THE BIGGEST THEFT EVER

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J. Eskow, produced by the Weak Radio Network and broadcasting from the banks of the Anacostia directly into the halls of power. And now your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another edition of the Zero Hour, or as I'm thinking of renaming it, the Dystopia Daily Gazette. Of course, everybody feels we're living in a dystopia. Well, not everybody. Everybody listening, probably, feels we're listening to dystopia news every day, and in a very real sense, we are. But one of the ongoing themes we try to emphasize here on the program is that All of this was a long time in coming. Case in point, we're going to cover in our first segment coming up the draconian and unprecedented steps that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are taking in order to seize control of state, local, and congressional and Senate elections and bend them to their will. That is overtly totalitarian, of course. But I went back to my own files and saw that nearly 10 years ago. I wrote a headline called, while Democrats chase Russians, Republicans keep rigging elections. They've been at this election rigging game for a long time. And the Democrats chose to attribute Trump's victory and perhaps that of other Republicans to unproven Russian interference when really it was... their own party's failures and the fact that Republicans have been rigging elections in blatant ways for a long time, which for some reason, even now, they're somewhat reluctant to point out whether it's making lower income people or black communities wait six hours to vote, whether it's what they call caging or some other techniques. Somehow Democrats never got as worked up about that as they should have. And now, guess what? They're hiding any pretense of supporting any kind of remnant of democratic process. They're talking about putting ICE agents or other military forces in our polling places. We'll talk about that more after the break. But remember, this has been a long time coming, and we're going to need to work to change. We'll be right back. This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J.S. Gal. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash The Zero Hour.

And we're back on the Zero Hour. I, as always, am your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. And joining me once again is Sonali Cole Hotcar, senior correspondent for the Zero Hour and so much more. Journalist, author, program host. You can find much of her work at Rising Up with Sonali.com. And I guess by way of introduction to the topic. that Sinali has brought up. I would say this, what's better for an autocrat than canceling an election? Well, I would say it's pretending to have elections so people don't get all riled up that mean even less, far less than they might today. But Sonali's been studying this issue. So first of all, Sunali, welcome back. Thank you so much, Richard. You just summarized... the point of this story. And if you want, I can just jump right into it. So Trump has been floating this idea of just canceling the elections, right? This is his way of kind of massaging the electorate, like floating the idea of seeing how it would go forward. And his whole approach to politics is to test out the unthinkable and then deliver a version that's slightly less than that. So people breathe a sigh of relief and think, okay, at least we didn't get a crazy idea that he was floating. So his crazy idea that he's floating is canceling elections because he's claiming you can't trust the Democrats to actually run fairly. But in reality, he needs elections in order to legitimize his. continuing authority. And we see modern-day dictators doing that all over the world from people like Viktor Orban in Hungary to Vladimir Putin in Russia and even, for example, the Iranian regime. They tend to not cancel elections. because the appearance of winning election gives legitimacy to an unauthorized dictatorship. And so Trump, for example, we know has claimed over and over again that he won the 2020 election. And then, you know, we have the insurrectionists at his beck and call trying to overturn that. and still claims that he won the 2020 election. And for him, the winning, the actual winning of the 2024 election, which he won the Electoral College for sure and the popular vote, unfortunately, because so many people sat out the vote, that was really important for him because he wants to be able to show that he's really, really popular. So he's talking about canceling the elections, but he's not actually going to, first of all, he can't cancel elections. And actually he doesn't really want to. He's trying to rig the elections in his favor. And of course, this year we have midterm elections. It's not a presidential election year. But the entire power of which party gets majorities in both houses of Congress is up for grabs. It's in play. The House is in play. The Senate is also looking like it's possibly in play. And if Democrats win in the House and the Senate,

Trump knows, and he's already openly said this, they're going to try to impeach me, they're going to try to remove me. He's already been impeached once, right? But of course, then the Senate voted to keep him in power. The House impeached him once already. But he's worried about both of those things happening. So the point that we have to be really, really focused in on is that he's going to try to rig him and his party are going to try to rig the midterm elections so that Congress stays in the GOPs. hands and he's doing that he's trying that in a variety of ways which we can talk about right and you know one of the problems i have and having these conversations sonali is that A lot of times when people, particularly, let's say, mainstream Democrats talk about their concerns about democracy or when Washington, the now virtually defunct Washington Post, you know, took on democracy, dies in darkness and all that. We had, our starting point was a pretty broken democracy, right? I mean, it's not like we were starting from a point of view, much as people might. pretend that, oh, well, everything was great until these guys came along. The fact is, first of all, that, you know, we've had now decades of Supreme Court decisions opening any restriction on big money in elections. We've had both parties yielding to the influence to a greater or lesser extent of big money. We've had voter caging. Republicans have been especially unscrupulous and, you know, but voter caging and kicking people off roles. I mean, all sorts of techniques. closing polling places in minority areas so that the people who can least afford to take the time, I have to wait six hours to vote. It's on and on and on. So it's not like you or I, if I may speak for both of us who say, well, things were great now. He's going to mess it up. But really, I think what you're saying, and obviously correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to man explain what you're saying. But I think what you're saying is, you know, as flawed and broken as it may be, he's going to really strip away what's left of a democratic process and make sure the outcome is what he wants it to be. Is that fair? Am I summarizing it correctly? He's very much worsening a system that's already fractured, a system that's already under attack. And look, the best way for an authoritarian to control a voting system is to bring it under... a centralized role. And I think the founders and the writers of the Constitution understood that states having the power to run their own elections was one way to provide a bulwark against that federal control. But yes, essentially what he's had is his Republican minions, and not just his Republican, the Republican Party has spent decades, even pre-Trump, laying the groundwork. for taking over state governments. Remember, Republicans are very good at running foreign winning elections as governors, and then taking appointing secretaries of state, who are the ones who oversee elections and doing everything they can to undermine elections. For example, voting issues in Georgia, swing state, even predated Trump, where

You've had Republican officials who have tried to strip people traditionally voting as Democrats off their voting power. You've had many efforts, local efforts to respond to that, such as Black Voters Matter, which is an organization that deals with taking back voting rights in the South among voters of color. So yeah, you've had these kinds of efforts for many, many years, even predating Trump. And Trump is now... trying to push it even further. And you're right, that it isn't as much specifically about preserving a perfect system, but throwing an already chaotic system that really requires improvement into further chaos. And it's really, really dangerous, really dangerous. We have to pay attention now, not in November. Right. And let's get into the specifics. But as we do, Sinali, you know, I just want to make the observation that, I think others have made too, which is that for people who are accustomed to like the liberal conversation about voting rights, there's a certain kind of reversal going on because maybe even since the Civil War, but certainly for many decades, the federal government has been more progressive on the issue of minority voting rights and voting rights in general than the states have, which is why states' rights was a slogan of the racist right and so on. And now we have a situation where, so there were people on the left calling for nationalizing elections. But now Trump is nationalizing elections. The goal is not to ensure rights for anyone, but to suppress rights. And I think it's a kind of a paradigm shift, isn't it, for people on the left to get used to? It is. And I think we do need to think about what it means when we live in a country that has been so close to authoritarianism that those previous solutions that had been floated to improve elections such as nationalizing elections need to be rethought. I think the main goal for any pro-democracy activist looking to better our elections has been, let's make it as easy as possible for voters to be engaged. So a national approach to elections included things like a day off for everybody to go vote. Nobody works on election day because everybody's, that was singular job on election day is to go vote if they are, you know, a voter, a registered voter and a citizen. And so that has been the, I think, the motivation. And states have often when they've been rolled by right-wing forces have often wanted to set their own rules because they have wanted to disenfranchise, particularly historically in the South, of course, disenfranchised black voters, disenfranchised voters of color in general, and that the federal government has been able to step in largely through the Voting Rights Act, which then the Supreme Court has, of course, been busy gutting for years now, because in the most bizarre way, their logic has basically been... It's worked so well. We don't need it anymore. Hang on. If it's worked so well, it's worked well because we've had it and we're going to keep needing it if we wanted to keep working well. So basically, this so-called Save Act, which the GOP tried to push through Congress last year, it failed, 2.0, version 2.0, passed the House, would automatically strip...

challenge the election results in every state they don't like, which would be every state that has a larger minority population and it seems to, or every county or every congressional district or what have you. So it seems to me that's an authoritarian power grab. And the voter ID, as you pointed out, is a racist trope there. And Trump is using the term nationalize the elections, isn't it? He is, which is really, really interesting because, you know, what we need a nationalized version of, we need nationalized health care. We need nationalized worker protections. We need so many other things that are nationalized that Trump has no interest in giving us. But we don't need nationalized immigration enforcement or nationalized voter ID laws, especially not in this moment. And I want to mention that, you know, he... He's making a lot of threats, but he's not actually quite yet winning them. One of the most aggressive ways in which the GOP, at Trump's bidding, tried to change the rules, was Texas's redistricting attempt, right? Texas City City. Basically, like, redistricted, created these district maps that very clearly gave the GOP a majority, disenfranchising voters of color and people of color. color from getting proper representation. And in response, the perhaps only good thing Gavin Newsom has probably done is California redistricted to ensure that Democrats would get an equal number of representatives in the House and effectively negating Texas' strategy. And the Supreme Court ruled that California's approach was legal. So that failed. The redistricting strategy failed. And of course, in the long term, we do need fairer districts. And like nobody should do it, neither Texas nor California, neither Republicans nor Democrats. But that aside, at least for the purposes of the 2026 elections and 2028 elections, the redistricting approach failed. And the other thing is that we've seen such a massive pushback against what Trump has been doing. in Minneapolis with deploying ICE agents that he has effectively flipped American opinions on immigration, right? There was, in going into 2024 elections, the propaganda had been working quite well, unfortunately, and majorities of Americans felt that illegal immigration was one of the biggest problems that people, that was afflicting the country, Trump rode into power on that false notion. but overplayed his hands so heavy-handedly that now people have flipped their opinions and people think that immigration enforcement is way too heavy-handed, that immigration is not as big an issue, and that the federal government needs to pull back on what it's doing. And I think that will help ensure people don't fall for this claim that illegal aliens, quote-unquote, are taking over our elections. So I think he is losing. And he's going to keep losing. We have to be very vigilant, though, and ensure, and the Senate needs to, like, the Democrats need to mobilize, which I think they will because it's in their interest. And they were able to stop DHS funding recently. So I think they will ban together and stop the Save Act from passing. To hear the rest of this conversation with Sonali Cole Hotcar, please go to Zero Hour Report.com. We'll be right back after this. Richard R.J. Eskow, and you're listening to The Zero Hour.

You are listening to the We Act Radio Network produced in Washington, D.C. Visit us online at weactradio.com or at YouTube.com slash weactradio, D.C. And we are back on the Zero Hour. I, as always, am your host, Richard R.J. Escal. A quick note before I have a conversation with my next guest, your humble correspondent, that is to say, me, wrote a year ago, actually February of 2025 that our social imaginations have failed to keep up with our technological imaginations, leaving us unguarded against today's fast-moving. multi-pronged assault on our individual and collective autonomy. I wrote that Doge is not just a power play for the levers of government power. It is also the greatest theft of a public resource in human history. that resources data, our aggregated data in form of research studies, along with some very personal individual information. Now, my next guest has been following that story, and it's all its ramifications. Alex Lawson, my good friend, my old friend, haven't talked to him quite a while, is the executive director of Social Security Works, and he kind of gets what's going on here. Social Security Works has been pushing back on some aspects of this. Without any further ado, Alex Lawson, welcome back to the Zero Hour. And it's been far too long. Hopefully, I can convince you to have me on again and we can keep talking because this is the exact conversation that I think people want to know about and they're demanding more answers because contemporaneously, you know, both of us were saying we're like, Why do you think they're hooking their computers to the Social Security database? Like they're stealing our data. Elon Musk did not become the richest person in the world by making cars. He's a data broker. And he has an AI that he thinks is the future. And now he has every single person in this country's most. important data, right? And what I've said and consistently is, you know, if you or I accessed one person's social security file without their permission, that's a felony. Why? Because it has every piece of information about you. Everything that a criminal would need for enormous identity theft. Everything that a nation state or bad actor would need to maximize pressure. There's a reason that our data at Social Security in the administration was protected.

at the level that it is, it's because it's priceless. And Elon Musk and his doge goons literally just walked in, plugged in their computer, stole it. And, you know, we know because of a lawsuit that what they did is so bad that Trump's own DOJ had to admit, you know, oh, yeah, they tried to minimize it. They're like, oh, yeah, this is basically an ethics violation because they are trying to hide the magnitude. of the crimes that actually happened, which is just a full-scale theft of our data, and then handing it over to a right-wing, you know, a right-wing crank organization. Like the people who don't believe the results of the 2020 election, most likely it's true the vote. Most likely it's Antonio Gracios. is one of the doge goons. He was the main doge guy at SSA. Why did the DOJ redact that information? You know, really harkens to the Epstein files, where it's strategic transparency, which also means no transparency, right? They're trying to say, this is the whole story. get over it, it's not worse than this, when in fact it's the tip of the iceberg and the magnitude is, I think, almost beyond people's imagination. Who has our data? What did they do with it? Who did they give it to? How was it protected from third party attacks, including by nation states, right? Like you think that adversary nation states don't want the entire database of American social security information. So. This story, they are desperate for it to go away. And I think it's yours and my responsibility to dash their hopes and make sure the story does not go anywhere except into as many people's brains as possible. A hundred percent. You know, this is Social Security. And of course, I'm sure they're getting their pincers around Medicare any way they can't do. Social Security data. for this industry. You nailed it. Data is the coin of the realm and Social Security data is the mother load because it's got everybody, essentially, every American citizen. is in there and everyone of working age, including a number of underage people if their dependents on the social security system and so on. But it has everybody's, and of course they're in there as dependents, if they have adult parents, which most people do. Everyone in there has provided a record of their employment, where they've lived.

if they have a business, what their expenses are, you know, what their earnings have been over time, where they live, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The things that, for example, you could do with that data if you gave it to, let's say, marketers. is astonishing. They already abuse our private data. You could manipulate prices as Amazon and others do based on what people earn. You could target political communications. You could grant or decline benefits. If you load it all into a bot, as they're saying they want to do to replace Social Security workers, well, who's going to know if they program the same technology that came up with Mecca Hitler, if they program that technology to just accidentally, quote unquote, deny millions of people their benefits without any trace. So the sort of dystopian scale of this is enormous, and it's not speculative. It's not speculative fiction. It's happening today, isn't it? It is. And, you know, you're absolutely on target. I'm just going to name a few more just to scare people more. It is Medicare. So, I mean, every single person born in this country gets to Social Security nearly every person. There's some, it's a vanishingly small amount. But you get a Social Security number. Like, the record starts at birth. And then all of your employment, everything you said. But. It is also all the Medicare information. It is also all of the SSI information. It is also all of the SSDI information. It is also all, which means your health, mental health, addictions, all sorts of information that is exploitable commercially, like massively exploitable. Your divorce records, if you have one. All of that. is included in your file. So I don't believe that many people understand just how much data is included in, you know, what generally people are like, oh, Social Security. I think they're talking about Social Security retirement checks. So maybe it's just this limit. It's so much information about people. And much of it is happening at incredibly vulnerable. parts at stage right like survivors benefits the loss of a spouse or the breadwinner right like all of that disability you're going back and forth with them sometimes for years trying to convince them so they're giving enormous amounts of data and all of that is what Elon Musk and I you know It's not speculative fiction. They fed it into Grok. Like, there's no way that, like, Palantir is now, it's the Peter Thiel, Palantir, Elon Musk, that dark renaissance under the idiot Curtis Jarvin. Like, that's what's going on. And they got it. They got the data because they gave it to a third party, most likely true the vote. And then...

Trump's Supreme Court basically said, actually they can, you know, actually it is okay for them to use the data. So the only time, and that's when. the DOJ stops looking at that point forward. So the only time that they're looking at is that point prior. And then they're saying, oh, don't worry about it. But we literally have no idea what's happened from that point to now. But I can tell you, we have a pretty good idea. All of it is bad. It's terrible because they keep saying, oh, yeah, well, we're just going to replace all the workers with AI. And all of it is. basically a smokescreen for the goal of the billionaires, which is the destruction of Social Security, of Medicare, of Medicaid, of public education, of everything that works for the people. and against the interests of the billionaires getting everything, right? And I mean, like, again, you don't, we're not making this up. You can literally just Google Curtis Jarvin. You know, you can Google, watch Peter Thiel talk about it openly with Joe Rogan, who's his creature. I was watching Joe, this is an aside, but I was watching Joe Rogan trying to make fun of Mark Marin. And I'm like, dude, Mark Marin is funnier than you on every single thing. And Joe Rogan's like, well, why do I have more subscribers? And I'm like, because the billionaire who owns your platform, you give him a platform to say crazy stuff all the time. But they don't hide it. They're trying to reorder society so that the... Billionaires have everything and we have nothing. And what is sort of like fascinating but also predictable is exactly where Social Security came from, right? The last time that the billionaires got everything and everyone else was left holding an empty bag, it led to the greatest economic calamity in human history, the Great Depression, out of which... One of the key solutions was Social Security. And now they're trying to destroy it to bring us right back into that place where we don't have the time. We don't have the ability to organize against their, you know, these billionaire pedophiles. The Epstein files are showing us exactly who we're dealing with. And that's what they want. They want to live. in a world where they have zero accountability to anything. And everyone who's not born rich or, you know, creates great crime to become a billionaire, all the working people, they're left scrambling for crumbs by working at, you know, lower wages, lower benefits. Right now it's very difficult to even call or access information about Social Security because they've hollowed out all the offices.

Right? There's ghost offices around the country where there's no workers anymore. And so... There is no accident here. This is what they're trying to do. They're trying to destroy systems that work for the people. And the first thing they do, it's very, you know, gangster-esque. It's mafia. At first, they steal. They emptied out the safe. And then they're going to leave wreckage behind. And sort of the flourish at the end is, you know, always they're like, they kneecap the mailman. complain that the mail is late. And then they're like, I got a cousin. He's in the private mail delivery service, right? He'll do a quarter of the work for eight times the expense. It's the same thing over and over again. And he'll read your mail. And if he don't like it, he'll throw it away. If it's a check, he'll cash it. And maybe he'll send ice after you too. I mean, like, talk true dystopia. Like, that's also part of it. There's now a goon squad. that they send after people who they are labeling terrorists for disagreeing with them. Now, and I want to follow up on something you said both in specific and in general. You mentioned true the vote. Now, in another report that shows doing this week with Sonali called Hotcar, senior correspondent, she's looking into the ways in which Trump is and the Republicans are further rigging or attempting to further rig the upcoming midterm vote. And, you know, my reaction to that, and I told her was, what's better for an autocrat than canceling an election while rigging an election and pretending it's okay because then people don't get as riled up? The same, before we get into where this fits into election rigging, which I think it does, you'll tell us, the same is true here. What's better than... cutting social security, cutting Medicare, cutting the things of the programs people love and depend on, saying you're not and using this technology to whittle away at it behind your back. So you don't even know it's gone like the canary in the coal mine. You don't even know you're running out of oxygen until you fall over. I'm mixing metaphors, but you get the idea, right? So isn't that what we're dealing with here? Yeah, I think on both fronts, you're right. I mean, the idea of what I've said is, you know, Donald Trump last state of the union stood on stage and was like, he just lied about Social Security for 10 minutes. He's like, my buddy Elon Musk's found all this fraud, like lies. Elon Musk did not find any fraud. They weren't looking for fraud. They were looking to commit fraud.

Right. So like the idea that they're looking for fraud in elections, you're like, you're looking to commit election fraud. That's what you're trying to do. You are not looking to see if an election was rig. You're looking to rig an election. And they're pretty open about it. So, you know, first they just came out. There's a lot of redactions in the actual file, the DOJ file that. We're talking about that really blew the doors off of the Doge data theft. And that's, you know, that lawsuit is with Americans with America. AFT teachers, ARA, which is escaping my brain at this point. And I'll get yelled at retired Americans. Right. And these are- Alliance for Retired Americans, I think, right? That's the word that I couldn't. Yeah. So Alliance for Retired Americans, A-F-T, but a lot of labor, right? The organizations that are working people fighting against the billionaire. destroying everything for working people, that lawsuit, it only exposed a part of what's going on. And there are redactions because it's still Trump's DOJ. You have to mix that with the public statements that were made. And the main one is Antonio Gracios, who is a billionaire, and he makes his money by guiding pension funds into private investments. So, like, think about that. He's destroying the largest pension fund. And then, but his entire business is made off of middlemanning pension, retirees, money. So we don't think that's right. And we work against that. He should never be invited to a retirement anything again. And what's his role in all this before you go on? So Elon Musk is Doge. Right. Antonio Gracias is the Doge embed at Social Security Administration. Okay. So he was the one who did the dirty work. And where people will most remember him from is the guy who's not Elon Musk on stage in Wisconsin in advance of the Supreme Court election when they had that big chart behind him and they were saying, you know, 22 million. illegal immigrants were brought into this country and given social security numbers. So it was just all lies about fraud. That's Antonio Gracias. To hear the rest of this conversation with Alex Lawson, please go to zero hour report.com. We'll be right back after this. I'm Richard R.J. Eskow, and you're listening to Zero Hour.

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J.S. Gal. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash the Zero Hour. We're back on the Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. I encourage you to look into the issue that Alex Lawson was discussing in the last segment very deeply because it's critically important. I mentioned at the beginning of the hour. that I was going through my archives. Another thing I found from a year ago was something called your data or your life, Doge's Highway Robbery, which is exactly what that conversation was all about. Another theme of, a constant theme of this show is that our social imaginations, our societal imaginations, failed to keep pace with our technological imaginations, leaving us. unguarded and unprotected against the fast-moving and multi-pronged assault on our individual and collective autonomy. Those wasn't, has never been from the start of power play just for government. It was also, and this is what we're talking about now, the greatest theft of a public resource, probably in human history. That resource, as we were discussing, is our data, our aggregated data in the form of research studies that they've hijacked or taken down, along with massive reams of very personal individual information. This is what the technology industry runs on, whether it's creating AI or profiles of you or targeting ads to you. So in a very real sense, the fight for this data is a fight for the future because government data is the mother load. It's what all these tech companies want so they can spy on you for the government, so they can spy on you for corporations, so they can manipulate you so that they can distract you. We're already providing the raw materials for chatbots and everything else. Now they want to seize those raw materials, even those that are in the public's corner in the public sector and use them against us. You know, made me think of In the 20th century, military coups and revolutions, the first thing they did was seize the radio station to show who is now in power. Today's, and then the television came in, the television stations, today's data hijackings are something similar, but far more draconian because they can tell you not only that they're in power, but they can pretty much tell you anything they want, and you'll never know. We'll be right back.