More Pete Hegseth Controversy, Harvard and Education Reform, Trump's State Department, Global Trade Concerns | Ep 339

Summary
In this episode, Clayton Cuteri delves into various pressing topics, including the Trump administration's significant state department overhaul, controversial immigration policies, and the implications of education reforms. He discusses the funding cuts to Harvard, the broader financial structure of higher education, and global trade concerns related to U.S. ship passage through key canals. The episode concludes with a focus on the controversies surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his handling of sensitive military information.

Clayton's Social Media
LinkTree | TikTok | Instagram | Twitter (X) | YouTube

Timecodes
00:00 - Intro
01:03 - Trump Administration's State Department Overhaul
05:24 - Education and Workforce Programs Under Trump
09:31 - Controversial Immigration Policies
12:15 - Harvard's Funding Cuts and Financial Structure
20:00 - Global Trade and Infrastructure Concerns
26:00 - Controversies Surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

Intro/Outro Music Producer: Don Kin
IG: https://www.instagram.com/donkinmusic/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/44QKqKsd81oJEBKffwdFfP
Super grateful for this guy ^

Transcript

0:21

exploring spiritual journeys to find answers in uncertainty. This is UpConsciousMonkeys, welcome back to another Pacific. As always, I am your host Clayton Cuteri. And in today's podcast, we are talking about the news. We're talking about the last week in review within regards to the U S government and what we have been doing. Um, we have a lot on our table. We've got stuff from Trump's administration, making major state department changes. We've got some executive orders targeting, uh, education and the workforce programs. There's a little bit of controversy regarding a US citizen, a toddler, actually. That's kind of sad. We're going to talk about Harvard and their funding cut. We just got a lot. We got stuff about the Panama Canal. It was a busy week. It was a busy week. Let's put it that way. And we're to do our best to cover as much of this as possible as quickly as possible. We got some controversy, of course, again, with the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, which seems like that dude just can't win. Seems like controversy after controversy keeps coming for that guy. without further delay, let's jump into it. And we're going to start off talking about Trump administration and how they have proposed this major state department overhaul. So here are the details of it. The Trump administration announced a significant restructuring of the U S state department aiming to eliminate over a hundred offices, including those focused on war crimes, human rights, advocacy, and diversity programs. The plan seeks to align the department with the America first priorities, reducing bureaucracy and reallocating resources. Now, secretary of state Marco Rubio emphasized that the reorganization is a roadmap, not an immediate firing of staff with congressional notifications sent to formalize this process. A fact sheet and an FAQ were provided to clear to clarify the plan's scope, countering claims of mass layoffs. Now the impact critics argue this could have weakened US diplomatic influence, particularly in human rights and international law. While supporters see it as streamlining a bloated agency, the plan's implementation will unfold over months with potential legal and congressional pushback as expected. Now in theory, and to put this in context and to kind of start blending in my opinion here, This aligns this does at some level align with Trump's broader agenda to reduce the federal government size, which generally speaking, I am in agreeance with. Now, whenever it comes to the idea, though, when it comes to the idea of this area focusing on war crimes and human rights advocacy and diversity programs, the biggest issue that I have with the American government is our undying support for Israel. Well, maybe it is dying support. Who knows how you want to do that. But but I think if we really want to truly address human rights and war crimes, we need look no further than Gaza. That would be the perfect place if we wanted to eliminate those things. So, you know, I know also if we want to go a bit deeper here, that diversity programs and human rights advocacy, it can be a little bit murky because I have a hard time believing it. Let me rephrase that. It becomes this catch 22. So I am unconvinced that that is a true area that our government is trying to fix, because if they did, we would find the 300,000 kids who crossed into our border and are now missing. We would stop the killing. We would stop funding the killing of innocent kids, innocent babies in Israel, which sorry, in Gaza, in Palestine. because if you look at it, there has actually been stuff coming out where they have a little graphic here. So trigger warning for anyone listening, a little graphic, but you need to know what's going on in the world. So I'm going to give it to you, but trigger warning. They are finding babies with sniper rounds in them and not just one, but two shots that are meant for the head and hit the heart. So there is absolutely no reason that that should be occurring. you if we want to sit here and there's, there's no justification for that. They're just, it just, doesn't exist. well, we had to kill the baby in order to kill the Hamas terrorists that was behind him. Cause that would be their typical thing. So, you know, if we're really trying to focus on war crimes and human, human rights advocacy, let's just stop funding. the government of Israel. That would be the simplest and easiest way. You don't have to cut all these jobs. I mean, yeah, if they're bloated, I don't know all the jobs specifically, but if they're bloated, then yeah, we should cut them. But meanwhile, let's also stop funding the billion dollars, the hundreds of billions of dollars we've been giving to Israel. And so while the state department is facing this shakeup, the administration is also rethinking how America trains its workforce and educates its youth. Now, this is my wheelhouse. This is one of the hugest, the hugest, the biggest issues that I believe. And I know that we're facing in America, along with the poisoning of our food and water supply. But this one, this one's important. So where are we? so the executive order, this executive order, uh targets the education system and workforce program. so the detail is of it is that on April 23rd, Trump signed seven executive orders focused on education, including modernizing workforce programs to prioritize skilled trade jobs and career preparation for youth. Another order aimed to eradicate quote anti-Christian bias and quote in the federal government with attorney general Pam Bondi leaking a task force to address perceived weaponization against Christians. Well, it's ironic because they're actually in bed with Israel who they believe that Christians should be killed. So I don't I'm not sure that that seems like a conflict of interest to me. But the impact here is that the education orders could shift federal funding towards vocalization training, potentially reducing the support for traditional academic programs. The anti-Christian bias in initiative has sparked debate over religious freedom versus secular governance. Now in context, these moves cater to Trump's evangelical base and reflect his critique of public education as misaligned with economic needs. And here again, is the biggest issue is that he is looking at all of this purely. He's looking at your kids from a state of just being an economic force, uh a dollar sign. And this aligns with his perceived tariff war, this trade war, where he wants to move manufacturing jobs back to America. And so you need a workforce if you're going to do that. And so his mindset is, well, let's create these trade labor jobs. And there's nothing wrong. Don't get me wrong here. There is absolutely nothing wrong with those jobs. They're some of the most important jobs that we have in America and they actually are under underappreciated, if you will. But this idea of pushing kids a certain way, I am vehemently against. We need to be inspiring our youth. We need to be giving them the passion. We need to be giving them the insight of how to be a human, how to be a person, how to thrive in this world. And so I. haven't seen all of the details of these executive orders or what he has in mind for them. But as a high level, they do not seem to be the most potent in giving us the ability to learn how to think for ourselves, how to be emotionally intelligent, how to care for one another, how to survive in the world, you know, financial literacy. I don't see it. So I think that's another huge issue that we have here. And speaking of issues and speaking of youth, our domestic policies isn't the only flash point that we have here because immigration enforcement is brought up another fierce debate that has been going on in our country. And here's the details on April 22nd. Sorry. On April 26th, reports emerged that a two year old U.S. citizen, two year old U.S. citizen was deported to Honduras alongside her mother and sister, prompting outrage and legal scrutiny. So I'm not sure how the two year old could be a citizen, but the mother and sister aren't. I don't know how that works, but maybe they're just focusing in on that one because as a kid, a federal judge criticized the Trump administration stating the deportation occurred quote with no meaningful process. End quote. The incident is part of broader immigration crackdowns, including arrest over a hundred immigrants at a Colorado nightclub and charges against a Milwaukee judge for obstruction immigration arrests. The impact of this is that you have civil rights groups and Democrats condemning condemning this incident, which may be fair, but highlighting highlighting potential violations of due process. The administration has not commented extensively, but the public pressure may lead to policy reviews of lower lawsuits even. And so for the context of this Trump's administration, Trump's immigration policies prioritize mass deportations, which he was very vocal about. So You know, give him credit where credit is due if that's, you know, at least he's doing what he's saying in this regard. So with these executive actions, stripping the legal statutes of hundreds or thousands and increasing removals to countries like Ecuador, mean, he said he was going to do this. So, you know, at least he's keeping his word. But you definitely have an issue here. You definitely have an issue here whenever citizens, U.S. citizens are the ones being deported. And I hope that this is not a part of a bigger agenda, you know, because Let's take a step back here. The way the media works is that they'll prime you. They'll prime your brain for an event that's going to occur. So think about a P Diddy for instance, right? They released that tape of him brutally assaulting that woman in a hotel room, which they had for 10 years. They were sitting on that tape for over 10 years, but they released it two weeks before him getting arrested. Now I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad, I mean, it's definitely a good thing that he got arrested, but why did they sit on that tape for 10 years? And why did they release it just two weeks before he actually got arrested? So what we see here, my point is, is that the media will set up an event. They'll prime your mind for something that's going to occur in the future. And so what I see here is them priming the mind for US citizen deportation. Trump has talked about this, deporting United States citizen prisoners. And I can't think of something that would be more egregious to us as citizens, as people who care about our common man, our common woman. This is not something that we should stand idly by and allow to happen because I think this becomes a very slippery slope if we just start deporting after deporting after deporting. So we have to be careful on this. You have to be very careful on this. um There's a couple other headlines. I'm just going to kind of toss in here because I feel like they are important to just know about. But I don't really want to dive too deeply into some of these. I think there's more important ones kind of later. We have the Trump administration threatening Harvard with an eight point seven billion funding cut, which is crazy because I did the math and it is absolutely let me see if I can pull up the numbers here. Absolutely absurd how much money Harvard gets and has. where I kind of just wanted to look at their overall like financial stuff and like where they got their money from. And it seems to me that majority of their expenses gets to $6.4 billion a year is their expenses. Salaries and benefits are about 3.3 billion. uh Services, space and facilities is about 1 billion, you know, so they have some stuff, but where it got interesting, let me see if I can find my numbers here. I was curious how much money they make off of their students. You know, let's talk about housing. You know, they have their law school, they have their medical school. They have all of these different schools, these graduates, they have enrollment costs, they have books, they have housing. And what I found, the numbers I found here was that their total revenue was about $1.8 billion from their students. So I, what I have a hard time with, and this is my entrepreneurial entrepreneurial mind kicking in here is that It doesn't make sense to me. Like so much of this doesn't make sense to me where the way that the system is set up the way that this The way that... college tuition and college education is set up is is set up in a way where the kids are only your customer, right? Because the kids would be the customer. They come in, they spend money, they get an education. It's supposed to help them with their life, but they're only spending $1.8 billion. And yet the federal government, my money is over $8.7 billion. Where's my Harvard degree? Why is it that the American taxpayers are fronting more? more money than the actual students. To me, that makes absolutely no sense. And this is, this is a part of a bigger issue, right? The reason that this is being talked about, by the way, and I should throw that out there, is that there were uh pro-Palestinian, there were Gaza protests occurring on campus. And so Trump wanted to kind of say, hey, no, we align with Israel. We're very pro-Israel. There's no human right violations happening in Gaza. So he went after Harvard for not doing anything about it. Now, again, I think that that's beating a dead horse, but we should actually keep talking about that. And it is important. But in this specific situation, I think that it is far more important for us to realize the amount of federal money that is going to subsidizing these colleges. I mean, and this is just Harvard. I'm sure this happens at almost every single college. And so whenever I take a step back and I look at this. It tells me it speaks to me that there is a huge issue in the way that the financial structure of our institutions is set up, especially when you can jump on YouTube and just get a free education almost instantly. The only thing is, is you don't get a piece of paper that costed you in the case of Harvard, maybe 400,000 half a million dollars. Some people pay half a million dollars to go to Harvard and get a piece of paper saying, Hey, I went to Harvard. So not to mention it sounds like I'm paying for them to get that degree as well. So To me, I think that brings up a much bigger issue that is just, you know, to fix that system. I think that's something that you kind of have to just completely wipe off the board and say, you know, maybe you don't even touch it. Here's what you probably do is you don't even touch it and you just start educating kids and providing programs and knowledge. So they can just find this stuff out for themselves. They can maybe it's online courses. You know, I had this idea where you just hire billionaires and basically teach them how for financial literacy, for example, you just hire billionaires. You might not even need to hire them. I bet a lot of people will do it for free, but you set it up where you basically just have billionaires create a course on financial literacy. If you want people who create a course on indigo education, like myself, people who are knowledgeable in that we create a course and we just supply it for free. It would not cost eight point seven billion dollars. And that's just one college. We're not even talking about the entire landscape of the education system within America. So in my opinion, this is something that is just going crazy. And by the way, I have seen tons of online universities starting to pop up, um like home people doing it on their own. And I think it's great. I think it's a genius thing to do. I think it's probably the best way to combat this, especially as these institutions are slowly going to die because they will slowly die. mean, the proof is in the pudding here, the numbers and even more so I am aware of And I'm just trying to bash Harvard, but but I am aware of companies and I cannot disclose them publicly here. So we have to keep them anonymous. I'm aware of companies who I have talked to where they say that they just no longer hire Ivy League students. They're like the education isn't there. They've become too woke. Too many people are just getting passing grades. They just give A's to everybody. And it has completely deteriorated the workforce. It has deteriorated the minds of our nation. And that's the biggest crime. That's really the true crime here is that the minds of the people who should be contributing to our society, our us citizens, their education system has left them in this slave mindset. It has to be broken. We have to change this. And I think a huge way is for the individual, for parents, you here's, here's what you do. You encourage the parents to encourage their kids to learn somewhere else. You encourage them to not be a part of the system where College, yes, is an option and they should be aware of it and they should understand the finances of it. Because when I signed my life away to get a job, I didn't understand how much debt was going to be. I didn't understand how I was going to pay it off. I didn't understand how much money I needed at my job to pay it off. I didn't understand how long it would take. So I think first and foremost for parents out there, educate your kids on financial literacy. Number one, number two, I think a big issue is a big thing that you could do if you're in the education space is create digital courses. And this is something that I'm working on in the backend. It's not available yet. I'm playing around with different stuff. That's a long story, but create digital courses to supply your unique talents to somebody. You know, I think this is one of the beautiful things about Montessori schools. And if you don't know about Montessori schools, essentially they provide like a, have kids teaching kids. So what you have is a certain situation and a certain dynamic where you're learning interactive nature of the world with people your age, with kids your age. And there's an element of kind of like the, like adults being there and kind of watching, but it's also interest-based. If you're interested in something, you're encouraged to pursue it. And I think that is extremely powerful within fostering the capabilities, the knowledge and the wherewithal for someone to grow in a certain field. And so by us digitizing courses, by someone creating an Indigo course about spirituality, about someone creating a course about financial literacy, because that's your thing. You can offer that course for maybe a hundred to 200, maybe $300 and you will get far much, far more interest. will, sorry, you'll get far more benefits because you're interested. You won't be strangled by debt and you're going to thrive because you have someone who actually did it, who you look up to, who you're like, wow, they did it. I need to learn from them because they actually did it. The problem is with professors is someone taught them and then they're going to just go and teach. They're never actually going out in the world and doing and that's the most important thing is that you actually have to go out in the world and do otherwise it's just hearsay. You don't have the real lived experience in order to pass that on to other people because the power of experience is tremendous. All right. I got into that one. That was a fun one. I'm really passionate about that one. So I don't know if you could tell. Hopefully you could tell because I am. Let's keep moving along here. So we have Trump pushing for free US ship passage through Panama and the Suez canals, which I think is great. A lot of US workers died building that thing, you know, and we just handed it over to, believe who was it? Who we hand it over to? I forget who we handed it over to. I don't want to make a mistake here and say the wrong name, but we just handed it over. So I'd here, take it. We did all this work, not ours anymore. And so I think that This is actually very important. It's a very important thing for commerce. So I definitely applaud Trump for this put this move. I think we should give credit where credit's due. I think this is very smart. So what happened was from a high level on April 26, President Trump declared that US ships should travel through the Panama and Suez canals without fees, citing national interest and trade priorities. ah This statement follows US investors, of course. including BlackRock acquiring a controlling stake in the Panama ports company, which operates ports at the both ends of the Panama Canal. The administration expressed approval of the deal, noting it reduces Chinese influence in the region. The impact the proposal could strain relations with Panama and Egypt, which rely on canal revenues and disrupt global trade norms. Obviously not something Trump cares to do. No formal policy has been enacted. And negotiations or executive actions may follow soon. We don't know. We'll stay close on this one. But for context, Trump's focus on trade and infrastructure control reflects his tariff heavy economic strategy and skepticism of international agreements perceived as unfair to the U.S. Now, it's a tricky one because I am all on board with this idea of free U.S. ship passage. We should we built the damn thing. It's it's a beautiful creation of America, like back when America was in its prime of like what America could do. Now, of course, we have the other issue that pops in with the whole Black Rock Vanguard State Street issue where they're basically just trying to own the world. We definitely have plans in place for that not to occur. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, foreshadow. But. You know, it's a tricky one. ah I would have to look into this definitely more in regards to the deals, but I think at a high level, I definitely agree that. We should not be charging ship fees for something we created for such a high value item that we put on the world. So I definitely applaud him for that. If we can find a way that we can levy that, I think that'd be great for us small businesses, which would be amazing. It would be great for the American people. Of course, these are things that should have occurred before he started trying to create this trade war that put tremendous amount of pressure on American citizens. We should have gotten rid of the federal income tax before we started doing that trade war too. But here we are. And speaking of the trade, this trade is not our only global concern on our agenda today. We saw that Trump and Zelensky had a meeting at the Vatican whenever Pope Francis passed away on April 26. A lot happened on April 26. President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met for 15 minutes at St. Peter's Basilica during Pope Francis's funeral, describing the meeting as, constructive, end quote, and planning further talks. Of course it's all talks. You ever notice how much just we talk, we just talk, Hey, we should stop bombing them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We definitely should. Sends a new sends a bomb in kills innocent people. Hey, let's talk about, let's talk about a ceasefire. Let's talk about this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We can talk. We can talk. Sends a missile in killing innocent kids and families. Yeah. Let's just keep talking. Cause talking is working so well. We need action. We need people to just sit there and say, no, If you keep bombing these people, there will be problems. You will have sanctions. This is going to happen to you because the value of innocent lives is far greater than anything else on this planet. And the fact that that is treated as if it's some sort of cattle or second class humans is absolutely absurd. You know, and so I think it's just absolutely disgusting. And it's kind of interesting because actually yesterday Russia announced a three day ceasefire like broke. Like my mind is just like, just stop. It's literally a just stop. You don't have to do this. You seriously do not have to do this. Be the bigger person. Stop killing innocent people and just let go. Stop being, what's the word I'm looking for here? So egregious with your actions. And I see that we're starting to run a bit long. So I'm to kind of just run through the rest of these. Cause I think there is one later. There is one later I want to get to. uh Actually, we'll just jump to that. Let's see here. Well, important note, justice department grants have been slashed by $811 million. It's part of Trump's effort to reduce the federal spending, which is good, but we need a lot more than that for sure. If we're to reduce federal spending uh their federal work first cut raise. cuts raise concerns for black middle uh class. On April 27th, NPR reported that Trump's workforce reduction plans, including buyouts and early retirements at agencies like the Department of Homeland Security threatened the stability of black federal employees. You know, I honestly should just avoid kind of like these race baiting titles. Now I'm thinking about this because I just feel like I stopped talking about it. I mean, look, they're saying that it disproportionately affects black communities. They're saying that this reduces economic stability and promoting criticism for civil rights group. I mean, look, I'm not saying that it doesn't do that. I'm just saying that we need to have a more cultural conversation around what's going on here. And I don't know. Let put it like this. Maybe I just don't know enough about this in particular to comment on it. If they're particularly targeting blacks, then that's definitely an issue. I think that's a NAACP issue. I think that's something we heavily need to address, but I just. I want us to get to a place and here's where my concern is. And this is where we need to have a serious conversation. So if someone disagrees with those, we need to have a serious conversation. I want to get to a place where we can just stop talking about the color of people's skin. I want to get to a place where we can just say certain communities, not even certain communities. I want us to get to a place where we can just appreciate people for being people. stop this segregation of well black communities and Asian communities and white communities and get to a place where we can truly just come together and realize like, Hey, is this a net benefit for everybody? Or is this a net negative? so with all of this being said, I do want to close on this, which is crazy. Or we're to be talking about defense secretary Pete Hagseth and some more controversial actions that he had because this dude cannot catch a break. I swear. I feel like every time I'm turning on the news, he's doing something crazy or it's off or whatever. But the details are essentially this, that defense secretary Pete Hagseth has accused top military officers of leaking to the media and threatened polygraphs in two separate meetings. which was confirmed by ABC News. He also shared sensitive military information in single group chats, which raised security concerns. The impact is that Hegcess actions have stained relations with military leadership and sparked criticism over his handling of classified information. This could lead to investigations or calls for his resignation. In context, Hegcess appointment reflects Trump's preference for a loyalist, but his unconventional approach has fueled perceptions of white house disarray. And I agree. I think I think there's a lot to uncover here. I recently did a reel where Tim Cain was grilling Pete Hegseth regarding some of his conduct outside of the workplace and it doesn't look good for Pete. So I don't know he seems to be going through it. I hope he's doing well on a personal level but I just I don't know. For some reason I have a feeling his days are numbered in the uh in the administration. seems like every time I'm turning there's new controversy, new issues with him leaking classified information. And it starts at the top. So he has to take the responsibility. That's how it is as a leader. You take the responsibility for it. So I'm very curious to see how all this shifts and plays out. But I do want to make a note that I think, I don't know, I have a feeling something's coming to a head here in regards to him. And so with that being said, I appreciate you guys for listening. I love you all. I hope you guys have an amazing week. I don't know what I'm going to be talking about on Thursday. I'm not even sure if I'm going to go live on IG. Life's been crazy since I moved. I need to be more diligent about it. all I do know for sure is that I appreciate you all. I love you all. And I will see you all in the sixth dimension. you you