All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. The Library Funding Cliff Anarchism In Uruguay feat. Andrew, Pt. 2 RFK Jr. Breaks the Medical System How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #10 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources/Links: RFK Jr. Breaks the Medical System https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/autism/114853 https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/28/health/fda-vaccine-peter-marks-resigns/index.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/31/trump-administration-hiv-research-grant-cuts https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rfk-jr-to-gut-vaccine-promotion-and-hiv-prevention-office-sources-say/ https://archive.ph/z2Fyx https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1839225/ https://www.axios.com/2025/03/29/rfk-jr-body-shames-west-virginia-governor https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/hhs-taps-anti-vaccine-activist-look-debunked-links-autism-vaccines-sou-rcna198214 https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/31/health/vaccine-grants-cancelled-pediatricians/index.html https://taggs.hhs.gov/Content/Data/HHS_Grants_Terminated.pdf https://archive.ph/48Ua1 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rfk-jr-wants-to-let-bird-flu-spread-on-poultry-farms-why-experts-are/ How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation https://apnews.com/article/columbia-university-mahmoud-khalil-ice-15014bcbb921f21a9f704d5acdcae7a8 https://archive.ph/20250316111414/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-university.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/nyregion/columbia-student-kristi-noem-video.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/nyregion/columbia-university-protester-chung-deportation.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/25/columbia-gaza-protester-yunseo-chung-lawsuit https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/nyregion/columbia-student-ice-suit-yunseo-chung.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/cornell-student-momodou-taal.html https://apnews.com/article/social-media-immigration-applicants-handles-dhs-f67b480abebff7e451056be17572593d https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-trump-admin-spies-on-social?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=7677&post_id=160081190&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1aiy5i&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email https://apnews.com/article/georgetown-trump-deportation-immigration-homeland-security-21fc205cebbbbba2ed260050df04702a https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/us/rumeysa-ozturk-tufts-student-detained.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/israel-gaza-student-protests-canary-mission.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/14/israel-betar-deportation-list-trump https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-administration-takes-aim-immigrant-students-rcna198346 https://apnews.com/article/immigration-detainees-students-ozturk-khalil-78f544fb2c8b593c88a0c1f0e0ad9c5f https://x.com/janashortal/status/1905759411248734353 https://dailyegyptian.com/120974/news/international-siu-student-has-visa-revoked-confirms-university-admin/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SGz224raVR8mHMzC6q-6EUiNcBKD6BSK/view Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #10 https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-stokes-trade-war-world-reels-tariff-shock-2025-04-03/ https://www.theverge.com/news/642620/trump-tariffs-formula-ai-chatgpt-gemini-claude-grok https://www.reuters.com/markets/frances-macron-calls-suspension-investment-us-after-tariffs-2025-04-03/ https://x.com/USBPChief/status/1907398210064437404 https://x.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/1907488012239302953 https://x.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/1907411257927311619 https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.11.0.pdf https://x.com/JDVance/status/1906934067607556440 https://t.co/dFXNSbOyiy https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/01/us/elections/results-wisconsin-supreme-court.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/02/business/tesla-sales/index.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What are the implications of the federal library funding cliff?
Hi, thanks for having me.
Yeah, this is really great for me because I have been trying to find a librarian for a very long time to talk to us on the podcast. I understand that lots of people have been like really concerned that we covered this, but also very afraid for their jobs, which is a rough position to be in. So thank you for coming on.
I thought we'd start with like there was an executive order on the 14th of March. I think it was called something like further something, the federal bureaucracy cutting, slashing, diminishing, whatever. You know, I don't really care. One of the outcomes of this was, I believe, the Trump administration moving towards a complete closure of IMLS. Is that right?
So it depends upon how much Joj and Trump and company are going to listen to Congress because Congress has already funded IMLS, which is the Institute of Museum and Library Services, for this year. So that money already exists. It's already been allocated. And so in theory, they should be good for at least a year. And then next year when the budget comes up,
Again, it should be up to Congress because Congress created this institution and Congress funds it. But the executive order and the commentary on it does say that they would like to dissolve it Kind of as soon as possible, definitely next year.
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Chapter 2: What is the role of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)?
So it's really up in the air about how fast things would move, what exactly would happen, if it would be this year, if it would be next year, whether anyone's going to listen to Congress.
Yeah, we will find out, I guess. So can you explain for listeners who aren't familiar what IMLS is and what it does?
Yeah. So it's, as I said, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And so basically they're allocated money by Congress every year. And then they hand it out to states, especially then who kind of break it down into other grants. They give grants to states and libraries and institutions. for things that museums and libraries do.
So that includes things like on the museum side, maybe putting together programming or doing big digitization projects. I used to work at an institution where we had a grant that did a lot of digitization of historic documents. And on the library side, they do all sorts of stuff, especially for public libraries. They
end up funding things like summer reading programs, equipment, especially for internet access, you know, all this stuff related to job training and those services that libraries offer. And interlibrary loan is a big one so that people can access materials that their library doesn't hold, but it's held by other libraries.
And rural libraries and tribal libraries, especially really, really benefit from this. Every single state and territory in the country gets these funds.
Okay. Yeah. I was, I was wondering about who funded interlibrary loans so that they're the ones who facilitate like the transporting of the books.
Yeah. Well, you know, depending on your library, some libraries will fund it from their operations budget, but if, you know, especially for small rural public libraries where that might be very expensive, that is one thing that these grants go to is interlibrary loan. Okay.
Yeah. So there are lots of very important services. And what would it mean if we didn't have that IMLS budget at all? Like, what would it mean? Especially for like, like you said, those kinds of libraries that are financially, I guess, more marginalized in tribal libraries and rural areas and stuff.
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Chapter 3: How have neoliberal policies impacted library funding over the decades?
Yeah, and, like, not get harassed by the cops just for existing.
Right.
Which is the rest of their existence here, sadly. Yeah, these are massively important terms. I think most people, like, haven't... No one... Like, there's not really a big, like, fuck the libraries movement, you know? Like, I think people...
I mean, these days there are.
Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess it's the whole, like, people should only read stories if they conform to a certain gender stereotype.
Yeah, moms for liberty and whatnot.
Yeah, well, fuck those people. Absolutely fuck those people. Talking of fuck those people, we unfortunately have to pivot to ads. So, you know, here are some unfortunate advertisements. All right, we're back. Talking of people I dislike, actually, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, who was elected in 2020 and then re-elected, shamefully, this year, which is very disappointing.
One of his first actions was to propose a budget which increased the funding to the police, surprise, and decreased the funding to the libraries that would lead to them closing for an extra day, right? And this is our, like, quote-unquote progressive mayor who, you know, has been anything but. But this isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, right?
I've spoken since then to librarians around the country who for the last, at least half decade have faced funding cuts. Can you explain like, why doesn't the state see value in these services?
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Chapter 4: What services do public libraries provide beyond books?
So, you know, you're talking about the last decade to half decade. I think we can really trace it back much farther, at least 30 years to the Clinton administration, actually. I want to talk about the Democrats. But even, you know, the roots farther back than that, because we have a neoliberal problem, right?
So it's basically the idea that all activity should generate obvious immediate monetary profit, that everything should be run by a business, that everything should be subject to the market, quote unquote. And so that's where we are with libraries, is that Even though I can sit here and say every dollar that the IMLS spends generates $2 of economic activity, that somehow isn't even good enough.
Because when the powers that be look at libraries, they just see money being flushed down the toilet, and that's the only way they can measure anything. So if you look at it and you're just saying, well, this is a place we spend money. This doesn't create money. This doesn't make more money happen.
The idea that everything should be run by a business and everything should be subject to market logics, that would say, well, if we're going to subject everything to market logics, libraries have no value because we're only measuring it. And can this make number go up? Yeah. And even though libraries do make number go up, it's not obvious. You can't make it obvious.
There's no direct line between what libraries do and number go up, even though there actually is, for example, with IMLS. So, you know, starting during the Clinton administration, when the federal government changed and how the federal government worked changed very much under the guise of increasing service quality, what they actually did was lay off a quarter million workers and
you know, turn everything into contract work instead of regular labor. And that, I think, filtered down from the federal level into states and municipalities so that those levels of government too also started to look at how they ran
they're government things and in many places public libraries are arms of local government, that those two should also be run like a business and be subject to market logics and therefore number does not go up, we don't value this.
And that's basically it, is that it's hard now that we've had 30 years of overt neoliberalism in our government system and a couple of decades more of less obvious versions of it to make government, which is now being run like a business, even in the best of times, value things that aren't valued strictly monetarily. So there's no cultural value.
And even if the monetary value isn't extremely obvious, it somehow doesn't count.
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Chapter 5: How can communities and librarians organize to protect libraries?
Yeah.
But at the public and school library level, you know, this is exactly why this is happening is because there is this ongoing narrative from the last few decades where, where people, especially like queer kids say that the library saved their lives.
Yeah.
Young people of color saying like, this is the only place I could see myself in culture by reading these books. So of course, of course this is happening because that, you know, they want to take that away. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's a place where people can kind of exist.
Yeah.
Without that. Yeah. So let's talk about like how can people engage to protect their libraries? What can they do? What are like some action items they can take?
I unfortunately don't have great news. I don't think, you know, because of the way this is working and it is so much about just like raw brute power that no one at the federal government or even state governments for the most part seems to be able to counter. It's just like not something they can conceive of.
yeah because they already are doing things that supposedly shouldn't be allowed right we've already had the congressional funding this should have a congressional you know this is passed by congress and yet an executive order and elon musk can undo it right if things were working this wouldn't be happening right so so we are really kind of down down the line a little bit in what we can do and how effective it's going to be that said there are things we can do a lot of them are the uh
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Chapter 6: What is the history and current state of anarchism in Uruguay?
Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a bestselling author with the second most banned book in America. Now, more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back. And that's what we're doing on Fighting Words. We're not going to let anyone silence us.
That's the reason why they're banning books like yours, George. That's the reason why they're trying to stop the teaching of Black history or queer history, any history that challenges the whitewashed norm. Or put us in a box.
Black people have never, ever depended on the so-called mainstream to support us. That's why we are great. We are the greatest culture makers in world history.
Listen to Fighting Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1978, Roger Caron's first book was published, and he was unlike any first-time author Canada had ever seen.
Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted.
Has spent 24 of those years in jail.
12 years in solitary.
He went from an ex-con to a literary darling almost overnight. He was instantly a celebrity.
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Chapter 7: How did the Federaci n Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU) influence labor movements and guerrilla warfare?
It favored armed struggle as a necessity in reaction to safe repression and economic exploitation. And the FAU had a very strong stance against Marxist-Leninism. Although some members sympathized with aspects of Marxism, many of them resisted the bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies that influenced that milieu.
Unlike in many other Latin American countries, as you may have recalled us covering in the past, anarchism persisted in mainstream relevance even after the rise of the Bolsheviks and their influence globally, and of course the coinciding fall of the anarchists in Spain.
According to Oliver Zizenko's 65 Years of Revolution, the FAU came about in a time when Uruguay's prosperity coming out of World War II had come to an end, as its agricultural exports were no longer needed to feed the Allies' massive standing armies. This economic downturn triggered major social unrest, which the anarchist presence was able to spring upon.
One such instance of unrest involved 150,000 workers going on strike in solidarity with their fellow workers in a tire factory. During the strike and after, the FAU involved students, unionists, intellectuals, community organizers, and even a few exiles from the Spanish Civil War to build up a more united labor movement.
So rather than having unions split along political ideological affiliations like moderates, socialists, anarchists, right populists, and so on, there would be one big tent just focused on labor. Now... I personally think a big tent has its benefits and its drawbacks, as with any other strategy. I think the benefit is obviously that it has the ability to mobilize a large number of people.
But I think the difficulty and the drawback is that having so many affiliations under that big tent can mean that there's not really much of a shared goal left behind. Like, yeah, the anarchists want anarchy. The right populists might just want to secure some benefits and protections. And the socialists may be interested in launching a party.
Sure, they all proclaim to have some interest on the side of the workers. But how that manifests looks different from group to group. But we'll see how that big tent approach turned out for the FAU. So they formed the National Confederation of Workers, or CNT, as that big tent in 1964. But even before that, there was a split. Not too much of a surprise.
After the Cuban Revolution, the FAU was actually divided between those who were opposed to Castro and those who critically supported the revolution. Those who were opposed to Castro eventually broke away from the FAU in 1963 as Castro entrenched himself in the Soviet bloc, while those who remained in the FAU were critical of Castro and his government but still supported the fall of Batista.
Of course, with the Cuban Revolution came that very noticeable shift in American foreign policy. They saw that with all that happening right in their backyard, they'd need to take a very different approach if they wanted to win the Cold War.
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Chapter 8: What is Especifismo and how does it shape anarchist organizing today?
Leaving like a gaping hole of knowledge, of experience, of education, of radicalism.
Yeah.
A country may take decades to recover from something like that. It's a cultural death in a sense. You know, this is a political movement. But it's kind of similar to how during colonialism, elders would be wiped out. And with them, all of their knowledge, all of their oral histories, all of their languages, just wiped out in an instant. This is different, of course.
This is a political ideology as opposed to an entire culture and ethnicity. But it's still just a massive loss of all that history, all that experience, all that radicalism and information just gone.
Right. Yeah. It's hard for a movement to recover from that. Yeah. It's not like a genocide or like these colonial kind of, you could call it like a decap. Well, it's like a decapitation of a movement, I suppose.
Well, I would say it's more than a decapitation because it's not just like notable figures that were taken out or particularly influential thought leaders or anything. It's almost everybody.
Yeah.
Anybody who had that fight in them or had that radical knowledge or consciousness. Yeah.
Yeah, anyone with any lived experience, all the things they'd learned, all the mistakes they'd made and learned from, like, are gone. The movement has to begin almost from, like, a blank slate.
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Chapter 9: What are the recent controversies and actions involving RFK Jr. and the US medical system?
B, they claimed to be able to treat it with puberty blockers? Like, they can cure autism with a puberty blocker? Yes. Which is also extremely funny, given, like... All of these people are trying to ban puberty blockers now.
I'll give it to them. That's fine. We're going to cure autism by giving all these autistic kids puberty blockers and making them trans. Sure. Let's go for it. Let's give that a shot. I'm sure that won't create a whole new problem for them. That bone damage thing isn't real, but that's fine.
Unfortunately, this is one of the other problems. This is like... You get a lot of sources that are just fucking making shit up about these fucking diseases.
To be fair, I also am probably... I'm unfamiliar with this exact puberty suppressant. Yeah, I don't think... But in general... Yeah, in general, the bone damage thing is bullshit. The bone density loss of puberty blockers is mostly negligible.
Yeah. So again, this guy is like, I found the cure for autism and it's puberty blockers.
Very funny. You know... I do know a lot of autistic people that have gotten... How do I say this? They've seemed more comfortable once they've transitioned.
I guess I'll say it like that. Look, I... Being on the right puberty blocker is better for an autistic kid than going through puberty if you are trans. But, come on!
This also shows how like the attack on puberty blockers for, you know, quote unquote trans minors is completely nonsense because these drugs have been used for cis children to cease early onset puberty. These are fully reversible. Yeah. These are used for cis children. It's used by these like hacks and weirdos to quote unquote cure autism. Yeah.
by these same people as in autism care for the vaccines.
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Chapter 10: How are budget cuts affecting vaccine research, public health, and marginalized communities?
And yeah, these people do not want anyone to know exactly how bad that their fucking transphobia is affecting the people that they're inflicting it on. And so, yeah, they're like, fuck it, we'll just get rid of all these people's funding. There's also a whole bunch of stuff that has to do with COVID.
I'm just going to read the description of one of the fucking grants they cut to give you a sense of, like, the shit that they're cutting. Development of a handheld rapid air sensing system to monitor and quantify SARS-CoV-2 and aerosols in real time, which actually would be an unbelievably useful thing, right? Like, a system that could detect...
fucking COVID aerosols in real time and tell you that there's fucking COVID in the air? Staggeringly useful. They don't fucking want it. One of the big things that they cut is like, you know, we're talking about this with sort of like cutting programs that study structural racism in medicine. They basically went on a county-by-county basis and found every single grant
State by state, county by county, city by city, every single grant that talks about studying the effects of COVID on non-white people. And they're doing this. I think people have forgotten about this, but one of the things that RFK Jr. said, I think it was during the campaign, was he had this giant rant about how COVID was specifically targeted to leave Chinese people and Jews alive. Yeah.
Which is great. That is how he put it.
Someone should probably report that to Trump's anti-Semitism task force.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, hall monitor, whatever. No one cares anymore.
Yeah, I mean, you know, so they're just trying to destroy all this stuff. They've also just like in blocks, just like got rid of every single fucking thing that was funding like any program that was like mental health care. As a block thing, they're just cutting all of it. So that's going to make everyone even more normal than we already fucking are.
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Chapter 11: What are the dangers of dismantling HIV/AIDS programs and disease prevention efforts?
Go-Boy is the gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable.
I had a knife go in my stomach, puncture my spleen, break my ribs. I had my guts all in my hands.
only to find himself back where he started.
Roger's saying is, I've never hurt anybody but myself. And I said, oh, you're so wrong. You're so wrong on that one, Roger.
From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We ready to fight? I'm ready to fight. Is that what I thought? Oh, this is fighting words. OK, I'll put the hammer back.
Hi, I'm George M. Johnson, a bestselling author with the second most banned book in America. Now, more than ever, we need to use our voices to fight back. And that's what we're doing on Fighting Words. We're not going to let anyone silence us.
That's the reason why they're banning books like yours, George. That's the reason why they're trying to stop the teaching of Black history or queer history, any history that challenges the whitewashed norm. Or put us in a box.
Black people have never, ever depended on the so-called mainstream to support us. That's why we are great. We are the greatest culture makers in world history.
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Chapter 12: What is RFK Jr.'s stance on bird flu and pandemic preparedness?
The Trump administration has been very, very good at finding very obscure pieces of law that it can wield against migrants, right? Like, no one in... 2016 would have foreseen what they did with Title 42, which is a public health law. And they're doing something similar here. I mean, they may have spent the last four years looking for these things, especially when the campus protests began.
But this is entirely unprecedented as far as I'm aware.
And right after this happened, we discussed how this case was probably going to be used as a testing ground for employing these tactics on a more widespread scale, creating legal precedent. And sure enough, Khalil's case was not an outlier.
This was just the first public instance of the Trump administration's directed targeting of students they believe to be associated with protests against Israel and its actions in Gaza. And this wave of actions by ICE had actually already begun before Khalil's arrest.
The day before Khalil was arrested, ICE agents knocked on the door of PhD student Rajani Srinivasan, who a few days prior was suddenly notified that her student visa had been revoked. When ICE agents knocked, she did not answer the door. The next day, ICE showed up again to her Columbia University apartment.
Sreenivasan was not home, but upon hearing of Khalil's arrest just a few hours later, she decided to quickly collect some belongings and flee to Canada. Five days later, when ICE returned to her residence, but this time with a warrant, Sreenivasan was already gone. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem praised this as quote-unquote self-deportation.
Yeah, they talk about this a lot. Self-deportation is definitely one of their goals. They talked about it before Trump even came into power. That's what we're seeing a lot of these spectacle raids and spectacle deportations.
Scare tactics.
Yeah, exactly. The desires that people leave. Is she a Canadian citizen?
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