Gary O'Donoghue
speaker
1,144 appearances
20 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 7 Sep
Gary O'Donoghue’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It's also worth saying I think that Barry Mundy has also signed a more general executive order saying all federal agencies will only recognize that there are two genders, men and women, and that's it. And the DEI thing, it's having a sort of broader impact in the private sector as well.
So you're starting to see some big, big companies like the Walmarts and the Targets and other people starting to wrap up their DEI programs there. So it's not just going to be restricted to the federal government. The knock on effect is going to be much, much wider.
I think this is really interesting because there's a feeling in the US and there was a feeling in Britain as well. For example, when gay marriage was legalized, there was a feeling that the clock cannot be turned back from big social changes like that. You know, that it's then ingrained, no one revisits it.
And I wonder if there's a sense in which we might have been wrong about that, that these sorts of things could be turned back. I don't know. Katrina, what do you think?
Well, that's two questions. So the US was the first country really to pass civil rights legislation for disabled people back in 1990, signed into law, of course, by a Republican president. What's Donald Trump's attitude? I have no idea whatsoever. I mean, the only instance I can ever remember him sort of alluding to disability was when he imitated the sort of slightly
difficult walk of a New York Times reporter who has a disability. So I have no idea. And I don't suppose they've thought about it very hard. However, it's true that disabled people will be swept up into the consequences of all these changes to DEI programs, because they're not just about race and gender, they're about disability as well. So
That unemployment rate among disabled, certainly among blind people, which is seven out of 10 across the Western world, unemployed of working age, which has been a hard nut to crack for governments of all flavors in all countries. That's probably not going to get any better under Donald Trump.
Well, there was a story about when Trump Tower was built. And I think it was an architect who wrote a book about the process. I think this was right at the time. And when they were designing the lifts, apparently she said to Donald Trump, well, the law says you've got to have Braille numbers by the buttons. And he said, no blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Don't worry about that.
There is a ban on refugees coming into the country now, an indefinite ban. And there's also a separate ban on grants, federal grants, a complete freezing of grants and loans, which will affect those organizations that do resettlement. There's a sort of 90-day thing they do with refugees who come into the country. So I think the listener is right to be concerned about that.
Stephen Miller, who is one of the most influential people in the White House, this is one of his big areas, immigration, refugee status, asylum. This is something he's been working on for the last four years while they've been out of power. So I'm afraid I do think, you know, there's going to be consequences for people that do this all around the country looking after refugees.
I'm tempted to say any country that does what they're told. But maybe that's a bit cheeky. But yeah, this is – I mean the word transactional is used a lot and that is definitely what Donald Trump is doing. He's not the first foreign leader or president or leader in any country to take a transactional approach. But he is the most powerful leader in the world at the moment.
And therefore it means something. And so you're getting into an era where rules-based international relations, norms, things like that were carried sway.
Now you're getting into an era where, you know, this is about deals and about the national, purely the national interest, about perhaps pulling up the drawbridge a bit, unless people, you know, want to do something that's strictly beneficial to the US. And that is what America First is all about.
Well, I think he's probably obliged to defend Greenland whether or not he owns it or not because it's, you know, part of Denmark, which is a NATO member. So, yeah, I don't really know. I mean, don't forget Donald Trump has already raised the prospect of not coming to European countries' aid if they were attacked by Russia. He's already dangled that idea of…
of reneging on Article 5 obligations, as they're called, under the NATO treaty. So he seems prepared to disrupt in that way in a fairly radical sense. And the irony, of course, is the only time Article 5 has ever been invoked was after September 11th.
It would be probably pretty rapid. There's only 57,000 people. I shouldn't laugh at Greenland. And it's – although I did read something that said, you know, you can – that New York restaurateurs would be very happy because the sort of deep water fish that could be caught and flown to New York restaurants in four hours would please their diners a lot.
The problem with this, of course, is that the cartels don't just do drugs. They're involved in all parts of the Mexican economy. The connections between the U.S. economy and Mexican economy are huge. The trading goods across the border is massive. And so this could have a real chilling effect on U.S. businesses who think it's just too risky.
We have no idea of finding out whether this group or this company or this factory has any connection to Ocarto. So we better not do it. And then also there's this question of Mexican migrant workers who come into Texas and other places like that seasonally and send money back home. That's billions of dollars a year, apparently billions and billions of dollars a year in remittances.
Now, the companies that organize those remittances, the PayPal's or the Western Union's, Do they know where that money is being wired back to? Do they know that that person is being wired back to doesn't have some connection with a cartel? So all these things could really sort of clog up. the free flow of money and trade and business across the border, which is advantageous to both countries.
So the implications are huge on this one. Other administrations have thought about it before and thought too complicated. And, of course, there are existing laws, which means if you start doing business with these cartels, then your assets can be seized. It's not that there's nothing on the statute book for this, but this is much, much broader.
Showing 1101–1120 of 1,144 · page 56 of 58
← Previous
Next →