Speaker 1: Cool Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
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Speaker 3: Welcome to It could happen here, It is continuing to
Speaker 3: happen stonks, but we will discuss the stonks probably late
Speaker 3: later this week. This episode's going to be much more
Speaker 3: fun because I am I am pleased to have returning
Speaker 3: to the show Elle Yeerman, writer, comedian, end creator and
Speaker 3: host of Going Down with Elle Yeerman, a trends political
Speaker 3: comedy news show. As well as joining us here is
Speaker 3: teen Vogue's news and politics editor Lex mcminnimon. Welcome both
Speaker 3: of you. Hi, Hi, Thanks, So we're going to be
Speaker 3: talking about the recent Teen Vogue special issue cover story
Speaker 3: on Vivian Wilson, the estranged daughter of Elon musk Ella.
Speaker 3: You put together a fantastic piece last month, and this
Speaker 3: is what we're gonna discuss how this article came together.
Speaker 3: That viral photo shoot in Japan, which is fantastic. All
Speaker 3: the styling in that shoot was lovely. But I think this,
Speaker 3: this particular piece was really relevant for like trans people,
Speaker 3: and also relevant because of the way like global politics
Speaker 3: has been shaken up by a few specific people, and
Speaker 3: focusing in on Vivian I think was really special. So
Speaker 3: I guess I would first like to hear about, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: like the broad strokes of how this first came together.
Speaker 4: From our perspective.
Speaker 5: You know, I don't know that like everyone is aware
Speaker 5: of this, and certainly I don't know that all of
Speaker 5: my friends in our various trans subcultures know this. But
Speaker 5: at Team Vague, we've been covering like transpolitics and trans
Speaker 5: writes for a long time, like far before I got here,
Speaker 5: But I've been here for almost four years, and it's
Speaker 5: been a pretty big part of my beat, in part
Speaker 5: because of it being like a very unavoidable thing within
Speaker 5: following like US state legislatures and then obviously like at
Speaker 5: the federal level, which has only intensified more and more
Speaker 5: in the last year. And so that's like one aspect
Speaker 5: of it. But at the same time, we love young
Speaker 5: people that shit post, and so Vivian had been on
Speaker 5: our radar for a while totally. I also think people
Speaker 5: are maybe more aware of this whole, like Comrade teen
Speaker 5: Vogue vibe of like, we're really interested in talking to
Speaker 5: people that have a clear political leaning, that have like
Speaker 5: a sense of how they see themselves in the world
Speaker 5: in a political context, and Vivian sort of came right
Speaker 5: out the gate as someone who was really eager to
Speaker 5: share her thoughts on these things. So from last summer,
Speaker 5: like within like a month of when Vivian was kind
Speaker 5: of introduced to the world through her father talking about
Speaker 5: her on Jordan Peterson's podcast, we were trying to get
Speaker 5: in touch with her and with something I was talking
Speaker 5: a lot about within the office, and we didn't really
Speaker 5: know what to do because she was just kind of
Speaker 5: she just kind of emerged from from nowhere onto the Internet.
Speaker 5: And so I had been talking about it a lot,
Speaker 5: including with Ella because we talk a lot. And so
Speaker 5: Ella find eventually revealed like, oh that's Umphy, I am.
Speaker 1: Utuls with Indian, not Umfi.
Speaker 4: You you did kind of I mean, are you.
Speaker 3: Threads Umfi's what what are you? Instagram Instagram nice.
Speaker 1: I would never use threads.
Speaker 4: My god, so over to you.
Speaker 5: That's my that's my teen Vogue intro. But Ella, if
Speaker 5: you want to yeah, no.
Speaker 3: Because yeah, I am interested in contacting Vivian because she
Speaker 3: was certainly getting like an unhinged number of media requests
Speaker 3: starting last summer.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's that's true, right, So she did that one
Speaker 6: NBC interview after after Elon went on, Peterson and I
Speaker 6: do not work at teen Vogue, but Lex and I
Speaker 6: know each other because you're contractually obligated to know everyone
Speaker 6: else who's part of the you know, deep State illuminati
Speaker 6: doing trans Politics online club.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I was just gonna say trans people Club then deep State.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the council exactly. We're all established members, right, we
Speaker 1: swear allegiance once a year. There's a whole ritual. Don't
Speaker 1: worry about it.
Speaker 6: So when I got in touch with Vivian last fall,
Speaker 6: which I got in touch with her initially to see
Speaker 6: if she would come on Going Down, and I reached
Speaker 6: out to her and I said, do you want to
Speaker 6: come on my live comedy show? And she said no,
Speaker 6: I'm actually not sure live comedy is for me. I'm
Speaker 6: a little worried. I'm not funny enough. And since then
Speaker 6: she has changed her mind. She's told me repeatedly that
Speaker 6: she regrets saying that to me, that she has decided
Speaker 6: she actually is funnier than everyone else alive, all of
Speaker 6: the things that a prolific twenty year old poster might say.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 6: But so I got in touch with her and then
Speaker 6: she said no, and I was like, okay, well, at
Speaker 6: least I have this mutual now. And then a few
Speaker 6: months later I mentioned Alex that I gotten in touch
Speaker 6: with her, and Lex said, okay, so she doesn't want
Speaker 6: to do a live comedy show that nobody that nobody knows.
Speaker 4: About does not want to do a live comedy show.
Speaker 6: What if instead we did a really fancy photo shoot
Speaker 6: and put her in teen Vogue, a legacy journalism magazine.
Speaker 6: And I said, honestly, I think that's a better sales pitch,
Speaker 6: and it was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it is. It is really compelling. I mean
Speaker 3: that the photo shoot pulls a whole bunch of people in.
Speaker 3: It's certainly if I was in Vivian's position, that would
Speaker 3: be interesting to me. And it does help spread around,
Speaker 3: like like so much of the piece is talking about,
Speaker 3: like the struggles of living as a young trans person
Speaker 3: in America, and the fact that you can use a
Speaker 3: teen Vogue photo shoot to like spread writing about that
Speaker 3: around the internet is like super super useful.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean I just want to like second what
Speaker 6: lexis to say, I think the work teen Vogue has
Speaker 6: been doing is really important. Like so many I mean Garrison,
Speaker 6: you know, like so much trans media is like independently
Speaker 6: distributed and like dy and I love us for that,
Speaker 6: but it is always really heartening to see like mainstream
Speaker 6: media institutions uplift trans voices the way teen Vogue has
Speaker 6: been doing.
Speaker 5: And it's also like Conde Nast as an institution, which
Speaker 5: is like teen Vogue's parent company is only one of
Speaker 5: multiple media conglomerates that will very proudly like use trans
Speaker 5: people in a representative way, like and like sell magazine
Speaker 5: covers with trans people on it. Like you could think
Speaker 5: of Hunter Shaffer, for example, she'd been on the cover
Speaker 5: of several vogues, but at the same time, Hunter Shaffer
Speaker 5: also received a misgendering passport after the Trump admins. So like,
Speaker 5: I think that if legacy media is unwilling to connect
Speaker 5: the dots between like profiting off of like the aesthetics
Speaker 5: of trans people, but not actually like talking about the
Speaker 5: political underpinnings of like why trans people are even able
Speaker 5: to be visible at this time and like what the
Speaker 5: you know trapdoors Termaligne calls it of trans visibility means
Speaker 5: then it's like why even do this work in the
Speaker 5: first place. So Vivian was like a really great opportunity
Speaker 5: for us to like build on, Like we've done several photoshoots,
Speaker 5: particularly with trans women because I trans girls at teen Vogue,
Speaker 5: because we like feel very strong. Only a Allen makes
Speaker 5: this point in the piece that like the way that
Speaker 5: transfem people are like objectified and commodified, and also like
Speaker 5: the target of such extreme bittrial is something it feels
Speaker 5: really important to take a stand against. It just felt
Speaker 5: like doing this with Vivian, who's so high profile but
Speaker 5: also hadn't had the opportunity yet to take control of
Speaker 5: her own narrative in the public eye, and with this
Speaker 5: being her second ever interview for a sever photo shoot,
Speaker 5: like it just felt like a really big opportunity that was.
Speaker 4: Worth using as a big swing, you know.
Speaker 3: No, like she is at like this center of this
Speaker 3: like matrix of trans commodification in so many ways like
Speaker 3: like this this special issue was the first time Vivian
Speaker 3: was really like framed as the subject matter of like
Speaker 3: any piece and like framed as her own person. For
Speaker 3: the entirety of her adult life, she's been used as
Speaker 3: this rhetorical object, like both by her dad, but as
Speaker 3: well as like by people on the left who's like
Speaker 3: objectified Vivian to use her as a bludgeon against her father.
Speaker 3: And Yeah, like people are very willing to like commodify
Speaker 3: or or use trans people in certain ways, but to
Speaker 3: have like trans people writing about other trans people in
Speaker 3: a way that frames them as a subject matter is
Speaker 3: so important.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think Vivian.
Speaker 6: One of the things that drew me to the story
Speaker 6: in the first place is that Vivian's sort of case
Speaker 6: is such an interesting microcosm of the transform experience as
Speaker 6: a whole. Yeah, She's incredibly talked about for something that
Speaker 6: is not her fault and not under her control at all,
Speaker 6: in the same way that right now on the national stage,
Speaker 6: like transfemininity and transit is at large, but specifically transfemininity
Speaker 6: is the like problem to be spoken about, especially conservatives,
Speaker 6: like Butler calls it a phantasm like gender nonsense.
Speaker 1: I read that book.
Speaker 4: You have my copy.
Speaker 1: I think I'm almost certain I do that.
Speaker 3: That makes sense.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that makes almost certainly. That's the trouble with gender, right,
Speaker 6: gender trouble. Yeah, no, no, that's the original book.
Speaker 4: It's she was afraid of gender. Thank you very much.
Speaker 6: I have your book, but I haven't looked at it
Speaker 6: in a long time except for to remember the word phantasm.
Speaker 6: And so, yeah, I totally agree with what Lex said
Speaker 6: of it's really exciting to sort of like take her
Speaker 6: out of being used as a prop and give her
Speaker 6: own voice back. I think one of the most exciting
Speaker 6: moments in the piece to me is the moment where
Speaker 6: I ask her about sort of the allegations that Elan
Speaker 6: like shifted right word because of her, and she pushes
Speaker 6: back against sort of that narrative very strongly. And I
Speaker 6: think that is the way we've seen her being used
Speaker 6: both on the left and the right as sort of
Speaker 6: a this is why he's doing this. It's clearly the
Speaker 6: fact that he has this twenty year old trans girl,
Speaker 6: and she's like, actually, that's a crazy thing to say
Speaker 6: about it about a twenty year old well.
Speaker 3: And especially to counter the narrative of her life. That's
Speaker 3: been driven by Walter Isaacson's twenty twenty three biography, which
Speaker 3: is like so hostile and to have like a prominent,
Speaker 3: like a prominent biography like that, like trying to make
Speaker 3: a narrative out of out of your existence with something
Speaker 3: you have like no like input in no control, and
Speaker 3: it's like so demeaning. It's also like a very like
Speaker 3: you know, trans misogyny moment as well, Like, yeah, it
Speaker 3: is interesting how how much of like Vivian is so relatable,
Speaker 3: Like like a lot of trans people have, shall I say,
Speaker 3: challenging relationships with their parents, maybe not to this extreme,
Speaker 3: but but sometimes frankly right, like there's a lot of
Speaker 3: people are forced to cut off contact with their family.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, I've just been thinking a lot about this because
Speaker 5: you know, Trump released yet another executive order. I think
Speaker 5: that this one was today basically trying to codify allowing
Speaker 5: trans youth to access gender affirming care as abuse quote unquote,
Speaker 5: which is like something that the Republican Party has been
Speaker 5: flagging for months that they were going to do at
Speaker 5: the federal level as well. It has already shown up
Speaker 5: in the rhetoric around transit healthcare, which obviously is going
Speaker 5: to be used as justification for targeting trans adults access
Speaker 5: to health care and something that you know, I'm the
Speaker 5: only transperson on my team. Something that kept coming up
Speaker 5: in Vivian's story was that it was almost like anyone
Speaker 5: could relate to this, because anyone can relate to having
Speaker 5: like a shitty parent, an abusive parent, like a bad dad, whatever.
Speaker 5: And so I think there's an extent to which this
Speaker 5: story has like a lot of value in like forcing
Speaker 5: CIS people to really be confronted with the fact that
Speaker 5: like how trans youth are treated like objectively is like abusive.
Speaker 5: And it's not the access to healthcare that is the abuse.
Speaker 5: It's like the way that they're dismissed. It's the way
Speaker 5: they're belittled, It's the way they can't even be like
Speaker 5: trusting their own parents to be looking out for them,
Speaker 5: and to the extent that they have to push themselves
Speaker 5: out into the world to clarify that point. So like
Speaker 5: that's one aspect of it. I totally agree with what
Speaker 5: you were both saying that it is like a microcosm
Speaker 5: of the trans experience. But I do think there's like
Speaker 5: this other valance for like allowing her to like control
Speaker 5: how this is being perceived or received sort of by
Speaker 5: CIS media and like sis like the CIS political spirit,
Speaker 5: which is like how trans people are just getting shoved
Speaker 5: into that over and over and over again with very
Speaker 5: little context. Felt like a really valuable thing to be
Speaker 5: able to do give and how like, frankly, so much
Speaker 5: of my coverage right now just feels like it's like
Speaker 5: trying to raise attention to the fact that, like, these
Speaker 5: are kids, these are young people, Like everyone should be
Speaker 5: able to relate to a young person saying like I
Speaker 5: have a bad parent and that sucks and is a
Speaker 5: formative thing for me, Like that is something that like
Speaker 5: other children are afforded the ability to do, and like
Speaker 5: we just don't let trans kids like have that as
Speaker 5: something that's part of their truth when it's such a
Speaker 5: key part of like growing up trans in a hostile household.
Speaker 3: And something like Vivian talked about at length, is like,
Speaker 3: as someone who did transition as a minor, there's all
Speaker 3: this like villainization around, whether that's whether that's puberty suppressing hormones,
Speaker 3: whether that's having HRT, and how like the landscape that
Speaker 3: like me, like her Ella and like a lot of
Speaker 3: people that our age like came out of is not
Speaker 3: going to exist for the next generation of like trans kids,
Speaker 3: or at least it's going to be very different, and
Speaker 3: we need to do everything we can to stop it
Speaker 3: from being as bad as what it looks like it's
Speaker 3: going to be. And Vivian like talked about this at
Speaker 3: length of the piece, with the restriction of puberty blockers,
Speaker 3: all this stuff in schools and this complete demonization of
Speaker 3: not just the healthcare but also like the people they
Speaker 3: like trans kids as this own demon of America that's
Speaker 3: that's like invading or is like threatening. So I think
Speaker 3: it is really cool a Vivian do talk about that
Speaker 3: at length in this special teen Vogue Cool photo Shoot article.
Speaker 6: I will say, I think, yeah, I think it's so
Speaker 6: important that that's talked about, and I'm glad she did.
Speaker 6: I'm also really glad as someone who covers like trans
Speaker 6: politics and news all the time, it was such a
Speaker 6: breath of fresh air to be able to frame this
Speaker 6: piece as like a look into what like the joy
Speaker 6: of transition looks like and looking at like yea, how
Speaker 6: transition has brought her closer to the life she wants
Speaker 6: to be living. And I'm not that old, but like
Speaker 6: talking to someone who's a few years younger than me
Speaker 6: and who transitioned at an earlier stage in life gave
Speaker 6: me like such a beautiful vision of what the future
Speaker 6: could look like if we if we fix some of
Speaker 6: the bullshit that's going on these days. All Right, I'm
Speaker 6: being clowned on in the chat. I'm not that much
Speaker 6: older than Vivian, is what I meant. And now I'm
Speaker 6: peaking my microphone and the podcast is going to sound terrible.
Speaker 6: Look what you said. I'm not that much older than Vivian,
Speaker 6: but she started transitioning at a much younger stage of
Speaker 6: life than me, and to see like what that has
Speaker 6: done for her, and like the way, I don't know,
Speaker 6: it was just really beautiful to talk to like a
Speaker 6: twenty year old girl and be like, oh, you're like
Speaker 6: trans but it's like it's like not actually that big
Speaker 6: of a deal, and it.
Speaker 5: Like it also like confirms a thing that like, I mean,
Speaker 5: I made a joke about this earlier with like we
Speaker 5: love young people that ship post, but like I think
Speaker 5: so much of liberal and right wing talking points about
Speaker 5: like young people in general like sees them as so
Speaker 5: humorless like they are like cancel culture, like are nonsense,
Speaker 5: whereas Vivian is so funny, Like we actually struggled to
Speaker 5: cut jokes out of the piece, like Ellen and Ellen
Speaker 5: could tell you we went back and forth for hours
Speaker 5: about so many jokes that did not and just one
Speaker 5: liner is like she's so quickie and so like so funny.
Speaker 5: She's extremely funny.
Speaker 3: A very dense style of humor, as in like there's
Speaker 3: a lot of there's a lot packed in like almost
Speaker 3: every other sentence.
Speaker 6: Alex and I are both some of the fastest talking
Speaker 6: people I know, and I would put Vivian in that
Speaker 6: same group of people who can keep up with us
Speaker 6: or out talk me.
Speaker 7: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: That comes across in the writing too, like the way
Speaker 3: that the interview is transcribed, you can you can read
Speaker 3: that pace into the piece.
Speaker 1: She's awesome.
Speaker 6: So much of our editing was just like sort of
Speaker 6: taking out yeah, like little jokes or like she's twenty
Speaker 6: so she is swearing all the time, or dude.
Speaker 5: The amount of cursing I much love. But also that
Speaker 5: was the editing process for this was much less like
Speaker 5: stress and we're just like how many.
Speaker 4: F bombs are we keeping today? Hearthand emojis.
Speaker 6: The way Edits goes is you send in a piece
Speaker 6: and the editors give you like change some stuff, and
Speaker 6: then I get to look at a new draft and
Speaker 6: I get be like, hey, uh, why do you change that?
Speaker 6: And then we go back and forth over and over
Speaker 6: again until eventually it's not up to me anymore. But
Speaker 6: at one point I did have to I did have
Speaker 6: to say, actually, femboy is one word correct. It's different
Speaker 6: from feme space boy and space something specific.
Speaker 1: And I felt really like I was bringing.
Speaker 5: I'd like to clarify I was not involved in the
Speaker 5: grammatical edit of that.
Speaker 4: There were multiple editors who was hands.
Speaker 3: Ut as a subject matter expert.
Speaker 4: What can I say?
Speaker 6: And then excuse me? Kande nasked, theemboy means something.
Speaker 8: No.
Speaker 3: I am so happy that you have someone like Vivian
Speaker 3: who's able to appreciate drag way more than what I'm
Speaker 3: ever like able to even though I can like appreciate
Speaker 3: it like on like a conceptual level. Having this like
Speaker 3: complete sincere like engrossment in it is so is so
Speaker 3: thrilling because a significant portion of this piece is talking
Speaker 3: about how much Vivian loves trag.
Speaker 1: Oh my God and he.
Speaker 5: Much Ellen knows nothing about drag also, so that was
Speaker 5: like a really good combo for all of us.
Speaker 7: That was I. I. Yeah.
Speaker 6: I sat down with her and we started talking very
Speaker 6: very quickly. She brought up RuPaul's drag Race, and I
Speaker 6: would just like she kept calling it RPDR, which I'm pretty.
Speaker 1: Sure I've I've told you even get into this my.
Speaker 6: Sources, Garrison, is that something you call drag race? Have
Speaker 6: you heard RPDR? Said out loud, I've never heard this.
Speaker 4: No, Okay, okay, whatever. What I'm want.
Speaker 5: What I'm here to say is as someone who actually
Speaker 5: watches drag Race, Ella, that is actually not that uncommon
Speaker 5: to refer to it that way.
Speaker 4: But you know, we had.
Speaker 5: Two different roles as the two trans people whose brains
Speaker 5: were wiped by the story. Ella's job was to actually
Speaker 5: write the Peace of Mind was to interface with Viviana.
Speaker 1: About drag Race.
Speaker 5: So clearly it all came together the way it was
Speaker 5: supposed to do.
Speaker 6: I get at the very end of our first call,
Speaker 6: I said, you, is there anything else you want to say?
Speaker 6: And she talked to me for another fifteen minutes about
Speaker 6: about drag Race, specifically classic rules.
Speaker 1: Classic rules yeah.
Speaker 6: Like I know, I'm I like sort of about your
Speaker 6: dad or about like any of the important things. We
Speaker 6: talked about this as you're like, no, so in season
Speaker 6: fifteen of Drag Race that rules.
Speaker 1: That's so cool, she's the best.
Speaker 3: But no, I it's it's so funny that you you
Speaker 3: talk about how like there's this there's this caricature of
Speaker 3: like humorless trans people, which is very funny because like
Speaker 3: all of like the biggest shit posters online right now
Speaker 3: are mostly trans women. The trans comedy scene is huge,
Speaker 3: and like this is something that Ivian talks about, like
Speaker 3: spending the COVID lockdown and like online queer communities and
Speaker 3: how how like the the like drama and like conflict
Speaker 3: in those spaces trains you for how to be like
Speaker 3: relief like funny and snappy. How fighting with with like
Speaker 3: like fellow queer teenagers like like prepared you for for that,
Speaker 3: which has like certainly been like my experience.
Speaker 6: I mean there's a reason you can sort of tell,
Speaker 6: and I'm sure this applies to beyond trans people, but
Speaker 6: you can sort of how which social media you grew
Speaker 6: up on, like were if you were a totally tumbler
Speaker 6: teen or a Reddit teen or a four chanteen you
Speaker 6: can tell because of your style of fighting and making
Speaker 6: jokes changes because it's it's it's such a deeply.
Speaker 1: Formative part of it.
Speaker 6: And I I don't know what online forums the right
Speaker 6: were on growing up, but they were the wrong ones.
Speaker 3: Well a lot of four chan as well.
Speaker 1: Sure, just the not funny parts not funny.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, I'm still trying to untrain my like defensive way
Speaker 3: of writing that I learned on Twitter, because it's a
Speaker 3: horrible style.
Speaker 6: Where right you have to like have like twelve prefaces exactly. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: your article one. I am not a racist.
Speaker 3: Waffle pancaking the entire time, which is it's weird because
Speaker 3: like it's like Twitter does have its own style of
Speaker 3: humor which I also like also like picked up on,
Speaker 3: but it also has that defensive style of writing which
Speaker 3: which needs to get untrained. But it is, you know,
Speaker 3: a work, a work in progress.
Speaker 6: I think it's downstream of Tumblr. I I read to
Speaker 6: remain wrong on my stance that the Tumblr porn band
Speaker 6: ruined the Internet.
Speaker 3: No, absolutely absolutely, I guess I'd like to talk a
Speaker 3: little bit more about like the structure of the piece
Speaker 3: and how it succeeded so much in putting Vivian as
Speaker 3: a subject right because the first half is written in
Speaker 3: more of like a traditional like article format to give
Speaker 3: context and frame Vivian as like a person. But then
Speaker 3: halfway through it switches to like a back and forth interview,
Speaker 3: which allows Vivian to just speak for herself. And I
Speaker 3: think having both of those and not just one or
Speaker 3: the other strengthens the piece entirely, and strengthens like being
Speaker 3: able to see Vivian as a complete person because like,
Speaker 3: as I'm as, I'm getting the context like for her
Speaker 3: life and the political situation in the first half. Then
Speaker 3: I get to see how much she reminds me of
Speaker 3: like regular twenty something trans girls, and you know, like
Speaker 3: half of the friends I have. Though I do disagree
Speaker 3: on team Peta. Pete's a bitch boy. It's team Gale
Speaker 3: all the way.
Speaker 1: Thank you contrary.
Speaker 3: All right, all right, all right, I've excited that we
Speaker 3: we agree on this, But those those sorts of like
Speaker 3: offhand comments and likes, there's other things that like give
Speaker 3: you like a you know, a view into into this person.
Speaker 3: It's so useful to have, like, you know, like at
Speaker 3: least fIF fifty percent of the piece be this like
Speaker 3: just straight interview.
Speaker 5: We unsurprisingly talked a lot about how we were going
Speaker 5: to structure this piece and partially landed on Q and
Speaker 5: A format for like we knew this was going to
Speaker 5: be a behemoth, like no matter how we tackled it,
Speaker 5: given the subject matter, and then ultimately how long the
Speaker 5: transcript was, and you know, just like it. There were
Speaker 5: many aspects of this that like we were like, okay,
Speaker 5: how do we how do we do this in a
Speaker 5: way that's going to read well to people, because something
Speaker 5: we also think about a lot is like accessibility, Like
Speaker 5: young people famously hate reading. Now we but we wanted
Speaker 5: this to actually be something that like a young person
Speaker 5: could sit down, dash through, still get some like you know,
Speaker 5: historical political context out of and still come away being
Speaker 5: like haha, team PETA, team Gail or whatever the hell
Speaker 5: right and so.
Speaker 3: And maybe have like subway surfers on like another phone
Speaker 3: at the same time.
Speaker 5: Exactly, yes, exactly exactly, And then I would say the
Speaker 5: I want ella to talk about the transcript and like
Speaker 5: interview stuff, but like the intro I think is probably
Speaker 5: where I spent the most of my time editing this piece,
Speaker 5: and like adding stuff and a lot of adding stuff.
Speaker 5: It ballooned like we wanted this to be lauch shorter
Speaker 5: than it was, and then it just kept feeling like
Speaker 5: there were more pieces to really tie it together. But
Speaker 5: I would say, like the reason that was the case
Speaker 5: is because it was a really hard line to walk
Speaker 5: to acknowledge that, like people would be clicking on this
Speaker 5: in part because of Elon, but that we wanted to
Speaker 5: like trick them into coming for Elon but staying for
Speaker 5: Vivie and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like it's it's not about Elon, nor like should
Speaker 3: it be.
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, and so so like like Ellen and I
Speaker 5: had a zoom with Vivian and what November was the
Speaker 5: first one or was that?
Speaker 9: I think?
Speaker 5: So yeah, November December to just like so she could
Speaker 5: kind of get our vibe and just kind of suss
Speaker 5: out if she was willing to consider this at all.
Speaker 5: And one of the earliest things she said was like,
Speaker 5: I don't really want to talk about him. I don't
Speaker 5: want this to be about him, And we were really
Speaker 5: down for that, like we don't think that her story
Speaker 5: is about him. Ultimately, it felt really important, and it
Speaker 5: was also challenging to make sure that we felt like
Speaker 5: people were coming away with it from this without like
Speaker 5: a garbled interpretation of what the stakes were for her
Speaker 5: to be coming forward like we wanted it to be,
Speaker 5: especially right now while so much of mainstream media is
Speaker 5: really fumbling their coverage of like politics at this moment,
Speaker 5: it felt really important to be like.
Speaker 3: Super trans politics, especially.
Speaker 5: Especially and then also just like all of it. So
Speaker 5: like all of it and then especially trans politics.
Speaker 4: We just really wanted the intro to be.
Speaker 5: Like as strong and also like informative and also like
Speaker 5: kind of funny and also like just all the things
Speaker 5: because and I would say that probably took the most time.
Speaker 6: Correct me if I'm wrong, but yeah, I mean I
Speaker 6: think the intro started off as probably an eighth of
Speaker 6: the piece, and yeah, now is closer to a half
Speaker 6: of the piece.
Speaker 1: And there were so many hands on it. I wrote like.
Speaker 6: Sort of a very loose like skeleton of what that
Speaker 6: intro ended up being.
Speaker 5: And I would say the most like it wasn't that
Speaker 5: many people adding text.
Speaker 1: It was mostly means, it was mostly legs.
Speaker 6: But part of that is because I mean everything like said,
Speaker 6: but also that Musk is currently a high level government
Speaker 6: official and is in the news all the time. I mean,
Speaker 6: when we started writing, the intro said that Musk had
Speaker 6: thirteen children, and then we had to update that twice.
Speaker 3: New kid just dropped.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Over the edit.
Speaker 6: Process, things wouldn't stop happening, and then also Vivian wouldn't
Speaker 6: stop posting, which was a little bit frustrating.
Speaker 1: At one point I.
Speaker 6: Had to DM or I said, Hey, if you get
Speaker 6: any more information, can you please just tell me and
Speaker 6: not post it on threads And she said, oh, totally.
Speaker 4: That girl as a poster post hard hard for sure, But.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, I think I really love the balance
Speaker 6: the piece found it in the end. Early on, when
Speaker 6: we were talking about structure, I think I pushed for
Speaker 6: more of a standard profile, mostly because you know, then
Speaker 6: I get to show off my writing skills more and
Speaker 6: I liked to write. But after talking to Vivian, even
Speaker 6: after our early pre interview, but certainly after the full
Speaker 6: interview where I sat with her for a very long
Speaker 6: time over zoom in a fourteen hour time difference, I
Speaker 6: immediate it was like, no, if I write this out,
Speaker 6: it's going to be mostly dialogue anyway, because her voice
Speaker 6: she has, she's so voicy, and it's so fun to
Speaker 6: keep it in that voice.
Speaker 3: She's a very very distinctive voice.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, and so do you, Ella, and so like
Speaker 5: it's like that's really the strength of the piece in
Speaker 5: so many ways, is that like people come away with it.
Speaker 5: It doesn't feel like you're in the background or like
Speaker 5: hiding behind something when you're writing this piece, Like it
Speaker 5: very much feels like the success of it is because you.
Speaker 1: Are a part of it.
Speaker 5: And The New York Times reported that this was Ella's
Speaker 5: first che lance article. So I just wanted to add that,
Speaker 5: you know, Ella kinda did her did her big one
Speaker 5: with her first article.
Speaker 6: Thanks all, this is now everything that big one. The
Speaker 6: next fifteen years will be underwhelming.
Speaker 3: It's all downstream from here.
Speaker 6: Woo, it's not true. Baron Trump, I'm coming for you.
Speaker 3: You're gonna re enroll at NYU exactly.
Speaker 1: They'll never see me coming.
Speaker 3: I am waiting for him to get fixed by like
Speaker 3: a bisexual she They it's gotta happen, right, No, I
Speaker 3: don't think so.
Speaker 6: I don't know Obama was like into a bisexual she
Speaker 6: they And he's still yeah, bombed the Middle East or whatever.
Speaker 3: But no, like like mainstream coverage is just completely failure
Speaker 3: and trans people right now. I got so mad at
Speaker 3: a Washington Post article yesterday that I that I skeedd
Speaker 3: about it something I never do.
Speaker 4: Was it the sports one yes, role playing.
Speaker 3: After President Donald Trump band transgender our girls from competing
Speaker 3: in girls' sports, Virginia high schooler joins the boys team.
Speaker 3: She wasn't going to let the president's executive order stop her.
Speaker 3: Framed is like a feel good story, fucking infuriating.
Speaker 5: And it's so like transparent like and I again, I
Speaker 5: feel like I keep.
Speaker 4: Bringing the system into the space. I'm really sorry.
Speaker 5: One of my like CIS colleagues was like, this is disgusting.
Speaker 5: Why did they write this like a feel good story?
Speaker 5: And it's like, my thing is is if, like, if
Speaker 5: anyone with some amount of criticals thinking skills can see
Speaker 5: exactly through what you're doing, why even do it? Like
Speaker 5: it's so transparent like the way that that story was written,
Speaker 5: because it gets clicked. I mean, I guess we you
Speaker 5: know what got clicks was Vivian So I actually don't
Speaker 5: know about.
Speaker 1: That, that's true and say that and say that I
Speaker 1: did and I will.
Speaker 3: Do you want to talk about the length of the transcript,
Speaker 3: because I am curious how long Vivian talked for.
Speaker 1: Am I am I allowed to say that?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think I'm legally Yeah, say, can we explain why?
Speaker 5: Uh, when we're not recording, I can explain why.
Speaker 6: Okay, I think I got to say most of what
Speaker 6: I want to say. I mean, I think Vivian's just
Speaker 6: like a delightful person, and I'm really excited for her
Speaker 6: that she gets her moment in the spotlight and that
Speaker 6: hopefully this like helps her build herself as a public
Speaker 6: figure outside of and away from Elon Musk, And she
Speaker 6: has all of these aspirations to perform and model, and
Speaker 6: I hope she gets to do Her and a Winter
Speaker 6: Drag one day soon.
Speaker 3: I love that movie.
Speaker 1: It's a great movie.
Speaker 3: Hi Anna wind tour Lex, do you want to plug
Speaker 3: your little outlet? Was this teen Vogue?
Speaker 10: Oh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't know if anyone's heard. Actually so frequently
Speaker 5: people haven't heard of it, So it's actually fine. Yes,
Speaker 5: you can find us at teen vague dot com. We
Speaker 5: have no paywall, we have a fact checking department. Most
Speaker 5: of mainstream media is not doing it like us, if
Speaker 5: you consider those two points.
Speaker 3: So yeah, labor politics, especially teen Vogue's been phenomenal the
Speaker 3: past like eight years.
Speaker 1: Yep, so true.
Speaker 4: If you love Kim Kelly, she is our labor columnist,
Speaker 4: so comes through.
Speaker 5: I also do some of our labor coverage, but like
Speaker 5: definitely not to day than Kim does. Yeah, I'm on
Speaker 5: the things. I'm on the socials. Yeah, that's it. That's
Speaker 5: all I had, Little Ella.
Speaker 3: Where can people find you on the worldwide Web?
Speaker 6: I'm on on Instagram and actually everything app as Ella
Speaker 6: Yurman or Ella dot Yerman on Instagram.
Speaker 3: We're gonna get you on Blue Sky one of these days. Sky,
Speaker 3: we can fix the vibes. I'm on Blue Sky. I
Speaker 3: just forget about how to do it?
Speaker 1: Can we?
Speaker 6: I suffered through twenty twelve tumbler once. I don't need
Speaker 6: to do it again.
Speaker 4: That is so not the vibe. I wish it were.
Speaker 4: But it's not on Blue Sky.
Speaker 3: No, it's it's more twenty nineteen Twitter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 6: You can also find my show at Going Down TV
Speaker 6: on Instagram, Going Down the Show on YouTube, Going Down
Speaker 6: Show on Patreon.
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 6: I make a transgender daily show. You guys know about it.
Speaker 6: New studio looks great, it's so fun. We got to
Speaker 6: get you on there. We got to get you to
Speaker 6: come hang out.
Speaker 3: Okay, well I will. I will be in town shortly
Speaker 3: so hell yeah.
Speaker 9: Oh fun.
Speaker 4: I go to the taping so I can crash.
Speaker 1: That'll be fun. You should do it? Hell yeah?
Speaker 4: Are we did we do it?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 10: We're done.
Speaker 2: Hello everybody. It could happen here or here. And this
Speaker 2: is Robert Evans. We're a show about things falling apart,
Speaker 2: and boy howdy, they sure seem to be doing just that,
Speaker 2: as they always are and have been four years.
Speaker 11: You know.
Speaker 2: In fact, anticipation of the end times I think is
Speaker 2: probably close to the number one hobby in the United
Speaker 2: States at this point. I suspect if you counted up
Speaker 2: the dollar value of all the collapse themed movies, books,
Speaker 2: prepping gear, monetize social media content, and of course religious
Speaker 2: sects in the country, the apocalypse would be one of
Speaker 2: our big industries. Doomsday prepping alone was an almost one
Speaker 2: point two billion dollar business last year, and it's expected
Speaker 2: to more than double by twenty thirty. Our popular fiction
Speaker 2: can't even imagine a better future right now. Ninety percent
Speaker 2: of modern future media takes place during or shortly after
Speaker 2: an apocalypse. The odd exception today like Bong Juno's recent
Speaker 2: Mickey seventeen is so rooted in trump'st politics that we
Speaker 2: only catch occasional glimpses of anything beyond it. In other words,
Speaker 2: in our fiction, there's no respite from the news. We
Speaker 2: watch a slow motion, self inflicted global economic collapse and
Speaker 2: then relax with shows about mushroom zombies or literal wage
Speaker 2: slaves created by mind control surgery. In other words, it's
Speaker 2: bleak out there. Tomorrow could be the day Trump invokes
Speaker 2: the Insurrection Act or uses the military to occupy Greenland,
Speaker 2: or like one of a dozen equivalent horrors. We all
Speaker 2: just know our coming in some form or another, even
Speaker 2: if no one can say win. And I'm not here
Speaker 2: today to tell you how we're gonna get past all
Speaker 2: of that or fix it, because I don't know. So
Speaker 2: today I'm just here as a merchant of hope. My
Speaker 2: job is to convince you that our species will someday
Speaker 2: get past our bullshit and perhaps even lay claim to
Speaker 2: the stars. And no Elon Musk isn't going to have
Speaker 2: anything to do with that. But in order to convince
Speaker 2: you of all this, I'm going to have to talk
Speaker 2: about a movie. It's called Roar, and it is technically
Speaker 2: a nineteen eighty one comedy adventure film about an American naturalist.
Speaker 2: This guy lives on a nature preserve in Tanzania filled
Speaker 2: with big cats. His family comes to visit at the
Speaker 2: same time as a grant committee shows up to evaluate
Speaker 2: his project, which has an unclear goal. He's apparently just
Speaker 2: trying to prove people and giant cats from all over
Speaker 2: the world can live together, which the movie shows they can't.
Speaker 2: It's really immaterial what happens in the plot. All I
Speaker 2: can tell you is how Wikipedia describes it. I've watched
Speaker 2: this movie dozens of times, and I have very little
Speaker 2: idea what it's supposed to be about. This is because
Speaker 2: in any given scene, the script is only ever a
Speaker 2: vague suggestion, as each scene starts with actors trying to
Speaker 2: read lines and evolves into those same actors trying to
Speaker 2: survive while being mauled by dozens of lions, tigers, and panthers.
Speaker 2: I should probably step back a minute to explain some things.
Speaker 2: Roar is largely the brainchild of Tippy Hedron and her
Speaker 2: husband Noel Marshall. If you're on the younger side, Tippy
Speaker 2: Hedron was the female lead in a little movie called
Speaker 2: The Birds It is a horror film and also an
Speaker 2: early apocalypse flick by Alfred Hitchcock. It's often credited with
Speaker 2: inventing modern horror cinema. Hitchcock himself sexually and psychologically harassed Hedron,
Speaker 2: but his worst actions came during a crucial scene where
Speaker 2: Hedron was attacked by a flock of birds. Up to
Speaker 2: the day of filming, Hitchcock had assured Tippy the birds
Speaker 2: used in this scene would be animatronic, but when the
Speaker 2: time came to shoot it, she spent five days having
Speaker 2: hundreds of live birds hurled at her in huge numbers
Speaker 2: by the crew. Hedron later described it as brutal, ugly,
Speaker 2: and relentless. Carrie Grant, her host star, told her she
Speaker 2: was the bravest woman he'd ever seen. Now, whatever other
Speaker 2: impacts this had on Tippy, she has no discernible fear
Speaker 2: of animals after this point in her life, though she
Speaker 2: really should. Her husband, Noel is a bit more of
Speaker 2: a mystery to me. He was an agent, a producer,
Speaker 2: a film investor, and a serial entrepreneur whose best financial
Speaker 2: decision was putting money mind what became The Exorcist. In
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine, he and Hedron were in mosam Beaque
Speaker 2: while she starred in the film Satan's Harvest, about which
Speaker 2: less is said the better. This is only relevant because
Speaker 2: during their time in Africa, they observed a pride of
Speaker 2: lions lounging about an abandoned home, and this gave them
Speaker 2: an idea. They wanted to make a movie about poaching
Speaker 2: and conservation, something that could use the power of film
Speaker 2: to save these majestic creatures being threatened by humanity. All
Speaker 2: four of their children agreed to star in it and
Speaker 2: to help with production, but there were immediate snags. They
Speaker 2: wanted the film to be set in a big cat sanctuary,
Speaker 2: but actual lion tamers warned them that it was flat
Speaker 2: out impossible to keep so many large fee lines together safely.
Speaker 2: This would eventually prove to have been very accurate advice.
Speaker 2: After a while, one tamer introduced them to their first
Speaker 2: tame lion, and, for reasons known only to God, he
Speaker 2: suggested to this traumatized movie star and her family of
Speaker 2: charmingly deranged Californians that they could just get their own
Speaker 2: big cats and train them by adopting animals confiscated from
Speaker 2: their previous owners, generally sketchy zoos and circuses. So a
Speaker 2: lot of these cats had never known the wild, and
Speaker 2: they'd often been badly mistreated given them. This was the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies. We must assume that some had been confiscated
Speaker 2: property of coke dealers. Tippy and Noll had no professional
Speaker 2: or legal qualifications to care for dozens of big cats
Speaker 2: when the authorities eventually found out there was trouble, although
Speaker 2: since Hedrid and Marshall were rich, they bought their way
Speaker 2: out of said trouble by purchasing a rural compound and
Speaker 2: having a house built specifically for they and their dozens
Speaker 2: of apex predators to live. While lions had inspired the
Speaker 2: initial vision, the compound in California soon filmed with big
Speaker 2: adopted cats of every kind. Tippy and her husband took
Speaker 2: them in and raised them among and around their own children,
Speaker 2: who came to see the animals as something between pets
Speaker 2: and family. When they actually started filming the movie that
Speaker 2: became Roar. Making any kind of movie had become secondary
Speaker 2: to the act of caring for these many, many giant,
Speaker 2: traumatized kiddies. As I noted earlier, the plot to Roar
Speaker 2: is kind of immaterial. I've never watched it with the
Speaker 2: sound on. I can tell you, though, that none of
Speaker 2: these cats were trained in any really meaningful way, which
Speaker 2: meant that every scene devolved into the same spectacle. The casts,
Speaker 2: surrounded by dozens of giant cats, stumbled through a few
Speaker 2: lines before one or all of the cats began to
Speaker 2: bite and claw them, at which point each scene becomes
Speaker 2: about surviving from one moment to the next. Roar took
Speaker 2: more than five years to film in more than a
Speaker 2: decade to actually make. No cats were harmed during the
Speaker 2: production of this movie, but more humans were injured than
Speaker 2: in any other film production on record. Of the one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty or so cast and crew on Roar,
Speaker 2: more than one hundred suffer significant injury, often more than once.
Speaker 2: Jan Debaut, the cinematographer, had his scalp ripped off by
Speaker 2: a lion, requiring one hundred and twenty stitches. He went
Speaker 2: on to make Speed and Twister. Melanie Griffith, Tippy's daughter
Speaker 2: and a future star herself, left production at one point
Speaker 2: because she was worried a big cat might rip her
Speaker 2: face off. She ultimately returned and immediately had a large
Speaker 2: chuntic of her face ripped off. Requiring extensive surgery. This
Speaker 2: all sounds horrifying and impossible to justify. But before you
Speaker 2: make a final judgment, I want to remind you of
Speaker 2: two things. One, for all its horrors and severe injuries,
Speaker 2: fewer people were killed on the set of War than
Speaker 2: in Alec Baldwin's recent film Rust. The second thing that
Speaker 2: you must remember is that Roar is a work of
Speaker 2: art on the level of Moby Dick. If you watch
Speaker 2: it enough, among the right people and in the right headspace,
Speaker 2: you can come to a deeper understanding of every facet
Speaker 2: of human existence. I've taken a lot out of it
Speaker 2: over the years. Recently it has convinced me that we
Speaker 2: will one day get over our bullshit and escape the
Speaker 2: present hell that our species seems mired in. I know
Speaker 2: that doesn't make much sense now, but give me some time.
Speaker 2: I'll explain why. But first it's probably time for some ats.
Speaker 2: We're back, and the first thing I need you to
Speaker 2: understand about all of these fucking cats is that in
Speaker 2: every mauling caught on tape, and there are dozens of them,
Speaker 2: I see no anger or malice in the actions of
Speaker 2: these cats. I don't even see hunger. It's clear to me,
Speaker 2: as a cat owner, that the cats didn't see these people,
Speaker 2: Tippy and her family and the cast and crew, as
Speaker 2: prey or as a threat. If anything, they saw them
Speaker 2: as fellow big cats, cousins and close kin who they
Speaker 2: extend to kind of familiarity and perhaps even a kind
Speaker 2: of love that, since they are cats, is expressed primarily
Speaker 2: by batting at them with claws that hit like bowie
Speaker 2: knives embedded in the hood of a speeding camri. If
Speaker 2: you have cats of your own, you understand now. Given
Speaker 2: that nearly every person on this film was badly injured,
Speaker 2: including Tippy who got gang green from infected cat wounds,
Speaker 2: and all of her children, you might feel inclined to
Speaker 2: judge who are a knol or both of them for
Speaker 2: risking their kids lives to make this insane movie. I
Speaker 2: understand the impulse, but I believe it to be an error.
Speaker 2: The first thing you need to see to understand the
Speaker 2: deeper dynamics going on with War is a picture from
Speaker 2: a Playboy magazine photoshoot of Tippy's husband and co star,
Speaker 2: Noel Marshall. He's in his office on his typewriter and
Speaker 2: this fully grown male lion gets up on his desk
Speaker 2: because it wants attention again normal cat behavior, And despite
Speaker 2: the best efforts of this animal, who has to weigh
Speaker 2: five hundred pounds, Noel Marshall won't stop focusing on his work,
Speaker 2: and so the cat inches away from his face roars.
Speaker 2: The sound of a male lion's roar is deeply imprinted
Speaker 2: on all of us, an epigenetic memory passed down by
Speaker 2: the handful of our ancestors who heard the sound up
Speaker 2: close and lived to tell the tale. It has such
Speaker 2: a foundational impact on our mind that Metro Goldwyn Meyer
Speaker 2: the film studio, used it to open every movie they
Speaker 2: made from nineteen twenty eight on. I believe they did
Speaker 2: this because the sound is a sort of hack to
Speaker 2: compel our attention. It pulls an audience out of whatever
Speaker 2: state of mind dominates their outside lives and makes them
Speaker 2: more attentive to the film that is to come. And
Speaker 2: so the first thing you need to understand about the
Speaker 2: people who made Roar is that Marshall, upon having a
Speaker 2: living adult lion inches from his face roar, gives the
Speaker 2: creature a look that says, hey, man, can you give
Speaker 2: me a second. I'm like, I'm in the middle of something.
Speaker 2: I bring this up so that you will understand that
Speaker 2: these were not people operating on anything close to the
Speaker 2: same wavelength as you and I. Their lives and their
Speaker 2: choices are to outsiders inconceivable. There's another great photo from
Speaker 2: the set of that Playboy shoot. While the camera people
Speaker 2: roamed the Heddroom compound, one of them caught a shot
Speaker 2: of Tippy's adolescent daughter, Melanie, jumping into a pool. An
Speaker 2: adult male lion, which he must have considered to be
Speaker 2: in some way a member of the family, as this
Speaker 2: girl passing by in the corner of its eye, and
Speaker 2: that motion ignites an instinct inside it, so like any
Speaker 2: cat of that size in the same situation, it reaches
Speaker 2: out to bite her. Afterwards, the Hedron family and the
Speaker 2: cast and crew had complicated feelings about what happened that
Speaker 2: extended to the present day. Tippy divorced Marshall almost as
Speaker 2: soon as the filming finally wrapped. She is alleged that
Speaker 2: while Roar was being made, he utterly ignored her well being.
Speaker 2: She also does not seem to have ever seriously considered leaving.
Speaker 2: She later wrote that she quote was into it every
Speaker 2: bit as much as he was, and that production was
Speaker 2: an obsessive, addictive drama. John Mitchell, Nol's son, who acted
Speaker 2: in the movie and like everyone else, was mauled repeatedly,
Speaker 2: came to own the rights to Roar when his dad
Speaker 2: died in twenty ten. Dad was a fucking asshole to
Speaker 2: do that to his family, he said recently. He also
Speaker 2: said this, it was amazing to live through that. I
Speaker 2: should have died many times, but I kind of want
Speaker 2: to do it again. If you have any friends or
Speaker 2: family who have survived extended periods of every combat, there's
Speaker 2: a good chance they may have expressed a variation of
Speaker 2: the same feeling. This is because trauma is sometimes a
Speaker 2: drug taking. It can be more than just hell. It's
Speaker 2: often also a high, which is one thing that drives
Speaker 2: a lot of people crazy. I need to take a
Speaker 2: moment away from Rohar to talk about some people that
Speaker 2: I met in twenty seventeen in Iraq during the desperate
Speaker 2: and ferocious urban combat against Isis. The closer I drew
Speaker 2: to the front, the more guys I met who were
Speaker 2: elite veterans of the Iraqi Special Forces. They did the
Speaker 2: bulk of the fighting. These were mostly young men ranging
Speaker 2: from the tail end of their teens to their twenties.
Speaker 2: Many had grown up in places like Fallujah fighting from
Speaker 2: the time they were seven or eight, sometimes younger, they'd
Speaker 2: been born into the US occupation. In many cases, their
Speaker 2: earliest memories were as runners, ferrying supplies and information to
Speaker 2: the older men and teenage boys who did most of
Speaker 2: the fighting. When the opportunity presented itself, they sometimes dropped
Speaker 2: grenades or improvised explosive devices on US troops, most of
Speaker 2: whom were teenagers themselves.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 2: They fought against ISIS in close quarters, building to building
Speaker 2: a few weeks at a time. Periodically, they'd rotate off
Speaker 2: the front and would go to Urbil an hour or
Speaker 2: two away. Many of them were gangsters in their spare time,
Speaker 2: running drugs and guns and brothels. They spent their days
Speaker 2: off in a drunken haze of Turkish amphetamines. Then they
Speaker 2: would drive back to the front in new, brightly colored
Speaker 2: Mustangs and dodged chargers. The trunks fold to bursting with
Speaker 2: so many machine guns and rocket launchers they could only
Speaker 2: be closed with bungee cords. The guns and rockets were
Speaker 2: useful at a distance to soften up enemy positions, and
Speaker 2: the impossibly dense warrenlike urban environment of Mosl's old city.
Speaker 2: In every building, on every block, the fighting terminated with
Speaker 2: door to door, room to room battles, where the most
Speaker 2: useful weapons were hand grenades, combat knives, and pistols in
Speaker 2: that order. I don't know if any of these guys were,
Speaker 2: at that point that I met them, capable of feeling
Speaker 2: what Uuri would recognize as fear. These were the men
Speaker 2: and boys whose bodies formed the cutting edge of the
Speaker 2: fighting against Isis and Mosl on occasion when they kidnapped Ice.
Speaker 2: As fighters, some of them committed war crimes with the
Speaker 2: ease and with as much thought as you and I
Speaker 2: give to breathing. This is bad, of course, unforgivable, but
Speaker 2: I've never really given much thought to judging them for it.
Speaker 2: Where would I even start. A thing I've come to
Speaker 2: understand in my travels is that human beings are capable
Speaker 2: of contorting themselves into the most incredible shapes in order
Speaker 2: to fit into the times they're forced to live in.
Speaker 2: This has been the story of our entire long journey
Speaker 2: on this earth, and if there is one reason our
Speaker 2: species has survived above all the others, it is our
Speaker 2: capacity for infinite variety and infinite contexts. We can make
Speaker 2: ourselves into anything if we're given the right incentives, and
Speaker 2: to an extent, you can't judge individual humans without judging
Speaker 2: the incentives the world we collectively create presents for them.
Speaker 2: We evolved, and we still live in a world where
Speaker 2: trauma and pain are inevitable, and those of us who
Speaker 2: survive the worst things that life can throw at us
Speaker 2: tend to become addicted, sometimes to the cause of the trauma,
Speaker 2: but nearly always to the people we experience it with.
Speaker 2: This is why the cast and crew of Roar often
Speaker 2: reported feeling almost addicted to spending time among these gigantic predators,
Speaker 2: and it's why many kept coming back despite being repeatedly maimed.
Speaker 2: Roar happened because the core cast and crew exhibited radical
Speaker 2: empathy for roughly one hundred and forty large cats and
Speaker 2: for each other, and almost exercised zero critical judgment beyond
Speaker 2: that point. Now, I will understand if you still feel
Speaker 2: that nothing could justify the decision of two parents to
Speaker 2: risk their children's lives in such folly. And I know
Speaker 2: this essay is supposed to be my ultimate enduring optimism
Speaker 2: about mankind's potential, and I'm going to get to that,
Speaker 2: but you know, we still live in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: So first, here's ads. So here's my best step at
Speaker 2: explaining why I find RAR inspirational. There's a scene about
Speaker 2: three quarters of the way through this movie. After roughly
Speaker 2: an hour straight of watching the Hedron, Marshall family and
Speaker 2: their friends get repeatedly mulled for real by giant cats.
Speaker 2: And in this scene, John Marshall finds a dirt bike
Speaker 2: and engineers a scenario that I am certain has never
Speaker 2: happened before or since in the history of this planet.
Speaker 2: He rides away from the home where his family is
Speaker 2: trapped and draw several dozen lions, panthers, and tigers away
Speaker 2: by making them chase him. The cats assume this is
Speaker 2: a game and repeatedly try to murder or maim him,
Speaker 2: but he continues building up speed in an ever greater
Speaker 2: tale of the most lethal killing machines to evolve on
Speaker 2: this planet. You can see from the look in John's
Speaker 2: eyes in this scene that he has no idea. If
Speaker 2: he seconds away from death, it would have been physically
Speaker 2: impossible to stop or control this number of giant cats.
Speaker 2: The only reason this number and variety of lions, panthers,
Speaker 2: and tigers would ever have existed together at any previous
Speaker 2: point in world history, would have been across a distance
Speaker 2: of thousands of miles of rugged wilderness. But thanks to
Speaker 2: Tippean Knowles's insane dream, and thanks to the deranged and
Speaker 2: utterly unjustifiable commit of many of the crew and their family,
Speaker 2: a moment of utter novelty occurs where the singular assortment
Speaker 2: of big cats watches as a man fleeing in terror
Speaker 2: from them on a dirt bike does one of the
Speaker 2: sickest jumps in film history and lands directly into a river,
Speaker 2: and then keeps riding until he is charged by a
Speaker 2: juvenile African elephant, which the Adrons also kept on their property.
Speaker 2: In its uniqueness, this moment has to rival, if not exceed,
Speaker 2: the Moon landing. After all, considerably more men have stepped
Speaker 2: foot on the Moon than have achieved what John Marshall
Speaker 2: does in this scene, although some of that may be
Speaker 2: due to the fact that it is extremely illegal for
Speaker 2: anyone today to even try. And this is why I
Speaker 2: encourage you to watch Roar My Dear Friends during the
Speaker 2: Dark Times, not because it's a good movie, but because
Speaker 2: it reveals what is best about humanity, What piece of
Speaker 2: art could better illustrate the infinite possibilities within us. If
Speaker 2: a group of human beings can learn to live among
Speaker 2: lions and tigers, I fight the constant guarantee of severe
Speaker 2: injury without really understanding why is it's so mad to
Speaker 2: think that perhaps we two can transcend the barbarities of
Speaker 2: our age and become something better, or at least something
Speaker 2: far stranger than money grubbing fascists. I don't know how
Speaker 2: we escape the darkness that seems to encroach a bit
Speaker 2: further with each passing day, but I do know this,
Speaker 2: If we can make war, we can do anything.
Speaker 7: Welcome to ikodapa Here Podcasts, where here is the rapidly
Speaker 7: encroaching rise of fascism. My name is mir Wong, and
Speaker 7: one of the major vectors of fascism that we have
Speaker 7: been covering on this show has been the increase in
Speaker 7: just effectively straight up black baggings by ICE and immigration's
Speaker 7: enforcement in general. We have spent a good amount of
Speaker 7: time covering a bunch of different angles of this, but
Speaker 7: there is another incredibly distressing angle that we have not
Speaker 7: covered as much yet, which is their targeting of labor
Speaker 7: organizers and with me to talk about that is Mark
Speaker 7: Medina from Portland Jobs with Justice and the Coalition of
Speaker 7: Independent Unions And yeah, Mark, welcome to the show.
Speaker 8: Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. So one of
Speaker 7: the most pressing sort of black baggings that's happened fairly
Speaker 7: recently is ICE's kidnapping of Alfredo Juareze Ferino, otherwise known
Speaker 7: as Lelo. Can you tell us about sort of his
Speaker 7: work and the projects he's been doing and familius you
Speaker 7: need us pro Justicia.
Speaker 8: Yeah. So it's been a very disheartening and scary couple
Speaker 8: of weeks since it's happened, because this opens up a
Speaker 8: new power for the state to go after organizers, to
Speaker 8: go after workers and the most underprivileged in our society
Speaker 8: in a way that I suppose we all expected. But
Speaker 8: now that we see it, now that we see it happening,
Speaker 8: now that we see it happening to people that we
Speaker 8: know in our community, it's becoming apparent there is no
Speaker 8: turning back from the idea that we have to be
Speaker 8: able to take this on head first. We as activists,
Speaker 8: as organizers, have to look at this and see it
Speaker 8: as an actual thing in our day to day that
Speaker 8: we have to combat and incorporate into our organizing. So
Speaker 8: maybe it might be a little helpful to start off
Speaker 8: with a little bit of a backstory on if I
Speaker 8: mean this need us by Lassay. So the union has
Speaker 8: its origins going back to twenty thirteen. The area in
Speaker 8: which they organize, the Bellingham or the Washington walkingscadget areas,
Speaker 8: has a very particular type of immigrant community there. Lelo
Speaker 8: himself is of Mextco background. There's a lot of indigenous
Speaker 8: Mexican populations in the region. It also want to have
Speaker 8: long routes. A lot of these people go back generations,
Speaker 8: have been here for quite some time. This area also
Speaker 8: happens to be very particularly with the non Hispanic population,
Speaker 8: particularly the white population, a very conservative, particularly conservative for
Speaker 8: the area. It's one of the very few areas of
Speaker 8: Northwest that Donald Trump came to visit. It's an area
Speaker 8: that has had repeated attacks on then imbric community. And
Speaker 8: so it's in this context that workers are organizing in
Speaker 8: twenty thirteen for this first independent union. And two it's
Speaker 8: important to mention the independent part of it. A lot
Speaker 8: of the organizers from the start of this of the
Speaker 8: union came from a tradition of the United farm Workers
Speaker 8: in California. They some of them worked with such jabas
Speaker 8: in the heyday of the United farm Workers. And in
Speaker 8: the years and decades since then, since the Dolana boycotts
Speaker 8: and other things, there's been a growing rift of what
Speaker 8: the next steps should be. And I think that for
Speaker 8: a lot of farm workers, because they don't organize under
Speaker 8: the general labor law that we have for most workers,
Speaker 8: there is a sort of patchwork system for how farm
Speaker 8: working organizing happens in the United States that's dependent upon
Speaker 8: different states and legislatures, and for the most part, with
Speaker 8: the exception of only two states, farm workers don't have
Speaker 8: the same kind of protections that regular workers generally in
Speaker 8: the society have for union recognition for collective bargaining. Only
Speaker 8: Washington and New York at the moment, I believe, have
Speaker 8: laws that allow for elections for farm worker unions, and
Speaker 8: there's a very particular reason for that being the case.
Speaker 8: Farm workers were excluded from the Wagner Act for having
Speaker 8: general labor rights in the nineteen thirties because precisely it
Speaker 8: was seen as immigrant labor and immigrants were not seen
Speaker 8: as meriting the same rights as white Americans in the
Speaker 8: same way that domestic workers were removed because I was
Speaker 8: seen at the time as black labor. So it has
Speaker 8: its roots and racism.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and that's something that you know, like you can
Speaker 7: tie that exclusion, like there's a straight line between that
Speaker 7: and Japanese and tournaments, which also to a large extent,
Speaker 7: is about land seizure and this sort of like fusion
Speaker 7: of racism, specifically racism in the farming sector with the
Speaker 7: tax and labor rights and with this desire to just
Speaker 7: sort of seize literally the lands and labor from non
Speaker 7: white people.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So it's a long and bleak history.
Speaker 8: No, absolutely, and I'm sure your audience is well aware
Speaker 8: of a lot of these subject matter. It is a
Speaker 8: bleak history. And it wasn't until groups like the United
Speaker 8: farm Workers in the sixties and the seventies. I they
Speaker 8: began to create the possibility for something new for the
Speaker 8: Hispanic community. It was United farm Workers that built not
Speaker 8: just a lot of solidarity with other immigrant groups in
Speaker 8: the California area, but they also built a sense of
Speaker 8: pride and identity and belonging for a lot of communities.
Speaker 8: I grew up in Bluid High It's East Los Angeles. Says
Speaker 8: that Travis and Knight farm worker murals are everywhere. You know,
Speaker 8: me and my friends would often joke, as said Javis
Speaker 8: is like the patron Saints. It is Los Angeles, even
Speaker 8: though it's nowhere near Delano. And there's a reason for that.
Speaker 8: I think that a lot of us looked up to
Speaker 8: the United farm Workers. We looked up to the farm
Speaker 8: worker Union movement, and we saw in them our heroes,
Speaker 8: our modern day heroes. We saw them. We saw people
Speaker 8: who said, be proud to be brown. You know, there's
Speaker 8: a courage that comes from that history. The union movement
Speaker 8: that then sprung up in twenty thirteen in the Bellingham
Speaker 8: Northern Washington area was coming out of that milieu. They
Speaker 8: understood that background, they understood that history, but they also
Speaker 8: understood that there was very little organizing in the region.
Speaker 8: There was a lot of fear in the region. It's
Speaker 8: very difficult to organize farm workers. To have access to
Speaker 8: a lot of these areas. You have to cross just
Speaker 8: private property for quite some time before you reach the
Speaker 8: first farm workers, and it becomes very very difficult to
Speaker 8: have organizing happen and it's intentional that way. The rise
Speaker 8: and farmers unions that happened in the sixties and seventies
Speaker 8: had a massive plummet by the time they begin into
Speaker 8: the nineteen two thousands, and so these workers had heard
Speaker 8: these stories, had heard by this legacy, but had been
Speaker 8: essentially deliver with increasing frustration, racist behavior by bosses, lower
Speaker 8: and lower pay, and the use of certain types of
Speaker 8: immigrants to try to scab their jobs. It be the
Speaker 8: capitalist class using one type of worker against another type
Speaker 8: of worker, picking them against each other. It's in this
Speaker 8: context in twenty thirteen that this union starts to form.
Speaker 8: They go public at that time period, they call for recognition,
Speaker 8: and they started taking action directly, and they organized this
Speaker 8: years and years long boycott campaign to gain recognition, to
Speaker 8: get the employer to start bargaining. And after years and
Speaker 8: years of this and coourt battles and the employer trying
Speaker 8: to lay everyone off and hire certain types of newer
Speaker 8: immigrants coming in to replace all of them, putting one
Speaker 8: worker against another, all these types of maneuvers, by twenty seventeen,
Speaker 8: these workers win a contract, and the philosophy of the
Speaker 8: union since then has been not just to grow this union,
Speaker 8: but also for them to be able to stand on
Speaker 8: their own two feet. Their idea is that they are
Speaker 8: very proud of their independent nature of that union. They're
Speaker 8: not part of the afl CIO, they're not part of
Speaker 8: the Nice farm Workers, They're not part of any other organization.
Speaker 8: You know, when I spoke to some of their leaders
Speaker 8: last year, one of the things that came to mind
Speaker 8: was they brought up a quote from Eugene Debts, the
Speaker 8: notion of like, if we were to lead you into
Speaker 8: the promised Land, someone else would just lead out. And
Speaker 8: the notion of their union is we have to be
Speaker 8: able to stand on our two feet. We can't rely
Speaker 8: on anyone else, because if they promise us things today tomorrow,
Speaker 8: they'll hold something over us. And so the notion that
Speaker 8: farm workers lead this movement and leave this union is
Speaker 8: an incredibly powerful statement of what working class people can do.
Speaker 8: The kinds of workers that everyone else kinds of looks at.
Speaker 8: They could never do it. These you know, these workers
Speaker 8: could never handle this kind of level of struggle and
Speaker 8: couldn't do this kind of organization have built one of
Speaker 8: the most powerful independent farm worker unions in the West Coast,
Speaker 8: Lelo Alfredo Lelo was a founding member of this union.
Speaker 8: He was a farm worker studying at the age of twelve,
Speaker 8: and since then devoted his entire life organizing to helping workers,
Speaker 8: to being the kind of person who commits himself to
Speaker 8: the work of making the world a better place than
Speaker 8: you found it. You know, at twenty five, he is
Speaker 8: significantly younger than me. And when I think of people
Speaker 8: who I look up to, who I think as Wow,
Speaker 8: when I grew up, I want to be someone like that,
Speaker 8: I think of Lelo.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I have met little many of times over the years.
Speaker 8: He's a very soft spoken, very thoughtful type of person.
Speaker 8: And yeah, I think that the labor movement owes him
Speaker 8: a bit of a debt. Now it is time that
Speaker 8: we as a whole stand up for him.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we are going to go to ads regrettably, and
Speaker 7: then when we come back we are going to start
Speaker 7: talking I think a bit more about the repression we
Speaker 7: are back. So obviously then this is this is a
Speaker 7: part of the story that you've been telling, the sort
Speaker 7: of the sort of capitalist class out in Bellingham, and
Speaker 7: you know, the sort of I mean, this has been
Speaker 7: true of the broader capitalist class since it's kind of
Speaker 7: organizing starting like has been trying to break these unions
Speaker 7: this entire time. You know, that has been a major
Speaker 7: focus of everything that they've been doing. And you know,
Speaker 7: what we're seeing right now seems like a massive sort
Speaker 7: of escalation in the degree of repression. So, yeah, can
Speaker 7: we talk about the recent black bagging Alilo and yeah,
Speaker 7: and sort of what happens and where we go from there.
Speaker 8: Yeah. The weaponization of the state to go after immigrants
Speaker 8: and go after activists is I'm sure to your audist
Speaker 8: is well known. Is nothing yet and it no knows
Speaker 8: parties affiliation. The Democratic administrations have been doing this to
Speaker 8: immigrant communities, and I've been using it to silence political activists.
Speaker 8: The Trump administration, however, is now doing this on a
Speaker 8: level that is, at least to a lot of us
Speaker 8: unheard of in the modern day, which is to go
Speaker 8: after specific union leaders in the labor movement, to go
Speaker 8: after civil rights leaders. You've seen this happen also when
Speaker 8: it comes to Palistinian rights activists around the country. The
Speaker 8: idea is pretty simple to silence the loudest voices, to
Speaker 8: cut to leadership from the movement. On March twenty fifth,
Speaker 8: Alfredo Lelo Barres was dropping off his girlfriend at a
Speaker 8: nearby farm for work and was accosted by ICE agents
Speaker 8: as he was exercising his rights or what he thought
Speaker 8: his rights were at the time because of the regime,
Speaker 8: who knows what your rights are. They broke his window,
Speaker 8: they dragged him out of his car. You know, this
Speaker 8: was obviously very traumatic incident, but also is a real
Speaker 8: shock to the union to see to see the community
Speaker 8: group that works with the union, and to the local
Speaker 8: Hispanic community in the area. Within hours of that, workers
Speaker 8: organizers community went to move to try to carry a response,
Speaker 8: knowing that time was of the essence. It was then
Speaker 8: taken to a local life facility. He's now since been
Speaker 8: moved to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. A large
Speaker 8: rally of hundreds took place calling for his immediate release.
Speaker 8: What we know now seemingly is that at the very
Speaker 8: last minute apologies I forget the exact day, but it
Speaker 8: was within a couple of days of the kidnapping, Lelo
Speaker 8: was pulled off. He has an automatic stay of deportation
Speaker 8: in place at this point, no longer has any legal
Speaker 8: authority to remove Lelo. If this came at the last minute.
Speaker 8: He was in line for deportation and was moved at
Speaker 8: the very last minute. However, while this is good news,
Speaker 8: this is not good for someone's personal health and well being.
Speaker 8: These are massively cramped facilities, underfunded facilities. You know, there's
Speaker 8: horror stories around the country of the conditions in some
Speaker 8: of these places. Every day that Lelo is stuck behind
Speaker 8: these prison walls is an injustice to our movement.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I think the thing it immediately reminds me
Speaker 7: of is the story of Thomas Paine, who was like
Speaker 7: slated to be executed in the French Revolution and they didn't.
Speaker 7: They didn't execute him because his door was opened, so
Speaker 7: they didn't see the slash line on the cell that
Speaker 7: was supposed to execute him. And then like the next
Speaker 7: day the reign of terror ended with the coup against
Speaker 7: the Jacobins. There rits me a lot of that, but
Speaker 7: you know, but on the other hand, here's the thing.
Speaker 7: We have gotten the stay of the deportation, but we
Speaker 7: have not we have not brought down.
Speaker 12: The rate of terror yet.
Speaker 8: So yeah, and I would hope does it have to
Speaker 8: way four more years for that one?
Speaker 7: Yeah? Good lord, good lord? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 7: let's let's talk a bit about So. I mean, obviously,
Speaker 7: you know what we're seeing here and this this is
Speaker 7: you know, the connection that you made is we're seeing
Speaker 7: just on a sort of broad scale, the use of
Speaker 7: the state and of the sort of black bagging and
Speaker 7: of these deportations as a way to target organizers from
Speaker 7: Palestine to label organizers. That's only going to expand as
Speaker 7: this goes on. And I think something critical about you know,
Speaker 7: one of the first things you were saying here about
Speaker 7: the fact that they're targeting sort of the loudest voices
Speaker 7: in the community. And I think a big part of
Speaker 7: this is that they know that their position isn't as
Speaker 7: strong as they're making it out to be. Right, Like
Speaker 7: they have just detonated a nuke across the entire economy.
Speaker 7: They are systemically going through and individually fucking over every
Speaker 7: single group of people who are supposed to be their base.
Speaker 7: And I think part of what they're doing is they're
Speaker 7: trying to spread sort of raw terror and spread fear
Speaker 7: and you know, and and attack the critical infrastructure of
Speaker 7: organizing because they want to make it look like resisting
Speaker 7: them as impossible and that's just not true. They can be.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Absolutely. I think that oftentimes, particularly fascistic power wants and
Speaker 8: needs to present itself as inevitable, as overwhelming, and impossible
Speaker 8: to defeat, in part because it's meant to hide the
Speaker 8: ultimate weakness of some of these powers. The actual power
Speaker 8: that these farm workers showed against the Sukuma farms when
Speaker 8: they went on strike and boycotted for years and years
Speaker 8: and years out in the fields, talking to workers for
Speaker 8: years and years and years. It showed that no matter
Speaker 8: how powerful some of these companies are, some of the
Speaker 8: CEOs are that the power of workers overwhelmed and the
Speaker 8: power solidarity overwhelms. And they know that going after leadership,
Speaker 8: going after some of the most some of the bravest
Speaker 8: people in our movement is a way of trying to
Speaker 8: hit the movement at the knees and trying to convince
Speaker 8: folks that struggle is impossible. But I think it is
Speaker 8: important to remember that what we're doing, the struggle now,
Speaker 8: the response. This is how we show the population the world,
Speaker 8: you know, our communities, that they are not inevitable, it
Speaker 8: is not insurmountable and so and by taking action responding
Speaker 8: to the kinds of fascistic behaviors of the state. We
Speaker 8: show how people the state can be at times, even
Speaker 8: when it seems it's most treacherous and awful.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think a lot of times when we
Speaker 7: win fights, it can be very very hard to actually
Speaker 7: see our victory because we don't see the world that
Speaker 7: could have been if we didn't fight. And that's the
Speaker 7: thing I think about with the First Ship administration. We're
Speaker 7: in the First Hump administration. They absolutely wanted to be
Speaker 7: doing this kind of shit, and they were able to
Speaker 7: do a lot of terrible stuff, but they weren't able
Speaker 7: to sort of go this far because of the kind
Speaker 7: of mass mobilizations that shut down a lot of the
Speaker 7: kinds of things that they wanted to do. And I
Speaker 7: think that's a kind of victory that is hard to
Speaker 7: kind of like process because all we see is, you know,
Speaker 7: the suffering that did happen, and we can never see
Speaker 7: an image of like all of the people you know,
Speaker 7: who got to continue living their lives because we stop them,
Speaker 7: And that I think is another sort of powerful tool here.
Speaker 7: But also we do have an opportunity to make sure
Speaker 7: that we can beat them right here, right now in
Speaker 7: a way that's very very public, and.
Speaker 8: That's a question mark about that in my mind, because
Speaker 8: you know, my entire adult life, I've heard stories of
Speaker 8: the state repression against union organizers in the twenties and
Speaker 8: the thirties and the forties. You hear the stories if
Speaker 8: you're an organizer, about all the violent eras and how
Speaker 8: hard it was in the past, and we forget that
Speaker 8: a lot of that does continue on. It's just not
Speaker 8: where you would imagine it where a lot of American
Speaker 8: workers imagine it, and so they don't see it in
Speaker 8: their shops and their factories and their unions. But this
Speaker 8: right here is an attack on the labor movement. Had
Speaker 8: this been the head of you know, the Electricians Union,
Speaker 8: the head of the SCIU, Had this been an attack
Speaker 8: on what a lot of America would view as the
Speaker 8: mainstream labor movement, this would be headlines. Yeah. The fact
Speaker 8: that it isn't shows, and that it has been so
Speaker 8: much work to try to get attention to a union
Speaker 8: leader being picked up and kidnapped by the state should
Speaker 8: be you know, a blaring red light on the labor
Speaker 8: movement to take action immediately.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I hope that what we're doing is the first steps
Speaker 8: to that, because you know, this is one of those moments.
Speaker 8: If you know, they went after the trade unions unionists
Speaker 8: and I was not a trade unionist. Well, going after
Speaker 8: the farm workers, I am not a farm worker. It
Speaker 8: isn't comment upon us morally to stand up for one
Speaker 8: another at this point in time.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think there's been a real kind of
Speaker 7: real cowardice and a real sort of appeasement of power,
Speaker 7: and a real demonstration of where a lot of these
Speaker 7: union's politics are. I mean, we saw the way that
Speaker 7: the Teamsters like leadership just I mean just you know,
Speaker 7: openly went to speak at the R and C.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 7: We've been seeing the UAW, which traditionally has had better
Speaker 7: like immigration politics in the last few years than a
Speaker 7: lot of these other sort of mainstream unions, but has
Speaker 7: also been sort of going to bat for Trump's tariff,
Speaker 7: Like I've been calling you the turf tariffs tariffs because
Speaker 7: of the wages of transphobia. But you know, they've been
Speaker 7: going to bat for like the turf tariffs, right, And
Speaker 7: that I think is part of why they've been sort
Speaker 7: of unable to like respond to this moment, and why
Speaker 7: they've been unable to respond to the past fucking fifty
Speaker 7: years of moments, which is that like, if you're sort
Speaker 7: of like labor politics is rooted in this sort of
Speaker 7: like American nationalist, like American jobs for American workers stuff, right,
Speaker 7: and it's not actually based in the power of workers
Speaker 7: and the power of workers everywhere, then you're going to lose.
Speaker 7: It's it's not just sort of reactionary politics also it
Speaker 7: is it's also bad politics, and we're seeing it right now.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And I think that the history of labor movement
Speaker 8: has been an interesting one in my adult life because
Speaker 8: you know, I'm as pro liber as they come. However,
Speaker 8: the history of labor movement in the modern day has
Speaker 8: been a fascinating one. It is one that when it
Speaker 8: came to large strikes, was that its natier at the
Speaker 8: mid and late two thousands. I think at one point
Speaker 8: it was just over a dozen strikes over two thousand workers.
Speaker 8: And you compare that to the high of the labor
Speaker 8: movement in the forties and the fifties when it was
Speaker 8: in the hundreds, and you've had strike actions all the time,
Speaker 8: and that is what builds so much at what we
Speaker 8: call the middle class for some And it was this
Speaker 8: really historic moment at the time, and we're in a
Speaker 8: historic moment now where I think the labor movement for
Speaker 8: so long from that point, has been trying. Workers from
Speaker 8: the rank and file have been trying to kind of
Speaker 8: reshape the labor movement in the thoughts and the ideas
Speaker 8: of the new But it comes with its own regressive setbacks,
Speaker 8: and it comes with its own shortcomings of leadership. You know,
Speaker 8: the teams tours making statements around immigration rights was a
Speaker 8: very unfortunate thing to be said in the modern day.
Speaker 8: In the modern context, I think that you know, other
Speaker 8: unions seemingly looking to you know, circle the wagons rather
Speaker 8: than take the risks that need to happen in this
Speaker 8: current time has really shown a lack of imagination from
Speaker 8: some of the mainstream unions. And the thing is, I
Speaker 8: hope for the best for them. I want them to
Speaker 8: succeed and I want them to get better because the
Speaker 8: world is a better place we're having these larger unions. However,
Speaker 8: if the independent movements, the independent unions like Familias who
Speaker 8: need this Quo Thesia, like these other unions in the region,
Speaker 8: that can be the kind of canary in the coal mine,
Speaker 8: the kind of labs of experimentation that can be the
Speaker 8: first people out to do some of the most radical
Speaker 8: and interesting and worker centric type of movement building and messaging. Like,
Speaker 8: I think there is the reason why it was the
Speaker 8: coalition of independent unions here in the Pacific Northwest that
Speaker 8: came up with the notion of having transity of solidarity,
Speaker 8: this idea of patterning contracts together to have inclusive and
Speaker 8: pre for trans workers and having that be a thing
Speaker 8: that unions take up together. I think that it's incredibly
Speaker 8: notable that it's group's life, I mean us who need
Speaker 8: as Yeah, they carry out this long years long boycott
Speaker 8: and created a model by which other workers in the
Speaker 8: region can not just organize themselves, but organize themselves on
Speaker 8: a low cost, member led democratic model. I think it's
Speaker 8: important to see that sometimes the large unions have to
Speaker 8: start looking at some of the radical pragmatism that comes
Speaker 8: from the necessities of these smaller independent campaigns.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I mean before we go to ads. I
Speaker 7: think the last thing I want to say there is, like,
Speaker 7: you know, the other option they have is to do
Speaker 7: the option of what the unions didn't during the rise
Speaker 7: of the Nazis, which is like dream the rise of
Speaker 7: the Nazis the unions fell in line, right, They fell
Speaker 7: in line because they were scared and they thought that
Speaker 7: they could fucking win benefits from it. And you know,
Speaker 7: it saved some of them, like they were a few
Speaker 7: of those people like just became Nazis, but the rest
Speaker 7: of them got fucking liquidated anyways. So those are your options, right,
Speaker 7: You either stand and fight now with the independent unions,
Speaker 7: or you become part of the regime and eventually get liquidated.
Speaker 7: When you know, Trump in like fucking two and a
Speaker 7: half years science executive order that says unions are illegal
Speaker 7: or whatever.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and what does that do at the end of
Speaker 8: the day, even if it staves, even if you're the
Speaker 8: head of some of these larger unions. And by working
Speaker 8: with the administrative the administration today, by selling your soul,
Speaker 8: by selling the movement out, you give up the moral
Speaker 8: high ground of our movement, of our working class democratic movement. Yeah,
Speaker 8: you give it up for another generation. Then when workers,
Speaker 8: when people look myself growing up, looking at images of
Speaker 8: the United farm Workers, there are similar I presume there
Speaker 8: are similar people in the United States growing up who
Speaker 8: look that way up to the Unitedado Workers, look that
Speaker 8: way up to the Teachers' Union. What happens to those children,
Speaker 8: to those kids, those young people who want to be
Speaker 8: the next leadership, the next era of the labor movement,
Speaker 8: they will not look at us as having the moral
Speaker 8: high ground. We give that up. We give our role
Speaker 8: in history, our moral role in history to fight with
Speaker 8: a working class when we do things like this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and what you become and set is just another
Speaker 7: extension of the state. You become like one of like
Speaker 7: the national syndicates and like Franco of Spain. And and
Speaker 7: what that does to you is people people don't look
Speaker 7: at you in a generation as a labor movement. They
Speaker 7: look at you as just another arm of a fascist regime.
Speaker 7: And it doesn't have to be like that, It really doesn't.
Speaker 8: But yeah, no, it does not, Yea. I take no
Speaker 8: pleasure in saying this, you know, I take no pleasure
Speaker 8: in saying this. But it's an unfortunate reality. And hopefully
Speaker 8: the turnaround can come from anywhere, it can come from
Speaker 8: from unexpected places. And I hope that there is one,
Speaker 8: and things like solidarity for Lelo, I hope it'd be
Speaker 8: a small link in the chain that moves the pensulum
Speaker 8: right back into the direction of an ethical and moral
Speaker 8: superiority that comes with fighting for working class folks.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we're going to take an ad break and when
Speaker 7: we come back, we're going to talk about what we
Speaker 7: can do for lelo. Right now as listening to this,
Speaker 7: we are back, So let's talk about both the operation
Speaker 7: I mean, just immediately, the plans to sort of put
Speaker 7: pressure to Freelillo, and also what then I guess we'll
Speaker 7: get into sort of more broadly the kinds of fighting
Speaker 7: that we need to be doing in order to resist this.
Speaker 8: Sounds good. So, like I mentioned earlier, and you need
Speaker 8: an aftermath of lelo is kidnapping by ice, workers in
Speaker 8: the region began organizing and unions came together and support
Speaker 8: a Lelo and help a rally in front of attention
Speaker 8: center in Tacoma. Now, what we're trying to do is
Speaker 8: trying to spread the word further. There are other communities,
Speaker 8: particularly here on the West Coast, that can't stand solidarity,
Speaker 8: that should stand in solidarity. And when we heard this
Speaker 8: needs to go down, activists within the CiU asked themselves,
Speaker 8: we can't stand idly by while a leader in our
Speaker 8: movement is kidnapped by the state. We need to take action,
Speaker 8: and so we did. And the point was to move
Speaker 8: as quickly as possible to try to build a larger
Speaker 8: voice for Lelo while he is in detention. So there
Speaker 8: is a good number of activists here in the Portland area.
Speaker 8: We can be of service to the farm Workers Union.
Speaker 8: You know, we have a strong core of independent unions
Speaker 8: here in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in the Portland area.
Speaker 8: We can do what other unions are hesitant to do,
Speaker 8: which is take action immediately. It stands firmly with our
Speaker 8: brothers and sisters are monosynas up in northern Washington. So
Speaker 8: what's happening is the call from the union is workers individually,
Speaker 8: for people individually to call into the Attorney General in
Speaker 8: Washington State and call to the release of Lelo, also
Speaker 8: calling the new governor up in Washington State to call
Speaker 8: for the release. Bring a wider attention, making me known
Speaker 8: that this person is someone who is important to the community,
Speaker 8: cannot be expirited away to another country where they are
Speaker 8: not from, where that is not their home, and taking
Speaker 8: away from their family, the community, from the good work
Speaker 8: that they do. And the other thing that we're trying
Speaker 8: to do is we're trying to get local officials to
Speaker 8: also use their voice to maximize the pressure to give
Speaker 8: more attention to this issue. So that's the call so far.
Speaker 8: This rally that we're having in front of city Hall
Speaker 8: on Saturday, April twelfth at two pm is the beginning
Speaker 8: of what we hope is a larger campaign that will
Speaker 8: not end until Lelo is free and until these raids
Speaker 8: stop attacking the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. You know,
Speaker 8: just because we in Portland, you know, are not farm workers,
Speaker 8: because we don't work with farm workers, because a lot
Speaker 8: of the workers who work here had maybe never met
Speaker 8: a farm worker, it does not mean that we should
Speaker 8: not stand shoulders shoulder and arm and arm and support
Speaker 8: the farm workers Union up in northern Washington to the hilt.
Speaker 8: And this begins this fight building that kind of level
Speaker 8: of solidarity. It begins by showing up for them doing
Speaker 8: what they can do right now. They don't have the
Speaker 8: resources to go stay by day in city by city
Speaker 8: to bring its tension and awareness to one of their
Speaker 8: leaders being attacked. But we can do it, and if
Speaker 8: we can do it, we should do it. It's a
Speaker 8: moral imperative that little be free.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And so I mean statistically there are a lot
Speaker 7: of you in Portland listening to the show, but statistically
Speaker 7: most of you are not in Portland. Are are there
Speaker 7: things that people in the rest of the country, and
Speaker 7: I guess the rest of the world. I know, I
Speaker 7: know there's so Sally statistically don't live in the US.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Are are there things that people in other places can
Speaker 7: do to put pressure specifically for Alala, but also just
Speaker 7: can do in their own communities to you know, I
Speaker 7: mean put pressure to stop these raids?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 8: Absolutely, So this is very similar I think to the CiU.
Speaker 8: The Coalition of Independent Unions is Coalition of Independent Unions
Speaker 8: here in the Pascopical Northwest. It was trying to do
Speaker 8: and it's trying to do with TRANSI of solidarity. The
Speaker 8: idea is we are trying to make this work here
Speaker 8: in the Pacific Northwest and if it's useful, if it's good,
Speaker 8: if people are paying attention to it, then we can
Speaker 8: export this to other cities in other areas to bring
Speaker 8: more attention to these causes. And so with that one
Speaker 8: paving earning contracts together, particularly on this one issue of
Speaker 8: tresender health care and trans incluencive language and contracts and
Speaker 8: codifying that between unions and having that a demand of
Speaker 8: labor movement that they not walk away from this. We
Speaker 8: want to also do the same thing with this fight
Speaker 8: for freedom for the farm Workers Union and their leaders
Speaker 8: and workers everywhere. And the tax will come soon enough,
Speaker 8: I suppose, I would imagine from this regime in Washington,
Speaker 8: if this works, we want workers in other cities to
Speaker 8: start assisting the farm worker Union take them up the
Speaker 8: call of action and fighting for so not just let up,
Speaker 8: but whoever comes afterwards, because there will be lettles in
Speaker 8: the future, unfortunate as they may be. So if this
Speaker 8: works here, if workers here, as they hear more updates,
Speaker 8: we would hope and we would love if workers elsewhere,
Speaker 8: if organizing groups elsewhere would want to take up this
Speaker 8: fight and bring attention to the cause.
Speaker 7: Hell yeah, yeah. And I think there is a lot
Speaker 7: of you know, potential and sort of mobilizations. There's a
Speaker 7: lot of potential in getting people to understand that this
Speaker 7: stuff's happening, And there's a lot of potential in cross
Speaker 7: uniting organizing. And also, and I will say this too,
Speaker 7: because like you know, obviously statistically, like there are a
Speaker 7: large number of people listening to this who are like
Speaker 7: union staffers, but also like most of you are not.
Speaker 7: That also doesn't mean that whatever kind of organizing that
Speaker 7: you're doing doesn't overlap with this and doesn't have capacity
Speaker 7: that they can bring to bear to stop the entire
Speaker 7: deportation regime that we're facing right now. And that's something
Speaker 7: that you have to do both on the level of solidarity,
Speaker 7: on a moral level, and also on a strategic level,
Speaker 7: because again is going to come for you too.
Speaker 8: So yeah, yeah, you know, without making it too personal,
Speaker 8: like I know level personally, I have met a little
Speaker 8: many times over the years. He's a fantastic person. The
Speaker 8: reason why a lot of us as organized is why
Speaker 8: we do this kind of work to begin with, is
Speaker 8: because we believe, as bizarrely as it may be, that
Speaker 8: we could be a link in the chain that makes
Speaker 8: the world a better place, that we can leave the
Speaker 8: world better off than we found it. And we also
Speaker 8: believe in what we're doing because when we look at
Speaker 8: people who have been attacked by corporations and attacked by
Speaker 8: the state, we feel in moral compulsion to help. And
Speaker 8: what I would say to folks who are outside of
Speaker 8: Portland who are hearing this story who hear the calls
Speaker 8: to call the Attorney General in Washington State and demand
Speaker 8: that they'll be released. To follow up with the union
Speaker 8: by media Plicia further direction on how they can assist
Speaker 8: and potentially holding their own rallies and support and solidarity
Speaker 8: and bring attention to the issue. I would hope that
Speaker 8: they do this. Imagine if Letlo were your brother, Imagine
Speaker 8: if Leto were your cousin, your father, your friend, Act
Speaker 8: as if they were they were them, because it require
Speaker 8: that level of to have the kind of solidarity that
Speaker 8: we need in order to fight this fastest regime and
Speaker 8: everything that it does. It is easy to say I
Speaker 8: will wait for someone else to do the work. I will,
Speaker 8: someone else will come along and it'll get resolved that way. No,
Speaker 8: if you don't do the work, it just will not
Speaker 8: get done. And so we have to go in every
Speaker 8: day as part of civic engagement and assisting the working class,
Speaker 8: as part of our daily routines and using the kind
Speaker 8: of the kind of sense of moral necessity and of
Speaker 8: immediate action it requires that you would do for someone
Speaker 8: that was close to you, because this person is you
Speaker 8: just by another name, This person is your family. Even
Speaker 8: if you've never met them. We are all in this
Speaker 8: together as working class people, and if we start coming
Speaker 8: up with boundaries and reasons for why we shouldn't stand
Speaker 8: up for one another, those reasons then become excuses for
Speaker 8: everyone else. So I would hope that when people hear this,
Speaker 8: they look and see the struggle of this person, and
Speaker 8: they can imagine what would happen to them in the future,
Speaker 8: and they say, I would want someone there for me
Speaker 8: in my corner, in my time of me, So I
Speaker 8: will be there for them and theirs.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it reminds me a lot of this line from
Speaker 7: Peggy Seeger, who wrote and wrote an anti fascist song
Speaker 7: called Song of Choice, and one of the verses that's
Speaker 7: always stuck with me is today the soldiers took away one.
Speaker 7: Tomorrow they may take away two. One April, they took
Speaker 7: away Greece, but surely they will never take you. And
Speaker 7: you know, I mean, that's the thing that people in
Speaker 7: the thirties woke up to, right is you know, if
Speaker 7: you're in this country and this is the thing that
Speaker 7: you're waking up to now, is that, Yeah, the soldiers
Speaker 7: are taking people away, and every day they're taking away
Speaker 7: more and more people and one day you wake up
Speaker 7: and they've taken entire countries. And the only way that
Speaker 7: you can stop this is by making sure that the
Speaker 7: action that you're taking is not just waking up and
Speaker 7: going back to sleep. Right, Yep, you have to take
Speaker 7: a stand. You have to fight because no one is coming.
Speaker 7: The only person who was coming for these people, the
Speaker 7: only person who was coming for the people coming next
Speaker 7: to them, and inevitably the only people who is coming
Speaker 7: to save you when they come for you is going
Speaker 7: to be you. And you know there there are enough
Speaker 7: of us to stop them, right there always have been.
Speaker 7: That's that's always been a thing about fascism is that
Speaker 7: it relies on us not fighting them, but relies on
Speaker 7: us on our passivity. It relies on us not caring
Speaker 7: enough about the people that they take first, you know,
Speaker 7: to sit back and do nothing and think that we
Speaker 7: can wait, and you can't have You have to start
Speaker 7: right now, and you have to stop them before they
Speaker 7: advance any further. And you have to roll back what
Speaker 7: they've already done. And this is our opportunity to do that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, absolutely absolutely. I think that says that they encapsulates
Speaker 8: the sentiment perfectly.
Speaker 7: Well, yeah, do you have anything else that you want
Speaker 7: to add before we head out, and we will put
Speaker 7: links to a whole bunch of things in the description
Speaker 7: to this.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, I suppose to those that would want to
Speaker 8: know more about not just the struggle of the farm
Speaker 8: workers doing, but also the general experiments in independent unionism
Speaker 8: here in the Pacific Northwest, I'd highly encourage that folks
Speaker 8: take a deep dive and see that to organize your
Speaker 8: workplace to have the kind of solidarity with your coworkers,
Speaker 8: you need not be dependent upon someone else and other
Speaker 8: organizations that come in and sort of rescue you from
Speaker 8: the mystery and drudgery of non union workplaces. You can
Speaker 8: do it too. You can create. You have it in
Speaker 8: your head, in your own mind and your own ends,
Speaker 8: the ability to organize, the ability to fight with your coworkers,
Speaker 8: you have the kind of clever problem solving skills that
Speaker 8: every worker has in order to come back the boss
Speaker 8: and create a better world than the one that currently exists.
Speaker 8: And also that when it comes to issues like standing
Speaker 8: up for this struggle now and struggles in the future,
Speaker 8: I would say you have it now, the creative capacity
Speaker 8: to in whatever city you're in, to make connections to
Speaker 8: build inroads with the labor movement, to build inroads with
Speaker 8: working class people, and to try to create those bonds
Speaker 8: that happen. We here are trying to build closer bonds
Speaker 8: with city workers and farm workers out out in the country. Yeah,
Speaker 8: it's an important struggle because one it's going to be
Speaker 8: more and more important in the future. You don't have
Speaker 8: to wait for anyone else to tell you how to
Speaker 8: do that. You yourselves can show solidarity and work together
Speaker 8: to build those kinds of bonds now so that in
Speaker 8: the future you can create working class movements that whether
Speaker 8: that takes the form of collective bargaining or something else.
Speaker 8: Organizing for the common good is useful no matter in
Speaker 8: what legal capacity it happens.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I mean, you know, one of the last
Speaker 7: point I want to add about that in terms of
Speaker 7: looking at like you not needing help to do things,
Speaker 7: like you know, I know a lot of the people
Speaker 7: who you know, like are the organizers who are hired
Speaker 7: by places like the UAW, like AFLCIO unions. Right, they're
Speaker 7: good people. Like, they're good people, they're good organizers. They
Speaker 7: don't know anything that you can learn, Like, a lot
Speaker 7: of these people are just literally college students right, who
Speaker 7: are recruited like from college campuses and are thrown with
Speaker 7: no training into organizing these things, right, And you know,
Speaker 7: and again these are people who are just like stepping
Speaker 7: out of classrooms into like into these organizing scenarios with
Speaker 7: very minimal training, and they've been able to do it.
Speaker 7: And if those people can do it, so can you, Like,
Speaker 7: I know you, I know, I know these organizers and
Speaker 7: the only difference between them and you is that they
Speaker 7: spent some time learning some things and then they apply
Speaker 7: the same tools like they apply in some ways worse
Speaker 7: versions of the same tools that the independent union organizers use.
Speaker 7: And they're all tools that you can learn.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And if any of the people listening want to
Speaker 8: learn sim of those tools, yeah, or you help with
Speaker 8: education and training, or just want to make connections at
Speaker 8: in roads with workers elsewhere, contact the coalition and independent
Speaker 8: husdents and seeing how we can build these bonds together,
Speaker 8: because I think that we will problem solve how to
Speaker 8: defeat this regime one way or another. But I think
Speaker 8: that we, particularly in the independent union space, provide a
Speaker 8: unique possibility for how this can happen because since we
Speaker 8: are not tied to larger established contracts. We're not tied
Speaker 8: to jurisdictional disputes, We're not tied to a lot of
Speaker 8: the legacies of some of the larger unions, God bless them.
Speaker 8: We can create and fashion a labor movement that doesn't
Speaker 8: have to live by those rules. You know, if you
Speaker 8: imagine the idea of what it would look like to
Speaker 8: refound the CIO in the nineteen thirties, if you could
Speaker 8: imagine the worst aspects of the labor movement and excising them,
Speaker 8: and what is the best aspects of labor movement that
Speaker 8: you would want to see, we can create that together today.
Speaker 8: And today it takes the form of standing up in
Speaker 8: solidarity with LELO and farm Workers Union up northern Washington,
Speaker 8: not because we get anything from it, not because it's easy,
Speaker 8: but precisely because it is difficult, and precisely because it
Speaker 8: is a moral compulsion on us to take action today
Speaker 8: for it. We don't have to wait for anyone to
Speaker 8: tell us what to do. As part of an independent
Speaker 8: labor movement, we get to decide our future and our faith,
Speaker 8: and we get to decide our struggles.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and if and when we beat them here, we
Speaker 7: can beat them today. We can beat them tomorrow. We
Speaker 7: can beat the next day, and one day you know
Speaker 7: we will. We will have one, one victory too many
Speaker 7: for them to hold onto power. And that's the only
Speaker 7: way forward.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, fascism wants you to believe in a nihilistic perspective
Speaker 8: of the world. They want you to believe in which
Speaker 8: it is hopeless to fight back. They want you to
Speaker 8: believe just doom scroll forever and don't take any action
Speaker 8: and focus on yourselves and navel gaze indefinitely. No. No. The
Speaker 8: way that you find out the kind of person that
Speaker 8: you are, and the way that you build the kind
Speaker 8: of future that you want for yourselves or families, for
Speaker 8: your communities, for the people that you don't even know
Speaker 8: and never will meet, what you want a good life
Speaker 8: for them. The way that you do that is you
Speaker 8: take action. Now, you start organizing, You do what you can,
Speaker 8: you build what you can. That's how we do this.
Speaker 8: Like we said earlier, they want you to believe that
Speaker 8: the fighter is already over, the history has already been written.
Speaker 8: They only say that because they know it's not true. Yep,
Speaker 8: and me and other people who talk like this, who
Speaker 8: are as optimistic and as hopeful and is fight. Ready.
Speaker 8: We don't believe this out of nowhere. We believe this
Speaker 8: because we truly do see that the better world is
Speaker 8: possible if we fight.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I think that's a spectacular place to end. Mark,
Speaker 7: thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah,
Speaker 7: thank you, and everyone else who's listening to this, go
Speaker 7: out and fight.
Speaker 11: Hello, and welcome to It could happen here. I want
Speaker 11: you to imagine a world where everyone shared a second language,
Speaker 11: not because of imperial conquest, but out of a shared
Speaker 11: desire for unity and understanding. That was the duram behind Esperanto,
Speaker 11: a constructed language designed to be the basis for global bilingualism.
Speaker 11: Long before I learned anything about anarchism, I spent some
Speaker 11: time trying to learn Esperanto. It has shown up on
Speaker 11: my due lingo one day, and it seems like such
Speaker 11: a fascinating and simple project to pick up. I was
Speaker 11: enamored with the philosophy behind it, so I generally spent
Speaker 11: a few months on and off trying to learn it.
Speaker 11: I was probably a decade ago at this point, so
Speaker 11: I don't remember too much about it, but the connection
Speaker 11: was there. And it's really because I've been exploring this
Speaker 11: topic for this episode that I ended up going back
Speaker 11: and dabbling in some of it again. I've learned recently
Speaker 11: this is actually somewhat of a connection between Esperanto and anarchism,
Speaker 11: so I stayed the time to explore the origins of Esperanto.
Speaker 11: It's anarchist connections, it's flaws and its future. My name
Speaker 11: is Andrew Sage, and I'm here once again.
Speaker 9: With its face James. Again, very excited for this one.
Speaker 11: Yes, you're familiar with Esperanto, right.
Speaker 9: Yeah, very familiar. I am.
Speaker 13: I wrote about it a little bit in my my
Speaker 13: first book and my PhD dissertation. Also, the last living
Speaker 13: person to participate in the Popular Olympics, which is what
Speaker 13: I wrote my book about, was an Esperantist like. Part
Speaker 13: of the project of the Popular Front in Catalonia was
Speaker 13: to bring people to diverstory sport, and then Esperanto was
Speaker 13: going to be this thing that would, as you mentioned,
Speaker 13: like bridge the gaps between people.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 11: Yes, it's a really inspiring project, and so I know
Speaker 11: you're probably gonna know all this information, but I do
Speaker 11: have to share it with the audience.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I'm excited. I never really did full run down Esperanto.
Speaker 13: It disappeared, and I was like, holy shit, that's cool.
Speaker 13: So I'm going to learn a lot.
Speaker 11: Sure.
Speaker 5: So.
Speaker 11: Esperanto was first constructed in a little booklet in eighteen
Speaker 11: eighty seven by Polish Jewish ophthalmologist el El Salmonoff. According
Speaker 11: to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the name itself comes from the
Speaker 11: pseudonym he took on to publish the booklet. He called
Speaker 11: himself doctorro Esperanto, Esperanto meaning one who hopes and hope
Speaker 11: really analyzed the whole project. According to a BBC article
Speaker 11: written by Jose Luis Benarredonde, he lived as a Polish
Speaker 11: Jew in the multicultural Russian Empire in a time rife
Speaker 11: with racial and national conflict. He was trying to promote
Speaker 11: peace and understanding, and he saw an international language as
Speaker 11: a ways to do that, with a flag of green
Speaker 11: and white, the colors of hope and peace. For his efforts,
Speaker 11: Zamenhoff himself was nominated fourteen times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaker 11: He genuine believed that if we all shared a common
Speaker 11: second language, quote, education, ideals, convictions, aims would be the
Speaker 11: same too, and all nations would be united in a
Speaker 11: common brotherhood. End quote. Esperanto was created in a time
Speaker 11: when modernism was on the rise and the idea of
Speaker 11: rationality and science was being used to quote un quote
Speaker 11: optimize the world. When it was featured in Paris's Exposition
Speaker 11: Universal in nineteen hundred, the language caught on amongst the
Speaker 11: French intelligensia, who saw it as more optimal than the
Speaker 11: messy and the logical realm of natural languages. Because it
Speaker 11: was so easy, all words and sentences being built from
Speaker 11: sixteen basic rules that could fit on a paper, and
Speaker 11: the language lacks the confusing exceptions and special rules of
Speaker 11: other languages, it was once seen as the language of
Speaker 11: the future. Esperanto made its full fledged public debut in
Speaker 11: nineteen oh five when seven Hoff published The Fundamental Esperanto,
Speaker 11: which laid down the basic principles of languages structure and formation.
Speaker 11: Esperanto was designed to be simple, logical, and accessible, drawn
Speaker 11: from the influence of Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages and
Speaker 11: its construction. The orthography is phonetic, so all the words
Speaker 11: are spelled as pronounced, and the grammar is so straightforward.
Speaker 11: There's a consistent word ending for nouns. Pluralization adjectives and verbs.
Speaker 11: But although simple, it can couldvey complexity. A lot of
Speaker 11: suffixes you can add to give degrees of meaning, and
Speaker 11: there's room for compound words too. It's European focus to
Speaker 11: be the target of criticism later on, but it actually
Speaker 11: ended up being picked up in some unusual places. Anyway,
Speaker 11: Zamenhoff translated literature and wrote original verse, and after years
Speaker 11: of effort, there were speakers to be found across Europe,
Speaker 11: the Americas, China, and Japan.
Speaker 9: Interesting.
Speaker 11: By nineteen oh eight, the Universala Esperanto Associo was founded,
Speaker 11: and it can now find members in eighty three countries worldwide.
Speaker 11: Today there's also fifty national Esperanto associations and twenty two
Speaker 11: international professional associations that use Esperanto. There's an annual World
Speaker 11: Esperanto Congress and more than one hundred periodicals published in Esperanto.
Speaker 11: Estimates range widely in terms of how many people speak
Speaker 11: Esperanto today. They are apparently a handful of native speakers,
Speaker 11: folks who were raised speaking Esperanto. Oh wow, yeah, it's
Speaker 11: really really really cool. Yeah, but L two speakers are
Speaker 11: somewhere between thirty eight thousand l to being you know,
Speaker 11: second language speakers are somewhere between thirty eight thousand to
Speaker 11: two million. According to Wilfith's article on Esperanto and anarchism.
Speaker 11: There are tens of thousands of books in Esperanto and
Speaker 11: several hundred, mostly swam periodicals that appear regularly. Yeah Party
Speaker 11: a day passes about international meetings such as those of
Speaker 11: specialized organizations, conferences, youth get togethers, seminars, group holidays, and
Speaker 11: regional meetings. There are several radio stations that broadcast programs
Speaker 11: in Esperanto, and Esperanto has even been used by couples
Speaker 11: of different origins as a family language.
Speaker 9: It's cool, funny enough.
Speaker 11: As with every language, even an aspiring universal language, it
Speaker 11: has since had its offshoots. I saw on Wikipedia that
Speaker 11: nearly a year after Samonoff's creation of Esperanto, in eighteen
Speaker 11: eighty eight, Dutch author J. Brachmann proposed a few changes
Speaker 11: to language, like combining the end in for the adjective
Speaker 11: and adverb, change in conjugations, introduce in more Latin roots,
Speaker 11: getting rid of the diacritics, and so on. This language
Speaker 11: would be called Mundolinko, and it was the first of
Speaker 11: many offshoots from Esperanto proper. Even Zamenhoff would try to
Speaker 11: reform the language at one point in eighteen ninety four,
Speaker 11: but it was rejected by the Esperanto community and eventually
Speaker 11: even himself. These reforms would later be used to develop Edo,
Speaker 11: another attempt at universal language, with far less success. I
Speaker 11: also learned theo Wikipedia there was an attempt to make
Speaker 11: Esperanto more complex by introducing Cherokee components called Policepo, created
Speaker 11: by a Native American activist named Billy ray Walden. Esperanto
Speaker 11: speakers continue to play the language in all sorts of ways.
Speaker 11: To this day. Esperanto is an evolved in language, and
Speaker 11: Samonhoff himself is honored as part of this global Esperanto culture.
Speaker 11: They celebrate his birthday the fifteenth of December, statues and
Speaker 11: streets and plaques remembering him worldwide, and even an asteroid
Speaker 11: there's his name. At one point, according to the BBC article,
Speaker 11: there was an effort to establish an Esperanto speaking land
Speaker 11: called ami Kejo, which would have been a three point
Speaker 11: five square kilometer territory between the Netlands, Germany and France. Yeah. Nice,
Speaker 11: three point five square kilometers.
Speaker 13: Yeah, not huge, Yeah, it's like how big? Well, I know,
Speaker 13: we've got a few of those, like little ones in Europe,
Speaker 13: you know.
Speaker 11: Yeah, a couple of micro estates. It could have been
Speaker 11: another micro state, but the idea was very quickly squashed
Speaker 11: following World War One.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I know. This senatee.
Speaker 13: The Spanish Anarchosynthicalist Union was like in its first congress,
Speaker 13: like its foundational Congress. I supposed they were like, and
Speaker 13: everyone has to everyone should try and learn Esperanto, like
Speaker 13: that was one of their like the things that at
Speaker 13: the foundation of what became probably the most powerful anarchist
Speaker 13: movement the world's ever seen.
Speaker 9: They were like, also, this is a big thing.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, Esperanto is really huge in the anarchist movement
Speaker 11: at a certain point.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 11: But we're going to get to those connections soon enough.
Speaker 11: I want to bring up this other interesting story. There
Speaker 11: was actually an effort by esperantists, including a delegate from Iran,
Speaker 11: to get the language to become the official language of
Speaker 11: the League of Nations. But take one guess as to
Speaker 11: which country block that effort.
Speaker 9: Was it one of the anglophone countries? No, oh, wow,
Speaker 9: the French.
Speaker 11: It was the French.
Speaker 13: Yeah, there is not a state more invested in its
Speaker 13: language than France. Indeed, they have laws I think about,
Speaker 13: like broadcasting music and dubbing films and things.
Speaker 11: Yeah, the French government seemingly hated Esperanto. At least according
Speaker 11: to the article on imp of the Diverse blog site,
Speaker 11: they blocked its study in universities and public schools, and
Speaker 11: as the article quotes the opponents directly quote. On September tenth,
Speaker 11: nineteen twenty two, the New York Tribune ran a translation
Speaker 11: of a piece by the editor in chief of Limatin,
Speaker 11: Stefan Lausanne. Miss Lasan spent half his editorial writing about Esperanto.
Speaker 11: And I'm not going to do a French accent for
Speaker 11: this section, but just imagine, like the most French Frenchman
Speaker 11: reading this, that Finns or Albanians have fevered such a
Speaker 11: proper ganda is comprehensible. Their dialect has no chance of
Speaker 11: imposing itself on the universe. They need a second language
Speaker 11: just as well Esperanto as any other. But that French
Speaker 11: people or English or Germans could have let themselves be
Speaker 11: allured by this linguistic bolsheviser that is far more extraordinary.
Speaker 11: It is nevertheless a fact that Esperando, which was born
Speaker 11: twenty five years ago and ought to have died through ridicule,
Speaker 11: continues to have disciples in Europe. Every year in a
Speaker 11: different capital they hold a congress at which they are
Speaker 11: not very numerous, but where they make a great noise.
Speaker 11: They get so excited that quite recently the Minister of
Speaker 11: Public Instruction had to address a circular to all the
Speaker 11: French educational resorts to warn them against the danger of Esperanto.
Speaker 11: An article in the Washington Herald on that same day
Speaker 11: explained the danger, at least according to the Ministry of
Speaker 11: Public Instruction. The reason for this order, according to Sittin
Speaker 11: school teachers, is that teaching of a language as easy
Speaker 11: as Esperanto endangers the existence of the French language and
Speaker 11: thus the national solidarity of the country. They contend that
Speaker 11: children will nationally take to an easy language as Esperanto,
Speaker 11: and in that time French and English would perish, and
Speaker 11: that the literary standard of the world would be debased. Furthermore,
Speaker 11: they argue that a national language plays a predominant part
Speaker 11: in maintaining national unity, and points to Poland and the
Speaker 11: Rain as examples. Esperanto is an artificial language of no
Speaker 11: real merit right to one professor, it has no very
Speaker 11: definite origin and what it aims to draw the scattered
Speaker 11: people of the world together, does it doth rather tend
Speaker 11: to de nationalization? End quote?
Speaker 13: They're not wrong, Like France is the language if you
Speaker 13: read like a peasants into Frenchman is kind of the
Speaker 13: classic work on like French nationalization. But like, in order
Speaker 13: to make people French, they did have to suppress like
Speaker 13: Basque and Breton and Catalan and other languages, right, and
Speaker 13: make people go to schools where they learned French and
Speaker 13: conceived of themselves as French.
Speaker 9: As a result of that.
Speaker 11: Yeah, their imposition of DaShan identity was perhaps among the
Speaker 11: most successful in the world. Yeah, in terms of its
Speaker 11: earliness and its consistent enforcement.
Speaker 13: It shows like nations are always projects of the bourgeoisie, right, Like,
Speaker 13: at least I would argue that, and so a lot
Speaker 13: of other people. But like the French example is one
Speaker 13: where we can see it more clearly than others. Like
Speaker 13: it's a state and specifically like a certain class within
Speaker 13: the state project to enforce and continue to perpetuate this
Speaker 13: narrative of nation.
Speaker 11: And you know, they weren't the only enemies of Esperanto
Speaker 11: and do you know that's saying judged me by my enemies?
Speaker 9: Yeah? Who else?
Speaker 11: We got Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, and the Soviet Union
Speaker 11: also heated.
Speaker 9: Esperanto gets cooler with everyone.
Speaker 11: The Nazis they were nationalists, and the Zavenhoff was Jewish.
Speaker 11: So his family was actually targeted and the language was banned,
Speaker 11: and Esperantis were targeted and put in camps during the Holocaust,
Speaker 11: which is really tragic.
Speaker 9: Yeah, pretty fucked.
Speaker 11: Yeah, his whole family was heavily targeted by Nati Germany.
Speaker 11: Franco associated Esperanto with anti nationalism and anarchism, which true.
Speaker 9: Yeah, he wasn't wrong, So it.
Speaker 11: Was targeted for a while. Yeah, and the Soviets, while
Speaker 11: originally recognizing Esperantists, eventually reversed that policy under Stalin during
Speaker 11: the Great Purge and executed exiled or gulagd Esperantists. And
Speaker 11: as you can imagine, all that repression all at once
Speaker 11: kind of killed Esperanto's momentum. Today, despite its goal of
Speaker 11: being a truly international language, Esperanto's global reach remains une fun.
Speaker 11: While it has made some strides in recent years, it's
Speaker 11: still underrepresented in many parts of Africa and Asia. The
Speaker 11: majority of Esperanto speakers today are in Europe. Those development
Speaker 11: outside of Europe deserves some attention, as Esperanto managed to
Speaker 11: levermark in China, Iran, Togo and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Speaker 11: But the response to Esperanto historically you should give you
Speaker 11: an indication as to how anarchists must have felt about Esperanto.
Speaker 11: As an internationalist or anti nationalist movement. Anarchism was very
Speaker 11: supportive of the Esperanto project won. Running through the timeline
Speaker 11: could to see Wilfirth's Esperanto and Anarchism. One of the
Speaker 11: earliest anarchist Esperanto groups was founded in Stockholm in nineteen
Speaker 11: oh five. The same year, the anarchist Paul up with
Speaker 11: a Lot founded the monthly magazine Esperanto. Similar groups soon
Speaker 11: emerged in Bulgaria, China and other countries. In nineteen oh six,
Speaker 11: anarchists anarchist Sinicolis founded an international association Paco Libreco Peace Freedom,
Speaker 11: which published the Internacia Socia Review. By nineteen ten, Paco
Speaker 11: Libreco merged with Esperantista Labarri Staro to form Liberiga Stillo
Speaker 11: star Liberation, strengthening anarchist Esperanto networks. The nineteen oh seven
Speaker 11: International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam formally addressed the role of
Speaker 11: Esperanto in international communication. Subsequent anarchist congresses continue to pass
Speaker 11: resolutions advocating for Esperanto's use within the movement. By nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 11: these anarchist esperantist organizations had published extensive revolutionary literature, including
Speaker 11: anarchist texts in Esperanto. Around this time, correspondence between European
Speaker 11: and Japanese anarchists became more active, facilitated by Esperanto. In Prague,
Speaker 11: Eugene Adam proposed the formation of Senassa Associo Tutmunda the
Speaker 11: SAT or the World in National Association. Unlike other Esperanto associations,
Speaker 11: SAT rejected nationalism wholesale and sought to create a transnational
Speaker 11: class conscious workers movement. To quote why is there an
Speaker 11: Esperanto Workers Movement by Gary Michel, SAT was not meant
Speaker 11: to usurp the role of political parties by engaging in
Speaker 11: political struggles directly, but was to be a cultural association
Speaker 11: engaged in workers education, one that would help to break
Speaker 11: down national and ethnic barriers between workers by involving them
Speaker 11: in practical collective activity, bringing workers into contact, freeing them
Speaker 11: from the shackles of nationalism. SAT's idea, and especially the
Speaker 11: ideas of its a nationalist faction, were an early statement
Speaker 11: of an idea that has more recently come to be
Speaker 11: known as globalization from below. So in August nineteen twenty one,
Speaker 11: seventy nine workers from fifteen countries gathered in Prague to
Speaker 11: formally established SAT. By nineteen twenty nine to nineteen thirty
Speaker 11: SAT had grown to six five hundred and twenty four
Speaker 11: members across forty two countries, reaching its peak influence. The
Speaker 11: use of Esperanto flourished in German workers' movements between nineteen
Speaker 11: twenty and nineteen thirty three. By nineteen thirty two, the
Speaker 11: German Workers Esperanto League had four thousand members, leading to
Speaker 11: Esperanto being called the Workers Latin. But as you can imagine,
Speaker 11: this was not to last. By the time Hitler came
Speaker 11: into power. The Scientific Anarchist Library of the International Language
Speaker 11: or ISAB, was founded in the USSR in nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 11: published in anarchist works by Kropotkin and Ann Borivoi in Esperanto.
Speaker 11: This also would not last. The Great Purge The Berlin
Speaker 11: group of anarchist cyniclist esperantists created the Second Congress of
Speaker 11: the International Workers Association in Amsterdam in nineteen twenty five
Speaker 11: and reported that Esperanto had become so integrated into their
Speaker 11: movement that an international libertarian Esperantist organization had formed. This
Speaker 11: likely referred to the TLEs the World League of Steepless Esperantists,
Speaker 11: which later merged with SAT. Esperanto was also popping off
Speaker 11: amongst anarchists and socialists in Korea, China, and Japan. Liushifu,
Speaker 11: a key figure in Chinese anarchism, began publishing La Voucho
Speaker 11: de la Popolo, The Voice of the People in nineteen thirteen,
Speaker 11: the first anarchist periodical in China. His work relied heavily
Speaker 11: on information from Internacia Socia Review and helped popularize esperanto
Speaker 11: in China. Japanese anarchists and socialists, as I mentioned, were
Speaker 11: among the earliest esperantists in the country, but faced heavy
Speaker 11: persecution and sadly between imperial Japan, Francoist Spain, Nazi Germany,
Speaker 11: and Stalinist Russia. The rise of tatalitarian regimes lead into
Speaker 11: World War II, largely suppressed the anarchist esperanto movement. After
Speaker 11: the war, the Paris Anarchist Esperanto group was the first
Speaker 11: to resume organized work, launching the publication sen Santano in
Speaker 11: nineteen forty six. Most anarchist Esperantists have since been organized
Speaker 11: within SAT, with an anarchist faction maintaining its autonomy. In
Speaker 11: nineteen sixty nine, this faction began publishing the Liberal Sana Bultano,
Speaker 11: later a day in the Liberate Sana Liguillo. By nineteen
Speaker 11: ninety seven, SAT membership had dwindled to fewer than fifteen
Speaker 11: hundred members. The initial radical vision of SAT was weakened
Speaker 11: by political shifts and the growing dominance of English as
Speaker 11: a global lingua franca. Daily separation between SAT and mainstream
Speaker 11: Esperanto organizations was a response to bourgeois political neutrality, but
Speaker 11: it also contributed to its marginalization, and today the anarchist
Speaker 11: esperanto movement exists largely as a niche within SAT. So
Speaker 11: what can we say about the role of Esperanto today. Well.
Speaker 11: One of the more interesting currents I found in the
Speaker 11: esperanto community mentioned by Firth is Raumismo, a philosophy named
Speaker 11: after the Finnish city of Rauma, where a youth congress
Speaker 11: in nineteen eighty helped define this approach. Braumismo views Esperanto
Speaker 11: speakers as a kind of linguistic diaspora, a cultural group
Speaker 11: bound together by a shared language rather than a national identity.
Speaker 11: Instead of focusing on making Esperanto a universal second language,
Speaker 11: raumistoge embraced it as just one language among many, valuing
Speaker 11: its use in literature, culture and everyday communication without any
Speaker 11: grand ideological ambitions. But it's possible Esperanto who can still
Speaker 11: play a role in facilities in exchange and collaboration between
Speaker 11: people of different linguistic backgrounds. A German anarchist once lamented
Speaker 11: the barrier international understanding quoted in food article. More or
Speaker 11: less in isolation from one another, we work and fight
Speaker 11: without engaging in exchange about our victories and defeats, and
Speaker 11: with thoughts supporting and encouraging one another. Intensifying contact above
Speaker 11: the regional level with people having similar ideas and aims
Speaker 11: should be an important component of our work in order
Speaker 11: to make effective active solidarity possible quote. And that's the trouble.
Speaker 11: Even today. Linguistic barriers hinder international cooperation groups struggle to
Speaker 11: maintain foreign language correspondence, organize multilingual meetings, or find interpreters. Instead,
Speaker 11: communication tends to rely on chance. You know, someone in
Speaker 11: a group happens to speak a certain language that determines
Speaker 11: who they can connect with. But when those key individuals
Speaker 11: move on, those connections can have falling apart. So I
Speaker 11: get the appeal, I mean, wouldn't it be beneficial for
Speaker 11: these movements and for any interest group working across language barriers,
Speaker 11: to have a relatively easy to learn, politically neutral means
Speaker 11: of communication. Major languages like English, Spanish or French don't
Speaker 11: fully solve the problem, as they come with historical baggage
Speaker 11: and imbalances influency levels. Esperanto, on the other hand, provides
Speaker 11: a more equitable solution because everybody is from this starts
Speaker 11: and from the same point. Since it isn't tied to
Speaker 11: any one nation, it avoids the poodynamics that arise when
Speaker 11: non native speakers must conformed to the linguistic norms of
Speaker 11: dominant cultures. Unlike English, which often privileges native speakers and
Speaker 11: places others as perpetual learners, Esperanto fosters a more level
Speaker 11: playin field. English is treated like a global lingua franca
Speaker 11: right now, But a lot of people leave school without
Speaker 11: ever developing an affluency to navigate an English dominated world,
Speaker 11: and English is not the easiest language to learn. Esperanto,
Speaker 11: regardless of weather ever, becomes a global standard, offers an
Speaker 11: alternative path. It can help people overcome language learning anxieties,
Speaker 11: as particularly those who feel disempowered by educational systems, and
Speaker 11: it can inspire an interest in language itself. If you've
Speaker 11: ever met an Esperanto speaker, you know that they are
Speaker 11: very passionate about linguistics. More often than not, many of
Speaker 11: the speakers go on to study linguistics, language politics, or
Speaker 11: even lesser known languages. It's also a great way to
Speaker 11: develop translation skills in a friendly, cooperative environment. For monolingual
Speaker 11: English speakers, using Esperanto can be an eye open and experience.
Speaker 11: It puts them the shoes of those who never got
Speaker 11: to rely on their native language in international settings. Rather
Speaker 11: than view an Esperanto as a competitor to other languages,
Speaker 11: perhaps a more productive approach is to see it as
Speaker 11: a tool for promoting multi lingualism, cultural exchange, and a
Speaker 11: more cosmopolitan mindset within the Esperanto speaking in the community.
Speaker 11: Opinions on its future vary widely, but one thing is clear.
Speaker 11: The question of how we communicate across linguistic divides is
Speaker 11: still very much alive, and Esperanto offers but possible answer. However,
Speaker 11: as I alluded to Ilia, Esperanto is not without its critiques.
Speaker 11: As covered by Firth, Let's start with one of the
Speaker 11: most frequent critiques. Esperanto is an artificial language. Unlike the
Speaker 11: so called natural languages, which evolved organically over time, Esperanto
Speaker 11: was deliberately constructed. But here's the thing. Since the rise
Speaker 11: of the nation state, the line between natural and artificial
Speaker 11: languages has become increasingly blurry. Many national languages, like standard
Speaker 11: German or Standard French, have been shaped by deliberate standardization,
Speaker 11: legal regulations, and media influence. In that sense, every language
Speaker 11: is to some degree engineered. Authors, storytellers, and ordinary speakers
Speaker 11: continuously influenced language development, meaning that Esperanto is not as different.
Speaker 11: After all, it does continue to evolve. And here's where
Speaker 11: I think James Scott had a rather negative characterization of
Speaker 11: Esperanto as a purely high modess endeavor, as though all
Speaker 11: esperandos sought to make Esperanto, the official international language in
Speaker 11: se Meca State. He claims that Esperanto was created to
Speaker 11: replace the dialects and vernaculars of Europe, but such was
Speaker 11: never the case. It was always meant to be a
Speaker 11: language used to facilitate communication. There was more than one
Speaker 11: motivation of Esperando's use, and boil in such an exercise
Speaker 11: and human creativity, and attempted a connection down to just
Speaker 11: that status focus to me seems needlessly reductive. He also
Speaker 11: calls it quote an exceptionally thin language without any of
Speaker 11: the resonances, connotations, ready metaphors, literatures, oral histories, idioms, and
Speaker 11: traditions of practical use that any social embedded language already
Speaker 11: had end quote, which may be true when it began,
Speaker 11: but it's certainly not true now with over a century
Speaker 11: of use and evolution.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 11: His analogies between Esperanto and plant cities also missed the
Speaker 11: mark for me, as Esperanto has clearly operated as a
Speaker 11: self organized and grassroots move on for most of its
Speaker 11: history and has never really received the back end of
Speaker 11: states or their enforcement.
Speaker 13: It's a weird angle from Scott because normally he'd advocate
Speaker 13: for like what he calls like the anarchist squint right like,
Speaker 13: and seeing history through a perspective of anarchistm I guess,
Speaker 13: like an anarchist lens. And I feel like, exactly this
Speaker 13: is very applicable with Esperanto, the only language which isn't
Speaker 13: inherently tied to any state or nation or ethnicity.
Speaker 11: Exactly when I saw that, I remember reading seeing like
Speaker 11: the State some years ago, and I've already the lost
Speaker 11: st to for that. But in doing the research for this,
Speaker 11: I ended up, you know, stumbling upon it again and
Speaker 11: I was like, hm, after reading the history, it's like
Speaker 11: this wasn't quite accurate.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, that's a bum it. Yeah, generally like Scott
Speaker 13: me as well. Yeah, recently some listeners very kindly, James's
Speaker 13: got passed away out of this knit as I'm sure
Speaker 13: you know, I do, yes, But his library was donated
Speaker 13: to a local second hand bookshop and some folks that
Speaker 13: I asked online and they went and got me some
Speaker 13: books and sent them, which was really kind. So I
Speaker 13: have some of his books now.
Speaker 11: Oh that's nice.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: There's another common claim about Esperanto, which is that it's eurocentric,
Speaker 11: right and linguistically. There's some truth to this Esperanto originated
Speaker 11: in Eastern Europe, and it still carries structural elements to example,
Speaker 11: Indo European languages. The majority of Esperanto speakers today are
Speaker 11: European and its vocabulary is largely drawn from European languages. However,
Speaker 11: critics who make this argument often suggest alternatives like English
Speaker 11: or Spanish languages that are just as if not more,
Speaker 11: Eurocentric in the historical and political reach. Esperanto, in contrast,
Speaker 11: has evolved through influence from non European languages as well,
Speaker 11: particularly through its development in China and Japan. It's a
Speaker 11: glassenative word formation, a feature more common in languages like
Speaker 11: Twokish or Japanese and what some call the Hungarian period
Speaker 11: of Esperanto's history. So while Esperanto soo has European roots,
Speaker 11: it's global evolution challenges the idea that it is exclusively
Speaker 11: European in character. Another critique is that Esperanto is sexist.
Speaker 11: The argument goes that because feminine forms are typically created
Speaker 11: by adding in to a base form like Laboristo worker
Speaker 11: become a Labristino female worker, the language assumes masculinity as
Speaker 11: a default, and while this is a valid concern, Esperanto
Speaker 11: differs from any European languages in a key way. It
Speaker 11: is not assigned grammatical gender to inanimate objects. A chair
Speaker 11: isn't arbitrarily feminine like in French, or masculine like in German. However,
Speaker 11: in practice, gender bias can still creep in the basic
Speaker 11: form of noun is often assumed to be masculine, even
Speaker 11: though Esperanto allows for explicitly male forms as well. Like
Speaker 11: in any language, reducing linguistic sexism in Esperanto requires conscious
Speaker 11: effort in how people actually use it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's an interesting one.
Speaker 13: Like we see this in Spanish too, right, like with
Speaker 13: attempts to create like gender neutral forms the presumptive mask
Speaker 13: then or if you're addressing a mixed gender group then
Speaker 13: you would use the masculine. But like people who are
Speaker 13: first language Spanish speakers can correct me. I'm sure you
Speaker 13: will on the subreddit if you want to. So, like
Speaker 13: when I hear in English language media it's referred to
Speaker 13: as latin x but like that's kind of a word
Speaker 13: that I struggle to say in Spanish, like it Latin
Speaker 13: ekie or like is it latiniques?
Speaker 9: And so there's this very kind of.
Speaker 13: Clumsy gender neutral form, which seems to be easier to
Speaker 13: say in English and Spanish.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I've seen Latin used in some circles.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Latine, Latine.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 13: When I speak to non binary people in Spanish, that's
Speaker 13: what they prefer to use. Of this relatively small sample size,
Speaker 13: given that there are probably millions of non binary Spanish
Speaker 13: speaking people, I haven't obviously spoken to all or most
Speaker 13: of them, but like, it's very interesting to see this.
Speaker 13: Like outside critique of the language seems to also ignore
Speaker 13: an inside movement within people who are Spanish first language
Speaker 13: speakers to create a organic, like gender neutral form, yeah,
Speaker 13: which could also happen in any language, right, Like, just
Speaker 13: because Esperanto has a certain form doesn't mean that people
Speaker 13: within that language who don't feel represented by them couldn't
Speaker 13: create forms within that language better represent them exactly. And
Speaker 13: it's easier because you don't have like a government telling
Speaker 13: you you can't use it or whatever exactly exactly.
Speaker 11: Esperanto is and continues to be a grassroots movement, and
Speaker 11: that has actually been a subject of critique for some.
Speaker 11: You know, perhaps one of the biggest critiques for Esperando
Speaker 11: is that it never achieved its original goal of becoming
Speaker 11: a universal second language. Zamenhoffit's created envisioned the world with
Speaker 11: Esperanto would bridge linguistic divides, but for many learner language
Speaker 11: that relatively few people spoke simply wasn't practical. But the
Speaker 11: rise of the Internet changed the game for Esperanto. What
Speaker 11: was once difficult to learn and use daily has become
Speaker 11: far more accessible. For example, Esperanto is actually one of
Speaker 11: the most overrepresented languages on the Internet. The Esperanto Wikipedia
Speaker 11: has around two hundred and forty thousand articles, putting it
Speaker 11: in the same league as languages spoken by tens of
Speaker 11: millions of people, like Turkish and Korean. Google and Facebook
Speaker 11: have offered Esperanto versions of their platforms for years, and
Speaker 11: language learning services like due Lingo have helped introduce it
Speaker 11: to a new generation of learners like myself. In fact,
Speaker 11: the people who developed Esperanto courses for due Lingo did
Speaker 11: so voluntarily, simply because they believed in the languages potential.
Speaker 11: Esperanto has fostered a unique online community, and there's even
Speaker 11: a free hospitality network called Pasporta Servo where Esperanto speakers
Speaker 11: can stay with each other around the world, no money required,
Speaker 11: just a shared language and a common philosophy of global connection.
Speaker 11: Not everyone learns Esperanto for the same reasons. Some people
Speaker 11: seek intellectual challenge, some want a sense of unique community,
Speaker 11: and others are drawn to its political neutrality. As communications
Speaker 11: lecturer Sara Marino points out in the BBC article, people
Speaker 11: engage in Esperanto for many different motivations, whether it's personal fulfillment,
Speaker 11: social inclusion, civic engagement, or just the simple joy of
Speaker 11: learning a new language. It's important and not to reduce
Speaker 11: Esperanto learners to a stereotype. Their reasons for participating are
Speaker 11: as diverse as the language itself. So where does Esperanto
Speaker 11: stand today? It may never replace English as the global
Speaker 11: lingui franca, but perhaps there was never the point. Instead,
Speaker 11: it serves as a tool for promoting bilingualism, foster and
Speaker 11: cross cultural connections, and encouraging people to think differently about
Speaker 11: language itself. And I think that is worthy of its
Speaker 11: own reward. That's what I have for today, or power
Speaker 11: to all the people. Peace.
Speaker 3: This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder our weekly
Speaker 3: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 3: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today
Speaker 3: I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.
Speaker 3: This week we're covering the week of April third to
Speaker 3: April ninth. We have recovered from the liberation day, fully liberated,
Speaker 3: and now the economy is back to normal.
Speaker 2: Right, Yes, everything's really good. Everyone's four oh one k's
Speaker 2: have been normal and stable and stable and stable. That's
Speaker 2: what's important.
Speaker 9: Just line go up.
Speaker 2: The economy runs from stability. I mean one of the
Speaker 2: things the line did was go up. So, yeah, the
Speaker 2: line's gone. Why should anyone complain? Yeah, line's going in
Speaker 2: a few different directions this week. Among the different directions
Speaker 2: the line went up, was you know a portion of
Speaker 2: that time.
Speaker 9: Yes, yeah.
Speaker 13: A direction that hasn't gone is left. I guess which
Speaker 13: you know we're waiting for that one.
Speaker 2: And related news, a dead cat can bounce. I don't
Speaker 2: know why they picked the cat for the dead animal
Speaker 2: to bounce to refer to that stock market there.
Speaker 13: But I think this is a term that's new to Garrison,
Speaker 13: just judging by the facial expression.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you don't know what that is.
Speaker 2: So basically, when when a stock price for a company
Speaker 2: or whatever collapses right, there will generally be it will
Speaker 2: straight a line down and then it will bump back
Speaker 2: up and it will look like it's rallying. But this
Speaker 2: isn't generally a rally. What it is is that when
Speaker 2: people like short a stock, there's a point at which
Speaker 2: they have to like buy back the share like shares,
Speaker 2: and that artificially inflates it briefly, but for it then
Speaker 2: begins to decline again. So it's not a real it's
Speaker 2: the result of how short selling works that there has
Speaker 2: to be this thing that makes it temporarily look like
Speaker 2: it's rallying, but that that's really not what's happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm familiar with this concept.
Speaker 9: And they call it a dead cat. It's referred to
Speaker 9: as a dead cat bounce.
Speaker 11: Yeh.
Speaker 2: I don't know why it's referred to as a dead
Speaker 2: cat bounce, but it is.
Speaker 3: Brocas and not normal people. Then why these these are
Speaker 3: Wall Street guys.
Speaker 7: One of them has probably done it, like that's that's
Speaker 7: probably why it's called that.
Speaker 2: Like, Yeah, I've thrown a lot of corpses at a
Speaker 2: lot of things and they don't really bounce.
Speaker 3: Speaking of corpses, Robert, you have some exciting news on
Speaker 3: the army.
Speaker 9: Pronounce Col Garrison.
Speaker 2: Yes, Yes, the good news is the army is going
Speaker 2: to be more lethal and efficient than ever before, which
Speaker 2: President Trump announced while sitting in the White House next
Speaker 2: to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin net and Yahoo, who had
Speaker 2: to take roughly at twice the length of trip he
Speaker 2: normally has to take to go here because so many
Speaker 2: countries that he would normally fly over or stop in
Speaker 2: have arrest warrants out for him for all of the
Speaker 2: war crimes. We love to see it, but you know,
Speaker 2: it's not about the journey. It's about you know, the
Speaker 2: people you journey too. And Netanyahoo met with Trump, you know,
Speaker 2: someone whom he clearly feels very safe, and you know,
Speaker 2: I dare I say loving with and the two of
Speaker 2: them shared the most intimate bond that two elderly men
Speaker 2: who have committed war crimes can share, which is announcing
Speaker 2: a record budget for the United States military of one
Speaker 2: trillion dollars. Well, I should say, Trump stated it would
Speaker 2: be in the vicinity of one trillion dollars. Now, does
Speaker 2: that mean possibly that very little is changing about the
Speaker 2: military budget? Yes, it does, and we'll get to that
Speaker 2: in a second, hag Seth, our secretary of Defense, made
Speaker 2: a post on Twitter right after saying Trump is rebuilding
Speaker 2: our military and fast. He also really bragged about that
Speaker 2: trillion dollar amount and said, ps, we intend to spend
Speaker 2: every tax pay dollar wisely on lethality and readiness.
Speaker 9: Now here's the thing. Trillion dollars shitload of money.
Speaker 2: Current amount of funding allocated to national defense programs eight
Speaker 2: hundred and ninety two billion dollars, so trillion dollars about
Speaker 2: a ten percent bump right for you know, the national
Speaker 2: defense programs. But it's actually unclear the way in which
Speaker 2: he phrased things and the way in which we like
Speaker 2: talk about the funding for national security, this could mean
Speaker 2: that basically the military will have pretty much the same,
Speaker 2: you know, something of an increase but not a mass,
Speaker 2: not really a significant difference from what it has now,
Speaker 2: and there will be more money into other defense related programs.
Speaker 2: So this is not like as massive a thing as
Speaker 2: it might necessarily sound like. I think one thing that's
Speaker 2: sort of significant here is like how this comports with
Speaker 2: the way a lot of the folks and what we'll
Speaker 2: call the shit had left had talked about where there
Speaker 2: was this discussion that Trump's actually going to be you know,
Speaker 2: bad for imperialism and the world machine. And you know,
Speaker 2: there was even talk as of a couple of months
Speaker 2: ago that they were going to like half the Pentagon budget,
Speaker 2: like you know, you know all these whatever else happens,
Speaker 2: you know, it's worth it if the military budget comes
Speaker 2: down in this you know, imperial juggernaut of hell gets
Speaker 2: finally neutered. And just all of those people are always wrong.
Speaker 2: They were always going to just make the army bigger.
Speaker 2: They were always going to put more money in defense.
Speaker 2: They were always going to put more money into the
Speaker 2: hands of defense contractors. Like anyone who knows anything about
Speaker 2: these people or about how Republicans have worked, knew that
Speaker 2: was going to happen. There was never any chance that
Speaker 2: they were going to cut the actual amount of money.
Speaker 2: Now they're probably going to cut the number of people
Speaker 2: in the military because despite what heck Seth said, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of evidence that a shitload of this is
Speaker 2: going to go towards modernization, and in fact, armed services,
Speaker 2: each branch is being our arm services are all being
Speaker 2: asked to cut about eight percent of their individual budgets
Speaker 2: in order to put money into modernization. Efforts, which obviously
Speaker 2: any military needs to regularly modernize different systems. But this
Speaker 2: is also a thing where if your country is run
Speaker 2: entirely by grifters and conman trying to shotgun money to
Speaker 2: their political supporters who have a lot of money in
Speaker 2: different defense companies, what this means to me is you
Speaker 2: are probably going to see them continue to trim numbers
Speaker 2: of actual troops and put more money into bullshit that
Speaker 2: gets a lot of money to contractors. Yeah, that is
Speaker 2: my expectation. That is what I see happening. More than
Speaker 2: anything here, we'll see, but I think a lot of
Speaker 2: this additional money is going to go towards buying shit
Speaker 2: that may or may not be useful. But the primary
Speaker 2: purpose of putting the money into that shit is because
Speaker 2: somebody who is somebody gets a veig.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 13: I mean, if we look at fascism as a concept too,
Speaker 13: it kind of it has troubled relationship with modernity, but
Speaker 13: one of the things it likes to do is flex
Speaker 13: its new little weapon systems and toys. And we're going
Speaker 13: to see some guys posing with some weapon systems that
Speaker 13: probably never get used, right, like probably some AI targeting
Speaker 13: shit stuff like that.
Speaker 9: Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, it's does said.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, we got to find some way to reallocate
Speaker 3: the alleged one and fifty billion dollars in DOGE cuts,
Speaker 3: which is certainly a fake number, absolutely a fake. We
Speaker 3: might as well send over two hundred billion more to
Speaker 3: the Defense Department.
Speaker 2: Based on early IRS filings, there's something like half a
Speaker 2: trillion dollars that we might be losing in tax income
Speaker 2: this year. So you know that I don't think we're
Speaker 2: doing great. I should also know to hear a big
Speaker 2: part of the money that they're going to get for
Speaker 2: modernizations coming from cutting fifty to sixty thousand civilian jobs,
Speaker 2: many of whom are veterans, but also just in terms
Speaker 2: of like military readiness, guys like hag Seth, who's primarily
Speaker 2: a push up dude, and people who don't know anything
Speaker 2: about the military see it as like, well, you know,
Speaker 2: the military, you just want as many door kickers as
Speaker 2: you possibly can, and you actually need very few of
Speaker 2: those guys. Would need a lot of is guys that
Speaker 2: can move things to different places and fix things when
Speaker 2: they break, and do a lot of the paperwork that's
Speaker 2: necessary to make both of those things possible, which is
Speaker 2: why you need those jobs, and cutting a shitload of
Speaker 2: them is not likely to increase readiness. It's also worth
Speaker 2: noting that the US Army is looking at a force
Speaker 2: reduction of up to ninety thousand active duty soldiers. This
Speaker 2: is based on an article from April fourth, which is
Speaker 2: a significant reduction, and again like, we're not.
Speaker 3: Is that real?
Speaker 9: Yes?
Speaker 3: Why why are they doing a ninety percent reduction?
Speaker 2: In part because it's very hard for them to find
Speaker 2: new active duty soldiers. It is not easy to get
Speaker 2: people to do this, and it is not the priority
Speaker 2: of anybody in charge of anything to actually get more soldiers.
Speaker 2: The priority is to put more money into systems AI
Speaker 2: and all this shit. Like, I don't think they have
Speaker 2: a vested interest in actually helping with that.
Speaker 3: How are we going to take Greenland with drones?
Speaker 12: When do we do it?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Probably?
Speaker 9: I mean there's not a lot of peace.
Speaker 3: Probably, how we're going to do it?
Speaker 2: A lot of people in Greenland Garrison.
Speaker 3: Excited for the naval blockade of Greenland. Yeah, kick off
Speaker 3: in about two months.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's gonna be great. Anyway, they're gonna make
Speaker 2: part of why I think they feel confident trying to
Speaker 2: make you know they're calling this making the army smaller
Speaker 2: and more agile, is because Trump is doing his best
Speaker 2: to make friends with Russia and we're certainly not going
Speaker 2: to whatever happens with Taiwan, the US military is not
Speaker 2: going to be involved.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Yeah, we ain't gonna go back for them.
Speaker 2: You know, his attitude is like, what do we need
Speaker 2: this for? We need an agile military that we can
Speaker 2: use to fuck with Greenland and Panama. Like that's that's
Speaker 2: what we're going to be doing.
Speaker 13: Two very similar biomes where like everything is very similar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's a lot of people like you know,
Speaker 2: the folks running Palanteer who have an increasing amount of
Speaker 2: say in what happens to the military, and you know
Speaker 2: what Trump does, who are basically advocating for, Like we're
Speaker 2: going to have this whole kill chain automated soon. We
Speaker 2: barely need people. You can't trust people, you know how
Speaker 2: untrustworthy your generals have proved. Donald Cool.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm excited for some more Arctic camo surplus to
Speaker 3: hit the market once yeah, Greenland situation is resolved.
Speaker 13: I'm excited to be fucking around wondering who a drone's
Speaker 13: going to kill next. That has been a really life
Speaker 13: affirming experience for me, and I'm excited to have it
Speaker 13: again soon.
Speaker 9: It's going to be great.
Speaker 13: Robbie, you mentioned the IRS and IRS maybe maybe get
Speaker 13: less money, So I'm going to talk a little bit
Speaker 13: about the IRS.
Speaker 9: I guess let's let's start with like a little summary
Speaker 9: of this week immigration news. This week child Rachik, who
Speaker 9: is the person who runs libs of TikTok Yeah, joined
Speaker 9: Ice on a raid.
Speaker 2: She is, shall we say, the uh Julius striker of
Speaker 2: our modern fashions.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess you're right.
Speaker 2: Damn, sorry, I'm just no. I mean, like, I wasn't
Speaker 2: joking about that. That's the most direct comparison that.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Sorry, I just took a moment to reflect on that,
Speaker 13: and it's not a great thing to reflect on.
Speaker 2: It's really not.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 2: It doesn't make me feel good.
Speaker 7: Yeah, No.
Speaker 13: Other things that don't make me feel good are the
Speaker 13: sixteen Minutes report is seventy five percent of people since
Speaker 13: SECO had no criminal conviction, which seems to leave open
Speaker 13: the possibility of there being a crime for which it
Speaker 13: will be okay to be sent to a foreign goo
Speaker 13: lag with no hope of return. Which I don't believe
Speaker 13: is the case. Like, yeah, I'm very disappointed at any
Speaker 13: reporting which focuses on guilt, as if one could ever
Speaker 13: be guilty of anything which would make this justifiable, you can't.
Speaker 13: The government is also soliciting for proposals this week to
Speaker 13: massively increase migrant detention, which again is not surprising, right,
Speaker 13: we talked about this last November, but it's also not great.
Speaker 13: But where I want to focus today is on the
Speaker 13: IRS and the Abbudegorgatia case we spoke about last week.
Speaker 13: So well, it's see inter reporting that the IRS has
Speaker 13: said it will hand over information of people who are
Speaker 13: subject to criminal investigation to DHS or ICE, right, ICE
Speaker 13: being under DHS. They so, they say they What happened
Speaker 13: here is that if part of court filings, a memorandum
Speaker 13: of understanding between ICE and the IRS was released in
Speaker 13: the MoU or in the court filing. Actually they cite
Speaker 13: an offense of failure to depart the United States after
Speaker 13: being ordered removed. So essentially anyone who they're saying like,
Speaker 13: you have to go right, you know that they could
Speaker 13: they could then ask for their tax return information. Exactly
Speaker 13: what the IRS will disclose to ICE is covered by
Speaker 13: a big black reaction in the court documents, so we
Speaker 13: don't know that the entiremus submitted, but like there's significant
Speaker 13: reactions in it, ICE has to hand One thing that's
Speaker 13: not redacted is that ICE has to hand over the
Speaker 13: person's name, address, and the crime of which they're for
Speaker 13: which they're investigating, and it has to be a non
Speaker 13: tax crime.
Speaker 9: Not that that matter is Huguely.
Speaker 13: This is more limited than a lot of people have feared,
Speaker 13: and it's more limited than a lot of the reporting
Speaker 13: I've seen. It's possible that there's something else going on.
Speaker 13: I saw the acting director in ICE was going to
Speaker 13: quit over this that this morning. But the fact that
Speaker 13: they have to have their address suggests that they couldn't
Speaker 13: locate them using the tax return form, right, which is
Speaker 13: a good thing, Like it is one last step towards
Speaker 13: vacues from I guess. I'm also aware of ICE having
Speaker 13: memorandums of understanding with other agencies to include hud housing
Speaker 13: and urban development. All of this is going to reduce
Speaker 13: the amount that migrant communities engage with the federal government
Speaker 13: to any degree. Right, contrary to what you might have heard,
Speaker 13: undocupateed to people do tend to pay their taxes. It's
Speaker 13: actually relatively rare for them not to do that, and
Speaker 13: this might change if the RS starts handing over people's
Speaker 13: tax return and information to ICE. Right, Obviously, if HUD
Speaker 13: starts handing over people's information, that's going to lead to
Speaker 13: people not being as willing to take housing benefits, more
Speaker 13: people landing up living on the street.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 13: On the other hand, Houston City and Texas for those
Speaker 13: you who aren't familiar, Have I pronounced that right, Robert Tehouse, Yeah,
Speaker 13: I thought it was. I wasn't sure if it was Houston.
Speaker 13: Houston House, so understood it.
Speaker 2: It's a place we just don't go. That's that's that's
Speaker 2: how I refer to Houston.
Speaker 9: Okay, beautiful.
Speaker 13: So this Texas No Men's Land town has turned over
Speaker 13: information including addresses and license paids for people charged with
Speaker 13: driving without a license, even though some of this under
Speaker 13: Texas law is supposed to remain confidential.
Speaker 9: So that's great.
Speaker 13: They are also now making immigration detentions at regular traffic stops.
Speaker 13: Some aware of one incident where a man was arrested
Speaker 13: after being stopped for a cracked windscreen and he's now
Speaker 13: an ICE detention so that there was I presumably an
Speaker 13: ICE warrant for this person that the Houston police then
Speaker 13: acted upon.
Speaker 3: I mean, and this is this can just be racial profiling, right,
Speaker 3: Like if they're going to just pull someone over and
Speaker 3: then send them to ICE, like they're just going to
Speaker 3: start pulling over as many people that they don't want
Speaker 3: to be in Houston.
Speaker 13: Yeah, Like we already know that police departments have a
Speaker 13: tendency to pull over people who aren't white more often, right,
Speaker 13: and then like if you give them this, that's just
Speaker 13: going to exacerbate that further. Again, it's also going to
Speaker 13: stop my communities interacting with the police in any way.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 13: This obviously has look not a big police fan, but
Speaker 13: like in cases like domestic violence, right, sometimes people need
Speaker 13: to go to the police to be safe, and they're
Speaker 13: not going to do so. They think that means they
Speaker 13: or people they love will be deported and this will
Speaker 13: have negative consequences, and specifically in cases like domestic violence.
Speaker 13: And we know this, there is plenty of evidence for this. Nonetheless,
Speaker 13: this is continuing anyway. What's also continuing is our obligation
Speaker 13: to pivot to acts, which we should do.
Speaker 12: Now, Okay, we are back we're.
Speaker 13: Back and it's time to talk about the Supreme Court.
Speaker 13: We have to, Yes, yes, we do, Garython, because it's
Speaker 13: the biggest court. It's the big one, and they're big
Speaker 13: crushing it all week, just just sending down decisions. The
Speaker 13: two big ones I guess I want to talk about
Speaker 13: are a five to four ruling that it was vacating
Speaker 13: Bosberg's Troro. Bosberg being the judge who had initially told
Speaker 13: the United States government that had to stop sending people
Speaker 13: to set court right, and then the US had ignored
Speaker 13: Boseburg and done it anyway, and then they had this
Speaker 13: whole court case about how they hadn't ignored him and
Speaker 13: anyway it was a secret. Even though we're tweeting it,
Speaker 13: you can go back a couple of eds and hear
Speaker 13: about that. In this decision, the Court was unanimous in
Speaker 13: asserting that people removed under the Alien Enemies Act do
Speaker 13: have a right to due process, but that they have
Speaker 13: to bring a habeas petition. So like the reason they
Speaker 13: vacated to tro was that the case shouldn't have gone
Speaker 13: to Bosburg right, that they should have bought this habeas petition.
Speaker 13: In practice, that's going to be very hard given the
Speaker 13: fact that many migrants, even under the current system, even
Speaker 13: under Biden, most migrantsh didn't speak English didn't have access
Speaker 13: to legal representation, so this ruling is still pretty bad.
Speaker 13: The only thing that people in the court case wanted
Speaker 13: to stop was their rendition to El Salvador, right. It
Speaker 13: wasn't even like opposed to other forms of removal. It
Speaker 13: was specific to this El Salbador situation. The court also
Speaker 13: sort of cited criminal cases as precedent, which is a
Speaker 13: very different thing, and it gives us very narrow ruling
Speaker 13: of the due process available to migrants rate and it
Speaker 13: relies on my having access to a legal team, which
Speaker 13: could be expensive and complicated for them.
Speaker 3: So this ruling allows Troup administration to send people to
Speaker 3: El Salvador as as long as they have the quote
Speaker 3: unquote right to do process, which is narrowly defined as
Speaker 3: something that not many people will have access to anyway.
Speaker 13: Yes, yeah, well summarized, yeah, you would need to have
Speaker 13: like a lawyer on retainer to file your habas right
Speaker 13: leg straight away.
Speaker 3: So if that just doesn't get filed, then you are
Speaker 3: basically in their view forfeiting your due process and they
Speaker 3: can deport you anywhere.
Speaker 9: Well, they can deport you anyway.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I guess you have the right to appeal it,
Speaker 13: like by saying like I want to file this habeas petition,
Speaker 13: but most people aren't going to do that, so in
Speaker 13: practice that they haven't explicitly ruled on the zecoric thing.
Speaker 13: Right the Aberigo Garcia case, which is the other case,
Speaker 13: a Fourth Circuit judge required the US to return Abergogarcia
Speaker 13: to the US, and then Chief Justice Roberts on his
Speaker 13: own issued in an administrative stay, so he is effectively
Speaker 13: telling them that Fourth Circuit judge, you can't order them
Speaker 13: to have him return right now. We need to take
Speaker 13: a time out. We need everybody to get their evidence
Speaker 13: in order and then bring that to us, so that
Speaker 13: case like remains ongoing.
Speaker 9: Right in the brief for that case, the government.
Speaker 13: Referred to Abligo Garcia as an enemy alien. But I
Speaker 13: don't think MS thirteen is covered by the evocation of
Speaker 13: the Alien Enemies Act. I think it was specific to
Speaker 13: trend deer Ragua. And then they also claim that they
Speaker 13: removed him under the Immigration Nationality Act, not the Alien
Speaker 13: Enemies Act. So like, none of this, I guess is
Speaker 13: hugely surprising we're seeing this like sort of post hoc
Speaker 13: justification of what they did, right, which is kind of
Speaker 13: how they operate. But that case still remains ongoing, so
Speaker 13: we're still we're still going to hear that one, which
Speaker 13: presumably will reflect on the constitutionality of sending people to
Speaker 13: said cod But like the fact that, yeah, they ruled
Speaker 13: the other case, right, the one that was five to four,
Speaker 13: It wasn't about whether said cock was legal. It was
Speaker 13: about where the Bosberg had the right to make a
Speaker 13: decision on this particular case.
Speaker 9: But it's still not great.
Speaker 13: Like it looks like the Supreme Court is doing everything
Speaker 13: it can to avoid a face to face showdown with
Speaker 13: the executive branch. Yeah, because they don't want to deal
Speaker 13: with the consequences of be ignoring them.
Speaker 3: Nope.
Speaker 13: And like we said before, like maybe the only court
Speaker 13: that they will listen to is a Supreme Court. Whether
Speaker 13: the Supreme Court doesn't make them, then they won't.
Speaker 3: So that's where we're at with that. Not great, not
Speaker 3: exactly great at all. Well, do you know what is
Speaker 3: doing great? The economy? And for more on that, I
Speaker 3: think I think it's time for tariff talk with me
Speaker 3: a wong.
Speaker 2: Wait wait, wait, tariff talk.
Speaker 3: Jazz rock, jazz, bar.
Speaker 9: Locking jazzy jazz.
Speaker 2: B ah yeah, every day, every time we do it.
Speaker 15: The only band that matters is the only band that matters.
Speaker 15: The Narcissist Cookbook doing a very brief refrain from Rocks,
Speaker 15: the worst clash song.
Speaker 13: By a white margin, the only clash song from the
Speaker 13: plagiar in Operation Desert Storm, which summer cry.
Speaker 9: A real catastrophe?
Speaker 3: Do you know what is in't a catastrophe? The economy?
Speaker 7: How's it going?
Speaker 8: So?
Speaker 7: I just I just saw a wonderful chart where someone
Speaker 7: was like, ah, this is this is one of the
Speaker 7: eight best days the SMP has ever had in every
Speaker 7: single other one of those days is like nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 7: nineteen thirty one, thousand age.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's one of the best days. From Mount Saint
Speaker 13: Helen's Equality. Yeah yeah, so good.
Speaker 9: So all right.
Speaker 7: The terriff situation as of two forty three pm Pacific
Speaker 7: time on April ninth.
Speaker 2: Is that there is mine going good.
Speaker 9: It's gotta be cool, guys, don't worry about it.
Speaker 7: Okay, So there isn't one hundred and twenty five percent
Speaker 7: tariff on all goods from China?
Speaker 3: Is that bad?
Speaker 7: I Uh, you know, there's a bit that I cut
Speaker 7: here where I was gonna say about how like at
Speaker 7: fifty four percent, I was like, we've entered the part
Speaker 7: of the map where it just says here there would
Speaker 7: be dragons. At one hundred and twenty five percent, there's
Speaker 7: not even dragons there that they didn't even think to
Speaker 7: put that on the map as an unknown region. Hi,
Speaker 7: this is Mia from the future. It is now Thursday.
Speaker 7: One of the problems with attempting to do this episode
Speaker 7: is that we are learning the teriff rate from Twitter
Speaker 7: in real time. So it turns out that the actual
Speaker 7: tariff rate on China, as as clarified by by Donald
Speaker 7: Trump today, is one hundred and forty five percent. And
Speaker 7: also it has become clear that the twenty five percent
Speaker 7: turf tariffs on both Mexico and Canada are also still
Speaker 7: in effect. So yay.
Speaker 2: In medical terms, it means what happened to the global
Speaker 2: economy is equivalent to you getting hit directly in the
Speaker 2: spine by an F two fifty going forty five miles
Speaker 2: an hour. That's that's that's what's happened to the base
Speaker 2: of the global economy.
Speaker 7: Yes, and I mean it's it is very funny that
Speaker 7: like a lot of people have been focusing on the
Speaker 7: bond stuff because you can just look at the tariff
Speaker 7: numbers and it's like like, yeah, okay, seeing a one
Speaker 7: hundred and twenty five sent tariff on all goods from
Speaker 7: China and then looking at the bond markets to figure
Speaker 7: out if that's bad or not is like is like
Speaker 7: walking outside into a blizzard and being like, whoa, I
Speaker 7: need the weather rather tell me if it's knowing, like,
Speaker 7: what are we doing here? What are we doing here?
Speaker 2: The reason I'll explain, like briefly, treasury bonds are the
Speaker 2: underpinning of every country, the entire global economy. Every single
Speaker 2: country has a shitload of money in US treasury bonds
Speaker 2: because they are the most reliable thing. And what a
Speaker 2: treasury bond is is you give money to the US
Speaker 2: government and they say, in a period of time you
Speaker 2: can take this out and it will have grown by
Speaker 2: a set percentage. Because treasury bonds have been for the
Speaker 2: last basically a century, so incredibly stable. This is where
Speaker 2: you put your money that you don't want to gamble.
Speaker 2: So you have money that is in stocks and stuff
Speaker 2: that can go up and down, but you also head
Speaker 2: your bets by having a bunch of this. And you know,
Speaker 2: generally treasury bonds are hopefully enough to about keep pace
Speaker 2: with inflation or beat it by a little bit, but
Speaker 2: usually the rate is not all that high because there's
Speaker 2: a shitload of demand. People are always buying treasury bonds.
Speaker 2: When the treasury bond rate, which is the percentage you
Speaker 2: get back, raises, that may look good, right, they're like, wow,
Speaker 2: you get five percent now on if you put money
Speaker 2: into a into a thirty year T bond. But what
Speaker 2: that means is that everyone is selling their treasury bonds.
Speaker 2: So demand is down and the rate is higher, and
Speaker 2: everyone is selling them because entire countries at a time
Speaker 2: are pulling their money out. Nations are pulling their money
Speaker 2: out of the US economy.
Speaker 7: It's great, yeah, And we are going to get more
Speaker 7: into how through administration wants to fuck with that later.
Speaker 7: But first off, programming note, programming note, I am going
Speaker 7: to be from this episode forward referring to all of
Speaker 7: these as the turf tariffs, because fuck them, and because
Speaker 7: these tariffs are in a large part also about a
Speaker 7: bunch of really weird fucking masculinity bullshit.
Speaker 3: So God excited for that yeah, and when you make
Speaker 3: most of your election ads being about yeah, trans people,
Speaker 3: and then and then the economy goes to the toilet.
Speaker 3: This is this is what was voted for.
Speaker 7: Like, if if you wanted transphobia, this is what you wanted.
Speaker 7: You want you wanted to lose your job, you wanted
Speaker 7: everyone to lose their fucking home.
Speaker 2: Speaking at Tea Bonds, am I right, let's keep over
Speaker 2: that immediately.
Speaker 12: No, no, no.
Speaker 7: One law for him, go away, okay, okay. So, so
Speaker 7: the most the most chaotic thing happening here, other than
Speaker 7: Robert randomly saying things, is that nobody knows what the
Speaker 7: tariff situation is going to be, just even just on
Speaker 7: Friday when you're listening to this, right, like you, by
Speaker 7: the time you were listening to this, there could be
Speaker 7: two hundred percent teriffs on Indonesia. There could be four
Speaker 7: thousand percent terroriffs on Vietnam. We don't know.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: Trump could have dissolved the US dollar and we're all
Speaker 2: using the fucking d or whatever, like I know, I
Speaker 2: don't know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and like you know, so so it's all really unstable.
Speaker 7: We can talk about the other things that are still
Speaker 7: in effect, so that there's a general ten percent tariff
Speaker 7: on all countries except for China are just supposed to
Speaker 7: have a general ten percent tariff. There's also the per
Speaker 7: Megan Cassellos, a CNBC reporter, there are twenty five percent
Speaker 7: tariffs on steel, aluminum, and cars. There's probably going to
Speaker 7: be more. He keeps talking about more tariffs, and it's like,
Speaker 7: who knows where they're gonna happen, like maybe pharmaceuticals, semiconductors.
Speaker 7: But the Liberation Day tariffs turff tariffs are currently on
Speaker 7: hold for.
Speaker 3: Ninety days at least as of right now.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the and the quote unquote reciprocal tariffs have
Speaker 3: been lowered to ten percent for me at least, it's
Speaker 3: unclear as of recording. On Wednesday, Trump said that this
Speaker 3: is a fact, this is in effect immediately. It's unclear
Speaker 3: if those ten percent tariffs are also on hold for
Speaker 3: ninety days.
Speaker 7: No, I think the tempercent ones are in effect right now.
Speaker 7: But it's really hard to tell because he's just saying shit.
Speaker 3: And yes, it's very hard to tell, which I ain't
Speaker 3: saying it, he's truthing it.
Speaker 12: Yes, sorry, he is.
Speaker 3: He is true social ing that this information.
Speaker 13: That is how we have to work out the global
Speaker 13: economic future. It's based on posts. I'm true social yeah, so.
Speaker 7: So okay, And one of the things that's been happening
Speaker 7: with with the turf tariffs is that, like the media
Speaker 7: is just is reporting things as true that are just
Speaker 7: clearly obviously a lie. So one of the ones that's
Speaker 7: been going around and that the media is reporting that
Speaker 7: Trump has said is that he's he said he's going
Speaker 7: to pause tariffs on countries that don't retaliate, except we
Speaker 7: know that's a lie because the EU already imposed retaliatory tariffs.
Speaker 7: But the EU's turf tariff rate is like already down
Speaker 7: to ten percent, just like everyone else. So we know
Speaker 7: that Trump is lying about his rationale for the rollback
Speaker 7: of the turf tariffs, right, and every single fucking media
Speaker 7: outlet is still just reporting it because nobody fucking knows
Speaker 7: how to do freaking reporting anymore. We should move to
Speaker 7: what this is going to do the supply chain, and
Speaker 7: to put this in perspective. When I learned about the
Speaker 7: one hundred and four percent tariff on China, that was
Speaker 7: before it was one hundred and twenty five percent where
Speaker 7: it's at now, I was writing an episode called The
Speaker 7: Old economy is dead, which will probably be still be
Speaker 7: coming out on Monday. Again, that was the fifty four
Speaker 7: percent rate. I was writing a thing called the old
Speaker 7: Economy is dead at one hundred and four percent, Like
Speaker 7: things are going to break in the supply chain that
Speaker 7: only seven people on Earth have ever heard of before,
Speaker 7: Like entire sectors of the economy are going to be annihilated.
Speaker 7: We're going to see right now, we're probably going to
Speaker 7: see everyone attempt to route like all shipping from China.
Speaker 7: There's going to be a massive effort to try to
Speaker 7: reroot it through like literally any other country. But again
Speaker 7: that's only a solution for like you know, ninety days,
Speaker 7: and and again it's not even clear that can work.
Speaker 7: I mean, I'm already seeing a bunch of reports swamp
Speaker 7: business as being like, yeah, we're fucked because and that
Speaker 7: was the four percent tariffs, and at one hundred and
Speaker 7: twenty five percent, entire industries are non viable. Now it's
Speaker 7: maybe possible that if it was just these tariffs and
Speaker 7: such an all Chinese shipping was able to be routed
Speaker 7: through some other country, maybe we would only have a
Speaker 7: regular economic collapse like a like you know, like an
Speaker 7: early two thousands tech bubble collapse and not like a
Speaker 7: two thousand and eight one. But again that's the same
Speaker 7: thing that note moti war tariffs go into effect. Now,
Speaker 7: the problem is that we went through this with the
Speaker 7: ninety day pauses on the Mexican tariffs and the Canadian tariffs,
Speaker 7: and then after ninety days everyone assumed they weren't going
Speaker 7: to go to efect again. Then they just went to effect.
Speaker 7: So the odds are of that the absolutely catastrophic turf
Speaker 7: tariffs from like Liberation Day are going to go into
Speaker 7: effect in about ninety days, right, that that's probably what's
Speaker 7: going to happen. There's probably going to be some attempts
Speaker 7: to negotiate them down, but like again, those absolutely catastrophic
Speaker 7: tariffs which are going to just fucking annihilate the entire
Speaker 7: world economy, are probably going to go into effect. And
Speaker 7: you know, part of what's happening here, right is that
Speaker 7: so the markets are doing this, they're like dead cat bounce, right,
Speaker 7: And a lot of this is because they haven't actually
Speaker 7: stopped to think about like how much American manufacturing and
Speaker 7: con sure, every argument everyone is making about this, there
Speaker 7: is actually a lot of manufacturing still in the US,
Speaker 7: but all of it relies on Chinese imports and various
Speaker 7: stages of in vadio stage of production, and they're fucked.
Speaker 7: And I haven't even mentioned yet, by the way, the
Speaker 7: sort of caps to all of this is that China
Speaker 7: is doing an eighty four percent retaliatory tariff on all
Speaker 7: American goods, which is going to just fuck massive portions
Speaker 7: of American agriculture. We've talked a lot on the show
Speaker 7: about soybean exports. It's going to be absolutely catastrophic. We're
Speaker 7: going to go more into this on Monday. But you know,
Speaker 7: the thing that's clear from this is that these people
Speaker 7: don't see the economy as real in the way that
Speaker 7: you and I do, right, They simply don't. You know,
Speaker 7: we look at the economy as something where we have
Speaker 7: to have a fucking job so we can go to work,
Speaker 7: so we can come home and fucking buy food for
Speaker 7: our families and pay our rent. And they think it's
Speaker 7: a fucking joke, right. They think it's a fucking masculinity signifier,
Speaker 7: and they think it's like they look at tariff rates
Speaker 7: and they go, this is just a number on a
Speaker 7: fucking page. And that's why the tariff rate is now
Speaker 7: one hundred and twenty five percent China because it doesn't
Speaker 7: none of this ship is real for them at all.
Speaker 7: Now do you know what is real? No, the products
Speaker 7: and services that support this. Yeah, yeah, yep, we are
Speaker 7: back now. Okay. One of the things that I've been
Speaker 7: seeing a lot of is there are a lot of
Speaker 7: arguments about whether there was some kind of plan here.
Speaker 7: Trump has claimed that he was going to roll back
Speaker 7: the terrorists all along, and no, he wasn't. Just no,
Speaker 7: he's just lying. He's just going by the seat of
Speaker 7: his pants. And I can prove that there is no
Speaker 7: plan here by moving on to the second thing that
Speaker 7: I want to talk about here, which is a speech
Speaker 7: given by Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Steve Myhren at
Speaker 7: the Hudson Institute. So this is this is again the
Speaker 7: the the Council of Economic Advisors is is a federal
Speaker 7: agency that is like their their job is to provide
Speaker 7: economic advice to the president, right, and their chair gave
Speaker 7: a speech where he argues and this is something that
Speaker 7: like I I Jesus fucking Christ, we were talking about, Okay,
Speaker 7: the fact that every fucking country on earth has us
Speaker 7: Treasury bonds. We were talking about this earlier, right, the
Speaker 7: status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.
Speaker 7: This guy is arguing that that is actually a public
Speaker 7: good that other countries should pay US for. He wants
Speaker 7: to force countries to fucking pay taxes to the United
Speaker 7: States for holding US Treasury bonds.
Speaker 2: And again, if any nation on Earth could pay to
Speaker 2: have their currency be the global reserve currency, there's no
Speaker 2: amount they wouldn't pay. Like, the degree to which this
Speaker 2: benefits you is ridiculous, Like the fact that you wantn't
Speaker 2: to charge other people for it.
Speaker 9: It's nice.
Speaker 8: It is like.
Speaker 7: Look how this like actually works, right, is that every
Speaker 7: single other country on Earth is forced to buy American debt,
Speaker 7: which is what a bond is, right, Yeah, And this
Speaker 7: allows the US to carry out even more spending without
Speaker 7: inflationary effects every single other country.
Speaker 2: Everything is based on this, Yes, it's just.
Speaker 7: It's all forced on on like other countries happen to
Speaker 7: stockpowle US dollars like the literally the entire global economy.
Speaker 7: The US is advantage in the entire global econy is
Speaker 7: that every single other fucking country on Earth needs US dollars.
Speaker 7: Part of this is to buy oil. And part of
Speaker 7: this is again because the dollar is the fucking reserve currency.
Speaker 7: It's the currency the fucking trade is done in. And
Speaker 7: the asset that you hold is is like, is the
Speaker 7: fucking US bond. The anthropologist David Graeber called this in
Speaker 7: his book Debt the First five thousand Years, a tribute
Speaker 7: system that again, every country in the world is forced
Speaker 7: to buy US bonds. The US government has just like
Speaker 7: fairly explicitly, like they did this in the Reagan administration,
Speaker 7: does this other times, like has just fairly explicitly leaned
Speaker 7: on countries and been like, you're buying a fucking a
Speaker 7: fucking bunch of US bonds now, right, Like this is
Speaker 7: this system. The status of the dollar of the world
Speaker 7: reserve currency, is the entire lattice that supports and spreads
Speaker 7: the American Empire. And these fucking clowns want people to
Speaker 7: pay taxes on the tribute that they are paying to us.
Speaker 7: This is not by Trump and Elon Musk, right, this
Speaker 7: is the guy these people brought in to be their
Speaker 7: economist to do economic policy. Yeah, there there is no
Speaker 7: limit to their stupidity. There is no rock of sanity
Speaker 7: upon which the tide of madness will crash everything we
Speaker 7: have seen. We have seen so far is just a
Speaker 7: prelude to an infinite abyss of stupidity, so mind numbingly incomprehensible,
Speaker 7: it will shatter our minds like a snowflake and a hurricane.
Speaker 7: You can no longer think to yourself. They cannot possibly
Speaker 7: be this stupid. They are thinking thoughts even gods cannot comprehend.
Speaker 7: They are attempting to drain the sea by shouting at
Speaker 7: the moon. They are trying to wipe their ass with
Speaker 7: pine cones. There is no five dimensional pl here. There
Speaker 7: was not even a man behind the fucking curtain. There
Speaker 7: was only an infinite sea of cruelty, malicone, stupidity trying
Speaker 7: to drown us, all for the crime of attempting to
Speaker 7: exist in the world we were born in. The reality
Speaker 7: of the man who ruled the American Empire is this.
Speaker 7: It is so terrifying that everyone from the most powerful
Speaker 7: CEOs on the planet to the fucking day traders running
Speaker 7: the stock markets to broke left the ship posters recoil
Speaker 7: in horror and try to construct meaning and some kind
Speaker 7: of like anything, any kind of strategy, any kind of
Speaker 7: strategic reason why anyone could possibly be doing this because
Speaker 7: the existence of a plant, literally, any plan, no matter
Speaker 7: how evil it is, is preferable to this, which is
Speaker 7: that the largest economy in the world, the most powerful
Speaker 7: empire the world has ever seen, is being run by
Speaker 7: the dumbest people who have ever fucking lift and they
Speaker 7: are doing this because they are evil and they're stupid.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, there's absolutely like yeah, yeah, no, nothing else
Speaker 2: to say.
Speaker 8: Really.
Speaker 3: I think one of the things that is underpinning this,
Speaker 3: which you can pick up on if you are cursed
Speaker 3: enough to listen to enough of these speeches and enough
Speaker 3: of their of their talking heads and podcasts, is like
Speaker 3: this reoccurring trend in which these people really need to
Speaker 3: be victims in order to in order to politically succeed,
Speaker 3: which is an acuation that's usually thrown against you know,
Speaker 3: woke sgw's. But like before the election, right, it was
Speaker 3: this idea that that because because of the dem corrupt
Speaker 3: elite establishment, you know, everyday Americans are are are victims
Speaker 3: of this, of this hidden cabal of Democrats that that
Speaker 3: are ruining everything. But but now that these people are
Speaker 3: in charge of of of the United States, the people
Speaker 3: who are victimizing US is just the entire world, right,
Speaker 3: the entire world is ripping off the United States by
Speaker 3: using our dollar, by by doing trade with us. They
Speaker 3: are somehow ripping us off, like we are the victims
Speaker 3: of this global scheme, and it's hurting you at the
Speaker 3: average blue collar worker, and it's making women adopt manager
Speaker 3: surial positions and and this is this is what's actually
Speaker 3: is the core of of your oppression. And even even
Speaker 3: even when they win, even when they control the country,
Speaker 3: they can't let go of this victim status. They have
Speaker 3: to have someone ripping them off in order to justify
Speaker 3: them doing just incomprehensible stupid power grabs. And it is
Speaker 3: very much linked to like this like masculine signifier. It's
Speaker 3: very odd, like like the way that people are trying
Speaker 3: to trying to justify losing so much money in the
Speaker 3: stock market. It's by re posting a clip of some
Speaker 3: like Australian women from dancing dancing on TikTok in like
Speaker 3: an office building, and they're like, well, you know, tariffs
Speaker 3: are are are much better than having to deal with
Speaker 3: women in the office.
Speaker 7: Am I?
Speaker 12: Right now?
Speaker 9: Women having a joke?
Speaker 3: This is this is this is how they this is
Speaker 3: how they justify it.
Speaker 2: At least we don't have woke. It's worth it to
Speaker 2: not be able to afford food. If the is the
Speaker 2: global loghouse, that's a deep cut. The long House is
Speaker 2: burnt down. Sure, because the Long House is burnt down,
Speaker 2: We're now exposed to the elements and all of our
Speaker 2: food stores are gone, and it's about to snow eighteen feet.
Speaker 2: But at least the Long House.
Speaker 13: The Long House with the nephew in it that you
Speaker 13: hate and owned you at Thanksgiving, it's gone.
Speaker 3: Shout out to your nephew.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I guess what's what's the nibbling? Nibbling? It's a
Speaker 9: correct non binary appollition.
Speaker 3: In other news, last week, President Trump said that he
Speaker 3: would be quote unquote honored for the president of l
Speaker 3: Salvador to take US citizens, which he calls American grown
Speaker 3: and born criminals, and put them into Seacott, the Terrorism
Speaker 3: Confinement Center, which is essentially a prison work camp.
Speaker 2: Yep, that no one gets released from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Trump said, quote why should it stop just at
Speaker 3: people that crossed the border illegally on quotes.
Speaker 9: But it shouldn't stop that.
Speaker 3: She shouldn't be there at all. And his dams already mentioned,
Speaker 3: seventy five percent of the immigrants sent to see Caught
Speaker 3: don't have a criminal conviction. These people are not criminals. Now,
Speaker 3: a few days later, the White House presecretary reiterated that
Speaker 3: this is something that Trump is seriously discussing, both publicly
Speaker 3: and privately.
Speaker 14: So the President has discussed this idea quite a few
Speaker 14: times publicly. He's also discussed it privately. You're referring to
Speaker 14: the President's idea for American citizens to potentially be deported.
Speaker 14: These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our
Speaker 14: nation's laws repeatedly, and these are violent repeat offenders in
Speaker 14: American streets. The President has said if it's legal right,
Speaker 14: if there is a legal pathway to do that, he's
Speaker 14: not sure. We are not sure if there is. It's
Speaker 14: an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed
Speaker 14: very publicly, as in the effort of transparency.
Speaker 3: Now, one of the last things we're going to discuss
Speaker 3: is an update on DHS and ICE efforts to deport
Speaker 3: students across the country. Me and James did an episode
Speaker 3: last week which is still pretty relevant, but all of
Speaker 3: the numbers have increased dramatically since that episode. As of
Speaker 3: Tuesday night, April eighth, ninety two student visas have been
Speaker 3: revoked at California universities, fifty at uc campuses and thirty
Speaker 3: six at California State University campuses, with six more at Stanford. Also,
Speaker 3: as of April eighth, fifty student visas have been revoked
Speaker 3: at Arizona State University, with multiple students now in iced attention.
Speaker 3: Lawyers for these students believe that upwards of one thousand
Speaker 3: visas have been revoked across the country. A map on
Speaker 3: inside higher ed dot com shows four hundred and nineteen
Speaker 3: confirmed instances of student visas or in some cases, green cards,
Speaker 3: being revoked by Secretary of State Mark Rubio across thirty
Speaker 3: four states, and as of Wednesday, April ninth, visas for
Speaker 3: eighteen international students have been revoked at the University of Utah,
Speaker 3: with these students and recent graduates received letters from the
Speaker 3: Trump administration instructing them to quote unquote self deport immediately.
Speaker 3: At Utah State University, more than thirty students have been
Speaker 3: in pacted, according to the university administration.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I'm aware of at least one UCSD student who
Speaker 13: was detained at the border and immediately deported. I'm also
Speaker 13: where that UCOP uc officer, the president right had a
Speaker 13: statement about the impact of service terminations across its campuses.
Speaker 13: But the UCSD Guardian, in a dub for student Journalism,
Speaker 13: reported that UCSD convened an emergency meeting before this of
Speaker 13: faculty and it knew about the revocations or that the
Speaker 13: service changes, right, they were a vocation of their student status,
Speaker 13: and it was reluctant to act because it hadn't received
Speaker 13: guidance from UCOP yet. So we're seeing this from a
Speaker 13: lot of university administrations, right, they don't know how to respond.
Speaker 13: I did see that the University of Arizona was helping
Speaker 13: fund some of the legal fees of their students, which
Speaker 13: is more than many universities are doing as of now.
Speaker 13: There seems to be no pattern of prior rest for
Speaker 13: the people who have had their status has changed, but
Speaker 13: in some cases it seems that in so university systems,
Speaker 13: all of the people who have lost their status are
Speaker 13: either Chinese, Indian, or from majority Muslim countries.
Speaker 7: One other thing I wanted to close out this episode on,
Speaker 7: so we have an episode out about this already, but
Speaker 7: one of the things that ICE has been doing has
Speaker 7: been targeting migrant farm work at labor organizers. They have
Speaker 7: basically just kidnapped, like just straight up broke this guy's
Speaker 7: window in his car and dragged him out. A guy
Speaker 7: named Alfredo Quarez is known as Lalo. He is an
Speaker 7: organizer for Familias You need Uslegisticia in Washington, and there
Speaker 7: is going to be a protest. This will be Saturday,
Speaker 7: the twelfth. That'll be tomorrow as you're listening to this,
Speaker 7: on Friday at Portland City Hall at two pm. Organizers
Speaker 7: are also asking that you call the Washington Attorney General
Speaker 7: to demand pressure be put on everyone to release him. Yeah,
Speaker 7: if you want to hear more about that, there is
Speaker 7: I have an interview with an organizer works with them,
Speaker 7: and yeah, it's real fucking bad. The scale of the
Speaker 7: repression has been increasing. It's not undefeatable. And this is,
Speaker 7: you know, is a this is a tangible thing that
Speaker 7: you can do to try to stop them. But yeah,
Speaker 7: it requires movement now, and yeah, do this now before
Speaker 7: it gets worse.
Speaker 3: To update another topic of the episode me and James
Speaker 3: did last week, we mentioned that DHS was seeking input
Speaker 3: for installing a new program to screen the social media
Speaker 3: activity of people applying for immigration benefits for what they
Speaker 3: label as anti semitism, and this policy is now in effect.
Speaker 3: This applies to quote unquote, aliens applying for lawful permanent
Speaker 3: resident status, foreign students, and aliens affiliated with educational institutions,
Speaker 3: possibly also people applying for citizenship. To quote the DHS
Speaker 3: Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs, Trisha McLaughlin, quote, there's no
Speaker 3: room in the United States so for the rest of
Speaker 3: the world's terrorist sympathizers, and we are under an obligation
Speaker 3: to admit them or let them stay here. Secretary Nome
Speaker 3: has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can
Speaker 3: come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to
Speaker 3: advocate for anti Semitic violence and terrorism, think again. You
Speaker 3: are not welcome here. Unquote. The web page for this
Speaker 3: new policy states, under this guidance, USCIS will consider social
Speaker 3: media content that indicates an alien endorsing, espousing, promoting, or
Speaker 3: supporting anti Semitic terrorism, anti Semitic terrorist organizations, or other
Speaker 3: antisemitic activity as a negative factor in any discretionary analysis
Speaker 3: when adjudicating immigration benefit requests. So essentially, this means that
Speaker 3: if you've posted anything that is in support of Palestine
Speaker 3: or criticizes the Israeli government. This will be now used
Speaker 3: against you if you are applying for visa, if you
Speaker 3: are applying for a green card, if you're applying for
Speaker 3: citizenship and already live in this country as a permanent
Speaker 3: read lawfully, So just a wider net of social media surveillance.
Speaker 3: Four h four Media put out a good article on
Speaker 3: Wednesday about a palanteer system that ICE is using to
Speaker 3: look for immigrants and people in this country, which allows
Speaker 3: them to select for specific attributes with a pretty intense
Speaker 3: filtering system. So yeah, this is ongoing and we will
Speaker 3: continue to report as such.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, everybody, Well until next week, Please don't
Speaker 2: go to an El Salvador in prison camp if you
Speaker 2: can avoid it.
Speaker 10: We reported the news.
Speaker 8: It is great, We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 9: It could happen.
Speaker 16: Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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Speaker 16: or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Speaker 16: Thanks for listening,