I mean, and this is the thing, you know, that even if Doge is not some sort of cabinet level, you know, entity, you know, as you've been laying out as Wendy Brown, as Quince Labodian have laid out, and there's a lot of like the documentaries of these right-wing nuts have laid out so you've been talking about here right uh the centers of the government of the welfare state of the administrative state of the regulatory state that are vulnerable are worrying as part of this, you know, counter reactionary project to purge capitalism of inconvenient features, like its democratic defects, right? That have allowed it to introduce all these anti-capitalist elements or these elements that undermine the viability of profit making, right? And I think that's, you know, part of the thrust here is we're going to talk about what the National Labor Relations Board and the potential constitutional challenges that are being weighed against it, right? That might result in horrible rulings for workers and their right to collectively organize because the court is ridiculously slanted towards the conservative wing, right? And have given up the pretense of being above all of that. You know, attorneys for SpaceX and Amazon have begun arguing cases in federal appeals courts that are ended at undermining the post-New Deal collective bargaining system, right? Specifically SpaceX and Amazon. They've been, you know, and we've covered extensively in this pod in the past, you know, the lengths to which these firms in particular go to violate their workers' rights, to deprive them of the right to collectively organize and bargain, to undermine those unions if they do emerge, or to undermine the potential election of them, to lie, disseminate misinformation, have captive meetings, retaliate against organizers. right? But now their lawsuits are pushing that, hey, look, like, the real issue here is that the NLRB structure is unconstitutional. The argument here is most likely, you know, as the HuffPost kind of lays out in their article, the main concern here is that unlike previous administrations, the Trump administration and the judiciary has stock full of Kwisatz Haderachs that were grown in lab vats by the federal society, right? You know, the closest thing we have to the Benetalaxu in this world. And these guys, it is their life's mission to give birth to a perfect market, right? Or a perfect market god. Let's say that, right? Or one of their many life missions.

Do you think Clarence Thomas can use the voice? I mean, he could say the word. I don't know if he can use the voice. Would his racial politics allow him to say the word? I

don't even, I'm curious, you know, because his, his piece, his pieces, his essays, his writing, you know kind of drips with contempt for black people so i really don't even think

he would say the word you

know if you held a gun to his head and said say it or get shot i think he would probably get shot i

feel like he's got a real relationship to the word that is uh the same one as the classic Chris Rock bit? Yes.

Yes. And if you have not heard that bit, pause this and go listen to that bit right now. I

thought you were going to say, if you've not heard that bit, Jathan will give us a quick recap of it right now.

What's wrong, Jathan? When

I do this, I'm not Jathan. I'm actually Michael from The Office. Right. Yeah,

we have another person who sounds suspiciously like Jathan with one or two octaves removed from their voice here today, actually, coincidentally, to tell us this bit, to explain this bit to you guys. Yeah. So that brings us to, you know, like we're talking about the Supreme Court, the judiciary, stock full of right wing nuts who believe they're going to save capitalism from whatever new threat is emerging. And there are also a few other developments to consider, right? You know, as I talked about, we have this, you know, 6-3, 7-2, I believe it's 6-3, a supermajority that's on the court. We have an agency that is barely able to function with inadequate funding. And we have a new administration that's going to likely fire the NLRB's Democratic members before their terms are up. right? And also put its hands up and refuse to defend the constitutionality of the NLRB. Here, you know, they are talking about why it is that these constitutional changes concern them particularly as they're right, you know, the NLRb has no ability to find employers or seek damages for workers who've been illegally fired or retaliated against and its cases often drag on for years due to appeals but it can still serve as a check against companies worse behavior and delivers some justice to employees who've been wronged right by acting as a sort of deterrent as a risk factor that they have to consider. You're going to have to risk some undefined amount of time suing and appealing and likely just to lose challenging some of these NLRB decisions, right? Instead, you could just, you know, either, you know, likely comply with them or try some litigation and hope that you can kick it up to an appeal, into an appeal court that will stay the hand of these meddlesome federal employees. And here they're talking about how they use the example of some smaller unionizing efforts to kind of shed light of how people might react to their SpaceX case. Here they talk about a union organizing effort at Medieval Times, where a few workers had accused the dinner theater chain of trying to repeatedly break the nascent union. The general counsel found merit in the allegations, filed complaints against the company, but the union fell apart before much of the litigation was resolved, right? Medieval Times ended up settling one of the cases, has agreed to read a notice on employees' rights at its California castle, and is, you know, not a great, you know, not a big concession, but a victory on some level. All of that would be overturned. This ability to try to offer moderate concessions, right? That deter these companies and put workers in a better position to understand what their rights are when organizing at the workplace and when they're being violated would disappear by lawsuits that are being pushed by the richest and the second richest man in the world. NLRB stretches back to the New Deal. It was created in 1935. It's supposed to be an independent bipartisan board. It has five members, as the HuffPo writes, review decisions that are handed down by administrative law judges. It also has a prosecutorial arm led by a general counsel. The president gets to nominate the general counsel and new board members as their staggered terms and reshaping the agency's agenda when the White House changes hands. And so what are the challenges that are being weighed or that are being levied here by SpaceX and Amazon, and also by previous iterations of corporations that have tried a similar tact in arguing about the constitutionality. So they say that board members and administrative law judges are unconstitutionally protected from removal by the president. And they're also arguing that the NLRB handles unfair labor practices. And they're also saying that the way that the NLRB handles unfair labor practices violates the employer's rights to a jury trial. SpaceX also has an additional challenge where they're saying that it's unconstitutional the way the board seeks court injunctions against employers accused of breaking the law, which would be yet another. way that SpaceX is arguing its case would have a severe consequence and ramifications, as HuffPool points out, for federal regulators that have already been contained and lost a great deal of interpretive space with the recent Chevron ruling. That undermines the Chevron doctrine that allows, you know, federal regulators to kind of interpret for themselves how to move forward in cases that are not explicitly articulated by Congress in the, you know, when passing legislation and empowering regulatory agencies.

And I mean, to talk about as well, how this is like a constellation of these kinds of challenges, like these are not uncoordinated or independent challenges, right? They are part of a really a coordinated attack on this. it rings of the now like kind of trope-ish right-wing talking point around lawfare so this idea that you know the the progressive their progressive opponents are waging these unconstitutional and unfair attacks against conservatives and against corporations through lawfare, right? So understanding here the kind of administrative state as itself constituted on unjust, if not illegal grounds is basically their argument, right? That like everything, you know, what you're laying out here around how these kinds of constitutional challenges to the NLRB are largely based on these kind of administrative technicalities, right? So the unconstitutional protection of the judges, the administrative law judges, right? So that's the really important aspect. Or the use of injunctions or regulatory actions against companies as being forms of lawfare that are using the law to wage warfare on conservatives in a way that exists outside of the law. So it's kind of trying to argue that not just the administrative state, but administrative law, which would be things like rules and regulations, exist as this unjust, unfair, illegal state of exception and is a source of authoritarian power that is always wielded against conservatives, capital and corporations. And so it also rings of, I remember now, like a couple years ago, there was this, I think it was in Texas, right? There was this like battle being waged. little surprisingly on the side that the SEC is illegal because the Security and Exchange Commission uses regulatory actions that exist outside of normal criminal cases, right? Where it's this idea of like the corporations don't get a right to a jury trial. Their due process is being violated in some way because corporations are people, of course, and so they have constitutional protections. I remember this case from a couple years ago. It was this test case, I feel like. Now in retrospect, it seems like it was very much a test case against the Security and Exchange Commission trying to argue that their actions in regulating corporations, in enforcing rules and injunctions and fines and violations against corporations, was illegal lawfare, was illegal use of the administrative state for purposes of criminal justice. And obviously, the SEC is still operating. The FTC, these regulatory agencies are still operating. So it wasn't successful enough in terms of completely undermining the whole constitutionality of the administrative regulatory state. But it's the same kind of argument here. And I think it is part of this kind of coordinated legal strategy being propped up by these corporations, right-wing judiciary think tanks, and by a number of law firms that are helping to push this forward, that are arguing these cases in front of federal judges and the Supreme Court. And to that point, the HuffPost piece also mentions here that SpaceX in this lawsuit against the NLRB is represented by Morgan Lewis, which HuffPost describes as, quote, a management side law firm best known for helping employers avoid unions. Two of the firm's partners, Harry Johnson and John Ring, are themselves former NLRB members, a fact that's outraged supporters of the agency as it's come under attack. A former board member called it, quote, particularly galling. Are they going to disgorge the salaries that they made while working at the NLRB? The former board member wondered. Johnson and Ring did not respond when asked via email if they had such plans. So it's also this, right? It's this kind of like the classic revolving door of, you know, you get appointed at an agency, you hold power there, you make a salary, you create influence, you set yourself up for a beautiful career at a top white shoe law firm, representing the kinds of cases and topics areas that you, you know, in your agency appointmentship. And then you destroy that agency, you kill your own mother and you kill your own father and you wear their skin like a mask. The classic story that we all know. Thank you for setting me up in this world and giving me a path to success. I will now kill you and crawl inside your skin like a tauntaun. The number of law firms that exist exactly like that, though, where it's like, you know, people who are former board members or former commissioners or former top-level appointees at an agency or at a department that they are now devoting their life to destroying. The right-wing legal and judiciary industry around this is made up of so many people and so many law firms that have that exact pedigree. It's like a reverse form of salting. You get an appointment ship at a department so you can learn all of its secrets and then... in order to tear it down from from not from the inside. But once you leave, then you then you can tear it down because you know where all the the weak points are. Yeah. I mean, hey, listen, this is

what Kamala Harris's brother in law, her top advice, one of her top advisors did. UK, you go you work in the Obama administration as what third in line, you know, number three at the DOJ the civil rights division uh then you go work for uber where you have learned how the doj protects civil rights and leverage that to help uber violate them and then you go advise your sister-in who's running for president on the best possible way to lose the election or at least lose people who are interested in voting for you possibly because of messaging that they might be interested in. Like, you know, fuck, billionaires, they kind of fucking suck. And the groceries are a little too expensive. And we should have surrogates marching around combining that message and saying you know what we should actually we should have a billionaire who doesn't believe in that that's time for you i think also this is you know that pattern that model you pointed out is you know something that's endemic to academia and the tech sector, especially, right? I mean, you cannot throw a rock in, if you got a thousand people in a room from academia or from tech or from some other highly vaunted sector of our incredibly dynamic economy, and you throw a rock, you would be, you'd reliably either hit some sort of expert witness who's an academic, who's gets trotted out to explain to you why actually smokeless tobacco products are healthy, you know, or actually what people really want is to be surcharged based on their demand for a good or service at a particular time, because it will be an additional sort of a curb on their behavior. It reflects how much they really want it. They're not going to mind if they really want it. There are a litany of academics who are, I mean, because the cash is good, the money is good, so they have no, and the morals are, you know, they don't have the morals. They have no problem shuttling between university, these firms that are destroying the world using the insight, using the research and the, and the funding and the support and the protection and the insulation they get to help these firms acquire more power and more autonomy. And the same is true. Like you just pointed out with the government, right? You cannot throw a rock in like DC without hitting someone who has probably gone through the revolving door at least twice. And when you say, it's such a deep level of moral rot that you can't even like say the words without people being confused. Like they're just like, what are you talking about? What is the problem with this? You know? I'm sorry, you know, you're over here talking about morals and the gospels, and we hear you're living in the real world where we have to pay bills. I only make six figures for my other job. I need another six figures helping these companies make eight figures or nine figures or 10 figures.

it really is this case where it's like you become the weird loser who got a job at a at a uh at a government department because you actually cared about the mission of that government department rather than because it was a a good line on your cv that would give you a stepping stone to a job that paid three times as much destroying that government department it's like you're the fucking loser here you got a job at the sec because you actually cared about regulating securities

weird weirdo you know that's what it is i mean that's what it is you're the freak you are actually the deep you're the deep state uh if you stay in the government for a few years because you believe in something or because you just want the fucking pension.

You got a job at the Department of Education because you actually knew something about education and cared about education and not because you wanted to destroy the idea of public education as an institution.

Freak. Yeah, you know yeah if you did all that and then decided to work for betsy devose for 10 years at whatever fund she has uh psyoping people into believing charter schools are good um you know one of those people yeah one of those people's a deep deep uh state operative that's invested a conspiracy and the other just believes charter schools are really nice you know i'll let you decide which one is which it's

so ridiculous man the way the incentives oh you you want to work at the department of education what you like kids yeah weird weirdo you like kids

is that yeah listen you you you you're weird you like kids all right why would why did i get on a plane called the lolita express 10 times don't worry

about it okay because i like classic novels i like right

i'm actually really sophisticated i like nabokov i uh nabokov i can't i don't even i'm

a big butterfly dude that's why yeah right um

yeah