James Stout
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult
LeBron, Ramon James.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult
Kareem would be such a good choice.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult
He's way too moral. I have a frog named after him.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult
I do, but I'm biased because I think you'd be good at most things.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult
By the way, a hack Google job indicates it's Berkeley.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult
David, you have a podcast. Do you want to tell people about it?
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Zizians: How Harry Potter Fanfic Inspired a Death Cult
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
They're incredibly brave people and they've saved more than 300 lives. You can read more about them by going to my Patreon post, which also includes all the links for donation. The website for that is tinyurl.com slash help hyphen Myanmar. That's
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
tinyurl.com slash h-e-l-p hyphen m-y-a-n-m-a-r if you'd like to donate somewhere else an organization that you can donate to is the free burma rangers free burma rangers.org they're a fantastic ngo they've been doing a lot of medical work uh in the liberated zones of myanmar for a very long time they've also worked in rajava and lots of other places around the world where people need help
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
I spoke to Dave from FPR today, he's well, and he told me that they're already starting to respond to the disaster. So to donate to them, FreeBurmaRangers.org. Thanks very much. We appreciate your support.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
Hi, everybody. It's James here. If you didn't listen to what could happen here, you might not recognize me. My name is James Stout, and I am the guy who pops onto this feed every few months to tell you something very sad and then ask for your money. And that's why I'm here today. A terrible earthquake struck Myanmar today, the day I'm recording this, which is Friday, the 28th of March.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
It was 7.7 on the Richter scale. We know of more than 100 deaths, but it's likely the death toll is much, much, much higher. Lots of the telegraph and internet infrastructure has been taken out by the earthquake and the Hunter restricts internet and social media access. So we don't really know the full story.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
extent of the death, but we can imagine it will be very high as one of the areas most affected was Mandalay, which is the second largest city in Myanmar. I've spoken to half a dozen sources in Myanmar today, people who Robert and I have interviewed before. They're all okay, but they all shared how terrible things were.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
They said things were as bad as they were at the time of Cyclone Nargis, which was a terrible disaster in 2008. If you would like to support the people of Burma who are currently fighting against a tyrannical dictatorship, as well as dealing with the consequences of this natural disaster, there are a couple of ways you can do so.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
I was actually already running a fundraiser on my Patreon for MobiePDF. They are a casualty evacuation team in Southern Shan State, right at the fiercest part of the fighting right now. They don't fight. What they do is they go and they evacuate people who have been injured and they provide medical services to internally displaced people. They've been doing this since 2021.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
They're incredibly brave people and they've saved more than 300 lives. You can read more about them by going to my Patreon post, which also includes all the links for donation. The website for that is tinyurl.com slash help hyphen Myanmar. That's tinyurl.com slash H-E-L-P hyphen M-Y-A-N-M-A-R.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
If you'd like to donate somewhere else, an organization that you can donate to is the Free Burma Rangers, freeburmarangers.org. They're a fantastic NGO. They've been doing a lot of medical work in the liberated zones of Myanmar for a very long time. They've also worked in Rojava and lots of other places around the world where people need help.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
I spoke to Dave from FPR today, he's well, and he told me that they're already starting to respond to the disaster. So to donate to them, FreeBurmaRangers.org. Thanks very much. We appreciate your support.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
Hi everybody, it's James here. If you didn't listen to What Could Happen Here, you might not recognise me. My name's James Stout and I'm the guy who pops onto this feed every few months to tell you something very sad and then ask for your money. And that's why I'm here today. A terrible earthquake struck Myanmar today, the day I'm recording this, which is Friday the 28th of March.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
It was 7.7 on the Richter scale. We know of more than 100 deaths, but it's likely the death toll is much, much, much higher. Lots of the telegraph and internet infrastructure has been taken out by the earthquake, and the Hunter restricts internet and social media access. So we don't really know the full...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
extent of the death, but we can imagine it will be very high as one of the areas most affected was Mandalay, which is the second largest city in Myanmar. I've spoken to half a dozen sources in Myanmar today, people who Robert and I have interviewed before. They're all okay, but they all shared how terrible things were.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
They said things were as bad as they were at the time of Cyclone Nargis, which was a terrible disaster in 2008. If you would like to support the people of Burma who are currently fighting against a tyrannical dictatorship, as well as dealing with the consequences of this natural disaster, there are a couple of ways you can do so.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
I was actually already running a fundraiser on my Patreon for Mobier PDF. They are a casualty evacuation team in Southern Shan State, right at the fiercest part of the fighting right now. They don't fight. What they do is they go and they evacuate people who have been injured and they provide medical services to internally displaced people. They've been doing this since 2021.
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, you should be concerned that he has a dumb podcast where he demonizes trans people like, yeah, he signs vetoes all the time.
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There was a recall, but it was not for the right reasons.
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I want to talk about a couple of things. I'm going to try and keep this fast. I know it's already been a long episode. Let's start with ICE agents have been arresting people in the immigration court around the country and placing them in expedited removal proceedings. If you want to know more about exactly what the expedited removal proceedings are and how they work,
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You can go back to our episode, which will have aired the day before you hear this, and that will explain, and I talked to an immigration attorney there and explained a little bit more about how that works. This includes people whose cases were not dismissed.
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So previously it was reported that ICE was dismissing cases of people who had arrived less than two years ago and placing them under 240 expedited removal proceedings. Apparently, they are also detaining other people. I am not sure how that works. I have not seen any justifications for this to give me an explanation for it. I'm not sure how much that matters anymore.
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These people are going to have to fight their removal from detention, which is obviously going to be... A pretty unpleasant experience, right? Detention in these core civic or geo group facilities is pretty bad. I'm aware of cases where ICE misidentified the person being detained, cuffed the wrong person.
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And I'm aware that there are spectrum services who are ICE detention officer provider officers, at least outside some of these facilities, I believe also inside ICE. Spectrum Services, I've noticed, have been posting a lot of job adverts recently. This is something I sometimes keep an eye on, right?
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Like right before the end of Title 42, I saw they were advertising for ICE contractors to transport detainees, right? So this is sometimes... A sign that bad things are afoot in the immigration world. I'm guessing in this case, it's either this or a plan to further expand detention capacity, which is also something the Trump administration has been talking about, right?
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So they also have these various subjective orders authorizing more budget and the budget bill authorizing more budget for detaining migrants. Secondly, the South Sudan case, right? We covered this last week, a DVD at Owl vs. Gnome. We also covered it earlier in this week.
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If you go back to our episode, which aired on Wednesday, you can hear more about the sort of blow-by-blow timeline of that case. In the South Sudan case, the Trump administration seems to have gone directly to the Supreme Court to try and get an emergency stay on the injunction which afforded due process rights to the migrants who are currently detained in Djibouti.
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The administration asked for a stay of the court's injunction. The court's injunction had given them 10 days to assert their reasonable fear of torture and then a further 15 days to ask to reopen their case immediately.
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if the department of homeland security determined that fear not to be credible justice supreme court justice jackson has given the plaintiffs a week to respond to the united states the doj's call for a stay right so in practice these people will still have that 10 days from the injunction to make their claim that they have a fear of torture right um
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South Sudan has said that if these people aren't South Sudanese, it will just return them to their country of citizenship. So if the United States can't return them there because they have a fear of torture, it just seems like the whole South Sudan thing is just an end run around the Convention Against Torture, right? Their obligation not to return people to places where they will be tortured.
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Talking of returning people to places where they will be tortured, unfortunately, the Trump administration has deported 20 people to Myanmar. This is according to reporting in Myanmar Now. I've also written about it on my page, Patreon page.
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I've linked both of those in the show notes, but it should be noted that Myanmar Now broke the story and it's getting very little coverage in the United States. I can speculate as to why, but you probably don't need to hear me to sort of join the dots there. This is atrocious. Robert and I have both spoken to people with extensive experience of detention in Myanmar.
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And when we talk about the worst detention conditions in the world, we get to a point where it doesn't really make any sense for us to say A is worse than B. Right, right.
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We're talking about that level. Yeah. Like, I mean, things that I have heard, people have been electrocuted to death. People are waterboarded. People have acid poured in their mouths. Bodies are found without organs. People are beaten to such an extent that their entire bodies are covered with bruises and contusions.
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Many times people will only know that their family member is detained when they disappear. And then a few days later, they get a call telling them to pick up the body. Conditions in Burmese hunter detention facilities are atrocious. These people are currently being held at the Aung Ta Pai Interrogation Center.
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It appears that seven of the earliest, so this has been happening since March, it appears that some of these people have been released. The rest are being held by SAC, that's the Burmese Hunter Military Intelligence Units, who will almost certainly torture them. Myanmar does have a temporary protected status, but I think I've seen a couple of posts about this, so I just want to clarify.
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The TPS doesn't apply to people who entered after the TPS was granted or to people who have committed certain crimes. We know that at least one of the men they returned had been convicted of a crime. Not all of these crimes are like particularly heinous felonies, right? You can do a certain number of misdemeanors and also be deported under a DPS. But I'm trying to find out who these people are.
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I know that you can't download our podcast in Myanmar, which is a huge dub for us. But, you know, I know a lot of Burmese people do listen. So, you know, if you have any particular insight into this, you could reach out to us. We'll drop the email address in a little bit here. It does seem very unlikely that these people were given a chance to make a claim of fear of torture, right?
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Because it would be a very easy claim to make, given every major human rights organization on the planet has documented torture of detainees in Myanmar. I was just reading a report this morning about harassment of trans women in prisons in Myanmar. But that same thing goes for cis folks, for straight folks, for everyone, right? No one, no one comes out of there the same. They went in. Yeah.
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I can't believe that these people were given a chance to, to claim a credible fear because it would have been such an easy claim to make and they wouldn't have been returned there. So yeah, I wish this story was getting more reporting. I wish more people in the media in this country cared about Myanmar, but I,
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That's a drama I have been beating for four years now, and I think shit's going to change anytime soon. So I guess all there is to say is that I really appreciate those of you who do, especially those of you who listen to the show and take an interest in all things Myanmar. But yeah, if these people had been returned to a country that the U.S.
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press is more familiar with, there'd be a lot more noise about this. But this is absolutely unconscionable. Yeah. Yeah. These people will be tortured. It would not shock me if some of these people died.
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Yeah, I mean, it's documented that people deported from Thailand are immediately conscripted and sent into the military, right? So if they get out of prison, there's a good chance, especially if they're men, that they will be, and women do get conscripted too in Myanmar, but there's a good chance that that will happen too. They've been conscripting a lot of Rohingya people.
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So yeah, the outcomes of this will be very poor. And yeah, the only way torture stops in Burma is when the revolution succeeds and liberates the prisons. There is no reasoning with the Burmese hunter. Yep.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's me, James, today, here to bring you more terrible news about migration and deportation. And I'm joined to share that terrible news by Gillian Brockel, a journalist who has been tracking deportation flights to Djibouti. Hi, Gillian.
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I'm good. Well, amidst the crumbling of everything, it's wonderful.
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Yeah, welcome. Welcome to the Coulton universe. It's a Sophie Lichterman comic universe.
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The United States government attempted to deport 12 men, none of whom are Libyan, to Libya on the 7th of May, right? It got so far as to take them to the airport, right?
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In San Antonio, Texas. And then thanks to a injunction, a court injunction, those people were not taken to Libya. Those people were instead returned to a detention center where, as listeners of the show will now be aware, they were informed that they were being deported, renditioned, however you want to say it, to South Sudan. This news broke a couple of days ago now, I think Tuesday.
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Yeah. And that was when you were able to begin using your OSINT aviation knowledge, looking for this flight that was taking you to South Sudan. Because at the time, the United States government was claiming the flight was classified or like a state secret. Mm-hmm. And even in court, the judge wasn't aware if the flight was in the air, on the ground, could it turn around?
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The judge in the entity wasn't going to ask it to turn around. So I wonder if you could walk listeners through the timeline of this deportation and then how you were able to find out of millions of, maybe not millions, thousands of planes in the sky, the one that was taking these people to, as it turned out, to Djibouti.
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Can you explain those to people? Because I don't think everyone's aware of those.
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Yeah, explain. I think it's interesting for people.
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Yeah. Not a U.S. base, to be clear. People aren't aware.
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Yeah. And it went to Djibouti where it remains at a time of recording. Yeah. It's been raised since you first kind of identified this plane. It's been raised. I talked to Darla, so like an Irish member of parliament raised it today. I saw there was an exchange about it. I spoke to Paul Murphy, who's the TD for Dublin Southwest. Paul gave me a statement. I'm just going to read here.
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The very least the Irish government must do is to inform the US authorities that no more deportation flights are permitted to use our airspace and our airports. We must not facilitate this inhumane and illegal deportation policy. So it does seem like even if nothing was done in this instance, hopefully this isn't something that will be able to happen again.
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I know, as you said, people have been upset about that use of Shannon. I think they used Knock Airport as well for a long time because the US used them a lot in its war on terror. And Ireland has been a neutral country for a long time. And there's a feeling that it compromises out among some people.
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But this raises a really interesting question for those of us who are following the deportations, right? Which is, like, we've been thinking that it was happening on military or commercial flights, like you said. But there's this possibility that these smaller planes are being used for deportation. And, like... That's very concerning. It means we could have missed things.
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It also shows the timeline here is extraordinarily rapid, right? Like from the people being informed at 6pm, I believe it's 6pm Pacific. I've been spending a lot of time on Pacer this week.
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Yep. A lot of the money generated by the adverts in this show on Pacer. So at 6.35 Central Time, NM, who is one of the Burmese people in this class action lawsuit, right? So the lawsuit, a number of people trying to get a tentative restraining order against being sent to South Sudan now, previously Libya. At 6.35 Central Time, that person's lawyer was told that they had an order of removal.
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At 9 a.m. Pacific, the lawyer had scheduled a video conference. But at 8.27 Pacific, they were told that that person had already been removed. So pretty fast. And like, perhaps that's why they're using these like small... Can you give an idea of like, I guess a lot of people wouldn't have flown on a small aircraft, but these are quite like, this isn't a usual thing, right?
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Yeah, perverse is the right word. It is. It's perversely ludicrous. I don't know. It's so striking to me as well that somebody who has the financial means to own a private luxury jet to fight themselves around the world is also profiting off... The rendition of people who are trying now to plead in convention against torture, right?
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They will be tortured if they are flown via luxury private jet to South Sudan. And the South Sudanese government seems to have stated that it would just return them to their countries from which they have withholding of removal in the first place, which is why the US can't send them to their countries.
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Right. Yeah. And then have someone else do our dirty work, like send them back. Right. You found these contracts. Do you know how much DHS is spending like per flight on these things?
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We see a number of issues, questions that we can answer with these things. The United States deporting people to Venezuela. There are lots of entities in Venezuela which are under sanctions. How is it doing that? Who is it paying to do that? Where is our taxpayer money going? How much is it costing
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to achieve this rendition of a dozen people who, at the current time of our recording, which is Thursday afternoon Pacific time, the 22nd of May, I just checked the pacer again, which is what I do all day now, and Judge Murphy's most recent order had clarified that these people would have 10 days left to present their reasonable fear, right?
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So to present their reasonable fear and convention against torture proceedings that they would be, they could face torture, right? If they were sent to these places. If the Department of Homeland Security determined that they didn't have credible fear, then they would have 15 days to again petition for reopening of their migration case. So that's 25 days for those who are counting.
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That these people will presumably now have to be accommodated in Djibouti. Right. The DHS is claiming that they can do all these interviews, and that will necessitate translators. One of them speaks Karen, not a language that we have.
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I mean, there are lots of Karen-speaking people in the United States, but it's not a language that many immigration lawyers speak, so I'm guessing there will have to be a translator provided. And so all that is now happening in Djibouti, and we wouldn't have known that if we hadn't been able to track these flights, right? And so it's a very interesting way of...
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of approaching this and i think like increasingly the government recently lost a number of FOIA requests i guess like public records do not move at the same speed as the news cycle does like i file a lot of public records requests Most of them, I don't get anything back.
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Yeah, literally. I mean, I have public records requests that I made under the previous Trump administration that I believe are still ongoing. Yeah, it's infuriatingly slow. You have a right to inspect these records, but you don't have a right to inspect them at any particular time period. And so doing this kind of open source tracking thing,
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Offers us a window into this deportation machine that the government is building, right? Exactly. In cooperation with the super rich, like using your taxpayer resources. I wonder if people are interested in doing this, like how would you suggest they kind of get going? They're good explainers out there.
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Yeah, no, I think that's like there are countries which have strong legislation that could possibly prevent these, you know, these either planes transiting their airspace or if they're refueling there, as you said in Ireland, like perhaps prevent these people being renditioned to somewhere where they might face torture. I think it's a really valuable thing to try.
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Yeah, yeah. I know RTE are now camped out at the airport waiting for the plane to come back.
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It hasn't left the building. Look at the court proceedings. It's going to be three weeks. But yeah, it's great. You've made this an issue there, which I think it helps. Like all this stuff makes a difference.
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Right. I guess I can't find anyone who can answer the satisfactory question of like whose jurisdiction the plane is under.
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Yeah. These are all questions we can now ask because we know that it was there. And I think that's very valuable. Gillian, where can people follow your work? You published this on your ghost newsletter first, right?
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Nice. Do you want to plug your book while you have the opportunity?
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Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. It's me, James, today, and I'm joined once again by Kirsten Zittlau. We've heard from her before. She's an immigration lawyer who takes asylum cases. I'm going to talk about the asylum system, or I guess what's left of it today. Kirsten is representing somebody I met in the Darien Gap, Primrose, who you've heard from before.
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So we're going to talk about that case, and then we're going to talk a little bit about ICE Detentions Inside Immigration Court. Welcome to the show, Kirsten. Thank you, James. It's good to be here. Yeah, thanks for coming. I know you're extremely busy. Can you explain to us, like, the asylum system is essentially coming to an end, right? We are not getting new asylum cases.
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What is the situation for people in the asylum system right now?
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Right. So for those people fighting their case, the asylum system was already an uphill battle, right? And it became harder after Biden's asylum ban. It was already harder after Title 42. Like, people who listen to the show would have known about the people who crossed in 2023.
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And, of course, they would have followed those people who I met in the Darien Gap, some of whom, very few of whom, crossed before January. Right. literally one, I believe that I'm aware of. Can you explain what the asylum system is like for those people now?
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Okay. Yeah, I think it's really important that we do. There are still possible victories to be had within the court system. And asylum is one of the places where there's no more getting on the train, I guess. The people who are on the train now, we can, and people should, if they have the financial means. And we'll talk about how they can do that later.
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People should support those people because... There's no one else who can go through that system. And like, there are people who have gone through horrific things to get here and horrific things in the places that they came from. And even if it's not everyone we would like to keep safe, we should do everything we can to keep those people safe.
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Yeah, I think that the rates of success for people who don't have counsel are dramatically lower. I haven't looked on track recently, but you can normally find that on the, I think track is no longer the University of Syracuse, but it's a place where you can find information, statistics. Let's talk about one of those cases, if that's okay.
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And obviously, you know, we won't intervene in anyone's privacy any more than we have to, but like, I want to talk about Primrose. Primrose is a Zimbabwean woman who I met in Bajo Chiquito when I was in the Darien Gap reporting on my series. People heard from her in the series.
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uh i don't know my family and my family they don't know where i am right now but i make it yeah now you're here i make it you're safe yeah she is now in the asylum process right can you explain a little bit about like where she is in the process and i will eventually do a scripted series on this but like i guess can we get an update on her situation and how it's progressing
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Yeah, I mean, what's the point of having the judge or having the whole process, right, if then they're going to declare this clear bias?
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Yeah, or people who don't have counsel. Getting that self-deportation notice if you don't have counsel, you could assume that you are just obliged to leave and that your process is over.
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Right. Yeah. It kind of nullifies the whole system.
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Yes. Yeah. I mean, it seems even like I think the executive order said permanently leave the United States. Right.
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Yeah, that's that's pretty bad. Let's take a break for advertisements here and then we'll come back. All right, we are back. And we've spoken about these like self-deportation orders, right? For other people who have entered more recently, right, entered within the last two years, this has been happening. We're recording on the 22nd for the last two days now.
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It seems like ICE is dismissing the cases against them and then detaining them directly in court, if I'm correctly informed.
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Jesus. Yeah. I thought ICE couldn't arrest people in California. Is that California state courts, not federal courts, which were in California? I believe so.
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Oh, OK. Right. Yeah. So they could have very broad authority to detain people like anywhere. That makes sense.
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Yeah. And fighting it detained will be a lot harder. They will be obviously in like terrible situation. They are, as we've covered before, often moved to a different state from their council. It will make it a lot harder for them if they choose to go that route. I'm guessing that ICE is hoping that people won't fight and will just or DHS is hoping that people will just choose not to fight.
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Yeah, I think that's worth sort of focusing in on that this is a completely distinct and much more radical disassembling of the asylum system as we know it.
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Right. We are four months into four years, and we have seen a constitutional crisis, like a full-blown defiance of the courts. The day we're recording, the Trump administration is attempting to deport people to South Sudan. many of whom, 11 of 12 of whom are not South Sudanese, right?
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I guess from what I understand, their attempt to giving those people a credible fear screening was that they didn't hear them shouting from the cells they were detained in that they were afraid of being tortured.
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Yeah, my understanding is they are in a country which is neither the United States nor South Sudan on an aircraft at this time. And DHS is arguing that they can do their credible fear screenings there on the aircraft. I don't know how they plan to give those people privacy, translation, access to counsel.
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I just looked on Court Listener right before we recorded and Judge Murphy clarified, Massachusetts District Court Judge, that 10 days would be the amount of time that they would need to assert a credible fear. And then if DHS determined that they didn't have credible fear, they would then have 15 days to ask for the reopening of their case.
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TBD, is the United States going to somehow accommodate them in where they are? People are speculating they're in Djibouti, which is the largest US military base in the continent of Africa and close to South Sudan. And so if that's the case, yeah, I don't know how they will get due process. We will find out if they will get due process, I guess.
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Yeah, like if we no longer have habeas, it's a frontal assault on the Bill of Rights, like most of them.
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And like, this is where like the rubber meets the road, right? For like maintaining people's basic rights, dignity, and yeah, the right not to be sent to a labor camp in El Salvador or, you know, South Sudan, a country which is rapidly descending into conflict again. I thought the government was barrel bombing this week.
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You're still fighting a number of asylum cases, as we said before the call, like you probably won't be forever, right? Like at some point, there's just not going to be any more asylum cases. I know that you're accepting donations, I think, through Venmo on behalf of Primrose that we'll be sure to link to that Venmo account in the description of this show so people can donate if they'd like to.
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Now is the time to do it, right? It's not like this is going to be an ongoing thing. Like if people don't help now, then there won't be migrants to support or asylees to support later. So like, how can people materially support maybe in other ways, right? If they're like on hard times, they don't have the financial resources.
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What else can people do to, just to make this a little bit less cruel to some people who are among the most unfortunate people on the planet often.
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Yeah, no, it does. And it shows that, like, even if the government doesn't want you here, a lot of people want you to be protected. We want you to be safe. Like, yeah, the mental damage it does, I think it's hard to overstate. Like, I was talking, I remember, to a young woman in Paho Chikito, and, like, she was the only surviving member of her family. The government had killed everyone.
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And so she came to the U S right. To be safe. And like, now the government is coming after her in addition to the trauma she already has from watching her entire family die. Like now the most powerful government in the world is coming after you. I can't imagine how that feels.
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Yeah, like have people over for dinner if you can, or yeah, like call the detention center and put money on someone's commissary. Like just showing people that they're welcome is important. Like I know a lot of,
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the migrants like if i look at my phone right now in the time we've been recording one of the migrants i met the darian gap will probably have texted me they're in mexico right and they just want the world to know about the situation they know they can't come to the us anymore but sometimes people will say i guess the americans don't want us anymore and like that breaks my heart because i think most people if they knew these people's circumstances right like hundreds of people have reached out to me since the darian gap stuff to ask how they can help and like
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Most people do want those people to be their neighbors. And it breaks my heart that they think that we don't want them, that we would rather leave them to die wherever they're at. Like it's genuinely really horrible for me to think of that. So yeah, I would really encourage anyone listening, if you can, to do what you can.
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Yeah. Yeah. Like we can still help those people. And while we can, we should. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We do appreciate it. I know that your time is very valuable and you're really busy right now. So we really appreciate your time. You're always welcome back. And if there's anything else you'd like to say before we finish up.
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So no, yeah, this is considerably more severe. Yeah.
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Yeah, definitely. And I think it is important for people to do whatever they need to do to self-preserve and take care of themselves as well. I think that's a good place to end. Thank you so much for your time. And again, like if you're listening, please check the description of the show and we will have a link to Primrose's GoFundMe if you'd like to help. Thank you so much, James. Thank you.
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Yeah, it's the murdering people that's terrorism.
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Yeah. I think Kat Abu Ghazala, a Palestinian-American woman who's running for office in Illinois.
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Yeah. Anyway, I saw that she'd shared something about how this was something that evidently should be condemned, right? That is wrong and is not advancing the cause of Palestinian freedom. I think adventurous terrorism is a good way to describe it. And was just getting panned by people on...
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The internet, which like, I don't know, people engaging with this, like from a place it doesn't come from, like it's bad when random folks get shot and killed.
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The Assad test around Supreme as it's a fucking A-B test for someone having shitty politics.
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Yeah, Assad who gassed his own people, who murdered little children.
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There's the Stalin did nothing wrong brain type that we were looking for.
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Yeah. Like a lot of kind of telegram propaganda consumption type worldview here.
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yeah jesus christ i mean this goes with the like people who i don't know aren't useful to me or of no value right like people don't have inherent value and you know they don't agree with or are useful to him then fuck them they can die like i guess there's some kind of coherence there
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Talking of media capture, Garrison, we have been captured by the advertisers in this show. It's true. There you go.
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What does that mean, Gavin? That's not a sentence. Also, I made my living exercising for most of my 20s. You're a professional athlete. I've done sports. And then I've done all kinds of other shit where I still got paid to race my bike. Sports are unfair. It fucking sucks. I coached people who worked way harder than me. They trained super hard. They slept well. They ate better.
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Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they were not able to get to the same level. That sucks, but sport is inherently unfair. The idea that the only difference is your XX or XY chromosomality is nonsense. Especially in high school sports, kids will develop at different times. That is unfair. Some kids will excel, and then other kids will get better.
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The function of high school sports is not to find who can go higher, faster, stronger. It's to teach people to play nicely with one another and to communicate inclusion. And excluding trans kids is completely contrary to that.
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Yeah, if these people gave a single shit about women's sports, they'd have been there when women weren't getting paid the same. They'd have been there when they didn't get the same TV coverage. They'd have been there when they didn't get the same prize money.
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Yeah, now that I've faced a consequence for my shit, I hate trans people even more.
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podcaster who goes around who still hates you touring college campuses to debate 17 year olds that must be so hard for you it's gotta be tough gotta be tough gavin he did say in his podcast that his his kid likes charlie kirk not surprising maybe this is all just a ploy to be a cool dad yeah i'm not surprised he sucks at being a dad yeah gavin use some exudes wants to be a cool dad energy it's embarrassing
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Part of World War II, Tapper. Curious. Curious. Many such cases. Doesn't his kid want to be a cop? Is that Jake Tapper?
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And like Newsom clearly has no moral principle other than advancing his own career and personal power and wealth. Right now. But like, even if that is the case, it's so easy to be like, yeah, I'll fight him on this. I'll fight for the trans kids and get some like resistor points. But he's just too much of a fucking coward.
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Yeah, hopefully I've done a good job introducing you. I'm always terrible at that. What we thought we'd talk about today, Kevin, is your significant experience in Lebanon with UNIFIL. And I think, obviously, when we've spoken about this before, we've spoken about it from a sort of looking at it from above strategic level. But what we've not spoken about is what it looks like on the ground.
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Yeah. Explain those weapon systems for people who aren't familiar. Like what's a GPMG for someone who's not?
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So hopefully you can give us some insight into that, especially having been there both as an enlisted soldier and as an officer, I think. Can you explain at first, I think there's been a lot of the confusion or misinformation about like, how did these Irish, if we look at the Irish soldiers, that's the one you've obviously the most experience with. How did they end up deployed to Lebanon?
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Yeah. If you're comfortable, could we talk about that last one a little bit? Because I think it's one of the ones that are like, there's no mistaking that UN position, right? And you don't accidentally just go dropping JDAMs left, right, and center all over the place.
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They couldn't deconflict the airspace to launch it? Or what was stopping them launching their helicopter to evacuate?
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Is it a voluntary thing? Did they sort of say, put their hand up and say, I want to do this? Or is it your unit's going, so you're going?
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Yeah, there's a huge difference, yeah. I suppose what people will ask is like, it's, I think it's important to explain this from the point of view of someone on the ground is obviously UN troops are not there to fight. They're there to keep peace, but they are an armed presence. And so they'll wonder how or why the UN can or can't defend itself, the UNIFIL troops specifically in these positions.
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So can you explain your rules of engagement and how that works from sort of on the ground perspective?
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Yeah, that's an interesting... Do they not have... If you can't answer this, that's fine. Do they have, for instance, javelins, things like that? Do they have those weapon systems available?
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So for those, like the people on the ground then and now, there's not a great deal they can do, right? They can attempt to ask the IDF to stop, which they did, which has historically not worked. And they can take shelter in their bunkers, which they did, which is only helpful if they're not going to use bunker busting missiles to destroy that bunker. So like... It must be terrible.
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It's one thing to be engaged in combat with someone, especially if you're a soldier, right? It's another thing, and I found myself in this situation last year, to be effectively unable to respond. I'm thinking here of the Turkish drone bombing and fighter jets and bombers in Syria where I was, but it's a horrible thing to be in that situation.
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And for those peacekeepers, it must be a really difficult place to be.
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Yeah. So that's sort of where they find themselves now, right? Can you explain, like, you've got these positions along the frontier, and then you've got the headquarters that you just mentioned two days ago have been, I don't know, infringed by a bulldozer, attacked, depends how you want to say it.
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Yeah, and they've done consistently for a month or so now, firing directly into these observing positions. Are these positions that are now, are they left isolated? Because the IDF will advance past and around them, in addition to firing directly at them.
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Yeah. Israel stopped one of those at some point, didn't it? Like, was it a resupply movement?
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Yeah, yeah. And I think it's working well in terms of like, what's happening in Lebanon is bad. And it'd be better if it wasn't. But it's not at the same tier as it has been in Gaza.
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Yeah. And so many of those being civilians, right? People who absolutely no business targeting. Yeah. And that genocidal violence that we've seen in Gaza hasn't come to Lebanon. And in part, I think we can attribute that to there being observers there. Is that fair to say?
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Right, yeah, they've never really established like control or like a monopoly on violence in the area. And yeah, they've not done that this time. And I think... I suppose the last thing I wanted to ask about is like, we've just talked about like why this mission is important.
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And we've spoken about for like, you had your family there when they were being bombed and like this investment in being there in Lebanon, being alongside the Lebanese people in your case with your own family. It's one that Ireland's had for a long time.
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Ireland has historically, amongst European nations, been much better on the rights of Palestine and Palestinian people than most European nations. How is this peacekeeping mission perceived in Ireland? Are people proud that they're there?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've personally seen hospitals bombed and all that kind of stuff myself, and it sometimes doesn't even make the news. I mean, that orphanage evidently didn't really make my news diet. Kevin, thank you very much for sharing some of your experiences over there.
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And I'd love to have you on again to talk about the things, the work you've done in Africa down the line after Lebanon. You've written a book, right, about your experiences, peacekeeping and other things. Where can people find that?
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Yeah. I like that balance. I've always thought that like, I'll go somewhere and I'll write about the worst things I saw there and the worst days I had there. And that'll be my story. But I've always wanted to write about the mountains of Kurdistan are beautiful. And I really loved being there. And, There are other places that people think of them as wars, not countries.
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And I think I'd love to write about mountaineering, backpacking in these places where often it's really sad that you don't get to share that part.
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Well, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, Kevin. Thanks so much. Okay, cheers.
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About 20 years ago, maybe 30, a circus visited Majuro, the largest island on the Majuro Atoll and the capital city of the Marshall Islands. They came to Majuro, as almost everything that isn't breadfruit, pandanus or fish does, on a boat. After performing, they couldn't find a boat to take them to their next destination.
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And so the residents of this tiny island, which at times is no wider than the single road which travels its whole length, decided that they'd have to share the food that they themselves had imported at great cost.
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and they set about gathering apples, bananas, and anything else that they thought an elephant might like to eat while it waited for a way off an island that barely has enough room for its own people, let alone the largest land animal on earth.
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The people of the Marshall Islands, for whom hospitality is as natural as the tides of the sea, greet each other the same way they do strangers, by saying yorkway. The word has several meanings, but I'll let David Kabua explain them. He's the president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, so he seems like he'd be a good source.
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But unlike those little specks of dust that manage to sneak their way onto my camera sensor, the Marshall Islands belong here. Here is a pretty vague term. The 29 coral atolls and five islands that allow 54,000 Marshallese to live on 182 square kilometers of land span an oceanic territory of 200,000 kilometers.
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Yeah, it's not an insignificant amount, especially considering the Irish Defence Forces are much smaller. If people are more familiar with the US military, which is more than a million people, 48 is a significant amount. You talked about how it exposes you to other cultures, and obviously one of them is the Lebanese people, but it's a very international deployment, right?
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It's like you took a small American town and scattered it across an area one and a half times the size of Alaska. Even though the RMI is 98% water, every inch of land is precious to the Marshallese, whose matrilineal society ensures that land passes from mother to daughter and ties families to the remote islands that make up the low-lying atolls of the Republic.
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It was on one of the bigger chunks of land that I recorded the music you heard a minute ago. Maduro is an atoll. That's a coral ring that encircles a lagoon. And its biggest island is about 30 miles long, but often less than 100 yards wide. There's one road that runs the length of it, and sometimes also spans the width of it. It's also home to about half the RMI's population.
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The highest point on the atoll lies just three meters above sea level. If you want to get higher than that, then your only options are houses or palm trees. From the top of the fifth floor of the Napa Auto Parts store, which also houses the UNDP and the Marshall Islands Olympic Committee, you can see the whole island.
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For Marshallese people, these tiny pieces of paradise that barely poke their heads out from the top of the ocean are everything. Their land and their ties to it define them. Without their place, they can't be themselves. Even though many thousands of Marshallese live in the diaspora of the United States, they still import handicrafts made from little shells on the outer islands and coconut husks.
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Many of them come back to the islands to retire. But slowly, the ocean is taking those islands back. Rising sea levels and more extreme tidal surges have placed this tiny Pacific nation on the front lines of climate change. There isn't an exact estimate as to how long the Marshall Islands have, or what they can do to halt the creeping advance of the ocean.
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They've always existed on just a few square kilometres of land, among millions of square kilometres of ocean, and they depend on that ocean for everything, but now it's threatening to take everything away from them.
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One day, they fear their islands will become uninhabitable, as saltwater invades the water table and their trees die, or storms bring more and more frequent floods that sweep away their homes and their possessions. They don't want to leave, but they can't stand alone against climate change either. But the Marshallese are resilient people. They've weathered many storms to get to where they are now.
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The tiny museum in Majuro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic. A nuclear bomb, the Second World War. But in the end, these did little to crush the incredible kindness of the tenacity of the Marshallese. The islands that make up the Aramai have been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years.
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They've been variously ruled by the Spanish, German, Japanese and United States governments before becoming an independent republic. Before they were named by a British sailor, the islands had their own name.
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I'll let Jeff, a Marshallese Renaissance man who was at once our driver, the head of the World Health Organization's EMT program on the islands, a registered nurse, and the custodian of an incredible collection of Marshallese music, explain what they were called before that.
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You're not just sort of sitting there on your Irish base with Irish Defence Forces. People are not interacting with other militaries. So can you explain some of the other countries that have this long history there?
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Undeniably, the Marshall Islands are not a bad place to find yourself on a summer afternoon. And in the time I spent there, I took several trips to the smaller islands around Maduro Atoll. They look like the platonic ideal of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms, vibrant coral reefs, white sand and turquoise water.
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I love freediving, and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and dozens of brightly coloured species of fish in almost infinite visibility, without even needing to put on a wetsuit or a weight belt, might be the closest I'll ever get to flying. But I wasn't just here for a dip in the ocean. I'm actually here to tell you a story of incredible resilience.
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Much of America, both on the left and on the right, spends much of its time and money preparing for its own imagined version of a crisis. For some, that's the unimaginable destruction of nuclear war. For others, it's the encroaching of the ocean onto their land and the resulting loss of places to live and grow food.
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And for others, it's the collapse of basic services like power and clean water that we take for granted. These are all storms that the tiny island nation has already weathered. And it hasn't done so in the atomized and individualistic way that so many American preppers fantasize about online. It's done so as an incredibly strong, optimistic, and welcoming community.
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There's a lot we can learn from the people of the Marshall Islands and their story. And so this week I'll be doing my best to share the stories that they shared with me. If you're familiar with the islands, it's likely because of the history of one of the other atolls in the group, Bikini Atoll. The name is a German bastardization of a Marshallese word, pikini.
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Pik meaning plain surface, and ni meaning coconut tree. It's a flat base where coconuts grow. But you likely don't know the island for its coconuts, and those aren't safe to eat anymore anyway. If you've heard of Bikini Atoll, it's because of what the United States did there after the Second World War.
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On the 18th of July 1947, the Marshall Islands were placed in a strategic trust territory by the United Nations. This territory was administered by the United States, which was supposed to administer the islands in the best interest of their inhabitants and of international peace and security.
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But a year before the trust territory was created, the US began nuclear testing in the lagoon at Bikini Atoll, a site that would, over the next 15 years, become the most heavily bombed place on Earth,
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with some islands entirely removed from the map, and much of their population left dead, sick, and without the land that defines them and their ability to thrive on these tiny islands amidst the endless ocean. As far as possible, I want to let the Marshallese survivors of the nuclear tests and their families tell their own stories.
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They call what happened on Bikini and Enewatak Atoll the nuclear legacy of their country.
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Talking about the nuclear legacy is a difficult topic for the Marshallese, especially at a time when none of them have been paid the compensation they were allotted, and the US was negotiating a new agreement with the Marshallese government that was very far from settled, and the numbers the US were offering were very far from sufficient.
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I was very fortunate to join a few other journalists on the tiny island of Bokenboten, a short boat ride away from Majuro, and home to perhaps the most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen. We had lunch, walked around the island, and then had a talk on the nuclear legacy from descendants of some of the survivors. I'll let them introduce themselves.
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Almost everyone in the RMI has a family member directly impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that came after it. Although we know the name Bikini Atoll, the entire republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Maduro itself, thanks to the ill-advised decision to drop bombs on a day when the populated atolls were downwind of the test site.
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In fact, right next to our hotel and showing the same parking lot, there's a US Department of Energy office. I asked Jeff what that was doing there. Yeah, I saw there's a DOE office, a health office on the street here.
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The RMI saw fighting in the Second World War. It's memorialized in murals across Majuro. In 1943 and early 1944, the USA bombed and then fought the Imperial Japanese military, who had been occupying the island since 1914. U.S.
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soldiers and marines, along with Marshallese scouts, landed on Majuro, Kwajulin, and Eniwetok on Higgins boats that were virtually identical to the boat we took across the lagoon to Bokenboten. The fighting was fierce, and the scale of the destruction was immense. Overall, the Americans lost 611 men and suffered 2,341 wounded. 261 were missing.
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Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over 11,000 men and had 358 captured. Today, the Bikini Atoll Lagoon still holds the ghostly remains of the ships and planes that fought that battle. alongside the Nagato, the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the ship from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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It was a shadow of this war that was evoked in 1946, when 167 of Bikini Atoll's inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the United States. They initially accepted this settlement, quote, for the good of mankind and to end all wars, in the words of the U.S. commandant at the time. Assisted by US Navy Seabees, they disassembled their church and moved to different atolls.
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Nine of the 11 family heads from Bikini elected to be transported 125 miles to Rongerik Atoll, an island with about one quarter of the landmass of Bikini Atoll. Many believed the island to be haunted, and by the time the Navy left them with a few weeks of water and food, they had every reason to be afraid. I'll let Arianna explain what that removal process was like.
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Following their removal, the testing began. The idea was to test nuclear bombs on ships. So the U.S. bought 95 ships, fully loaded with weapons and fuel. At this time, this would have ranked the navy of Bikini Atoll just outside the top five biggest fleets in the world. But those boats didn't stay afloat for long.
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Now, you might think that, given the testing was on ships, the Atoll's navy would be some kind of mid-century Mary Celeste. But you'd be wrong. 3,350 experimental rats, goats and pigs died in the service of this strange nuclear experiment.
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some of them after being subjected to the great indignity of being covered in sunscreen, which bizarrely scientists thought might be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation. It's rather staggering that this research was being done three years after the United States dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities full of human beings.
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But as you've maybe already picked up in this story, the possibility of unintended but entirely predictable human suffering does not seem to have been top of the priority list. The first test at the island somehow misfired. The gathered press were disappointed and many of them went home. But the second, codenamed Baker, didn't.
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Chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, the longest-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called the Baker test the world's first nuclear disaster. It drove a 2,000-foot-wide pillar of water into the air. It sunk the USS Arkansas and released massive amounts of radiation across the islands of the atoll. which at the time the residents had been expecting to return to.
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Just five days after the first bomb went off, Louis Royard, a French mechanical engineer who was working as manager of his mother's lingerie shop in Paris, introduced a new swimsuit design, named the Bikini, after the Atoll. It was, one writer quipped, the atom bomb of fashion. The people of the Atoll, however, gained little from the outfit or the testing.
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In January of 1948, just two years after their removal, Dr. Leonard Mason visited the Bikinians on Rongerik and was appalled to find the people there had almost starved to death. We were dying, but they didn't listen to us, one of them said to him. Mason, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii, asked that food and water be bought immediately. The U.S.
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built houses for Bikini Atoll residents on Ujalang Atoll, but it decided to use these for the residents of Enewatak Atoll, where it was also about to begin conducting nuclear experiments. Instead, the Bikini Islanders were placed in tents alongside a runway before they eventually chose Kili Island, a land of less than one square kilometre, as their next home.
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Also evacuated were Enewatak, Rongalap and Wathau Islanders. They too thought this was a temporary arrangement and that they could go home in a short period of time. They too found out later that this was not the case. Over the course of their exile, they've been moved several more times, starved half to death, cheated of their compensation, and stripped of their ancestral homeland.
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For the next 12 years, the United States would drop increasingly large bombs, culminating in 1954 with the Bravo shot of Operation Castle, also known as Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear device that we know of the US ever deploying.
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That 15-megaton Bravo shot yielded more than 2.5 times the estimated 6-megaton explosion when it was detonated on an artificial island in the Bikini Atoll. The device's mushroom cloud reached a height of 47,000 feet, which is 1,400 meters, and a diameter of 7 miles or 11 kilometers in about one minute. Eventually, it reached a height of 40 kilometers and a diameter of 100 kilometers.
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This took less than 10 minutes. It traveled more than 100 meters per second and covered 7,000 kilometers of the Pacific Ocean and everything in it with nuclear fallout. On the eve of the Bravo shot, weather reports indicated that the, quote, conditions were getting less favorable. But nonetheless, the decision to go ahead with the first test was taken by Dr. Alvin C. Graves.
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Joint Task Force 7 ships, located 30 miles east of Bikini, in what was thought to be an upwind position, began detecting high levels of radiation just two hours after the test. Very soon after, they began travelling south at full speed to avoid the fallout. But directly downwind of the blast and unable to travel were Rongelap and Alinganay atolls.
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Yeah, yeah. And there's certainly a lot of nationalities. I know the Indonesians are there now and the contagion from India. When people talk about UNIFIL now a lot, you'll see one of two accusations, right? You'll see that they're either... there as allies of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is not the case, or you'll see that they're there as observers for the IDF or spies for the IDF.
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Ariana explained the impact of the fallout there, which residents were not warned about. American service people there were warned to stay inside and not eat or drink anything. But no such warning was given to the local residents.
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Tomorrow, we'll hear more about the consequences the Bravo shot for the people who, despite never having any quarrel with the USA, were the recipients of the largest nuclear bomb it's ever detonated.
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And obviously the fact that they're being accused of both probably suggests that they are neither, because it would be fairly obvious if they were. But can you explain the tripartite agreement? It seems to me like that might make it difficult to do the things that UNIFIL is supposed to be doing. Is that fair? Yeah.
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Everybody really happy with that? I love that, yeah. I'm feeling not at all like I want to kind of shower today.
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The machine is very similar to what you would use to milk a cow.
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So strange. So strange that he left the world of peer-reviewed academia.
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What's the orientation? Does it stand on the ground and you just approach it? You have to stand up. Yeah. But what if you're a short king?
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Yeah. I think we should share some of these on the CoolZone account.
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If you watch the video, there's a rubber part that comes out like a sea urchin.
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court. He got chased down by a herd of velociraptor cattle.
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Didn't even write that. Didn't even write that, Garrison. So on the back of his hand, he had a brainwave at two in the morning and he got that down.
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Robert's been in the cum space for several years.
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all right we are after all at work so let me continue uh so i'm going to talk about what happens when you keep your calm inside you uh okay yeah this is a thing that garrison what are we doing today This is critical journalism. We are making content. Talking of content, let's talk about the content of some Reddit posters.
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So what is called the semen retention movement, and this will shock many of you,
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began on reddit.com oh my god yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like so many wonderful things i feel like i feel like because no one's getting laid with their own reddit i feel like if you type that into your phone it would have finished the sentence the same way what is auto directed you to reddit.com believe me we're gonna go there garrison because when you google sperm retention you do indeed find some stuff on reddit uh so i'll bet
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Now, they've spun off from Reddit rather than have their own organization, which is NoFap.com. And NoFap.com is a community-centered sexual health platform. I'm allowing them to define themselves here, I guess. Designed to help people overcome porn addiction and compulsive sexual behavior.
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Which is not necessarily... Not all semen retention, as we're going to learn, is based in helping people overcome addiction to porn. But so far as that is a thing that people actually have. I know someone was accusing Robert of being addicted to porn on his timeline this weekend.
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I really hope he thinks it's like milking. Like they have RFID collars and they get fed based on their production level. That would be great.
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Anyway. Just get it out. Okay. So after this movement began on Reddit.com, it quickly pivoted to kind of offering all kinds of weird physical and mental health benefits. And that's where it was adopted by friends of the podcast, the Proud Boys.
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Luckily, we do have a bit of insight into why, into the exact nature of the no-fap fascism that the Proud Boys practice, thanks to Kyle Chaney, who's a Politico reporter, who was reporting on the trial of one of the Proud Boys accused of sedition on January 6th called Zach Rell.
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And in that trial, for reasons that I'm not exactly clear on, the Proud Boy, I guess it's like their handbook, like the kind of Proud Boy vibe was introduced, and into the record, somebody started to write. Oh yes, it's in there. Yep, it's in the court record, buddy, because one of the lawyers decided that it was pertinent to the case.
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So a proud boy may not ejaculate alone more than once in every 30 days. That means he must abstain from pornography during that time. And if he needs to ejaculate, and this is really weird, it must be within one yard of a woman. Fascinatingly specific. Yeah, yeah, right. And I like that they've gone with imperial measurements. With her consent, so that's nice, the woman may not be a prostitute.
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So that's the Proud Boys' nature, their no-fap fascism. But I think the way of understanding why some people practice this perhaps best is to go onto Reddit.com. So I found a post by Reddit user u slash monk191817. It seems like a nice guy. And there were 480 upvotes on this. What I did was I went to semen retention. I looked at, you know, sorted by popular posts.
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Found this one from a bunch of numbers. So this guy has nine years of experience with semen retention. So I'm just going to read. I'm presuming it's his.
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Yeah, yeah. Him and some monks off the coast of fucking Lindspar.
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No, I don't think it is. There is, and we'll get to this evidence, that you shouldn't do this. So... In his nine years of experience, he has experienced the following things. Semen, when retained in our bodies, has healing, rejuvenating effects. Loss of semen has the opposite effects. This may not be scientifically proven, but it's proven by experience. That's a red flag.
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Getting Reddit medical advice. While attempting any task that demands high physical, mental, or intellectual abilities, if we are semen retention powered, we would actually enjoy the task, which would otherwise seem dull. This is called sexual energy transmutation in layman's terms. Oh, no.
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It's got even more... I have no idea. Spermazoic fucking fission. Uh... So for peak performance, it's always necessary to be powered by semen. It would be best to use semen only for regeneration purposes, since nature originally intended it for regeneration and not use it for sexual purposes apart from to create a child.
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If not serving that purpose, master whatever techniques are useful in not letting the seed out while having sex. At the end of the day, don't let your seed out like a worthless thing. There's more, so just contain yourself. Okay, great, great.
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Which is exactly the reason why core religions are based on celibacy, because opposite of regeneration is degeneration, which will cause a man to fall into a lower state, controlled by his lower nature, rather than when he's subduing it. we should let semen retention be part of our lives, not something that is done for superpowers.
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For superpowers are, in my experience, the sudden ecstasy that we feel once we transition from the degenerated to the regenerated state. And that will stabilize after some time, similar to how a flight maintains stable altitude after takeoff.
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So, yeah, he didn't. I should add that this person confesses to having lapsed at some point in the nine years. Poser, poser, poser. Yeah, it's stolen.
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no one would have seen it coming see what I did there okay so this person then urges other posters on the semen retention subreddit to not use streaks to outperform others or look better about ourselves or bring others down the battle with lust is a lifelong fight and the more we get better at finding victories yeah yeah buddy the more we become better at finding victories over internal battles the better we become as high valued men hell yeah brother
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Yeah, I'll get some t-shirts knocked up and we can do a fundraiser.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like on a plaque with a... Yes, yes.
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There is a marketing company that has been emailing me for about six months telling me how cheap it is to buy a billboard by the side of a road and send a message to a loved one. So maybe... Great. Maybe I'll go with... Well, the billboard industry's got to be fucking doing Bangarang. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Well, there will be until I put my positive messages about controlling lust and holding semen inside our bodies. True. And return men to their former glory. So a lot of the Reddit posts rely on a couple of different studies, right? One of these studies measured participants, a lot of what they're doing is they're claiming to increase testosterone, right? Right out the back.
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Testosterone does have, as Lance Armstrong can tell you, some performance-enhancing benefits. Yeah. So yeah, it increases your muscle growth, your recovery from exercise, all that stuff. One of the studies measured participants' testosterone levels at baseline before masturbation and then in 10-minute intervals after masturbation, right?
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And then they were asked to abstain for three weeks and they came back and they did the process again. Testosterone was higher in the baseline measurement at the end of the three weeks of abstinence, right?
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But the sample size was pretty small, and there's some theorizing that the boost was actually caused by the anticipated masturbation that they were about to do at the second... They were so ready to cum. Yeah, these guys were just ready to pop. After three weeks. The second study looked at a 45% increase after a few days, seven days of abstinence.
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But even a study showed this was a temporary peak that returned to normal, even with continuing abstinence. So there's just these two studies. They're pretty...
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they happened a long time ago uh we'll post them all in the show notes if you guys want to read more about nofap science um but we should just point out that there is in fact a multitude of evidence that this is a bad idea uh that having sex is actually good for you having sex while trying not to ejaculate is probably not good for you uh probably not good for your relationship either um one would surmise uh they are sure into that whatever yeah
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yeah yeah yeah well yeah if that's your thing you do you um there was a study that investigated the motivation for semen retention among semen retainers uh and it a lot of it it seemed like it people were people who felt that like either sex or masturbation was unhealthy or wrong or sinful and uh there is evidence to show that like feeling uh
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like a guilty about yourself or like living with stress and self-loathing like that is bad for you. Right. And that will reduce your testosterone level. Um, there's also some evidence to suggest that not ejaculating can give you prostate issues. Uh,
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You'd have slept better if you'd taken some horse medicine first.
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With the right machinery. You know what? I think we know exactly what the right machinery is.
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Here's the thing. Martin Luther. Keep it in high Latin so the proles can't understand.
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This website, by the way, Absolute Adventures on here. I'm just reading about how to use Christ's blood as a weapon.
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Maybe they're Mussolini's, like they're into the Mussolini stuff. He was a big fan of canola oil.
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oh that's the thing we're objecting to from this episode that's the line yeah yeah because it shouldn't have climaxed it lost its power in that moment considering both like no no one sec james that was a very good joke thank you thank you for thank you for seeing me buddy
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Right, yeah. Was that when the IDF came in and their Merkava tanks and the French physically blocked them with their own tanks? I can't remember when that was.
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No one expects Tucker to talk to anyone serious.
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Hey, if you want to get trim, that's where you get trim. That type of dude is emerging here.
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Real bastion in the platonic cave of men stands Kid Rock and a guy from Abercrombie and Fitch. And we must only be their shadows.
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Is that written by Ben Greenfield by any chance? Because he normally pops up with these things. Which one? The men's health one. It's a guy who injected his own dick to make it bigger.
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We have stepped into a gold mine of contact with Ben Greenfield, the guy who injected his own dick with stem cells to make it bigger.
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I urge you, I compel you, if you have any free time in your day, just Google Ben Greenfield penis. There will be several articles at supposedly reputable outlets that will just fucking make you unwell.
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And the tripartite agreement is the only place where they actually meet, right?
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This is when you know it's a grift. If someone is telling you that they need to sell you sunlight, they are having a fucking laugh.
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And if there's one thing I trust, it's science from 1939. Yep. Got any comments on race in this study?
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It's great that Lance Armstrong has come back to the episode again.
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We haven't even covered all the things that Ben Greenfield did to his dick in 2017.
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Yeah, yeah, no, I think it would be wrong to overlook those. We'll take a quick break for adverts and we'll come back. We're back. And Kevin, you'd mentioned that you were in Lebanon in 2006. I think you said you were an unarmed observer at that time. Is that right? Yeah, that's right, Geoff.
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Hi everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's me, James, and I'm joined today by Kevin MacDonald, who previously served as a senior officer in the Irish Defence Forces with special forces experience and has significant experience working all over the world. After that with the United Nations and other organisations. Kevin, welcome to the show. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
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There's something I love about Yavin where you get to see sort of the beauty of it and the beauty of what's going to destroy the Empire. Where it's like, you keep just seeing, like, people who survived all of this shit and make it to Yavin. Like, Meshi is, like, the other survivor of the Narkeen F5, like, prison break. Yeah. Right? And he's, like, one of the people going out with Endor. The...
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What's the other rebellion twink's name? The kid who threw the brick. Wilman. Yeah, Wilman. Wilman's French resistance girlfriend makes it there. And, like, all of these... You get this little microcosm of, like, all of these people who are, like, the survivors of all of these imperial sort of, like, horrors, like, have gathered in this place.
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And it's like, these are the people who are going to destroy the empire. And I think something really beautiful about that. And then I also think there's a really interesting thing in the Yavin politics we do see, which is that, like... You know, so, like, again, I am notoriously the show's, like, Luthan hater. I'm not really a hater of Luthan.
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I just don't want the most annoying people in the world to try to replicate him in real life. But also, like, the Central Rebel Command is a shit show. It's a complete disaster. They're, like, top-down hierarchical command from that council. Those people, at every single instance of this, attempt to lose the war, right?
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They're too pissed off at Luthan to, like, listen to the information that he literally fucking died to give them, right? Like, this entire operation of it about giving them the information to destroy the superweapon that will destroy the Empire. And they don't want to listen to it. And, like, in Rogue One, like, that council tries to surrender.
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Like, they literally vote to be like, yeah, sorry, we can't fight the Empire. They're too strong. And then, like, the rebel military defects. And it's not defect. Like, they stage an insurrection. They go rogue. They rebel. Yeah, they go rogue. And they're the ones who do this. And I think it's just interesting.
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thing here, that as much as Gilroy doesn't want to, like, touch Yavin that much, there's this interesting political dynamic of, like, yeah, okay, so, like, we finally developed this sort of, like, centralized political force capable of bringing all these things together, and they're useless. They are worse than useless.
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They nearly destroyed the rebellion that they had been sort of, like, trying to bring together on multiple occasions, and they're only stopped by doing that by these sort of, like, unhinged guerrilla-like... people who are completely out of control and, like, these, like, rogue operator people who, like... Yeah, but fundamentally, like, the inheritors to Luthan's legacy, right?
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Yeah. By the actual rebels, not the fucking senators. And I think that's, like, a... Because I've been seeing... I've been seeing some small attempts to recuperate Mon Moth, but from this, it's like, no, Mothma's the only senator who backs the, like, go for it, like, we're carrying out this raid to seal the Death Star planche. Like, she's the only one, right?
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And I think this is like the actual fundamental break here is... between these people is it's like when the chips are down, are you willing to fight? And most of the sort of like liberal sort of like defecting noble leadership isn't. Except for Mothma. And she's just like, and Bale at the end, too, is like, I want to go down fighting.
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Yeah, and that's the fundamental difference between, like, someone who politically I don't like, like the Marquis de Lafayette. Like, that motherfucker went down swinging. Like, he, that man, at every single point of his life, was always funding an insurrection, was always like, I will take up arms.
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Let's throw a punch. Let's throw a punch. Yeah. And it's like, you compare that to, like, the German liberals, or, like, the liberals who, when Pinochet, like, takes power, were like, yeah, when Pinochet called them all to, like, report to, like, have meetings with the government, they all went, yeah, we're gonna go report to, like, talk to the secret police, and they all got, like, killed, right?
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And that's the difference between those two things, and that, I think, is a really, really, is a crucial political distinction to draw out, is, like, it's not even necessarily, like, your class background, it's not even necessarily, like, what your politics are, because a lot of these people believe the same things. It's like...
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When the chips come down, will you fight or will you try to surrender? And that's something I think, I don't know, that's to me the best part of Andor is that. And I think that's the part of it that's being set up in this episode that I love.
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That was a trifecta from hell. It's so bad. This one's so bad. It's really, I have to do the laughing like right here because good Lord, like many, many of these weeks are bad. This one's particularly bad.
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Okay, the one important note that I will say is if you have a prostate, get checked for prostate cancer. Like, get the screening. It's good. It'll help you.
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That one, I think, was the official inauguration of the years of lead paint. which we're just perpetually living in now.
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This is the most Bay Area shit I've ever heard in my entire goddamn life.
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These people shouldn't be allowed to use computers for, like, 50 years. Like, just a ban on California using computers.
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This is the most... This is the most online... Like... Like... Like... Best friend... Vegan rad femme antinatalist. Vegan rad femme best friend antinatalist has her boyfriend shoot her.
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Yeah, I keep thinking about that Hunter S. Thompson quote about like those poor bastards who were born after 9-11 don't know the party's over. The party is over. And yeah, welcome to hell.
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Yeah, it's good to see the sunrise, and it's better to see the sunrise with everyone you love in it. And that's a thing that you can make sure you do every day.
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And again, whenever someone says the word Libya, you have to figure out which Libyan government you are talking about because there are multiple of them because there is a fucking civil war going on there right now.
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If you're removing 300,000 people from our country, that's just straight up an ethnic cleansing. That's what that is.
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Dan, blink twice if they threatened you or your family.
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We have a chance to swing the Epstein demographic. Now is our time. Division to our enemies.
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You know, all right, before everything gets so, so, like, I do the most depressing segment I've maybe ever done on here. Tariffs. That can't be true. No, not the tariff. The next one I genuinely think is the most depressing thing I've ever done on here. But the tariffs. So our negotiations with China that were supposed to, like, solve all of the tariff problems are already breaking down.
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Both sides are, like, sniping at each other. This is not going to work. It structurally cannot work. The U.S. 's demands on the negotiating table are... which is, again, the political and economic rationale behind this is that the U.S. should not have a trade deficit with China. That can't be solved, and it's already breaking down.
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The talks are almost certainly going to fail, and we're going to be right back to where we were. It's also worth talking about a bunch of companies have been doing price raises.
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And I think it's worth going back a little bit to some of the some of the economic work we've done in this show with the people at Strange Manners and talking about in our previous episodes about inflation, about how price works, because this is really, really badly understood by just about everyone, which is that the way that people think about tend to think about price is as like, OK, it's supply and demand.
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There's two X's that meet on a graph. That's not how price is set. Price is set by, like, specific people in supply chains, right? Like, they're constrained by certain factors, and one of the biggest things they're constrained about is that if you raise prices, people get pissed at you. But the way that they actually do pricing strategies is cost plus markup, right?
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There's a cost of the physical good, and then they do a markup, and the markup is the profit margin. And the thing about tariffs, right, is that the way that tariffs affect supply chains is that each part of the supply chain now that's moving, that's importing stuff, right? Each part of those things now has an additional cost that they have to have to put into their costless market ratio.
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Now, Trump wants all these companies to just fucking eat shit and eat the price of the tariffs. He's been tweeting about this. Or posting about it, I think, on Truth Social and possibly also on Twitter. True thing.
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But the thing is, right, and in theory, right, like, Walmart could just, like, take this, right? In theory, like, you know, some of the really, really big companies could, in theory, do this. They won't. And the other thing is, like, these companies have an incentive not to raise prices because it pisses consumers off.
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And also because Trump is just like directly threatening sanctions on companies that raise prices. Mattel, for the people who make Barbies, said that they were going to raise prices on toys. And Trump is now threatening them with 100% sanctions or 100% tariffs. Only three dolls. Yeah. So, you know.
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Completely hinged situation we've gotten here. We're going to have dull quotas. But, you know, again, again, it's worth mentioning, right, that like in theory for a little bit of time, some of these companies can sort of eat this or they can fuck with their supply chains. The company's been publicly talking about this. The problem is the suppliers, because the.
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The distributors tend to have pretty high margins, right? Like your Walgreens, like Amazon, like their margins are okay. And like Amazon makes most of its money from government computing contracts anyways. So it's not as catastrophic. But the suppliers operate on very low margins. The shipping companies, everything else along the supply chain operates on really, really low margins, right?
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And those people have to raise their price. Because otherwise, they're just going to die. And when they raise their price, right, that's an increase to the next company's costless market, which increases the next company's costless market, which increases the next company's. And we're starting to see this ripple through the supply chain. Things are disappearing from grocery stores.
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They're going to continue disappearing from grocery stores. And as this goes on, and as presumably the tariffs from China come back into effect when these negotiations break down, and the next round of tariffs goes into effect, and the Liberation Day tariffs come off their 90-day pause and go into effect... This is all going to get worse. This has been Tariff Talk. Lovely.
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This, unfortunately, was the fun part of the episode. Yeah, I was going to say, it's going to get worse in three, two, one. Okay, so when I said this might be the bleakest segment I've ever done on this show, we need to do an update on Palestine because things have gotten...
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When I was kind of opening this episode, I thought it was going to mostly be about Trump's plan to deport most of the population of Palestine to Libya. That's not even the immediate crisis. The immediate crisis is that... That's not even true. What I'm saying is the immediate crisis.
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Last week, I thought the crisis was going to be the 11-week blockade of Gaza and the fact that everyone is about to starve. Yeah. And so the actual specific thing that we're getting to right now is Israel is attempting to evacuate. That's their wording. What they're actually doing is ethnically cleansing basically the entire population of Khan Yunus by just forcing everyone out of the city. Right.
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The United Nations has said that nearly 100,000 Palestinians have been displaced in Gaza in the last four days. Right. as Israel has been expanding its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. This has been combined with the 11-week-long blockade of Gaza. I think by the end of this week, it might be week 12. This has set off an enormous risk of famine. I'm just going to read this from Al Jazeera.
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Quote, Some 70 days after the Israeli military halted the entry of food, water, medicine, and all other life-saving supplies into Gaza, the report said—this is a report from a UN-backed food security group of analysts— The report said, quote, goods indispensable for people's survival are either depleted or expected to run out in the coming weeks.
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Quote, the entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity, with half a million people, one in five, facing starvation, it said. Approximately 93% of Gaza's population is experiencing acute food shortages, it added. The report also said that one in five people could starve between now and November. People have already started starving to death.
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Israel has been blocking aid from getting through. They symbolically allowed a small number of trucks in, but aid groups on the ground. And I want to emphasize that this reporting is coming directly from the Times of Israel.
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If you want to understand how bad the situation is, the Times of Israel is reporting that aid groups on the ground say that none of the aid has gotten through, none of it has been distributed. This is... I don't know how to convey how bad it is. Indescribable numbers of people are on the verge of starving to death, and the Israelis are simply not letting any food arrive.
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They keep talking about how they're going to let food arrive, because this is actually... This is the first thing I've seen them do that's actually seriously gotten... I mean, not even seriously, but it's like gotten a lot of their Western allies pissed at them because they're just very obviously trying to exterminate entire population by starving them to death.
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And this has caused the UK, Canada and France to issue a joint statement coming out against the Israeli policy and telling them to fucking stop and let food through so these people don't starve. The UK is talking about suspending free trade agreements with Israel. They're talking about sanctions on West Bank settlers.
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The whole group has threatened that they're going to take more actions unless the Israelis let food in. Now, the Israelis, because of the Israelis, shot at a bunch of diplomats who were visiting a refugee camp in Jenin. This was like a few days ago. Yeah, it's like a few days ago. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's that's not been like making anyone less angry at them.
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It's genuinely remarkable that we've reached a place where like the UK, Canada and France, who are all major weapon suppliers to Israel, are like talking about sanctions against Even targeted sanctions. The UN's Human Rights Commission was like, well, this is bullshit. You can't just do targeted sanctions. It's the entire government doing this.
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But the fact that they're doing something is an indicator of just how apocalyptically bad the situation is right now. Yeah, I want to read this quote from The Guardian from just perennial most fascist guy in the Israeli government. But he's saying something.
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Yeah, who's their fucking finance minister, who said, quote, Now we conquer, cleanse, and stay until Hamas is destroyed, he told a news conference. Along the way, what remains of the Strip is also being wiped out. Cleanse.
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The extent to which they are simply doing a genocide here has reached a point where even a bunch of Israel's closest allies are going, what the fuck? I don't know. I really hope that people are able to force their governments to actually fucking do something about this, because if they don't, it's going to continue to get really bad. Yeah.
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And I mean, I guess right now that's mostly like if you're if you're in like the UK, Canada or France and you think you can apply more pressure on your government, like go for it. Do it. Do that.
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I don't know to what extent pressure can even be mounted on the Trump administration. But it's yeah, I think that's pretty much a dead end. Yeah.
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Yeah, because like, and this is the thing here, right? Like these countries, the stuff that they're threatening to do is not enough to really make a difference here. But like, if they're willing to do this, they can be pushed further. Yeah, yeah.
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This as a concept just should be the death knell for the idea of America. Oh, yeah. If America has an experiment, we tried it, it failed.
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It's over. As an experiment, the American project was a fucking disaster and it needs to stop because this is what it's done. No more. No more American project.
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They could be stopped by a doorkeeper. They can be resisted. They can be stopped from doing things.
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Welcome to the War Update, an update about war. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James and Robert.
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Yeah. So we're going to be talking about three wars. Yeah, I think we're going to lead off with the India-Pakistan war, and then we're going to do the other two wars in some order. Do you want to announce the other two wars?
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Yeah, let's, oh God, let's do this. Okay, so the good news is that, look, we do have good news, which is that we have not all died in nuclear fires. I know there are some of you for whom you are very disappointed, but we're all still here, for better or for worse. I mean, for better. Like, I'm very glad we didn't all die in nuclear fire.
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Yeah, so let's talk about the recent war between India and Pakistan lasted about four days ago. So, all right, we've talked about this a little bit before. The very basic sort of elements of this conflict. We've talked about partition on the show before. When India sort of gained independence from the British Empire, it split into India and Pakistan. Millions died. Horrific sort of conflict.
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People killing each other, like mass migrations everywhere. Cross the borders, very, very, very unstable set of borders get set up that change a bunch of times. And one of the aspects of this sort of whole thing is that Kashmir was supposed to be this independent state, right?
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And then through an extremely convoluted process that I am again, once again, pushing off to another episode with like actual good experts on this, because this is a very, very convoluted thing. But the short version of it basically is that this series is sort of escalating conflicts.
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Ends basically in a sort of short war and then Kashmir being split in two between India and Pakistan, where like about a third roughly of Kashmir ends up under Pakistani control and then about two thirds ends up under Indian control. Now, there's an agreement signed by sort of Kashmir's ruler at the time to let India like annex like two thirds of Kashmir.
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Kashmir or so the actual dividing line basically ends up being like where the army stopped, you know, as it changes over the years. But the important thing here, right, is that Kashmir is supposed to have had an independence referendum. Right. That was like, yeah, the deal. Yeah. Now, in a move that is, like, genuinely even more stunning than the shit that, like, Indonesia pulled in West Papua.
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So, in West Papua, right, like, Indonesia pulls a, like, fake independence referendum. Here, they've never even done that. Like, they've never even pretended to have the referendum that they're supposed to have had.
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Yeah, yeah. They're just like, nope, eat shit. Like, you're basically a colony now. Now... As part of this deal, right, Kashmir got a pretty substantial amount of autonomy. I'm going to read, there's actually, there's a very good Jacobin, one of the rare good Jacobin articles, which usually tend to be the ones written, like, not by the American Jacobin writers.
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Yeah, this is written by Arish K. And I'm going to quote here from this article. Central to the instrument of accession, it's the document that the ruler of Kashmir signed to sort of like hand Kashmir over to India.
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"...was the constitutional provision of Article 370, which assured the Kashmiri people autonomy over all matters besides those pertaining to defense, external affairs, and communications. The article was supposed to be temporary and provisional because there was a promise of a referendum by which the people of Kashmir would decide their own political fate."
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to remain part of India to join up with Pakistan or become an independent state. But as we've already mentioned, this just never happened. I mean, they didn't even do a sham one. It just literally didn't ever happen. And India has just been imposing its rule on Kashmir ever since. I mean, it is also worth pointing out that Pakistan has also been imposing its rule on its part of Kashmir.
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But the Indian occupation has become increasingly brutal. Basically, since it's starting, it's just continued to get worse and worse. And it is sort of a full-blown military occupation, right? There's just like a bunch of fucking Indian troops in the street. And as it becomes clear that India is like never going to let Kashmir be free or just even let the Kashmiri people decide what they want...
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Militant struggles ensues. And as Kate points out, it's originally spearheaded by the secular Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front. And this group is just sort of wiped out because it wanted an independent Kashmir. And this was convenient to neither the Indian or the Pakistani government because Pakistan... And Pakistan talks about this a lot internationally.
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Like one of their sort of international political things is like, yeah, we want free Kashmir. But it's like, no, you don't. You want Kashmir to be part of Pakistan. That is not the same thing as being free. Like, let's be very clear about this. And so Pakistan's engagement towards Kashmir has always been about this, right?
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It's always been about making sure that there wouldn't be any kind of sort of independent Kashmir. Yeah. And so both India and Pakistan crush the sort of secular Kashmiri independence group that have been spearheading a lot of this.
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And over time, Pakistan has sort of, through a complicated series of things, has asserted a lot of control over a lot of these groups or has intelligence relations with them. ISI kind of notoriously works with militant groups.
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The ISI is the group in Afghanistan that really full-on did the thing that everyone thinks that the US and the Saudis sort of did in terms of funding the worst parts of the Mujahideen. That was really mostly Pakistani intelligence. So they have a lot of relations with a bunch of people who absolutely fucking suck.
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And they've, you know, sort of used a lot of these groups as, like, a way to sort of poke a stick at India and also, you know, like, attempt to obtain their sort of, like, domestic political goals of, like, weakening India for their own sort of internal stability, which we'll come back to later.
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Well, the internal stability of, like, military, of the power of the military in Pakistan and also, like, taking the rest of Kashmir. Yeah. And so this has caused a really horrific conflict in which the people of Kashmir have suffered a bunch of horrible shit.
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In 2019, that autonomy, you know, again, the autonomy that was the carrot in order to like join in order in exchange for Kashmir joining India. Yeah. Right. And supposedly getting this referendum like the like the carrot was supposed to be that they're supposed to have an unbelievable amount of of internal autonomy. And in 2019, it had been being eroded for a long time.
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But in 2019, India is just like eat shit. Fuck you. It's gone now. Have fun. And this causes a bunch of protests. It causes militant group attacks. It causes a genuinely astonishing crackdown. I mean, they turned off the phones and the internet in Kashmir. The Indian government just did this. And it became unbelievably difficult to get any information out.
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They arrested unbelievable numbers of people. There are, I mean, just absolutely horrifying accounts of the shit that Indian security forces were doing to people. You know what I mean? Like, this is a colonial occupation, right? The things that happen in a colonial occupation, they fucking torture people, they kill people, they, like, they rape people. It's really fucked.
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And during this, as more sort of, like, militant attacks erupt, like, India does the first version of its... Well, not the first version, but it does... Like, it launches a series of attacks on southern Pakistan. And this is kind of... You know, there were escalations of it a couple of years ago. But, you know, the sort of big deal this time was insurgents.
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And it's... We have a group that claim responsibility for it. It's still... I don't know. It's still unclear the extent to which the Pakistani government was actually involved. There's a whole thing with this. But a bunch of insurgents killed 25 Hindu tourists in a Kashmiri tourist town, and it's really fucking horrifying. This immediately causes...
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this just unhinged wave of Hindu nationalism, like Hindu nationalism in India. We talked last time about all of these Indian government officials literally talking about, quote, an Israel-style final solution to Kashmir. So a bunch of very, very horrific shit is happening. And then India decides that it's going to start launching attacks across the border. There's the immediate small arms fire.
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There's missile strikes. There's drone attacks. And then as this sort of escalates, India launches... attacks on three pakistani air bases and again like they hit an air base that is in the city where pakistan's army general headquarters is which is a kind of provocation that has not happened since like the last time these two countries were just straight up at war
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And, you know, like, that could have killed us all. It didn't, but it absolutely could have. And it was also just horrifying for, and it's worth pointing this out, right? The people who are getting killed on both sides of the border here, like, are Kashmiris, right? Because, like, their home has been occupied by these two powers.
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When India and Pakistan go to war, the people who die on both sides are Kashmiris. Right? Who are being killed by two states who've decided, fuck you, we get to control your fate, we get to be the people who fucking occupy your land and then claim to, like, be the people who represent you. And, you know, the civilian toll of this is fucking horrifying. There's a bunch of civilians are killed.
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People spend a huge amount of time cowering in these, like, horrifying overcrowded bunkers. There's a good sort of BBC report on this of, like... There's so many people packed into bunkers that like you can't even like walk. Everyone's just like pressed against each other. And three days later, you come out of your bunker and your fucking house is gone.
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And those are the people who survived, right? It's just horrifying. And eventually there's a ceasefire. Everyone is now saying different things about the ceasefire. The Indian government is trying to downplay the US's role in the ceasefire. The Pakistani government has been talking about how a whole bunch of places were involved, including Iran and Turkey to some extent, or Turkey more than Iran.
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It seems like the US, the UK, and Saudi Arabia all played a role in mediating it that we can confirm. The US seems to have played the largest role, which I guess... I don't know, like Marco Rubio was like, we should probably not have a war between two nuclear powers, which okay. I'm glad that like, he's finally found a thing, a level that he won't stoop to, which is we all die in nuclear war.
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Yeah, I mean, it's like he we are fully in like, which of Hitler's generals would you prefer to be in charge of this territory? All these people.
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Okay, so there are a few things about this conflict that are very, very bad. One is that India has demonstrated the capacity to launch attacks against Pakistan that don't involve them mobilizing their ground troops, which takes forever. It is hard. That's really fucking bad. It's also bad that, again, they fucking hit
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like, the air base next to Pakistan's army general headquarters, which means if they try to do another attack, they're going to have to hit a bigger target. And apparently, it seems like the Indian government has sort of concluded that they can do this now.
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It's also very bad that, like, most of the domestic Indian left supported this, including CPIM, the Communist Party of India, Marxists, which is, like, the sort of social democratic, technically Maoist party that is supposed to be, like, the left in India, like, back the attacks, and they've always had a fucking terrible line on Kashmir.
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So it's also worth mentioning a little bit, there's been a lot of reporting about India, you know, Modi isn't making a bunch of noise about trying to just straight up cut off Pakistan's access to water, which is very scary. Yeah. It's worth noting, Kay talks about this in that Jacobin piece.
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Kay's argument basically is that, like, they don't actually have the infrastructure to do this, which is good because... I mean, that would be a genocide. Like if they just knocked out all Pakistan's access to water for agricultural purposes and for drinking purposes, it'd be really bad. But here's, I'm going to read this quote.
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"...under the treaty regulations, India is required to share hydrological data that is essential for planning to deal with floods and or droughts during monsoon seasons. Denying Pakistan access to this data would have a damaging impact." Moreover, because of the limited storage capacity, India can change the timing of water flow, which is crucial for many crops during sowing seasons.
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So there is still a lot of damage they can do. They can't straight up do like a genocide, but they can do a lot of damage. And while both sides have backed off of like direct military conflict, India still is committed to every single thing they can do to fuck with India.
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Pakistan which affects just like the people of Pakistan this has also been politically very good for Modi because ultra nationalism it's been bolstering the sort of like Pakistani military government because there are ultra nationalists feed off of this and it's once again really fucking bad for the people of Kashmir who are the ones getting killed on both sides of the border yep War is bad.
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Yeah, it's also, like, it's worth noting, right, when they're talking about, like, casualty numbers, the Houthis are not a, like, small rebel group. Like, they control the capital of Yemen, right? Like, this is, like, the government, right?
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Yeah. Yeah. And so when you're bombing them, right, like, you're... You are blowing smoking craters in apartment buildings.
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Yeah. I will say my understanding of it also is that the only thing that's going on here is that this aircraft carrier has been out past the point it should have been refitted. Yes. Like so extraordinarily.
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Also, I want to say I want to say imagine you are like the deck off. Oh, man.
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Okay, like the first one goes over, right? And then the second one goes over. And now it's happened twice, right?
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Like, imagine, like, you're the deck officer of the fourth one.
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Well, and it's also worth mentioning, too, when you're talking about the global supply chain part of this, right? On the one hand, the U.S. has done an extraordinary amount to try to make sure that as much of the supply chain as they can is in the U.S. On the other hand, it still requires a bunch of other places, including a bunch of rare earth metals that the U.S. gets from China.
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Now, you may be noting we are currently fighting a trade war with China. A bunch of our strategic planning is about stopping a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. And we've just expended a shit ton of our stack pile of munitions that we can only replace by using shit we get from China. So absolute just genius brain shit that's happening here right now at the highest levels of the regime.
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Yeah. We're getting relief from the horrors to live the horrors in another universe.
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Hey, if anyone wants to be Armand Mothbud, take it applications. You can be the good liberal. You can be it.
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But you gotta have some explosives. Like, you can't be relying on staggering yourself with the dagger.
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Fits into that old Marxist category of objectively revolutionary. Yeah. Just by, like, how she fucked this up specifically. And, yeah, that's what this stuff will get to. Well, you know, I think we've talked about how, like, the Death Star plans got stolen, like, from her fucking hard drive.
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So when I first saw this, I was really worried because I think one of those interesting parts about Clay as a character is that she is the only person that Luthen trusts absolutely, right? She's the only person that he sees fully as an equal.
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She's the only one who has all the information that he has. And... I was kind of worried that it was, okay, well, now she's effectively his daughter. And it's like, no, it's actually like she is still the only person. Even though Luthien has been sort of raising her, he's been trying to raise her as an equal as much as he possibly can.
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I think that's a really, really fascinating way for this thing to have gone.
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It's like this, and the thing where he's going, cowl, kite, like the earlier episode.
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It's like his two best, like, this also just really, like, god, they didn't let him cook in Andor, like... It's him and Mothma. It took time to know how to cook, you know? Oh, yeah, but it's like... You mean in Rogue One. You've been getting to watch... Sorry, yeah, in Rogue One.
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You've been getting to watch these people who have just been playing kind of generic Star Wars characters, and you get to watch them cook. It is a thing of beauty. The real freak gets to be let out.
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And he's turning her off. Yeah. And he has this line where he's like, you think I would come here for the death of an ISB clerk? Say, say the word.
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They all get iced out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is this is a dynamic that I think like because like everyone you were trained from birth in the US to know the like the revolution devours its children thing. And no one ever talks about this side of the fascist. It's like, no, the liquidation rate for these people is astonishing. They also all like turn to these people.
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And it's like, you can, you can watch like Vader doing this to people. We're like Vader, like Vader just keeps fucking killing his officers. Yeah.
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really good you're going to make some mistakes and the first time you do Darth Vader chokes you to death and so the empire never gets better it's interesting because this was a point in the old canon where like one of the arguments of why the rebels won the war was like X-Wings have shields and TIE fighters don't so you can make a mistake in an X-Wing
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But if you make a TIE fighter, you're just dead. So the Rebel pilots end up being better than the Imperial ones because they survive. And there's this other, like, there are lots of these interesting parallels, too, where, like, the death of the administrative state was also sort of an old canon thing where it's, like, so the way it plays out in the old canon, it's, like, at Endor.
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And this, like, is the thing in the new canon, too, I guess. But, like, all of the best officers are trying to get promoted up the ladder. And so they're all on the Emperor Super Star Destroyer. Yeah. And when that thing goes down, it's like, yeah, and this is partially just a thing also about how Imperial administration works, is how centralized it is, is that they have single points of failure.
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And this is, for example, how Rhodesia fell. It's like, yeah, they put all their fuel reserves in one spot, it got blown up, and it's like, we don't have a state anymore, because everything's so centralized, and it being so centralized, and everyone being... So essential. And also you killing all these people because your organization doesn't tolerate failure.
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It just creates these cascading failure points where you knock out a couple of people on it and suddenly it's like everything's destroyed.
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Hey, I know. Oh, I know. I'm well aware. I am the sober autistic girl in every one of these things.
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Like, no one will be this drunk again until, like, many, many years later in this galaxy until, like, Civil War generals are fighting each other and will be this drunk.
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I'm so glad they did this because this is such a core part of the ideology of fascism, right? Of seeing the body as a nation and there being these sort of like parasitic infections that are inside the nation that are like undermining it. That's like just the core of fascism.
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And you're just getting to watch like the people in the middle of the empire just literally trying to do the thing in the most literal way possible, right? Right. Like they're just they're just coming out and saying what the ideology is and how it works. And I it may be it may still be a level of metaphor that is slightly too high for the average Star Wars viewer.
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But they are just telling you the politics. Yeah. And I really appreciate that.
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To be fair, it's not like she hasn't blown up a bunch of things.
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From a distance. From a distance. We just watched her liquidate an entire Imperial security complement to go kill Luthan. Like, it's not like she hasn't done this before.
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There's also this great thing at the end of that where Mothma's like, we're just trying to help you. And Saw just cuts the line. And I think it's Draven or whatever the rebel intelligence ghoul in the room is. Cuts the line, and Moth was kind of just going like, uh, and he goes, oh no, we've absolutely been sending spies into his group.
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He's absolutely right. This is something I think is interesting about, because like, in Rogue One, Saw is like, seems like such an unbelievably paranoid asshole. It's like, no, like the rebels really have been like trying to, the rebels and the empire really have been trying to infiltrate his group for like so fucking long that he's completely lost his mind from just like the paranoia.
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And I want to talk about this moment a little bit because I think it's an interesting character thing with Clea here. Clea throughout this entire show is the only character who hasn't been put together the entire time.
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Like, even Pardagast at, like, the very end starts to sort of crack, right? Clea is the one character who, like, when everyone is falling apart around her, when Andor is falling apart, when, like, even when Luthen is falling apart. Clea is always on it.
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And it's like, you get to this moment where her task is... This is when she finally is able to break. Yeah.
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Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like, one, her task is finally over, and so she can, like, let herself fall apart. And two, it's like, a thing that could finally actually drive her to fall apart is the fact that she just had to fucking... She had to kill Luthen. Kill the person who raised her. Yeah. Yeah, she had to fucking kill Luthen, and then get out. And you can see this thing where...
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I think it's very familiar to a lot of people. She also has to hold all this information in her head because if she forgets any of the information that she's been told by Lutheran, the rebellion is doomed. And when Andor first meets her on Coruscant, she's just spilling it out. She's spilling out this jumble of words. And it's like...
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And it's this thing where she's finally reached the point where it's like she has one last thing to do and she can fall apart and then she can finally, instead of having to be the one who's caring for literally everyone and holding literally everyone else together, she can finally rest. And she doesn't know how to do that.
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Because she's always had to be the one who's holding everything together this entire time.
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And like, that's not something I have a good explanation for other than like, I think most Kurdish people can understand the difference between people and government and people and state. And like, I might have a belief, but it is not the same as the government of the US. So can you explain the role of the US here? Because people will be very confused, right?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. The reason Jeffrey Bezos was at the inauguration is because we like to be buying things.
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And I think it's easy to sort of simplify this as like, America is in Syria for oil, but...
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Yeah, and like, especially in this country, the military represents one of the few social mobility tools that exist, right? People don't just join the military because they, contrary to what you might have seen on twitter.com, they want to go to Middle East and kill people. Sometimes they do it because they want to get a chance to go to education.
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Sometimes they want to do it so they get a chance to have healthcare. And like, trans people serve at a higher rate than cis people do. It may not be the case for very much longer, but that has been the case. And they have rights to use however they want. They don't just have rights to use how you or I or anyone else would like them to use them.
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I don't know, isolation that so many people experience in the world.
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whether you think the army is good yeah and imagine for those people like when they people could have served 19 years right they could have been just about to get their 20 years and get their retirement and will now not get that like they they signed up expecting a thing right like there was a quid pro quo there that they would give 20 years of their life and possibly a lot of their health to the united states government in return they would get health care and and a pension for the rest of their lives and people are now going to lose that
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Just to be clear, cis men can still receive gender-affirming hormones.
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Yeah. It's, I found it interesting though, that they seemingly like you try to even get around like that, like linguistic thing in their statement. Yeah.
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Yeah, we should say that a lot of that stuff is not particularly unusual in ICE detention. Lights being on all the time, not being given bedding. But being shoved into a cold shower is not something that happens.
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Yeah, we've seen that a lot with like in similar cases, people crossing the land borders of San Ysidro, but I think a Canadian and German citizen were both detained, which is in San Diego County, if it's not familiar.
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It seems like there's some kind of policy at certain border crossings or maybe like the person in charge there is saying, do this, you know, detain people if there's anything on their record at all.
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And it cannot overstate how disastrous this would be. Yeah. And COVID killed more than a million Americans, just in case people have memory hold that.
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All right. If you are a chicken or you know a chicken or you have anything else that you would like to share with us, you can do so. Well, not anything else. It should be related to the news and things that we can report on. You can send it to coolzontips at proton.me.
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Yeah, it's a ProtonMAT address. That means, yeah, you have to send from encrypted to encrypted. It still doesn't mean it's perfectly safe. That just means it's encrypted. So send what you think you can send over an email that is that way. We reported the news.
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Yeah, some of them are just trying to get on with life.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's James today, and I'm joined by Jenny Keesden, who's a writer, activist, and someone who's been in and out of Northeast Syria for a long time, working with the women's movement.
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And today we're going to be talking about the situation in North and East Syria since the fall of the Assad regime, some of the conflict that has been happening and a resistance of the SDF. Welcome to the show, Jenny.
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Yeah, you're welcome. Of course. So I think if we start off, people have been messaging me a lot on various platforms about the letter that Abdullah Ocalan wrote. And I don't want to address that in its entirety today because we've got something coming up on that. We're going to talk to some people from the Freedom for Abdullah Ocalan campaign.
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I don't know what you call it, like a safe conduit to capital. Like it's a very stark difference if people haven't traveled in that part of the world to be in Jaulero, Abil, and then to cross into Rojava. Like you can see the impact that a decade of that being the safe place to have your oil company headquarters has had on the Kedstar regional government. Yeah.
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I want to move on before we finish up. I want to talk about the current manifestation of resistance, right, and specifically at Tishreen Dam, because that's something that, A, has been reported on, and B, it mirrors what you saw in 2019, and that it's not... just a military resistance, right? But also like a civil society resistance.
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Can you explain, maybe if people have seen anything, they've seen that horrible video of people dancing and then SNA drones dropping a mortar bomb right in the middle of them. But can you explain how we got there?
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But I do want to use it as a jumping off point because I think it... A, has reminded people, as we spoke about before the show, that North and East Syria exists and the SDF exists, which has been largely missing in their legacy media reporting on Syria. But B, there's been atrocious reporting on what it means for the SDF. Even though there's a very clear answer to that.
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So for people who have been reading papers which either just ignore the existence of the FDF entirely or speculate as to what they're going to do when they've given a very clear answer, could you explain to people where this leaves the FDF?
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Yeah, no, that is a very unique thing to Kurdistan and the Kurdish freedom movement. It's this sort of joy. I mean, it's very similar in Burma, actually, where they love to dance in a war. And it's one of the things that I think the joy is hard to explain. I know we're sort of running low on time here, but when people hear Syria and to an extent when they hear Myanmar, they'll think of wars.
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But you should also think about all the people who exist outside of the conflict or who don't exist outside of it, that's the wrong word, but who are not fighting at the front line. The experience of revolution is a very joyful one, even amidst very difficult times. And it's difficult to explain it if you haven't experienced it because it sounds so juxtaposed. But it isn't necessarily.
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I have actually really fond memories of Meeting Kurdish people coming into the United States in the mountains at the time when the United States was retaining people outdoors in very difficult conditions and like dancing with them there, uh, at a time when like it was miserable, the ability to salvage joy. Uh, like it gives you a sense of sovereignty, I suppose.
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And I can understand why that's such an important part of the Kurdish freedom movement when every expression of Kurdish identity has been suppressed for so long. Like, yeah. The ability to seize your moments, what James C. Scott would call small acts of resistance. It's important. It's more important, I think, people understand.
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If you're understanding it from a Western military doctrine, it doesn't fit. But that's because you're using the wrong framework. Yeah, exactly. Jenny, if people are interested in following your work about this, or perhaps they're interested in doing what they can to support the revolution in what is a challenging time, a very changing time, how can they do both of those things?
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Yeah, I think that's a very good way to put it. So yeah, I'd encourage people to do all that. Thank you so much for your time, Jenny. I know it's late there, but we really appreciate you joining us today.
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Yeah, definitely. And I think if people are hearing this and you're new to the show, this is your first time hearing the sea of acronyms that is the Kurdish freedom movement. I could direct you to The Women's War, which is a series that Robert made. I have a book, but you can't read it yet. Still editing it. Or you could listen to one of our numerous.
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Yeah, that makes sense. I'm trying to remember exactly when this began, but there was a movement among anarchists, I guess more in the early 20th century, to learn Esperanto as part of their internationalism.
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I will connect you to somebody who writes books about it with pleasure.
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My first book was about the anti-fascist Olympics and the last surviving popular Olympian, Eduardo Vivancos, died in 2022 in Canada in an old people's home. I've been trying to visit him, but because of the COVID restrictions in the old people's home, I wasn't able to. But he had served as a Esperanto translator at the popular Olympics. And like...
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lived out his whole life with this dream of like, if we can break down the linguistic barriers between workers and we can get together and change things.
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There you go. It worked. They see that this is what they wanted. You saw the barriers fall down once you began speaking Esperanto.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, you were ready for it. That was a dream of the 1920s and 30s. I'm glad that you're living it.
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If you search Rojava or North East Syria or Syria in our feed, I'm sure you'll find a lot to explain those acronyms to you. But yeah, we've had this situation, right, where since December, the situation in Syria has drastically changed. And we now have two state actors. Well, we have lots of state actors. We always had lots of state actors intervening in Syria.
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Yeah. Paul Schake, you just mentioned, he's the guy. He's translated a library of anarchist text.
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Yeah, absolutely. I translated some text for a zine last year and it is a lot of work. Yep. Massive respect to people who do that.
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But we have this new state actor in the Syrian state, right? And I think... People, if they're, you know, if they're like reading the New York Times or God forbid seeing Charles Lister, then they'll have a certain vision of this that sort of exempts the SDF. It sort of just ignores this whole area of Syria and says like, oh, well, the Syrian revolution has succeeded.
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No, it's a great thing to do if you have a couple of languages. To make the world visible from someone else's perspective is such a wonderful thing. To be able to try and share that is really special.
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available and vice versa you know there's probably a lot of gems out there that have yet to hit the english language definitely yeah yeah like just because especially if it's a big language like a language is something like arabic or spanish mandarin where so many people speak it already like there's less need to translate it because like it's
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It's getting out there, I suppose, so there isn't quite the same urgency to translate it. But the ideas get out through paraphrase, I suppose, because enough people can read it in the original language and then paraphrase it in other languages.
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Yeah, it has some beauty in like, the piece I translated was pretty short, but it's the Belgian anarchist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and then went into exile in South America. But the way he writes about the revolutionary moment is one of the most perfect and beautiful encapsulations I've ever read. So like, it was nice to be able to share that.
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It's called Rejecting or Refuting the Legend by a guy called Luis Mercier Vega was the name he went by. Sometimes he also called himself Charles Riddle. Neither of those were his real names, but those were the names he lived most of his life under. I've been reading a lot of translations of Derutti column memoirs.
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Another wonderful one is called Sons of the Night, which is by an Italian anarchist who fought in Spain and then lived the rest of his life in France. And then it's a beautiful book because he was a groundskeeper at the Libertarian Club in Marseille. And the young people of the Libertarian Club,
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was so influenced by his life and his experiences and the way he talked about the world that after his passing, they translated his diary and then wrote this huge historical sort of... The footnotes are four times as long as the book because the footnotes explain the things that he's talking about and who the characters are. And it's...
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It's a really kind of beautiful text and it has, the authors call themselves the Ximenologues, like the followers of Antoine Ximenez. So it's kind of anonymously authored and I think it's a really special like literary project.
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Yeah, yeah. It's a really special thing. I'll send you a link to it when we're done. But I've diverted us a long way from Uruguay. I'm sorry.
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I think we should address like what has happened to the SDF to northern East Syria since the collapse of the Assad regime in December?
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Yeah, that's really cool. That's what we hope for, you know, when like people are forced into exile to be able to return eventually and to be like accepted into the community where they find themselves and able to like, like you say, catch your breath and build their strength and return. That's really cool.
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have them set up and that kind of thing if they did yeah swedish have been really good at accepting migrants and refugees unfortunately a number of people who had received asylum in sweden were killed this week so uh it fucking sucks rob to them
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Yeah, all around the world. Thanks to the wonder of social media, I think.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's beautiful. Yeah. Everyone listening, start learning Esperanto.
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He had like Esperanto in the age of AI is an interesting, uh, I'd love to hear from Esperantis. Honestly, like if we have Esperantis who listen, I still have a great deal of admiration for the project and like for the people who participate in it. And, uh, I've had a lot of communications with them because of their relations to Spanish anarchism.
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And they've always been the nicest, most interesting, welcoming people. So like, yeah, if you want to be our Esperanto guest, please hit me up.
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Yeah, I mean, when you combine it with the open defiance of the courts that we saw this weekend with deportation, it's not a good outlook, actually, in terms of the old separation of powers, which is supposed to be a thing.
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Yeah. It's fundamentally, I don't want to say unconstitutional because I guess I don't get to decide what is unconstitutional and to the extent that it matters.
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Fuck him. We get to, well, it doesn't matter. Yeah, but it is like obviously hideously unconstitutional. It's entirely against the basic principles of the constitution, right? Like the sine qua non of the US constitution, to use a fancy word, is separation of powers, is it?
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Yeah, that's not great. I don't think people realize how much damage this could do. They have a year of just randomly slashing. Not only is it the programs who are affected, things that are cut, the certainty that contractors will get paid, the certainty that if you have a contract with the government, it is a reliable thing. That will have...
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devastating economic consequences if they just start randomly yoinking contracts and not paying people as they did with the USAID suppliers, right? Yeah.
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Yeah, I was talking to someone in the medical profession about this. There's a serious chance that there just won't be one developed in the U.S. for next year and that it will just use the European one. Great stuff.
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Yeah. We've already seen some of this manipulation of federal government funding with Columbia University. Oh, we're going to get to that. Yeah. Okay, good. Exciting. Yeah.
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I don't know who the fuck is doing this. That's what I sometimes wonder is who comes up with these numbers? Is there like a... Staffers.
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I was just looking this up, actually. There was an office founded under Biden that was the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which was supposedly to exist to examine people's conditions in immigration detention, right? And I'm wondering to what extent it still exists.
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I don't know. I was just trying to find that out. I would have to go through the resolution, and maybe I will at some point, but... Yeah, there is stuff that the federal government does right now that provides people with some protections in immigration courts, right? And yeah, I can see.
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I mean, look, to the extent that that matters because they're just deporting people in open violation of court orders right now, we don't know. But it's still bad either way, right? Taking away the very few protections that migrants have. Yeah. It's bad.
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He's a Quisling in this scenario. Like the capital Q Quisling.
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And the thing is, like, As a Democrat, the move, just if you want to get re-elected, is to vote against it and then blame them for everything bad that happens this year because of the budget thing, right? If you have no moral backbone whatsoever, and I'm sure there are things in this continuing resolution which will really screw over rural areas, right? Like some of the funding that was allocated.
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Oh, yeah. And like... Kane is at least, I guess, astute enough to see that when things get harder for his constituents, he can go, yes, they did this and I voted against it and you need to return me to office so I can continue opposing this shit, which is a very cynical approach. But then, yeah, we've just got Chuck Schumer who just kind of bowed down and kissed the ring.
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In 2020, in mobilizing the vote in Toronto Territory, for instance, like, Indivisible Tohono played a really important role. So, like, they're not negligible in their power.
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primarying Chuck Schumer. Yeah, it's a total cultural victory for the Bernie bros, is what's happening. It's a Democratic Party.
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Yeah, minority leader of the United States Senate.
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bay to some extent um and you know and you can you can see this in sort of various border states too where you know these these people fundamentally are doing this because they fucking agree with him that's why that's why that's why they're fucking collaborating yeah or at the very least like and perhaps it's in a sense worse that they don't agree with him but they don't care enough to to not like they're doing it because they think they can personally benefit
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The section of the United States law they're using to justify deporting him is not one that has been used before. He did not do a felony. And they're not suggesting that he did do a felony. And if Schumer can't find it in himself to condemn that... Like, yeah, like folks need to move on because he agrees with it.
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resident commits any crime or doesn't know he's not accused, he's not accused of a crime like he's he.
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Yeah, and the stuff that they proposed and didn't pass because the Republicans wanted to kill it. And then Biden executive order banning asylum. I think what it comes down to is that for the Democrats, the existence of people who oppose the genocide in Palestine and the existence of migrants
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is seen as inconvenient and they're prepared to do away with any rights those people might have and even do away with those people rather than engage with them in any way. I'm sure people like Schumer continue to blame people from both of those movements
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for their ass whooping that they took at the polls in 2024 because they decided that it was more important to do genocide than it was to listen to votes in this country. And rather than listening now, they're blaming them. And the only logical way for them to go is right. And the only logical place for them to take it is more state violence, right?
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Yeah. That's when we saw the Oath Keepers for the first time as well. This kind of militant right really grew dramatically in response to that.
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Yeah, it might legit become that like AOC is more powerful than Chuck Schumer in the next few weeks. You know, he is... The reaction against Chuck Schumer from establishment Democrats is stronger than anything I've ever seen from them.
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yeah look call your senator if you want to but if that's the net total of your political activity then like right now it's probably not going to make a difference in time and really consider if it's the most useful use of your time yeah and maybe make some beans or sew something nice for someone instead or as well you could listen to it while you sew something nice you could call them while you're cooking your beans
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Yeah, absolutely fuck them. Fuck Chuck Schumer in particular.
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I don't believe in cancellation. I don't believe in cancel culture. You know, and I know maybe it's not going to make up a difference, but you know what? After I drove my friend's Tesla... I went and I already picked out the one I want. It's called the, what is it called? The S Plaid. And do you realize this thing, an electric vehicle has 1,006 horsepower and goes from zero to 62 in 2.0 seconds.
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And this thing rips and you can go about 400 miles without a charge. And I don't drive enough to go further than 400 miles, so I'm good. And maybe it's just a gesture on my part, And I like new technology, but it's just a way of saying, you know, look what they're doing to this guy.
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Yeah. Sometimes, to introduce another acronym, we use TFSA to refer to some of those groups, like the Turkish Free Syrian Army, and they're essentially an operation by the Turkish state to co-opt what was initially a democratic grassroots revolution more than a decade ago. And if you haven't been following, I suppose, it would be easy to be confused by this, but the SNA have...
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not been backwards in documenting their war crimes in the advance toward, I guess, their advance westwards towards the Euphrates and even over the Euphrates. And there have been some really horrible things. Some of them I've shared online. They're not hard to find if you want to find them, but I'm not going to put them right in front of you because they're horrible.
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Yeah, it's been a pretty rough week. It sucked. It sucked.
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Well, the day you're listening, it's Newroz. So Newroz Piroz Bey.
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Kurdish listeners. Ashi. So I want to talk today about rendition. This has been reported as deportation. Like, I guess it technically falls within deportation. But what's happening here is that the Trump administration has begun renditioning people who it accuses of being members of Trenderagua, which is a Venezuelan gang, and La Mara Salvatruchelic, the MS-13, as they're known here, right?
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It has done this based on something called the Alien Enemies Act. The way it's able to use the Alien Enemies Act is that it has designated these gangs as foreign terrorist organizations rather than as international crime organizations. And it's used the Alien Enemies Act to expedite their removal.
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We spoke about the Alien Enemies Act in a podcast that I made last November with Rob and Sophie about parts of the law that Trump administration might use for its mass deportation agenda. They're now using this one. Very briefly, it's a 226-year-old piece of legislation that hasn't been used since World War II when it was used to justify internment camps, which were a bad thing.
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These people aren't being deported back to Venezuela, right? The US doesn't have relations with the Maduro regime, although it has deported people back to Venezuela on an airline that was previously sanctioned, which can now land in the US for the express purpose of deportations, which is great. Instead, they're being sent to El Salvador.
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They're being sent there with no trial or hearing or seemingly right to appeal. When they get to El Salvador, they've been paraded in front of video cameras. Very degrading treatment, right? Their hair is being shaved. Sort of being walked with their heads forced down. They're being filmed on their knees while all their hair and facial hair is removed. And then they're being sent to Secot.
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If you're not familiar with this, it was the subject of State Department human rights reports very recently. And now we are sending people there. It's a mega prison in El Salvador. It roughly translates to Terrorism Confinement or Terrorism Detention Center, I guess.
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It's been very recently built by Bukele, who's the president of El Salvador, and is part of his Superman Arturo, like Iron Fist, Super Iron Fist would be the way you would translate it, I guess. It is... routinely criticized by human rights organizations for the disgusting conditions that people are kept in, right?
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And as the SNA have advanced, they've reached... a couple of locations that are very crucial, right? And that's where they've been kind of stopped by the SDF. Because the SDF haven't been in, like, such a large-scale conflict for the last couple of years. They've, of course, been fighting against, like, Islamic State splinter cells and, to a degree, the SNA. But, like...
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The United States government intended to send 300 people there, and in return, it paid $6 million to El Salvador for the cost of their detention. At the time that I wrote this, 238 people who were accused of being part of Tren del Agua were sent there, and then 23 who were accused of being part of MS-13. They were removed on flights.
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The Trump administration is claiming they were removed before a district court judge in D.C. blocked the removals. But there are a series of timelines that you can see online, some of which will be linked to the source of this episode, which suggests that they were in the air when he blocked their removals. Nonetheless...
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The judge very explicitly said, and I'm quoting here, any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States. This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately. This did not happen. The planes continued traveling to El Salvador. It stopped in Honduras. And then these people were paraded before the cameras.
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And they're now presumably being detained in this prison, which doesn't meet basic standards of human rights. The government has given various reasons for ignoring this ruling from the judge. Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt claimed that there was, quote, no lawful basis for it.
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Obviously, the process here is if you don't believe the judicial ruling is correct, you stop doing the thing and appeal it. You don't just keep doing the thing and say, like, oh, well, I don't believe you. It's not true. Obviously, this only matters insofar as the judge can enforce his decision. They also claimed in court that a verbal order that the judge gave is not the same as a written one.
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And they claimed that because the flights were over international waters, this was a foreign policy matter and that the judge couldn't intervene in a foreign policy matter. That's a power that's reserved to the executive.
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Yeah, this is, there are fringes on the flag, so Admiralty Court applies kind of stuff.
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Yeah, in terms of, yeah, you basically don't have human rights. Look, they're forcing a loophole that doesn't exist in the same way that George W. Bush did in the early 2000s with Guantanamo Bay. He was never stopped from doing it. Yeah.
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The SDF has modernized a lot more than the SNA have, I guess, in the past few years. They've embraced the use of first-person view drones. They've even shot down several Turkish Bayraktar drones, which they previously, if they had the ability to do it, then they weren't able to use that ability until very recently. Yeah. So, like, in a sense, their resistance has been very impressive, right?
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Yeah. So... Yeah, that's the idea here, right? That we're at war with these foreign terrorist organizations and these people are essentially like spies.
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I want to really briefly, like one of the criteria that was used here, so ICE criteria, so they have to have two identifying signs to be classified as a gang member. One of them that has been used very heavily here is tattoos. We know from court filings that one man, Jose Reyes Barrios, he has a football tattoo, right?
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Like a tattoo of a football with a crown on it and it says Dios, like God underneath. It was supposed to be, I guess, similar, like a play on the logo of Real Madrid. But they've used this to claim that it's evidence he's a member of a gang. Gangs like Fendi Aragua don't have gang sign tattoos, right? Yeah. They're smarter than that.
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They've seen what's happened to gangs like MS-13, because who do, like Maras, Central American gangs have had these things as part of their tradition for a while, and they've been used heavily by law enforcement. I remember Christmas Eve, 2023, I was in the desert with my friends and a large number of migrants across that day.
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I remember meeting a Venezuelan man who was like covered in tattoos, like head to toe, very heavily tattooed. And that dude spent the entire day building a shelter for someone else's sick kid.
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and then slept by himself in the freezing cold outside and like i know i've been thinking about that guy a lot because like under this ruling right like just his appearance of having tattoos would have him classified as a terrorist and like when thousands of americans living within an hour of that place did nothing and that little girl who was sick had nowhere to sleep like this guy took it upon himself to help even when he himself was in a difficult place and uh
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It just really makes me kind of sick to think that this is where we're at now.
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Yeah, it's not all a slippery slope, and I'm not saying that they're both as bad as each other, because what's happening now is much worse than anything that happened previously.
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But when we could detain people, including little children outside, and we could leave them there in the snow, and little babies could be shivering, and I could be giving away my own coat almost every day I was out there because I was worried someone's baby was going to die of hypothermia. We kind of conceded that these people didn't have rights. Right.
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And the Democratic Party let that happen and people on the left let that happen. And that is a stepping stone on the pathway to where we're at now.
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Because we have, on the one hand, it's the second largest army in NATO, giving its, like, full support to the SNA. And on the other hand, we have the FDF, which is, in theory, a U.S. partner force, right? There are U.S. bases still in Syria. There are U.S. troops still in Syria.
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But, like, I mean, I remember when I was in Rojava in October of 2023... The US shot down a Bayraktar drone over a US base, and then it did not shoot down the dozens of other Bayraktar drones that were bombing the cities. The city that you're in right now, the city that I was in, other cities. I met a mother who had lost her 14-year-old son to one of these drone bombings.
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Really horrific and just cruel bombing of what are very clearly civilian targets. So like the US is there, but they're not doing anything to help supposedly their friends, supposedly their partners. And like every interview I conducted began with like five minutes of me being asked why the Americans weren't being friends when the SDF had been friends to them in a battle against ISIS.
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In my defense, I'm on a lot of podcasts. I was going to say that just because Robert Evans lives in like a constant podcast.
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Yeah, if you didn't get the turkey joke, we explain it in detail there.
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Yeah, it is like the opening credits of a disaster movie, the White House Twitter feed right now.
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They seem to be an open violation of that, though. Yeah. Like they were told to keep paying USAID stuff and they just said they won't.
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Yeah, perfect. Okay. So what I want to talk about is this. It was first reported by the New York Times. I've since confirmed it with sources on the ground in Panama. The Trump administration is detaining migrants that it can't deport to their home countries in Panama currently. So currently, these are places where the US doesn't have good relations with their government, right?
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There'll be Afghans, there'll be Iranians, people like that. The US seems to have found a way to deport Venezuelans using an airline that was sanctioned until the day it apparently landed in the US military base to take Venezuelan people back to Venezuela. If you want to hear about people leaving Iran and why they're leaving Iran, you can listen to my episodes I did in The Dalian Gap.
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They came out late October and November of last year. But Right now, they're being kind of corralled in a hotel in Panama City, from what I've heard. And just this morning, the transport to San Vicente began. So the New York Times kind of mischaracterizes the detention center at San Vicente. I'm guessing this is because they haven't been there. And I have.
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They called it like a detention center that's being built, quote, close to the jungle. It looks close to the jungle if you're looking on Google Maps, I suppose. It's off the Pan American Highway, actually. You literally take a dirt road off the Pan American Highway and you come across this shithole.
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huge prison facility it's all big modern white buildings the old facility that was there burned down and it's been rebuilt largely i'm guessing with money from when the biden administration was funding deportations from panama in 2024 it's a vast detention facility at the time when i went there my fixer daddy and ella and i weren't allowed to access the facility the
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But it was very clearly like too big for what its stated purpose was. Its stated purpose was people who had warrants for their arrest and had been found to have warrants for their arrest when they entered Panama and were being deported back to the countries where they had warrants. I've spoken to half a dozen to a dozen people who were detained there.
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And I just got one quotation to read and then we can talk about this. They treated us very badly, verbally and psychologically. We all had to do our business in the same cell. They threw food on the floor for us to eat, and we were all in handcuffs.
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Yeah. So the legality of taking someone to a third country is a little unclear, right? Of course, the United States has done this. Well, Guantanamo Bay is technically American soil, I guess, but they've also, they've done it in other places around the world that are not Guantanamo Bay throughout the war on terror. This is not the same as the El Salvador plan.
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The United States Department of Homeland Security, the Secretary for Homeland Security attended the inauguration of the new Panamanian president, DHS and the Panamanian executive have a very close relationship. Got it. The US was funding deportations for Panama under Biden. They claimed that these were only people who had warrants for their arrest in the countries they were being deported back to.
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When I spoke to those people, I was there when they literally took the families apart, put the people in a truck, sent them off to San Vicente and deported them. And these guys, if they had warrants for their arrest, it seems very odd because when they arrived back in Colombia, they were not detained or arrested.
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And if you have a warrant for someone and they get handed to you, that's when you're going to detain them, right? And none of them were detained. They just released back to their day-to-day life in Colombia. So there was definitely precedent for this set by the Biden administration. But what's happening now is a degree worse, right? Taking people...
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I don't know what the long-term plan for these Afghan and Iranian people is, right? Were they going to live in San Vicente? Like, whose custody are they in? Yeah, like, is this like a DHS black site? Yeah, no, absolutely. Are they on U.S. soil in San Vicente? Certainly when I was there, it was secured exclusively by Panamanian authorities, not by U.S. authorities.
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So like the legal process, I'm guessing, like, I don't know if there is one beyond like, we can't deport these people back to their countries. We want to, number needs to go up, right? There's been reporting that Donald Trump is upset that his deportation numbers haven't hit the numbers that Biden did. Yeah.
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And so they're doing things like this, which appears to be move fast and break things, I guess. Like, I don't really know how to describe it.
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Yes, they are. Yeah, including lots of human rights conventions. As we're recording this on Wednesday afternoon, I just heard from a friend in Panama that 300 people were transferred to San Vicente. And it looks like 179 of them have no sort of clear path to be deported back to their home countries, no accepted place to send them.
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So those are the people who seem to be in legal limbo right now in Panama and San Vicente for a matter of time that we don't know in a status that we don't yet. No, it isn't clear. But yeah, this is pretty bad. Like I say, I've been on the ground. I don't have any other reporters who have been on the ground in San Vicente. We're very well sourced in Panama and among the migrant community.
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So we're going to continue reporting on this. I've already sent some requests for comment out. So I would expect us to have something out on this in the next couple of weeks, hopefully.
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Did Garrison say something rude or offensive when I had to take my headphones off to take off my plate carrier?
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Oh yeah, no, they are beaten into a corner. I didn't put up much of a fight.
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Yeah, like, one of the, like, types of guys who I've run into when I'm out in the mountains is people who, like, have very reasonably assessed that people in the United States don't have access to the healthiest food, especially if they don't have a lot of money, and that that is impacting their health, right? That's a fair enough assessment. Sure.
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To go from that to, like, and I just want someone who will do something about it, so I guess this RFK guy is okay.
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It's really worrying. And there's a measles outbreak right now, right? In Laredo, like in Texas. 300 people last I checked in Laredo, around Laredo, yeah.
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If you're not aware of how devastating measles outbreaks can be, I'd really encourage you to look into the outbreak in Samoa and the absolutely heartbreaking consequences of that.
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Yeah, they ran out of child-sized coffins and had to ask for people to send more.
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Like... Yeah, and like, I'll just say, like, I've worked in diabetes education in the past, right? And in various non-profit capacities, not that kind of doctor. But I have seen the people who have died because they have been subjected to this kind of bullshit. Like, I know the people who have lost children and loved ones because of this.
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And it is heartbreaking to think that somebody, normally it's somebody trying to make money, would lie to someone about their health, right? And the people who are most vulnerable to this are the people who are also already struggling to access healthcare and access medications. And it is disgusting to see the government pushing this.
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Yeah, this is kind of foundational to the Constitution, right? Access to an attorney, the right to an attorney. And it's, again, something that, like, even under Biden, the DHS have been taking a swing at. Specifically, we've done an episode last year about transferring... detained people in ICE custody away from their attorneys, right?
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In most cases, it was people from California, specifically San Diego County, because San Diego County had a program that funded some attorney access and moving them to Texas. So you're either going to bleed that program dry, flying attorneys to Texas or...
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have them do it over a phone call, but a lot of these people who are detained because they come from dictatorial countries don't feel like phone calls are secure. And so they're not really going to feel comfortable talking to their attorney on a phone call. We've done a whole episode about that. You can go back and listen to it.
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Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what they're going for throughout, right? But like, I know, for instance, in California, lots of universities have these like know your rights cards accessible that you can have them in your lectures and give them out to your students. They can take them regardless of citizenship status, right? Which is generally the way to approach this, right?
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With an agnostic approach to citizenship. Correct. You don't certainly want to be holding a, if you're undocumented, come to this thing at this time and we'll give you a know your rights session. Like that is not a smart way to approach this. But yeah, like immigration agnostic, know your rights trainings.
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They're kind of foundational to like constitutional rights that they're pretty much front and center of things you're allowed.
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That's right. It's in there. Article 22. It's like they can't put the soldiers in your bedroom unless they're sponsored by. I mean, look, depending on the soldier.
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Tariff talk with Mia Wong. There we go. I thought Garrison said turf talk in a Canadian way. Very different podcast, much more cursing.
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Great. Cool. Luckily, SpaceX has had no notable incidents, and so I'm sure that will be fine. No, they didn't just hide a rocket going off.
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it's certainly not helping right that like the faa was already understaffed like as you as you said people were already dying in plane crashes taking staff away from the faa is not helping like we can't isolate that from every crash that happens and like it's not it's not just that it's also like the continued the continued hiring freeze largely air traffic control operators have not been affected by the firings uh other support staff have which are still just as crucial
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You should explain what a probational employee is.
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For legal reasons, this is a joke. We do not want any nukes. It is coolzontipsatproton.me. You can contact us there. It is protonmailisencrypted. That only means that the mail is encrypted if you send from a Proton email address to a Proton email address. None of that means that you are necessarily 100% secure, but it's the best option that we have for right now.
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If you'd like to reach out to us, please feel free to do so. coolzontipsatproton.me. We reported the news. We reported the news.
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Yeah. And like, I believe he didn't, isn't he like a member of the university Buddhist club?
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Yeah, yeah. The way he and his group were referred to during COVID, he's now using in the same fashion.
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Like you said, we already know because people are seeking out diagnoses. Right. We have better awareness of it now.
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We're back. Thank you, future Garrison and future Mia. So it's my role here to update you on the board of fascism, right? And that's what I'm here to do. Where I want to start this week is in the Roosevelt Reservation. This is something that's been reported on a little bit. It's wreaked largely by people who maybe only found out about it this week and...
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looked at the Wikipedia page and then wrote a story. The Roosevelt Reservation is a 60-foot easement that runs along the southwestern border of the United States from the coast of San Diego all the way to New Mexico. It doesn't cover the Texas border.
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I've written about it before for the Sierra Club and for Drilled News four or five years ago, and I'm going to include a link to the Sierra Club piece in the show notes. The Drilled piece is down now. They don't have that print site anymore. It was established in 1907 by Teddy Roosevelt, and
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It was transferred for three years from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Defense by the Trump administration in 2019 using an executive order. This year, in 2025, all of the Roosevelt Reservation that is not part of federal reservation land was placed on the Department of Defense jurisdiction.
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A lot of reporting seems to have missed this exemption for federal reservation land, which makes up a significant part of the border, especially in Arizona, right in the Tornadum Reservation.
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I'm going to quote from the language of the executive order here, quote, "...to provide for the use and jurisdiction by the Department of Defense over such federal lands, including the Roosevelt Reservation and excluding federal Indian reservations that are reasonably necessary..."
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to enable military activities directed in this memorandum, including border barrier construction and emplacement of detection and monitoring equipment. The way I read this, it also doesn't limit to the reservation. It seems to include other federal land, right? Which could include national monuments, national parks, the BLM and the national forest, all of which exist along the border.
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The Trump administration this week also obtained waivers. The waivers waive dozens of laws that have been limiting construction in the San Diego sector. I'd like to quote a little bit from that Sierra Club piece that I wrote, because I think...
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The aspect of the damage done to the sacred space of indigenous people is being completely overlooked by the legacy media in this, not perhaps surprisingly. So one of the laws waived was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
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The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was enacted by Congress in 1990 to protect and safely relocate native burial sites when construction takes place on sensitive sites. The tribe in question should be consulted, and in the event remains or other archaeological objects are found, construction should be altered so as not to disturb the site."
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In the areas of San Diego where they are digging, what's called midden soil has been found. Midden soil is soil that contains evidence of cremated human remains, in this case of Kumeyaay people.
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With this waiver, they don't have to comply with NAGPRO, Native American Graves Protection and Relocation Act, which means that they can continue digging through what are literally people's ancestors' graveyards. Here's another quote from that 2020 story.
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If this were another country's government destroying a region's holy land, the US would go to war and the people would feel it justified, activist Thomas Barber told Sierra. But it happens here at home in front of us and we just turn away.
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Yeah, it's not even... What bugs me is like not so much of folks, you know, not doing anything. I get that it's overwhelmingly horrible at the moment. It's that this doesn't even get reported. Yeah.
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Big outlets with a massive budget who are supposed to have a border reporter who's never fucking set foot on the border, doesn't take the time to talk to the indigenous people whose land the border crossed, right? Like...
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doesn't take the time to hear their concerns doesn't take the time to think about when you dig 30 feet into this ground to build your border wall that's 12 000 years of someone's history how do they feel about that and like that is a failing of the legacy media has been a failing for a long time and it will continue to be one for a long time and pisses me off
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I guess to talk more broadly then about this militarization of the Roosevelt Reservation and other public land, there's been some speculation about what this might mean. I don't think that you're going to see soldiers pointing their guns at the southern border and shooting anyone who comes across.
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I do think it's likely a lot of the people who have been deployed to southern border so far are MPs, military police, right? Yeah. And it's possible that those MPs will be able to detain people and potentially charge them with trespassing on a military installation.
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That would just be another string to the bow of their attempt to like rapidly deport people because they already have many other kind of options through executive order of doing that, which they're already implying, right? it might also make it easier for them to waive some of these other laws and to construct more surveillance equipment.
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In the Ebrego Garcia case, which we've covered for several weeks now, the Supreme Court has unanimously asked the United States government to, quote, "...facilitate his return." The US government has embarked upon a unique definition of the word facilitate, which it feels like means allowing him to enter the country and providing transport if El Salvador releases him.
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Bukele refused to release him, saying that doing so would be to, quote, smuggle a terrorist into the United States. Gareth and I did a whole episode about this yesterday that you can listen to. Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen went to San Salvador, right, capital of El Salvador, if you're not aware. He met with the vice president because Bukele is still out of the country.
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Van Hollen held a press conference right afterwards that I watched right before we recorded this. In the press conference, Van Hollen basically said that he'd asserted to the vice president of El Salvador that there was no evidence nor any conviction of being a member of MS-13. And he asked the VP why he was holding Mr. Abrego Garcia. And the VP said, because the US is paying us to hold him. Yeah.
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Yeah, they won't even lie. Yeah, no, he's not lying. That's why they're doing it. I believe that. Yeah. And credit to this Maryland senator for being the only one to do something. And it's not enough, and it's just one person. There are 300 people there, right? They're not even going for the hundreds of other innocent people who are there.
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It's one guy, but at least he's doing something while the rest of the Democrats are collectively, I don't know, like voting for Trump's nominees. He asked to meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia and was told that they needed more time. He said, I'll come back next week. They said they don't know if they can organize it in a week. He asked if he could call him.
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They said they didn't know if they could facilitate a call. They said maybe the U.S. embassy would have to be the one that requests that. So he has now requested that the embassy request that he be allowed to call Mr. Abrego Garcia and Mr. Abrego Garcia be allowed to speak to his wife.
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Garrison and I spoke about how it's not in the interest of the government of El Salvador to have people leave this prison and testify to the conditions that are in it.
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That we're aware of, yeah, that no one who's been detained there has left. Yeah. The government wouldn't give him a date when he could meet Mr. Abrego Garcia or when he would be likely able to make a call.
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In a separate case, Judge Boasberg, who we've spoken about before as well, right, Judge Boasberg was the judge who issued the tentative restraining order on the rendition of people to El Salvador, which the government then ignored, has found probable cause that the administration is in contempt of court. What does this mean? It doesn't mean, despite what you have seen on your timeline,
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that this will mean these people will be brought home. When they're found in contempt, they have two options, right? They can purge themselves of the contempt. And the way they would do that would be by providing habeas. not by bringing all these people home, at least not yet, right?
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Or they could present the people who are responsible, and then either an attorney could be appointed by the DOJ to prosecute them, I guess. I don't quite know how that would work consistently. So the judge himself can appoint an attorney to prosecute them for criminal contempt. Again, at least the guy's trying, I guess.
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No, yeah, and he's asserting that they need to listen to the court. They are supposed to listen to the court.
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Judge Ginez, who is a judge on the district court that had its case sent to the Supreme Court for review in the Abrego-Garcia incident also, quoted the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and said that the government's understanding of the word facilitate flew in the face of the common understanding of the word. Again, like I've seen it asserted like, oh, legal experts can disagree.
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Meanwhile, you've got the actual judge in the actual case being like, no, this is what the dictionary says. Your definition is ludicrous. I would caution people to be very careful looking at like blue check legal experts on x.com or people on blue sky. There has been so much misleading stuff about immigration law and the laws in these particular two cases and about the resort reservation actually.
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Just be really careful where you're getting your information, especially on immigration law, from maybe go back and check what that person was doing in 2023 when thousands of migrants were detained in outdoor detention camps, because I've seen so much misinformation.
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And people, understandably, who aren't expert in this, because it's extremely complicated, are likely to be taken advantage of by people who are grifting off what is a moment when a lot of us are afraid and a lot of us are uncertain. So be very careful what you're reading out there.
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Hello and welcome to the show. It's me, James, today, and I am joined by Garrison Davis. Hi, Garrison. Hello. Hello. Garrison has just said some words about something that's happening on social media that I don't understand, and it's made me feel very old. That's what's happening today in my world. It's very sad. We're gathered here today to talk about the earthquake in Myanmar, right?
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I think most of you will probably have been made aware of the earthquake. It's somewhat odd that corporate media has really not reported on the revolution in any substantial way since 2021. But the earthquake apparently justified a lot of networks sending people to Myanmar for the first time.
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Very amusingly, people DMing me on Blue Sky and Twitter asking how to get a visa from the Burmese hunter, which is not a thing I have ever done. The last communication I had with them came in the form of a car bomb that they set off near to a place where we were. But if you're not aware, the earthquake happened on the 28th of March of this year, just before one in the afternoon.
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It was the biggest earthquake in Myanmar since 1912, and it registered 7.7 on the Richter scale, which is huge. Because it's very hard for foreign journalists to get a visa to enter Myanmar. The initial reporting focused on Bangkok and the damage done in Thailand. But the epicenter was in Sagaing, which is near Mandalay. Mandalay is the second biggest city in Myanmar.
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And that was where the worst of the destruction happened. Almost every street in Mandalay has collapsed buildings. It's a little difficult for us to get a sense of the exact scale of the damage because the Hunter refuses to allow... Some media has been allowed in. The BBC, I saw, like, sneaked somebody in. It's very difficult for media to move and report freely.
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And in addition to this, the Hunter has continued its practice of cutting off internet for people in Myanmar, right?
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Yes, especially during emergencies. They've cut it off as a response to this because I guess they perceive it to be something that makes them look weak. This is a tendency that The Hunter has displayed before. So in 2008, Cyclone Nargis affected Myanmar and killed over 130,000 people. And they blocked international aid.
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They said that people didn't need the, quote, chocolate bars that the US and other countries countries were trying to deliver and that they could exist by like hunting frogs in ditches was their suggestion i don't think people realize like how far down the north korea scale the the burmese hunter is
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uh but like they're very worried that any interaction with the outside world specifically with like i guess western neoliberal powers will be damaging for their like ability to control the population so for that reason we don't know how many people have died right um From what I've heard on the ground, the death toll is substantially higher than the 3,600 number being reported.
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The US Geological Survey estimated that an earthquake of that magnitude in that region would kill between 10 and 100,000 people. Obviously, that's quite a big kind of delta there. What I can tell you is that I've heard firsthand that there are some parts of Mandalay and Sagang where the stench of rotting bodies is so powerful that people have stopped returning to their homes.
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There have been so many aftershocks that people are still sleeping in the street because they're worried about the damage structures falling down. The UN has an estimate of 17 million people across 57 townships. Townships are like the administrative districts that are used in Myanmar, have been affected with over 9 million people facing severe hardship.
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And of course, this is all compounded by the fact that there were already 20 million people in Myanmar who needed humanitarian assistance. And there are about three and a half million internally displaced people as a result of the fighting that's happened after the revolution. So like it really came at a pretty difficult time in, in, in a place where the government is not willing.
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They, they said after the earthquake, they wanted international aid, but they've, as we'll see later in this script, they've, uh, they've only accepted it from certain countries. I spoke to a friend who has family in Mandalay yesterday. He told me that the way they're assessing the damage is using open source intelligence.
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They're trying to look in the backgrounds of people's videos on Facebook to work out if their childhood homes fell down. They were using satellite imaging software when I spoke to them yesterday to try and ascertain if their families were okay. They told me Sagang has very famous pagodas and the pagodas are all on a hill.
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And apparently a lot of those pagodas have fallen down and even the hill itself is like listing. So there's been like massive cultural damage as well. Another way in which the damage was compounded by Myanmar's politics was the quake struck, like I said, at 1pm on a Friday, which is Friday prayers.
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This happened during Ramadan, specifically the day before Idul Fitr, which is a very busy day for mosques, if you're not aware. Successive governments of Myanmar since the 1960s have refused to allow even basic maintenance for mosques. That means that these buildings were in great states of disrepair, right?
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Myanmar, there is an ultra-nationalist Buddhist movement, which has been embraced to a great degree by the Hunter, but also limited even like the National League for Democracy, which was the relatively neoliberal aligned party that had previously been in power in Myanmar or somewhat in power, I suppose. Ultra-nationalist Buddhist monks like Ashin Murathu and his 969 movement
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have kind of condemned anything that they did as making them pro-Muslim. And they have this, essentially they have a great replacement theory, right? That Muslims are trying to come in through Bangladesh to replace Buddhists in Myanmar.
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Yeah, I mean, as vicious as any other. People, I'm sure, will be familiar with the Rohingya genocide. There are a lot of monks that supported that, including Wirathu is the most notable one, but there are plenty more. He's literally explicitly expressed how much he looks up to the English Defence League.
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Yeah. Yeah. Like these are people who like, they are part of this, this global nativist movement. People's Orientalism, I think sometimes stops them seeing that or appreciating that this extends outside of like white global North countries. Yeah.
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One thing that I did think that really touched me in the days after the earthquake was young Buddhist Bama people of the majority ethnicity reaching out to me and being like, hey man, this happened in Friday prayers during Ramadan and it has devastated Muslim population.
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Like thousands of people, hundreds of mosques have gone and thousands of people are trapped in a rubble and like no one's talking about it. Why is no one talking about it? This is terrible. And like, it would have been inconceivable that, to hear young Burma Buddhist people so concerned with the well-being of their Muslim countrymen before the coup in 2021.
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This was a country that had been manufacturing consent for genocide against its Muslim minorities for four or five years by that point. Specifically on Facebook, there's a Behind the Bastards episode on this. You can also listen. If you're new to the show, Robert and I have made two scripted series about the revolution in Myanmar, which we'll include in the show notes.
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But that change to a real genuine solidarity and care between these two groups was really touching in the moments after the earthquake and the days after the earthquake. When we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about the revolution and I want to talk about how the revolution has been responding to this and the impact it's had on the revolution. We are back.
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And of course, the revolution hasn't stopped because of the earthquake. The conflict is still ongoing and the PDFs and their allied ethnic resistance organizations are still fighting against the hunter. In fact, within an hour of the earthquake, the hunter began using paramotors to drop bombs on Hangu Village in Sugang. This has been a thing that they've started to do recently.
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In a sense, I guess it's a good sign because it shows that maybe their jets and other aircraft are in a poor state of repair or that they're struggling to keep enough of them airborne. Initially, I wondered if they were using the paramotors because their runways had been damaged, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They've been air striking just as much as they ever did. which is unfortunate.
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Satellite images or reports from my sources on the ground suggest that they're able to continue carrying out bombing raids at a pretty similar rate from when they did before.
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Despite this, the National Unity Government, which is kind of the shadow government composed mostly of people who were elected and then deposed by the coup in 2021, and the PDF, who in theory are commanded by the National Unity Government, called a two-week ceasefire right after the earthquake to allow for a humanitarian pause.
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The Three Brotherhood Alliance, which is an alliance of the three most powerful ethnic resistance organizations in Myanmar, also called what they called a humanitarian pause for a month. In both cases, they said they wouldn't undertake offensive operations, but they would defend themselves, right? Because I think they had a sense that the junta wasn't going to stop attacking them.
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The junta did declare its own ceasefire on April 3rd, and the Kachin Independence Army, which is another ethnic resistance organization, followed shortly thereafter. Notably, that ceasefire from the junta came the day after its troops fired on a Chinese Red Cross convoy. which is not a great look for them. No, never loved to see that. Yeah, we don't love to see people firing on the Red Cross.
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This is especially bad for the Hunter because China has been growing closer and closer to the Hunter and supporting it. China's had this weird back and forth relationship with the revolution. At times it supported the revolution, it seems like, specifically supporting the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, which is a group that broke off the Communist Party of Burma in the 1980s.
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Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. There's also the United War State Army, which isn't part of the revolution, which has the strongest relationship with the PRC, and they're just chilling. They haven't really entered the conflict. It's called straight chilling, by the way, James. Straight chilling? Yeah, there you go. That's how they use it. I've marked myself out yet again.
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Straight chilling, the United War State Army. Thank you, Garrison. Actually, it spoke to some cadres from the Burmese Communist Party recently. The Communist Party of Burma re-entered after 2021. And they're not focusing on proselytizing the Maoist gospel to people. They're focusing on fighting the hunter and developing alliances. And it's interesting to see where that will go, given...
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Marcus Leninism is definitely not the majority ideology of the revolution. Most people are committed to some form of federal democracy, which, when you speak to different fighters, varies from, like, we want what you guys have in the US to something more akin to the democratic confederalism that people might be familiar with in Rojava. China is competing with Russia in politics.
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So both of them are interested in supporting the junta, right? And obviously both their ideologies are far from liberatory. They're interested in propping up a totalitarian state. So we have seen both Russia and China send support to the junta, send rescue teams after the earthquake. Meanwhile, the US offered $2 million, which... I was kind of surprised they offered anything.
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Three USAID workers, at least three, I should say, three that I'm aware of, were laid off, like literally they received emails telling them that they no longer had a job while they were on the ground assisting earthquake survivors. Department of Government Efficiency. Strikes again. Highly efficient.
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We'll send you the money and then also pull out our own people who I guess are supervising how the money is spent or would be. It definitely shows a strategic shift in the region. China, Russia... China obviously is interested in Myanmar because of its rare earth metals, because of jade. China has traditionally had a lot of jade trade with Myanmar. And then...
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because it controls a large amount of seafront. China wouldn't want to fall into what you would see as someone with adversarial interests. Russia is still interested in just kind of projecting itself as a global power, even as it continues to shrink every day in terms of its global abilities to project power.
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But there definitely are both Chinese and Russian assistance helping the Myanmar hunter now. Meanwhile, the US doesn't seem to give a shit what happens here now. Not that the Biden administration was doing very much either, but at least we had USAID.
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And USIP was very invested in Myanmar and actually did a really good job of almost being the foreign affairs, not branch, but they explained the revolution to the world. Whenever a journalist wanted to understand the revolution in Myanmar, it was USIP they went to. Obviously, all the contacts that have a USIP have now been doged, which is a shame. So despite the ceasefire, right?
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I said they fired on these Chinese troops. The Hunter has in fact not stopped bombing earthquake struck areas since the earthquake. Madeleine PDF, who I'm in contact with, they're the revolutionary forces in the area that was most affected by the earthquake. On April 7th, told me that they're aware of 10 airstrikes in their area of operations.
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Since the earthquake, a three-month-old baby and a 10-year-old child were killed in an air raid on Naikar village in Papoon Township. That was in Karen State. On April 10th, they bombed a school, something that the junta likes to do a lot. They dropped two 500-pound bombs on a food court.
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They then circled back and dropped another bomb on the people responding to and giving aid to the people they'd initially bombed at the food court. By food court here, just to clarify, I'm not talking about like at the shopping mall. I'm talking about like a market where people can buy like prepared food, right?
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They've killed, at best, I can collate from various sources, at least 72 people and injured about 100 people in addition to thousands who died after the earthquake. There are also reports that hunter quote unquote recruiters here are engaging in forced conscription in the disaster zone.
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I read of at least one person who was on a search and rescue team, that they were a trained search and rescue volunteer, right? So they were moving rubble to rescue people and they were forcibly conscripted while they were doing that. Obviously that's had a chilling effect on people going out to help others, right? What the hunter is not doing is rescuing its citizens.
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The military is detested in most of Myanmar, even in the areas that it controls. And its failure to even try and trap people rescued on the rubble won't help this. There was a video that went viral recently of hunter troops, literally a line of soldiers rescuing bricks.
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They've gone to a collapsed building and they're inspecting the bricks to see if the bricks are whole and then passing them down the line and stacking them up. Don't worry, the bricks are safe. Yeah, the bricks are safe. The people are not. It was genuinely infuriating to see it. I can't imagine for people who have lost family members how it must feel.
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Even rescue workers, like I said, have been forcibly conscripted. Equality Myanmar has noted more than 100 cases of forced conscription since the earthquake. So Myanmar has a conscription rule, a law, so any one men and now women between certain ages can be forcibly conscripted into the hunter's army.
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Yeah. It's people who have been hiding in their homes, right? Who now don't have homes to hide it. Yeah. Or people who came out in order to save their neighbors. And now they're forcing them to fight for them. Just as the hunter did with Cyclone Nargis, they've also delayed and in cases blocked aid. A team came from France to assist in a search and rescue. They spent
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24 hours sitting in an airport waiting for their visa to be approved. And then they spent one day working in search and rescue efforts before being told that search and rescue efforts had now finished and they were to go home. They traveled around the entire world, didn't save a single life. Abundance. It's great.
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Presumably because the hunter wanted to placate China, a Taiwanese team was straight up refused entry into Myanmar. Taiwan had a search and rescue team that they were willing to send who could have saved people's lives and that they weren't allowed to enter.
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All tourist visas have been suspended, so it's not like the hunter is overwhelmed with visa applications, but they're not allowing search and rescue teams to enter from countries I guess they're not politically aligned with. This kind of horrific indifference to human suffering has characterized Atatmador for decades.
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And it's really unlikely to change as it grows even more desperate and it loses even more territory. It's just going to clamp down harder and harder on its people. B1, in the liberated areas, aid is being mobilized using the mutual aid structures which have existed for decades in the absence of the state.
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In significant and growing parts of Myanmar, people are relying on each other instead of the government for aid. And that has its benefits, right? Like people have been out rescuing people from the rebel, but they're also desperately short of resources.
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I spoke to Mandalay PDF rescue team at the first week of April and they literally sent me, they have a notebook of a list of like, we've run out of gauze, we've run out of tourniquets, we've run out of adhesive dressings, we've run out of elastic bandages, right? They're like the literal nuts and bolts of saving people's lives. They run out of
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We did a fundraising campaign for them through Behind the Bastards. We raised nearly $2,000, which is great. So they're restocking their supplies, which is fantastic. But that's just one township all across the country. People are struggling for the basic supplies that they need to save lives. The military has also blocked aid and medicine from entering their areas, right?
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So the military controls a lot of roadblocks and it uses its control of those roadblocks to... Stop aid and medicine. Often it's kind of hoarding it in the capital city, which is Naypyidaw. If people aren't familiar, Naypyidaw is a city that the junta built for itself to govern from. It means seat of kings. Also in Naypyidaw right now is the U.S. aid agency Samaritan's Purse.
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Are you familiar with Samaritan's Purse, Garrison?
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Samaritan's Purse, perhaps most famous for being run by Franklin Graham.
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Yeah, having all their volunteers sign like a statement of faith and being extremely homophobic. For some reason, Samaritan's Purse is establishing a field hospital in Naypyidaw right now.
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Yeah, or just leave them like they did in Afghanistan if they're not Christian. I cannot work out for the life of me what the fuck they're doing. Because the Hunter has made a consistent policy of bombing Christians in Myanmar. In Karen and Karen state, there are a lot of Christian people. On Christmas Day...
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The Hunter bombed people going to services because it knew that Christians would be going to services at churches, right? The Karenni Christians this year I saw celebrated Christmas in caves because they were so afraid of being bombed, right? Like, I have no idea what logical leap you have to make. Bizarre. Yeah. And they're not even at the, in Sagang.
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The only people, the only international aid I'm aware of that was able to make it to Sagang was a Malaysian team. who were able to save some lives. Unfortunately, there were really strong rains this week and that made all the collapse structures even more unstable. And the Malaysian team I saw have now returned home. We're going to take another ad break here.
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And when we come back, we will talk about what you can do to help. All right, and we're back. First, I want to, I guess, have some good news. Despite everything, the military has still been taking massive losses. The all-Burma Students' Democratic Front captured remaining junta positions in Indore. The all-Burma Students' Democratic Front are a group that's been around since 1988, right?
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And they have... armed up and re-entered the revolution since 2021. One of the things that they captured on Monday was an underground Japanese field hospital from World War II, which I guess had been like an entrenched position. I guess they're not covered technically by the ceasefire, but there was a unit under the National Unity Government's command that operated with them.
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And from what I understand... This began as a defensive action. They'd surrounded the hunter. I think it's called Japan Cave Hill. They'd surrounded them on Japan Cave Hill for a long time. And then the hunter, obviously seeing the earthquake and everything thereafter, decided that now was the time for them to break out of this encirclement. They did not break out.
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They took a fat L. And as a result, they've all been captured now. Meanwhile, in Chinland, if people haven't listened to the episode I did a couple of weeks ago with Azad from the Anti-Fascist Internationalist Front, I was just going back and listening to that to understand Chinland.
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But the AIF and a lot of their allied forces from the Chinland Defence Force and the Chin Brotherhood had a significant victory in capturing the rest of the junta's positions in Falam last week. And I think it's very much like on the table that we will see the whole of Chinlan liberated in the next few months or by the end of the year, which would be great to see.
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So people are wondering what they can do to help, right? And I think it's a very valid question because I saw today that the UN was meeting with the hunter in Naypyidaw. And I just have no faith that any money that goes to the hunter is going to get to people who need it.
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I don't... No, they're, like, evil. Why... Yeah, yeah. They are literally genocidal. They have done a genocide that has been prosecuted in international criminal court. I have no understanding why international organizations continue to funnel money to them, other than because they have a status quo bias, I guess. So don't be doing that.
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But there are groups who are making a really big difference. And one of them that I wanted to highlight, and Robert and I are both very familiar with their work from the last time that we were over reporting, is Community Partners International. CPI are really cool because they work by empowering members of the local community to be health volunteers, as opposed to like...
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dropping in some doctors from America, right? Or doctors from the United Kingdom or whatever. And then when those people leave, they take their skills with them. And CPI, the thing is to educate folks within the community so that they can take care of one another. And I saw that CPI has a matching donations thing right now, which is pretty cool.
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So if you donate, someone else will match your donation and that will double the amount that you receive. Otherwise, I will provide a list of mutual aid funds that have been shared with me. Most of them are GoFundMes or things like that. I'll put it all in the show description. They've all been vetted.
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I know people are sometimes reluctant to give to GoFundMes and they'd rather give to a 501c3 or an organization which has a little bit more, I guess, online presence. In this case, you have to understand that a lot... of orgs just aren't operating in the liberated areas. The two that I'm aware of are CPI and Free Burma Rangers. I spoke to Dave from Free Burma Rangers.
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They're trying to get to as many people as they can as well. That would be another great place to donate. And I would include a list of vetted GoFundMes. If you want to have a look through those and see if any of them kind of speaks to you more, you can do that too. What this will mean for the future of Myanmar, We don't know yet, right?
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We have really no sense of how many people have died, of what it's done to the hunter's ability to control those areas. But until the revolution has a way to stop planes bombing people, we will continue to see the same dynamic, right, of the hunter losing terrain on the ground, pulling back its soldiers, and then bombing civilians in the areas that it's lost. That is its game plan. It's continuing.
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to get more drones from China. It's, it's getting aircraft munitions and jet fuel from China. And until there is an embargo on jet fuel and munitions to the hunter, then we will see the same pattern continue, right? They lose terrain, they bomb a school, they lose terrain, they bomb a hospital. It's the same stuff that Israel is doing.
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Um, and they of course previously been armed by Israel as well. Uh, but we don't see as much solidarity for the people of Burma. Um, If you want to stay in touch with what's happening on the ground, I think the Irawiri, I-R-R-A-W-A-D-D-Y, does a really good job of doing daily summaries right now. So I would suggest checking out what's happening there.
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And of course, we'll keep you updated on developments in the Spring Revolution as they come.
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Yeah. Like it made me feel like I found 2023 very hard, like going out and seeing people freezing in the desert and then coming home and seeing Joe Biden eat ice cream on the timeline. But like this was different. This was so like blatant.
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Naib Bukele? There you go. You know, he's Palestinian Salvadorian.
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This is just fucking... I'm sorry if anyone's driving and has had an accident upon hearing that.
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The lights thing, by the way, was a specific policy change by Bukele. There was a particularly violent weekend in El Salvador. And as a result, he stopped letting people who were detained for gang crimes go outside and stopped building windows into the prison and just put the lights on. Like as a way of punishing, I guess, the gangs by punishing the people who were detained there.
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like Bukele has ruled and we're going to do a whole episode on Bukele and like his rise to power and then his use of power but like he's ruled under a state of exception for years in El Salvador which allows him to detain people without warrants without trials right and like it's that state of exception that is now the norm there and that's kind of what he seems to be referring to right like like
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we just get to lock people up. Why would I not do that?
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Yeah, Bukele is very reticent to release anyone for that reason. And there are plenty of allegations, and I think Time magazine has published this, it's not hugely controversial, that he made deals with gangs in the past in El Salvador to get them to reduce the murder rate. And he certainly wouldn't like to hear that testified to, certainly not in the United States court.
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So he doesn't want people to be released from there either. Yeah. Like you said, they don't want anyone to be able to go to any international human rights courts and testify as to what happened to them there. So it's kind of in his interest to never have anyone be released.
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It's not just also, I guess, like in his interest, he's also being paid $20,000 per detainee per year by the United States right now. So he also has a financial interest in keeping people in there.
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There's a lot to break down in what Miller said. It's also just kind of interesting how Miller is amongst the press. He's not one of the people sat on the couches supposed to be giving the press conference, right? He just kind of wades in to... I guess, like, like offer this opinion and kind of like, uh, be the kind of embassy of this, of their response, I guess, in, in a sense. Yeah.
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I think crucially like Abrego Garcia's protection was from being returned to El Salvador, right? Because he had been harassed by gang members when leaving El Salvador and when living in El Salvador.
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Yeah, the gangs that he's been accused of being a part of. But it then follows that it would be legal for them to deport him to a third country, right? And that is the path that they've followed with all the Venezuelan migrants, right? They've accused him of being members of Trenderagua. I have not seen a compelling case made that any of them are yet.
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I'm sure people from Tren del Agua have come to this country, but they have not provided any evidence that the people they have sent to Secot are those people.
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Yeah, and the bulk of this is reliant on some kind of idea that they have entirely created from fiction, that there are tattooing practices when one enters Trenderagua. And for them, even if they can't be returned to Venezuela, they feel like they have this end round, which is, okay, we'll send them to El Salvador. But for the Salvadorians, that's a different question, right?
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And that is what they're trying to find here. And that is worrying because... The case here that is getting the most publicity, that seems to be the one that the Supreme Court has taken up, is about the Salvadorian man. And I hope that doesn't mean that the ship has sailed for the Venezuelans, right? That essentially they don't have a case. Because that was the vast bulk of them.
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I think there was something like 60 Salvadorian citizens and the rest Venezuelans.
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Yeah, I think we should just point out, obviously, the court is not conducting the foreign policy of the United States. It's ruling on the legality of the action taken by the president, which is exactly what it's supposed to do.
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Yeah. Yeah. Like every single U.S. person, right? U.S. person would be anybody who resides in the U.S., be they documented or undocumented migrant citizen, what have you, like has a stake in this.
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Yeah, did you notice he called out Miller? He said, you'll have to look at the laws on that, Steve. Obviously, Miller is not the attorney general.
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Right, but Miller is often credited with being the kind of mastermind behind Title 42, right? Which was an extremely obscure piece of public health law that was then mobilized by the first Trump administration to immediately return migrants to Mexico without giving them their right to an asylum hearing, right? And that's what I'm wondering if they're going for again.
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Steve Miller has been very good at this, at finding obscure justifications in United States federal law for shit that they want to do.
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It seems like a specific case that he's referring to.
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Yeah, I mean, they've sent migrants, third country migrants to Panama before, right? And detained them there. Honduras, I believe, is building like a prison that's not dissimilar to Secot. Like I'm guessing this will be their sort of way of courting allies in the hemisphere. Like they'll sort of pay them a relatively large amount in order to attempt to offshore people they don't like.
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Yeah, it's like a dinner party joke for them. It might just be worth noting that, like, every totalitarian regime has housed its dissidents outside of the imperial core, right? Like, Germany did this in the east, right? Russia sent people to Siberia for a reason. Russia, Soviet Union.
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Right. And where the horrors are so far from the populace that the populace can't really grasp them.
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Yeah, and just to be even clearer, I guess what distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison is that there is no due process, right? People are sent there because of who they are, not because of what they did.
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Yeah, like we are, I don't know what it will take for some people to realize what's happening here.
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Yeah, I mean, he doesn't hide from that reputation, right? He embraces it. His Twitter for a while had world's coolest dictator in the bio. I don't know if it still does, like.
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You don't have to have a PhD in the history of the 1930s to have someone tell you that liberation of the chosen nation by purging of the undesirables is fascist shit. But I'm here with one to tell you if that's what you need, you know? This is textbook stuff, like Garrison's saying. This is not debatable. I know we spent the last four years debating is Trump a fascist or not.
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I don't think that matters hugely. This is a fascist thing.
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I think that's a very skewed sample of people who paid for Elon Musk's hate app.
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Right. So much of this has hinged over what facilitate means, right? Like they found a legal concept that they can argue ad nauseum. And in this case, it's the word facilitate. The DOJ didn't present any new information today, but we see that there's some hopeful things from a district court judge, and then it kind of all goes up in flames. But I think Chinis, X-I-N-I-S is how the name is spelled.
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I believe it's Chinis, said that every day that he's there is a day of further irreparable harm. And then she talks about the process being at the roots of the constitution, right? She's ordered for like two weeks more of discovery, which is going to mean that both sides have more time to repair their cases, right? She wants people to testify in front of the court.
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So the administration has argued that facilitating his return would consist of them allowing him to enter the United States if Bukele released him. and possibly providing a flight for that to happen, but not, crucially, ensuring his release from Secord, right? And so anything else subsequent to that doesn't matter.
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Gini said that their interpretation of the word flies in the face of the plain meaning of the word. quote, when a wrongfully removed individual is, and then I'm adding to the quote here, I guess, or context, she means when a wrongfully removed individual is taken outside the US, it's not so cut and dried that all you have to do is remove obstacles domestically.
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She also said, quote, to the Department of Justice here, you made your jurisdictional arguments, you made your venue arguments, you made your arguments on the merits, you lost. This is now about the scope of the remedy, right? This is a case that Miller is claiming they won. That's pretty unequivocal for a justice.
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However, she does not seem to think that it is within her power to request his return from El Salvador. So she's calling for things to move quickly, right? They want to conduct depositions by the 23rd of April. She said, quote, cancel vacations, cancel other appointments. I'm usually pretty good about it. Not this time. I'm going to be available if you need to do it odd hours or weekends.
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That's what I'm talking about. Anything short of a judge saying you have to go to Secod, remove him from the cell, put him on the plane and bring him back to America is going to be interpreted by the Trump administration to mean that they don't have to do that.
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And like they've done that right. The word facilitate, I think most people who are first language English speakers have a fairly good grasp of what that means. And it doesn't mean like remove barriers domestically. That's what they've gone for.
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The only way that he is getting out is a majority Supreme Court decision that is extremely explicit that directs the Trump administration to go to El Salvador and remove him from that prison. I haven't seen anything to indicate that we're getting that anytime soon. And as the judge said, every day he's there, irreparable harm is done to him. And that's where we're at right now, right?
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With people arguing over the definition of a word as hundreds of people are locked up having done nothing wrong in a giant torture prison.
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Like I've said before on this show, one of the things that I learned in The Darien Gap was how much people can care about their kids. And this shit that I saw people do to ensure their kids have a better life broke my heart in a way that war hasn't, that anything else I've seen in my life hasn't.
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And it's honestly really hard for me to hear stuff like that and not react, just being really sad and really angry. It's fucking brutal.
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And your options include creating networks to take care of one another, right? Like the... things that will probably affect more of you than direct state violence are economic downturns, are recessions, right? Things like this, like those are things that you can take care of one another through. And like, you should plan to do that too.
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You should think about how you're going to pay your bills, how you're going to feed each other, how you're going to take care of your medical needs. Because I don't think that the world is going to want to keep doing business with a country that acts like this. And both economically and in terms of its conduct towards migrants.
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So like your plans don't have to be to leave, like your plans should also include what to do if things get really bad, like in an economic sense. I'm not going to tell you what that means, but it's all the stuff we've already talked about, right? It's mutual aid. It's all the, all the basic preparedness stuff that is not as big and scary as leaving the country, but is nonetheless like vital.
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Yeah. Just to finish up, as things continue to get worse, people keep reaching out to us, which we appreciate. If you would like to, you can email us coolzontipsatproton.me. We will read it. We might not get back to you. Your email is not end-to-end encrypted unless the email that you're sending from is also encrypted. But you can reach out to us there.
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Let's talk about the way that people are helping to take care of one another, because I think that's what always happens in these situations. So... Let's talk about the mutual aid effort. Maybe you could talk about some of the groups, talk about some of the things you've been doing.
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And then I want to get on to how people can help if they're in town and how people can help if they are a long way away.
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Yeah, I think that's really important to say that, like, it can seem really overwhelming sometimes. this is an email I get almost every week. Like, how do I start a mutual aid group? But like, if you can make a sandwich, then you can, you can start a mutual aid group. Like just go and feed people who are hungry. If someone's cold, give them a blanket.
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Like it, it doesn't have to be like, you don't have to read 17 books, you know, and be like starting a 501c3 and stuff. You just need to do things. And I think especially like when, We're going into a new administration. We're going to see the state being more hostile to people who are already marginalized.
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And like the best advice I have for people is to get off the internet and to get into the streets and just do something. It doesn't matter. As you say, you won't be able to do everything. Not right away. Maybe one day we will, but like doing something is a lot better than doing nothing. And I guarantee it is also much better for you.
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And you're like, I feel so much better when I'm able to help people. I wouldn't be able to do the job I do at the border if I wasn't also able to help people. It helps me feel like I'm not part of the problem, I guess, or we're doing something about it at least. What are people doing right now to help people who are impacted by the fires?
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What are the needs that are arising and how are people meeting them?
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Yeah, definitely. And like I hope one good thing that can come out of this is that we can build stronger communities. Right. And we can hopefully folks who are finding themselves dependent on mutual aid for the first time can realize that like they can participate in that.
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And I know there are folks already who have lost their homes, who are still out there helping other people, driving around, rescuing people and stuff.
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Yeah. Talking of food, water and shelter, those are things I need as well. And so to pay for them, I have to pivot to ads now. OK, we're back. I think that was a really good plug for like why mutual aid is important. And hopefully there are people who are listening, right? Or people who are finding themselves for the first time interested in helping, seeing a crisis.
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A lot of people like will ask me if they can come help at the border. And of course you can, but you should also help in your own community because there are people who need you there. And obviously that's very true in LA right now. So I want to like give some resources, some ways people can help.
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If people are listening in LA, what are some, like, I know there are all kinds of efforts, but what are some concrete things they could do or some places they can go if they're in a situation where they're not massively impacted by the fires and they want to help other people, but what are some things they can do?
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to It Can Happen Here. It's me, James, today with a terrible cold, as you can probably tell. But still very important to listen today because I'm talking to Andreina, an organizer from K-Town for All up in L.A. And we're going to talk about the fires in L.A. and the mutual aid response and what you can do to help. So welcome to the show, Andreina.
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Yeah, that's really cool. I think it's really important that we share. One of my friends, when we were doing border stuff, made a website where we documented all the stuff we did so that it was open source and available to people, like how we built shelters and how we cooked. But yeah, we don't need to reinvent the wheel every time.
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We can all help each other get that start and not make the mistakes that we all made. So that's really cool that people can reach out to you. What about if they're a long way away and they just want to send some money? They want to help and they've got money they want to share. Yeah.
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Yeah, that'd be nice. Is there anything else, like, do you have any bottlenecks or particular shortages that you want to shout out that the audience can maybe help you with?
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Yeah, thanks for being here. I know you guys are really busy right now. So to begin with, in case this has missed people and there's a lot of news happening right now, can you explain what's been going on in LA with respect to the fires for the last two or three days?
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Yeah, I think that's a really good message. It's a good place to end. Just to remind everyone, it's at ktownforall on Instagram and ktownforall on Venmo, right?
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Yeah, it's pretty devastating. Like whole neighbourhoods are gone, right? I think I saw like 2,000 structures have already been burned.
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And like, as you said, if people aren't in the United States or aren't familiar with how fire is fought, like out here in the Western United States, it's a lot of air dropping fire retardant and air dropping water, which without that, it's very hard to get enough water to where it needs to be. And I believe at one point they actually ran out of water in water towers right up in Palisades.
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Yeah, I'd seen that too. There was a water boil warning for, yeah, lots of places. So as a result of these fires and all the destruction they've caused, I think I saw, was it 150,000 odd people have been displaced now? Is that right? Is that a good number?
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Right, yeah. I guess, again, if people aren't familiar, fires destroy property and kill people every year here, and climate change has meant that they have become worse and worse. But in the middle of a city, you're generally not worried about fires because the resources will be spent to defend that property, right? This is a very unique situation to see huge parts of a city burning down.
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Yeah, and like, that's something I want to address because I think In every natural disaster that I've covered, the reason it becomes a disaster, I guess, is because the state's incapable of responding in a way that protects people. And in almost every case, it's people who have to step up and look after one another. So we should talk about the response of the LA city and county governments.
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And then I'd love to talk about the mutual aid response after that.
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Yeah, it's not. And we've definitely seen that there was just a failure of the state to respond in the way that it needed to as quickly as it needed to. And it's wonderful to see people picking up slack. Of course it is. It's really beautiful that people show up for each other in these times. There's something about that that I obviously find really affirming.
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That's maybe why I do this for a living. But yeah, it's really beautiful to see. It doesn't mean that we should forget that like... The state has capacity that it is using, as you said, to displace people who are unhoused. It could be using that capacity to bring masks to people, to bring food to people, to create shelter for people. It's choosing to harass people who live on the streets.
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Yeah. It's sadly not that dissimilar here. Like every time it rains, people will die. Every time we have a heat wave. I remember they found the remains of an unhoused person a couple of years ago and they thought the person had been burned, like by fire. And it turned out they had just been exposed to massive amounts of heat.
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And yeah, I remember a couple of years ago, just to give an anecdote, it was, I think, above 100 degrees in town. It was so hot. And I was in the riverbed. I had this big insulated backpack to give people cold water. And just dozens of people were in terrible distress. And yeah, there was no presence of...
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police fire any anyone to help right like we have these sometimes billion dollar police departments in these cities and and and people are still unsafe and and they don't feel safe reaching out to any government agencies because these government agencies the same ones that you say that throw away their shit that destroy all the little things that they've been trying to build up to get onto you know like a better situation in life
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Yeah, definitely. Let's take a little break here for some advertisements and then we'll come back. All right, we're back. So, yeah, I think anyone who's familiar with the situation facing unhoused people in Southern California will understand that there is not a safety net. And that's about to become more profoundly obvious than ever for thousands of people.
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Come on now. It kind of works. Pull him back. Pull him back. Hold me back, bro. China got a hand on Pakistan's chest. Calm down, bro.
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Exactly. They're not worth it. They're not worth it.
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Of course not! Someone should offer him the fucking snowpiercer. You know it's all gold up in there. It is. It is all gold up in there, actually.
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Okay, now I need to see it. All right. Hit me with the link.
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Oh, my God. It's just a bug. The whole plane is just a bug.
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You think he's going to take a golden palace in the sky? Come on, man.
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Yeah. And it's one of those things, again, like it's worth like covering this as it develops. There's not much to say other than like this is incredibly illegal and has to be opposed immediately and vigorously. Like, yeah, yeah.
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The ACLU did, which I should note because I heard some people saying they did not expect the ACLU to. They have. But yeah, the ADL is fully in the camp of lock anyone up who's ever protested Israel.
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Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. That was worth the rest of our year's budget. Now, everyone will be getting paid for the rest of the year in Denny's coupons. That's all we have left after paying for this. But I think we can all agree worth it.
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Well, there was a great band called The Clash once, and they wrote one song that wasn't very good. And in it, somebody says something that didn't sound very much like the word tariff. But if you mispronounce the word tariff, it fit in. And that's where $42,000 of our operating budget this year went. Anyway, Mia, let's talk about tariffs.
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Let's be honest. Outside of music, this nation has produced one thing of value to the world, and it's bourbon.
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Oh, I mean, yeah, it took generations. Look, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day, and bourbon is the Rome of liquors produced in Kentucky.
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No, that's that stagflation garrison. Two very different things.
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If you ever get to fight the Undertaker, you have a song to go on to.
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Now, Trillian, is that... Okay, so for example, I have $32 right now in my pocket. Is it more than that?
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Okay, okay, okay. So it is enough to buy two different servings of pizza. Okay. I'm trying to put this into terms I can understand. Thank you. It is... Imagine one burger, right? And a burger in Portland does cost $32. So yes. Yes. Now...
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But on the upside, we have a great new song for everybody.
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Yeah. Yeah. Just a little bit at the end here. So in the subreddit for the 50501 protest campaign, which is... An attempt to do protests in all 50 states simultaneously, right? I think their next day of action is coming up in April.
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I'm not giving an opinion on the overall thing, but in the subreddit, somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard soldier, giving kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would respond to orders to carry out violence against U.S. citizens. And I just wanted to chat about this because it's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly.
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My opinion is that one of the likely ways things come to a head probably as early as this summer is that there is mass protests in D.C. and the Insurrection Act gets used and the guard at least are brought in to attempt to crack down. I mean, obviously, Trump has done a version of this before.
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And Trump and his state attorney have both discussed using the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests. I think they see D.C. as the place they want to do that. So it's interesting to me to see a post like this. This is not a thing where, like, I've been able to verify this guy yet. There's a couple of points that make me think he probably is a National Guardsman.
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For one thing, there's a lot of them, right? Like, this is not like a National Guardsman. Where'd you find one? There's a ton of fucking dudes in the National Guard. For the other thing, everything he says is consistent with things that I have seen and talked to other people who are in and were in the Guard about.
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There's one little bit where he advises people on, like, stop the bleed gear, and he gives good advice. He says only buy from NAR, North American Rescue. It's the same advice we would have given. He cites DOD Directive 134410, which is why he believes he's well within his rights to make a post like this. And in essence, what he's saying is that
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It is his belief that most of the military chain of command from NCOs up to officers would not be down with following illegal orders to fire on U.S. citizens. But the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon, would get over whatever issues they have with that very quickly. Right.
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That's the gist of it, is that I think, you know, within sort of the officer class and the NCO class, there are a lot of resistance to the idea of the military being used for domestic policing. That is less clear with kind of the enlisted class who are, you know, a significant chunk of them are very much down for Trump.
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But whatever sort of divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon. And I think this is probably like assuming this is accurate. And I don't really see a reason to doubt it. There's nothing he's saying here that's crazy.
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I think this is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind that like when you're looking at the military, it's not the police. Like if I have to have agents, armed agents of the state cracking down on a protest, I I'm less worried about people being killed if it's the National Guard in general. But that situation can change very, very rapidly if like the situation becomes an active firefight.
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And I do think like that's a thing we have to consider right now is the possibility that we have U.S. soldiers, whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in shooting at American protesters. Like that's that's in the cards as early as this summer, right?
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And it's not a fun thing to think about, but I'm seeing more and more not just posts like this, but I'm having more and more conversations with people who are in the military or who were in are in the National Guard about their concerns about what they might be called upon to do. Some of this has to do with the border, but like it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military to.
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to worry about how they are going to be used in the immediate future. We're not talking about years. We're talking about this summer, right, is when there's a very good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head. So these are things you should be thinking about if you're listening and you are in the military.
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These are things that you should be thinking about because the people who are in charge of our government right now have made a lot of statements about how they want to use the military to deal with protests. And the idea that that's going to happen very soon is not fringe or crazy.
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And when we've seen, I mean, even in Portland, when we have seen, which you witnessed personally, unfortunately, Garrison, The worst injuries to crowd control devices are usually people in our case, it was federal agents, but who are utilizing crowd control weapons and have not trained on. Yeah, because they're not there's certain ways you're supposed to and not supposed to use them.
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And these guys are just, hey, you know how to use a gun. You must know how to use the rubber bullet thing, you know.
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I think that's going to do it here at us with the ED. To play us out, we're going to refer back to our friend, the Narcissist Cookbook, who put together our lovely new tariff theme song that you're going to hear every week until tariffs aren't a thing anymore. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
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Yeah. Repeatedly trying to warn people of Cassandra-like to no avail. Yes.
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It's not just cops who are doing raids very often don't have all or accurate information.
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No, they're going directly after this individual in part because he's somebody that a lot of folks who might otherwise be like, up in arms about a move like this would say because of some of his connections and some of the things he said in the past. Well, he's, you know, supported groups that are really bad.
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Like, I think they're really trying to find the first case is they want someone that they can calve a lot of, like, liberals off from being too scared to support because he said some things that, like, they don't want to have attached to them. Like, that's how they're... And they're going to keep pushing that further and further each time. You find some folks who...
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You can scare off a lot of maybe what you might call like their otherwise natural support base because you can point out this thing or that thing they did that was not great. Yeah, the ACLU types. I'm not insulting or trying to say bad things about this guy. I'm just saying like that's the tactic here, right? To try to paint this guy as like, well, this guy did this.
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Do you really want to support that? Which is why you have to take an incredibly firm stance that no, the government doesn't get to do this. The State Department doesn't get to do this.
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I also think it's worth, and I don't want to make this, because a lot of people online have, this shouldn't be our immediate primary concern. Our immediate primary concern should be Mahmoud and the other people like him who are in situations like him who are going to be targeted.
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But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if they get away with this, at some point they will start saying, look, if you support groups the government describes... Or any support for any group that the government considers a terrorist. It doesn't matter if you were born here as a citizen.
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You know, we can start like that is that is a potential in state of this, which is, again, not should not be on your front burner. It should be the people being targeted. Right now, but also an awareness of like this is part of why you have to draw such a hard line.
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Like if if the situation was reversed and this were a Democratic administration coming after an anti-vaccine student activist who is a permanent legal resident, it would be wrong for them to disappear. Right. Like that has to be like where the line is drawn.
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Yeah. Also, be really clear, I'm not equating support for Palestine to being anti-vax. I'm just saying, like, if this was, like, a shitty guy, right, it would still be wrong.
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Well, the ACLU has come out against Mahmoud's arrest. Okay, good. The ADL, obviously, totally for it. Shocked. The ADL, an organization formed to help avoid another Holocaust, does not see any potential danger in a state redefining citizenship in order to disappear its political enemy, so... We love the ADL here, folks. But the ACLU did.
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I mean, we'll see if they do anything, but they did like make a statement.
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Oh my God, you guys, it could happen here. Meaning our podcast. It could. It is. It's happened. It did.
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That's a fun joke that I only hear 47 times a day. And the whole point of the podcast was, well, initially, I was a crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen. And now it's a bunch of that stuff happened. And even more of it looks very likely. And so now I just feel bad all the time.
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Yeah, why don't you rename the podcast, Robert should have bought more stock in ammunition companies than he did. And DGI. Jesus, should I have bought stock in DGI?
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Yeah, there we go. A lot of people are going to be buying little DGI drones here very soon, James. Thanks.
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Like physical DGI drones. We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder.
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James, I keep all of my gunpowder. And you know how, like, people used to take cocaine by wrapping it in toilet paper and swallowing it?
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Speaking of toilet paper, Nate Silver has a newsletter. And it would be useful as toilet paper, more so than it is as a newsletter. Sorry, I just got, like, PTSD flashbacks from 2024 when you said that. It's okay. Normally, my rule of thumb is...
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Every election, usually starting in like December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or four times in a bucket, and then head over to Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls. And I do this. I hate that I keep having I have regularly on election years. People were like, but he was always wrong.
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Like, no, he's he's reasonably good on polls. He's usually if you read what he's saying about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close to that. So I read him during elections and I hate it because he's never been right about anything else. But he's he's a gambler. He's a very he's a degenerate, filthy gambler.
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And so when we're talking about degenerate, filthy gambler stuff and by God, election polls are the most degenerate type of gambling that exist. He's worth reading. And then after the election, no matter how well or badly it goes, I ignore him again for four years. And I didn't get to do that this year because on February 25th, 2025, Nate wrote a column called Elon Musk and Spiky Intelligence.
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spiky intelligence. Am I hearing that right? Spiky intelligence, yes. And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm sure he used some AI, like he must have used some AI like video software to do that just like shows you a kind of spiky star looking thing and then like a blob with rounded edges. I can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver thought that like we needed this illustrated.
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Why did you, like, the promise of AI. We couldn't have envisioned a spiky thing.
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It looks like an amoeba and then, like, a poorly drawn star. It's Boba and Kiki. This is an actual thing.
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In terms of my behavior, I am- Garrison, now that you bring up Rorschach, all I can think of is how cool it would be if Rorschach from The Watchmen showed up in Nate Silver's house and did his thing.
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They would become fast friends. Actually, yeah. No, no, Nate would. But after them getting along for like 45 minutes, Nate would take him to an illegal card game and Rorschach would murder everybody in the room because they were gambling without a license.
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Actually, yes, there is a little bit of that in there. He does not mention this Kiki and Boba thing. I don't know if that's because I'm supposed to just infer it from the image or if he's. Okay. We'll get your opinion on it. Is he ripping these people off?
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Because this doesn't count as enough for him to be crediting them if this is the underpinning of his stupid idea, which he credits to his stupid book that he came up with later. But I'm just going to start reading the stupid column. Well, hit us with the second paragraph because that fucking lets go. We haven't gotten paragraph one, James. Okay, that radicalized me immediately.
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There's been a debate raging on Twitter. Noah Smith can run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the platform's owner, Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest, and then there's a little I in parentheses because we need that, Elon is obviously pretty bright, and then there's two I's in parentheses. This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment.
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Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things. Okay. You'd think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves Elon and intelligence, well, it was. Elon has run founded or co-founded Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, XAI, PayPal, and more recently, Twitter.
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He's also managed to steer himself into a position where he's now the de facto chief of staff to the president of the United States. I do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects. Some of these were long shot bets. And Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk documents, he thought he'd be ruined if there'd been one more failed SpaceX launch.
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The success of some of these enterprises might also be debated. Yes. Twitter was a canny play for cultural and political influence. And he doesn't bring up in this whole thing where he's talking about like all the successful companies. Not a word about the boring company. Not a word about Hyperloop, right? Yeah, any of the failed ones.
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His record does seem better if you ignore the two massively publicized and invested absolute failures.
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Lower. I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft. Also crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co-founded open AI, but not in a way that mattered. He just shot gun money in there and then kind of edged out. Yeah, sure. Yes. And is actively in a conflict with everybody who did make open AI as prominent as it is.
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Again, Nate has to leave a lot out in order to start making this case.
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Yeah, and he's also saying, well, like, maybe Twitter won't be profitable, but we'll see how, you know, he could probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff. Not a word from Nate about, like, Yeah, but he's just, like, they're just breaking the law. So why aren't we including in our canny businessmen guys that get rich selling, like, shitloads of heroin for the cartels?
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Because, yes, if you are breaking the law, sometimes that goes well for you financially. Well, Walter White may have done some bad things, but... But you can't deny he was a brilliant meth cook, you know? Yeah. But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is, 1400 according to Isaacson. He's clearly some sort of outlier in many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably even a genius.
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And yet, first off, it becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider a 1400 to be an impressive SAT score and would normally be judgmental of someone who had an SAT score of 1400 if it weren't for all of Elon's other genius accomplishments.
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And yet, when my partner and I were heading to dinner the other day and we saw some tweet that Elon sent, I forget which one because he tweets so much, we were both like, man, he's such a dumbass. Yes, someone can be both a genius and a dumbass. Welcome to what I call spiky intelligence. Here we go.
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This gets to like the core of what's annoying about Nate is his need to, he's one of these guys, you know what it is? He's an intellectual enclosureist, right? Where he's not confident to be like, everyone is very aware of the fact that no one is good at everything.
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and that people have holes in their competence, and that there are like brilliant surgeons who are bad fathers or whatever, because there are different kinds of intelligence. This is like a broadly common understanding. Nate has to give it a name so that he can sell his book. So he gives it the name. It's like an intellectual, no, it's my idea.
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I'm the one who came up with the concept that smart people can be dumbasses. Stop it, Nate. It's annoying.
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Yeah, now he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original and then links to somebody without really like crediting them. Interestingly, many of the instances online refer to people on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he has Asperger's syndrome. But the concept is simple.
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While intelligence is a multidimensional phenomenon, the scientific consensus is that there's also something known as a G-factor, sometimes also called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and verbal skills in the GRE are correlated.
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The correlations are loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's just going into like he talks about like the absent minded professor. Like it's all just these these very common ideas that like, yeah, people are usually bad at more things than they're good at. Right.
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Like it's yeah, there's there's no need to to explain like how Elon Musk has been successful at certain things. But but Nate does. And he has to keep going back to like he makes a comment later in here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He doesn't back this up with evidence.
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He just says that, well, if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves, which ignores the fact that he's not making any of these decisions. He bought a company that already had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket engineers to design rockets.
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Elon is arguably good at hiring in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man, right? Like that's the actual brilliance that Elon has is he was very, very good at hyping people up and getting people to believe in him until he was too big to fail. Like that's the one thing he actually did.
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But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of, among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is, who is a guy who was really good at one narrow thing and now has a career writing about everything. And he can't, that's like a dangerous thing for Nate to think too hard about.
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We're back. I want to talk a little bit about the danger of being a guy who gets famous for being really good at one thing and then gets a job talking about everything. Because I've had a version of that experience. And let me tell you, you're not ever going to be competent to discuss all of the things that you can make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer.
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No one ever has been and no one ever will be, which is why what you ought to do is the thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on a bunch of people to like run a website with you, right? Where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately, it turns out FiveThirtyEight was a bad business venture. It got massively overvalued.
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A company spent a shitload more money on it than it was capable of making. And now everyone's gotten laid off. And Nate left years ago to do his sub stack. It's a tragic case in the problem of hubris and the fact that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't run an entire media enterprise. But Nate doesn't like thinking about that.
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It isn't like thinking about the fact that maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at was being the guy from The Music Man. Because I think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period of time. A lot of people did.
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Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There's been this thing lately where a lot of folks on the left have been like, oh, you couldn't always tell that he was a con man. You couldn't always tell that he was this bad. He was always the worst. I was like, no.
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Back in 2014-15, when I was writing about the billionaires and rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie Dimon because he had helped create the 2008 financial collapse. And he just seemed obviously much worse than this guy who, up to that point, was pretty much just making cars and rockets. You know, he had two companies doing that.
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Musk was not top of most people's radars for a very good reason, which gets to like there's this thing that's been created because of some of like the sinister beliefs that his grandfather had and his like family background, which has a lot of white supremacy in it. that this has been Elon's sort of like grand plan from the beginning and that it's all come together for him.
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Like as if he's, you know, a Marvel or a James Bond villain who's been executing this like 30 year plan to get where he is. Yeah, yeah. I think when you look at his cognition, like he's not the same man he was 10 years ago. He's not the same guy he was when he started dating Grimes. And I'm saying he was a good man before then. I don't think he particularly ever was before.
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But he's clearly, his brain has degraded in part due to contact through Twitter.
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Yeah. We get to a few of those things, but I want to read another quote from Nate's article because he's going to talk about his book, On the Edge, which, quote, describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call the river. These people who occupy a range of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital are bright, but in spiky ways.
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In Baron Cohen's dichotomy, they lean heavily towards the systematic side of the equation. They're good at abstract, analytic reasoning, but they may lack other forms of intelligence, like empathy, judgment, and self-awareness. They also have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence. For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrarian.
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And again, what you are talking about, all of these people, number one, when he says AI research, he's not
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talking about people who are doing like the the gut level coding he's talking about sam altman right yeah poker venture capital uh this is all gambling you're all talking about gamblers the river is just gamblers nate it's people like you who who put money on bets and they are contrarian and competitive because that's how gamblers are that's That's the river.
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He's thinking about it as this specific chunk of intellectuals who have, there's some dangers, but they have great potential to make the world brilliant. I'm like, no, no, no, no. These are just people who wind up shooting themselves outside of a sports betting facility. That's the river, Nate.
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Garrison, by the way, I've been meaning to talk to you about wearing the full data makeup because you know your skin can't breathe if you coat your whole body. You're only supposed to put that on your face. I don't do that every time I play. You get a gold finger yourself, Garrison.
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It would be rude not to. For better or worse. This typology, the river, is associated with high achievement in certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is also associated with high variance. Sam Bankman Freed built FTX into a company that investors valued at $32 billion before the House of Cards collapsed. Again, because he was a gambler.
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And again, Nate can't just accept, oh, he was never actually very smart. He just got really lucky for a while and then gambled it all away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought. Nate says, I interviewed SBF several times for the book, and I can tell you that he very much falls into the genius but dumbass category.
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Yeah. If a guy had won like one of the lotteries was like a billion and a half dollars. Right. Got crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks because he just kept putting half a million dollars at a time on 21 black at a roulette table in Vegas. And I would be like, well, obviously he's a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How else could he have made the money in the first place?
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No, he got lucky and then he gambled it all away because he doesn't have good judgment. Yeah. So it's important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence. Namely, neither their worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story. And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless statement because that's true of every human being ever born.
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Yeah, but clearly Nate doesn't feel that way because only, I think the undercurrent here is that only people like this in Nate's mind are worth talking about because only gamblers bring the world forward, right? Yeah, no one else deserves empathy. Yeah, yes. Like you're just addicted to putting money on sports games and elections, Nate Silver.
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Anyway, so here's the two things he wants to warn us up or wants people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent in several ways, but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just because he isn't in others.
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And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does! It's not high school! Nobody cares about his SAT skills!
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Yeah, you are a middle-aged man. I don't even know what my SAT score was.
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I've spent almost 20 years asking people questions for a living, and I've never asked anyone their SAT scores. Sorry, Garrison.
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Absolutely not, Garrison. Just how much... Well, he does have an alternative method. I'm seeing what you might call an infographic. Because the next section of the article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence. So, first he admits he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to talk to him. I have to say, Elon does have better shit to do than talk to Nate Silver.
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Because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree. And that is a better use of his time than talking to Nate Silver. So... Since he can't actually talk to Musk, he's going to model and extrapolate from, quote, many other Silicon Valley bigwigs I have met. Helping him in this is the fact that, quote, Musk maintains an extremely public profile.
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He's turned X into a running diary of his innermost thoughts. And in addition to that, the biographies of the guy. One more caveat here. I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory of Elon's career, not just his recent antics. So we go down here and the next segment is dimensions where Musk has exceptionally high or genius level intelligence. So finally, Nate's going to prove it.
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And I'm going to show you guys how he chooses to do that.
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All right, we're back. So let's look at what Nate shows as the chief dimension where Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence. Reading that first line, man. So, the first words under this are cognitive load capacity and overall horsepower slash RAM. He's always on. I mean, literally, look at how often he's tweeting.
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It's just a solid red after he buys the site. This like graph of like when he makes his posts. He's never offline now. He's not sleeping.
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No, he sometimes sleeps from about 6 to 9 a.m., as far as we can tell. But not regularly or often. That's like a streak of 2023 where he just isn't sleeping. He's not sleeping. And again, he's on drugs, people. Yeah. I think they're probably prescriptive. I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed.
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When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you want to do recreationally prescribed, right? But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that to judge drug users. I say that as someone who had a drug problem. Like, this is drug user behavior.
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He's railing Adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day, every day. That's what this is a sign of. And no one is allowed to take his phone away. Anyway, here's how Nate explains why this is smart. In NBA terms, we'd say this is a player with an exceptionally high motor. And this is undoubtedly a valuable trait as the world becomes more complex.
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Last fall, I was simultaneously doing an extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to build up Silver Bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work. Even if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would only have been sustainable for a short burst.
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But Elon is taking on, I don't know, approximately a thousand times more stress than that and has done so for years. No, he's not. That's the thing. He just tweets. He has a massive... Number one, all of the businesses are being run by people who are specialists in those businesses.
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He gets called on to sit in meetings and say yes or no to stuff and occasionally tells them to do something crazy that causes issues, right? And they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now than it gained after the election. And SpaceX just had a giant rocket explode. Again, the boring company has not...
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done anything other than make a useless hole underneath vegas and the hyperloop is nothing right like this this this is just you're full of shit nate like what you have just described running an election model that's functional going on a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is more work than i credit elon musk with actually doing oh yeah more actual effort work no
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No, no, no. Oh, and it's crazy how it does. Right before he posts the graph of how much Elon tweets. Oh God. Okay, good, there it is. Okay, okay. Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains. Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating, especially if Musk ostracizes people who might keep him grounded.
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More sympathetically, he's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities, doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which would be stressful on their own, while still managing to father 13 children.
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Like, that's not a big effort. You wouldn't include that as like, what did I get done this week? Well, in addition to working 40 hours, I jacked off. That's a little transphobic.
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I said... I'm just saying, it doesn't count as work.
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Unless you're a sex worker, then it does, okay? Like, especially, I know a lot of male porn stars... That is a difficult part of the job. That's why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that kill their hearts.
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Well, because it shows rapid cognition and thin slicing ability. Okay. Mm-hmm. All right. Yeah.
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Indeed, in a capitalist system with a significant premium on being first to market, making decent judgments fast is often more important than making better judgments slowly. Canonically, VCs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders as though on Shark Tank, relying on well-honed gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble, as it has for Elon.
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What is Shark Tank's success rate? I bet there's a quick answer to that.
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Less than 50% of deals are successfully closed. Yeah, so I don't know. All this tweeting also shows abstract problem-solving capability. This is related to the idea of creativity, though in Musk's case, it seemingly doesn't manifest itself in artistic prowess. Seemingly, seemingly.
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I'll give it to Nate there. I'll give it to Nate. I don't disagree with you there. And then, of course, instrumental rationality. Philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types of rationality. Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ends, basically figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want. For this category, I think you have to point towards the scoreboard.
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Musk has some unparalleled accomplishments and isn't about to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole, not one for nice guys.
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Now, and again, if Musk's actual goal is his stated goal, getting to Mars, then backing the political party that is actively doing as much damage to the biosphere as possible, ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind of off-world civilization likely, I would argue is a stupid decision. But he doesn't actually want us to get to Mars, right?
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He just wants to be in charge of everything, right? No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference. That's really all it is. Yes, yes. Yeah. Yes. And he has been very successful at that. But again, it's the success of brute force.
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It's the same way as like, if you hire a thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps of a guy who annoys you, like you could say like, I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who annoy me. But really, you just have a lot of dudes who can beat people up for you. Like, is that intelligence? Or did you just have enough money to hire thugs? Or are you just a mob boss? Right.
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Are you just a mob boss? And a mob boss no one is allowed to attack because it's going to be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon, you know? Anyway, we need Ghost Dog.
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I just text resist to every single person in my phone book every day. It takes about seven hours. I have fallen behind on work, you know.
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I'm like, dude, your brain is completely souped. No, you are fried. You are the most cooked a man has ever been.
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Well, yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data put together exhaustively by researchers studying how not just sleep deprivation, but wealth and power impact the brain. And all of it makes a strong case that Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to his brain than a career
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One of those career WWE wrestlers who kills their whole family and then shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their brain later.
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I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist and Zizian literature for two straight weeks. About a quarter of a million words by my last count, Garrison. I don't have it in me to do this. Again, I'm going to get back to my Hitler books, you know, where things make sense, where the world is comforting and safe.
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No, because it's actually not fair use now, as opposed to if he just mentioned that thing. Yeah, because he doesn't talk about them. then it is fair use, right? And he could use like a little clip of it to illustrate the point. Yeah, like I did with Manu Chao. Anyway, this is all I want to say again about Nate Silver until 2028. And you know what?
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The upside, if democracy really does die, is we'll never have to talk about him again. If Trump and Musk really take over fully and do a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silver. Nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin t-shirt.
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Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten 104% of the vote, but... Those are spiky percentages. Those are spiky percentages.
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I understand if Nate because Nate's rich, he doesn't need to do the other stuff. And if he was like just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well, that's what he loves. Right.
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if i had nate silver money i'd probably just write novels for the rest of my life because that's what i like to do i don't understand why he keeps writing about politics he's not good at it and he can't like it he needs to feel special he wants to feel like a special boy uh who knows the answers that no one else does all right well anyway this is us making fun of nate silver so you don't well you can still make fun of him but you don't have to read him we did that for you good night and
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Very happy to join you for E.D. this week. Huge fan of E.D. Just like just big, big E.D. guy. So, you know, psyched to be here.
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The situation is that this guy got taken into custody. My understanding is it was at an apartment that he lived in with his wife. He was a U.S. citizen. He became aware, it looks like at least about 24 hours before, probably became aware that he was being, it's a little clear if he was just like being surveilled or there was something else that tipped them off.
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But he contacted the school asking for help, convinced that ICE was coming for him about a day before they did. When they entered the house, my understanding is based on the claims being made by his wife that they did not like, they didn't like produce a warrant or anything. He's still not charged with any crime. No, he's not been charged with any crime.
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They just took him and like turned off the phone when they were on the phone to their lawyers, if I'm if I'm remembering correctly. Correct. So it's like none of this is the way this should have gone. Like if this was an arrest. No, he was just like black bagged from campus. Yeah, but it's not an arrest again.
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And they've been very clear about this, that like they have specifically stated we're not accusing him of like breaking the law. Right. Like that's that's not what's going on here.
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Yeah. I have found some stuff today of people on the right attacking the judge who put out, I guess, called a stay on this, in part because the judge is Jewish. So it's nice to see the anti-Semitism being used in that way as well in this instance. Just fascinating. We're really breaking new ground in all of this.
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I guess we'll see how it goes. For people who are unfamiliar, I do want to really quickly mention that Palestine is a signatory, and therefore war crimes that happen within Palestine are covered by the court, even if states such as Israel are not signatories. Therefore, they're still under the court's jurisdiction. That's how, in this case, this is happening. Yep.
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It could also make the ICC's life very difficult in terms of using technology, right? The tech back end of everything the ICC does, trying to remove that from any United States involvement would be very hard.
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Sorry, as a person born in Europe, the idea of Buddy Carter authorizing the formation of red, white and blue land is simply just like the fact that this is not a parody. It's just fucking too much for me. Yeah, yeah.
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Genuinely interested in hearing from people in Greenland.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, I'm really interested in hearing from Greenlanders, genuinely. You can contact us at coolzontips at proton.me, which is an encrypted email address that you can send emails to.
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I mean, it would come from Trump plus Adams, right? Like, we're going to see it. That's what we're going to see. We've hit a singularity of corruption.
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There are a few other ways they can go further with this, I'm afraid, to inform you, Mia. But we'll be hoping those don't happen.
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Yeah. And they can be in different parts of the world, right?
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Well, it's the end for race science, then. They can't do race science anymore.
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It's... Yeah, that's mad. I was just thinking of today, the scam compounds which exist on the border between Myanmar and Thailand. Thailand just cut power off to them today. I mean, I can see the strategy there, but it's just going to end up hurting the people who are in those compounds more. Of course it is.
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Yeah, you can't do IRB right now. Most grants will go through an institutional review board that will determine if there are human subjects. They're like... ethical boundaries and what you're doing is okay, but I can't see it being possible to do an IRB and not say these words.
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Of course, those people who are in those compounds used to be able to escape and go to places where they could... get back to their lives, be re-taken care of. And of course, those were funded by USAID, so they don't exist as of this week, which is pretty brutal.
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But these people, these migrant workers who come from all over the world, hoping for a chance at the things that capitalism has promised them, are the people who have to be exploited so that people in wealthy countries can have their treats.
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Yeah. They use the word children, actually, not students, which is fundamentally something we don't do in education. We refer to our students as students because we respect them as people. We don't think of them as lesser than, especially when we're getting to the points where we're discussing things like race and equity. These are high school students, right? Totally.
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We certainly do discuss these things in university. It fundamentally shows a complete lack of understanding of how education works to call them children.
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Yep. Yep. This is very funny because Trump went off on a tangent about electric tanks. Horrible idea. On the campaign trail a couple of times.
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Well, he's had a come to Jesus moment and he has changed his mind and he wants a more sustainable beast, as they call it.
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Wait six months to use a solar panel to field reach it. It doesn't get light for six months. Yeah. Magnificent.
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Yeah, yeah. So everybody, we have an email where you can reach out to us if you have things that you think we should be reporting on. It is a Proton mail. That doesn't mean that it's super secure. It simply means it's end-to-end encrypted if you send from a Proton address. The email address is coolzontipsatproton.me.
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You can send story ideas, things that you think we should be reporting on, things that you've seen that you think you'd like to draw to our attention to that email address. We will try our best to get through all of those. We've been getting a lot of tips. Please don't take it personally. We don't get back to you, but we do appreciate you all reaching out. We reported the news.
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I'm excited to hear which one we get. You know, it could be anything really at this point. Who knows?
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Yeah, you had all kinds of people running around in Iraq for a while there.
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Obviously the United Kingdom played a big role in it, like an outsized role given it being a relatively small country.
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Yeah, like America's always bullied Mexico, right? When we talk about the deployment of troops to the border. Biden absolutely bullied AMLO into bringing those troops to the border because they came before Donald Trump even came into office. But now Donald Trump is just doing it on true social. It's kind of different. Or Panama, fuck. I was in Panama September of 24th.
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I went to the Canal Museum, and Panama is very proud of its history of independence, right? It's relatively short and hard-earned and paid for in blood. But I traveled. I'm a U.S. citizen. I traveled, and no one gave me any shit. It was fine. Everyone was very nice to me. Now they're burning American flags in Panama City.
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Glad to hear about whatever's going to shit today.
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Yeah, he sees things in terms of raw power. It's a very...
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undeveloped notion of like power right like yeah yeah i was thinking the other day like whoever is in the same room as joseph nye must be having a fucking field day right now right the guy who he was uh he wrote books about soft power right the idea of the u.s power to persuade rather than power to kind of yeah rather there are then like hard power which comes in tanks or tariffs i guess uh joseph nye is no longer relevant like you
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For fuck's sake, like 2025 Monroe Doctrine posting on CNN.com.
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Uplift civilizing Christian eyes. What's the next paragraph?
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For fuck's sake, this is... I cannot explain how, like, I have taught this as a thing in history classes for more than a decade from the perspective of, like, that was fucked up and shameful. And even the conservative students are like, yeah, hard agree. Look at these racist as fuck cartoons about Filipino people that we're using here to justify this. And now we are back.
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It is... And, like, yeah, CNN is just out there, like, fucking cranking the manufacturing consent machine.
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Yeah, like an angel sweeping across the plains. Fucking manifest destiny.
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It's sick. We're going into new opium wars. It's going to be so fun.
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If people want to read more about the early, like, globalisation, the previous year of neoliberal globalisation, like, Naomi Klein has some good stuff. And I think Joe Stiglitz does as well. So we can...
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Great thing. Yeah, bring back Clown Block. That'll get us through it.
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Or a tunnel for DEI reasons. We would also include a tunnel.
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Yeah. Or if someone paid lower wages can make it and someone paid more can QC it and then they can send it back. Yep.
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Yeah, and exploit labor at the maximum possible exploitation rate.
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Yeah, I mean, these are your American trucks often, right?
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Yeah, yeah. Like Chevy, GM, like these, as well as like Toyota. Toyota, I think, has a big plant. I forget exactly where, but along the border somewhere, if I recall correctly. Yeah. Yeah, this is extremely common.
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Yeah. To a degree, like post-NAFTA, right, post-94, it has created a class of people in Mexico who have benefited from it, but it has not lifted up like the average income. It's created a greater disparity of income than at any point.
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Previous to that. You'll hear people, I was talking to a friend about this yesterday in Tijuana, like how like What NAFTA did, if you look at 1994, I think it's a really good example of what you're talking about, of like, yeah, we opened up that border to international companies to do tariff-free back and forth, right? But we didn't open it up to people.
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At the same time, we had Operation Gatekeeper, right? Like enforced much harsher border enforcement. And the two things in parallel really kind of indicate...
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Well, I don't know. The worse things get, the more people listen to our podcast. I don't know if you can say that.
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Yeah. And then it leaves like the previously well-organized workers like... If you look at the industries and the places where my grandparents come from, dog workers and miners, right? Those are not really jobs that are employing large numbers of people in the UK anymore. And like, as a result, those working class towns are just destitute.
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So that previously thriving and well-organized working class we had in Northern England, it's left kind of like it has to relocate or reorganize, right? And it destroys those like... nexuses of working class power that existed in Britain up until the 80s with the miners' strike, right?
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I will see that Chiefs merch again somewhere in like a resource pool setting in a park three years from now. Yes.
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Yeah, it's sick. It's really cool. And it's going to be great. It's going to be great if you're in the German arms industry. It's going to be a banger year for you. You're going to be making some leprechauns.
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Once again, Germany will rise to its former glory. Huzzah.
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Yeah, it's not good. It doesn't point to a great future. This is the multipolar world that Russia has wanted for some time coming to fruition. And I didn't want to talk about... So there was a time when Vladimir Putin, some of you remember, was sanctioned by the International Criminal Court for his war crimes in Ukraine.
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The United States, however, the United States has not been a signatory to the Rome Statute, so it wouldn't necessarily have enforced that arrest warrant anyway. But this week, Trump signed a little executive order titled, in block capitals, as we've come to expect, imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court.
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And in doing so, he followed the example of Putin, who in 2023 put out arrest warrants for ICC prosecutors after they put out a warrant for his arrest. Trump didn't cite the Putin example. He called the ICC's actions against Israel illegitimate and baseless. That's a quote. He specifically called the warrants against Yoav Galant and Benjamin Netanyahu baseless.
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He then went on to claim, quote, both nations are thriving democracies with militaries that strictly adhere to the laws of war. This is a thing that is not true. His order then goes on to outline what it calls protected persons. For people who aren't familiar, a United States person is distinguished from a United States citizen. It also includes any permanent residents. It also includes U.S.
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armed forces, government officials, and contractors working on behalf of U.S. armed forces. Contractors? Yeah. Yeah, the people who can do no wrong. It then goes on to include US allies, including all of NATO, and sometimes contractors working on their behalf. It says that if the International Criminal Court investigates any of these people, Trump will declare a national emergency.
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It also imposes material sanctions and travel bans on both ICC prosecutors and people acting on their warrants, as well as the families of those people. Interesting. Yeah, this is an unprecedented American politics. Sometimes it gets reported like it is. I want to throw back to what they called the Hague Invasion Act. That wasn't its real name, but that was George Bush's.
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It authorized the president to use any means necessary to release United States people held by the ICC or at its request. So people started calling it the Hague Invasion Act, right? Trump did also sanction ICC prosecutors and their families in 2020 for looking into US war crimes in Afghanistan.
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I think that happened in June of 2020, so you can be forgiven for having missed that because some stuff was happening at that time. Oh, was it? Yeah, things were going down. I'm sure the Philadelphia Eagles were, you know, beginning their rise to glory again. That was a big thing. Kansas City Chiefs were doing some racist shit, shockingly. Shockingly. I'm sure Taylor Swift was doing something too.
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But yeah, this is like, Israel has for nearly a decade been trying to hack, smear, surveil and threaten the court. In the show notes, I'll include a link to a Guardian article that came out last year about Israel's attacks and attempts to undermine the International Criminal Court. And just if I've been talking about something and you're like, what is the International Criminal Court?
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Very briefly, it's based at the Hague. So if you've heard, you know, you will stand trial at the Hague. That's what they're talking about. It has its most immediate roots in the tribunals, investigated perpetrators of genocides in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. The US and Israel are not members of the court. They never signed the Rome Statute. Russia withdrew in 2016. Curious time to withdraw.
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Interesting. Fascinating. Yeah. They just decided that it wasn't for them. And off they went to do some war crimes. The ICC has been criticized probably reasonably for the vast majority of the people who have actually been prosecuted for the ICC being outside of the core neoliberal states. It's prosecuted a lot of people in Africa.
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That doesn't mean that African people can't do war crimes in Africa. Of course they can. But it means that they're held accountable more often than when countries in the global north do war crimes, which they can do too.
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Okay, so Trump, just like everything else he does, was condemned internationally for this, including by several NATO allies, in so much as they really are NATO allies anymore, given everything we've just talked about. However, it's also worth noting that some of the countries like France who condemned Trump's sanctioning of ICC prosecutors also allowed someone with an ICC warrant, i.e.
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Benjamin Netanyahu, to transit their airspace. So like their full commitment to the ICC perhaps can be questioned. This is a problem with the ICC, right? It doesn't have an integral enforcement mechanism.
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Yeah. Literally, I reached out to a friend to book a room last night because I knew they were good at that stuff.
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Yeah, I organize with people who have kids. I remember four years ago, fuck me, 2020, a long time ago and also yesterday. But like we were organizing to feed unhoused people and we were having a big Thanksgiving dinner. And like some of my friends have very young children and they bought them. And I think that's actually really cool to do that. A, like for those kids, it is normal that like,
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We look after people in our community. This is what we do. And ever since I've been little, this is what we did. And like, it's also very nice for people. Like a lot of my friends also brought their children down to the border, especially last year when we had, because there were children there anyway, right?
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Some of my friends who bring their children down and their kids would play with the other kids. And like, it doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdish and some of the kids are from China and some of them are from Colombia or whatever. They'll get along just fine when they're four or five years old. They don't care. They just want to kick a ball or see a teddy bear or something.
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And I think it's really good for your children to, you know, you're bringing them into a world which is...
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cruel and and at times unequal and like your kids seeing that like we can make a difference and we can do this i think it's it's one of the best educations you can give your children yeah and it's something that's good for everyone involved yeah exactly and it's also very i think one of the things i see a lot when people are organizing with refugees of the unhoused is like they're just people like you don't need to be afraid of them like they don't want to hurt your children and
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Having your children around shows that you have grasped that they're just people and that you feel safe and your children are safe around them. And I think that's valuable too. You're giving both parties some dignity in that moment.
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Yeah, definitely. If you've been a teacher or in any way, you probably have this skill. You might not consider it a skill, but even if you've been a TA in grad school or something like that, you probably know how to do this.
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Hi everyone, it's me, James, and I'm coming at you today with one of these little requests that I make sometimes when there's something that we would like you to do, when it's very important to do so. Today, I want to talk to you about Syria, and specifically, northeast Syria.
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So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad comes to an end. But for Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have brought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing, and occupation by Turkish-backed jihadist groups.
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In an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rojava revolution, Turkey and its mercenaries are openly committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands have already been forcibly displaced, and thousands more are in danger. To make matters worse, this remains largely absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria.
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If you'd like to show your solidarity with the people of northern and eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent action by passing emergency legislation to stop the violence, hold Turkey accountable, and commit U.S. support to the Syrian Democratic Forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If you want to take action today, you can go to defendrojava.org.
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That's D-E-F-E-N-D-R-O-J-A-V-A dot org. If you are able to, the most effective action we can take right now is to call a couple of representatives, one representative and one senator. The representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York. He's a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is 202-225-3461.
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Yeah, claiming deep on the ground understanding of a place from Reddit. Yes. That is not us.
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It's good times. But my fixer would come around noon for whatever reason when I was in Rojava. And I hate sitting in the hotel, so I'd go out for walks around the market.
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People are lovely. Yeah. I'd be walking down the street and like, I'd be looking around, see if there's anything interesting to go and see. And then, uh, you can literally take one wrong turn down the street and walk into, to regime Syria, as you covered in, in the women's war. Like I was walking down one street and this man walked up to me. My Kurdish is not very good.
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Tried to say hello, told him my name and stuff. And then he starts getting more agitated and he just starts repeating a higher and higher volume. Assad, bad man. Yeah. Assad, bad man.
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The other one would be Senator James Risch. He's an Idaho Republican. He's a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone number would be 202-224-2752. If you'd like to have some talking points, you can find those on DefendRoshaba.org.
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Yeah, it was a very strange situation. It is no longer a strange situation because in the last week, the Assad regime has crumbled. Statues of him have been torn down all over the country, which we love to see. That's another of our stances as a network is fuck a statue. Yes, yes. Fuck most statues. Most statues. There are probably some cool ones.
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There's the lady hitting the Nazi with a handbag in Sweden. That's a good statue. But yeah, most statues. Most statues of dudes in suits. Don't love them.
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Yeah, I'm sure it will. So these statues have been torn down because the Assad regime has basically crumbled. It failed to really put up any meaningful resistance to this advance by different rebel groups, right? By HTS, by SNA, by the Southern Front as well.
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And despite, I guess, even what I would have said two weeks ago, even after they lost Aleppo, I assumed that they would regroup in Hama or Homs, and they did not. They completely failed to do so there. Russian backers more or less abandoned them, focused on getting their stuff and their people, those who survived, out of the country. And as a result, there is no more Assad regime, right?
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Assad fled the country at some point. It was initially speculated that Assad had fled on an aircraft on Saturday night as rebels were entering Damascus. That seems to be untrue, or perhaps it was true, but there's speculation that aircraft had crashed or been shut down, certainly. It does not seem to be true.
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Yeah, he didn't want to be found in a hole in the ground like Saddam Hussein, right? Like he, yeah. Or end up like Gaddafi, I guess. So he left. It's quite possible that he was doing a sort of final please, please help me tour of Russia around, which turned into his eventual exile.
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In breaking news, Robert, I don't know if you've seen this Telegram post, and obviously we can't confirm it because we don't have a Derek Lime's The Assad Regime, but... Allegedly, he is planning on setting up a specialized hospital in the field of ophthalmology in Russia, Abkhazia, and Dubai. Yeah, great.
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Yeah, cool. Not at the Hague where he belongs. Yeah. Anyway. He's gone, and we have seen in response some of the worst social media posting that I've seen. And I don't want this to be like Twitter review. I think that obviously that's pointless and pure-up. But I want to address, I guess, this kind of really disappointing response I've seen from a lot of people on the left that...
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If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to the humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can donate to two organizations that I would suggest. The first would be Have Your Soul, the Curtis Red Crescent. That's H-E-Y-V-A-S-O-R.com. And you'll want to go slash E-N if you want to see their website in English.
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Oh yeah, well, you have the grey zone tendency, right? That Assad was great, actually, in the protection of human rights in the region, and Syria was socialism incarnate, which is obviously nonsense. This is a person who, as we have seen in the last week, whose regime prisons were... holding thousands of people, killed tens of thousands of people, tortured people to death.
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In some cases in Sednaya prison, which is a big prison in Damascus, or near Damascus, I should say, it's towards the coast. It looks as if there were children in that prison who were possibly born in that prison and may have never been out of that prison, which is like one of the most horrible things I've ever had to think about, you know, like a little child, four or five years old,
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never having seen the sky. It's just, it's heartbreaking. Like a lot of the things we are going to find, the things we're going to hear about in the next few weeks are heartbreaking. And anybody who's prepared to apologize for that or prepared to say that that was good, I think you really need to question if there's someone who's aligned with you. But,
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In addition to that tendency, there's one that sort of holds that in Syria, what will come next is worse. What will come next, or we don't know. Of course, we don't know what will come next. None of us can see the future. But what will come next will make Assad look like it was a preferable option. And I feel that we need to address that because I think it's one of the...
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Some of the weapons, sure, that the U.S. supplied, Timber Sycamore, are probably still in the hands of HDS.
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No, the entire weaponry of the Syrian Arab Army is now also in the hands of the... HDS, which we'll move on to, actually, because maybe we should address that now before we address the responses, actually.
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When we talk about international involvement in Syria, right, we talk about the United States, who has supported the SDF not as a project – and this is important – they don't support the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria as a democratic project – What they support is the SDF as a partner force in the fight against ISIS.
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And that's been very clear when they have failed to defend the ANES against ISIS. genocidal violence, ethnic cleansing, and Afrin, what we're seeing again now in the Tal Rafat area. I'll use that terminology because if you want to look it up on Google Maps, that's easier to find.
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The violence that we've seen repeatedly from the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army or Turkish Free Syrian Army, as it's sometimes called, the United States hasn't defended the people of the ANES against that. And it won't because that's not what it's there to do. And as much as we would like it to, I don't think that that's in the nature of the U.S.
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mission in Syria, and I don't think it's in the nature of the U.S. as a state. To support a project which is seeking to build democracy without the state, it's not in the nature of the state.
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You can donate there. The other one will be the Free Burma Rangers who are currently working in Raqqa. I was talking to my friend Habat who works with them. You can donate to them at www.freeburmarangers.com. We will put all of this in the show notes, all the URLs. So if you're driving, you don't have to write them down.
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Yeah. This is not a U.S. proxy state, as some people are trying to tell you. This is not a CIA revolution, as some people are trying to tell you, indeed.
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They have good music and they like to dance. Generally cool people, yes. Yeah, I enjoy their company. I have vibed with the YPG.
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Yeah, it's one of the cooler things that's happened to the Middle East in the past century. Yeah. And like the United States does not have a plan for what has happened in the last two weeks. And it appears to be trying to think on the hoof right now. Joe Biden's foreign policy has been dog shit. And it doesn't look like he's going to pull a 180 now. Yeah.
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We should not expect the United States to save Rojava. We should do everything we can to get the United States to continue supporting the people that who gave more than 10,000 of their children in the battle against ISIS. The US didn't want to send ground troops, right? Obama didn't want to have another ground war, neither did Trump. And so they got people from the SDF to do the dying.
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And a lot of the killing, well, they maintained an aerial presence with a light ground footprint. We shouldn't expect the US to show up for the people who showed up for it. That's not in its nature. The only state that had a plan for what happened in the last two weeks appears to have been Israel, disappointingly. Right. Russia and Iran seem to have largely scrambled, extracted their state assets.
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Russia got some of its people out. They took some of the aircraft out. Iran. Likewise, the U.S. seems to be kind of scrambling. I'm sure there are still some like ODAs and special forces guys embedded with the SDF.
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I'm sure that in the areas where ISIS has risen up, because in some areas where the regime has pulled back, there has been an increasing presence of ISIS sleeper cells trying to sort of once again control territory and attack the SDF. In those areas, I'm sure that there are US special forces like directing airstrikes, but I don't think the US is going to come and save Russia.
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But the only country that had a plan was Israel. And what Israel's plan was, was to invade Syria in the Golan Heights, to increase their area of control, and then to bomb almost all of the aircraft. And perhaps, I don't know if it also includes air defense systems, but from what the IDF is saying today, they have bombed all of the Syrian Air Force's aircraft that had fallen into rebel hands.
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This includes ammunition for the aircraft. It includes the ammunition dump at Kamishlo Airport. About half an hour before Robert and I started recording here on Monday, I saw a video from a friend in Kamishlo of the ammunition dump at the airport, which had previously belonged to the regime, now belongs to the ANES. exploding after it had been hit by an IDF airstrike.
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So what they're trying to do, I guess, is deny any of those weapons to people who they perceive as a threat to their interests. And there's been, I don't know if you're seeing this also, Robert, but a lot of Israeli accounts being like, oh, we stand with the Kurds. Israel and the Kurds are one. And
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Those are the concrete ways that we can help right now in what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in North Syria. Thanks. I hope you enjoy the episode.
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First of all, I want to warn you, I want to warn you that we have an advertising break coming, Robert, is what I want to warn you about.
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We're back. Yeah, firstly, I think when you're seeing analysis about Syria, anyone who talks about things in terms of these monolithic blocs, these Israeli accounts are often like, we will support the Kurds. I would be, sometimes I'll maybe use that to refer to AANES or the SDF, but I really try not to because it's a multi-ethnic project, right?
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Like the areas that we'll talk about in a minute where the SDF is being attacked are Those areas, the largest component of the SDF is Arab forces, right? And that is the case in the SDF as a whole, actually. The majority of the SDF is now Arab, not Kurdish. I would be very sceptical of the expertise of anyone who refers to things in these monolithic absolutes, right?
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The Sunnis, the Shias, the Alawites, the Kurds. There are a lot of different groups in Syria, and those groups are comprised of individuals, and those individuals, shockingly... have different and distinct goals and experiences and desires. There are absolutely Alawites who will have remained loyal to Assad. There are others who demonstrably did not, as we've seen in the last week, right?
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And so... I would be skeptical of anyone who tries to paint things in those terms. And I would be skeptical to return to what we were talking about earlier, Robert, of people who tell you that we should expect... The one I see most is Syria to turn into Lebanon, right? And you and I have been talking about this before we recorded, but...
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That's not a useful example in my mind of what we're likely to see in Syria, right? And the reason for that is that in Lebanon, yes, there was a US air component as there is in Syria. That's true. But I don't understand why we would look at the example of Lebanon, a place thousands of miles away, when we have at least two examples of of governance in Syria, right?
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People who have been governing, in one case, for more than a decade, significant parts of Syria. Like, they have... government project. In the case of the AANES, I don't think it's fair to call it a state project.
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They would tell you that they're trying to build democracy without the state, which might not be popular with states, evidently, which doesn't net them the support of many states, as we've seen. But we have, and with HCS in July and the Salvation government, we have these two governance projects. They're extremely different, right?
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The Salvation Government under HDS is people have been arrested for playing music at their own weddings. It is neither democratic nor particularly liberatory. And then we have the ANES, which I would argue is the only democracy in the Middle East. Certainly the only democracy where people of different ethnicities and genders matter the same amount.
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You're just straining the definition of democracy if you're constraining it by ethnicity, right? Right. So I think you can make a good case for it being the only democracy in the Middle East. I saw this really atrocious BBC interview this morning. Some networks now have reporters on the ground in Damascus, and I've been trying to watch those to see what's going on.
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It can be very hard to just get your news from Telegram. I would also caution people who are perhaps new to this, who are finding these Telegram channels, to take everything you read on there with a pinch of salt. You'll see a lot of disinformation there. one of the BBC had an expert on and he was like, oh, every time we see people pulling down statues of dictators, I'm a bit concerned.
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And like, I have to think about how to express this. It seems to me deeply Islamophobic or bigoted or racist. I don't quite know the right term to say, oh, the people of this country and the places in the last 10, 20 years where we've seen people pulling down statues of dictators have largely been in the Middle East, right? Yeah. To say that, oh, these people are incapable of self-governance.
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These people are incapable of living in peace with one another. But they're not. We've seen that in Rojava. And I don't think that the right response now is to respond with skepticism to the... the Syrian people's ability to live in peace. They've been at war for 15 years, 14 years, 13 years, 13 and a half years.
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But I think that there is not an appetite for more killing and more dying, certainly from what I've seen and what I've heard.
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Yeah. I mean, some things I don't know how to interpret, right? HTS has asked the regime police and authorities in cities to stay on. Some of that is probably good, right? Like the people who ensure that the water gets pumped. I hope that they stay pumping the water. the people who were the police for the Assad regime, Syrian Arab Republic. I don't want those people to stay on.
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I want those people to fuck off and I want those people to be held accountable for the crimes they committed. But it doesn't point to sort of wild sectarian violence. We don't have the situation we had in Iraq, right? We have a US occupation which sits inside its bases and it only leaves, seemingly, to kill people.
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From the perspective of the people living in Iraq, that's what the US occupation looked like for the most part. It's guys in big military vehicles who kill civilians by mistake. We don't have that here. There's not that resentment, generational resentment that allowed the Islamic State to grow there.
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Now, the Islamic State did grow through capturing a lot of state institutions, which is what HTS has done. But I don't see that same resentment and I don't see that same desire for sort of redemptive violence that we saw there. I might be wrong, right? There might be more intercommunal violence. I have seen some videos of what looked like summary executions in Damascus today.
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Yeah, I can't blame someone. I can't understand someone doing that. What are you going to do? I can understand that in the next few days there will probably be more of that violence because we are literally, in some cases, opening the lid on some of the worst crimes against humanity of this century.
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Yeah. Yeah. And they got a lot of people. They kind of had it coming to them. I'm not particularly concerned about that. I'm more broadly concerned with, like, what are you doing on the left if you see people in the streets, you see people tearing down statues of dictators, you see people celebrating the end of a regime that oppressed them for decades, and you immediately go to, oh, this is bad.
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Like, why do you even bother if we don't believe that people can govern themselves, if we don't believe that the people in the street are normally the people who are right, and if we don't believe that... the downfall of tyrannical regimes is a good thing.
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Yeah, this is a person who dropped chlorine gas on blocks of flats with little children in them, right? Like, fuck this guy. It's good that he's gone. I wish he was dead. I'm sad that he gets to go and be an ophthalmologist. Like, he, of all people, needs to be held accountable for his crimes.
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Yeah, yeah. You never know. Yeah, I guess people... He's in Russia now. He's in Russia. Someone will find him in his high-end eye clinic one day.
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Yeah, we can hope. Robert, I want to take one more break. Talking of stabbing, maybe we will get an advert for knives, you know?
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Almost any knives, even crappy gas-stitched knives. Like, if you make the ones that look like an oil slick, get in touch with the advertising department at iHeartMedia. We'll pimp them. All right, we're back. The last thing I want to talk about, Robert, is how the rebels won. Because there was not a lot of fighting after the collapse of Aleppo, but before there was fighting.
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And in part, how that fighting went, I think, led to the downfall of the morale of the Syrian Arab Army, right? So there are some things here that... Both Robert and I are somewhat nerdy about conflicts, right? Like, it's something, even when we're not attending wars, we like to read about them.
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And you and I both take a great interest in history, and I think we'd be unwise to not look at this and learn from it. Especially with HTS, who massively professionalized since the ceasefire in 2020. I think professionalized is probably the right word, like...
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their command their technology the way they operated looked a lot more like a modern military than it did you know the militias like i'm sure you and i both remember the early syrian civil war for people who are a bit younger than us like some of the most incredible improvised weapons that I've seen.
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That they had literally taken out of the museum in Aleppo.
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Really incredible, and it speaks to the ingenuity of people and their desire not to be oppressed, their desire to fight against state tyranny. But when we compare that to what we saw with HTS in 2024, a world of change, right?
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In particular, I think it was very interesting that they captured armored vehicles and then they were able to combine armor and infantry very effectively, which is not easy to do, right? That is alluded even some professional militaries. They also...
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very effectively use drones, both drones to drop bombs and drones to adjust their artillery and mortar fire, which I think is something that, again, that modern militaries do, but it's not easy to do, right? And it's not like HCS could do massive...
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exercises in the lead up to this operation like they they seem to have professionalized very quickly another area that they were you can see that they've learned a lot from the conflicts in in ukraine and perhaps in myanmar too was their use of fpv drones a first person view drone how do you describe it it's like your eyes are on the front of the drone is that a good description Yeah.
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It's like you're flying. Yeah. And there are videos of whole classrooms of HCS, I guess, soldiers, militants, whatever you want to call them, practicing flying drones or using the controllers to play a computer game where you have to go through checkpoints and follow a route and things. And they seem to have developed a training course that then gave them this drone brigade, which they used...
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incredibly effectively. They had these massive first-person view drones that were almost like a sort of ersatz cruise missile. And it was, I think, one of those that penetrated some kind of command headquarters in Aleppo in the early days of the battle there, killed several important officers and commanders, and helped to then spread that panic which they rode all the way to Damascus, right?
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So this use of drones was extremely consequential. The other thing that they used and which we've seen the SDF use a lot is these pulsar thermal optics. So a thermal optic sees heat, right? I guess would be the easiest way to describe it. And it maps heat in a visual fashion for the user. And in this case, they put them on their rifles and they're able to see other people at night.
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Our friend Carl, who we had on last week, week before maybe, Carl made a really good video about thermal versus night vision on his InRangeTV channel. I'll link it in the notes because I think it's worth people checking out if they're not familiar with this technology at all.
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The optics he used were not the optics they're using, but these thermal optics, you've seen them a lot with the SDF, especially in Afreen. They'll do these night missions, right? Yeah. When you look at the recording from the thermal optic, it looks like people are glowing because... They are the hottest things in that area. And it makes it very easy to target people.
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And HTS used these a lot when they were attacking Aleppo, right? These thermal optics that they mounted on their rifles and that allowed them to pretty much The United States used to talk about owning the night, right? Because it had night vision when no one else does.
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Night vision has proliferated a long way now, and that means that some of the ways that they used to use night vision, they can't anymore. Like, for instance, they used to send out lasers that were only visible under night vision to aim weapons. If your adversary has night vision as well, you've now created a giant line that goes right back to you if you're using a laser aiming device.
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So you can't do that. But these thermal optics, especially when they're fighting against the Syrian Arab Army, who, I mean, these conscripts are massively demoralized, right? They're underpaid. They're underfed. Did you meet any when you were in Rojava? Did you meet any people who defected?
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Yeah, extremely. And I think when you meet the people who have been regime soldiers and come across, often they're like... They seem to be happy being waiters or working in the market in Rojava because their pay was so bad and their lives were so miserable as conscripts that they'd rather just come and work any job they can get in AANES. And I think...
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When you've got those guys going up against well-trained people from HTS with these thermal optics, with these using drones, their communications were solid. You can tell from their appearance that a lot of these guys are professionalized. They're almost indistinguishable from US troops.
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I think you and I had both responded to this tweet about some YouTube guy was shocked that people were wearing helmets online. and body armour, which that has been the aesthetic of violence, at least in places where the US has operated for decades. I don't know, half a decade, would you say? Like the sort of US special forces look.
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I think number three as well, like we should not understate the desire to look like your avatar on call of duty.
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Yeah, people, I think, if you've not been, you won't realize how young a lot of these people are. This incredible professionalism, incredible professionalism, I'm overstating it, but this dramatic change in the appearance and conduct of these rebels, particularly HDS, occurred over about three or four years from the ceasefire in 2020 to this offensive in 2024. And I think...
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gives us an insight into the way that war is changing, right? That access to information is easier than it ever has been. And access to a lot of these technologies has proliferated massively. Because we've seen in Myanmar, right, drones proliferate. People 3D print little night vision goggles in Myanmar. I spoke to Meowc about it about a year and a half ago.
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People remember Meowc from our Myanmar series about 3D printing little night vision goggles that use the camera from those security cameras that can kind of see at night. They use those and then a tiny LCD screen. Of course, drones are everywhere now, right? Things like plate carriers. Even you see rebels in Myanmar wearing them, buying them from AliExpress.
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All of the technology, all of the tactics also look much easier to find on the internet. Robert and I have both spoken to people who have said they go on YouTube to learn about military tactics and small arms even, and how to use different weapon systems when they capture them. I think it's a real change in the way that conflict is conducted.
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And it's one that we will probably continue to see as like... you know, the world isn't getting any more peaceful. Nope. And with a lot of, you know, Russia and Iran took a massive L in Syria. That doesn't mean that they're not gone as sort of global actors. We will continue to see, particularly Russia, obviously fighting in Ukraine.
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And I think it's worth looking at what happened in Syria so that we can understand what we're going to see in other parts of the world.
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And it might still be. Already, Germany and the Netherlands have stopped processing asylum applications from Syria, which is concerning. But yeah, I think it's worth continuing to keep an eye on. I will continue to post about it. We will continue to inform you about it here. We will continue to bring on people who have more expertise and insight than we do.
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So yeah, we hope you'll keep an eye on it. I just want to end by saying that the democratic project in Rojava is under a great deal of threat. Yes. Currently, more than it has been for perhaps a decade. Yep. They do not have an ally in the United States. They do not, as far as we know, have an ally in Israel. And from what we've seen, It's one thing what Israel says.
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It's another thing what Israel does. And what Israel has been doing today is bombing ammunition that they already have in the ANES. And that means that it's more important than ever that you do what you can to support them. If you go to the emergency committee for a Java, you can find them online. You find them on all different kinds of social media sites.
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They have a toolkit for supporting Rojava right now. I would urge you, if you care about that project, if you care about building democracy without the state, if you care about building a place where women and men are equal and the revolution was led by women. It's not a revolution that includes women. It's a revolution by women for women. I would encourage you to do what you can to support them.
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Yeah. Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs that are currently dominating leftist spaces in the United States are trash. Yeah. And bad for people. Bad for people in them, bad for people who are not in them. Yeah. Here's a little test you can do. Is your org currently sad that Bashar al-Assad is no longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case, leave.
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Yeah. Can I tell a little organizing story? Do we have time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, go for it. So I remember in like 2018, I am on a trip with a friend. We're coming back and we see the arrival of the migrant caravan. One of the migrant caravans, the one that everyone decided to have a fucking cow about right before the 2018 midterms.
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And at that time, they were corralling the people of the migrant caravan in a baseball stadium in Tijuana. And, like, it was raining every day, so the baseball stadium ends up looking like the Battle of the Somme after, like, a couple of days, right? You know, kids in needy mud and shit. And I didn't particularly know what to do, but evidently there were people there who were hungry and thirsty.
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And so I get three of my friends. At this time, I was still making... about half my money riding bicycles and the other half writing. So my friends and I are supposed to do a long bike ride. All of us are people who make a living riding bikes, right? We're not like expert organizers. And I was like, hey guys, this is fucked. What should we do?
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We called a friend who has a company who makes waffles. We obtained as many waffles as we could physically carry across the border. At that time, we weren't able to get in. We found a way to get in. We began distributing the waffles. After that, we put something online. People sent us money and we continued feeding people for months. None of us, I think, had a particular plan or a schedule.
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Yeah, it was a bit chaotic at times. But A, we were able to do that with a lot of other people. Clearly, it wasn't just us, right? But we were able to process tens of thousands of dollars and feed thousands of people.
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B, everyone there, and I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with, well, with refugees for the most part, people are so good at organizing each other and themselves.
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Like when we got there with bottles of water and food, there were a thousand people there who have not had sometimes a drink for days, let alone more than a thousand, I think, let alone something hot to eat, right? Yeah. Everybody made sure that the children and the sick people got what they needed first. Organizing is something that is very inherent in us as people.
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Yeah, literally, it was this morning. So I'm tired. Yesterday morning, I have some of my house neighbors, right? And it was cold. And so I went out and gave them some hot breakfast or hot coffee. It's super easy to do. If you are struggling socially, wherever you are, maybe you're finding it hard to make friends.
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I know that's the thing that people often struggle with, especially if you've moved to a new place or post-pandemic or you're still concerned with large gatherings or any of those things. If you start doing that, you will find other people who want to do it too. So many of my friends I organize with are people...
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Like, when we had the end of Title 42 and people were in between the fences there, a lot of the people who I organize with now or who I help people with now, I didn't know. I just showed up with a giant solar generator that I happen to have and some stuff that we had to whip around a cool zone for.
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And, like, people who care about the same things as you are generally cool, and it's a good way to make friends, and then you can go on from there.
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Yeah, it could literally be anything, right? Like if you've got some people to go to a bar, you have the skills.
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Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is... I'm thinking of a quotation here, something, the busy bee has no time for despair. But the thing that makes me feel better about the world is that I have seen that people can fix massive problems with very few resources by just showing up.
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And I think organizing is what gives me, what allows me to enter this period of time that we're entering into with a great deal more hope than I otherwise would have done.
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Is it the products and services that support this podcast?
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If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps, especially if you're a woman, then you know how to OSINT, actually. Maybe you don't credit yourself with that skill, but 100% that like you've developed that skill to keep yourself safe.
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Yeah, sure. So open source intelligence is an acronym that doesn't really need to exist. It's gathering information from open sources, things that are openly accessible, as opposed to like HUMINT, which is like being a spy. or SIGINT, which is capturing signals.
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Open source information is you're creeping someone's Instagram, creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking shit that they put on Goodreads, right? All the data that is out there largely on the internet about us. A lot of people put a lot of information on the internet and it's very easy and...
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I would imagine if you're under 50 and maybe if you're over 52, you just know how to do this because it's what you do anyway when you want to find out about someone. Especially if you are a person who goes on dates with people who you haven't met before and haven't been introduced to by a mutual friend, but you meet on the internet, you probably already do this to keep yourself safe.
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The man credibly accused of sleeping with an underage woman lots of times.
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The amount of things that people can't access because they can't get there is vast. Especially when I talk to migrants who have recently arrived in the US. They don't have a US cell phone. They can't Uber. Oftentimes, nowadays, you can't even pay for mass transit with cash. You have to have a special card. And then you have to get to the place to get the card, right?
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The problems you can solve by being able to drive someone five miles are enormous. Yeah. especially in the US where everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at all times. Yep.
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It's useful. It's important. It's okay if that's not something you can physically do or that works for the way you like to live your life. Another thing I was thinking of, which can be massively important and people don't realize, is If you know how to take off a taillight and replace the bulb in it... Yes.
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Like, we're entering a time when people with DACA, people with TPS, people who are undocumented, people who are on temporary migration statuses are going to be deathly afraid of any interaction with law enforcement.
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If you can... change the bulb on someone's taillight or their turn signal indicator for those of us in the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in a really important way.
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That's a badge for those of us in the Commonwealth. Also, if you have a sewing machine. Yeah, I was about to mention that. Yeah, you're a hero. Yeah, one of my friends recently made me a little patch and it's really cool and I like it and I'm putting it on my stuff. But if you can sew, like that's a skill that I do not have. And it's so great when people can...
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like fix stuff for someone or you know make stuff fit someone you know if you're a person who finds it hard to get clothes that you like to wear that make you feel good and someone one of my friends could do that and uh one of my friends was making uh clothes for another friend for like a uh renaissance fair and like it was the nicest thing I've seen someone do for someone else in a very long time it really made her like yeah
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feel nice and cared for. And you might think that this is just a weird little thing that you like to do with your sewing machine, but you can meaningfully really make someone feel cared for using that.
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I remember one of, we had one night last September, it was so cold, we were in the desert, and there were like a thousand people, right? And we were, at that point we were really struggling to feed everyone even, you know, because there was so few of us. But my friend bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had, and I think I had my harmonica in my truck.
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And we were sitting around with these, we had some Sikh guys, had some Uyghur folks come from China, and then some Kurdish people, and they were all just playing their different music. And it was so nice. Taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment with music, again, don't underestimate how important that is. Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not a useful one.
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Yeah. And going back to your music as a, like, morale is a terrain of struggle. Like, the other memory I have last year of playing guitars is in Rojava, being inside at night because everyone was getting drone struck all the time. And it was dangerous to be driving around, sitting around with some Azidi friends. And, like, we spent all night playing the Oud, which is like a...
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It's like a guitar with a gourd on the bottom. I don't know how to describe it. It's a stringed instrument. It's a stringed instrument is what it is. And that made everyone so happy. We had such a nice evening. Everyone was able to get through this relatively difficult thing.
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It sucks that people are being killed just for driving around or existing and they're bombing all the civilian infrastructure and the power keeps going out and all these things. But there's a reason those people have kept Ood around after 15, 13 years of war. And it's because it is important. And so don't overlook that.
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I don't want to call out any organization in particular. There is an organization that perceives organizing to exist solely in the realm of wearing a high-vis vest and carrying a clipboard and getting people to write their email addresses down and then telling them to attend things. And maybe there are several organizations like that. I don't know. I've perceived one locally.
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If you don't have those bonds, those interpersonal relationships... These things won't hang together. So many of my happiest organizing memories, again, going down James's memory lane, I guess. I have a memory of Christmas Eve last year, 2023. Me and my friends have been out.
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I know some of them listen because some of them have come across from different states to help us over their Christmas holidays, which is nice. And it was cold. And we had been feeding people all day. And then we'd heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find.
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And then we got to the end of the day and like, rather than just going home, I had a bunch of, we had some MREs left, the refugee MREs, sort of vegan. Lots of us are vegan. So we were like, oh, we're not going to find any other place. vegan food in the middle of nowhere out here.
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So we all sat around eating our little vegan MREs and like just talking and like sharing some thoughts and things we experienced over the last months of doing this. And like, it's those moments that make your organizing group so much stronger.
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No one's telling anyone to do anything, you know, like those genuine bonds and the love and friendship we build up between each other, doing things that are very important. Don't overlook the value of those because it's extremely valuable.
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Yeah, definitely. I've had some wonderful meals in war zones and I've deeply appreciated those people. More broadly, though, those ties, like the way we organize without the state, the reason I believe that that is the way we should organize and the way we will continue to organize in a way that we can make the state irrelevant is different.
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because we understand each other as people and care about each other as people. And then we approach our organizing holistically, right? With everyone in it, knowing this person is good at this, but they're struggling with this right now. And I care about them. So I'm not going to make them do that right now. That is how we can build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot.
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And in a way that capitalism cannot, right? Because, uh,
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fucking hurts rent a car doesn't care or know about its employees in a way that we who organize with people and care and love one another do and like that's where organizations will always be stronger than those created by capitalism or the state yeah unfortunately speaking of capitalism or the state we're taking our last ad break yeah hopefully it's hurts rent a car
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Yeah, the longhouse with your they-them nephew in it that you hate and owned you at Thanksgiving is gone.
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Yeah, I guess what's nibbling? Nibbling is a correct non-binary appellation.
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Yeah, I'm aware of at least one UCSC student who was detained at the border and immediately deported. I'm also aware that UCOP, UC Office of the President, made a statement about the impact of service terminations across its campuses.
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But the UCSD Guardian, in a dub for student journalism, reported that UCSD convened an emergency meeting before this of faculty, and it knew about the revocations or the service changes, the revocation of their student status, And it was reluctant to act because it hadn't received guidance from UCOP yet. So we're seeing this from a lot of university administrations, right?
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They don't know how to respond. I did see that the University of Arizona was helping fund some of the legal fees of their students, which is more than many universities are doing. As of now, there seems to be no pattern of prior rest for the people who have had their statuses changed.
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But in some cases, it seems that in some university systems, all of the people who have lost their status are either Chinese, Indian, or from majority Muslim countries.
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Yeah, very familiar. I wrote about it a little bit in my first book and my PhD dissertation. Also, the last living person to participate in the Popular Olympics, which is what I wrote my book about, was an Esperantist, part of the project. of the popular front in Catalonia was to bring people together through sport.
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And then Esperanto is going to be this thing that would, as you mentioned, like bridge the gaps between people.
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I'm excited. I never really did a full rundown on Esperanto. It just appeared. And I was like, holy shit, that's cool. So I'm going to learn a lot.
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Yeah. Not huge. Yeah. It's like, uh, how big, I know we've got a few of those like little ones in Europe, you know?
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I know this, uh, Senate, the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union was like in its first Congress, like its foundational Congress, I suppose they were like, and everyone has to, everyone should try and learn Esperanto. Like that was one of their like, uh, the things at the foundation of like what became probably the most powerful anarchist movement the world's ever seen.
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Was it one of the Anglophone countries? No. Oh, wow. The French. It was the French. Okay. There is not a state more invested in its language than France. Indeed. They have laws, I think, about broadcasting music and dubbing films and things.
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They're not wrong. France is a language, if you read Peasants into Frenchmen, it's kind of the classic work on French nationalization. But in order to make people French, they did have to suppress Basque and Breton and Catalan and other languages, right? And make people go to schools where they learned French and conceived of themselves as French as a result of that.
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It shows like nations are always projects of the bourgeoisie, right? Like at least I would argue that. And so a lot of other people, but like the French example is one where we can see it more clearly than others. Like it's a state and specifically like a certain class within the state's project to enforce and continue to perpetuate this narrative of nation.
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It's a weird angle from Scott because normally he'd advocate for like what he calls like the anarchist squint, right? Like in seeing history through a perspective of anarchism, I guess, or like an anarchist lens. And I feel like this is very applicable with Esperanto, like the only language which isn't inherently tied to any state or nation or ethnicity. Exactly.
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Yeah. Recently, some listeners very kindly, James C. Scott passed away earlier this year, as I'm sure you know, Andrew.
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But his library was donated to a local secondhand bookshop. And some folks, I asked online and they went and got me some books and sent them, which was really kind. So I have some of his books now.
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That's an interesting one. Like we see this in Spanish too, right? Like with attempts to create like gender neutral forms, the presumptive masculine, or if you're addressing a mixed gender group, then you would use the masculine. But like people who are first language Spanish speakers can correct me. I'm sure you will on the subreddit if you want to.
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So like when I hear in English language media, it's referred to as Latinx, but like, that's kind of a word that I struggle to say in Spanish. Like, is it Latinx or like, is it Latinx? And so there's this very kind of clumsy gender neutral form, which seems to be easier to say in English and Spanish.
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When I speak to non-binary people in Spanish, that's what they prefer to use. Of the relatively small sample size, given that there are probably millions of non-binary Spanish-speaking people, I haven't obviously spoken to all or most of them.
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But it's very interesting to see this outside critique of the language, which seems to also ignore an inside movement within people who are Spanish-first language speakers to create a...
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organic like gender neutral form yeah which could also happen in any language right like like just because esperanto has a certain form doesn't mean that people within that language who don't feel represented by them couldn't create forms within that language to better represent them exactly it's easier because you don't have like a government telling you you can't use it or whatever
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I think this is a term that's new to Garrison, just judging by their facial expression. Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, if we look at fascism as a concept, too, it has this troubled relationship with modernity, but one of the things it likes to do is flex its new little weapon systems and toys. We're going to see some guys posing with some weapon systems that probably never get used, right? Like, probably some AI targeting shit, stuff like that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Israel already does that.
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Two very similar biomes where everything is very similar.
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I'm excited to be fucking around wondering who a drone's going to kill next. That has been a really life-affirming experience for me, and I'm excited to have it again soon. It's going to be great. Robert, you mentioned the IRS, and the IRS maybe get less money. So I want to talk a little bit about the IRS. I guess let's start with a little summary of this week's immigration news.
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This week, Chai Rachik, who is the person who runs Libs of TikTok, joined ICE on a raid.
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I just took a moment to reflect on that, and it's not a great thing to reflect on. It's really not. No, it doesn't make me feel good. Yeah, no. Other things that don't make me feel good are the 60 Minutes report that 75% of people sent to Secot had no criminal conviction, which seems to leave open the possibility of there being a crime for which it would be okay.
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to be sent to a foreign gulag with no hope of return, which I don't believe is the case. I'm very disappointed at any reporting which focuses on guilt as if one could ever be guilty of anything which would make this justifiable. You can't. The government is also soliciting for proposals this week to massively increase migrant detention, which again is not surprising.
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We talked about this last November, but it's also not great. But where I want to focus today is on the IRS and the Abrego Garcia case that we spoke about last week. So you will have seen some reporting that the IRS has said it will hand over information of people who are subject to criminal investigation to DHS or ICE, right? ICE being under DHS.
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So they say, what happened here is a part of court filings, a memorandum of understanding between ICE and the IRS was released. In the MOU, or in the court filing, actually, they cite an offense of failure to depart the United States after being ordered removed. So essentially anyone who they're saying, like, you have to go, right, that they could then ask for their tax return information.
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Exactly what the IRS will disclose to ICE is covered by a big black redaction in the court documents. So we don't know that. The entire MOU is submitted, but there's significant redactions in it. One thing that's not redacted is that ICE has to hand over the person's name, address, and the crime for which they're investigating. And it has to be a non-tax crime, not that that matters hugely.
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This is more limited than a lot of people have feared, and it's more limited than a lot of the reporting I've seen. It's possible that there's something else going on. I saw the acting director at ICE was going to quit over this. I saw that this morning. But the fact that they have to have their address suggests that they couldn't locate them using the tax return form, which is a good thing.
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It is one less step towards fascism, I guess. I'm also aware of ICE having memorandums of understanding with other agencies to include HUD, Housing and Urban Development, All of this is going to reduce the amount that migrant communities engage with the federal government to any degree, right? Contrary to what you might have heard, undocumented people do tend to pay their taxes.
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It's actually relatively rare for them not to do that. And this might change if the IRS starts handing over people's tax return information to ICE, right? Obviously, if HUD starts handing over people's information, that's going to lead to people not being as willing to take housing benefits and will be planning on living on the street, right?
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On the other hand, Houston, a city in Texas, for those of you who aren't familiar, have I pronounced that right, Robert? Tejas? Yeah. I thought it was, I wasn't sure if it was Houston. Houston. Oh, Houston, understood.
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So this Texas no man's land town has turned over information, including addresses and license plates for people charged with driving without a license, even though some of this under Texas law is supposed to remain confidential. So that's great. They are also now making immigration detentions at regular traffic stops.
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So I'm aware of one incident where a man was arrested after being stopped for a cracked windscreen, and he's now in ICE detention. So there was presumably an ICE warrant for this person that the Houston police then acted upon.
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We already know that police departments have a tendency to pull over people who aren't white more often, right? And then if you give them this, that's just going to exacerbate that further. Again, it's also going to stop migrant communities interacting with the police in any way, right? This obviously has... Look, not a big police fan, but like in cases like domestic violence, right?
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Sometimes people need to go to the police to be safe and they're not going to do so. They think that means they or people they love will be deported. And this will have negative consequences, specifically in cases like domestic violence. And we know this. There is plenty of evidence for this. Nonetheless, this is continuing anyway.
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What's also continuing is our obligation to pivot to ads, which we should do now. Okay, we are back. We're back. And it's time to talk about the Supreme Court. Do we have to? Yes, yes, we do, guys, because it's the biggest court. It's the big one. And they've been crushing it all week, just sending down decisions.
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The two big ones, I guess, I want to talk about are a 5-4 ruling that it was vacating Boasberg's TRO. Boasberg being the judge who had initially told the United States government that had to stop sending people to sec court, right? And then the US had ignored Boasberg and done it anyway. And then they had this whole court case about how they hadn't ignored him.
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And anyway, it was a secret, even though we're tweeting it. You can go back a couple of EDs and hear about that. In this decision, the court was unanimous in asserting that people removed under the Alien Enemies Act do have a right to due process, but that they have to bring a habeas petition.
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So the reason they vacated the TRO was that the case shouldn't have gone to Boatsburg, that they should have brought this habeas petition. In practice, that's going to be very hard, given the fact that many migrants, even under the current system, even under Biden, most migrants who didn't speak English didn't have access to legal representation. So this ruling is still pretty bad.
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The only thing the people in the court case wanted to stop was their rendition to El Salvador, right? It wasn't even like opposed to other forms of removal. It was specific to this El Salvador situation. The court also sort of cited criminal cases as precedent, which is a very different thing. And it gives this very narrow ruling of the due process available to migrants, right?
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And it relies on migrants having access to a legal team, which could be expensive and complicated for them.
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Yes, yeah, well summarized. You would need to have a lawyer on retainer to file your habeas straight away.
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Well, they can deport you anyway, yeah. I guess you have the right to appeal it by saying, like, I'm going to file this habeas petition. But most people aren't going to do that. So in practice, they haven't explicitly ruled on this thing, right? The Abrego Garcia case, which is the other case, a Fourth Circuit judge required the U.S. to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
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And then Chief Justice Roberts on his own issued an administrative stay. So he is effectively telling them that Fourth Circuit judge, you can't order them to have him return right now. We need to take a timeout. We need everybody to get their evidence in order and then bring that to us. So that case, like, remains ongoing, right?
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In the brief for that case, the government referred to Abrego Garcia as an enemy alien. But I don't think MS-13 is covered by the evocation of the Alien Enemies Act. I think it was specific to Tren de Aragua. And then they also claim that they removed him under the Immigration Nationality Act, not the Alien Enemies Act. So none of this, I guess, is hugely surprising.
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We're seeing this sort of post hoc justification of what they did, which is kind of how they operate. But that case still remains ongoing. So we're still... We're still going to hear that one, which presumably will reflect on the constitutionality of sending people to Secod. But like the fact that, yeah, they ruled the other case, right, the one that was five to four.
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It wasn't about whether Secod was legal. It was about whether Boasberg had the right to make a decision on this particular case. but it's still not great. Like it looks like the Supreme court is doing everything it can to avoid a face-to-face showdown with the executive branch. Oh yeah. Because they don't want to deal with the consequences of it, ignoring them. Nope.
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And like we, we said before, like maybe the only court that they will listen to is a Supreme court. Well, if Supreme court doesn't make them, then they won't. So that's where we're at with that. Not great. Not exactly great at all.
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The worst Clash song. By a wide margin. The only Clash song to have been played during Operation Desert Storm, which made Joe Strummer cry.
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That is how we have to work out the global economic future. It's based on posts on truth social.
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Because it backs up all the detritus, all the dead branches and stuff get caught in the wall and then the water gets sort of pushed along the wall until it finds a weak point to undermine it or push it over. Very little of this gets reported at all, right? Occasionally there are media moments when everyone wants to report on the borders damage to indigenous communities.
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We had one in 2020 when they started destroying saguaros at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. But these appear to be, when they just pop up like this, it seems like it's without context or precedent, right? And when outlets ignore indigenous people for 90% of their border reporting, it doesn't give the context that's necessary to explain these incidents, which are outrageous in fact.
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decades of policy, which has been outrageous. If our listeners are not aware that the border is on native land, all of it, just like all of America, right? It can seem confusing for them, right? When they see something like Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and they think, well, that's not on a reservation because a lot of outlets don't give that context, right?
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That obviously reservations do not contain all the spaces that are sacred to indigenous people. And like a reservation is illegal, not a cultural construct. it can seem alien to them. I mean, lots of these spaces that are being, that will be militarized under this Roosevelt Reservation Declaration, right?
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The reservations are not militarized under that, but spaces that are sacred to people still will be. But because our reporting so often lacks that context, people don't understand it. The admission of tribal lands was again like missing in lots of pieces on the Roosevelt Reservation, right?
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Washington Post article on the Roosevelt Reservation, the one that broke the story, it doesn't contain the word tribal lands at all, right? It doesn't mention the fact that these areas are not part of the militarization proclamation. The problem here isn't just the ongoing erasure of indigenous people. It's a failure in basic journalistic practice in my mind, right?
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We can't properly understand borders unless we acknowledge the people they impact. There's no way I could have experienced a Darien Gap in the way that I did if it wasn't for the Mbara people who literally let me live in their homes, right?
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without the same generosity that they showed to me the people crossing would die in much greater numbers and it's precisely because migrants arrive in indigenous villages and not in like a government panama that a system exists where they're ferried up river on those piraguas that i reported on right and it's precisely because they enter government custody at las blancas a place at the ap called a river port by the way which
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I mean, it's one of the more miserable places that one can end up. It's terrible. And calling it a river port fundamentally undersells how appalling it is what happens to people. People are still there for months, right? And that is because they are entering the system of bureaucracy, the system of the state, the system of... fees and identification papers and all these things.
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Yeah, I mean, some of the most densely populated cities on Earth are in this region. Like a strike in any major city there would be devastating.
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Yeah, it's pretty bad. I know India claimed that they were launching a, quote, non-escalatory strike, and so much as that means shit.
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They also claimed that the PL-15 didn't have its interceptor head, which I guess the French intelligence refuted.
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More importantly, I think, we can't understand the relatively new and invasive nature of borders, especially borders with physical barriers, without acknowledging the much, much longer history of Indigenous people moving freely through these areas. Like I said, it's not just people, it's water and wildlife. And in all cases, the damage done will be unforeseen and likely irreparable.
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If we only treat the border as a rhetorical thing, like something to discuss in Congress, not a physical place, then we miss what's really happening. We miss the people it really impacts. I don't want to pick solely on the AP.
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It's a tendency in the whole US, right, where the overwhelming media narrative erases the existence of indigenous people, unless it's some kind of novelty or trope through which they can be deployed. The Darien example was a particularly stark one to me, because I spent a decent amount of time there, and I obviously have a great deal of affection for the people who looked after me.
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But as more and more laws are waived, both in terms of border wall construction and human rights, more damage will be done. It's already the case that people who speak indigenous languages tend to have much worse outcomes in the U.S. immigration system, right? I've seen this firsthand. It can be very difficult when someone arrives and
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It's not much to say. They're just saying the thing that they've been going for for a while now, which is the removal of all Palestinian people from the Gaza Strip, either in body bags or to live somewhere else, I guess.
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Cool. Well... Yeah. So more good news from me. Immigration update. The New York Times today on the Wednesday, the 7th, is reporting that the Trump administration is as soon as today. I checked this for recording. The plane hasn't taken off. Planning to ship people to migrants to Libya.
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The nationalities of people being renditioned there are not clear, but my guess would be that these are third-party nationals that the US can't deport to their home countries. They previously deported these people to Panama and to El Salvador. If you're not familiar with migrant detention in Libya, conditions are horrific. Among the worst things that can happen to people there.
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The situation in Libya is currently the country is divided between the Tripoli government, which is recognized by the UN, in which the US has formal government-to-government relationships with, and Haftar's government based in Benghazi, which the Trump regime has associated with before. We... have covered conditions in Libyan migrant detention camps before, which I'll chuck in the show notes.
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they speak an indigenous language from Mexico, from Peru, from these places where people speak these indigenous languages, their first language, and it's hard for them to, very hard for them to get legal representation, right?
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And we also talked about the dangers faced by people leaving Libya towards the EU in a different episode, which I'll also list. But to recap, reports document starvation, rape, murder, slavery, and organ harvesting occurring in Libya. Mass graves, including one last year that was found with 65 bodies in it, are not uncommon.
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To quote from David Iambio, David Iambio is someone who was, he was sold and then forced to fight in a militia in Libya. And I think, I believe he escaped and he is now in, I think he's in Italy, but he's relatively outspoken on this stuff. The slave trade is alive and thriving in Libya.
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It thrives in the silence of nations, in the shadows of complicit systems, and in the unchecked racism that dehumanizes Black lives. In other immigration news, the government's attempt to delay Rumaisa Ozturk's return to Vermont was rejected by the Second Circuit. So that means that she will have to be returned to... She was arrested in Massachusetts, if you remember, for writing an op-ed.
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At Tufts University, yeah. Yeah, moved across state borders to Vermont and from there sent to Louisiana. So the habeas case was transferred to Vermont and the Second Circuit has ruled that the government cannot delay bringing her back there anymore. Another flight containing 81 migrants left Panama yesterday at the United States' expense.
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This is a continuation of a plan that the Biden administration installed in summer last year, and the Trump administration has continued, whereby the U.S. funds deportations from Panama. Meanwhile, Tokyo Weekender in Japan is reporting that the United States is asking people to show five years of social media history in order to obtain a student visa.
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Just to put that in perspective for people, so you have to, even if those accounts are deleted or no longer used, you have to declare them all on your form. If you're applying for a student visa and you're at the younger end of a traditional aged undergraduate, you could have to list every social media account you've had since you were 12.
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This form and the US has required disclosure for a while, but like it hasn't been a practical thing. I haven't really ever heard from anyone of anybody's visa being denied or asylum being denied based on social media posting. But this is now something that that they are asking people to disclose.
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Yeah, which will massively delay the time to process visa applications on top of everything else.
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Yeah. I mean, I have been to other countries, to be clear, where they open up your social media and look at it when you're entering. But this is not a thing that anyone has ever associated with the United States. Finally, I guess, the Freedom of the Press Foundation got some documents released under the Federal Freedom of Information Act
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that outlined that the intelligence community did not believe that the Maduro regime was controlling Cundinamarca, which was one of the claims that Trump administration has made in its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, right?
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So it's just kind of, I think most people who pay any attention to the situation weren't really buying that, but it's showing that this was documented by the US intelligence community as well. So yeah, anything to add? The Libya stuff is bleak. It hasn't got much coverage in the US.
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We have covered it before, but the European Union is already complicit in the terrible treatment of migrants in Libya. Oh yeah.
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It has happened for ages. The so-called Libyan Coast Guard are bringing people back to Libya and literally selling them from shelters to human traffickers. I mean, we've more or less kind of lined up behind some of the worst places on earth, like in terms of migrant detention, right? With Secot and this.
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Yeah, like, which I think kind of these two narratives sort of play into each other, right? Like, because indigenous people don't exist so much in so much coverage, it can be much easier for the state to make them disappear, right? Like, like that guy.
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I saw one guy who had a Donald Duck tattoo, and that was, I guess, a decisive claim there. There's a form that ICE agents fill out, and there's a number of points they have to amass. I believe it's three points, and one of the things that can allow you to amass three points is, I think, two points come from a tattoo, which they decide to be gang-affiliated with.
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Yeah, that one haunts me because I have met young neurodivergent people and their families who are bringing them to the US to get what they thought was a better standard of care, right? To allow their children to progress and have a beautiful life. Yeah, man, that one, like... I honestly really struggle with that. I've spent lots and lots and lots of time with Venezuelan migrants.
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They're my friends. And that particular one, people whose children have any need for medical care are overrepresented in the migrant population because they just can't access it there. And so they upend their whole lives and carry their children across the continent to give them a chance at a better life. And that one is particularly hard for me to witness.
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I did just want to mention on the topic of asylum. I have heard from so many migrants stuck in Mexico who are having a god awful time. to include, you know, robbery, kidnapping, sexual violence, all of the things that we know can happen to migrants on the migrant trail because they have no pathway to get to the U.S. They're now just stuck there, right?
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Mexico continues to take migrants and move them back south if it catches them near the United States border. Even If some of them move up as far as Mexico City, right, because they have access to services there. And then again, sent back south to places where migrants have routinely been murdered. So I know we're focusing a lot on migrants being kicked out of the U.S., deported, renditioned.
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Conditions for migrants who aspired to come to the United States, who took great risks to be Americans and are stuck in Mexico are also dire.
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Yeah, like absolutely. And it's happened to indigenous people who are like indigenous to the United States, right? Like, and it will continue to. I think I've heard some stuff about it happening on a Navajo res relatively recently. Obviously, I should say, if that has happened to you or someone you know, you can reach out to us at coolzontipsatproton.me.
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So far, attempts to resurrect Joe Strummer have failed, but we have spent millions of dollars.
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Yeah, yeah. It's much like the dire wolf thing. We've put Joe Strummer's DNA into another coffee, man. We've released him into the wild, and we're going to see how he develops. So far, he just has a lot of blood clots, but we're hoping... We have Nathan Fielder on the case, though.
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And like, I know that there are lots of big border reporters at big outlets who fucking hate me. And I really don't care.
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just want to like any one person coming into this country who needs a bottle of water is more important to me than all of their collective opinions right like my job is not to make them happy my job is to tell the stories of the people who come into this country and often suffer greatly to do so I care more about them than like my ability to be objective which you know I don't think we should be objective in these situations I my and like
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Trump believes he actually is the Mission Impossible guy.
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Somebody convinced him? Yeah. Somebody convinced him De Niro's is- Well, didn't he reopen Alcatraz after the Alcatraz film aired on the local- There is evidence.
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This is the statement, I guess, that the DOD is claiming that expressing a, quote, false gender identity divergent from individual sex can't satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. And they specifically talk about a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life.
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I want to kind of end on this idea of objectivity because objectivity, I don't know. I'm glad that the Washington Post is running a story about a Venezuelan teacher who got deported today. I'm glad that they're giving these people human faces now.
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And they then go ahead to claim that being trans inherently contradicts that.
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Yeah. I will just say that if this impacts you, someone you care about, someone you know, you can reach out to us. Obviously, there's very little we can do about it, but we are here to listen and to report the news. And you can do that at coolzontipsatproton.me. It's only an encrypted email end-to-end if it comes from an encrypted email address to our encrypted email address.
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But it's fucking hard to look at the reporters who wouldn't drive half an hour down a dirt road to come and see people in concentration camps when Biden was president. Because, I don't know, they were worried about getting their rental car dirty or they don't speak Spanish or the desert's cold at night. Like, I don't know why people didn't come.
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Yeah. What constitutes covered persons under this?
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The term covered person means A, an individual designated in Section 114, B, a grand juror, petty juror, witness, or other officer of the court, an informal witness in a federal criminal investigation or prosecution, state or local officer or employee whose restricted personal information is made publicly available because of the participation in or assistance provided to a federal criminal investigation.
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So five people died after a panga carrying migrants capsized off Del Mar, which is in North County, San Diego. The search is ongoing. I believe another five are still missing. One of those is a 10-year-old girl from India. And Christine Noem has said she wants the DOJ to pursue death penalty charges against the smugglers who brought these people over. These boats have been...
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I suspect it's because their commitment to writing about migrants is more a commitment to doing it when it makes money than it is to doing it because it's the right thing to do. And like when we write these stories now about deportations being terrible, they seem to pop up without context, right?
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And the context of how these people came into this country and the amount that they were forced to suffer by choice by the Biden administration in 2023, it's completely absent from these stories, right? Like the reason folks... some folks are choosing to leave.
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It's because what they've seen of the US government, a week in an outdoor detention camp where the government didn't even bring them food or water, right? And then their passage through this system, which doesn't give them a pathway to permanent residency, which doesn't give them a pathway to citizenship.
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And then they see these deportations, like from the migrant perspective, this is just a sort of steady escalation. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that what's happening now is the same as what happened before. It's worse. It's considerably worse and it's abhorrent. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't tell the truth about what happened before either.
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And it doesn't mean that we should ignore the physical border as well as the sort of rhetorical and internal and technical border, right? All these things that we're seeing now. And like the way... that borders have worked in this country, it's like a ratchet that only moves to the right. And the Republicans move it to the right, and the Democrats never move it back.
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And until we hold them accountable for this, it will continue to get worse. The Democrats completely seeded the narrative on migration under the Biden administration, and that's part of why they lost, right? Rather than making an argument that these people have a right to come here, that many of them are a massive benefit to our society.
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And it doesn't matter whether they are or not, they still deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. And even if you're a big law and order person, like according to international and United States law, they didn't do that. It didn't treat them according to international and United States law, nor did they make an argument that it's morally right to do so.
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And that's one of the reasons they lost, right? This is why I really think that we need to be conscious in our media consumption and be conscious as journalists of like why we do this, because I'm finding it really hard to see this outpouring of care from people who I know didn't care.
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when there were shivering little babies in the desert from people who could have said something, could have done something, right? Like this could have stopped earlier if there were big major legacy media op-eds, if the pictures of shivering babies were like on the nine o'clock news, right? Coming into people's houses every night. This wouldn't have lasted for as long as it did.
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People wouldn't have suffered and people wouldn't have died. But Because, I guess, Joe Biden was in office, it didn't matter. And I'm glad that people care now, don't get me wrong. But I want, especially listeners, to think about holding those people accountable to caring when it's not profitable, caring when it's not convenient. And our listeners have, to be fair.
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We raised almost $50,000 from migrants in the desert, and that was fantastic. But... Yeah, I still think we do immigration reporting wrong. I still think for most outlets, that's because they treat migrants as a rhetorical device, not as people in the same way that they are. And that upsets me. And I wanted to write about it. So I have. I guess that's all I've got. It's not the best ending.
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If you are somebody who wants to get in touch, right? Like I said, especially with regard to immigration activities on reservations or of indigenous people, you can reach us at coolzontipsatproton.me. If there's other stuff that you want to share with us, you can do it there too. It is end-to-end encrypted only if you send from another Proton email address. That's all I got.
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Good morning, podcast fans, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's me, James, today, and I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Garrison Davis. Hi, Garr. Hello. Hey. So what I want to talk about today is a little piece I wrote. I wrote it on my Patreon, but I want to kind of discuss it a bit here, read it to you, and talk about it, about what we talk about when we talk about immigration.
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Sophie recently sent me an Associated Press piece on the Dalian Gap, and the piece was reflecting on the loss of economic opportunity for the Mbara people who had previously sold, as you heard in my series, right, products, services... accommodation to migrants coming through Garian Gap.
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But if you read that whole piece, you'd never know they were Embera because the word Embera doesn't occur once in the piece, right? You'd never know that the Embera people existed. They never appear in the story.
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Instead, the AP, which is currently going toe-to-toe with the Trump administration on whether it should call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America or not, and was ejected from the White House press pool at one point for refusing to call it the Gulf of America, used the phrase Comarca Indigenous Lands in its reporting, which I don't know where this came from.
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It has kind of a strange capitalization. If you were just reading the piece, you might think that that was the name of the comarca, like that it was a proper noun, but it's not. The comarca is like, I guess you could roughly equate that to an American state. It's like an administrative division of Panama. The name of the comarca is Embraer Unan, but that doesn't appear anywhere in the AP piece.
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And you could, to be clear, like, I understand that some reporters don't speak Spanish. I understand that some reporters, like, you know, they are not, like, particularly expert in a given region. Neither am I. That was my first time in Panama. But, like, this is something you could find out on Google Maps, right? It's not unique to the AP. It happens all the time, right?
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And I want to talk about that today because it happens at the U.S. 's southern border, too. One of the reasons that I wanted to go to the Dalian border was because I felt like the Embraer story was not being told when people talked about the Dalian Gap. When they're mentioned at all, it's kind of in passing or not as people who have agency, right?
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And even I think these stories about like the lack of income that they have after migrants leaving kind of strip them of agency in the way that they're told. When people talk about the Darien Gap in media, they kind of use this heart of darkness construction. Obviously, it's a Joseph Conrad novel, but this idea that it's where the wild things are. I don't know.
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It strikes me as very almost Orientalist. Yeah, Orientalist is what I was going to say. Yeah, and it's It completely discounts that there are thousands of people who live there, who've raised their families there, their children play fucking basketball there, right? They spend their whole life there and they bury their elders there. And they have done for thousands of years.
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For them, it's their home, right? And I understand that the jungle could be scary. And I think anyone who's listened to my series will understand that the jungle was scary for me sometimes. And it could be a very harsh environment. But if you're someone who belongs there, if you're comfortable there, it can also be home and it can be beautiful and it can be bountiful.
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And I think the same thing is true of the mountains and deserts and rivers that make up the USA's southern border. The desert can kill people. I'm well aware of that. But... For the people who call it home, the desert is somewhere that contains their memories and their sacred spaces, their childhood recollections and the remains of their ancestors, right?
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And the omission of indigenous perspectives is something that we saw again when Kristi Noem decided to waive a number of laws in order to facilitate faster construction of the border wall. So... I want to highlight again the AP coverage there. The AP, and again, they're far from unique in this, right? Lots of other outlets did this too.
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They seem to have only engaged with the DHS press release as opposed to the actual proclamation by Nome, which you can find in the Federal Register, right? So the press release only focused on the environmental laws she was waiving.
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DHS said, and I quote, "...to cut through bureaucratic delays, DHS is waiving environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, that can stall vital products for months or even years. This waiver clears the path for the rapid deployment of physical barriers where they are needed most, reinforcing our commitment to national security and the rule of law."
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The rule of law thing kind of made me laugh as they were like, here we are waving like a dozen or so laws. But I'm not a big rule of law person. So I guess like, that's fine. It seems that almost every outlet though, like... that's what they read and that's what they ran with, like, that they're waiving these environmental laws.
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And I think that can sometimes be this, like... We still see this all the time in the legacy press. Like, when they talk about environmental laws, there's this idea that it's, like, some kind of, like, people who want to protect the flowers and the plants and, like, that it's not that serious, you know, and that, like, these environmental laws are something that are nice but not necessary.
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And, like... Some of these environmental laws, like specifically the ones that regulate water, will determine the future of places like California. And obviously places south of the border, right? Water doesn't know where the border is.
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In the previous Trump administration, they waived some environmental laws, including ones about flood water, which that combined with the expedited way which they built the border wall, I guess, led to them not putting floodgates in part of the wall.
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which then led to the wall damming up with dead trees and dead cacti when it rained heavily, and then the wall becoming a barrier to water, and then the wall getting broken or washed away because it didn't have sluice gates so they could open to let the water out. The AP went to someone called Earth Justice for comment.
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And to their credit, that person said, quote, waving environmental cultural preservation and good governance laws that protect clean air, clean water, safeguard precious cultural resources and preserve vibrant ecosystems and biodiversity will only cause further harm to our border communities and ecosystems. That person is the only person who mentioned the cultural damage that's been done here.
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And unless a reader themselves, the Federal Register isn't linked in any of these pieces, it rarely is. I try and link to it when we talk about something in executive disorder. But unless you've found that yourself, you wouldn't know anything.
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that along with waiving these environmental laws, and like I've said, those are important, they also waive something called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. According to the Department of the Interior, I was kind of surprised this was still up on their website, actually.
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I thought this might have been purged, so like a lot of, maybe it just... Maybe it's just like skirted by... Yeah, yeah. Like, well, I mean, apparently no one fucking talks about it. So yeah, maybe they got away with it. You know, like, it's always funny going on government websites now being like, oh, it's gone.
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Like finding dead links to so much, even in stories I've written in like 2020, those links are dead now.
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NAGPRA requires any federally funded entity to return human remains, funerary possessions, objects of cultural patrimony and sacred objects to the deceased persons and their descendants by, and I'm quoting from the website now, "...consulting with lineal descendants, Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations on Native American human remains and other cultural items, protecting and planning for Native American human remains and other cultural items that may be removed from federal or tribal lands."
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identifying and reporting all Native American human remains and other cultural items in inventories and summaries of holdings or collections, and giving prior notice to repatriating or transferring human remains and other cultural items. The waiver allows them not to do these things, right?
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Crucially, in the context of border wall construction, what it allows them to do is not to conduct an archaeological survey before they dig the border wall. And again, I don't know why this isn't something the legacy media isn't concerned about. It wasn't in 2020 either, right, when they started doing this. They were blasting areas where... Something called midden soil was found.
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Midden soil is soil that contains evidence of cremated human remains, right? I wrote a piece in 2020 for Sierra about this. Normally, before these digs, there would be an archaeological survey done and a tribal representative would be there to take part in that, right? That would take time and it would delay construction.
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Instead, right now, the construction will continue without considering the damage done to the cultural patrimony and ancestral remains of the Kumeyaay people here in San Diego, whose homeland spanned both sides of the border and who were here long before the US or Mexico was. Talking of... I can't think of a good fucking ad pivot.
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No, there's not. We're just going to do adverts now. And we are back. The Kimi are not the only indigenous people whose homelands have been significantly and permanently damaged by the construction of border barriers, right? Further east, in the homelands of the Tohono O'odham people, where I've spent a lot of time, wall construction has destroyed sacred saguaros.
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Saguaros, that's the big cactus, like when you think of a cactus, right? Like the cactus that kind of looks like a guy waving. Yeah, with the two arms, you could put a little hat on the cactus if you wanted to. Maybe give it like a little six-shooter and it would look like it was a cowboy. Yeehaw. Yeah. It's literally the cactus.
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It's in all the Western films that were filmed out at old Tucson there.
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We used to ride our bikes from the Pascua Yaqui Res to the place where they filmed all those Western films. That was our loop. A very, very weird experience, that place. It's like a... One day I will write my fucking five-part documentary about the myth of the Old West, but you can find it. You can find it there in Tucson.
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The saguaros, people that aren't aware, are afforded the highest respect as ancestors by Ottoman people, and they play an important role in ceremonial and culinary traditions that have been kept alive despite centuries of genocide and assimilationist policies from state and local government.
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Under the Biden administration, the Government Accountability Office wrote a report about damage done by border wall construction. Again, for now, this is on the Internet and I will link it in the show notes. I don't know how long that will remain on the Internet. It's a PDF. So look, it's going to be out and about. It can't be taken down, but maybe it won't be on government websites anymore.
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They highlighted the case of Monument Hill, which was damaged by explosives in the previous Trump administration, despite being a sacred place for the Tonor-Odham, and the site of ceremonies conducted by the Hiyaset-Odham, who were their ancestors. Kito-Bakito Springs, which is a sacred site and oasis in the Sonoran Desert. It's a really special place.
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was irreparably damaged in the last Trump administration, including the destruction of a burial site that the tribe had sought to protect. In some cases, the Biden administration made this worse. One of those was that on entering office, Biden said they were going to build not one more foot of border wall in 2021, right? He was full of shit.
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They built lots more border wall, but they did put a pause on some of the contracts, right? It sort of, they finished some of them and they were like, oh, we can't go back on this federal funding. which has not been an issue for Donald Trump four years later. They were like, Congress approved it, so we have to pay it, which was great.
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But the bits that they were able to cut included a program that had people taking care of, so they attempted to transplant the saguaros. They didn't just cut them down because they were sacred, right? And they're very old. They wanted to take them somewhere else. And this was part of sort of the agreement that they came to.
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Unfortunately, the Biden administration cut the funding for the people who were taking care of them in their new location. So nearly all of them died. They were being watered and stuff to get them settled into their new root structure. And, uh, Yeah, because the Biden administration cut back funding, it stopped them from being watered and so many of them died.
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In areas where barriers were built, but drainage culverts were not finished, the culverts were never installed. So that was the flooding I was talking about earlier, right? Sometimes they just went ahead and built wall. When they build the wall, it comes in about, 50-foot sections. And they truck those out there and just put them on the ground flat and pull them up, right?
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And then they dig a foundation, they mix the sand, make concrete, and put the wall sections up. But then they, I guess, it's my understanding that in the end of the last Trump administration, Trump made a claim in a debate about the number of miles of wall that had been built. And that claim was largely inaccurate, but they sort of started trying to
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ex post facto justify it by claiming repairs were miles of wall, right? And in the final months of the Trump administration, maybe like from late summer to January, maybe certainly to November, they were really speed running wall construction.
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And part of that was putting sections up where there should have been culverts and just putting regular wall sections there and then attempting to come back later and do the culverts, which because of the funding pause they didn't do, So then we've seen a huge change in how the desert drains, right?
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Yeah, until it starts getting people sick and dead in this country. But we probably won't stop then. Probably not.
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Yeah, it's me, the border guy. I was down at the United States border this weekend, the one with Mexico, not the Canada one. And when I got back from the border, I saw an announcement from the Pentagon, which announced the deployment of a striker brigade combat team and an aviation battalion. So... What's the Striker Brigade Combat Team, you ask? Normally, they're like 4,400 soldiers.
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In this case, they're sending 2,400 soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division based in Fort Carson in Colorado. Striker Brigade Combat Teams are based around Strikers. What are Strikers? They are armored fighting vehicles with eight wheels. They're pretty cool.
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Big vehicle outside, small vehicle inside, as with all military vehicles. Great when you're six foot three like me. But famously, not really something you can use for like policing the border.
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Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Bradleys have been having a comeback in Ukraine. The Strikers, not so much. What they're not good at is moving through incredibly rugged mountainous terrain like stuff where I was on Saturday.
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It's a horrible thing to do to a truck. The people at Jeep have actually been thinking about how to make Jeep better for quite a while. Actually, very amusingly, the place I was down at the border this weekend, it There's a very rugged road that you drive down and then you get off and you hike. And I remember a few years ago, a guy, fresh, minty fresh TRD Tundra straight off the lot.
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And I've just negotiated this in a 1980s era Toyota pickup with my friend standing in the back to counterbalance and add weight as we go. I offered a spot for this guy. He says no, he doesn't need it because it's a TRD. Immediately destroys his oil pan. Oh, yeah. Beautiful, beautiful.
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The other vehicles that we're going to see are UH-60 Blackhawks and Chinooks from the General Support Aviation Battalion who are deploying alongside them. There are also about 1,100 soldiers from sustainment units, people who facilitate the, in this case, infantry and aviation deployment. There's some public affairs soldiers. There's people with logistics, people who are going to help
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make this deployment happen, right? In a press release, Northcom, that's the North American command of the United States military, New South United States Army, said, tasks carried out by a second strike brigade combat team would include detection and monitoring, administrative support, transportation support, warehousing and logistics support, vehicle maintenance and engineering support,
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Personnel will not conduct or be involved in interdiction or deportation operations. So this is the posse comitatus thing, right? They're not directly going to be doing cop stuff. They're just going to be helping Border Patrol do cop stuff, supposedly. But this is still very different to the previous deployment we saw. The previous deployments were of engineers and military police, right?
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So the engineers, the Marine Corps engineers, what they seem to do is get up every day and put razor wire on fence. and then wait for someone to take photographs and put razor wire on fence again, right?
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Yeah, it's just what you're signed up to do, I think. What are the MPs doing? They will be facilitating CBP operations, I'm guessing, like SIGINT, like helping with intelligence, that kind of stuff. Probably anti-drone stuff. There's been a lot of talk about drones. I have not seen any small drones.
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Most of the areas where I go on the border are federal wilderness or state wilderness, so drones aren't allowed there anyway, but I've never seen one. What makes this different is that these are infantry soldiers, right? This is a concentration of troops. Everyone in the military either kills people or helps people kill people. These are the killing people guys and girls. And secret lays.
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And the closeted they-thems. If you're a closeted they-them in the military, best of luck to you. That's what makes it different, right? This is a significant concentration of troops on the border with one of our allies. This is coming as the United States has used drone overflights to pass information to Mexican authorities that resulted in the arrest of cartel personnel in Sinaloa, right?
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So it is a significant change. And I... I imagine, based on what I've heard from sources, that we will see more of this, right? The US's deployable infantry troops will be coming to the border. It means that we might soon be seeing foot patrols, right?
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Soldiers on foot walking through the mountains to the border because we ain't going to see striker mounted patrols out there if they want to keep their strikers. They're adding more helicopter assets, right, which can both move people to more remote areas and...
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do more surveillance surveillance i would assume yeah yeah i mean like when a hiker was shot down at the border a few weeks ago and i was out there very quickly thereafter and they used a uh-60 first well they actually didn't evacuate the person in the uh-60 they went in the uh-60 evacuated them in a eurocopter and then another military black hawk was kind of flying over after that and i'm guessing that was just to kind of provide cover for the uh like the first responders right who were going there to to
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I think in that case, they're investigating the scene, the person had been evacuated. But there are very remote areas of the border which probably are best accessed by helicopter. And so that's what they will be doing. But this does represent a significant concentration of combat troops on the border with our ally, which is not a normal thing to do.
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So yeah, it's a lot of support for like drone strikes right now, which the terrorist designation does kind of pave a road to. But obviously it's worth noting for those not familiar that Mexico is a different country and you don't just get to drone strike other countries. That's an act of war.
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Yeah, it's a sea of acronyms here. I've tried to avoid all these faction acronyms. But yeah, explain that a bit. Because when people think of the UN and peacekeepers or troop contributing countries, the only time it comes on the news in sort of the global north is when people from, say, Northern Europe or North America are part of these UN peacekeeping missions.
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So they think of people, British troops, American, Canadian, what have you, in their blue helmets, right? But the vast bulk of TCCs don't come from Northern Europe, right? In Africa, the majority of TCCs are other African countries. I think I'm right saying it's a majority.
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If the era of woke is over where you're employed, if the era of woke has ended your employment and you'd like to reach out to us, you can using our Proton mail address. That doesn't mean that it's not like if you're not using Proton, that it's not end to end encrypted. If you are, then it's encrypted, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily totally safe. So you need to do what you think is best.
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It is coolzontipsatproton.me. If you don't work for government, but you do work for Elon Musk in another capacity, it would also be very funny to hear from you about what that is like. So yeah, coolzontipsatproton.me.
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And the IRS. So I'm sure that's going to work out great for government revenues.
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Yeah, yeah. And it's the same in the United States. I think it's not something that people think about for the most part.
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And so, like, there's this question of, like, why doesn't the UN... Certainly, I think when people saw what happened recently in Lebanon, they were like, why are these peacekeepers, you know, well, you had these peacekeepers, and we spoke about this in our last episode, right, being shelled, being shot at. You know, people were asking why they weren't out there fighting.
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And there are a lot of reasons for that. One being, that's not what they're there to do. But... When we had this force intervention brigade in Congo, they did some good things. They were able to retake Goma. And for the people who lived in Goma, I'm sure that was very important. That meaningfully improved their lives. But it also comes with these complications that you've addressed.
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Each of those troop contributing countries You need everyone to be committed to like the same mission, I suppose. And like if your government is giving your armed forces one mission that differs slightly from that, which the whoever's in command of the force inter-country brigade has, then we get friction, right? Or it's not as efficient as it could be.
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Yeah, right, no one wants foreign troops in their country, right, you know, walking around, especially, you know, engaging their own citizens, but I mean, it's interesting. I was watching a Speaks, the current president of the DRC, Felix Tshisekedi. I've tried my best to pronounce that correctly. It's not that disrespectful.
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He was saying that the international community is bordering on complicit in M23's advance because of the failure to do anything about it in a speech he gave this week. And it was interesting because it had previously been, like you said, for very understandable reasons, especially in the DRC, which has this long and horrible history of colonialism, the terrible things done in the Belgian Congo.
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We've covered this a lot on Bastards, another show that we do. People can listen to that if they want to. But now he's asking for more help, which is also understandable because his military is 125,000 or so, and a large number of that is not very combat-effective forces, maybe. And they've just been overrun in Gilmore, in a big city, a city of a million people. So, like...
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Where do you think we go from here? What's like... We're in a very unique time in world history in which the United States is... It's doing some things with its foreign policy. I mean, I won't really mince words about it. I think it's terrible.
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But if we talk about USAID, I was speaking to people on the Thai-Burmese border last week who were telling me that USAID has turned off life support machines as part of its drawdown and that people obviously directly died as a result of that there. The US is not necessarily averse to having terrible consequences to whatever it's trying to do right now, which I don't...
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really have a good word for. So, look, where do we go from here with the US becoming more isolationist?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Protecting resources, not people. That's a different thing. So what do those African-led peacekeeping missions look like? You talked about these various international and regional groups.
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Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast. It's James today and I'm joined again by Kevin Macdonald. Kevin is a retired officer from the Irish Defence Forces with some special forces and peacekeeping experience. Welcome to the show, Kevin.
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Yeah, I mean, and they've done some things which are horrific in terms of... We've covered that as well with Brent Dermott on the show. I did want to talk about this because... the U S is talking about withdrawing. It's sort of what we call like soft power assets, right around the world. And I saw like, I forget who it was saying like, Oh, let the chips fall where they may.
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It was very obvious where the chips will fall in this part of the world. Right. Like when I was in Rwanda, every fancy road in Rwanda. They call them Chinese roads because they go from the mines to the airport. It's as naked a resource extraction project as you'll see. China also does the soft power thing. They'll build hospitals.
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I forget where the quote comes from but every time the US comes we get a lecture and every time China comes we get a hospital. this will reorient the way these countries, specifically in Africa, associate with the world, right? With the US drawdown and the United Nations not capable or willing of sort of doing these massive peacekeeping missions.
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And I think for very understandable reasons, groups like the EU, you know, it's best not to have large deployments of European armed forces in Africa for very, reasons that are probably quite obvious. So, like, yeah, we're likely to see. I mean, hasn't Wagner rebranded itself as the Africa Corps now?
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Yeah, it's like a British East India Company kind of model, like a sort of proxy colonialism, but very tight. Like you say, it's just almost just like a different badge on the same thing there. I think this is one of the things that won't get talked about in the next four years because the U.S. media will talk about the U.S. a lot again. I mean, they always do.
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But I think people should be concerned about this, about the future for multinational peacekeeping in Africa. And more importantly, I guess, the future for or interlink with the future for human rights in Africa.
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What do you see as like meaningful ways that people can advocate for a future for Africa, which is not just another set of countries extracting resources and leaving very little for the people there, which is something that has happened. You know, I'm a British person. This has happened by British people for a very long time and other European people for a very long time.
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But like, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try and stop it happening in the future.
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Yeah, I mean, that is the thing, right? We can tell where this stuff comes from. There is a means to try and limit the amount of these resources which can leave conflict zones in a way which benefits belligerent parties. It's where the markets for those resources are willing to do it, right?
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Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, people think of diamonds a lot. And I think people, there's been a kind of movement to purchase diamonds which are ethically sourced or to just not use diamonds to sort of move away from them as like a store of value. But it's also the parts in your mobile phone, isn't it? It's not, you know, it's not just like fancy engagement rings.
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Put that out there before we get into it. Yeah, not a UN or Irish Defence Forces spokesperson. Not that we've had many of those, I suppose, on our show. Kevin, we're here today to talk a little bit about the situation in Congo and perhaps more specifically, like how the peacekeeping mission there has evolved and changed and sort of morphed over the years.
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Yeah, that's the thing, right? And especially when it's out of sight, out of mind for most people. Even compared to, obviously, genocide of Palestinian people or when we think about these other atrocities, right? Those have not remained out of sight, out of mind because they're visible on people's social media, because... People in Palestine have phones and they can film.
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And that's, I think, meaningfully changed the way... I wouldn't have thought American people would care about Palestinian people. I moved here in 2008. And you wouldn't have found much interest in Palestine.
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Yeah, well, you wouldn't have expected that either. But the movement to support Palestinian people from the grassroots... and then also the government doing the exact opposite. It's come from the bottom up. It hasn't come from government advocacy. We don't see that as much with certainly this part of Africa, right?
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I suppose it's a consequence of people in Congo maybe aren't able to access those global networks of social media and maybe to share their stories. And I think it's also a consequence of us in the media not reporting at all. I've for years tried to sell stories about Africa to American publications.
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And at best, they'll want a story about like the people who are starting like social enterprise, European or North American people starting like social enterprises or like sort of
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beneficial companies and i understand those have a role but like you're not going to persuade me that there isn't a single african person of interest to you and that like it's someone who came from north america that it's the only relevant story to tell in africa and like i've had this falling out with so many editors over the years that like no i don't want to tell that story i want to tell a story about people from congo in congo about people from rwanda in rwanda
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That's it. Yeah, that's the key is people doing it. One of the things that people did, which I thought was really great as an example, as a model, is from about October the 10th of 2023, I suppose, people weren't going to school or university in Gaza. And very quickly, there weren't any universities in Gaza because they all got bombed, right? The colleagues of mine in academic departments said,
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started putting on seminars and lectures that Palestinian people, be they displaced or still in Gaza but with access to internet, you know, still displaced but internally displaced, could attend and continue with their educations.
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So maybe just to begin with, I can give an idea that like, This city of Goma, which is the capital of North Kivu province, has recently been captured by M23 rebels. We'll explain who they are for people who aren't familiar in a minute. It's a city of about a million people. I believe they're saying around 3,000 people have been killed in this operation, which is, I mean, it's a massive death toll.
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And I thought that was a really great, like, solidarity-based way to facilitate access to something that people have had taken away from them through no fault of their own by state aggression.
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Yeah, there's a model for that. I mean, colonialism has done many terrible things, but it's given us a common language with a lot of our African friends. You know, you speak French and English, you can do quite well.
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So, like, yeah, there are things available, and I wish people would... I don't think people should stop caring about Palestine, of course they don't, but I do wish they would care more about people in Africa, too, because, like, they don't deserve this...
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Yeah. Yeah. It's a shame. And like, you know, if there's one thing I'd like to do with my career, I'd like to spend more time in that part of the world and do more reporting and, uh, I think we could do a lot as a media with just explaining how life is for everyday people. Because people think about Congo in terms of the M23 and the Congolese government and the Hutu militias and this and that.
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But the vast majority of people are just trying to get on with their day. They want a better future for their children. And the fact that your mobile phone is cheap is maybe making their children's future worse. And that's something that we need to reckon with. And e-cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the thing people don't talk about electric cars. It's where does all that stuff go?
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And then even here in America, right, where the US trying to mine lithium on reservations where, you know, the land, the little land is left indigenous people to have sovereignty on is where it's now trying to do this very invasive form of mining.
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Kevin, you've written a book, so would you like to, as we wind down here, do you want to explain a little bit about your book so that people are interested in your life and your time as a peacekeeper and an archaeologist?
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Yeah, well, maybe for the best, given the way tech people are playing the US economy. Yeah, you can get it online. You can get it sent to the United States if you're interested. I did. Thank you so much for your time, Kevin, your insights today. I know we really appreciate it. Is there anywhere else if people want to follow you online aside from the book?
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In a short space of time. It's a very short space of time, yeah. And some of the other stuff I've heard, like at one point there was a prison within the city, which there was a jailbreak, and they think... A hundred of the women who were incarcerated there were sexually assaulted and in some cases burned alive after the jailbreak happened.
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Thousands of Congolese military and police have surrendered. A contingent of, I believe, Romanian private military contractors were captured.
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Yeah, especially when you're talking about Romania, which is not a vast country. Understandably, a lot of things are happening in the US. People may have missed it. I think people in the US, just due to the nature of news being quite navel-gazing here, may not be as familiar with the conflict in Congo. If they know about it, it's from Warren's Eve on songs or maybe from a couple of films.
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Liars, guns and money. Yeah, yeah. What's the other one? Roland the Thompson Gunner? Yeah, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. That's it. That's the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's talk then about the various United Nations peacekeeping missions in Congo. They've been there since the 1960s, is it? On and off.
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I think you had some of the old Rhodesians in there as well at that time.
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Hello and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today. We have a very special episode in which everyone is a doctor. I will be leading the discussion, of course, as a doctor of modern European history.
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But I'm joined today by Venkatesh Ramnath, who is a practicing pulmonologist, a professor at UC San Diego Health, a medical director of several ITUs in rural and urban settings, and also the author of the sub-stack, Be a Health Architect. Welcome to the show, Venkatesh. Thanks for joining us. Great to be here.
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I'm also joined by Dr. Kaveh Hoda, a gastroenterologist and the host of our favorite medical podcast, The House of Pod. Of the many you listen to, I'm sure. Yeah, they might call a super user in the medical podcast space. You listen to more than me. Most importantly, Kaveh is, of course, our friend. That's right. Our resident doctor with a useful doctorate. So what we want to talk about today is...
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Medicare, and specifically some of the cuts to Medicare, more broadly, the, I don't know really how to put this, challenges for people working in healthcare in the Trump administration, right? We addressed specifically gender-affirming care in a previous episode, but it doesn't start and end there, right?
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That might be the thing that sort of the cultural wars have been focusing on recently, but I want to talk more broadly about the challenges facing healthcare in So first of all, would one of you care to explain Medicare for people who are not familiar? Some listeners might not be living in the United States or they might just not have encountered this yet in their life.
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So could one of you explain what this particular type of health insurance is and how it's maybe more vulnerable than other types to federal government changes?
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Yeah. So let's talk about those changes then, as you mentioned, right? There's this telemedicine, it's a waiver, right, that has allowed telemedicine to be funded through this for the last five years, I suppose. It's going to expire by the end of this month, which is March 2025, if you're listening later today.
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Explain why telemedicine has been such a positive step in healthcare since, if you could, since 2020, and then what we're facing if it's no longer funded federally.
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That's really interesting. I know they've been treated that way. It's quite sad to hear.
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Yeah. And like, it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people, right? Like, if I think about my own experience with it, I was traveling recently and got COVID like a couple of months ago. And there was no need for me to go to a clinic and be around other people, right? I just needed to contact my doctor and get some prescriptions and check in.
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And like, it was so much better that I could do it in my pajamas from a bed rather than like having to get out. And I'm lucky I have that I can drive to the doctor's surgery. It's not that far away. I have a job that accommodates my schedule, but there are a million reasons why it might be very beneficial to people.
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So let's talk about, you mentioned this before, but we have commercial insurers and people might think that this is limited to older folks or it doesn't affect them or it's something that only impacts people who have Medicare. But as you said, Medicare kind of sets the standard for what is covered and what isn't covered, right?
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So can you explain how this might end up resulting in just a massive, like a cliff? I've seen it described as a telehealth cliff.
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Right. Yeah. So something like a glucose monitor or like some other, yeah, which could be catastrophic for people, right? If they don't get those funded. Right. We're going to take a little break for advertisements here. Maybe you'll get an advertisement for a glucose monitor or even insulin. Only hope. Yeah.
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I'm glad they're taking some of that money that they've made me bleed out of my wallet over the years and returning it to me in the form of podcast advertisements. All right, we're back. Let's talk more broadly about, I guess, the changes in the legislative environment for healthcare might be a good way to put it.
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I think that you were an excellent op-ed recently where you discussed, you were one of the many recipients of the Tom B5 useful things you did at work this week email. I thought you wrote a really good piece about the varied and critical work that you do.
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Can you talk about, like, what is the feeling among healthcare professionals, physicians, whoever you'd sort of like to speak as, going into four years of possibly vastly reduced government spending and a sort of bizarre and haphazard cutting of the federal bureaucracy that we're seeing?
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Yeah. And certainly like, An area where we're seeing that right now is in like public health, right? We don't really know, like I'm going to Texas next week where there's currently a measles outbreak. Yeah. Things that we didn't think that we might be seeing in this country again, we're seeing again. And like, as you say, it's coming at a time when like
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not just funding is unstable, but also like the, I guess like the basics of science have been somewhat politicized.
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To a degree. And like people, I don't know if that's something you see in your practice, but like, Certainly, like I was talking to a doctor friend who said half their clients are now like declining vaccinations as I was there to get, you know, every disease that I could get. I have a lot of travel vaccinations, so I'm always getting new and exciting vaccinations.
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But I'm making up for some of the gap, I guess. But it's... It's a really challenging time, right, from that perspective as well, like the culture around it.
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I think that's a big difference between... this is the information we have available and we're doing our best with it. And when we get new information, we'll do something different if that's what that information points to. And these people are acting out of malice to deprive you of your rights, which is sometimes what's been suggested by some people.
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And I think a good way to defeat that, as you say, is communicating around it. It is very sad that like when I was doing the research for my PhD dissertation, I wrote about, first I wrote about violence in the anarchist builders union for my master's. And then I wrote about public health and popular sport in the 1930s in Barcelona.
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And a lot of what you saw anarchists doing in Barcelona in the 1930s was talking to people about tuberculosis, educating people about tuberculosis and explaining what tuberculosis was and where it came from. And, like, that was in 1931. How far we've come, baby. Wow. Yeah, it's great. There were some other things from the 1930s which have also made an unwelcome return.
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Tuberculosis is not the only one. There's also the Nazi salute in large public gatherings in the United States. Holy shit. Which, yeah, I don't know. Anarchists had answers for them both in the 1930s, and they're the same answers that apply now. I think people will be distressed by this, right?
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A lot of people of my age and younger, I guess it's folks a bit younger than me for the larger part, the pandemic was a life-defining event for a lot of younger folks, right? And it...
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was a scary thing it still is a scary thing like getting covid still really sucks and i know people who have long covid and it's the thought of that is is petrifying to me people will be genuinely anxious now right at this potential dismantling of the public health apparatus like a rise in vaccine hesitancy less funding for research such that if we enter another pandemic with some
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novel infectious disease we won't be able to respond as fast right the response to COVID for the criticisms of it like the speed with which we had vaccines was amazing so that came from like Venkatesh's college at UCSD actually or at Salk I guess which is next door with free parking which is nice so like What would you say to people?
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Because this is a thing I see more and more among folks who are friends of mine, right? It's like real worry about infectious disease, real concern about new variants of COVID or about the bird flu is one, right? These other infectious diseases. I saw 50 people have died of it as yet unexplained disease in Congo recently. What would you say to those people?
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Because their concerns are somewhat legitimate, right? Like if we go into another pandemic, we're not going to be anywhere near as effective as we were in 2020 because of all these combination of reasons we've discussed.
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Yeah, it's vast. It encompasses different climate zones, different ethnic groups, as we're seeing, right? 200 million ethnic groups. Yeah, yeah. It's a fascinating place. It's a place I've wanted to go for a long time. I spent some time on the Congo-Rwanda border a few years ago. Not so far from Goma, actually, like riding my bike around.
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Yeah, especially right now, I was just thinking, as you were talking about, how important is people accessing reproductive healthcare and being able to access reproductive healthcare wherever they are? And how much... the more difficult that would be if people didn't have telemedicine appointments, something we've spoken about before on the show. But yeah, I'm sure there are some small cases.
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I'm sure there are a bunch of cisgender guys getting gender affirming hormonal care through telemedicine who probably could go without and be okay. Guys, I'd like to wrap up there, but I want to give you a chance both to, you talked a lot about like science communication. So where can people find you online? Where can they see you communicating your medical knowledge?
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And it's a very interesting place in terms of what Rwanda is a very interesting place in terms of its relation to its neighbors. I think people will probably struggle to conceptualize. I actually saw somebody had posted on Twitter, somebody who talks about Syria mostly, like, how on earth is Rwanda invading Congo?
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Yeah. Great. Thank you so much for joining us guys. Really appreciate it. Thanks.
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And they had a picture, you know, and the land mass of Rwanda is one of the smaller countries in Africa, and Congo is obviously a vast country. Are you comfortable explaining a little bit of the Rwandan involvement?
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Yeah, Garrison, this is why we have to watch those videos where the bad actors talk about how they feel.
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Unfortunately, here in California, I have approximately 75 little, little red bells when I log into my...
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Yeah. First buddy, Garrison. First buddy is the official term.
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That was... I grew up watching the House of the Parliament, so I'm used to, like... the boomers getting unruly, but this was something else.
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It's the thing that Democrats are doing now, which is trying to be like the Republicans, but live like kind of, I suppose.
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Right. Like, we saw, like, the sort of blue and on attempts at election denial, like, after the election. And, like, I don't think that's what they were doing here. Agreed. They gave off this, like, yeah, this very ineffectual kind of half-arsed attempt at booing. And then, aside from Green, they all just sat down and waved their ping pong things.
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I thought, I mean, it's the sort of cane you normally see a sword coming out of, if I'm honest.
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No. No. And a lot of reporting didn't either, which was shitty, I thought.
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Like a lot of reporting just mentioned that he had shouted and not what he had shouted about, which I think is like really when you like you see what the media is doing is serving as like the propaganda arm of a certain class of people when they're more upset that he was shouting than that he was protesting the fact that people are going to lose their health care and probably die because of it.
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We didn't get any smoke grenades like you see in Serbia.
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Yeah, three more years for him to break out the ass off smoke grenades.
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You could see Vance was very uncomfortable as well.
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You could write an Onion article parodying this, but you actually couldn't because they would just do that next time. They really think this is the last joint session of Congress they're ever going to have. They sure didn't act like it or whatever.
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Oh God, that fully fucking sent me. I'd forgotten about that.
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Yeah, so look, it will shock listeners to hear that most of what he said is wrong. He directly referenced a friend of mine. He was referring to Austin Killips, who is a woman. She's a trans woman. She's a very good cyclist. The reason she was doing the race, which is the Arizona Trail Race, it's an 800 mile ultra endurance race. I used to do these kind of things.
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The reason she was doing it is because of a UCI, Union Cycliste Internationale, the governing bodies stopped trans women competing, right? So she did these races which were not sanctioned by them. She did get the record. The previous holder of the record was a cis man. The cis man had previously beaten a cis woman, Lael Wilcox.
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It's interesting that in this particular discipline, actually, cis women have been doing as well as, if not better than men. Lael Wilcox owns nearly all the long-distance records in the United States. She's a phenomenal athlete. The idea that there's some inherent biological advantage is... It's particularly nonsense in this sphere of cycling.
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But the reason that she was five hours ahead is because this race is 800 miles long. Those records are broken by that kind of period. Not all the time, but when you have athletes like Austin coming from the higher paying areas of the sport into this, which has been a much less well-paid and much smaller area of the sport, you're going to see these records getting broken.
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And again, she broke a record that was held by a cis dude.
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Yeah, it's the second time he's picked on Austin. And obviously it pisses me off. You can read her op-ed in The Guardian where she wrote about this the last time he cited her in his executive order. And I would encourage you to.
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Yeah, on national TV in front of both houses of Congress, attacking your own kid. Yep. For trying to be who they want to be, a subject on which you lost a lawsuit, like...
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Yeah. So I'm aware of this scholarship because I'm aware of the people within the civil disobedience movement who were talking to the state department about it. And they begged for it not to be a DEI thing because they could see this happening, right? It's the Lincoln scholarship program. I'll link to it in the show notes, but it exists to empower people in Burma, right?
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With technical skills and to rise up young leaders in Burma and, It's not a DEI program, but for some reason it was categorized as such. It talks about respecting diversity because, as long-term listeners will know, Myanmar is an extremely diverse country with more than 50 ethnic groups and hundreds of languages spoken. So that's why it talks about respecting diversity.
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This is one of the few things the United States has done for the people of Myanmar after pumping up their economy, pumping up real estate, and then doing nothing when the military seized power there and started to brutally repress the people. And the U.S. is also, I should add at this point, holding a billion dollars of the Burmese people's money that it froze when the coup happened.
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And if it doesn't want to give them these scholarships, it could give them back their money. But I'm sure it won't. I know this one pisses me off in particular because obviously I'm very invested in the cause of the people of Myanmar and they are my friends.
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Yeah, talking about public health programs as circumcisions.
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Yeah, this has been their thing for a while, right? Dead people are voting, dead people are getting social security. Yeah.
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Yeah. I should have pointed out that Lincoln scholarships were in fact a Trump. They started in 2019, this round of them. Good job cutting your own fraud, Donald. Do you know what else started in the first Trump era, Garrison?
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Today is the backbone of the American economy, yeah. I mean, that's actually, unfortunately, more true than it should be. No, if anyone wants to buy any colloidal silver.
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They're not necessarily illegal. They could just be undocumented people or they could be asylum seekers. Correct. Correct. Yes, that is a good point.
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I mean, they're heading down to Bookavu, so... Yeah, I mean, M23 have said that they're going for sort of the whole country now, that they're not, you know, it's not a regional or, like, you know, ethnic movement so much as a... And they will, M23 would say that they're not, like... per se ethnic separatists, right? I think they would claim that they're like a liberation of Congo force.
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Yeah, they've proposed the same thing for people smuggling drugs into the United States, like effectively charging them as if they were going to give all the drugs to one person to murder them and therefore giving them the death penalty.
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Yeah, I mean, proving membership of those groups would be a challenge.
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Yes, exactly. Yeah. We haven't seen how they're going to... Well, we've somewhat seen how they're going to try in the latter case, but... Not in the former, I guess. We'll see, I'm sure, at some point in the next year or two.
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And he said how they rule from mental asylums and prisons. Very standard campaign rhetoric that he's used for years now. If you're new to this podcast, you can go back, you can search the word Hakumba or border, and you can listen to interviews with probably hundreds of migrants.
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You can listen to my Title 42 series, you can listen to my Darien series, and you can judge for yourself if these people are criminal or bad or mentally unwell.
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And then you've Burundi supporting the Congolese government. There's all kinds of, as you say, regional and international actors. Because of the wealth in Congo, and as Congo emerged from, the DRC emerged from its colonial past, right? It's always been destabilized by these separatists. actors, both regional and international, who wanted a piece of that mineral wealth.
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When you adjust to not having a job that pays you any money anymore.
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She did, yeah, of her many good points. Trump said that people had never heard of Lesotho, at the same time pronouncing it in a way that one would only know if one had heard it pronounced rather than seen it written on the page. Very, very funny Southam.
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He also said something about Liberia, like implying, like, I would encourage people to understand the history of Liberia if they think the US doesn't owe Liberia a thing or two.
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And then they've created and sustained these differences, which have become... I think there's some evidence to suggest that certainly the ethnic differences have become more pronounced and more intransigent, I suppose. It's become more difficult for those ethnic groups to coexist over time due to decades of conflict and killing. It's a very...
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Which is two more of these weird props. It's like in the cave in Plato. Everything else is just a reflection of this cop kid. Every other cop.
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difficult situation and it leaves people like the civilians living in goma today in a terrible situation where i think this is the fifth time that people have attacked goma like it's certainly i think the last time was about 2012 was it when um the last time m23 took goma
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Yeah, so I think we break for adverts now. I'd like to come back and discuss the Force Intervention Brigade because I think it's something that people ought to understand when we talk about peacekeeping. And we're back. OK, so, yeah, you mentioned the Force Intervention Brigade, which is something a bit unique within peacekeeping.
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First it's tragedy, then it's farce, and then it's whatever the fuck is happening now.
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And there's a lot of like when people talk about peacekeeping, they'll be like, oh, why aren't they fighting? Why aren't they like going and stopping the things? And I understand why people ask that. So can you explain a little bit about what the FIB was and what it did?
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Yeah. Famously, the European national anthem will now be, because if it's not love, it's the bomb that will bring us together. Yep. Garrison.
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I think we should say that, like, this is how US diplomacy happens. This sort of shouting out and humiliating non-US leaders is what the US does. The difference here is that Trump did it in front of the entire White House press corps and TV cameras. Yes.
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Yeah. And it doesn't give Zelensky a place to back down, right? Like he's a leader of a country that is at war. He needs to show strength. And like, certainly sort of with the current understanding of leadership, he needs to show strength. And to show strength, he doesn't have many places to go when he's been humiliated like that, right?
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him to remain in that position of leadership a relatively uncontested right they haven't been able to have elections this is something that the ukrainian opposition have also kind of consented to it's not like he's he's being a dictator here as trump has alleged but like his his personal bravery and willingness to confront these strong men is something that like people draw strength from in ukraine and he can't afford to let that go
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Yeah, he handled it like a grown up would handle it. Like he tried to point out what you're saying is wrong.
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Yeah. And I think they also have some Turkish drones. Is that right? The Bayakar drones. Absolutely. So let's talk about that 2020 war, because that was a war that relied heavily on these drones as a major means of destroying Armenian armor and pushing that offensive. So what happened in 2020 along this disputed border?
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Yeah, so you have this situation where we now have this massive area that's, I guess, occupied. And a lot of people began leaving at that time, right? Through that latching corridor. People didn't feel like they could safely remain there.
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Yeah, fascinating. So they literally had a blockade of these protesters?
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Yeah. We've just created a pass through and like someone who can live off that rentier income. So let's go to 2023. What do we see happening in 2023?
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Yeah. Yeah. It's been lost. It's hard to quantify the meaning of that loss, I think, especially for folks who aren't familiar with people and their culture and their connection to these things. Talking of quantifying things, I need to look at the amount of time we got here and pivot again to advertisements. And we're back.
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So what we see in ArtsArk, especially in 2023, is a project of ethnic cleansing, right? Genocidal violence, whatever, however you wish to phrase it. I mean, ethnic cleansing is not a term that has really like a definition in national law. Genocide does. It often very much like in this instance, I'm using them to mean one and the same thing.
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It's the removal of people either through killing them or forcing them to leave or starving them.
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Yeah. There have been many genocidal projects in history. What is Azerbaijan's goal with this? Is it the... removal of Armenian people with the area such that Azeri people can occupy it? Is it access to the resources that are there? Is it settling a historical score? If you look at a map,
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Yeah. And I think one of the things that happened with the conflict in Artsakh, I'm thinking about this pan-Turkic stuff because I see it every single day in the replies to my posts on social media. In my case, it's with reference to my time in Kurdistan and in Rojava, disinformation played a massive role in the 2023 conflict, in the 2020 conflict too, right?
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And I think people who are hearing about this for the first time are at massive risk for finding some of that disinformation, right? They hear about this driving to work today on our podcast and they go to Google it. There's a lot of crap out there, right? So can we address that, the role that it's played and continues to play?
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The pan-Turanism generates a lot of crap. I'm convinced that some of the accounts in my replies are not real human beings.
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Yeah, well, these things are until it's your grandma or what have you being beheaded. Yes, it does seem obscene, and it's so obscene that it's funny, right? But this is a concerted state project that it's easy to get caught up in, and it's easy to get caught in this disinformation machine, not just from...
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Yeah, like a bot in your replies, but from news, like you say, news outlets or like doctored reports or things that look very convincing.
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Yeah. Oh, it's too complicated. And so they sort of.
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Yeah, and the difference there is that it has received a lot more coverage and a lot more attention. So where does this leave us today?
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now right as of john has just hosted this conference and like it's important to recognize that this conference is it's a project of kind of global liberalism right like the cop conference and like it conveys legitimacy and and in this case it's a means of kind of laundering legitimacy right for this karabakh project in their case right through through the lens of of protecting the planet where do they go from there
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Yeah, I think probably these COP conferences are not going to be the way we solve our issues with climate change. But that's another conversation. Going forward, what is the status of Artsakh? What can those people, those people who were able to leave, what does the future hold for them? Are they sort of refugees in Armenia now?
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How can people, they want to be in solidarity, they want to support, like this is something that doesn't get reported on right in the US, even if they just want to learn more. How can they do that? Where can they go?
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Yeah, we'll absolutely put those in the show notes, yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, people did the same thing for Assad, right, that he protected Christians in Syria while he murdered, gassed his own people. Exactly. That's at best a cynical thing and at worst a justification.
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I mean, look, when we talk about how the Kurds have defended themselves from, yeah, a state project to eliminate them, right? In some areas, they haven't been able to, right? And when they have, it's through their own armed initiative for the most part, right? They were very fortunate to have the support of the United States, but that was only ever in the battle against ISIS. It wasn't...
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When genocidal violence, right, this genocidal project in Afrin, where we're seeing it right now in Tawrafat, the U.S. didn't stand beside them there. And it's not in its nature to. And I think... This is a really difficult situation that we find ourselves in all around the world right now. We've seen this in Africa too.
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It's not really in the nature of the United States, not in this century, to intervene simply for human rights reasons, simply because genocide is wrong.
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We draw red lines and then a sidewalk over them. It happens all over the world. And I think, yeah, we're probably in a post-hegemonic era, but that doesn't mean that people deserve to die because we're in a post-hegemonic era. I don't know.
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Look, if I look at the other genocide, which I've spent more time with than most genocides, which is a weird thing to say, it's the genocide in Myanmar of the Rohingya people. They are still facing genocidal violence now, even from anti-Hunter groups. But I also see Muslim people in... the Karen National Liberation Army. I see them fighting with the KNDF.
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And the way that those people liberated themselves was like from the bottom up. And I think that like... I find some hope in what's happening in Kurdistan and what's happening in Myanmar. And I don't see very much from the community of states so much of the thing that even fucking exists. I don't really believe that states have a conscience.
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And I don't think it's in their nature to care about people because people are inherently valuable. But I do think people do. And I do think it is in the nature of people to care. So I guess we have to continue to hope
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Yeah. One of the things, there's another thing that will be deployed very often, the Kurds are responsible for the Armenian genocide. Kurdish people were part of the Armenian genocide and they will acknowledge that and they've tried to make amends for it.
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We're here now. We're not prisoners of our history, but we have to acknowledge it so that we can move from it. Thank you for sharing all that.
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Is there anything else that we've failed to address and you want to get in quickly before we... I mean, yes, there's thousands of years of stuff, but... You know, visit Armenia.
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No, I think that's great. Is there anywhere people can follow you online if they'd like to? Oh, absolutely not. I'm tired of getting doxxed. Excellent. Yeah, that's probably for the best.
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This is one of the more, like, crazy things that he's, like, you could see Netanyahu even, like, in the room, clearly finding out about this for the first time. Yeah.
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Yeah, but victories that would have been unimaginable three years ago. I mean, we're almost exactly three years from the beginning of the revolution. Four years? Yeah, 2025, God. Yeah, four years from the beginning of the revolution.
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I think Bibi knew that Trump would give him a positive outcome in any number of ways, right? Like, to include just saying, like, bomb it off the map. Like, I think it's reasonable to assume that.
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He has also said that he's going to, again, said he's going to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, which would leave 2,000 people in CENTCOM to deploy to Gaza, I guess, if that's what they want to do.
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When, as you say, those videos, that was when I first became aware of the post-coup resistance, was seeing videos online of people with those traditional muzzle-loading hunting rifles. Taking on police checkpoints or attempting to organize an armed resistance and those little air guns made of the blue plumbing pipe.
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There will be significant pushbacks. Not the word. Right. Like there will be guerrilla warfare. Right. Like it's very hard to take and hold significantly large urban areas as the U.S. has found out for 20 years. Whether or not people will accept that, I think I think they might.
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Like I think Trump kind of needs an enemy, you know, and a war and like a quote unquote, you know, he can paint almost anything as a win. And I think people might be more willing than we'd like to think to accept people coming home in body bags from that.
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Yeah. And the new model is this Syria model, right?
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With a relatively small footprint and then a local partner force at the IDF pulling security for U.S. contracts and U.S. money like that.
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It was incredible, just the bravery of the people and their commitment and their willingness to risk their lives and sometimes lose their lives. As one revolutionary doctor told me a few years ago, he said, like, my grandparents died for democracy and my parents' generation died for it. And we don't think another generation should have to die for it.
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So, like, we're all prepared to go down fighting for this, which I thought, you know, was really impactful. And then he was right, that their willingness to risk their lives and to be so brave is unparalleled. And the revolution wouldn't have got to where it's got to, but... It's such a beautiful thing that it has. I wonder, like, it's a crucial time for the revolution now, right?
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Yeah, and like... It's interesting that if we use a Bavarian definition of the state, like that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, right, that they've dismantled their apparatus for state violence as well. And this could just be like the blunt instrument of apparently offering every federal employee.
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Like the revolution is as successful as it's ever been. We're reaching the fifth year. Can you explain, like, the role of the AIF within the broader revolution? Because I think people get really confused by all the acronyms and it can be easy to think that these groups...
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I know I've heard that they've tried to unretire wildland firefighters who accepted their offer of retirement. Yeah. which is extremely funny. But like, it's, it's very, yeah. If you're going to work, you're going to retire a bunch of FBI agents or fire them because like Mia said, they are going to need hitters. They're going to need to use coercive force at some point, possibly very soon. Yeah.
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Yeah. I mean, FPS is infinitely expandable and is mostly contract threat. Robert and I have spoken about it before, but like that's the one that has a lot of potential to grow. And I think within local, especially sheriff's departments, you got some people who won't bat an eyelid in some of those.
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I can't wait for the IRS to send me a letter saying my pussy in bio. Like, that will be... Hey. The...
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and it's an alphabet super I'm writing a book about this and Spain and like I've spent most of the last week just trying to write the dictionary of acronyms that goes in the back of the book but like can you explain these aren't groups that are necessarily sometimes they are opposed to each other they have different visions for the future but can you explain the role of the AF within the broad anti-Hunter movement
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I didn't know about that. I'm very worried about the offshoring of Chinese labor and the impact that we'll have in places like Myanmar, where China has these special economic zones. And it's something we will cover.
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Yeah, so Mia spoke about falling into line there. I think it's probably a good place to start. This kind of Trump brinksmanship is very typical of his style, right? Nearly every media outlet, I think, fell for it this time, just like it did in his first term. Like, we got this. This is going to cause a crisis. Trump was very nebulous in his goals for these tariffs.
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And as almost always, he talked a lot about America being treated unfairly. He talked about the border. And he talked specifically about fentanyl. So I want to begin by talking about fentanyl. Just to be clear... It is true that some fentanyl comes into the USA from Mexico and to a lesser degree also from Canada.
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The vast majority of the fentanyl that enters the USA from Mexico, about 80% of the convictions made as a result of that fentanyl entering the USA are made on US citizens, right? And 90% of the fentanyl that is seized is seized at ports of entry.
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So this idea that there are like Mexican nationals backpacking fentanyl through the desert, that exists, but it is not what is bringing the bulk of the fentanyl that is killing the people in this country into this country. There are multiple cases of CBP agents taking bribes to allow the drug into the country. I will link to two of them in the show notes, but know that there are more of them.
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And given the relatively high bar for CBP agent, anyone in DHS to be investigated, right? We can assume that this is something that happens on at least a semi-regular basis. So- What did Trump do to stop this fentanyl coming into the country? What did he get? He got this promise that Mexico would deploy 10,000 troops to its border. In reality, this isn't much of a concession at all.
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The Mexican National Guard has been deployed to the border for years. Specifically, it's been deployed at gaps in the U.S. border wall for more than a year. So people will remember our coverage of the open air detention sites in Jocumba in East County, San Diego.
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All of those open air detention sites correspond to gaps in the border wall where migrants would enter, surrender to Border Patrol and then be detained in open air. Each of those gaps now has a Mexican National Guard checkpoint in front of it. They're there in conjunction with the INM, the National Institute of Migration in English. The INM has camps for the migrants who do come there, right?
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This is something that Biden obtained in, I think, late 23, early 24. And that's why we aren't seeing open-air detention. One of the reasons, the other reason being Biden's asylum ban. we aren't seeing as many people crossing the border, right?
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Mexican border towns also tend to be areas where the Mexican military deploys its troops because often there are places where organized crime occurs due to their proximity to the border and the market for drugs and the fact that weapons from the U.S. tend to flow into Mexico and that that's where large numbers of weapons for organized crime come from. Right.
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For more than a year, I've received press releases from Tijuana constantly talking about new unit arrives, special forces arrives, army arrive, and then they'll have pictures of a parade. Right. Now, they never tell us when those units are leaving. They just keep telling us they're coming. So it's very hard to get a sense of actually how many troops are there.
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But the idea that Mexico is suddenly militarizing its border is kind of farcical.
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Yeah. And the Mexican leaders have successfully been able to paint themselves as leftists, exclusively being two inches to the left of a further and further right regime in Washington, D.C. People can listen to the last episode of my Daddy and Gap series for an idea of how Mexico is constantly deporting migrants to its own southern states.
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I want to talk a little bit about the Canadian concessions very briefly. Again, 10,000 agents and border spending that really doesn't change much in terms of what was already becoming a more militarized border. There has actually been a significant flow of migrants from the U.S. to Canada in the last couple of years. Specifically a Francophone African people who would take that route.
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I'm aware of several TikTok influencers. There's one guy I follow in Chad who he's in Canada now, but he's from Chad. And he makes these videos explaining to Chadian people how to go from Mexico into the US and then move up to Canada, obviously, where they can speak French. And that makes their lives much easier. It makes it much easier to not have to learn a language.
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Trudeau did agree to list cartels as terrorist organizations.
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Yeah. So it does allow for some economic sanctions, right, if they attempt to use that Canadian border and sort of get around the United States. It's much less significant than a U.S. listing, which we believe is coming. Canada's not going to use it to do covert operations inside Mexico, I don't think. Canada's not going going to be drone striking anyone.
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When Trump listed the Kurz Force, he then struck its leader with a drone. I don't think Canada is going to be doing that. But nonetheless, that is a concession, and perhaps there is some plan for that.
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It certainly allows for, and I've said this before, the economic sanctioning of people who provide material benefit to those organizations, or potentially the arrest of people who provide material benefit to those organizations. which is a large number of businesses in Mexico which end up being extorted or paying protection money, right?
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So we don't know what is going to happen with that, but it's one of the tools that Trump now has to use as another cudgel against Mexico. Yeah. The last and perhaps most sinister of all development is this deal that Marco Rubio struck with Bukele and El Salvador, right? El Salvador has said it will host U.S. citizen criminals and deportees from any nation in its jail system.
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So I'll just read Bukele's tweet. It's very short. We are willing to take in only convicted criminals, parentheses, including convicted U.S. citizens, into our mega prison, Secod, in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for the US, but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable. If you're not familiar, it means counter-terrorism confinement center in Spanish.
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For people who haven't heard about this, it's the largest prison in the world that Bukele opened in 2023. And it's a terrible place. There are cells of 100 people. In that cell, there are 80 bunks, two toilets, and two basins. They are extremely confined. I think they get 6.5 feet of space per person. They get 30 minutes outside a day. They're forced to shave their heads.
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Their ankles and wrists are chained. People are arbitrarily detained there, sometimes for things like looking like they might be in a gang. Multiple human rights organizations, including, well, the State Department is not a human rights organization. Sometimes it's the opposite of that.
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The State Department itself has raised concerns about human rights abuse due to the quote-unquote state of exception which exists in El Salvador, which allows the government to do these things without really any human rights oversight. The U.S. has already seemingly moved some migrants to Guantanamo Bay, to the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, and satellite imagery has shown tents going up there.
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Very few at the current time. And they seem to come from Fort Lewis-McChord, which I couldn't work out. But there are tents, I guess, I think it was Washington Post had these satellite images of tents being constructed there. I'm trying to keep an eye on that satellite imagery. Of course, Biden opened the door to outdoor detention. It's... not impossible that we will see that again.
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But this Bukele plan, this plan to send people to El Salvador, especially U.S. citizens, evidently this is unconstitutional. The courts get to decide how much that matters, right? We don't. But this is deeply concerning.
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Now is the time to be talking to your union about like how you meet this because like the stronger we are, the better we can confront this. And the only way to confront this is we all need to do it together. And like these are conversations that we need to be having right now. Like we do not have time and our unions are a very valuable tool for preserving our rights.
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Yeah, I remember when I was much, much younger talking to a veteran of the international group, an anarchist veteran. No, it was from the International Brigade, to correct myself. And I asked him to explain anti-fascism to me. And he said that for him, like, when someone devalues humanity, like the junta does in Burma, like the Francoists did in Spain, right? Like Assad did in Syria.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today, and I am very lucky to be joined by Azad, who is fighting in Myanmar, in Chin Land specifically, with the AIF. Welcome to the show, Azad. Thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Of course. Yeah, this has been a project that I've been following from afar for some time, maybe several months now, I think.
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It debases his own humanity. And like anyone who attacks humanity in that way is attacking him and all humanity. And therefore, it's a responsibility of all humanity to defend humanity, to defend compassion and kindness. Absolutely. Yeah, I think what you're doing in Myanmar is part of that desire to defend humanity against inhumanity, against whatever you want to call it.
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What are the struggles that the revolution faces? I know you guys have recently been doing a fundraising campaign, for example, and the revolution is almost unique in its complete lack of solidarity from the states of the world, right? There is not a state that is backing this revolution. It is entirely the force of the people of Myanmar.
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So can you explain some of the struggles within the revolution, perhaps because of that?
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But for listeners who have not been following, can you explain very briefly the role of the AIF in the struggle in Myanmar? Sure.
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Yeah, definitely. I was talking to someone yesterday in another part of Myanmar, and I was saying, you know, I'm going to come visit you hopefully soon. And he was saying like, oh, you'll love it. Like just to be in the liberated zone is so special. Talk to us about like liberated Chin land, right? Mindat's just been liberated.
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Large areas have been under the control or semi-control of a dictatorial regime that has been extremely oppressive to the Chin people for decades. How are people receiving their liberty? How are they governing themselves or attempting to take care of one another in these liberated spaces?
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That narrative that you pushed back on already, and we've seen it from so many, every think tank, every analyst, every so-called expert has said the EROs will only fight for their territory when they've reached the limits of what they consider to be their ethnic homeland, they will stop. And that hasn't happened, right? It's not happened anywhere. But...
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The fact that even if it did, right, or even if some of these heroes have visions for the future, which is not as liberatory as maybe you and I would like, the fact that there are parts of Myanmar that are free now and that where people can live their lives as they wish,
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will never change and and that will mean that those places are always there for people to go to and like i'm sure lots of people you're fighting with and alongside have come to chin land right like like not all of them will be would have spent their whole lives there they'll have come there from but my majority cities maybe is that correct look like
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Yeah. I remember speaking to Mandalay PDF a while ago, and they were saying to me, like, they were really scared when they first left the cities because they'd been told that, like, wild people lived in the mountains. Yeah, yeah. Now we're wild people. We like the wild people.
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But yeah, this narrative, I mean, James C. Scott talks about this, right, in The Art of Not Being Government, this idea that these mountains were never really places that were amenable to state control and that now they're places where people can go to avoid it.
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But it's also important that this revolution extends beyond the mountains and into the cities and that people living there don't have to live under the boot heel of a dictatorial state, which is what's happening, right? Yeah, absolutely. People will be listening to this, I'm sure, and thinking, this is laudable, this is incredible.
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And A, they'll be shocked that they haven't heard about this, maybe, especially if they're newer listeners. And I do want to say that you can go back and listen to our other coverage on Myanmar. There is a lot. But in terms of conflicts, conflict is always messy and war is never inherently a beautiful thing.
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Beautiful things can happen in wars, but we rarely see wars where there is so much good on one side and so much evil on the other. And why do you think that the, especially the Western media has largely overlooked the conflict in Myanmar? That's a good question. Yeah.
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Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it offers an alternative for the world that like, it's distinct even from Rojava, like the building of a revolutionary movement. Like you said, the crowdfunded revolution, the revolution that like entirely, I mean, at points armed itself using guns it downloaded off the internet. You know, it offers, sometimes I think when I'm like thinking about
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you know, my background in studying anarchists in Spain. And like, obviously I've looked a lot at the past, but it gives me a vision of the future. Like, and it's only in covering the small parts of the revolution that make it truly a revolution that we can see that. Like, you have an Instagram and on there you're posting about training.
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Sometimes when you're doing the trainings and there are women who are coming to train, you know, with rifles to be, I was going to say marks, marks people, I guess, like I don't people.
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yeah okay yeah let's do that okay in the moment that that they receive that training and become like efficient with their weapons like a revolution happens for that woman and it's only through like following those those little revolutions that happen every day that make up a big revolution that we truly understand it and i'm sure that's something that like you're seeing on a daily or weekly basis right like people's worlds opening up and their horizons
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Yeah, it's given me so much hope. Like at a time the last few years when we've all desperately needed something good to happen, like something good is happening. Incredibly good. Yeah, like it's breathtaking. Like I went in 2022 during the first year of the revolution. And I was shopping around this story for months, right?
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I knew these guys who were doing the 3D printing and I went to every major outlet. I was like, this is the story that's going to make people care. And no one bought it until eventually Coolzone did. And here I am. But like even 2021, 22, talking to those guys, I was like, They might all die. It's still been worth it for them, but they might all be gone in a year.
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I'm unfortunately familiar with that from my line of work. But to see it succeed, it's so incredible. Obviously, war is terrible, and terrible things have happened in the war. But it's such a beautiful thing to see people refuse to accept tyranny, and just through the tenacity of their refusal...
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to create liberated spaces and to Nathra and to topple, like you say, what had previously been a feared army in the region. Like, it continues to amaze me every day, every time I see people dancing in front of a captured military headquarters or whatever. I don't know, it's just such a remarkable revolution.
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If people wish to be in solidarity, if they wish to follow the AIF, if they want to learn more about the AIF, where can they do that? Are there places online or are there ways that they can support you aside from obviously being part of the struggle? How can they help you?
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Yeah, that'll be great to see. And I hope you'll come back and join us again. And maybe we can delve into a little bit more of the history of the revolution and the revolution in Chinland specifically, because I think these are things that we need to cover more. And I'd love to give people a place to learn about them. Yeah, absolutely. Great. Thank you so much.
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Yeah. And if people aren't familiar, it's the anti-fascist internationalist front, right? The AIF has a really cool logo with the peacock tail and the three arrows and the white star and a red background. I really appreciate your logo.
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So yeah. I think people will like, when they talk about the conflict in Myanmar, they will be like, oh, why is there not more internationalism? Why is there not more international volunteers? Something that you and I have spoken about before is that this has always been an international conflict, right? And it's always been an anti-fascist. conflict as well. Do you want to explain that to people?
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Because I think sometimes it's easy for people to fall into these Orientalist or somewhat colonialist constructions of the conflict there. And I think you and I both agree that those are not the lens through which we should view it.
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Yeah, and something we've spoken about before is the links of the inspiration, I guess, that comes from the internationalist struggle in North and East Syria and Rojava, and how that's very much been a source of inspiration for young people in Myanmar. I've spoken to tons of them, even... Two years ago, especially young women there, right.
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Looking at, looking at the women's revolution in Rojava and seeing like that, this was a possibility that this was something like on the horizon that they could strive for. Do you want to explain like your own perceptions of that and experience of it? Yeah, sure.
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Really? What? Yeah, yeah. I was there to say we were there. We were both there. Yeah, at the same time, everyone started hitting me up for book recommendations. It's like October. I didn't know that. Yeah. Okay. Right after October 7th, I think.
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Yeah. And it's a really beautiful thing to see, like you said, just to see people like, When we think about alliances in conflict, if we look at the extremely interactional way that the United States enters into those alliances, it's willing to allow the people of Rojava to die for it in the battle against ISIS or Daesh, but it's not willing to stand by them when they're being bombed by Turkey.
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Something that you and I have both seen. But to see something that instead begins with genuine solidarity and admiration. One thing I really liked was when The KNDF replied to the video that came from Rojava. They said that they still had a lot to learn, especially with regards to gender.
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It's so rare to see revolutionary movements admitting their faults, especially during the struggle, during the moment of revolution. And that's something that I've been so impressed with in Myanmar for a long time is their willingness to look out at the world and see things that they think are better and adopt them or to at least consider them. It's a thing in Rojava too.
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One of the friends in Rojava said that they were excited to learn more about Myanmar because they hadn't worked everything out and that they thought that there might be some solutions that they could learn from there. And so it's really special to see that that solidarity that comes from a very genuine place and not just, it's not just rhetorical.
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There are people such as yourself who have made the journey to fight on behalf of the revolution in Myanmar. But it's really a special thing. It's really a wonderful thing to see, especially like with the world seemingly getting more and more isolated and more and more nationalist as opposed to internationalist. Like it's a really beautiful time for it to happen too. Yeah.
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Yeah, it's very real. And it has a very genuine basis in sharing more than common interests, I will say.
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So for people who are not as familiar with the struggle where you are, which is in Chin Land, would you explain a little bit of... I mean, obviously we can and we will at some point explain a little bit more of the history of Chin Land because I think it's very important and it sometimes gets marginalized from even narrative of the revolution. But can you explain...
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today, it's me, James, and I'm joined by Nevdan Jamgotian. We're here to talk about Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the increasingly genocidal rhetoric from Azerbaijan. But I want to start off, Nevdan, we're talking about... COP 2024, I guess.
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Can you explain, like, I think people will be sort of somewhat familiar with these series of climate conferences, but this one was held in Azerbaijan, right? And can you explain a little bit about, you've specialized in like these greenwashing, sports washing, various other sort of forms of laundering legitimacy, right?
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I'd love for you to start off there and explain how this particular conference was used as a means of laundering legitimacy for what is like a genocidal project.
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Like the groups and the struggle as it has been since 2021. In many ways, Chinland is where the revolution, the armed revolution began, right? So can you explain how we get to a place today where in recent weeks we've seen massive victories in Chinland?
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To allow this climate conference to happen. That's correct. So let's zoom back from this climate conference, right? I think it's a really interesting place to start. It's like the site of our genocide is a net zero area. And it's a very bleak vision of the sort of greenwashing future.
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Let's explain a little bit of the history of the conflict between these two countries and also perhaps more broadly, I think people will probably be familiar with the Armenian Genocide if they've listened to this show, but of Armenian people as a subject of discrimination and hatred for centuries, right? Yeah.
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Yeah. So let's talk about this area then, specifically this area, which would be called, depending on who you ask, Artsak or Nagorno-Karabakh, right? I think probably it's, I don't know if I haven't looked on Wikipedia, but like what the more commonly used term for people wanting to look it up, right, in American English.
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But let's explain why there is a conflict in this area and then what has happened since then. I guess we can go from like the fall of the Soviet Union would be a place to start.
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Yeah, sort of 30 years of... Right. But it was always disputed, right? This area was, did Azerbaijan continue to lay claim to the Artsakh region, is that correct?
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All right, we're back. One thing I think that might be illustrative to hear is that, like, in the first Artsakh War, Turkish, I guess, irregulars or mercenaries, or I don't know what you want to call them, people associated with the Grey Wolves, fought on the side of Azerbaijan, right? And keen history understanders will know that there is some history of...
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anti-armenian sentiment among the gray wolves and then indeed in in turkey as a country so perhaps this is a good point to talk about the international involvement here because i think it's very misleading to do this as we're seeing in syria right now people want to divide the world into blocks right with like the this sort of this sort of uh
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Cold War narrative that we have of Russian interests and US interests. And I think this is an excellent example of why that is not necessarily a great way to perceive the world. So can you explain the international involvement in Artsakh and in this ongoing conflict, which we'll get to it beginning again in 2020, I think, in a second?
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Also embargoed, no? Like, we've seized their government assets in the United States. Yep. There's one on, like, Diego Garcia, for instance.
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Yeah, and then they can come read a book instead. And yeah, it would be nice. It reminds me of one of the big projects of the anarchists in Spain in the 1930s was to create popular education centers, which included libraries, right? And they funded these entirely. They were not funded by the state. The state was not interested in making libraries in 1920s, 1930s in Spain.
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It's amazing that they're doing the same shit as like my undergraduates and the people are doing the same shit in their response.
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Most of them are smart enough to like pad it a little bit so that you can't put the prompt into chat GPT and find it. Yeah. And so my lowest effort undergrads
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And they funded them from popular subscription and from people's union dues. And they built these Ateneos, which are now really beautiful places. One of the places I did my PhD in Barcelona. And like, I wonder if there is, I guess it's very hard for us to conceive of a library without the state in the United States, right?
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That's working. Only jobs are things where you wear safety toe boots and everything else.
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Yep. Which Greek letters do they use, and which person's fraternity does it represent?
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And rich people putting little libraries in their middle-class neighborhoods is not the same thing. Right. As much as they'd like to think it is, your little phone box library is not replacing these services. Is there a model for recreating this in a way that isn't reliant on the state, which seems increasingly hostile to it?
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No, I mean, some of us, I guess people still alive in the 1930s. Yeah, I guess. Woody Guthrie has. My fucking grandma, I guess.
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Outstanding. Good. I'm just checking on our Wall Street bets and they're having a real one today.
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He didn't actively stop anything happening other than people not paying attention to him.
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Fiddling impressively while Rome burns. Thanks, Cory.
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Of course, we have to begin my segment today by saying whose birthday it is on the day that you're hearing this. So if you want to plant a tree for Apo... Get out there and plant your tree. Unfortunately, that is the only good news we have today. Border Patrol has spent most of this week touting the quote lowest number of border crossings in history.
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It will shock listeners to hear that this is not historically accurate. Border encounters are way down. If there's one thing that I have ever taught you, it is that border encounters are not the same as unique individuals because people are being sent directly back to Mexico and will tend to return it. attempting a different route crossing the border, right? Those are way down.
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And they're the lowest since they began publishing monthly data in 2000. But numbers were way lower in the 50s and 60s and before then. It's relatively immaterial. It's just sort of a nitpicky point, I guess. Today what I really want to talk about is the case of Mr. Kilmar Abrego-Garcia.
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He was removed by the Trump administration to El Salvador, to Secot, in a way that they have admitted was a mistake. So we have to go back a little bit to understand Mr. Abrego-Garcia's story and how we got here. He was arrested in mid-March due to the United States government claim that he played a, quote, prominent role in MS-13, MS-13 being the Salvadorian gang, right?
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He'd come to the United States in 2011. He was fleeing gang violence. He was allegedly arrested in 2019 outside a Home Depot where he was standing with other men looking for work. However, the incident report for that particular incident gives other names but not his.
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At that point, a Prince George's County Police Department detective filled out a, quote, gang worksheet and claimed that Mr. Abrago Garcia was associated with or a member of MS-13. The evidence he cited for this was a Chicago Bulls hoodie and the claim of a confidential informant.
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The confidential informant claimed that he was part of a group within this gang that was set up in a state that Mr. Abrago Garcia had never lived in. The United States in 2019, ICE argued that he shouldn't be given bond because of this alleged gang membership. And so he wasn't given bond. But through an asylum claim, although he didn't get asylum, he was protected from removal.
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So a judge ruled that he couldn't be removed back to El Salvador, where he would presumably face violence there. When Mr. Abrago Garcia's lawyers tried to interview the police detective who had filed this report accusing him of gang membership, they found no record of his arrest and that the detective has been suspended since then.
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The department in question also settled a lawsuit with its own cops over racism in the department. JD Vance, who has a law degree, right? The JD is, I guess, before and after his name. He has a law degree from Harvard, has claimed that Mr. Abrego Garcia is a convicted member of MS-13. This is not true. I can't find any evidence that he has any conviction of any kind.
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I'm going to quote here from a filing by the United States government. On the 15th of March, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error. So the government there has admitted in a court filing that they accidentally sent this guy to the prison labor camp in El Salvador, right?
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According to ICE acting field officer Robert Cerner, quote, he was an alternate. As others were removed from the flight for various reasons, he moved up the list and was assigned to the flight. So it appears that they had a large list of people they wanted to put on this flight. This is interesting, right? It's an insight into their process for filling that first flight.
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Some people they clearly didn't feel they had enough evidence for, but somehow this guy, who again has never been convicted of having any membership of any gang, they put on this flight, right? His wife and child are both US citizens, and they have sued in court. That's why we're seeing this, right? They've sued for the United States government to stop paying
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El Salvador for his detention and for the United States government to demand he return. Vance has advanced a kind of unique legal theory in response, claiming that withholding of removal only prevents someone being deported back to their home state. I mean, you could technically, that is what the withholding It's like he can't go back to El Salvador because he will be at risk in El Salvador.
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So they can deport him to a third state, but they deported him to El Salvador or renditioned him to El Salvador, right? I'm going to read J.D. Vance's post here. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I'll start with the second paragraph. In 2019, an immigration judge, parentheses under the Biden administration, said,
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For those of you who are familiar with dates, 2019 was under the first Trump administration. Yeah, that was the Trump administration. Okay, moving on. Determined that the deported man was, in fact, a member of the MS-13 gang. He also apparently had multiple traffic violations for which he failed to appear in court. A real winner. Father of three is in quotes here, by the way. Yeah. Yeah.
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And gulags generally not capable of doing the apprehensions themselves. If we think of a gulag as a place, it is the police who apprehend the person, send them to the gulag. Moving on. Here are the relevant facts. I'm still quoting. The man is an illegal immigrant with no right to be in our country. Obviously, the judge determined that he was protected from removal.
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Quoting again, an immigration judge during the Biden admin determined he was a member of the MS-13 gang. Again, that's not the case.
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Yeah, it's bizarre. I think what they're referring to is that the initial hearing, right, where he was denied bomb was in 2019, and then he filed his asylum claim and later was protected from removal. But that's not what they're saying here.
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And then the last one, and I think it's most revelatory, because he's not a citizen, he does not get full jury trial by peers. In other words, whatever due process he was entitled to, he received. The immigration court doesn't generally present the opportunity for jury trial, right? Vance, again, holds a JDE. He presumably knows this.
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What's more disturbing is the claim made by the United States government in this lawsuit that the Abrego Garcia family filed. Quote, because plaintiffs concede that Abrego Garcia is not in the United States custody, this court cannot hear these claims. So they're claiming that no U.S. court has jurisdiction over over the question of these people who are in El Salvador because they're not in U.S.
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custody, right? Which, obviously, if they stick the landing on this, it suggests that, like, it is a one-way ticket to the prison labor camp, right? That you cannot challenge that in U.S. court. You ain't going to get very far in court in El Salvador, right? So what they're suggesting here is this is a forever detention that there is no habeas, right?
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That was what they were asking for, habeas corpus.
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Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess in the collectivized economy of revolutionary Barcelona, libraries still existed. Athenaeus existed. And I'm sure it was along a syndicalist model because everything was. So yeah, I think that's a good thing for people to look towards. I want to stop and take one more break, and then I want to talk about what people can do to protect libraries. Thank you.
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Yeah, so in this case, we don't have any of that. Mr. Abrego Garcia is still... The way his family found out he was in Secod was that his wife identified him by scars on his head when they shaved it and a tattoo they saw. Jesus Christ. Yeah, they had no idea.
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It presumably doesn't come up on the ICE detainee locator, you know, that you're going to look up your family members, or if your family members are detained by ICE, it doesn't have El Salvador as an option. So, yeah, this is where we're at. This is a case I will be following, right, because I say it's pretty pivotal.
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If they can argue that the court doesn't have jurisdiction, obviously I'm sure at that point that ruling will be challenged and it'll run up the courts. Currently it seems like the only court they're going to listen to is the Supreme Court, but Evidently, this is what they're going for.
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This is their argument here, that once you're in El Salvador, you're out of their hands and they can't do anything. So sorry, even though it was a mistake, you're stuck there forever, which is pretty disturbing.
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All right, we are back. So currently, like, I mean, this is like a funding cliff for the library system, right? I suppose it's hard to say, but like, how long would it take before people stop seeing these services if Doge was to start Doge-ing tomorrow?
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No, this was pure personal dislike of Elon Musk meddling in Wisconsin politics. Well, and everything else has happened since January. But it does seem like Elon Musk's personal presence was a net negative and all the money he spent.
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We'll send you some merch. We reported the news.
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Which is sad, because it's someone's kid who doesn't get to go to the library very often, right?
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Yeah. I think about how... I wouldn't have survived my undergraduate without libraries. All my grad school books are super expensive, especially academic books. And I relied very heavily on interlibrary loan.
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Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's a place where people can kind of exist.
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Without that. Yeah. So let's talk about like how can people engage to protect their libraries? What can they do? What are like some action items they can take?
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Yeah, yeah. And you can even, let's say you're not inclined to go to the library for whatever reason and you didn't like going out or you're worried about COVID or something. You can do most of this online, right? If you have Libby, you can borrow e-books.
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Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of nicer, nicer experience to read a paper book as well. What about like, if people, I know lots of people who are librarians listen, say email me, like, is there a way that they can organize? Is there a way that people are organizing, um, either to prevent this or like as a way of harm reduction, right?
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Like as a way of reducing the damage that the state can do to people's access to learning.
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Yeah, definitely. Hopefully there's still time for people to do that.
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Yeah, right. Why not start that? And regardless of what happens, we're stronger in this together than we are apart. And unions have done a lot to prevent fascism in the past.
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near you and they're librarians and you know maybe if you do lose some of your funding you can put your heads together and uh you know use each other's resources and have joint programming and things like that that makes sense are people like attempting so i know some of the stuff i mls have is like online archives are people attempting to somehow like download that in order to preserve it in the event that it goes away i don't know that that's really is that not what's a threat what
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Okay, so it's more like along the workplace organizing side.
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Yeah, definitely. It would be pretty tragic. Like there's a library not so far from my house. Like I can ride my bike to it and I go there all the time. And it would be really tragic to be without that. Yeah. So yeah, please continue to organize your libraries. Is there anything else that you'd like to plug or suggest people...
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's just me, James, today, and I'm joined by Jamie, who is a librarian, and we are here to discuss the pending federal cuts on library funding and, I guess, years of attacks on library funding. So welcome to the show, Jamie. Thanks for joining us.
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It's a pretty bleak time generally, and I think a lot of us take refuge, especially in reading, actually. It's a way you can escape terrible things. Is there anything else you'd like to kind of suggest for people as we dive deeper into fascism every day at the moment?
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Yeah, I think it's really good. Like, it's so sad to think that we should have to quantify the value of everything monetarily. But especially something like a library, like so many people have had such positive engagements with them, which have nothing to do with the cash next. They're sort of like generating revenue. And that's what makes them valuable and what makes them special sometimes. Yeah.
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Hopefully people can advocate for that. How would you find your library's board meeting if you wanted to?
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Yeah, yeah, that is the thing that they do. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us, Jamie. That was great. It was really, really helpful.
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Yeah, this is really great for me because I have been trying to find a librarian for a very long time to talk to us on the podcast. I understand that lots of people have been like really concerned that we covered this, but also very afraid for their jobs, which is a rough position to be in. So thank you for coming on.
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I thought we'd start with like there was an executive order on the 14th of March. I think it was called something like further something, the federal bureaucracy cutting, slashing, diminishing, whatever. You know, I don't really care. One of the outcomes of this was, I believe, the Trump administration moving towards a complete closure of IMLS. Is that right?
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The existential debate among anarchists in arms is this that you've just highlighted, right? It's Need we form authoritarian structures similar to those using, for example, the Cuban Revolution, the Russian Revolution, these kind of status revolutions which characterize the left in the 20th century in some ways?
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Or is it possible for us to go from our community defense and the defense committees, like the six-person groups at the CNT organized in Spain, to a more egalitarian large formation, like a, like a truly revolutionary army. And like the split that you're talking about is a split that almost every movement has.
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Right. They were like following the Castro model. Is that right? Like the Che Guevara kind of guerrilla warfare doctrine.
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Yeah, definitely. Like, because it's easy to do that. It's easy to be persuaded that this situation is unique and different and therefore we need to accept some kind of compromise of the very essence of what we're doing. The method that like the people I have spoken to, both those within formations today and in Rojava and in most in Rojava, but also in Myanmar.
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And those, for instance, in the Iron Column, which was a Phi column in the Spanish Civil War, they're probably most famous for leaving the front line to attack the cops because they felt like they didn't have enough weapons and the cops had too many. And what they did was they created a concept of the minimum necessary discipline.
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Discipline being something that one has for oneself, not the hunting that comes from above. And they had leaders who would lead in times of combat when we needed to make swift and decisive action. There wasn't time to obtain consensus. They used consensus to arrive at those leaders.
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Those leaders were able in times of urgency to make urgent decisions, but that didn't confer to power or status outside of that moment.
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Yeah, we will find out, I guess. So can you explain for listeners who aren't familiar what IMLS is and what it does?
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Exactly, yeah. And that doesn't mean that that person is inherently capable of bossing you around.
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Yeah, exactly. And I think that's something like, you see it again and again when you read the column, the Daruti column newspaper, right?
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They talk about discipline and how we have to have, our discipline comes from our commitment to our cause and to each other, not from any fear of repercussions or like quote-unquote disciplinary action, but from like the fact that we don't want to let our comrades down nor do we want to let our cause down.
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And like when people do do that, right, it doesn't mean there aren't disciplinary actions, but it means that those are like like you said before, you don't break away from the core of what you're doing.
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So they agree by consensus to include with the person who has done the thing that is considered to be wrong, what a suitable punishment would be, or a suitable set of repercussions would be, so that it reinforces the idea of consensus and discipline coming from oneself rather than from fear of punishment.
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Yeah, I mean, the latter is like a system that looks not at people, but at quote-unquote crimes, right? And this is the opposite of a restorative justice system, which looks at people and the situations they are in and not just the worst thing that they happen to have done. We should return to South America, Andrew. We've once again diverted it. Yes, yes.
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Yeah, yeah, true. There's this wonderful line in Abel Paz's book about Daruti that Daruti was very fond of children, so he risked his life robbing banks to fund their education.
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I don't know. I just enjoy it very much. The whole, like, you never know what direction that sentence is going to go in.
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Yeah. Yeah. And like, I think it's really like, he wasn't maximalist for the sake of maximalism. He was maximalist for the sake of like educating children.
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It wasn't, he didn't see the violence as an end in itself. Yeah.
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Right. Yeah. It's hard for a movement to recover from that. Yeah. It's not like a genocide or like these colonial kind of, you could call it like a decap. Well, it's like a decapitation of a movement, I suppose.
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Okay. Yeah. I was, I was wondering about who funded interlibrary loans so that they're the ones who facilitate like the transporting of the books.
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Yeah, anyone with any lived experience, all the things they'd learned, all the mistakes they'd made and learned from, like, are gone. The movement has to begin almost from, like, a blank slate.
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Yeah, especially in a movement that's being criminalized and pursued by the state, right? Like, what they write down is what they risk the state discovering, so that they're only going to risk writing certain things down.
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Yeah. I mean, look at even like Spain still has very strong anarcho-syndicalist movement, right? But like the best of the anarchists died in in Aragon, in Madrid, and in concentration camps afterwards, or fighting in the Second World War. And it took decades for that movement to recover. And it's still not as strong as it was. This was one of the high points.
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Yeah, this has been one of my constant things as a historian is that like when people write histories today, they write them from the perspective of the inevitability of the state. And like, I'm not alone in making this analysis. David Graeber does it. Jim Scott did it too. The idea is that people who exist outside of the state are behind history.
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and that they have failed or chosen not to advance to the more advanced human existence that is the state. And Jim Scott does this in The Art of Not Being Governed, right? If we look instead as people who have chosen to refuse the state,
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then we understand anarchism as a choice that people would make knowing the options available to them rather than a step backwards or failure to advance to the state. And we can look at the whole of history from that perspective and see it very differently. But most historians don't. Exactly.
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Yeah. So there are lots of very important services. And what would it mean if we didn't have that IMLS budget at all? Like, what would it mean? Especially for like, like you said, those kinds of libraries that are financially, I guess, more marginalized in tribal libraries and rural areas and stuff.
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Yeah, and as historians, we shouldn't be making that judgment, right? We should be attempting to learn from and document the past rather than to sort of categorize it into failed and successful.
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Yeah, I think you're right. I think like this applies to lots of places. I think about it like, you know, I'm fortunate to have this like background in history, but also to be with people in their moments of revolution and to like spend time
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revolutionaries in myanmar and like one of the uh the analyses that you'll always see is that like this creation of liberated spaces is a not enough or b like there are also places within the non-government zone where there is still very strong control from a pseudo state right like but i think that overlooks the fact that yeah there are not like like libertarian states
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but people are living their lives without gods and masters that they are like experiencing freedom in every moment. And they are liberated in their own lives as they continue to struggle to liberate territory and other people. And that might be what success looks like.
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Yeah, and if we acknowledge that, it's much harder to go back. Those people can't go back because they've existed before. in liberation, right? Like they've lived in a free way. And like, they will always know that that freedom is possible, that they can live without authority, live without state power, that like liberation is a thing that can exist, not just in our minds, but in physical space.
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And like, they will always know that like, that's available. And if we can tell those stories, so will other people.
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Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We have to remember that when we're looking at these things, like we can, it's easy to look from where something ended and project that back, but we have to understand how it felt when people were doing it too. Exactly.
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Yeah, like I think I was looking online and the budget is something like 0.003% of the federal budget is going to, it's trivial.
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Yeah, maybe we should talk about that. Because I think if people like, maybe they just don't happen to go to the library, maybe they don't, you know, realize they have services they need, or maybe they don't live in the U.S., The library is not just a place where you can go and borrow the books, right? Can you explain some of the services that libraries provide?
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You mentioned some, but they really help people.
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Yeah, it's like... I don't know. I'm amazed how many of my friends and neighbors don't understand how my celebrity does. Like I'm forever like San Diego, our housing prices are ridiculous and no one seems to want them to not be ridiculous. Um, well, lots of us do, but we don't get to choose.
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And so like, we have a large in-house population and I'm always like, uh, helping my in-house neighbors go to the library, like giving them a ride or whatever, so they can, uh, yeah. Like you say, access internet services, apply for benefits.
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Yeah, that was the one that, like, I remember at the time you and I were discussing this, like, in our group chat, and we were trying to work out, like, how the Secretary of State could be revoking a green card. Yeah. And I think you found this, or you found it somewhere in there.
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The Trump administration has been very, very good at finding very obscure pieces of law that it can wield against migrants, right? Like, no one in... 2016 would have foreseen what they did with Title 42, which is a public health law. And they're doing something similar here. I mean, they may have spent the last four years looking for these things, especially when the campus protests began.
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Yeah, and, like, not get harassed by the cops just for existing.
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But this is entirely unprecedented as far as I'm aware.
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Which is the rest of their existence here, sadly. Yeah, these are massively important terms. I think most people, like, haven't... No one... Like, there's not really a big, like, fuck the libraries movement, you know? Like, I think people...
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Yeah, they talk about this a lot. Self-deportation is definitely one of their goals. They talked about it before Trump even came into power. That's what we're seeing a lot of these spectacle raids and spectacle deportations.
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Yeah, exactly. The desires that people leave. Is she a Canadian citizen?
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I wonder what her immigration status is in Canada now.
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Yeah, that would be interesting too, to see what Canada can offer her. I don't think the Trump administration would go after having her extradited back, because as you say, she's not accused of a crime, and they've kind of got what they wanted. It would be interesting to follow that.
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With the other cases of quote-unquote self-deportation, one of the issues is people have had their passports seized and held, like lots of Venezuelan migrants, so they actually can't, or it would be very difficult for them to just get on a flight and leave.
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Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess it's the whole, like, people should only read stories if they conform to a certain gender stereotype.
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Yeah, well, fuck those people. Absolutely fuck those people. Talking of fuck those people, we unfortunately have to pivot to ads. So, you know, here are some unfortunate advertisements. All right, we're back. Talking of people I dislike, actually, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, who was elected in 2020 and then re-elected, shamefully, this year, which is very disappointing.
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Yeah, I spoke to him a little bit back then, just via direct message. But I think at that time, whatever his agreement was, it seems like there was a component of it that at least he didn't want to talk about it in public, which is fine. Everyone has a right to do that, and he should do what's best for himself. But maybe I'll try and follow up with him again now, see if he wants to speak.
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Because he seems to have, like, he's been, of all of these people, the one who's been able to make the most statements and control his narrative to some degree.
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One of his first actions was to propose a budget which increased the funding to the police, surprise, and decreased the funding to the libraries that would lead to them closing for an extra day, right? And this is our, like, quote-unquote progressive mayor who, you know, has been anything but. But this isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, right?
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I think he proactively filed that suit, right? Yes. Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, that's leaving it at the complete discretion of the officer, right?
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I've spoken since then to librarians around the country who for the last, at least half decade have faced funding cuts. Can you explain like, why doesn't the state see value in these services?
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Yeah, the anti-American ideologies, again, it's just vastly broad, right?
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Yeah. And I'm guessing this will be either like a literal control F of whatever they can find of your public social media or some kind of AI system. That's what it seems to be, right?
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I mean, I don't want you to like speak for, you know, like the Democrats defunding the libraries to give the cops more money, but can you explain like why there has been this ongoing assault on library budgets?
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Yeah, it seems like he was identified through his wife, right?
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Okay. Yeah, it would be interesting to know, are they searching just through F1 visa databases? I mean, obviously not if they're finding these green card people.
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Right, and then being like, can we deport? He's not a citizen, so yes, basically.
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Yeah, his children presumably, therefore, are also citizens.
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Yeah. And I think that's kind of what they're going for. Like a lot of this is, it's like the politics of owning the libs, right? It's like the politics of being angry at your niece and nephew on Facebook and wanting to humiliate them.
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Like it's not a particularly coherent policy other than like the Palestine protests made a lot of people on the right mad and they don't like migrants and that now they're using this obscure legal provision as a cudgel against everything they dislike.
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Yeah, I mean, again, like writing an op-ed is like as central to the First Amendment as things can be, right? Yeah.
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If we're talking about this liberal idea of the marketplace of ideas, the way that ideas enter the marketplace, you will find nothing more amenable to liberalism than writing an op-ed in your campus newspaper. That is the most well-behaved, straight down the middle, constitutionally protected way to engage in anti-genocide activism, pro-Palestine activism. In a sense,
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This one is particularly disturbing. Like it's a frontal assault on First Amendment rights for non-citizens is what it is.
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People will be familiar with, I don't know if it's Bataar or Bataar, but like you probably have seen videos of them on campus trying to hand pages to people. Pagers.
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yeah like uh making light of the pager attack israel did i mean making a threat like sure like if you're going to come onto a campus and make a fucking bomb threat and accuse someone else of terrorism uh i mean the hypocrisy is kind of the point but uh
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Yeah, right. Like mocking this attack which killed children, which crippled people. It's just disgusting. It's just abhorrent. They seem to get a lot of attention online because they do the thing where they go up to people and say deliberately provocative things and then film their reactions, right? They're kind of IRL trolling.
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It could be his ethnic origin, right? Yeah, it could be his name, right? Yeah, but we should explain the status thing a bit more for people who aren't familiar. Sure. Your status is when you're in good standing with the university. So normally that means you need to be enrolled in 12 credits per year. You might be on semesters, you might be on quarters. I don't think it hugely matters.
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There's a minimum course load. It may be different for different systems. I don't know. You'd also need to be in good standing in terms of not late on your fees, your tuition fees, that kind of stuff. Not in any... you haven't been expelled or excluded from the university for any actions that you've taken, that kind of thing. It means you are currently a student at the university, basically.
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The only time this normally affects international students I'm aware of, as a person who now teaches students, is they can't drop below a certain course load when otherwise they may wish to drop below a certain course load to either focus on, they might have a research They might be doing other stuff on campus like TAing, right? Sometimes that TAing counts towards their course load.
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Sometimes it doesn't, but it can affect things like that. But generally it would be the university that would update that status, right? That would notify US Customs and Immigration if somebody fell out of compliance with that. If I'm hearing right, that doesn't seem like that's what happened here, right? No.
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Yeah, like I don't quite know how that works in terms of like, are ICE supposed to be able to? I don't think it hugely matters at this point.
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Yeah, and they don't have to remove him for that reason. But yeah, in this case, I guess they're going for something else.
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Yeah, yeah. Like everyone else here, he hadn't done anything that would, under normal circumstances, lead to him having any interactions with USCIS.
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Yeah, I mean, none of what they've said is wrong. It's kind of what you can expect from the university, the best you can expect from the university, really. It's like, hey, we've noticed it's happening.
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A tip off. They just let them know what was coming.
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Yeah, absolutely. The IDF completely failed to see this coming, right? But not the folks at the Ivy League universities who were ready and waiting.
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Yeah, absolutely ludicrous. I eagerly await this court case, I guess, to see what evidence they have of this. The evidence is going to be like someone had a Palestinian flag.
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Yeah, this is ludicrous. One of the reasons that maybe we're seeing this so much over the Palestine advocacy is that Hamas is a listed foreign terrorist organization.
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Many other groups, and lots of groups in that part of the world are, but it's just a bigger stick to wave, I guess, material aid, or that no one has been actually accused of material aid to a foreign terrorist organization, as far as I'm aware. But that is kind of the sort of stick that they're waving, right? That is the thing that they're alleging.
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There was no point at which the Biden administration really effusively said, this is protected First Amendment speech.
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We may not like it, but it is central to the Bill of Rights. It's central to what America is supposed to be about.
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Yeah, and I mean, in some cases, right, like I'm thinking of one of Columbia, like professors got away with things which are absolutely unacceptable, like 100%. in some violation of your agreement with the university as a member of the faculty, like doxing your students, photographing students without their consent, following students around, like absolutely unacceptable.
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Like in any other context that you would be immediately shit-canned for that. Like really, really, the only reason you can lose tenure seemingly is being a fucking creep to students or stealing a lot of money. And like universities did allow that for students more than a year under the Biden administration. And like we're seeing the consequences of that now.
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I mean, we don't know everything that they've said.
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Yeah, it doesn't matter. We are defending their right to engage in constitutionally protected speech.
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Exactly, and people are quick to call it out. Yeah, and the State Department of this country has called it out, right? Rightly. I don't agree with everything the State Department does, but I do agree with them on that. Like,
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If you find yourself having a discussion about this, I think almost everyone in America can find something that they disagree with the government on, or have disagreed with the government on. This hurts every single one of us. Everyone's right to freedom of speech is challenged when someone's right to freedom of speech is challenged. I think that is the way to approach this.
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It doesn't really matter If the people whose speech is being challenged right now, their speech is, if it's odious to us, if it's something that we don't agree with, like that isn't what's at stake. What's at stake is everyone's right to say everything without government consequences.
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And the priests who look for him after he dies when he comes back. this, guys.
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Yeah, yeah. I guess it kind of, I used to lecture, I still do lecture at university, actually, starting again next month. But like we pivoted towards like everything has to be STEM in education generally because- Right, because that'll make money or something. Yeah, I don't know why, because like Bill Gates make the line go up.
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Yeah. It's good when you see a 90-degree angle on the old stock market graph. That's when you know someone's really crushing it in the economic department.
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Yeah, you can't really vaccinate against stupid.
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Mayor endorses Reagan coin as the exclusive safe source of retirement savings.
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If it's not already a meme coin 10 minutes after this comes out.
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This is why we're launching Coolzone coin, guys.
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And yeah, we lost so much that has not just intangible value, like you say, but actual tangible value, very, very obvious value. But nonetheless, like- Like you say, it's not easy to put on a graph, so it disappears.
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We're going to be using this fucker for years. Yeah. At least something good came of this. Yeah. When you're struggling to get by with your family, just remember the song.
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I saw a good post. It was like, you don't have a trade deficit with your dentist. You just pay them to fix your teeth.
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It could happen here, the podcast that's happening right now. This is maybe the foremost of the Putting Things Back Together episodes. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. A guy who likes to put things together.
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Yeah, and you know, on the subject of putting things together, over the last, I don't even know, three, four weeks, the question I have been asked the most by everyone is, how do I start organizing? Mm-hmm. And, you know, the problem with how do I start organizing is that it's not a question that has clean or simple answers. Now, the most common answer you get is just join an org.
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And the problem is that most of the people who you are hearing this from are already in an org and want you to join their org.
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Yeah, that takes most of them, right? Now, we'll come back to orgs in a bit. But what I'll say about orgs is that, okay, if you know an organization in your area that you like and you think does good work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work instead of either infighting or talking about doing work, join them. It'll be good.
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But the important thing about organizations, and this is something we'll come back to later, the important thing about organizations is they have a lot of people. Yeah. And the thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah.
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But something I realized that the more I had these conversations, right? You know, I'm having it with friends. I'm having them with strangers. I'm having them with other organizers. And the more I had these conversations, the more I realized something sort of startling.
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You, the person listening to this, almost certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know that that's called organizing? Yeah, that's a very good point.
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I have encountered some of the most stunning organizing that I can't discuss the specifics of, but some of the best organizing I've ever encountered, I have ran into in the last three weeks from people who don't think that they're organizers and started talking to me about their stuff. I was like, what?
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People are winning victories that the hardcore committed organizers haven't been able to do in like 30 years. Yeah. And it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything.
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Yeah, and that's part of what I want to try to, the myth I want to try to puncture with this, because I think, particularly in the US, but this is true in a lot of places, there's this way in which the organizer, sort of TM, capital T, capital O, the organizer gets held up as this sort of, I guess, particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this guy with specialized knowledge.
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And that's just not true. This brings us to something that I think is actually really important, which is what even is organizing, right? And the answer is that most organizing is you get a group of people together, you get them to show up to something, and then you do something, right? And the thing about this, right, That's something all of you know how to do.
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If you can organize a dinner party, right? If you can get eight people to show up to a place to eat dinner, you can do this. It is largely the same skill sets. And all of the skill sets that make people good organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to, you know, work a job, right?
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You know, like one of the things that comes up a lot in this, which is less discussed and also kind of annoying, but, you know, you have to manage it, is that organizing is about people. Mm-hmm. And sometimes you have to, you know, you have to do things like you have to manage people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of you work jobs or have worked jobs, right?
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You have had to like deal with your boss being on one, right? You have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's just what it is.
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Yeah. And the way you do this is by building relationships with people. Right. And this isn't necessarily friendships, although that works. And like one of the easiest ways to start organizing is by getting all of your friends together because you're already friends. You have preexisting relationships and being like, OK, motherfuckers, we got to go. We got to go do something.
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And actually, I love that the first thing that you brought up was an admittedly sort of medium-ish scale lift version of this. But one of the very easiest things that you can do is you can just get food of some kind. You can either buy it or you can make it yourself. And you and a group of like eight people, not even eight people, you can do it with lower.
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I know people who've done this just solo, is that you can just go give food to people.
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Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here, too, which is that... You know, feeding people, it's a way to build relationships with people. And also, it's a really good way for people to get to know you in general and know that you are someone who will help them with things. Yeah. And from there, and this is a very common exception.
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I mean, this is, I literally had this conversation with one of my friends who's like an old school Food Not Bombs organizer. Food Not Bombs is a very, very, it's a cool organization. You can just like found a Food Not Bombs chapter online. They have like a couple of principles or you can just do your own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the largest anarchist project in the world.
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Because all it takes is you and like three other people and you just go feed people. But the thing is, from doing that, right, if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help them doing it. And this is a very good way to get into other kinds of organizing because suddenly you're
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Once you start building these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles and you know, you get involved in more and more things. Yeah. And that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But I want to go back to the beginnings of how so how do you get a group of people together to do a thing?
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And the answer is you kind of already know how to because you presumably at some point in your life have like organized a group of friends to go do something, right? Like you have gotten a group of people together to go accomplish a task.
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One way I've been thinking about it recently in my project is thinking about it as like putting together a heist crew. Yeah. Okay, I could vouch for this, right? The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling them individually, I'm putting together a team and I want you. It feels, you could just do it. There is nothing stopping you.
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Nothing in the world can stop you from just walking up to your friend and going, I'm putting together a team. And it feels exactly as good as you think it would for a heist movie. It rules. It's so fun. Amazing. Yeah, but this gets into also what kinds of people you want to do, right? Because obviously, you know, there's two vectors of this.
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There's, on the one hand, you have the aspect of, okay, who do you know, right? And a lot of organizing is just about... Here is a problem, and I know someone who has some sort of skill or resource that can help deal with it, and you put people in touch with each other, and that's organizing. So much organizing is literally just, hey, I have a broken part of my car.
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I know someone who's a car mechanic, right? And you put them in touch, and you have successfully organized people, and you have built relationships, and you have made... all of the sort of social web that creates organizing, you've made it stronger. Yeah.
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It also just feels good because, you know, and that's an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's a great way to sort of break the isolation we're all under.
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Yeah, and do you know what else will help you enter a situation with more hope?
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I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but we are not in control of the length of the ads. They just do it. We're sorry. Here's a really long period of ads. I'm so sorry. We are back. So I want to return to my heist career. I don't know, if you're a D&D person, the other way you can think about this is you're putting together like a Dungeons & Dragons party or like an RPG party.
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And the way you need to think about this is, okay, so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right? You've seen something in the world that is bad and you figure it, you go, okay, I can do this thing to solve it. And maybe that's, you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people. Maybe that's You know, I want to start I want to start doing tenants organizing.
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I want to start because my rent is too high. Right. People are getting evicted. I want to start doing like immigration defense. Yeah. And from there, you make a list. And that list is, you know, what you're interested in doing. And you try to match what things need to be done with people, you know, who have those skills.
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And this is where you really get into the heist things, right? Because everyone has their sort of like heist role. Now, obviously, part of this that you want is you want to create sort of balanced teams, right? You want people who have overlapping strengths so you don't just have only one person who can do a thing.
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And part of the way that successful organization works over time, and I mean, just how successful organizing works, is that eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job, which is to say you want your organization to function such that if you're not able to do it, or just you're gone, or you cycle on to a next thing, or any number of things that can happen, you want the organization to still be able to keep working without you, and you're trying to get people to be able to replace you as the person who's organizing the thing, right?
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Yeah. Yeah. And at this point, we can start talking about the kinds of skills that people need for organizing. And a lot of people, and this is unbelievably common when I talk to people and like, especially women and especially like a lot of non-binary people and trans people particularly have this is that people don't believe that they have any skills.
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And then you talk to them for five seconds, and they're like, well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right? I'm good with kids, which is a huge one. We'll get to you in a second, right? Or like, I don't know, I have a car. That's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things.
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I'm just going to go over lots of things that are actually really useful to get people a sense of the kinds of things that there are massive roles for. So one of the most important ones, and this is something you deliberately look for, you know, this is one of the things you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign.
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Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends, that is a staggeringly useful person. Because again, most organizing is just talking to people and building relationships. And, you know, one of the things you do when you're doing your sort of, they call it power mapping, but when you're figuring out
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how you're going to organize a workplace is you find the person who everyone likes and talks to and respects. And you talk to that person because that person can, you know, can sort of like organize people down the chain because they have, they have the relationships already. And also they're good. They'll be good at, you know, talking to new people and spreading the organization that way. Mm-hmm.
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And so like, you know, if you're just someone who's social or, and this is also very useful, if you have a friend who is very social, because I know a lot of us are not very social, but you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations and is charming and is good at making friendships.
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That person, unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill. There are also things like research, people who are good at, and I think people are much better at research than they think. To take like a tenants organizing example, right? One of the common things you have to do is find out stuff about a landlord, right? Yeah.
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And there's the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard. Also, I want to mention this, but like going to a courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies. Not that hard. It's not that hard. It's like you could just do it, right? It's not as hard as you think it is from someone saying it. But there's also even just easier things than that, right?
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That all of you probably already know how to do, which is just looking at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. Yeah. And this is very useful, yeah, for like union campaigns, you know, bosses.
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Do you want to explain what OSINT is and how that process works?
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Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for, I mean, there's so many use cases for this, right? There's, you know, there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with a local Nazi and you're trying to organize around, like, running them out, keeping people safe from them, and you can find information about them. But, I mean, it's useful for, I mean, cops who are beating people.
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It's useful for, like, politicians particularly. It can be very useful for, it's useful for landlords. This happens all the time. It can be very, very useful for bosses in union campaigns. Mm-hmm. unions have like teams of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff.
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But the thing is also, and this is something I don't think people understand those guys, the, like the, the people they're hiring to be researchers are just you, but they got a job being a researcher for a union. Like they have the same skills as you.
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They know how to like Google stuff and they know how to look through people's like dating profiles and like look through their, their Facebooks and their Instagrams. And like a big one, a big one that like, that the rich people especially do not think about is like Cash App and Venmo. Oh, Venmo is gold.
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Particularly Cash App because, yeah, yeah, because people just leave public transactions out there. Like that's how they got, what's his name, the congressional... Matt Gaetz. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile? I guess I'd call him the accused pedophile.
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And one of the ways they found that was that and also like paying for that, right? Yes. Which is rape, by the way. I want to be very clear about that. Like having sex with someone who is underage is rape. It is always rape. And the way people found that was that they just looked through like his Cash App history and they found all of these money transfers to people.
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This is all very, very simple stuff that's very, very useful organizing wise that you already know how to do.
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You know, if you're hearing some of these things and you think that you can figure out how to do this, that's also a huge skill. Finding people who are willing to learn things and willing to learn new skills is... is a huge benefit to organizers because this gives you a flexible person, right?
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It gives you someone you can flex into any of a bunch of roles that you need and also can pick up skills to learn things. Having a car and being able to drive, and I know a lot of you don't do this, but if you do do this, this is you immediately, even if you literally cannot contribute anything else to a project, being able to just drive a bunch of water to a place.
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Yeah, and like transport-based skills are also very useful. I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very, very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual aid projects. There's a lot of, you know, I mean, even things like setting up summer camps is a thing that like leftist groups do, right? And being able to hike, very good for that. It's good for things like wilderness rescue.
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There's a lot of, you know, James, like the work you do that has to do with like going and helping migrants like... being able to hike is staggeringly useful skill.
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And this is something that, you know, can scale up depending on how much skill you have, right? There's even just very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff like this. But, you know, like if you're a carpenter, right? If you're an electrician, You do some kind of trade work, right? You do plumbing, right? That is a thing that is massively useful to a lot of people.
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There's a lot of other kind of just skills that you have from your job that can be very useful. I mean, having someone to manage a spreadsheet. Oh, yeah. Yeah, is staggeringly useful. And another one that I think people don't understand that they really have, but like being able to set up a meeting, right? And like having a thing that lets you be like, okay, here's when everyone is free.
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Like you probably have to do this for your job or just for, you know, trying to get your friends to go even just like be on a call together or like go have food or like just do anything free. That is literally, genuinely one of the most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey, can you show up to this thing here?
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Yeah. And that is that is so much of just what organizing is. Can you be here at this time and then trying to figure out a time?
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So we're going to close out this sort of skill section with some, I think, just sort of like domestic skills that I don't think people realize are super useful. If you have a button maker, you are instantly the single most useful person in any organization. I love that.
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Or you can obtain a button maker. They're very easy to use, but if you have one or you know the person who has the button maker and suddenly you can just crank out buttons for every single event, they rule. Everyone loves them. It helps enormously. It's awesome.
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Yeah, and that's a huge part of what organizing is, right? And that goes into one of the things that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful is I mean, just like being nice to people, being kind to people and having people around who are good at like keeping groups together. Yeah.
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That's its own distinct kind of person is someone who can, you know, keep all of the people who are involved in a thing, enjoying being around each other. That's a kind of person who's very valuable. And it's something that you can look for, you know, and if that's not you, like you can, that's something you can, you know, find in your friends, you can find in the sort of the people around you.
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Yeah. Yeah, definitely. There's also something that I think you can tell when an organization is collapsing because this is like the first thing where the quality drops. Drawing and graphic design are very, very useful because a big part of what you do organizing is like you make a flyer and you put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to tell people that there's a thing happening. Yeah. And...
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Yeah, you know, and this is also something, you know, later on you might be making a social media presence, but just having good artists and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. And along this line, there's things like making music, and there's a bunch of different ways this can go.
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This can be an immediate thing where, you know, like you have people on a picket line, right? And everyone's singing songs, and this is great. We love this. Also, and this is another thing that you can be thinking about in terms of what skills you have and what things you can create, benefit shows. Oh, yeah.
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This has been a huge part of a lot of how some of the union stuff up here has been getting funded is by just having like punk benefit shows. Yeah. And if that's the thing that you can do, or you know people in bands, you know people who make music, you know people who just make stuff who are willing to contribute it to the cause, that's great.
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No, and this is something I've been starting to say more and more. If you need a theory-brained way to say this to someone who is a curmudgeon-y Marxist who hates fun, morale is a terrain of struggle. There's a reason why morale is one of the most important factors of military campaigns. You can't get people to do things if they're too depressed to do it. And being able to raise people's morale...
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It's this massive, if you want to go into technical language, it's a massive force multiplier, right? It makes everyone you have enormously more effective the better they feel about themselves and the better they feel about the situation they're in. And things like music, things like art, I mean, things like pulling pranks and
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If you are a good practical jokester, this is a staggeringly useful skill. Both, like, in terms of, you know, you need to be careful about whether you're playing your pranks on, like, other people in the org. But, like, you know, if you know how to just, like, pull pranks, this is a really, really useful thing in, like, union campaigns, in tenants organizing.
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There are a lot of people who you can prank, and it's very funny, and it lowers their morale, and it raises your morale. Yeah.
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And resisting fear is another huge aspect of this, right? A lot of the ways that people, like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people, this is why regimes like this spend a lot of effort trying to make people afraid, is that it makes it harder for you to act. And the things that make you less afraid, even if they sort of seem silly, are very, very important.
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And on sort of this note, one of the things that, as you've assembled your group of people, right? One of the things that's important to be able to sort of have a grasp on is that you can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital, the serious thing, the capital T organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together.
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There has to be actual like bonds formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help.
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And this is something that I think you can understand in your own life pretty easily where, okay, if a random person on the street walks up to you and tells you to go do something, are you going to do it? And it's like, no, why? No, probably not. Like, I don't know, maybe it's something like really sort of, hey, there's children in a burning building. We're going to run in and grab them.
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But like the odds are, no, you're going to ignore them. But if your friend goes and tells you to do the same thing and you've been friends with them for a long time and you really care about them, the odds of you doing it are much, much higher. And that's all organizing is. It's finding ways to you have a thing to do and you go talk to people and you ask if they want to help you do it. Yeah.
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And the stronger your relationships are, the more likely that is to happen. And that's why it's very important to do things like, you know, just like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh, yeah. And like, you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's good to, you know, you do like one capital O, capital T organizing thing, right? You get like a little bit of work done. Yeah.
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But mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever.
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Yeah. And just knowing how to cook. I realized I forgot to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a staggeringly useful skill. It's useful in literally every, literally any kind of organizing you can possibly be in. It is a thing. It is a skill that is useful in like, it's useful in war zones. It's useful. Like literally no matter what organization you are in, if you can cook for people.
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And you don't even, and you don't have to be like a good cook. It's just like, you can show up with food that you have made. You, you have instantly made this whole thing more successful.
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Unfortunately, speaking of capitalism or the state, we're taking our last ad break, would you? Hopefully it's rent-a-car. We are back. So I want to wrap things up by doing a couple of doing a few things. One, I want to talk about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going to have to do that are not very difficult, but are extremely important.
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And second, I want to talk a bit about how we did the first organizing project that I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing. Because it's really not that hard, right? If you just go do the thing, it will happen. And suddenly it ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert knowledge or this like, oh, this is a really difficult thing.
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If you just, I don't know, you go give food to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened. So there are things that are important to basic organizing stuff. Knowing how to book rooms from churches, from libraries, from whatever meeting spaces, and also knowing how to book rooms in places that accommodate disabilities.
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is a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings in places that are wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco. And you can avoid that very easily, but you have to put a little tiny bit of work into it.
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Yeah, you know, there's a range of people's schedules, getting people to show up for stuff. Things you can do to prepare if what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing, right? Getting together a bunch of people to do a thing that is technically forming an organization. Yeah.
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Now, how formal or informal you want it to be or just, you know, maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things you usually want. You want some kind of email so people can contact you. In tandem with the email, something that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not to think about is getting Google Voice. Yes.
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When Google Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people can call you and leave phone messages. I mean, everyone should just do this because this is the way that a lot of older people communicate, right? They won't send you an email, but they will leave you a voice message. And it's very, very useful for this.
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And childcare is something that's important. I did. I mean, a lot is probably too strong of a word, but like I did childcare when I was organizing and it wound up being really helpful because there's a lot of people with kids. And so, you know, there's a couple of ways that this could work. One is that, you know, you have you have everyone bring their kids. You have like a little space.
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You bring them like coloring stuff. You bring them toys. You bring them games and you just sort of watch everyone for a while.
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And as an organizing thing, again, if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful organizing skill. Yeah. Another way this stuff happens is, you know, everyone pulls together 10 bucks and you hire a babysitter. Yeah. For a bunch of kids. And that's a very useful organizing thing.
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Yeah. There are some other very basic things that I think are very important if you've never done this before. I'm going to talk a little bit about how you run a meeting. Yeah. And you would think that this doesn't matter until you watch a group of 100 people who don't know how to do this attempt to get anything done. And it just is a fiasco. And this is even true of sort of smaller groups. Yeah.
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So I'm going to give you how to run a meeting 101. Okay. Okay, a very common way to organize meetings that people use all over the world and it's very effective is you have two things. You have an agenda and you have a stack. And those are like the technical terms for them. The agenda, I mean, it's an agenda, right? You know what an agenda is. You put the things that you need to do on it.
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And another thing that's very helpful with these is, you know, you're going to be operating under time constraints because people don't have 45 hours to be in meetings. And my God, you don't want to be in a meeting for that long. Yeah.
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You know, knowing how long roughly you want to talk about these things is very, very useful and making sure that you're sort of moving the conversation through the stuff on the agenda because you have more stuff that you need to talk about. Yeah. All of this, again, like this all sounds very obvious. And again, you know how to do it. But until you've been in a room where people,
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have not realized they need to do this. You don't understand how important this stuff is.
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God, I have watched rooms full of like, these are like professional scientists, right? This is an entire room of 150 people with physics PhDs who don't know how to run a meeting. And it's a shit show. And all of this stuff could have been avoided with some very, very simple things. The other thing, and this is genuinely a piece of social technology, is the stack. It is very simple.
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You have one person who is the stack keeper, and when someone wants to talk, you have one person talking at a time, and when someone wants to talk, they raise their hand, or they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper, and that person writes their name down. And so you now have a list of who gets to talk in what order. And so you go down the list, and people get to say things.
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And, again, you know how to do this. This is not, like, a complicated thing. But, again, I have watched people who collectively have, like, more PhDs than, like, I earn money in a week. Like... Who know I cannot be able to figure this out. And you do. I believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener, that you can do this. Yeah, there's there's a very common some sometimes this is one person.
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Sometimes this is two people. A very common way to do it is to have a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator. And the facilitator's job is to, like, call on the people. and to try to move the conversation forward and make sure everyone's involved.
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And also, another important part of this, and this is, again, something you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have to get people like me to shut up. Your meetings can't just be one person giving a speech. You have to cut them the fuck off, and you have to get to the next person.
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Yeah, yeah. And finally, on this note, there's a lot of... If you want to go into more technical stuff, part of the things the facilitators use and part of...
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You know, the formal name for this is like the progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in a room is engaged and talking and that it's not just three people who talk all the time. Yeah.
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And, you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack, right, is you're trying to find the most marginalized people in the group, people who are least likely to speak, and you're trying to get them in first. Yeah. And sometimes this is literally just like, Hey, someone hasn't been talking in a meeting this whole time.
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And you can like ask them what they think about something or ask if they have anything to say. And a lot of times they will, but they just don't feel confident enough to say it. And this is, this is a very, very important skill for a facilitator or just even, you can just do this in a meeting too, right? Like,
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You can be the person who goes like, hey, do you have this person have anything to contribute? And that is an enormous thing. Sometimes it can be, you know, sometimes it can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very important thing because you're just losing out on people who have really, really valuable ideas and contributions and plans.
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And if you just let the same three people give speeches, you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful.
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Yeah. So I'm going to put all of this together briefly, and I'm going to run through basically how we started the first organizing project I ever did, which was a tenants' union in Chicago. Okay. So, and this is based on my memory. It's been a long time since I did this, but my basic memory of what we did was... Okay, so one of my friends is an experienced organizer. I was like a tiny baby, right?
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This was my first offline organizing project ever, right? I had no idea what I was doing. I still thought I was a guy, which, like, that's how much of a fiasco, like, little tiny baby Mia who doesn't know anything this was, you know. And so my friend talked to some people that he knew, and he knew that I was interested in getting involved in tenants organizing, and we, like, went to a cafe.
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And we sat down and we ate and we just talked about what we wanted to do, what our plans were, what things we needed to do to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff. And that's actually is something that's important, too, is part of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their actions. and think politically about their actions. Yeah.
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And that's something that's very useful. You also have to make sure that you're not forming a book club. Like, book clubs are fine, but you need to make sure your organizing group, if you're trying to do a thing, hasn't just become a book club. Yeah. But that's, you know, that was something that was very useful to us, and, you know, we started making a plan.
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And our plan was, okay, we made a bunch of flyers, and then we went out, and I did this, and I walked around through a bunch of streets, and we put them on light posts or whatever, and then we put them... Like, we hung them up in the buildings of tenants, you know, because you can just, like, walk up the stairs, right? And you just put them on the walls. And, you know, we had this flyer.
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This flyer had information. This flyer said, okay, we're starting a tenants union. If you have issues with your landlord or you want to talk about tenant stuff, like, come here at this time. We had an email. You can send us stuff. We had a phone number that you could call. Yeah. You know, and so, okay.
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And so parallel to this, we like, I forget if it was a church or if it was some building, some center or something. We booked a room. We were kind of lucky in that we had like local press people. Nice.
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Who we sort of knew, and this is another useful, like knowing a journalist can be a very useful skill because one way to get a project off the ground if you're trying to get to a bunch of people is by finding a journalist who is willing to cover it because, you know, we're founding like the first tenants union in this place, right? Yeah.
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And, you know, so we had media coverage and we got kind of screwed when this event eventually came together because there was like three feet of snow that night. Yeah. But people still came. Like, people still came in the blizzard. Like, a lot of people showed up for this. What are things we do? We also, like, you know, we just started talking to people, right?
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We started talking to tenants about their problems. We just, you know, we talked to our friends. We talked to the people they knew. We ended up talking to someone. You know, and this is the thing that just happens. As this spreads by word of mouth, right, people start contacting you. We ran into a really long-time tenants organizer, you know,
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in the city who had a bunch of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got their jobs by betraying the old tenants organizers. Right. And like, that's the other thing is, you know, another thing that happens in projects is you'll, you'll sometimes you'll just, you'll just pick up someone who's, you know, has been doing this since like the sixties. Yeah.
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And it rules because they have a wealth of experience and they, they want to go, they want to do stuff. we plotted out what we were going to do at our meeting. You know, we were going to do some political education. We were going to have a bunch of time for people to talk about stuff. And we were going to, you know, get people to understand what we were doing, how they could start organizing.
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And then we did it. And I, unfortunately, don't remember much of what we talked about because I was off in another room taking care of a bunch of people's kids, which was very nice. But I don't remember what we talked about. But like, you know, but like, all of those things, right? All of those steps from the start of organizing
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You get five of your friends to go eat dinner, and you talk about what you want to do through... Someone makes a flyer in, like, Microsoft or whatever. You make it in, like, PowerPoint. MSP. Publisher. What's the one I'm blanking... I haven't used it in so long. The one you make greeting cards in, I've realized...
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you're asking the wrong question there's like an actual program and I forgot what it is used to use it to make Christmas cards but like you know okay so we made a flyer and we walked around and put the flyers up and we made an email you know we got a space together we figured out what we wanted to do And then we did it. Yeah. And, you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right?
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But, like, we had started a thing. And you can do every single one of those steps. And if you can't personally do one of those steps, you can think of a person who you know, who you can bring in to help you do these things. Because organizing, you already fucking know how to do it. Yeah. You just have to go out there and do it. Yeah. You can have faith. Yeah. And this is what could happen here.
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Oh, boy. He's in a tiny submarine making his way to Cuba right now.
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Yeah, they didn't leave the building at that point, right? Because in the charging documents, then an ICE agent gets in the elevator with them and decides not to detain them at that point for some reason.
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Yeah. And like, just to, there's conceivably like a person listening who thinks that, I know these deportation things are okay. I don't know if you are. Fuck you. Why? This isn't for you. Go away. Yeah. We're not making a podcast for you.
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Even if you fucking like the deportation for whatever reason, you don't, You should be able to understand that doing this in courthouses is bad. Let's just take an example. If a woman who is undocumented is subject to domestic violence, going to testify in court could lead to her being deported. This is fucking bad.
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To being detained with people. If you believe in the judicial system, this stops it functioning.
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He's a 23-year-old guy coming to America. There's a high correlation with those people and people- Going to a gun range.
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The data sharing, I think, is something people should be aware of. That seems to be what I would imagine will be funding for more federal fusion centers and then equipping them with like homeland security assets, intelligence assets that are already used outside the US like that.
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Probably 50% of my time in the classroom right now is trying to explain to people where they shouldn't copy-paste the assignment into chat GPT. And like every year for the past three or four years, we have dealt with like bots, like students in my class who are not real people. I've dealt with more and more and more use of AI. It's from people who I think
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Like, the folks who are coming through my classroom now, like, many of their, like, high school years when they should have been getting good, solid, like, writing tuition were during COVID lockdowns, right? And so, like, I'm not entirely blaming, like, the folks coming through my class here, but it is... It's a fucked situation that's only getting worse.
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It's the... Like, I've been educating people for nearly two decades. Like, I've never... come across anything this bad. It is fundamentally damaging people's engagement with education and their ability to learn.
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Finding good solutions for that, writing assignments that AI can't write. It's not that hard. Before people come into my mentions saying, oh, you can use this to detect AI. I can detect it because the assignments it submits are shit. The problem is that people keep using it because, as Robert said, that they're running out of options, right?
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Yeah, I mean, sadly, like these federal and to an extent state level too, like diktats, I guess, do impact what you're supposed to put on your syllabus, right? Like, especially for like high school students, these can genuinely impact what high school teachers are supposed to teach. It changes a little bit. Like once you get to the university level,
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And I guess we'll see how this goes, but this genuinely could have a very damaging impact on, and it already has had a damaging impact on the US education system.
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We're going to get to the rest of the Clash catalog. We've got four years.
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Okay, so let's close out with immigration update. I'm just going to speedrun a few of these and we'll get a little deeper into some of them. The New York Times is reporting that once again the Trump administration has separated a child from their parents. Jesus fucking Christ. Yep.
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A federal court denied the government's motion to dismiss a First Amendment challenge to its policy of deporting pro-Palestine anti-genocide activists. activists. So that allows the case to go ahead, right? So it allows a First Amendment challenge to be mounted, which is a good thing, right?
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Given that their policy right now is a frontal assault on the First Amendment for people who are not citizens. In the Abrego Garcia case, both sides agreed to a seven-day pause in the discovery process after the passing of sealed motions. Then on Tuesday, Tuesday this week, the DOJ filed another sealed motion.
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We can speculate, and you will see people speculating if you go onto the Blue Sky or Twitter or whatever. I don't think it's beneficial to do that in this case, right? What we should be focusing on is that a man is in a prison camp who did nothing wrong. It doesn't matter. The justice system is continuing to fail him because he is still there, and so are hundreds of other people.
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The experimental, quote, national defense area in New Mexico. So we spoke last week about the Roosevelt Reservation, right? And they are starting this militarization of the Roosevelt Reservation with an area in New Mexico. And we've seen the first charges that are filed against migrants.
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According to Washington Post, at least 28 people have been charged or added to their charges a penalty for violation of security regulations. In addition to them being charged with entry without inspection, right? Hegseth visited the area this week and he talked about how they were going to post signage in English and Spanish to indicate that crossing the area would be trespassing on U.S.
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military property. Increasing numbers of migrants over the last few years have not spoken either of those languages. It doesn't seem to be something they've accounted for here. The U.S. attorney for New Mexico allegedly, according to the post, quote, can't wait to begin charging people who cross. So that's great.
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And so it does seem that they are using this, as we talked about a week or so ago, as a way to quickly charge and then deport people who are entering the United States between ports of entry.
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In other court news, a judge in Colorado placed a tentative restraining order on the use of the Alien Enemies Act there without 21 days of notice in a language the person understands, advising them of their right to bring a habeas challenge.
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So that means if someone is going to be removed under the AEA, they have to get three weeks of notice, and that notice has to advise them that they have the right to bring a challenge, as opposed to what they're doing right now, which is deporting people extremely quickly. And this was upheld by the 10th Circuit, so that's in place there.
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It'll be interesting to see how many of them are able to bring. Still, bringing a habeas challenge is complicated. It can be expensive and requires a lot of legal time. And I know most lawyers who work in immigration are overwhelmed currently. Yes.
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In California, a judge has ruled that CBP can't carry out warrantless stops and arrests after the ACLU filed a suit in response to the CBP sector's operation, Return to Sender, which happened in late 2024.
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So people, this is one of the things that people may have already forgotten about, but in December of 2024, CBP started detaining residents, migrants, laborers outside a Home Depot, a grocery store, and at road checkpoints up in California's Central Valley, right? People are thinking the Central Valley is a very long way from El Centro. What are they doing up there?
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I've included a map of Border Patrol sectors in the sources today so people can see. But although the El Centro sector only spans 71 miles of linear border, it goes a lot further north. So that's what they were doing up there. The judge in this case, who is U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer Thurston, said, quote, You just can't walk up to people with brown skin and say, give me your papers.
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There's some very good reporting on this in CalMatters, which I've also linked in the sources today. Notably, I looked through the order today, the court order, and one of the things we get is kind of a vision into how Border Patrol is expediting these deportations. So I'm going to quote from that order here.
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Quote, once Border Patrol agents transported the people they arrested to the El Centro station, they would, quote, extract voluntary departure agreements from as many people as possible without explaining the consequences. This is the plaintiff's contention, which is ACLU, right? So we've seen this a lot, right?
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Like we saw it in the case when they detained a citizen in Tucson not so long ago, that they're trying to get people to sign these documents. Sometimes you're not actually, in most cases, I believe, you're not actually signing a physical document.
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You're signing one of those little pressure pad screens, and you might be given an iPad to read the document on, but you don't get a chance to look and flick through the document and then sign a physical copy of the document, right? The injunction that happened here only applies in the Eastern District of California.
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The judge also ordered Border Patrol to record all arrests and stops and report them within 40 days. The government argued this would be too burdensome, which is odd because they're already required to do paperwork when they arrest or stop someone, right? But that was a rule by the judge.
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Despite this, though, the El Centro sector has still been carrying out operations way north of the land border, including recently outside a Home Depot in Pomona. So this is CBP, not ICE, right? People are familiar with that distinction. But at least in the Eastern District, they can't be stopping people now without warrants. So that's a good thing from the courts, I guess.
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Those are, I know we've got a long episode today. Those are the most important immigration things that I've come up with this week. I'm sure something will happen between us recording this coming out. But yeah, that's what I've got for you.
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And I think we saw in the Mahmoud Khalil case, the judge has ordered that New Jersey is a correct jurisdiction for that case to proceed. So that offers a possibility of the same, but it's essentially the same charge that both of them have, right? Or the same reasoning for trying to remove them. So hopefully we will see a similar result there.
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James Stout. Thanks for having me, Andrew. I'm excited about this one.
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Yeah, and I guess the more broad sphere of anarchist internationalism is something... I'm very interested in, right? Like we had an interview on the show maybe two weeks ago, a few weeks ago, and people hear this with people explicitly calling themselves internationalists fighting in Myanmar. Of course, I've spent time in Rojava and with internationalists there.
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So like internationalism is something I'm really interested in.
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Yeah, it's who counts as human, I guess, isn't it? Like... Which is pretty bleak.
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Yeah, yeah. I did see, um, it was like a pro-Trump account, I guess. Consciously or unconsciously paraphrasing Stalin this week, so that was great.
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It's like, how many divisions does the judge command? Which is a, I think, there might be a quote from Stalin. It's not a quote, it's a paraphrase, right? But in this case, it's a reference to the attempts by a district court judge in GC to block the rendition of people to El Salvador who were accused of being members of various gangs. Tren de Aragua and Mara Salvatrucha being the two main ones.
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The quote, how many divisions does the judge command? Let me... I'm pretty sure... How many divisions does the Pope command? That's right. So it's referencing this idea that might makes, right? And if you have the power of the state, then you're not accountable to... morally or even within the confines of the state, like separation of powers that we're supposed to have in the US, right?
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Like if you have the monopoly on coercive violence and you're no longer constrained by those things.
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Thank you. Yeah, yeah. There's obviously a lot more people than me doing it.
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Yeah, that's about it. It was really interesting to like, the moment I sort of became aware of libertarian left politics was in the early 2000s in the context of the movement against like the G8. As it was then. And at the time, it would be referred to in the legacy media as anti-globalization. Right. Which I don't think it ever was, right? By definition, I think it was very global.
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You had people from all around the world attending these protests and rallies and speeches and such. It was a very global movement. The problem was not with globalization, cosmopolitanism, internationalism. It was with the nature of neoliberal capitalist globalization, which let capital move and stop people from moving.
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Yeah, exactly. We let people take their money and employ people at lower wages. But God forbid those people ever want better for themselves or attempt to come somewhere where they can materially benefit themselves doing the same labor in a different nation, for instance.
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I think anyone, I see it a lot more from people who are not by any means radical or even on the left, like this, like within Europe, right? Within the Schengen area, which the UK has decided to remove itself from for reasons that are largely racism. Like we could move freely. When I grew up, my identity and experience was much more European than, than necessarily British, right?
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I could go for the weekend to Spain if I wanted to, or France and flights were cheap then. So it did. Like, I used to get on Friday night, take a train to Belgium, race my bike in Belgium and come back on Sunday night, like, very, very often. And, like, you see it here, too, in San Diego, where, like, the border is just a line and a delay.
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But for most people, like, we're a very binational community. Unfortunately, the one way that that manifests itself is that the cost of living in San Diego compared to the average wage is vastly disparate because we have this...
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Over pressure valve where people can't afford it here, they can live across the border where the cost of living is cheaper and that allows people to exploit working class people in both contexts, sadly.
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Yeah, and this comes after the British government attempting to deport Afro-Caribbean migrants who came as part of what we call the Windrush Generation, which is just one of the most disgusting and one of the most venal and pathetic things I've ever seen a government do. These people who the UK asked to come so that it could rebuild its economy after the Second World War.
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And then taking advantage of the fact that at that time there was no process for regularization and trying to deport these people who have lived their whole lives in the UK. It's just horrific.
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Yeah, yeah. It makes me really angry. Like, if we didn't have the Windrush generation, not that, like, you need, like, popular music to justify their existence. They're part of our community and they should be able to stay. But we wouldn't have punk music if we wouldn't have ska music. Like, so much of what is, like, integral.
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to even like quote unquote British culture actually came from these people because they are British and they belong there just as much as anyone else.
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I used to teach a class about music and colonial culture and colonialism, which is why that comes to mind.
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Yeah, it is just like, it's just the most clear and pathetic, like two level standard or whatever, you know, like it's, I mean, the UK has a very, I'm sorry, you didn't get to visit in one sense. And I'm sure we have lots of listeners who are in the UK. Every time I'm home, I feel this like profound sense of like post-colonial melancholy that
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the UK it's just sort of it's getting worse and worse and worse and the way Britain is responding is with our government blaming everyone else and like trying to strip the state for parts Brexit, austerity yeah like stealing everything they can just mess yeah yeah I think another frustration for me as well is that it's not so much the country itself although I would have loved to have visited like Scotland and you know Wales and that kind of thing but
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global order towards something as fundamental as the movement of people yeah it's it definitely we definitely are entering a like an era where things are becoming more closed off again like then then many of us grew up with right many of us you know i suppose most of my experience I can remember was being able to move freely through Europe. And that's not the case anymore for British citizens.
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So yeah, like it's getting visas and everything else is getting harder and harder to move around the world. And despite the internet somewhat connecting us, like our physical mobility is certainly much more limited.
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Both of those things are things that I have some knowledge about. I've been to Canada twice. That's good. A fellow Commonwealth member.
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Does Canada have the queen on the money? Queen is dead. Dead queen. Queen is dead.
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It's the United Kingdom, I think would be the institution that has the parliament. Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
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We're a continent-let, a mini-continent. That's what we're going for. We've left Europe. We're on our way to the Caribbean slowly. Oops.
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Yeah. Plus, plus, the postage is a very bad system. As electoral systems go, it leads to an awful lot of votes not counting for any representation. Like, for instance, the Garrison Davis party could have 51% of votes in all ridings. I could be there at 49 and I would get zero MPs. Based. Hey, sounds fine. Sounds fine by me. Garrison Davis in control.
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It wouldn't be such a, like, seen as such a humiliation for the Conservatives if it wasn't for all the polling until maybe like a couple of months ago, right?
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Yeah, like people. The thing is, the liberals won despite people having been pissed off with them for a long time and wanting something different.
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Yeah. Because people were just like mad at Trump.
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It's genuinely remarkable. Canada and the US have always had pretty good relations. Well, not always.
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That one time, yeah. That one time everyone fell out. With the White House, yeah. But things have improved since then. And, like, what's also remarkable is that this seems to be having an effect on Australia as well. I don't know if you've seen that. But, like, I think I saw an ad the other day that just said, Dutton wants to make Australia like America.
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it's pretty easy to find someone who wants to say what you want them to say. And often, you know, certainly some of the U S voter interviews have just been ridiculous, but like people saying, Oh, I just want to go back to how it was. Like, I want to go back to the, you know, the things that we're used to. And obviously Trump is threatening that for a lot of people and like in a very negative way.
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And so you, and as Garris has said, like the politics of personality is becoming more important. Like, voting specifically for individuals who they think will have, like, the negotiating ability or just bravery or, like, whatever it is to stand up to Trump, right?
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This is reminiscent of that, like, was it like Tim the Plumber shit from like the Bush-Palin election? Like the people I would want to have a beer with.
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Yeah, I think, like, I guess kind of to echo what a lot of those people said, like, in the US, we had Biden for four years, right? Essentially, because he was elected on not being Trump. And he was able to get away, well, he thought he could get away with more than he actually was able to get away with, as it turns out, electorally.
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But like, we were admonished to vote for the person who wasn't Trump, right? And what we got is open air detention for migrants, what we got is inflation, what we got is a genocide in Gaza, right? And this fear that a lot of other nations in the global north, right, like these neoliberal economies are feeling, is going to lead to lots of that, like, yes, we need a serious man.
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Like, we need a statesman to stand up to Trump. And that's going to reinforce a lot of that neoliberal orthodoxy. And that's going to make it very hard to make any meaningful progress through electoral politics in those countries for the next few years, which sucks.
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Yeah, they can't do what Biden did, which, like, I mean... Also, like, Carney isn't Biden.
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hopefully it does put an end to like this, this tendency among liberals, especially in the U S but also in the UK to like feel that they need to engage on right wing culture war talking points. And like, I guess, quote unquote, give some ground. Like we've seen that in the UK, right. With, with like really transphobic shit coming out of the labor party.
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And like, I would hope that like people can see the, where this leads to and that they're not going to vote for liberal politicians who are going to throw trans people under the bus. And that will be like a deciding factor in their support. But I guess that's just my hope right now.
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Yeah, yeah. Famously, no other regimes have harkened back to the classical era.
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I'm ready to report the news. I have never been more ready. Okay, this is going to be a long run because there was a raft of executive orders about the border in the... A flurry. A flurry, yeah. A sounder.
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We can't use a murder like crows, you know, the collective noun for crows. I mean, this is going to result in a murder. Yeah, well... So, let's start with a couple of the big ones, right? The first one was essentially revoking the right to asylum to anyone, quote, engaged in the invasion across the southern border, end quote.
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I want to highlight this invasion language because, obviously, I'd venture to say I've spent more time at the southern border of the United States than anyone in the executive branch and most people reporting on it, too. Mm-hmm. The idea of an invasion is laughable. I've been at the border twice since Trump was inaugurated. It's extremely quiet. I've never seen things more quiet.
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The only remarkable thing I saw was a pig, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, which some people have released, which now lives there. But I think it's being rehomed because of some other stuff that we will talk about later. But this invasion language is important because...
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It's used as a justification for some of the things that the executive branch is doing, which would otherwise seem to be outside of its authority. It's getting the national security and counterterrorism treatment. And anyone who's followed US politics for the last 20 years will understand that that means an effective waiver for all of your constitutional rights.
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And migrants have always been people who don't have rights. And this is just something that we're now seeing further pushed. So let's go through some of these orders aside from the effective asylum ban. He directed the United States Northern Command to quote-unquote seal the border. This has resulted in a deployment of about 1,600 United States troops.
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Most of them are military police or engineers. We've got Marines and we've got Army. In the San Diego sector, it's First Marines out of Pendleton. They're the ones that I've seen locally. He has directed...
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various government departments and the Attorney General to begin, quote, identifying countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries. This is effectively the travel ban that we saw in the first Trump administration or a version of that, right?
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It's a visa revocation or travel ban for people from certain countries. And we can guess what those countries will be. Last time they were, for the most part, majority Muslim countries, right? And we might well see that again. They have attempted to rescind birthright citizenship for children of undocumented families, right?
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This is one, if people go back to our, like, what can Trump do for mass deportations podcast that Robert, Sophie and I did sometime in November, I think. You'll get more information there on what is and what is not possible than we have time to go into today. But you're seeing a lot of the things that we talked about there coming into reality now, I guess.
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Specifically, the attempt to rescind birthright citizenship relies on the idea that they are not, quote unquote, under the jurisdiction thereof of the United States, which is how the 14th Amendment is phrased today.
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Generally, it is understood that people who are not considered to be under the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore don't get citizenship when they're born here are the children of diplomats because they have some diplomatic immunity, right? So they're not necessarily governed by United States laws in all areas.
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And that is why children of diplomats don't get citizenship even when they're born here. The Trump administration is arguing this applies to children of undocumented people as well. There are five court cases challenging that already, so they've got an uphill battle in the courts there. He has attempted to restart the Migrant Protection Protocol, MPP, better known as Remain in Mexico, right?
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The Migrant Protection Protocol requires migrants to wait in Mexico where their immigration cases are processed. In practice, it puts them in a lot of danger, right? Some of them are fleeing Mexico. Others are fleeing groups or states that can reach them in Mexico. So it leaves them in an unsafe place.
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The other thing he did while Trump was still in the inaugural ceremonies, literally minutes after taking office, was canceling CBP-1. CBP-1, there is a lot of misinformation about what CBP-1 is. CBP-1 is an application that allowed migrants to make an appointment, and they had to be either in southern border states of Mexico or north of Mexico City,
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They could then make an appointment to approach a United States port of entry, those are the places where you can enter across the land border, and make their case for their asylum, right, do their first asylum interview.
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Yeah, making a CBP-1 appointment is quote-unquote the right way.
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Yeah, you have a legal right to enter between ports of entry and still make an asylum claim, which is what we saw earlier. in the outdoor detention situation, right? But doing it via CBP1 is like the belt and braces correct way to do it. People who had appointments at noon Pacific on the day Trump was inaugurated saw those appointments canceled. They can't make appointments anymore. CBP1 is gone.
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Those people who have waited an average of nine months in dangerous places have wasted their time. They now don't have a pathway to asylum in this country. If you go back to my episodes on the Dalian Gap, you will hear some of those people, right? Those people are now stuck in Mexico without really any legal means to enter the United States and claim asylum.
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Trump has directed ICE to increase detention capacity. We spoke about this in our previous podcast. The amount of detention beds they would need to hit the 13 million deportations they talked about is immense. But one of the things they are doing is starting to house people. It's people whose countries won't accept them for deportation, right, which is a thing that has happened.
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The United States has begun using military aircraft for deportations in the last two weeks. I want to stress that this isn't a capacity issue. Biden deported 8,000 people in a month in the September to October of 2021. Trump is aiming to hit 5,000. Biden did it all with contractor flights. Trump is doing a lower number and using Air Force flights. This is not because he can't get the contractors.
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It's purely an aesthetic choice. And it's an aesthetic choice which has ruffled enough feathers in South and Central America that you have Honduras saying that they're going to revoke the U.S. mission to have a military base in Honduras as they mistreat migrants. We had Colombia briefly refusing U.S. military flights with deportees. Mexico doing the same. Briefly entering a trade war with Colombia.
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Yeah. The trade war with Colombia was averted when Colombia sent its own military plane to get these deportees. Yeah, Colombia caved immediately. Yeah, that they will continue to accept U.S. deportees, as they have done for a long time, right? Again, if you listen to my Darien series, you'll hear of some Colombian people being deported. We're now getting into things that are like more...
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These are orders that we haven't seen realized yet. One of them is he has talked about having the attorney general remove as far as possible federal funding from so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, right? These are normally places where local law enforcement will cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. ICE makes a majority of its detentions from people who are already detained.
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People who are like arrested by police. Yes, exactly. Yeah, for whatever. And then those police notify ICE and ICE come get them. We've seen a lot more of door-to-door ICE raids in the last two weeks, and they've been ramping up even really this week, but ever since Trump was inaugurated. We've seen ICE attempting to enter people's homes.
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Often they just have a warrant issued by themselves rather than a judicial warrant. So we've seen people refusing to let them into their homes. We've also seen the removal of the quote-unquote sensitive places doctrine. Sensitive places had previously been understood to be schools, churches, and hospitals. Now ICE is conducting quote-unquote enforcement operations in those places.
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Those are actually places, like the sensitive places doctrine had been in place for a long time. This wasn't like a Biden thing. This had been a long-term thing. So ICE is now, and we've seen immigration actions conducted at a church in Atlanta, for instance. We've seen, I think there were actually Secret Service agents who identified themselves as ICE agents at a school in Chicago.
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because a child had posted an anti-Trump video. And then I guess the last thing that we are seeing is this designation of organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations. This is an interesting one. We haven't really seen any action on this yet, but it's one of his executive orders in day one.
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In his first administration, he designated Iran's Quds Force as a foreign terrorist organization and then proceeded to kill their leader, right? So this FTO designation opens up the possibility of... A lot of like covert activity. I'm talking like CIA and like tier one special forces units.
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It also allows him to bring about economic sanctions on anyone materially supporting these organized crime organizations. In practice, that would encompass huge swaths of the Mexican economy, right? Because there are people... in agriculture, people in business who are paying protection or they're being extorted to pay money, right?
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And so in theory, those people are now materially benefiting a terrorist organization and they could be sanctioned as well. We will have to see how this plays out, I guess. And there's still, the directive was to look into and then name these groups.
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Yeah, Hexeth has talked about using special forces in Mexico. Oh, yes.
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Yeah, it's also in our Agenda 47 episodes if people want to go back there. Direct action raids in Mexico, drone warfare in Mexico. Obviously... Doing this without the permission of the Mexican government would be an act of war, right? Like killing foreign nationals without the permission of their government, conducting direct action raids, bombing another country. That is an act of war. The U.S.
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has had an FID, Foreign Internal Defense Mission, right, where it trains, advises and assists Mexican law enforcement and military for a long time. The guys who arrested El Chapo, for instance, were trained, I think, by MARSOC. But this has been happening for a long time. But to go from that to unsanctioned direct action would be a huge, huge step up.
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The only really analogous, directly analogous thing I can think of is Clinton with the Plan Colombia designating FARC as a foreign terrorist organization. But that was very much with the cooperation and support of the Colombian government. We're seeing a much more adversarial situation. between the United States and Mexico right now. The last thing I want to mention is this deployment.
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I'd spoken about it, but there are about 1,600 troops deployed right now. Biden deployed 1,500 troops in the summer of 2023. This is not a vastly different number They are doing different things. They seem to be chucking razor wire on top of the wall and being photographed. They're two major jobs at the moment. We will see how that plays out.
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Also, with reference to the military, Trump immediately cancelled the refugee resettlement program. This left people all over the world stranded, including Afghans, many of whom worked for the United States or are family members of US service people. The refugee resettlement program, people don't come to the southern border.
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They go do all their background things and then fly into the United States to different status to entering and claiming asylum. Those people, many of whom had booked flights, found their flights were cancelled. They're now stranded. Lots of them are stranded in Pakistan and facing immigration enforcement there in the case of the Afghans.
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So yeah, that is a speed run of all the terrible Trump immigration executive orders. We'll be reporting on this pretty extensively, so you can keep coming back for more. But another thing that we have more of right now is advertisements.
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I mean, Denali has been Denali for longer than America has existed. It's just... Right, right, right.
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Yes, yeah, yeah. You're not going to get much buy-in on that.
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Let me tell you, Panamanians, not stoked. I've been receiving communications from Panama where I was in September. They are burning American flags.
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Well, he did deregulate drilling in Alaska. Drill, baby, drill. I will be up there later this year talking to people in Alaska about drill, baby, drill. Very excited for that. Mm-hmm.
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I mean, look at Colombia, right? He immediately went to like 11 on the retaliation scale and effectively received concessions.
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Right. Yeah. And like Biden did significant legwork for detention that is cruel and unusual. Yes. With his legal defense and his establishment of outdoor detention for migrants since the end of Title 42 in May of 23. Mm hmm. And I think, like, we have to acknowledge that. I know people are very much into the, like, don't criticize the Dems right now.
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Like, if they don't change, if taking a fat L in what should have been one of the easiest elections of the century doesn't change them, then nothing will. And, like, we have to acknowledge that we are going to concentration camps quicker. I mean, there were foreign outlets that called the outdoor detention sites in Hakumba concentration camps. Yeah. Right? Because they sure as hell look like one.
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right now like yeah no no stop it yeah like we have you can trace a line from like Bosque Redondo right where they sent the Navajo people right Bosque Redondo is a great thing to bring yeah yes and you can trace a direct line from that to the outdoor detention camps we saw in 2023 where people were forced to remain in one place without food water or shelter and people died as a result of that last year two years ago
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And like from there to Guantanamo Bay, it is not a massive leap. And yeah, just being like, we don't have Auschwitz. It's just asinine. Like if you, if you can't acknowledge that America has a long history of doing this and you really need to examine your own preconceptions before like speaking for others. Yep. All right.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, I think he returned to the UK, right?
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, I spoke to him a little bit back then, just via direct message. But I think at that time, whatever his agreement was, it seems like there was a component of it that at least he didn't want to talk about it in public, which is fine. Everyone has a right to do that, and he should do what's best for himself. But maybe I'll try and follow up with him again now, see if he wants to speak.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Because he seems to have, like, he's been, of all of these people, the one who's been able to make the most statements and control his narrative to some degree.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
I think he proactively filed that suit, right? Yes. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, I mean, that's leaving it at the complete discretion of the officer, right?
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, the anti-American ideologies, again, it's just vastly broad, right?
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah. And I'm guessing this will be either like a literal control F of whatever they can find of your public social media or some kind of AI system. That's what it seems to be, right?
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, it seems like he was identified through his wife, right?
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Okay, yeah. It would be interesting to know, are they searching... just through F1 visa databases?
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Right, and then being like, can we deport? He's not a citizen, so yes, basically.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, it's children, presumably, therefore also citizens.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah. And I think that's kind of what they're going for. A lot of this is... It's like the politics of owning the libs, right? It's like the politics of being angry at your niece and nephew on Facebook and wanting to humiliate them. It's not a particularly coherent policy other than the Palestine protests made a lot of people on the right mad and they don't like migrants and now they're using...
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
this obscure legal provision as a cudgel against everything they dislike.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, I mean, again, like writing an op-ed is like as central to the First Amendment as things can be, right?
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
If we're talking about this liberal idea of the marketplace of ideas, the way that ideas enter the marketplace, you will find nothing more amenable to liberalism than writing an op-ed in your campus newspaper. That is the most well-behaved, straight down the middle, constitutionally protected way to engage in anti-genocide activism, pro-Palestine activism. In a sense,
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
This one is particularly disturbing. Like it's a frontal assault on First Amendment rights for non-citizens is what it is.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
People will be familiar with, I don't know if it's Bataar or Bataar, but like you probably have seen videos of them on campus trying to hand pages to people. Pagers.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Like if, if you're going to come onto a campus and make a fucking bomb threat and accuse someone else of terrorism, uh, I mean, the hypocrisy is kind of the point, but, uh,
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, right. Like mocking this attack, which killed children, which crippled people. It's just disgusting. It's just abhorrent. They seem to get a lot of attention online because they do the thing where they go up to people and say deliberately provocative things and then film their reactions, right? They're kind of IRL trolling.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
It could be his ethnic origin, right? Yeah, it could be his name, right? Yeah, but we should explain the status thing a bit more for people who aren't familiar. Sure. Your status is when you're in good standing with the university. So normally that means you need to be enrolled in 12 credits per year. You might be on semesters, you might be on quarters. I don't think it hugely matters.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
There's a minimum course load. It may be different for different systems. I don't know. You'd also need to be in good standing in terms of not late on your fees, your tuition fees, that kind of stuff. Not in any... you haven't been expelled or excluded from the university for any actions that you've taken, that kind of thing. It means you are currently a student at the university, basically.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
The only time this normally affects international students I'm aware of, as a person who now teaches students, is they can't drop below a certain course load when otherwise they may wish to drop below a certain course load to either focus on the They might have like a research position. They might be doing other stuff on campus, like TAing, right?
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Sometimes that TAing counts towards their course load. Sometimes it doesn't, but it can affect things like that. But generally it would be the university that would update that status, right? That would notify US Customs and Immigration if somebody fell out of compliance with that. If I'm hearing right, that doesn't seem like that's what happened here, right?
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, like I don't quite know how that works in terms of like, are ICE supposed to be able to? I don't think it hugely matters at this point.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, and they don't have to remove him for that reason. But yeah, in this case, I guess they're going for something else.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, yeah. Like everyone else here, he hadn't done anything that would, under normal circumstances, lead to him having any interactions with USCIS.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, I mean, none of what they've said is wrong. It's kind of what you can expect from the university, the best you can expect from the university, really. It's like, hey, we've noticed it's happening.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
They just let them know what was coming. Completely absurd. Yeah, absolutely. Like the IDF completely failed to see this coming, right? But not the folks at the Ivy League universities who were ready and waiting.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, absolutely ludicrous. I eagerly await this court case, I guess, to see what evidence they have of this. The evidence is going to be like someone had a Palestinian flag.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, this is ludicrous. One of the reasons that maybe we're seeing this so much over the Palestine advocacy is that Hamas is a listed foreign terrorist organization.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Many other groups, and lots of groups in that part of the world are, but it's just a bigger stick to wave, I guess, material aid, or that no one has been actually accused of material aid to a foreign terrorist organization, as far as I'm aware. But that is kind of the sort of stick that they're waving, right? That is the thing that they're alleging.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
There was no point at which the Biden administration really like effusively said, this is protected First Amendment speech. Yeah. We may not like it, but it is central to the Bill of Rights. It's central to what America is supposed to be about.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, and I mean, in some cases, right, like I'm thinking of one of Columbia, like professors got away with things which are absolutely unacceptable, like 100%. in some violation of your agreement with the university as a member of the faculty, like doxing your students, photographing students without their consent, following students around, like absolutely unacceptable.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Like in any other context that you would be immediately shit-canned for that. Like really, really, the only reason you can lose tenure seemingly is being a fucking creep to students or stealing a lot of money. And like universities did allow that for students more than a year under the Biden administration. And like we're seeing the consequences of that now.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
I mean, we don't know everything that they've said.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, it doesn't matter. We are defending their right to engage in constitutionally protected speech.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
I mean, it does happen in Russia, right? Exactly. And people are quick to call it out. Yeah, yeah. And the State Department of this country has called it out, right? Like, rightly. I don't agree with everything the State Department does, but I do agree with them on that. Like, yeah. And I think this is like, I don't know, if you find yourself having a discussion about this,
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
I think almost everyone in America can find something that they disagree with the government on or have disagreed with the government on. This hurts every single one of us. Everyone's right to freedom of speech is challenged when someone's right to freedom of speech is challenged. I think that is the way to approach this. It doesn't really matter...
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
If the people whose speech is being challenged right now, if it's odious to us, if it's something that we don't agree with, that isn't what's at stake. What's at stake is everyone's right to say everything without government consequences.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah. That was the one that like, I remember at the time you, you and I were discussing this, like in our group chat and we were trying to work out like how the secretary of state could be revoking a green card. Like, yeah.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
And I think you found this or you found it somewhere in, in the, the, the Trump administration has been very, very good at finding very obscure pieces of law that it can wield against migrants. Right. Like no one in the, 2016 would have foreseen what they did with Title 42, which is a public health law. And they're doing something similar here.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
I mean, they may have spent the last four years looking for these things, especially when the campus protests began. But this is entirely unprecedented as far as I'm aware.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Self-deportation is definitely one of their goals. They talked about it before Trump even came into power. That's what we're seeing a lot of these spectacle raids and spectacle deportations.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, exactly. The desire is that people leave. Is she a Canadian citizen?
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
I wonder what her immigration status is in Canada now.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
Yeah, that would be interesting, too, to see what Canada can offer her. I don't think the Trump administration would go after having her extradited back because, as you say, she's not accused of a crime and they've kind of got what they wanted. It would be interesting to follow that.
Behind the Bastards
How ICE Is Targeting Students for Deportation
With the other cases of quote-unquote self-deportation, one of the issues is people have had their passports seized and held, like lots of Venezuelan migrants, so they actually can't, or it would be very difficult for them to just get on a flight and leave.