Dani

No, no, no, no, no, no. They don't want curious people working on like lower levels of this stuff at all. Like they're not. They want you to just come in and be like, my job is to do this and then have blinders up to everything.

Ain't no snitches. Exactly. Exactly.

Oh, man, what a fun place. Just a bunch of sober Coke dealers.

It's digital only and everybody is not only funny, but a good person, which is a Venn diagram that I wish more people in comedy paid attention to. Yes.

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's just one is just on a longer timeline and eventually. Maybe.

Yeah, no, he is just trying to help.

Immediately doesn't trust the woman. Okay, good. Yeah.

He's like, man, this six-year-old fucking with me. Right, right.

So let me turn you into a chicken first and then tell me if you saw the aliens or not. Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, people aren't susceptible to being influenced to say things to please somebody either.

That's their problem for going dynamic. That's right. That's right.

Fuck yeah.

What a name.

Man, good on you, Leo, for making it to adulthood. Yeah. That's a real boy named Sue situation. Leonardo Sprinkle.

He's married, right? Is he got a wife? Oh, yeah.

She's putting up with a lot. I know the power of disassociation this woman is capable of.

It's like, honey, I need the car to go to the grocery store. No, I have to go interview this woman. I got the aluminum cable. Get the tinfoil out. Babe, we need it for the potatoes tonight. Absolutely not. I need it to protect us from aliens.

Yeah, where are those bodies? Where are those bodies, Polly Boyd?

There's inside and outside beauty, you know?

No, I have a friend that is her sister's an ER nurse. And when she gets in her car, her whole backseat is full of those claws. Because when he gets in her car and she throws it, she just takes it out and throws it in the backseat. Because the number one thing that she sees in her ER room is that in women's skulls from car accidents. Thankfully, this lady seemed fine.

Yeah, it's a whole full of nukes.

Damn. Nobody's doing sex ed on these aliens. That's the problem. They got to learn to wrap it up.

Oh, I see. Yeah. Got it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We're going to keep refining from our side until we actually make him a believer. And he'll feel great because he's passed all these tests. So he's going to start looking less and less because of how smart he believes he is, too.

Um, it was a slow day in the office when they came up with it. It was like, ah, well, we got to do something this weekend.

Hey, I love an ironic grant. Ironic grant money still spends.

So what do you think, like the like the internal notes of a person that constantly lies are like, is it just like a notebook? Is it like a series of post-its around their house? How do you keep that shit straight? It sounds exhausting.

How many timeshares do you think they own? It feels like they could take advantage of a lot. Oh, my God.

He's getting there. Yeah.

I mean, I want to know who's writing this stuff because that's the best job on the base.

Okay. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I hope the aliens don't have aluminum foil.

I think you got to sign him up for bowling league or something. Get him bowling. Yeah. Let's get some more social contact. Maybe. Yeah. Social schedule a little bit. You know what?

Yeah. Yeah.

This is so crazy. And now there's an art director involved. Yeah, there's an art director. It's become a full production. There's production meetings about what to do to this poor man.

Yeah, exactly. Let's get everybody off the scent once again.

Oh yeah. It feels like they probably would have like broken out in some sort of like, yeah, stress rash of some kind. Like, yes, that's fair. I have several friends from the California fires that had them a week ago. Yeah. Right. Right. Imagine prolonged experience to potential aliens for years. Yeah. You have rashes, too.

I just need you to sign off on that.

In 1978, Thunder Scientific had 30 employees. By 1981, the number was down by almost half.

That's why I didn't burn. That's why I didn't burn.

Hooray. So exciting. But they make pretty firework alternatives. It's fine. Yeah, it's all good stuff. Yeah, don't worry. They can form Steve Harvey in the sky.

They should have done that. What if the aliens love Steve Harvey? Oh, my God.

Poor wife.

Oh, man.

Yeah, for real, man. Also, shout out to the place he was committed, apparently. Apparently they did the job. Yeah, that's serious deprogramming.

Yeah, we had a computer bad. Man, some poor doctor just cracked all over their knuckles and said, all right, let's get into it.

I'm sure he wrote a script, but... I'm sure he wrote a script, yeah. A lot of people have written scripts.

I would never. I absolutely would never do that.

It reminds me of... What's the... In the... Tanya Harding... In the assault of Nancy Kerrigan, Tanya Harding... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Galooly and his idiot friend. The amount of bullshit that they just... Believe about themselves and talk about, like, yeah, like, the other guy, Eckhart, he, like, talked about how he, like, was a special forces guy and had all this shit made up.

Yeah, if you've actually done any of this stuff, you're like, it's not the movies, buddy.

I have a lot to answer for and process. Didn't like it.

Not worth the free beer to talk about adobially, no.

Of course. Maybe the alien was inside of you, listener, the entire time.

Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, define what an alien is. Is it something that works against the good of humanity? Then in that case... The government is run by aliens. I don't know. Who knows? Who knows what's out there or in here, apparently.

What a transition.

Thanks, Sophie. Yeah, you can find me online at Brandazzle on all of the platforms, including the new ones and the old ones. My podcast is called Lady to Lady. It comes out every Wednesday and has been around for 13 years. Burn This Records is my comedy label that I run, where I put out amazing comedy albums of people all over the country that are very funny and also good people. And then

I have my own album coming out on that label in the middle of March, and I would love for you to buy it. That'd be amazing. So yeah, brandyposie.com has all the information for all of the things. But yeah, come say hi. If you're a fan of the show, you'll like me, I promise. So come on over.

If you want to test your relationship, go down an alien hole.

Do you know there's no nerve endings in your elbow skin? That's the hottest thing about it. Yeah, I know. It's an elbow guy. I had a friend in my comparative religions class that discovered weed and would make everybody bite his elbows at the beginning of every class.

Yeah, I lied because I also tell the truth. Yeah, exactly.

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Well, currently he's a born again meteorologist in North Carolina. So, yes, that is a pervert.

It's like a step above base janitor, but like also the same kind of. Yeah. Not to besmirch either job necessarily, but also like you're not passing security. I'll besmirch it a little. Yeah.

I'll let you just a scooch of smirch. We'll take it.

Right.

Right.

Oh, for sure. Yes. Yeah, this low-rent Bond is definitely a movie that I'd be into.

Like, that's part of the point. Yeah. Hey, 18 year old without a frontal lobe that is fully formed. You want to see aliens right now? Like, unless I want to fuck with you specifically, maybe, but like not like an official constructive capacity for sure.

Yeah, exactly. You know all those push-ups you did? Guess what? Here's also aliens. You passed the test.

Yeah, of course. Before we get elbow deep into aliens. Bow in.

Getting it down, baby. Yeah, I run a comedy record label. It's called Burn This Records. We seek to create equity between our artists in a way that most comedy labels don't. I put out 17 albums last year. It was our first year this year. We have about 15.

I'm reading it in a book. It's definitely been recounted several times. But also...

Hi, James. It's really good to be on.

Yeah, well, that's a big question because it's a big project. It's been going on for quite some time.

Yeah, it's kind of been lost in discussions and news about the Syrian civil war because it has been such a complex, multipolar, multi-ethnic conflict. And it's been going on for, what, like 13, 14 years now? Yeah. coming up to 14 years, the Kurds in the northeast had been preparing for some time before the outbreak of civil war back in 2011 for something like this.

Obviously, they didn't know this was going to happen, but they had been working on revolutionary emancipation for decades and in particular since around 2000 they'd been working on this concept of democratic confederalism which is moving away from a sort of

what they call an old paradigm of Marxist-Leninist thought, to this system they've now quite effectively built up there, where democracy is bottom-up, it's structured around small communes and self-organising units, cooperatives.

There's a market economy, but it's not a capitalist economy, where there's sort of radical emancipation of oppressed peoples, particularly women, who are really centred in the revolutionary process and organising that. And I think because they, maybe you can't call them conflict avoided, but they haven't avoided conflict. They very famously defeated ISIS amongst other groups in the Northeast.

They fought against al-Nusra Front and various other jihadi groups. They also didn't enter into serious conflict with either the FSA, as they were, or the regime and the Assad regime. Mm-hmm.

And so they kind of managed to carve out a sort of democratic and semi-enclave, I mean, people would describe it as a state that they quite vehemently say it's not a state, in the northeast of Syria, whilst the worst of the fighting was between the Assad regime and the FSA and groups that came out of the FSA in the west and south of the country.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think something that is hard to convey or fully understand unless you spend a lot of time there or you're deeply involved with any of these communities is quite how hard that was to do. Yeah. A lot of different ethnic groups, political groups that hate each other, you know. Yeah.

The Kurds, they brought in lots of different policies like the right to be taught in your mother tongue. When they took power 2012 onwards, they were very keen not to just sort of replace everything with Kurdish, make it a Kurdish state, you know, start being the oppressor instead of the oppressed.

They made sure that they continued using Arabic as the majority language because it is the majority language there. The north and east of Syria is still an Arab majority area. And this is despite the fact that they've been pretty horrendously oppressed by the Arab population through the Ba'ath Party and its oppressive systems for decades.

So it has been a pretty hard ongoing process to negotiate and to put aside pretty serious conflicts between quite a few different groups that exist there.

Yeah, it's pretty hard to discuss any of this stuff without talking about Turkey and without understanding where they're coming from. I think it's something that isn't said enough or understood enough that the modern state of Turkey is an ethno-nationalist project. I don't say that as a slur, that's like a basic founding principle of the state.

It's a state founded on genocide and the mass forced demographic change across the whole country. And it's continued that way. And there have been reforms for sure. But that's still a founding principle. And even now, sort of speaking a non-Turkish language in the Turkish parliament is a pretty serious violation.

And the size of Turkey, the size of its economy, the size of its military, the regional power status they have in the Middle East means that they have an enormous gravity. They have an enormous amount of power over Syria. A lot of the goods and services that Syria relies on come in through Turkey or rely on Turkish industry.

And the Turkish military is a huge supporter of the groups in the northwest, like Hayat-ı Al-Sham and the Syrian National Army. And of course, The Kurdish question within Turkey is the main reason for their antipathy towards what's been built up in northeast Syria.

As much as the self-determination for oppressed people as minorities is something that's an issue, the fact that it's Kurdish-led and in particular it's emancipatory for Kurdish people threatens this ethno-nationalist aspect of their state. And it... they see it as something that needs to be nipped in the bud, right?

And they've sort of done that with northern Iraq, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, by essentially vassalizing the KDP, the main party there. And they know they can't do the same in northeast Syria, and the military option is their best chance, their best hope. of nipping Kurdish emancipation and Kurdish self-determination in the bud and preventing it from sort of snowballing across the region.

Yeah, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I think it's so hard for people to report on the Syrian civil war. It's very hard to convey like a simple coherent narrative of one side versus the other, you know, like Ukraine versus Russia, the Russian world and Ukrainian world. Mm-hmm. Because there are so many different groups in the SNA, it's an important one.

And they are grouped together with this concept of the rebels that have liberated Syria. Despite the fact that they're not actually part of Hayat al-Sham, the liberation movement, as it calls itself, that have taken over Syria. Yeah, the Syrian National Army, it's kind of like a loose collection of various, some of them call themselves brigades or groups.

It's essentially a military proxy force of Turkey. They don't have a coherent political framework. They're not revolutionary groups. They're not liberatory or emancipatory. They wouldn't describe themselves as that in the same way that maybe HTS would. I mean, the Kurds in northeast Syria describe them as gangs, which kind of sounds like a propaganda term.

But when you actually look at what they do, they really are like sort of a criminal enterprise, a criminal gang that's used as a convenient proxy force by Turkey because ultimately Turkey has a massive military. Their navy is quite underfunded and not particularly well staffed. The air force has suffered pretty seriously from the fallout of the The coup in 2016. But the army is massive.

It's relatively well funded and their drone program is huge. The thing that they struggle with is the losses that are incurred against Kurdish groups, particularly the PKK in the mountains between Iraq and Turkey. And they need to they need to control that because they realize that they've been fighting militarily, as you say, since the early 1980s.

And they can't have a Vietnam situation of a mass movement against their military occupation and against their military efforts in Syria. They can't afford financially or politically to get into a quagmire there.

And so by funding this sort of collection of groups called the SNA, that's their way of being able to incur pretty massive losses without having to report on it, without that creating unrest or opposition within the Turkish population of Turkey.

Yeah, it's been very fast moving. As you say, it's only been two weeks since the battle for Aleppo started, if you can call it a battle. So the SDF, so this is like the alliance of military groups that falls under the remit of the self-administration in the northeast Syria.

So the YPG and the YPJ are like the most famous and largest components of this force, but there are a whole bunch of Arab and Syrian and Armenian units within the SDF. Yeah. they held this sort of salient pushing out into northwest Syria towards Afrin, which was captured by the SNA in Turkey in 2018. That was on one side surrounded by HTS and on the other by the SNA.

When things really kicked off, the SNA started a pretty concerted campaign to capture this area known as Sheba. And because of its position and its relatively difficult terrain and difficult logistical position to resupply, They pulled back from that towards Aleppo and Manbij, which is the only major city that the SDS still held on the west of the Euphrates. And it's the area closest to Aleppo.

They got hit pretty hard. If you follow a live update map or any of these sort of update maps, it looked like that collapsed pretty quickly. Actually, it ended up being a sort of large gray zone of cities. the guerrilla attacks potentially still ongoing.

It's been really murky and hard to tell what's going on there, but essentially there's a large area of uncontrolled but heavily contested territory between Aleppo and the Euphrates River now, which the SDF and the SNA have been fighting over. One of the curious things for me is that the Turkish Air Force and military did not get involved for a while.

But after about a week, they did, and they started hitting Manbij very, very heavily. And at that point, when the center of Manbij started being contested and far over, the U.S. stepped in. We don't know the details of it, but there seems to have been some kind of negotiation, whereby the suggestion is that if the SDF fighters pulled back across the Euphrates,

the SDF would assure their protection from any further assault. We don't know how true that is, and we know that today further negotiations on this failed. But it's really hard to tell right now as we speak what's disinformation and what's truth, because stuff is only coming out officially in dribs and drabs.

Yeah. For instance, like just before we came on air, I saw a couple of videos being posted by pro-Turkish accounts of purportedly showing mass troop concentrations lined up against this border wall waiting to invade. And I realized that they were from 2019 when Sirikani and Talabayat were invaded and they were just reposting material from then.

as disinformation on these movements and whether the attack's going to happen, what the negotiations between the US and Turkey turned out to be. And the truth is, right now, we don't know exactly what's going on.

Yeah, we saw this a few times when Man Beach was reported to have been captured by the SNA and they posted videos of themselves in the middle of the city. And then an hour later, the SDF posted a video from the centre of the city of 20 or 30 dead SNAs blitting about the streets and them flying their own flags. So, yeah. Yeah, it's really it's really hard to tell. It's also really hard.

It's like anyone who cares about the region or has been there has reported on it. And anyone interested in the kind of politics that the Kurds have built up in the region and others, I should say, is, you know, it's been a multi-ethnic project. If you care about that, it's really hard not to be glued to social media to see what's going on. But it can be quite detrimental to morale.

It can be quite an act of self-harm to be constantly checking on this because it's so murky. And as you say, things can turn around within two hours of info or disinfo getting out there.

I mean, I think the best way to answer that question is to look at what's already happened. So in 2018 and 19, they already captured three significant cities that were under control of the self-administration. So the first and most famously was Afrin, which was in the far northwest of the country. like just north of Aleppo, sort of jutting out into Turkey. That was a majority Kurdish city.

I don't know exactly, but it was something like 80 or 90%, which I think is higher than any other city in northern Syria. And it was also like, it had seen the least fighting of pretty much anywhere in Syria by that point. So the war had been going on for like, what, seven years, and everyone was pretty much untouched. So it was in a pretty good state.

And Turkey and the SNA invaded just as the war against ISIS was winding down. And I mean, it's become hell on earth. It's been almost completely depopulated. I think it's less than 10% now Kurdish ethnically.

It has been ruled by a number of different groups. We can say the SNA, but different groups within the SNA have fought over it. The HTS at times have had control over certain parts of the area. And there's been a lot of infighting. There's been horrendous war crimes committed. rape, murder, and thousands of disappeared people.

And as you say, they really like to openly put videos out of them committing this stuff. I mean, they're pretty shameless about it. There are some pretty disturbing videos of them mutilating the bodies of fallen YPJ soldiers, of committing some re-executions, of wiping out whole towns. It's been awful. And

The same thing happened again in 2019, around in October, when they captured Sary Karni and Tal Abyad. And it's worth also pointing out that these were not Kurdish-majority cities as far as I'm concerned. I think that Sary Karni maybe was about 50%. And...

Tel Aviv, which is kind of close to Kobani, I'm pretty sure wasn't Kurdish majority city, but it was organised under the self-administration and it was organised quite effectively. And they committed the same horrific crimes there. They are an anti-Kurdish force, if we can say that. They are... They do have a stated goal of committing genocide against the Kurds. That's not an exaggeration.

That's something they openly say. But they don't seem to care who they steal from or who they rape or who they extort. Wherever they go, it's death and destruction. And it still is now. And there's still something like a quarter of a million internally displaced people from Kurds.

from these areas in northeast Syria, hoping to go back and now having to see the situation get even worse and not knowing if they ever will be able to.

Yeah, I think this is actually a really good political education to see what's happening, because what's been built up in the Northeast has been built up over decades, right? They like to use this analogy of the mycelium and the fruiting bodies of a mushroom.

They appear to magically emerge from the earth in the autumn out of nowhere, but actually, you know, they've been brewing underground for years before. And they use this analogy because it took decades to put in place these structures. That's why they were ready

As soon as the regime, the Assad regime, pulled out and collapsed in the face of ISIS in the early stages of the war, they were ready to build up these structures. They already had self-organized militias. They had the economy planned out. They set to work immediately. And the SNA don't have any of that. They are... a force of convenience.

They're mostly sort of young men who were in groups before that were defeated in Syria, like ISIS, who are simply taking the opportunity to enrich themselves. And that's also very convenient for Turkey because they do the dirty work against the population of northern Syria.

So I think it's worth saying that that aspect of it, that preparation, that resilience, is something that also works in favour in the event of the worst case of full invasion of northern Syria. I do think they are significantly better prepared than they were in 2018 and 19. And even if the worst happens, even if militarily it's defeated, that's not going to be the end of this project, right?

It's not going to be the end of this emancipation. There's now... An entire generation of young people in northeast Syria who have grown up entirely living amongst a liberated and emancipated region and people. That's not something you can militarily defeat. So I, you know, I'm not completely hopeless. Obviously, I'd be like devastated if... The worst does happen there.

But I don't think it means the end of this incredible political. And it feels wrong to call it a project because it's not. It really is a revolution in every possible meaning of the word. And it's deeply embedded now.

Yeah, I mean, this is something that I worry isn't being spoken about enough. I don't as a non-Syrian don't want to say to people, you know, you shouldn't be celebrating your own liberation because people should absolutely should be. And it's their right to be. And I'm like, yeah, extremely happy that.

this brutal dictator has gone i mean it's it's hard to summarize quite how awful he was and it's it's deeply frustrating that he's probably not going to see justice yeah but it's also really hard to see stuff which is really reminiscent of like uh 1979 tehran 2003 baghdad of a sort of jubilation whilst at the same time there are videos of sort of pogroms being carried out against minorities

minorities like the Alawites who were in control, and you don't know if the person being executed in the street was a torturer, an intelligence agent. You don't know who they were, but this is happening. But you're also seeing Salafist groups raising their flag, hardline Islamists raising their flag in places like Latakia and Tartus that have significant minority populations.

I am very, I mean, concerned is the right word. Like, it's hard to feel that spirit of liberation when you see not only these things happening, but that the people who have captured these state institutions are admitted former members of Al-Qaeda. And they are jihadis, hardline people that have now got to very effectively have made themselves out to be moderates. But

My gut feeling is that we're going to see something like 1979 Tehran of a lot of talk of reconciliation, a lot of talk of the concerns of the Kurds or working with the communists. But mass executions and oppression is not far around the corner. And I guess when the jubilation dies down, my question is, what's going to happen when

Minorities do demand their rights or women don't want to wear a hijab inside the buildings of state institutions. And I'm finding it very hard to believe that these men who are professed Islamists are going to allow a moderate future to exist.

Yeah, Al-Hol is a really important point to talk about. Al-Hol is a very large camp. It's hard to sum up what kind of camp it is because it's so vast and has different sections. It's near al-Hasakah, which is one of the largest cities in northeast Syria. It mostly contains families who were members or were resident in the Islamic State when it collapsed.

So in the beginning of 2019, ISIS was sort of squeezed into this little corner in the eastern side of Syria between the Euphrates and the Iraqi border. And when the state collapsed, or the caliphate collapsed, a lot of these people had nowhere to go. And a lot of them were foreigners who were coming from abroad. And when I say a lot, I mean like tens of thousands.

There were something like 20,000 families left within Susa and Bagos, like the last parts of the caliphate, to hold out. And they didn't have anywhere to go. There were already camps set up for IDPs and for members of ISIS and families in northern Syria. But al-Hol was rapidly expanded to take these on. So it's a sort of semi-prison, semi-open camp.

that I think peaked at 75,000 people, which it sounds like a lot on its own, but when you consider that a large city in northern Syria is about 150,000 people, it still is significant. You probably have more accurate recent figures than me, but I think the current population is about 40,000.

The big problem that the self-administration have had is multitude, really. Many of the people there are foreigners. Many of them don't have papers. Many of them come from countries that either don't want them back or will almost certainly execute them if they're sent back, like Iraq, which is against the policy of the abolition of death penalty in Syria.

There are some in Al-Hol, but mostly in other camps in the north and east of Syria, former ISIS members like Shammam and Begum who come from countries like the UK who simply won't take them back. And the UK is taking back some families that simply refuses to take back their citizens who joined ISIS as, you know, card-carrying members. Yeah.

So they've made a pretty massive effort to repatriate as many families as possible. They've made a big effort to rehabilitate and de-radicalise as many people as possible. They have shrunk the camp massively, but they're still... yeah, 40,000 or something left there. And these are like really, a lot of them are really radical.

Like I think, I don't know what an exact number is, but something in the order of 10,000 of them are still like professionally members of ISIS. And they have a lot of children. And this was something that shocked me when I was at the end of the caliphate in Baghdad and witnessed tens of thousands of people coming out. And I could not, have imagined how many children there were.

And this was like, what, five years ago now, coming up to six years ago. So some of them who were, you know, seven, eight, nine years old are now like heading towards their mid-teens. They've spent their entire lives being radicalized. And like, what do you do with them?

And I think it's no coincidence that in previous Turkish attacks, because Turkey's been attacking the north and east of Syria for the last five, six years now, through the air, through information warfare, a lot of their attacks have focused on trying to break the people out. They have bombed the entrances to prisons multiple times.

They provided funding and arms and ammunition to groups that are trying to break them out. and they provide a safe passage back to Turkey for those who have managed to escape.

So it's massively in their favour, but of course it's a Pandora's box, because if that does break open, if these people aren't repatriated or aren't de-radicalised, then that's a lot of people who have pretty much only known their whole lives an extremely radical, fascist, Islamist ideology. I don't think they're just going to give it up. They're not going to join this moderate future Syria.

Oh, I mean, I would happily apportion blame. This is entirely on the hands of the coalition. Northern East Syria is a very poor place. It's deeply impoverished. It's been kept impoverished by sanctions, by Turkey. The oil refineries, the industry, the economy has been smashed to pieces. They've held on really well. All credit to them. They have maintained this camp.

They have tried to give these people a life. But it's pretty awful conditions.

yeah and this could have been sold if the international community if the coalition in particular united states had uh helped with these repatriations who put political pressure on european countries in particular to take back their citizens and had just provided the funding you know for right they have provided funding i'm not saying they haven't pretty much but like

It's a drop in the ocean compared to the Department of Defense budget. You know, we're talking a few tens of millions here and there, as opposed to a concerted effort to de-radicalize and repatriate people that could pose a serious threat to Europe and the US.

I'm incredibly short-sighted. I don't like using the word terror or terrorism because I think they've become meaningless terms. But ISIS did commit horrendous acts of terror in Europe and the United States. And these people, a lot of them I'm sure, would happily do so given the opportunity. So I don't think the threat is sufficiently understood in the West.

Yeah, I think that's a really important point. When similar atrocities have been carried out in Europe, we see international tribunals, we see the ICC and the ICJ step in, we see arrests, we see prosecutions, you know, like Milosevic, like the Nuremberg trials. And ISIS was a massive state. It had something like 10 million people.

inhabitants it committed multiple genocides you know and this isn't just you know people in the region saying oh they're committing just like these are like western highly studied highly understood accepted by western states as genocide against like the azidis They committed horrendous atrocities. They posed an international threat and a massive regional threat.

And at the end of the caliphate, as a territorial realm, as a serious military presence, it just disappeared off the radar. I think this is a really... It really shows the sort of racist and colonial mindset behind this rules-based international order that the people who were their victims and who had left to pick up the pieces after it's got very little support or recognition.

And they've been calling for tribunals for years and it's just fallen on deaf ears.

This is a question that gets asked a lot.

It's also a question that's really hard to answer given how things are just across the border in Palestine. You know, I personally find it hard to... to engage and ask for help and ask for solidarity when there's a genocide being committed next door. But we might be about to see the same thing happen in Syria. And I do think we should be taking it seriously.

And yeah, anything from raising awareness to actually going there and lending support, anything on that spectrum, it's not just the material contribution that you can make. It's the people that do...

really feel left out they feel betrayed they feel let down by the international community by the rest of the world yeah and any act of solidarity goes on incredibly well like the first year i was there i was basically useless because i didn't speak the language i didn't know my way around i was like a burden on society more or less

And for people just like happy that you're there, you know, showing solidarity. And it's not about being useful. It's about that act. It's about more than that, is what I'm trying to say. And if you can show solidarity in any way you can, like this is, you know, incredibly, incredibly important to find to do it.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I would just add to that to say that solidarity with any group is a long term project, right? You're not going to jump in and be able to make a huge difference immediately. But also at the same time, like if the worst happens, if Turkey invades Fulon and there's genocide in northern Syria, that isn't the end of it. It's a massive international movement.

And there are practices from it that are being put in place in Turkey. And things that actually don't even have anything to do with the Kurds as a nation. And there are ways of organizing. There are methods that they use. There's personality analysis. There's criticism and self-criticism. There's a lot of that that goes far beyond a single geographic region.

And I think engaging with that can... And I've seen with my own eyes since I've been back, there's a lot of groups around the UK that use techniques... for self-organisation within land rights movement, within worker struggle, within anti-cuts campaigning.

And these have got nothing to do with Rojava, but they have seen that through solidarity with Rojava and Kurdistan, that there are ways they can improve their own practice and their own actions.

Definitely the RIC, that's the Rojava Information Centre. They are probably the best source on the ground in Rojava and Rojava They are a collective of journalists, a mixture of locals and internationalists who've been working there for six years now. So they're Rojava IC on various social media platforms. You can follow me as at Lapinesque, L-A-P-I-N-E-S-Q-U-E.

I'm also posting about it, although I'm not there anymore. I'm posting updates from friends and people I know there. And my take on the situation based on my experiences of being there for almost five years.

Thanks very much, James.

This is Danielle Robay from the Bright Side. Because you're worth it. Growing up, I remember hearing that famous L'Oreal Paris tagline and feeling empowered. With those four words, L'Oreal Paris broke the mold. Beauty was for all of us. For me, knowing my worth means being able to be my authentic self. It's more than just getting that perfect lash.

Knowing your worth is embracing the things that make you beautiful, inside and out. With a commitment to innovation and quality, L'Oreal Paris delivers groundbreaking products that help you take on the world. Through their Women of Worth program, they recognize 10 exceptional female nonprofit leaders each year, offering grants, mentorship, and a platform to share their inspiring stories.

Discover more about these extraordinary women and embrace your beauty with L'Oreal Paris. Because you're worth it.

Sure, you mind if I take this one, Hayley? So I would start by saying that our industry, our advocacy arms would riot if they assumed that federally qualified health centers weren't good care. Right. So I got to dismiss with that to start.

Yeah. So around the 1960s, there was the sort of free clinic movement that got started. And what grew out of that became the federally qualified health center system in the United States. So there are roughly 1600 unique federally qualified health centers all over the country. And we, as in sort of, you know, uh,

confederated set of health centers all across the country are responsible for treating those most in need in the United States. So the Medicaid population, those without insurance, we cannot turn anybody away if you do not have insurance. People in rural areas where healthcare is very difficult to access and to get, undocumented folks, and really everybody in between.

At the health center that I work at, we mostly treat folks on Medicaid, which is pretty typical. Although you'll find in states with no Medicaid expansion, it's a lot more uninsured and less Medicaid. But we are the nation's safety net health care provider. And without us, there are roughly one in 10 Americans would not get their health care.

Sure. So America does not have a nationalized insurance program, as we are very frustrated with most of the time. It's mostly commercial insurance that you mostly get through your job. But if you are not fortunate, it's not the right word.

But if you're not fortunate enough to get that, Medicaid is the system that gives health insurance to people who are living at or below the federal poverty line. With the Affordable Care Act or the ACA, Obamacare, that level raised a little bit. So you could still get Medicaid if you were at above the federal poverty line, but this is mostly for the working poor. That's who gets Medicaid.

Yeah. So most of the work that we do is fee-for-service. We're not a lot different than a lot of other places in that regard, right? If you have Medicaid patients, we are a fee-for-service program. We give provision of care to them on a per-visit basis, same as anywhere else in the country and how that works, and we get reimbursed for it.

What makes FQs different than everywhere else is two things. One, we get a special rate that is designated because of our willingness to take on these more expensive, more complicated patients and to ensure that they are healthy enough to keep About expensive systems of care, like emergency rooms and things of that nature. And two is that we have a grant called the Fed 330.

And this is a sort of like large sort of use it as you need to grant that depending on the agency is anywhere from five to 25% of your total annual funds and is meant to cover all of the folks who can't afford care and are uninsured.

Yeah. I think it's worth talking about the fact that, like, there are so many angles of attack on this, right? There is the one that is just very clearly aimed at trans kids, right? The EO that specifies, like, protecting children. It's nonsense. But that is aimed at ending this care everywhere. Now, are they going to be able to do it everywhere? I don't know. Maybe, but not quickly.

But they can end it for FQHCs all across the country by simply making it like the Hyde Amendment. Right. Right. Right. Then there are also just the doge fuckery that is going to harm all of this and may create a lot of the same outcomes, right? Which is they turned off grants kind of just across the board.

Yes, some of them were targeted on things like gender-affirming care, but most of them were just like, it's a grant, we're turning it off. And then there was the TRO, but much of that funding has remained frozen. We have been told that the system is up and running and that they... undid what they did and the courts stepped in and, oh, don't we have the courts still here in the United States?

Isn't that a good thing? But they just kept the funding off, whether because they're incompetent or because they're actively defying the law, doesn't really matter. And as a result, federally qualified health centers all across the country have laid people off. They have closed clinics and have entirely gone underwater in some cases.

And then those people are not there to treat the community that needs them so badly. Yeah. And all of these systems are grounded in their communities. So when you lose, you know, the clinic that's in LA that had to close its doors for the office that's, you know, on one side of town, the people there knew that place. It was part of their community, part of their existence.

It was grounded in that community and its community's needs. And that's just gone. And this puts us in a very difficult position and, you know, leadership in a very difficult position of figuring out, well, do I worry about these trans youth and the fact that they might kill themselves?

Or do I worry about the impact that standing up on principle and saying I won't toss them to the wolves might have on the rest of the system? And it becomes a very difficult sort of situation for us as providers to navigate. But, you know, in fairness to leadership, which I disagree with, for them, too.

Yeah, so on Trump's first day in office on the day of his inauguration, so January 20th, he signs 100-some-odd executive orders. The ones that are particularly of interest to us in healthcare were Protecting Children Against Chemical and Surgical Mutilation is the name of it, which is a disgusting and vile name. Yeah. And then protecting women, something, something, something. Defending women.

Yeah, defending women, which is similarly aimed at transgender individuals. And I think will be used after we are under attack for trans youth to come after trans adults in federally qualified health centers as well.

Those EOs led to later that week on Friday, we got emails to every PI, which is principal investigator on every federal grant that we had that said, because of those two, and there was one about DEI, which is also an executive order. you are not allowed to use any of these grant dollars in service of anything in defiance of these three executive orders.

So that was the first shot we got, and it came only four days later. It's threatening, but it wasn't specific, right? It didn't specifically say we're going to do X, Y, or Z, but it was, here's the threat. The following Tuesday, Doge is let loose and announces that they are freezing federal grant funding tied to anything that is in opposition to

to those things if you actually looked at the excel file that they released with the actual grants it froze everything like it was not just the stuff that they felt was in opposition to this it was like everything we have a ton of grants that were on that list at the agency that i work at and boy oh boy oh boy was there a lot of panic going around

So Wednesday rolls around and they get a judge to come in and sort of put a halt on it. And then later that day, the press secretary says, oh, we're just going to rescind the memo. We're still going to freeze everything. And then the judge comes back and puts a temporary restraining order. So in theory, what that should have meant is that all of that grant funding once again flows. And it did not.

Importantly, too, for us, given how much Medicaid dollars we take in, Medicaid portals in all 50 states went down, so we could not get any of those dollars in service of what we were doing for 12 hours. But still, it was this very concerning situation because Medicaid was not on their list of things that they were after, and yet we couldn't even access it at the state level.

A few more weeks go by and there's news popping about, hey, you said you unfroze stuff, but it's still frozen. Another judge issued an order saying that, like, no, for real, I need it this time. Unfreeze everything. I know some of the grants that we had that we couldn't access seem to have come back online already.

But I don't know, you know, I think it would be an impossible thing to do an accounting of like every single one that might have been turned off that might or might not be back on right now. But I am doubtful that at this point, every single grant across the federal agency is potentially available for folks. Just seems unlikely to me.

I think importantly, Haley and I have the advantage of working for a more economically stable institution. There's a lot of health clinics out there that have a week's worth of working capital, right?

So if all of a sudden they lose access to every grant dollar, they lose access to their Fed 330, they were scheduled to draw down on a grant that was going to cover a whole bunch of upcoming expenses, but they haven't done it yet. And then they can't, like in very real ways, that may mean that the doors are closed and the place goes under and that no one can get care there.

And there is this real challenge of, you know, how do we decide what is the best thing to do? But for me, and what sort of started working with, in our agency at least, to organize around this, is that, like, this is an anti-fascist practice. It is the right medical thing to do. It is the right ethical thing to do. But it is also our chance to take an anti-fascist stance against this government.

Because if we don't stand now for the very first group they're coming for, then the next group, which is without question trans adults and undocumented people, then those groups will fall just as quickly. And then at some point we're doing the poem, the first they came for the socialist thing. And I just refuse to be a part of that.

Yeah, I think the organizing side has been challenging but also hugely rewarding, right? It became really obvious really early on that both from the federal government's perspective as well as from our organization's perspective that the uncertainty was where they wanted us all to live and die. That was the place that served them and their goals the most.

And so how does uncertainty sort of foster? Well, people don't talk to one another, right? Like this is true kind of in organizational senses across the board, right? If you're in a union, you don't talk about your salary. It doesn't benefit you. It benefits the boss.

And so if we're not talking to one another about where our lines are, who we're going to treat, whether we're going to keep doing it or listen to them, what we're being told or not being told, that we're consulting lawyers, all these other kind of things, then we're all just alone in the dark kind of, you know, trying not to scream and cry about the horrors that are happening around us.

So we pulled together folks with conversation here, conversation there, folks who before anything was going on internally, you know, made really bold statements about what they would and would not do around this kind of stuff. And now all of a sudden there's an internal network that's looking at, well,

okay so individually we can keep doing this care because it's the right thing to do but as a group if they start coming after us we have a lot more power there's a lot more that we can do and i suspect and you know haley's getting at this point that like there are probably a network of us across the entire country in these kind of settings that are not talking amongst ourselves at our workplace but are really not talking about it amongst ourselves on a national level

And I think we have some power that could be used there to really make a difference in all of this. And I am optimistic that if we talk about this, we get this out there, we make sure everyone's communicating openly about it, that there's a real possibility that we can work together to prevent this from being the first of many dominoes to fall.

We sat down on a call and talked about, you know, what are we going to do? And I made mention that like, oh, through my other organizing work, I've got a DIY connection for estradiol. So that's a huge thing that will help us if we can't prescribe this anymore, if Medicaid stops covering it, yada, yada, yada. I was like, but I don't have a, you know, a DIY solution for tea.

If anyone knows of anybody, that'd be great. And immediately someone's like, oh yeah, absolutely. I do. It's tested. It's a 99.9% pure. We're ready to go. So now like, I wouldn't have done that. There was no way for us to know that that was the kind of radical work that people were doing, if not for coming together on this kind of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, fascinating stuff.

Which is also gender-affirming care, for whatever that's worth. Like, cis people get gender-affirming care, too.

I would say there's two conversations that we all need to be having. Like those external organizations are huge and necessary for direction. Within your own space, you have to talk to your colleagues in a way that's honest and talk to them about risk-taking, talk to them about where you will and will not budge on some of these kinds of things.

Talk to them about the value of the work that you all do, because there's more of you doing it. Talk to your trans colleagues. They exist. They're out there. Like they have very strong opinions on this, I am sure. And then talk to a lawyer, talk to an employment lawyer, because your corporate attorneys have very different goals than you do.

Their goal is simply to protect the company and its bottom line. And both they and the federal government and the sort of DOJ are spewing absolute bullshit. So don't let them flood the zone with nonsense. Get a lawyer who can tell you what's nonsense and stand firmly in that because it is.

And then when you start thinking about, as an organization, as a group, as a set of employees, communicating with leadership about these kind of things, know that the law is actually not on their side. It's on yours.

And let them know that they are exposing themselves to vulnerability for malpractice and for civil rights violations and any number of other things that they probably don't want to be on the hook for. This is the leverage that we've got right now.

It seems to have slowed things down a little bit internally for us that they've had to confront like a very well pointed out legal opinion that said that like they were exposing their providers to civil lawsuits if they didn't do this and that the FDCA, the Federal Tort Claims Act, didn't protect people under these guides. That has been really beneficial to us.

The other thing I would say is like there's a real union sort of feel to a lot of this. And as we started coming together, a bunch of us realized, well, we all kind of had union conversations somewhere along the way. But corporate unions and like SEIU represents a lot of like individual sort of arms of companies like the ones that we work at.

they aren't interested in the politics of the work you do. They're interested in your benefits, they're interested in you as a worker, but they're not interested in your relationship to the work. And so we're approaching this not necessarily as a union, but from the perspective that if we need to strike on behalf of patients and their access to care, like that's a tool in our toolbox.

And we don't have to do anything more than declare it a strike to be protected under the NLRB and some of these various different things.

And we can do it for political reasons instead of for pay reasons, which means we can do it as a diverse group instead of as all the nurses, all the advanced practice providers, all of the psychologists and therapists and LCSWs, where they break us apart by discipline instead of by, you know, what sort of managerial status you are.

I think one of the mantras I've been given to fellow colleagues as well as to our leadership to get their heads on straight is that fascism is messy, right? It's a scary, messy, there are a lot of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. But the things that in theory are still in place Like when and if they fall, we have different problems than the ones we're facing now, right?

So we still have, in this country, protections for your healthcare information. So if what you worry about in going to the doctor is that someone will find out that you're trans and put you on a list, like I can't tell you that's never going to happen.

But I can tell you that if it happens through your healthcare clinic, like we have significantly changed the threat model that we're all living in because HIPAA doesn't matter anymore and doesn't exist.

Your providers are spending enormous amounts of time thinking carefully about how they document, where they document, how much of a deal they want to make it, whether or not they can change the thing they're prescribing for you and what diagnosis it's for. We are finding ways to sort of throw as much cover and shade and camouflage over this as we can. But you shouldn't not come get care.

Your life matters. You being in the body that you were meant to have matters. Come talk to us. Come ask for help. We're here to do it. And we're not going to stop until they make us. And right now, they can't make us. And so we're going to keep doing it.

It's really important to ask your friends. That's really solid advice in part because whether I like it or not, a lot of organizations are taking the stuff that says, hey, we treat trans people down off their website, off their marketing materials. We are not trying to draw that attention. It doesn't mean we don't do it.

It doesn't mean we're not skilled and trained and educated and smart and passionate about it. It just means we don't really want to totally fly a trans flag on the roof right now because it's just going to cause everybody harm. So talk to your friends, talk to people in your community. They know us. We know them. I have a lot of activism experience outside of my work.

And it's amazing how many of those people end up being the same people that are in this conversation because of the way that this all works.

I think if you're looking as a cis person who gets your care somewhere that might get federal funding, but this is a thing that you care about, would encourage you to sort of make people get on record about this kind of stuff, right? It's been the most distasteful piece of all of this is the kind of like weaseled, the hiding in all of this. So force them on the record. Ask them.

If they don't tell you, send them an email. If they don't respond to the email, send a follow-up email. Make people get on the record about this so that we know where their values are. And if their values don't align with yours, take your business elsewhere. Because at the end of the day, healthcare is a business because the United States sucks. And so we have to use those dollars in the

I don't know that anyone will care to, and I certainly don't want to present us as the people with all the answers here. Cause we just like are figuring this out as we go to, but you can email us at community health resistance at proton.me. And maybe let's have a conversation.

Maybe there's like a ton of people in the FQ world who want to do like a Amazon or a Starbucks, like DIY union project where we're all working on this together for the politics rather than the pay.

Thank you.

This is Danielle Robay from The Bright Side. Because you're worth it. Growing up, I remember hearing that famous L'Oreal Paris tagline and feeling empowered. With those four words, L'Oreal Paris broke the mold. Beauty was for all of us. For me, knowing my worth means being able to be my authentic self. It's more than just getting that perfect lash.

Knowing your worth is embracing the things that make you beautiful, inside and out. With a commitment to innovation and quality, L'Oreal Paris delivers groundbreaking products that help you take on the world. Through their Women of Worth program, they recognize 10 exceptional female nonprofit leaders each year, offering grants, mentorship, and a platform to share their inspiring stories.

Discover more about these extraordinary women and embrace your beauty with L'Oreal Paris. Because you're worth it.

Right.

This is Danielle Robay from the bright side because you're worth it. Growing up, I remember hearing that famous L'Oreal Paris tagline and feeling empowered. With those four words, L'Oreal Paris broke the mold. Beauty was for all of us. For me, knowing my worth means being able to be my authentic self. It's more than just getting that perfect lash.

Knowing your worth is embracing the things that make you beautiful, inside and out. With a commitment to innovation and quality, L'Oreal Paris delivers groundbreaking products that help you take on the world. Through their Women of Worth program, they recognize 10 exceptional female nonprofit leaders each year, offering grants, mentorship, and a platform to share their inspiring stories.

Discover more about these extraordinary women and embrace your beauty with L'Oreal Paris. Because you're worth it.

This is Danielle Robay from the bright side because you're worth it. Growing up, I remember hearing that famous L'Oreal Paris tagline and feeling empowered. With those four words, L'Oreal Paris broke the mold. Beauty was for all of us. For me, knowing my worth means being able to be my authentic self. It's more than just getting that perfect lash.

Knowing your worth is embracing the things that make you beautiful, inside and out. With a commitment to innovation and quality, L'Oreal Paris delivers groundbreaking products that help you take on the world. Through their Women of Worth program, they recognize 10 exceptional female nonprofit leaders each year, offering grants, mentorship, and a platform to share their inspiring stories.

Discover more about these extraordinary women and embrace your beauty with L'Oreal Paris. because you're worth it.

You could get away with that.

God damn it, guys.

I shouted you. I shouted you. Yes. Who do you think you are saying I shouted at you? I speak in a very calm tone at all times.

Get to work. How about that for initiative?

Tablescape for my art form!

I can't fucking take this right now. Fucking millennials, I'll be back. Oh, fuck you.

Don't blame me for it. It's not my fault that you don't have the passion to keep your face straight.

I kissed the Keith and I liked it.

Absolutely not. Take her for taking a fucking toddler for a little treat. Absolutely not, Gary. I'm not taking her for ice cream. Not for one second. Not one sprinkle. Not one smidgen of fudge. She gets no ice cream. Not from me.

Understand your rank, little person.

I don't think they would have liked it. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Hold for it, hold for it.

Nobody will impregnate me. Nobody.