0:39:40 Thomas: Is this nut job

0:39:41 Matt: This kind of rhetoric you're hearing about Portland and Oregon, you're obviously hearing about big cities in California.

0:39:47 Thomas: Sacramento is not yet so the capital is whatever

0:39:49 Matt: In San Francisco, of course, I've heard that kind of a rhetoric about how it's not the real California. And this, of rural areas and the outside areas against the cities, that kind of anger. So

0:40:01 Thomas: She's lost her voice from yelling of her racism you

0:40:04 Matt: In of the end migrant crime sign.

0:40:06 Thomas: Actually doing slight disservice by saying is the end migrant crime sign it's a backdrop that they have thought ahead they went to kinkos or whatever they've thought ahead it's end migrant prime text trump to a it's background like it's a background that has all these little fascist catchphrases and text trump 28 blah blah blah zero two whatever and migrant crime deport illegals illegals now like it is like it is like you're making a video and you put your background on it that's that's what that is not not someone holding a sign like that's a premeditated feature of this stage well

0:40:38 Matt: That's right. That is right. And this is the same way that they're talking about Springfield being overrun by Haitian migrants, which it's not. They're talking about Aurora being overran by Venezuelan migrants, and she's standing next to a picture of a gang member. And of course, there are gang members coming across. It does happen. Very, very few.

0:40:54 Thomas: I will say in aurora there was a really bad I'm trying to think there's really bad shooting there I think we should ban whatever race that was because it was it was 2012 is an awful mass shooting killed a lot of people and whatever the race that that guy was I think we should probably just deport all them from the country until

0:41:05 Matt: Yeah, maybe all that until we figure out what the hell's going on. Yeah.

0:41:14 Thomas: We yeah yeah let me see here oh it's a a white person. Nevermind. That's a single act alone. Wolf. There's no, well, who can say what happened and why?

0:41:23 Matt: Health, obviously. Couple more things. Has been promising for some time to end birthright citizenship. And nobody's been taking this seriously because birthright citizenship is guaranteed under the 14th Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court under Wong Kim Ark in 1898. That hasn't been really re -examined and no serious actual legal scholar thinks it's possible for the president to end birthright citizenship. But what he's promising to do is an executive order which would stop issuing social security numbers and passports to children whose parents can't prove their immigration status. And this again is directly, This is Nuremberg Law stuff. This is saying that these people just don't belong here. And obviously, that'll be taken up to the courts immediately. But you get that through the Fifth Circuit, maybe they think it's a good idea. Maybe the Supreme Court thinks that's all right. I don't know. This not been reexamined in a very long time. But that's just one of the many things that were being promised along with these mass deportations and this use of the National Guard. And so I want to talk about that as well, not just the National guard, but the way that ICE and local police have have been integrated in the past and will continue to be integrated. That's another very serious concern here. George W. Bush administration after DHS was created. Now, DHS, Department of Homeland Security, was created directly in response to 9-11. It was opened in 2003, the largest reorganization of the federal government, as I said last week. And it created this massive security infrastructure structure and an immigration force like no other country has ever had, both on the border and in the interior. And interior deportation is a reasonably new thing in American history. And for the most part, during my lifetime, it's ramped up, but we haven't really had it at all like we've had it in the last 40 years or so. And the integration and what they're promising for further integration of state, local, and federal enforcement in the name of doing immigration enforcement is very concerning. Because you might remember that during beforethe 2020 election, was using a lot of this language about Antifa and about blue cities and about, you know, sort of the, youknow, burning down our cities and whatever. And they sent in, I don't know if you remember this, but a CBP strike force called BORTAC, which is an elite group. They're trained in military sniping and tactical operations to fight cartels on the border. And they were going to send them into blue cities to keep the order during elections, specifically into blue cities. And this was an ongoing theme in the last year or so of Trump's administration, which I just want to remind everybody about because I think these things are so far in the rear view at this point. And maybe you didn't even catch it at the time, but CBP was being used to, they were showing up at demonstrations that had nothing to do with immigration that were nowhere near the border. And they were being used as a federal police force in support of local and state police. And the really scary thing about DHS, about ICE, about CBP, is that they really are only accountable to the president. And The Hardest Line people in there, especially the union that's most vocal representing them, has made it very clear that they're only really accountable to The President. And not to go there yet again, but that was because Hitler's final sort of move in 1936 was to centralize federal, state, and local police under one sort of umbrella and one operation. And if you do it in the name of immigration and something that his are all about, then it's pretty easy to do. You have a good reason to do it. And that's been my main concern. That was something that was keeping me up at night in the last few months of the Trump presidency, thinking about where this is going and what a second term would look like when he doesn't really have the restraints that he had in this first term.

0:44:52 Thomas: Uh, Miller should not be in charge of anything. He should not be the middle manager at a Chili's, let alone in charge of something like immigration. Uh, wow, we need to not allow this to happen.

0:45:02 Matt: Personally, I think that everyone involved in engineering the child separation policy in 2018 should be at the Hague. They should be prosecuted for international human rights violations because that was such an intentional knowing thing that they did to those kids. No, I agree, of course.

0:45:16 Thomas: Boy, that might be a deep dive we should do, getting the facts of what happened there. Because there's been a lot of misinformation. There's been the fact that, you know, there's a lot going on. There's a whole lot of cloudy, you just can't, you what I mean? Like it's, we're overwhelmed. There's so much, there so much. And that's a key part of it. But that would, I would be interested in an accurate kind of that history. And hopefully it's history and not still on, you our future. But yeah, yeah, they

0:45:38 Matt: Even understanding the legal basis of it is very important. I think that very few people actually understand how they did it legally. And that's something else to emphasize is we think about the Nazis as being lawless, which they were, but they were operating within a legal system that they created to make sure that these things could be done the way they wanted them. The other thing I meant to mention, of course, is that by the end, the Nazis were using political courts, Nazi courts that were completely controlled by the executive. And we have a robust system of executive courts already set up in this country. And I was just telling you, of course, about ways that Trump is going to try to get around those so people don't have to go through removal proceedings. I'm not saying that immigration judges are the agents of fascism. I'm just saying that we're comfortable they could be. They absolutely could be under a different system, different people, different times, far in the future, not now. But the idea of having an executive agency that is a court, that is not accountable to the judiciary in the same way that judiciary is accountable to us, very concerning. And it is not a good precedent, and it goes bad places like a lot of these things.

0:46:13 Thomas: Could be, can

0:46:37 Matt: Thing I want to mention, and this is not my area of expertise, it has to be mentioned just in terms of the historical parallels we've been talking about is the hateful rhetoric against trans people and sexual minorities, because that is something the Nazis relied on to a degree that I don't think people really understand. It was actually one of the safest places in the world, in the Weimar Republic, to be trans, to being gender non -conforming. You could get a special ID card to confirm your status, and the Nazis hated that. It was something they talked about a lot, and it's something we're hearing about constantly now. And one of most effective things that fascism can do is identify the minorities that the most people are uncomfortable with.

0:47:12 Matt: And they've done that with immigration and with gender nonconforming people.

0:47:16 Thomas: And they've successfully created an entire universe of propaganda that's fake, just ways of fear mongering about trans people that it's just not real. And to talk about the New York Times again, New York times is actively participating in this, that they're just spreading false medical information about what being trans entails and what trans treatment entails and what, you know, like they're, just, I cannot tell you, I can't emphasize enough. We've covered this a lot on Where There's Woke and Serious Inquiries Only, by the way. Actually, I'm going to give a quick plug. You may have heard in Justifications of Transphobia, the CAS review report that came out of the UK. This is something that a of real doctors, real experts looked at and was like, this is at best identifying actual problems, bytheway, which is like not enough trans kids are able to get the treatment. And at worst, completely recasting that as somehow something bad about affirming care.

0:48:11 Thomas: It's very crazy. It is very wild how they have done it. But they have effectively, that anti -trans propaganda machine, just, all got on the same page. To where if you just Google cast review, you'll come up with, and I, and I read this to the doctors on serious inquiries only because it was, it was just so demoralizing. You'll comeup with at least two or three New York times opinion. Now that's opinion, but it's opinion in the same way. That's like, you're spreading medical misinformation. I don't think the New York, New York Times would have published an opinion piece that was like, actually maybe do inject bleach. You like, I don't think they would have done that. And yet when it comes to trans care, there are not one, not two, but like at least three that I found on a first Google New York Times opinion pieces. They were saying, I do not understand what the heroes who did this cast review, why are we even still doing trans health care in this way? Like it's, it's sickening and it's sorry to get on my, you know, soapbox on that, but it really is part of it. It really is. I think you put it right because it's finding the minority group that the most people will be scared of and people when it comes to the masses are relatively new, like group. That most people were not, I know they aren't in reality, but like that most people in terms of awareness, we're not aware of. And so there is a lot of questioning. There is a Lot of like skepticism. And there are ways to address questions that people would have. Unfortunately, that's not happening. We're just getting propaganda. We are just getting a real campaign of hatred and misinformation against them. You

0:49:49 Matt: That's right. And I know this, but the first and largest Nazi book burning was at the German Institute of Sexuality in Berlin, which at the time was the world's first trans clinic and had the first person to receive any kind of gender affirmation surgery, I believe, living on the premises at the time that they came for. And that is extremely relevant. It's relevant to a degree that I hope that people, even who have questions about these things, will stop and consider which side they're on when they hear about this. Of the most things that we can all do right now is vocally supporting our trans and immigrant neighbors and friends. I think it's something that really needs to happen right now, because it's a hard time. This is something that, when you see it, you just can't not see it. And I know you've been seeing it for a while.

0:50:32 Thomas: Can't not see it is that what you're saying uh

0:50:35 Matt: You can't non -see it, yes.

0:50:37 Thomas: I right yeah on that note you know what to do everyone like really we got got to get the word out we gotta we gotta vote we gotta I mean this is not optional this is not something we can even entertain the possibility of like winning means some number of these things like it just does there's there's no there's no way where that the system and the people around him are going to prevent this like there's just no way like he did so much damage to it the first time I and he also did so many fascist things the first time. It's only going to be worse.

0:51:10 Thomas: So let's do all that. Thanks for the breakdown, Matt. Matt, I do want to ask as we exit here, was part two of X. Do we have any, or is it part two of two here?

0:51:09 Matt: Well, that might really depend on what happens next month. I do want to end this on a more hopeful note. So I think sometime in the next month or two, I'd like to... Because even beyond Trump, of course, as we've been talking about, and let's hope that we're not ever talking about Donald Trump in any serious way again, we still have a movement that he has spurred on, and we have a hard right that is now living in conspiracy theories. It has now completely lost any sense of reality. And as long as we have that, we have to figure out what to do with it. And that's what I I want to talk about next.

0:51:49 Thomas: Until next time, please support the show go patreon .com slash law, skip the ads, and that know you're making a show like this happen, an episode like this happened. And if you can't do that, please at least share the show out or write a positive five -star review on iTunes to help us get the word out. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

0:52:05 Clip: This podcast is a production of Opening Arguments Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved. It is produced and edited by Thomas Smith, who also provided the fabulous intro and outro music used with permission.

0:52:22 Matt: All that you just can't say anything good about Adolf Hitler. That's you're going to read one book, I guess it's going to be Hitler speeches.

0:52:25 Thomas: Out better ideas than the nazis that's